Pre E3

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 25 May 2014

Microsoft Forced to Abandon Nonsense

Microsoft released a lot of bad news recently so that by the time E3 coverage started up, the only news left would be good. In Microsoft's world, bad news is actually nice for consumers.

Netflix and other services used to be locked behind subscribing to Xbox Live. Yep. You had to pay a subscription to take advantage of a subscription you were already paying for. As of June 6th, that's gone, and the Xbox One will finally have caught up to the Nintendo Wii. :P

The other piece of bad news is that they will now sell the Xbox without Kinect for $400. This means that their slightly inferior hardware will now only cost the same amount as a PS4, not $100 more. They have removed every differentiator they had, and their system is less powerful.

Microsoft has never won a console generation. They won North America in the last gen, but they still lost to Sony worldwide. Yet somehow they thought they were in a position to dictate terms to consumers. I'm glad they got humbled. I don't want them out of the race, because nobody wins when a single manufacturer, regardless of who, is in the driver's seat. But Microsoft was hosing customers by double charging for access to video and trying to hose customers on used games and on a peripheral they had no plan to make worthwhile. They deserved this.

And now they'll have to seriously revamp the system's interface because they assumed people would always use voice commands and left it a terrible rat's nest. They deserved this.

Wii Online Dead

As of May 20th, only games that made you pay for online will work on the Wii. I don't have a list of which titles have paid multiplayer, but basically it's killed multi for just about everything anyone might care about: Mario Kart, Monster Hunter, Smash Bros. They're all dead.

Why would Nintendo do this now? Because Mario Kart for the Wii U comes out May 30th. Mario Kart always moves hardware and now Nintendo is pulling an even worse move than EA. At least EA would wait until the next iteration was out before killing the servers of the old one. But EA wasn't desperate to move hardware like Nintendo is.

Much like Microsoft, Nintendo brought nothing substantial to this generation.

But at least they tried.

Sony Parent Company Issues

Sony Entertainment has posted losses for six of the last seven years. And some investors want it broken off from the rest of the company. I don't really know what this means for the games business, but it's a huge distraction, and that's never helpful.

But they've got the best indie support, VR on the way, and they haven't been slipping on banana peels like their competitors seem to be.

Wrap Up

According to Arthur Gies on the latest Rebel FM podcast, gamers will have a lot to play this holiday season. It'll take something amazing to reverse the larger trends, but one killer app can make all the difference.

E3 officially starts June 10th.

Bethesda Needs a Boycott

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 20 May 2014

Bethesda is deleting negative reviews for Wolfenstein: The New Order on Steam

The game has significant bugs, but instead of owning them, Bethesda has been deleting negative reviews for the game. How do I know? Steam lets users rate negative reviews as helpful or unhelpful. The most helpful positive reviews have hundreds up upvotes. The most helpful negative reviews on the site have 1 or zero votes each. Knowing that a game doesn't run is very helpful, so there's no way this is legit. People are posting their system specs and saying exactly where they're having performance issues / crashes. There is no way this is legit.

I know they're not the greatest games, but I actually enjoyed the last Wolfenstein. I was thinking of buying this one. But that seems like a long time ago now.

[EDIT: I removed the accusation that fighting over the review probably took down store.steampowered.com. I don't really know that. It just happened at the same time and I was mad.]

Microsoft Press Conference

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 4 June, 2012

Better With Kinect

To demonstrate Kinect voice commands, a player speaks to make a character in an action game call in an air strike. Audibles are called in sports games. These are not bad things, but it only takes some simple math to prove they aren't worthwhile.

Publishers believe that the money Microsoft pays them to make voice commands for Kinect only is more than the extra copies they would sell (across all platforms) if they gave everyone with a headset access to this "amazing new feature".

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Live Anywhere 2

Announcing MS Smart Glass! Yep, Microsoft's cross device initiative that died on the vine in 2006 is back and so withered it's hardly recognizable.

In 2006 Microsoft was talking about the future of games. Buy once, play on any device. Edit your race cars on your PC and phone, then race them on the Xbox. Play multiplayer games across all supported platforms. It was ambitious and cool.

If the 2012 edition succeeds in every way, it will be a dismal failure by 2006's standards. Microsoft's lead feature was being able to pick up watching a movie on your TV from where you left off watching it on your mobile device. They'll save you the two seconds it took to read and remember the time index and the three seconds it takes you to skip ahead on your TV.

The rest of the features (supplementary info during video viewing and gaming, using the tablet as a controller, web browsing) were also uninteresting.

Maybe they think a little tablet integration will make people ignore the Wii U, but that's wasted effort. The Wii U will sink or swim based on software designed for it's unique abilities.

As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft had nothing to show this year.

Pretty Brainless

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 24 May, 2012

Last week we had the simulated pretties with Assassin's Creed 2. This week we have imaginary pretties with Avatar.



Even on my older computer, the foliage looks pretty good. And if I was playing the game in 3D, that plant on the right would probably stick out and give the scene a lot of depth. But that's a double edged sword because while other games would make that tree transparent so that I could still see my character, enemies, etc. Avatar will let you block the camera with it, even if you're in 2D mode. :P

But there's more to Avatar than just pretty graphics. There's also weighty moral choice.

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If you shoot the guy on the left, you're friends with the guy on the right, and vice versa. That's weighty, isn't it?

I suppose this would make the game replayable at least once so that you could see the different outcomes. But the tasks in the game are so repetitive that even a single playthrough was more than I was interested in. Meh. It was pretty and as part of my expiring GameTap subscription I feel like I didn't pay anything for it, per se.

Devil May Cry: A Medium Reading

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 8 April, 2012

THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR DEVIL MAY CRY. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

I've never been big fan of "close readings". If you have something important to say, just say it. Communication is hard enough without hiding a message behind symbols. But that may be because I was forced to do close readings of works I had no love for in school.

As melodramatic and poorly translated as it is, I do love Devil May Cry. And while I was playing it for my latest video series, I started noticing elements of structure and symbolism that I hadn't seen before.

I'm not claiming these elements give the game artistic merit, or somehow "make up" for the shoddy bits. But there was thought and planning and work that I'd never noticed before. That work deserves to be recognized.

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I believe Devil May Cry is a game about balance. There is a demon world and a human world. Dante, who is himself half demon, is not seeking to destroy the demon world. He's just trying to maintain the balance. The main villain in the game is Mundus, mostly represented as a three eyed statue with angel wings. I suspect that the three eyes and angelic affectations represent Mundus' pride. He believes he can transcend balance and rule all.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the game's history puts Mundus' birth within a year of Christ's. I'm not saying DMC is intended to be particularly Christian or anti-Christian. But it does seem to reference it, almost mirror it, in its construction. In Christian belief, an angel rebelled against God and corrupted humanity. In Devil May Cry, a demon rebelled against Mundus and saved the human world.

But Devil May Cry has no heaven or ultimate victory. It seems to believe in eternal, cyclical coexistence and conflict. It's a very natural belief system for a fighting game's world. :)

The idea of coexistence even extends to Dante not killing his major opponents. Trish sacrifices herself. Phantom gets carried away and falls through a window. Griffon is killed by Mundus. Vergil overloads on his own power. Even Mundus himself, the target of Dante's vendetta, is only forced back into the Underworld, with Dante asking Mundus to pass on his regards to his son in another thousand years. The only major opponent Dante destroys is Nightmare, which appears to be a magical construct and displays no sentience.

I could go on, but I'll wrap up by saying that pairings are also a very important motif in DMC. Male and female, parent and child, siblings, and possibly even race relations (as represented by Dante's twin pistols Ebony and Ivory) are referenced. There are mirrors, reflections, and representations (paintings) that can physically be traversed. In Devil May Cry connectedness is the driving force.

Full of Sound and Fury

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 23 March, 2012

The Mass Effect 3 ending furor continues. And the furor about the furor continues as well. It's mystifying to hear people on podcasts go on for twenty or thirty minutes about how upset they are about other people being upset, apparently completely unaware of the irony.

What I don't hear is dialog between reasonable people of differing perspectives. What I don't hear is the one thing that might be illuminating, possibly even useful.


As an additional note about Mass Effect 3, I'm also not playing it because there's a bug that doesn't allow you to import your character's appearance. With a series that puts so much emphasis on an epic continuity, that's inexcusable.

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Gaming-wise, nothing's going on. I check in with the crew of the U.S.S. Moogie 5 a few times a day to make sure they're keeping busy. I play Devil May Cry for my videos. I look at the occasional indie game, but none of them leave enough of an impression to write about.

Shooterpalooza

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 6 February, 2012

For no apparent reason, I've been on a shooter binge. Half-Life 2 and the episodes, Crysis 2, Fear 1 and it's two expansions, Fear 2, and even Half-Life 1 since I figured if I was doing a comparative study, I should head back to the first shooter with well regarded enemy AI.

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Overall, I'm not a fan of "good" AI. The AI itself isn't the problem, it's that developers feel the need to make enemies super durable so that they live long enough to show off their behaviors. When point blank head shots can't down a foe, the power fantasy is suddenly less powerful than real life.

Crysis and Fear have stealth clauses where if you shoot an unaware opponent in the head they die immediately, but that mostly serves to highlight how bizarre it is that they don't die from the same bullet in the same head on other occasions.

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Games did used to be harder, but that wasn't a good thing. Half-Life 1 was far and away the hardest game I played. And Fear will kill you in a flash on normal difficulty. It's good that this mostly went away. The fun in these situations is adjusting on the fly, making new choices. Dying only gives you the choice of repeating everything since your last save or quitting. Neither of those is interesting or fun.

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Once you turn it down to easy, Fear and it's expansions can provide some pretty great firefights. Moving from cover to cover, tracking enemies to avoid getting surrounded, and matching all of it to the rhythm of shooting, reloading, and switching weapons is pretty great.

The expansions also added in the ability to bash open doors, and the feeling of barreling through everything in your path, being unflankable because you're bashing and shooting and jumping and running so fast you can't be caught is ridiculously great.

The second expansion (Perseus Mandate) also added in monsters that pull you into the ground. Fear has tons of blood puddles and pitch black shadows, but these monsters made them scary.

The expansions had their problems, but there were good additions that I miss when I go back to the stock game.

Co-opting Cheating

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 4 February, 2012

On a recent co-op night, Chris and I decided we had played enough Minecraft, and it was time to shoot some mans. We tried Battlefield: Bad Company 2. But the cheating in that game is hideous. And it's easy to tell who's cheating. They're the ones who are instantly popping their aim from one target to the next without ever looking around like a normal human. Plus Battlefield keeps historical data, so it's painfully obvious when someone's skill level suddenly jumps through the roof.

It's so easy to tell who's cheating that it appears EA, DICE, and Punk Buster aren't really trying to stop them. This may be because they've simply stopped bothering with Bad Company 2 now that Battlefield 3 is out. You never really buy an EA multiplayer game, anyway. You only rent it until they shut down matchmaking.

But if you can't beat them, why not join them?

If you can't be bothered supporting the game, turn off all the anti-cheat stuff and let people go nuts. The only reason cheating is appealing is because it gives you an unfair advantage. Once the playing field is level, the good players are still going to mop up because they know how to use cover, prioritize threats, and decide which weapons to use in which situation.

The gameplay will certainly devolve, but watching how the game devolves could be informative. Why ever carry an SMG if a sniper rifle can get you one hit kills at any range? What classes aren't useful anymore when the rules change?

In fact, I'd love to see a game designed like this from the ground up. Build something that's all cheating all the time and see what that experience teaches.

Used Games

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 4 February, 2012

Microsoft recently floated a rumor that the next Xbox won't allow for used games, probably to see if the threats Gamestop made to them would be ugly enough to make it a bad idea. Well, maybe Microsoft didn't float it. The internet is pretty good at making up its own rumors. But the result was the same, a lot of pontificating about the nature of used games, most of which was a waste of time.

For one thing, digital distribution doesn't allow for used games, so the point will be moot in a decade or two. For another, and I don't think I've heard nearly enough discussion about this, we've had used books, music, and movies since the things were invented, and all of those industries have done fine, at least until they ran up against the aforementioned digital distribution.

Long story short, as markets move to digital, the shrinking amount of retail dollars will be fought over more and more viciously, more and more wastefully. In the meantime, I'll be playing games (Crysis 2, for example) that I bought for $5 online.

Keepalive: The Holiday Sale

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 25 December, 2011

Steam's having it's usual holiday sale. They've recently added coupons to the service, so they've folded those coupons into the promotion. Unfortunately, the way they've done it is awful. If you perform a holiday task (by completing special holiday Steam achievements), you get an item in your Steam inventory. You might get a game. You might get a lump of coal which acts as an entry in a contest to win games on your wish list. Or you might get a coupon, which is worst of all. The vast majority of coupons are useless during the sale, and worse than that, provide lesser discounts /than the sale/. I can certainly imagine circumstances where the coupons will be better than nothing, but for me, they're worse than nothing because they clutter my inventory with garbage. I couldn't even give them away to other people in the Steam group I hang out with. :(

The contest lets you take seven lumps of coal and turn them into a guaranteed "gift" of a coupon or game. If I could make just one lump of coal from a coupon, I would have a clean inventory and wouldn't see coupons as worthless. OCD whinging aside, I have picked up some games during the sale (though not all from Steam).

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Dark Void

I would have put up a picture, but Dark Void tends to crash my computer so badly that the screen goes away and I have to restart via memorized hot keys. Saints Row 3, Bulletstorm, and Dark Void fail spectacularly while Rage, Singularity, Killing Floor, Orcs Must Die, Psychonauts, Magicka, and everything else I've been playing work fine. I have no idea what's going on.

Anyway, Dark Void is only $3 during the sale, and when it works has pretty lousy mouse and keyboard controls, but for $3, I had fun. The best part is definitely the flying. The way you can never quite control your direction on blast off and the way your limbs dangle around in the wind give me the sense that my character is being hurled through the sky by his crazy little rocket pack. But with the controls as bad as they are I'm grateful the designers didn't put any stunt flying challenges in the game. This is pretty much the only game where I actually used my gaming mouse's ability to adjust sensitivity on the fly, cranking sensitivity up so I could actually turn my jetpack without dragging the mouse across the pad four times, then cranking sensitivity back down so I could aim at something without doing a 180 in the on foot segments.

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Payday: The Heist

Since the game was patched and my Steam compatriots have taken it up again, I tried some Payday multiplayer. It's better than playing with bots simply because you don't have to do all the objectives yourself, but it's still a pretty bad game, with cops magically shooting you through hostages you get penalized for shooting and solid objects. Supposedly the patch reduced the number of cops and made them hit harder, but when we saw over a dozen of them spawn in front of us on a section of Heat Street with very little cover, I knew that mission was effectively over. And we also lost a couple maps to one hit kill Cloaker enemies coming around a blind corner. It's not a good game.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Amazon was (and still is as of this writing) selling the downloadable version of Human Revolution for $10. You can then get the key from your download inventory and add the game to your Steam account. You also get a $5 credit for any future Amazon downloads, so it's a really nice deal.

So far, it feels like the Deus Ex I remember, which is kind of good and kind of disappointing because it's over a decade later and the gamier elements seem more ridiculous as the production values go up. I'll say more when I'm done with the game.

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Prototype

Prototype is an open world super power game. When it came out, it was frequently compared to Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, which was made by the same developer (Radical). The feeling was that Prototype wasn't quite as good, but hopefully the sequel would be better. Activision fired half of Radical after Prototype came out, so I don't know about that, but I do know that so far a lesser Ultimate Destruction is still better than most of what I've been playing lately. Plus all the different combat modes I can switch to have put me in hot key heaven trying to master all this power, a tiny bit like Magicka.

Also, I'm finding myself having all these weird memories of virtual New York. I've been here so many times. Grand Theft Auto IV was the most recent trip, and at a similar level of graphical fidelity, so that's the game I most often remember. Those were the projects where Dwayne lived. Here's a section of walled street that stuck out in my mind so I start looking for the nearby bowling alley that Niko had to go to so many times.

Some of the buildings in Central Park immediately take me back to Alone In The Dark. Pretty much every structure in the park had to be investigated and cleansed in the eternal night of that game's midsection. I had to use a rope to climb around the burning part of that silly castle in the middle of the park. I think that castle was also the entrance to Alone In The Dark's underworld.

And even though it was much lower fidelity, I also get flashes of Spider-Man 2 once in a while. I'll remember swinging down a particular street, or think I know which building Doctor Octopus' penthouse lab was in.

I may never go to New York, but I feel like I've been there a lot.



And I know there are a lot of cabs in New York, but this is ridiculous!

Everybody Loves Pirates

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 2 December, 2011

CD Projekt Red recently talked with PC Gamer about piracy. I normally tune out piracy talk, but CDPR is the only triple A developer not using DRM, so I thought their CEO, Marcin Iwinski, might have an interesting perspective. He really didn't. He walked through a very rough calculation of how many people pirated the game and talked about how educating consumers and offering extras like soundtracks, making-of videos, and books are the only way you can compete with pirates.

You can imagine how disappointed I was when Joystiq and GamesIndustry.biz chose to run his off the cuff piracy figure as their main headline.

Then GamesIndustry.biz ran an editorial on the subject. It was very strange to see an editorial criticizing "the media [for] breathlessly reporting the results of his paper napkin calculations as cold, hard fact", when that site was one of the offenders. Plus the editorial ignored how CD Projekt had beaten the pirates, which seems like what its audience would want. But the editorial was trying to point towards getting better numbers so that we can finally have a proper discussion instead of mindless hand waving.

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(You can skip this bit.)

Then the comments were a bunch of mindless hand waving. (Aren't they always?) GamesIndustry is a British business site. Consumers aren't, to my knowledge, even allowed to comment. And the amount of ignorance coming from industry people, especially Chief Marketing Officer Bruce Everiss, was amazing. First he claimed that piracy was the reason publishers stopped working with certain companies. He basically said Commodore and Atari died out due to piracy. There wasn't piracy on the IBM-PC!? This has to be a joke.

This is from a man who worked for Codemasters, a company that moved on from Commodore and Atari computers to the NES, then built a lock-out chip bypass so that they could cheat Nintendo out of licensing fees! So they love piracy when it lines their pockets. Not only that, but he goes on to state that "20% of the workforce were made redundant because of PlayStation 1 piracy".

While I'm sure piracy played a part and layoffs are never cool, isn't it more likely that it was simply easier for management to scapegoat nebulous pirates than to be truthful about their own mistakes? Codemasters created zero intellectual property on the PS1 that I can find. Everything was licensed: sports, toys, even a clothing license, so they were always splitting profits. Plus Codemasters had dumped the budget titles that earned them their success, so they were a budget brand selling full price products.

But that's the real key here. Piracy is a bogeyman. While it is a bad thing for sales, it's a fabulous godsend as a lie.

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Publishers have to make PC versions of their games. Shareholders see how much money World of Warcraft and The Sims and Starcraft 2 and little indie games like Minecraft are making on the PC. Publishers have to tell shareholders they have a plan to get that big money, even if they don't. And when they don't, they blame the pirates.

The GI editorial is trying to call out for better information about how much of piracy is really lost sales. It's a nice idea, but why would a publisher pay money for a study that could evaporate their best excuse?

Everybody loves pirates.

PAX 2011: The Games

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 31 August, 2011

I took a notebook to PAX. I wrote quick impressions of sixteen games from the show floor. Because I don't hate you, I'll just discuss the interesting bits.

First off, the best experiences I had were not on the show floor.

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Bushido Blade

I had spent all day in lines. And playing Red Faction: Armageddon in console freeplay had only confirmed what I'd heard about it being less interesting than Guerilla. Then I wandered over to classic freeplay and saw three guys playing Bushido Blade on PS1.

The only other time I've played Bushido Blade was at the first PAX back in 2004. It's a technical and challenging dueling game where one hit can kill. But if everybody playing sucks at it, it is a hilarious collection of lucky and unlucky accidents. At one point my legs had been crippled and I was flopping towards my opponent like a fish, trying to stab him in the shin. It turned my entire day around.

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Left 4 Dead 2

During one of the gauntlet sections (where zombies spawn infinitely until you run a maze and flip a switch), I crouched in front of the group with a fire axe and began singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" as I cut down the constant flow of zombies in front of us. One of my companions started singing as well and it was magical. It could only have been better if I'd been using an oar and we'd sung a proper round.

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And now, for the less awesome show floor. Feel free to skim or stop reading if it gets dull.

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Alice: Madness Returns in 3D

The game isn't new, and the tech isn't new, but this was the first time that I spent more than a minute actually sitting down and playing anything in 3D. Honestly, I didn't think the 3D added too much. I didn't find myself being more certain of my jumps or combat positioning. What I did find myself doing was moving the camera to angles that were worse for gameplay just to put more stuff in the foreground so that I (and the people watching) could see the 3D.

Since I started recording game video, it jumped out at me how much a player can enhance an experience by paying more attention to camera movement and positioning. Heck, in some games, you fight the camera more than the enemies. 3D made playing camera man a little more rewarding, but not so much that I'd pay extra for it.

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Firefall

Firefall will be a free to play futuristic action MMO. The teams on the demo I played were so mismatched that I don't really want to play it now. Such are the dangers of running largely unattended demos at a convention. At least in the Brink demo last year the devs tried to give advice to the losing side. When one of the Firefall stations went down, the employee I told didn't even seem to care.

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Battlefield 3

A lot of people are really hopeful about BF3. My feelings are less positive. They demoed no vehicle combat at PAX. They are not selling on Steam. They will only have servers available until EA wants players to buy something else. Mod support is highly unlikely. And the co-op is only two player. I can't imagine what it would take for me to care about BF3. That game is going to be dead and buried, and I'll still be playing BF2 (with the Nations at War mod).

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Twisted Metal

I was never big on the Twisted Metal combat driving games, but (once I figured out where the accelerator was) the new version seemed both a little easier to get in to, and presented more variety. There was a semi with turrets on it's trailer. Friendly cars could drive into the truck and man a turret. I drove an ambulance that shot homing gurneys with crazy people covered in dynamite on them. If I had a PS3, I'd definitely keep an eye on it.

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Everything Else

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Dead Island

Beating up zombies is fun, but the five minute demo leads me to suspect that the devs are just as worried as I am about its longevity.

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Black Knight Sword

It's a side scroller with a nice paper art style and lots going on in the background, but the jumping bits kill the momentum.

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Bloodrayne Betrayal

It looks like a decent side scroller. I just wish Dust: An Elysian Tale had come out. With stuff like Black Knight Sword and Bloodrayne Betrayal out, it may get buried.

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Dragon's Dogma

It's Lord of the Rings meets Monster Hunter. It felt a bit sluggish, but it has potential.

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Asura's Wrath

Oh, Japan. The realistic art style and attempts at gravitas belie a very cartoony action sensibility. It felt like Dragonball for people who think they're too cool for Dragonball.

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Charlie Murder

Another Final Fight game for Xbox Live Arcade. Meh.

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Retro City Rampage

I don't know if it's just because I'm old enough to have played the 2D GTA games, but it does nothing for me.

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Lord of the Rings: War in the North

I enjoyed the action game version of Return of the King. It had a lot of issues, but the connection with the films and passable combat were enough for me to have fun. The demo of War in the North might be as good, but this many years later, that's pretty disappointing. Maybe it's just the segment they chose to show, but the combat looked very bland. The only reaction to attacks I saw were damage numbers or death. That's fine for tower defense, but action games need more feedback and give and take, in my opinion.

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Resistance 3

I played a little deathmatch. It was alright. But I've heard that the best part of Resistance is the crazy weapons (which makes sense coming from the developers of Ratchet and Clank), and I didn't have time to experiment with them much in the hurly-burly.

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Counter-Strike: Global Operations

It's still Counter-Strike. I would have thought Valve would want to show off more of the new stuff to bring in new players, but they seem focused on people who still want to play de_dust for the billionth time. I suppose there are a lot of them, but they already have the game they want, don't they?

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Path of Exile

PoE played like a slightly less refined Titan Quest. Still, I liked Titan Quest a lot. They also gave me some beta or demo disk, so I'll likely try it out.

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Rage

It pretty much looks like expected. It's pretty, but the need to show off enemy behavior has turned them into bullet sponges that make the guns feel wimpy. We'll see.

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Vessel

It's an indie platformer where you use fluid dynamics and creatures made of fluid to solve puzzles. I was pretty impressed with the puzzle design and the way the game valued the player's time by not forcing the player to run all the way to the edge of the screen before loading the next puzzle. It was fine until the lava area. I sprayed water on it until the surface looked safe, but then it would crack and I'd die instantly. After almost completely solidifying it and still dieing, I moved on.

Blasts From The Past

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 12 August, 2011

I have no idea why, but IdolNinja and Digital decided the Penny Arcade forum members hadn't been playing enough Star Wars: Battlefront 2. And you know what? They were right! I remembered we tried Battlefront 2 at a LAN party a long time ago and me not thinking much of it. The weapons feel puny. The movement is artificially smooth. The bots can swing between useless and uncannily accurate depending on what weapon or vehicle they're using. And the game has some features that take a while to figure out.

All that stuff is still true, but as long as you don't take it at all seriously, there's a lot of fun to be had. For one thing, the game is old enough that you can put in a ton of bots, making the battles feel like battles.



For another, there's a mod called the Conversion Pack which adds maps and additional vehicles, including content from Knights of the Old Republic. A lot of it's pretty janky because it's pasting textures of KotOR characters onto existing models, but sometimes that just makes it hilarious. The run animation on Mission is just her walk animation at double speed, which always makes me laugh. Plus the KotOR Wookies have huge heads for some reason.

Plus the combination of all the elements of the game frequently causes scenarios you can't find elsewhere. An enemy Jedi was bearing down on my lowly imperial officer. I'd been force pushed from my feet and I thought I was doomed. As I started to stand, I jammed on the mine button, hoping I could drop a mine that would take my attacker out with me. I drop the mine, but get knocked down again. Death seems imminent. Out of nowhere, a friendly Jedi force pushes my attacker. He flies into my mine which flings him across the room and into a bottomless pit! Force powers are to high explosives what peanut butter is to chocolate.

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It makes me sad that companies are trying to eliminate mods and user run servers. I know they want us to buy new games and pay for new content. That's the business they're in. But no one will be having this kind of fun with today's games six years from now. The servers will be gone. Outside of a few map packs, no additional content will ever be developed for them.

As we put more and more effort into creating games, the results of that effort are being abandoned quicker and quicker.

Free To Stay Away

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 24 July, 2011

I've been trying the free to play games again, and it's not working for me. I even got tired of League of Legends early in the week. It's not a bad game, but there's just something about making these cute little avatars do violence to each other that feels too removed to be satisfying and too aggressive to fit with the art style. I think a direct control scheme (as opposed to click to move) might help the former.

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Alliance of Valiant Arms

I actually tried War Inc. first, because Steam said it had co-op. But Steam lied, so I deleted it immediately. It's nice to have internet fast enough that you don't feel obligated to play something just because you invested a lot of time in the download. But back to the subject...



This is the co-op mode of AVA. If you look in the top left corner you can see that this is not part of a map, you are looking at virtually the entire map. Three sets of doors spawn waves of bad guys who run at you with knives. You die in two or three hits and subsequent waves are better armed. Co-op DooM is more refined.

I tried some of the versus multiplayer. The map wasn't much bigger. It was like the worst maps in Counter Strike being played over and over in order to earn enough game points to buy marginally better weapons and weapon enhancements that degrade over time. If Dante's Inferno is to be believed, there is at least one layer of hell itself which is more pleasant than this game.

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Global Agenda

Global Agenda is basically a free to play MMO about fighting robots. As action MMOs go, it's not terrible. It's less crazy than Champions Online, which is probably good for some people. For me, the most entertaining thing about the game was the fact that it let me create a character resembling Futurama's geriatric robot magnate Mom, then watch her be an action hero who shoots robots.



But at about level fifteen the game seemed to run out of solo content. And while I did appreciate the variety of the randomly generated instances, the fighting didn't have enough oomph to keep me satisfied.

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Zeboyd Games
A couple guys from the Penny Arcade forums made some games which finally got released on Steam. They aren't free to play, but at $3, they're close enough.



Yep. They're SNES era JRPGs. They've added many delightful improvements (a run button to cover terrain faster, silly enemies and stories, and a finite number of random fights before you're free to explore at your leisure), but when I'm winding my way through yet another maze, knowing that I have to explore the entire thing or miss out on loot I'll want to have for the boss fight, I can't help but feel it's still not streamlined enough. Plus you make permanent choices between abilities when you level up. I often found myself wishing I could change those choices retroactively to correct mistakes or just experiment more with the combat system. At $3, they were a treat. But after playing through both, I'd probably pass on spending even the time it would take to play another.

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Iron Grip: Warlord

The following picture probably makes Iron Grip look about three times as fun as it actually is, and at $10, it's probably a bit overpriced. But I enjoyed the demo enough to play it for four hours, so they earned their money through an older form of free to play.



Iron Grip is a co-op FPS tower defense game. You can see why I was particularly intrigued. The main problem with the game is lousy difficulty balance. Easy starts way too easy. But Medium is nigh impossible without human backup or exploiting the map and enemy AI pretty thoroughly. Also, the turrets are so weak that the tower defense aspect isn't worth much. That said, I did enjoy parts of my Easy playthrough of the game.

At it's best, Iron Grip let me play a super soldier. In the picture above, I have been set on fire by a flame thrower and am still strong enough to hold back an enemy platoon by myself. Did I mention I was on fire? But with great power, comes great responsibility. Should I be thinning the herd, focusing on enemy armor, or seeking out the enemy leader to damage morale (the primary way to win)? Feeling like you are the one soldier capable of turning the tide of a war is very empowering. It's the Dynasty Warriors of FPS.

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Killing Floor

While it's payment model isn't in keeping with the week's theme, at less than thirty dollars for a hundred and fifty hours of fun, Killing Floor is probably still the best value on this list. I still enjoy feeling out the strengths and weaknesses of a new group, tying to decide what role to fill, and telling the occasional bad joke. Why I enjoy this in Killing Floor and not in any other FPS or MMO may forever be a mystery.

Horror, Hollywood, and Faery Tales

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 16 July, 2011


Dead Space 2

While there were a couple slow sections in the middle, overall I'd say Dead Space 2 is a high four, if I were still putting scores on things, that is.

The combat is still not my favorite. It's good to back yourself into a corner so you don't get surrounded, but the third person camera goes squirrely when you do. And there are occasionally sections where you're probably boned until you've been through it once or twice to know when and where bad guys spawn. But once you know, the fights often becomes trivial.

My favorite thing about the combat was that EA's unlocking system doesn't work right and I got a bunch of nice guns from the very start of the game and for free, letting me experiment more than I otherwise would. I do plan to play through the game again at some point, but that's because it's a good ride with some variety, a decent story, and good production values, not because of some manufactured compulsion to own / max out all the guns.

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Top Tier Blues

I feel bad for the top tier developers, in a way. Mark Twain supposedly said golf is a good walk spoiled by a little white ball. I suspect as the writing and production values of games approach Hollywood quality, we'll hear more people saying games are good movies spoiled by difficult, confusing, and tedious interaction. It's taken incredible leaps in technology, billions of dollars, and lifetimes of work to get games to a point where people can say "That looks cool except for the game part." That's probably frustrating.

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Faery: Legends

It's a simple turn based RPG with some nice window dressing.



You can design your own male or female faery and as you upgrade them, you change their appearance even more. For me this made for some strange decisions. I chose my main attack element based on which wings looked best. But I stuck my faery with some pretty ugly antennae because I wanted a specific ability.



Anyone who's played Mass Effect will find this conversation interface strangely familiar. I don't think choosing "renegade" has a big effect on the game, but some allies will let you choose a special ability for them if they like you enough. There's even a potential to make a certain amount of romantic choice in the game, although it also doesn't amount to anything gameplay-wise.

The game itself is pretty much fetch and fight, but you can choose which you want to do sometimes. I felt it more realistic for an eight inch tall creature to lean toward diplomacy rather than violence. :)

While it's probably too simple for RPG fans and too complicated for most kids young enough to want to play with faeries, it's got nice music and visuals, decent writing, and a nice flight model / camera that makes the getting around feel pretty good (tight areas excepted).

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Tower Defense Failures

While I did write down a list of the annoyances I found in many tower defense games, it all boiled down to giving the player enough info to make good choices and making the feedback clear enough that mistakes are obvious. If either is lacking, success and failure feel random and meaningless.

Gaming Culture

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 20 April, 2011

Gaming culture is a funny term. It recently popped up in a review of Portal 2 when Adam Biessner of Game Informer said the original game "defined a year-plus of gaming culture". The veracity of GLaDOS' promises of cake, the weighted companion cube, and of course the ending music kept popping up all over.

I don't think of those things as culture. They feel like memes, amusing refernces. It's probably just in my head, but I thought that culture was the stuff that was meaningful to people.

Or maybe I'm just out of touch. When I go to PAX now (and I just registered for PAX 2011), most of what I see feels pointless. All your base? Rick Astley? Dragonball Z? I like silly things, but putting them up on a thirty foot screen in front of hundreds (thousands?) of people who have already seen them feels extra tired. Heck, there were silly videos I'd never bothered to watch that felt instantly out of date in that format. But maybe that's just because being in a giant entrance line in a largely featureless concrete room that feels like the holding pen for a slaughterhouse does nothing for comedy. But I digress.

Culture used to be exclusively about geography. The printing press and faster forms of travel let ideas move around a bit more. And the internet lets them go all over. But does playing the same games and talking about them make gamers a culture? I'm not an anthropologist, but I suspect it doesn't.

I think it's called a culture, though, because people tie it to their identities. People dress up as game characters. People get game tattoos. People give game character names to pets or even children. I guess the idea is that culture is what shapes and defines identity, so if gaming does that, it's culture. But all this stuff happens with movies and music, too. Is there music culture? Is there movie culture? If there are, I don't hear them called by those names.

I have heard of hip-hop culture, so maybe it's about feeling apart. Liking music in general doesn't give you any identity. But if you're really into a particular type, then you start to be interested in the trappings and behavior associated with it. Maybe. If that's true, than the term gaming culture will probably go away as gaming becomes more pervasive. Or maybe it's already going away as we break into smaller groups like core / traditional gamers versus casual / social gamers.

Anyway, that's my muddled thinking on the subject as it stands. I predict that as long as there are hobbies closely associated with gaming that are considered outside the norm (writing chiptunes, cosplay, etc.), the term gaming culture will still exist. But as gaming becomes ubiquitous, those communities will become cultures of their own, and playing games will be like watching movies or listening to music.

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I feel compelled to add a final note. These are all cultures based on escapist entertainment and consumerism, not the healthiest of sources. But that's a bigger subject for more educated people.

State of the Industry?

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 19 February, 2011

I used to think I had a passing idea of how the industry was doing, but a lot of stuff just doesn't make sense.

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Music games are out
Activision laid off virtually everyone working on Guitar Hero (and most of the rest of the company that wasn't Blizzard or working on Call of Duty). Similarly, Viacom sold Harmonix (the makers of Rock Band (and Guitar Hero initially)) back to the original owners.

But dancing games are in
Four of the top ten selling games at retail for January were Wii dancing games.

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Conventional wisdom is that the 3DS will do great
I don't remember hearing any serious doubts on the Giant Bombcast, Gamers With Jobs podcast, or Weekend Confirmed. And I haven't seen doubts around the forums, either. But that might be because I haven't been looking for them.

But cell phone games cost a buck and DS games cost forty
We've got article titles like "As Mobile Games Rise, Studios Fear for Blockbusters’ Future" and "Peter Moore Likens Game Industry to 'Burning Oil Platform'" which talk about mobile games threatening the big games. But shouldn't the portables be feeling the squeeze much worse than the blockbusters?

Maybe the commentators I've listened to are just thinking about the hardware, which should be novel enough to move a lot of units initially. I don't know.

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Game companies want to expand into other media
Facebook and the iPhone are big? Let's put versions of our game on them! Let's make comics! Let's make movies! Everything grows the brand and makes money simultaneously!

But game companies can't really create or share
People play a game to do stuff. But in every other medium they look for genres, settings, characters, stories, and sometimes particular actors, writers, or directors. Games work in well established genres. Sometimes they have interesting settings. But everything else they tend to do poorly, including giving recognition to performers and designers because they don't want to pay them more. Also the TV and film industries seem to view games as the enemy and vice versa, even when they're part of the same parent company.

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The industry sees big money in social gaming
Farmville maker Zynga is making crazy bank. They made $200 million last year, and are supposed to be on track to more than double that this year. Considering the company's size, and that their revenues are more predictable than the hit driven big games, they're doing great.

But that's not how social interaction works
People have been trying to take some of World of Warcraft's success for years, and even though there are many games that had elements gamers preferred, everybody they knew was playing WoW already. I suspect that's the main challenge anyone trying to break into the social space will run up against. That doesn't mean you can't still make money there. But the kind of money a large publisher looks for may just be a pipe dream.

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As many developers have said, these are frightening, exciting, and uncertain times for the industry. We'll see how it goes.

A Bit More On Biometrics

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 20 February, 2011

There were a couple more things about biometrics I wanted to mention. Valve had a debug setup where they could play Left 4 Dead competitively and see the excitement level of everyone playing. They noticed that people often attacked the most excited player on the other team and defended the most excited player on their own team. And this is definitely valuable data to have as a player. I often get frustrated with teammates who don't know what to do, but if I could see that they were freaking out, I would be more likely to cut them some slack.

Gabe actually thinks this might make the internet significantly more civil, but I doubt it. A lot of the people who behave badly in games do it precisely because they get a rise out of people. Being able to see your jerkiness have a quantitative effect will probably just make it more fun for them.

Also, the second people catch on that The Director attacks them less when they're exited, or that everyone helps the person with the highest excitement, they'll just lick their hand so the sensor thinks they're totally sweaty and freaking out.

We're gamers. Give us a system; we game it.

Biometrics

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 16 February, 2011

I saw a mention on Blues News about an interview with Valve Software head honcho Gabe Newell (Part 1, Part 2).

I had heard about Valve working with psychologists in some of the coverage surrounding Half-Life 2. I thought they'd worked on the facial animation system and gone back to their old jobs. It turns out there's a lot I didn't know.

Here's the first question of the interview.

In the past you spoke about using biometrics to measure players physical and emotional response to a game. Would this technology only apply to play-testing in order to add better design the games or would it be something that all players would be able to use? If it became an option for all players, how do you see this technology being integrated in a non-intrusive piece of hardware.

Huh? Seriously? That's your first question?

Gabe spent over eight minutes responding. I had no idea Valve was so far down this road. Heck, I didn't even know this was a road.

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Galvanic Skin Response - by measuring how much a person is sweating, you can tell how excited he or she is. You can't tell if it's fear or anger or lust. But you know they're worked up about something. Valve's put this tech into mice (the mouse and keyboard kind, not the medical experiment kind), so they can measure player responses.

If you've played Left 4 Dead, you probably already know where this is going. Left 4 Dead is a cooperative game where AI opponents are set loose on the players by an algorithm called The Director. When the players are healthy and well armed, The Director sends more monsters. When they're beaten and running on empty, The Director may space the enemies out more, or spawn more helpful items for players to find. It's a good system. But now, it knows when they're afraid. That allows them to adjust The Director in very effective ways.

Gabe said he "would be surprised" if next gen controllers didn't have this tech integrated.

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Eye tracking - While current console cameras and most webcams don't have the resolution, we may eventually get to the point where tracking eye movement and pupil dilation (which can indicate interest in what the viewer is looking at) becomes feasible. Advertisers have long used eye tracking to test that their ads draw viewers to their logo or product. But it's also very important to games where designers want to be sure players see cool scripted events, find clues to solve puzzles, and can see an enemy telegraphing an attack to react accordingly. As a side benefit, this might allow users to navigate menus and target by simply glancing around the screen.

No estimate of when this might be practical for mainstream use was given.

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Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation - Outside of having EEG equipment implanted in your head, this was the freakiest thing discussed in the interview. Apparently researches have made significant progress in remotely stimulating specific parts of the brain with magnets. If you want the player to feel something, you directly stimulate the relevant portions of his or her brain. The long term effects on humans aren't known. But people are already willing to risk severe illness and death for the way alcohol and nicotine (not to mention illegal drugs) make them feel, so who knows?

Gabe thinks we may see this tech make it into some kind of game controller ten years from now. Although he might have been talking about a crazy expensive PC peripheral, and not any kind of mainstream application.

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Before the Wii came out, most of this would have sounded like crazy talk. But from the Wii's success, the responses from the other console makers, and the push for 3D, it's obvious that the industry has a keen interest in any new differentiator.

Next Gen

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 31 January, 2011

Salt Racer brought up the subject of the next generation of consoles and how nobody talks about it. I suspect that's because they're still a ways off. Well, maybe not Nintendo, but trying to predict their next move seems foolhardy.

Sony and Microsoft are making money right now. They like that. Both companies lost huge sums on launching the last hardware, and that wasn't during a prolonged recession, so they probably want to hold off as long as possible without getting caught napping.

Microsoft spent 500 million promoting Kinect and will want to spend at least two holiday seasons (2010 and 2011) cashing in on that investment. Sony also invested in their motion controls, and the thought of another launch like the PS3 probably still makes some of the Sony folks break out in a cold sweat.

That said, Sony is introducing a hand-held that can play Metal Gear Solid 4 (at reduced frame rate, but still). If that much power can fit into a hand-held, full HD 3D consoles could probably be ready today, if it wasn't for the economic roadblocks.

My guess is we'll see announcements at E3 2012. But that's just a guess.