lost in games

There is good thread over at the forums of www.cygaming.net (Link) with a healthy discussion going on. I wish there were more discussions like this and also stop beating around the bush. Start naming Cypriot retailers charging exorbitant prices. Apart from the Megaland fiasco i also find Stephanis to have some ridiculous pricing system with games at Euro70 to Euro80 and i am not talking about limited editions.

Also something that all retailers have in common is that they are too late with their sales. They could introduce some deal of the week schemes much like the Game and Play online stores.

About a month ago i linked to a news story about the French parliament trying to pass a bill which would disconnect people suspected of downloading illegal content.

“The new legislation operates under a three-stage system. A new state agency would first send illegal file-sharers a warning e-mail, then a letter, and finally cut off their connection for a year if they were caught a third time. ”

As this is the first time a country introduces a specific law to combat piracy i am really interested where we will go from here and how successfully can such laws will be enforced.

Read the full news story here at BBC.

 ”And i find it kind of funny, i find it kind of sad”

MadWorld was no.34 in the UK’s sales charts in its first week of release. In the following week it disappeared from the top 40. From what i have read, the situation is not any better in the US either.

Unfortunately whenever a developer tries to do something bold and different the gamers’ response is “give us something we know and have seen before with a number preferably at the end of the game’s name”. MadWorld could not manage to find an audience even in the Wii’s massive installed base.

For PlatinumGames (developer) and Sega (publisher) this must be a big blow to another attempt to create a new IP with a distinct art style and gameplay. I don’t follow other forms of entertainment as much as i do video games so i don’t know if it’s common but it is really extraordinary how people avoid to venture out of their comfort zone. And sad.

“When people run in circles it’s a very, very

Mad world, mad world enlarging your world

Mad world”

I really wanted to love this game. I really did. When i played the demo for the first time a few weeks ago, i thought it was one of the most exciting and fresh gaming experiences i had in a long time. My vote of confidence had been cast and i bought it on launch and did not wait for the inevitable January/February price drop.

This was also the case for the first 2-3 chapters of the game. Free flowing was my middle name. Only a few times did i have to redo my runs and jumps more than 2-3 times. It was frustrating as it was mostly a result of trial and error and not of any fault of my own. But the enjoyment of the game’s core gameplay was still strong enough to carry it. Free running in first person mode is really inspirational. But setting up the game’s core mechanics means nothing after a while if there isn’t a solid game to support it.

Unfortunately this is where Mirror’s Edge fails me. When you are trying to figure out how to get from one place to the next it’s bad enough that you have to try and die a few times to find the right way to do it. But later on, without spoiling anything, there are certain situations where enemies storm in and you have to find a way out while they are chasing you. So you don’t have the time to find the correct escape route and avoiding their gunfire. What happens is that you will do the scene 7-8 times figuring out the way piece by piece until you finally escape. By the time you do this whole process correctly, you just can’t care less whether you free flowed or not. You just want to get it over with.

After this, the game introduces situations where combat is inevitable. While it explicitly tells you in the beginning that you should avoid it and run, it deliberately sets it up so that you can’t. You have to fight either with your fists or with a gun. But why? The most fundamental principle of Mirror’s Edge is that the heroine is a runner. She is not a soldier. If you are looking to play the game without shooting at anyone then you will be frustrated until you find the perfect way to put the enemies, one by one, out of action with kicks and punches.

The Edge reviewer, which i did not want to believe, sums it best for me,

” ‬Is it a Portal-style puzzler or a breathless steeplechase‭; ‬an Orwellian parable or freeform Olympics‭? ‬Unable to decide until it’s left the springboard,‭ ‬it tries to be all of them but manages none.‭”

Fantastic premise, visuals and mechanics. But it’s too many stops and starts to feel like a game.

An air of satisfaction filled my empty brain on Sunday morning as I completed BIA:HH’s last mission. Alas, it was not because I had successfully overcome insurmountable challenges in the game and not because I had played one my most anticipated games of 2008. No. It was because It gave me the freedom to move on to better things.

BIA: HH is not a bad game, it is just mediocre. There are some moments which lift the game above that to remind you what made the first 2 versions so great but these are few and far between. I don’t want to do a review of the game as I agree with most of the reviews I have read (bar Gamespot’s) so you can check those out.

Instead, I would like to talk about a few things that I would like to see in the series’ next game (as emphasized by the game’s ending cut scenes) which might help the developers bring the series back on the right track. It might be presumptuous of me to think that I can possibly have any valuable input seeing that I am not a professional developer but just a gamer. But consider it my input to a series that I love.

1. Skip the solo missions

These were possibly the worst missions in the game as they exposed the it’s weaknesses. BIA is not a COD fps. It cannot compete and nor should it want to. It’s the thinking man’s FPS and it’s about tactics. My greatest sense of achievement was maneuvering my men successfully in the battlefield and not when i managed head-shots. If Gearbox feels the need to have these missions, especially in indoor gunfights, then they should give you command of a couple of squad-mates. The only difference is that you should be given the option to control them on an individual level instead of the usual squad level. This will allow tight spaced combat and also increase the “bonding” between you and the men.

2. Germans’ cover

Stop making the enemies behaving stupidly. Having Germans hiding behind cover only for their limbs to be fully exposed is ridiculous. This is made more evident when you are shooting them and they are still not moving to shield themselves completely. Soldiers would never act this way on the battlefield. Granting the player opportunities to shoot enemies is one thing and making him feel stupid while he is doing it is another.

3. Cover system

Change the cover system from the third person view to first person or just don’t have one. It will make the game more difficult but at the same time increase immersion and realism. The first two games didn’t have this cover system and were better games for it. Stick to the first person view throughout the game.

4. Tactics

You should be able to designate where you want your squads to go in 2 ways:

(i) Same as always during battles with your left trigger.

(ii) The only time the game should go into a top down view of men gathered around a map. Then you can give instructions to the men which are located near you by pointing on the map where you want them to go, or via radio if the squad is not near you. I found it tedious to have to travel from one squad to the next to get a better angle of where to send them.

5. Enemy behaviour should be more proactive

One of the things that is noticeable with BIA is that during a particular battle you usually, like 90% (arbitrary statistic) of the time, you are not worried about what the Germans are doing while you are thinking of how to flank them. They are just sitting there, firing away. Their only movement might be to fall back to a new position at a certain stage to avoid being flanked. and that’s it. I would expect that in real battles the enemies are indeed entrenched in their positions. At the same time however, especially if you sustain losses, they would counterattack to take back the initiative. I would like to see that happening more often. The battles must feel real, not some only some set piece or puzzle that you just need to decipher.

This is not an exhaustive list of the issues. There are more of course, especially with regards to destructible cover, but all the above involve tweaking the game-play section of the game. The game’s story and presentation also did not live up to my expectations but i believe it’s in the game-play that Gearbox should focus on. It was after all what attracted me and i suspect most other fans to the series in the first place.

Following my post Consistency and realism of the game world i came across Manveer Heir’s Design Lesson 101 column on GameSetWatch. He is a game designer by profession, therefore a more authoritative person than myself, and has written about how the new cover system implemented by Gearbox has affected the game. He scrutinises the choice made by the developer to change the first person view, when covering, to third person.

It’s very  interesting because this decision, as he explains, has affected both the gameplay and the immersion of a player in the game. Here’s the link.

It’s no secret that Music has been facing a crisis with declining song and album sales in the past few years due to the advent of piracy. As the record companies are continuously searching for a solution to their problems through itunes type of services it seems that the answer lies elsewhere.

The videogames industry has been booming in contrast with the US expanding by 43% in revenues last year alone. MTV has spotted this trend and also that its own viewers are regular gamers. That is why they collaborated with Harmonix and Electronic Arts to develop Rock Band to rival Red Octane’s Guitar Hero which is published by Activision.

The latest figures show that as both Rock Band and Guitar Hero made more songs available to play via download gamers have been actively purchasing them. In two months Rock Band sold 2.5million additional songs via download. What makes this even more remarkable is the fact that the game has only been released in the US so far with a European release in spring. The Metallica three-pack of “Ride the Lightning”, “Blackened” and “And Justice for All” is the best selling “Rock Band” download. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock on the other hand which was a worldwide release has sold 5million songs since it began adding downloadable content in early November.

There is no reason to restrict the music-games link to just Rock Band and Guitar Hero and it is very likely that record companies will try to include downloadable music in games such as FIFA, GTA or Skate.

Games may just be the Hero of music,

Isn’t there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and I turn and I dream of what I need

I need a hero
I’m holding out for at hero ’till the end of the night
He’s gotta be strong
And he’s gotta be fast
And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight

I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero ’till the morning light
He’s gotta be sure
And it’s gotta be soon
And he’s gotta be larger than life
Larger than life

 PSP

The PSP might not be the juggernaut of sales that the Nintendo DS is but it still managed to establish itself in the handheld world with a respectable market share and a very solid games lineup. This despite Sony’s blunders with the UMD format and controls design. In fact it is my favourite handheld console and with games like Patapon and God of War coming this year it will only get better.

The PSP community showed Sony that with regards to movie playback no-one was willing to purchase titles on a UMD format, which is slowly becoming obsolete as everyone predicted. Instead they were being downloaded or copied on the console’s memory stick. In the CES 2008 which is taking place since Sunday Sony demoed how Blue-ray discs can be copied first on the PS3 and then on to the PSP for playback on the go (PC World article). This comes just after the announcements regarding the use of Skype by the slim version of PSPs and also a new 16GB memory stick.

Sony is slowly giving consumers useful applications and also appears to be doing it in a logical and a more consumer friendly manner. Not to mention the realisation of the hard fact that the PSP’s future also depends a lot on its interactivity with its big brother the PS3.

Do all these, plus a great game lineup, mean that Sony is finally getting it right with the PSP? I really hope so.

Blu-ray Vs HD DVD

After Warner Bros decision to side with the Sony camp and release movies exclusively on Blu-ray it appears that Paramount may be about to abandon the HD-DVD sinking ship according to the Financial Times:

“Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD-DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.”

This means that the end of the format war is very near unless HD-DVD has some wild card up its sleeve. Although i don’t think that the blu-ray is the future (downloadable content is) it is good to have this thing over with for the benefit of the consumer.

We have always been tresspassing. Cyprus was never an option. Greece? Yes. United Kingdom? Of course. But Cyprus? No, never an option.

Like refugees, Cypriots wanting to get a taste of XBOX Live have always been using false information to get access since the original Xbox. For people using the UK as their country for example a simple, arbitrary choice of a Post Code was fine as long as the remaining credit card information was correct. Because make no mistake we have always been paying our dues even we are outside the service area of Live.

But it appears that Microsoft now is trying to put an end to it. Cypriot 360 gamers trying to subscribe to Live or add MS points using their credit cards are no longer able to. A message informing the gamer that the address details are incorrect appears. It seems that now that arbitrary UK post code is no longer enough. The system verifies all the credit card details.

For the time being there is a way around this. Using redeemable Live cards both for the Live subscription and for adding Microsoft points to one’s account. I have successfully tried the latter. Also a friend of mine yesterday managed to get a 48 hour Live subscription using one of the free card codes found in some games.

But i wonder. Are we facing a ban on all things Live? If Microsoft decides to also start checking gamers IP addresses, much like the video rental service currently does, then i am afraid there will not be a way to get around anything.

Maybe it is time for gamers to start petitioning both Microsoft and internet service providers to formally bring the service to Cyprus to resolve the issue once and for all. But this is a country which has stuck to a 1mbit broadband and high prices compared to the rest of Europe and there is still no action from consurmers. I am not holding my breath. It is more likely that the Xbox Live service will finally be offered for free instead……

There has been a lot of discussion lately regarding the credibility of reviews and mostly about the independence of reviewers and games sites, However, there is another issue. I don’t mean someone’s writing skills, gaming skills and experience. I am also curious about how much time a reviewer spends with a game.

I watched over the weekend a lot of reviews on Gametrailers (GT) which although i don’t always agree with i respect and enjoy. But when i watched the Scene it? review on the 360 i was astonished. The reviewer missed something which would only have happened if he played it just once! He claims that one of the faults in this game is that the answers of players (which are multiple choice A,B,X,Y) appear on screen and thus made known to all players. This leads to “jumping the wagon play” especially when one of the players is identified as an expert, just like the reviewer says.

BUT! That happens only in the party mode. You can play (along with three other people) the play mode where answers are not visible!

I am amazed that the reviewer did not notice that. It happened to me and my friends the first 2 times we played it. We played the party mode and experienced the jumping in the wagon thing. But then we tried the first mode and voila! Multiplayer Scene it? with non-visible answers!

Which brings up the obvious question. How long did he play this game? 5mins? 1hour? By himself or with colleagues? Did he take it home to try it with other people? How could he miss such a thing and then post a drawback that is not there? That is simply poor reviewing.