VARIOUS clippings from discussions I’ve had since.

I will be adding to this post over the week. Reaction to the conference is rightly negative on the whole. It was extremely badly stage-managed for one thing, not to mention the fact that it shows Microsoft heading in a overtly counter-intuitive mainstream direction, when it has done so much for gaming with the Xbox project this geneation and last. Comments mine unless noted.

Basically what you’re seeing happening is MS going from taking over the console market from PS2 with Xbox Live, to having an entire E3 presentation dedicated to how they are copying from the other consoles because they’ve lost so much ground recently.

This is not a good day to be an xbox gamer.

Jul 14, 2008 21:28

[ed: Posted right after the show, after post-show discussion @ Something Awful. ]

–

I am an Xbox stalwart, but MS sucked at E3 (to put it MILDLY) and they’re conceding ground to Nintendo like nobodies business. The new dashboard could almost be a ‘photoshop what happens when Wii outsells all other consoles’.

It’s sickening to be a console gamer right now. The mainstream is the only stream, the real gaming is getting squeezed out.

I don’t think living room family gaming has the legs to progress gaming. Mainstream family entertainment isn’t going to grow the market.

PC is looking like being rejuvinanted as the leading platform in the coming years.

Posted by Harmonica at 21:44:50 14-07-2008

[ed: More spur-of-the-moment reaction posting @ Eurogamer. With titles like Spore and Diablo 3, the PC could see a resurgence in subscribers if the big three console platforms fail to cater to the passionate gamer/pro-gamer ethos over the coming years. This has been on the cards for years, practically ever since PC gaming seemed to be get squeezed out of spotlight a few years ago.]

On Thursday evening I had finished playing Bioshock and was chatting to a friend on MSN when I heard a crash upstairs. Since I’m alone at my parents house while they’re on holiday, this was pretty unsettling. Not to mention the fact that the house is centuries old and in the middle of nowhere, because this absolutely didn’t cross my mind for a second.

I went up to investigate in the direction of the sound. The darkness swam in front of me so I flicked on the lights. As soon as I did, a bulb blew on the wall right in front of me, and all the lights in the house went out with it. This frankly scared the shit out of me since it had been happening in BioShock all over the place, and I was probably still half-in-and-out of that environment. I backpeddled downstairs to the fuse box. Quickly.

At least I wasn’t playing Condemned; I might have had a heart attack.

When I went back up I found a bunch of shampoo bottles in the bathroom had been knocked off a shelf. I probably should have put more thought into this, but somehow I actually dismissed it and just went back to my friend with a shrug (his suggestion of ghosts was very calming).

..about thirty minutes later I had a visit from a dormouse of the squirrelly aesthetic, who had ventured downstairs from the attic, and was investigating the bins in the kitchen. I coraled him out. He gave me a scare or two because he liked to pop his head out (cute as it was) from around the corner right as I was leaning in to look.

It took me til 3am to get him out the backdoor.. stupidly timid little guy. Stupidly tiring too.

Hi there Game Daily fans, I’m about to bring you upto speed on the hip, young slender something that all the cool kids are most definitely not hitting.

Kotaku:

“AOL Buys GameDaily

AOL has purchased GameDaily from Gigex, the company announced today.

As part of the agreement AOL gets both GameDaily and Biz.GameDaily. This is the second major game site purchased by AOL. Last year the company bought up Weblogs Inc, which includes gameblog Joystiq.

GameDaily will become the flagship of the AOL Games network, which will still feature stories from their current writers and properties. The AOL Video Games editorial team will be combined with the GameDaily editorial staff to create content for GameDaily.“

Back up just a second there el journalisto: AOL BUYS GAMES FREAKING DAILY? Nurse, check my dosage of red pills. GameDaily, the site I’ve been slanging on recently, aka the most downtrodden worthless collection of characters ever flung into the webosphere, has been purchased by AOL Times Warner.

I’m not a business man, but I know a bad deal when I see one staring me dead in the face. Lest it need stating, GameDaily is the best guide ever written on how not to put finger to keyboard and start writing about games. And yet AOL brings out the big bucks and calls it a deal. Why would any rational company do this?

Well allow me to stop you there, Mr Smarty Pants, before you leap and say ‘B-b-b-but AOL isn’t rational!’ You’re right, it’s not. Didn’t we hear recently and continue to hear of AOL’s frankly hideous consumer support lines that are staffed with jargon spewing drones who have all subscribed to AOL Bullshitting Monthly (How To Keep A Customer In Ten Easy Steps). Except it’s not Ten Easy Steps, they wrote a whole manual on it. And then we all laughed for ten minutes when AOL threw out months worth of logs of 500,000 users onto the web, before the realisation dawned that maybe it wasn’t as much hilarious as a complete contravention of privacy laws. And now AOL has purchased GameDaily, the most worthless site on the web: actually paid for it and everything, without using Monopoly money.

I know what is going on here. AOL has been infiltrated by the same evil alien lifeforms who instigated it way back several millennia ago, and they’re taking it down. They’ve had enough. They’re killing it from the inside. They’re totally fucking it. It’s beautiful to watch the masters at work, I guess. But there’ll come a time when you’re sitting in your garden with your air rifle and you’re taking aim along the sights and then it hits you:

YOU RAN OUT OF AOL STARTUP CDs.

Update: the letter that I wrote to GameDaily’s editor last week was picked up in their mailbag article of response to Chris Buffa’s various articles.

The inclusion of my un-prettified 5AM ramblings should probably annoy me more than it does, I’m just amused they would even publish it since it attacks them fairly along the broadsides. No such thing as bad press, perhaps. Or a lack of better entries.

Chris Buffa sent me a response via email that wasn’t entirely satisfying, so I fired one back.

HITMAN: BLOOD MONEY is another one of those games that is so foot-stampingly, fist-clenchingly, teeth-grittingly close to being a brilliant game that it makes me wonder yet again how things like this happen.

Io Interactive are a well known and popular game developer making a title for the current platform du-jour, the Xbox 360, and yet they’re dragging their heels in the mud, kicking and screaming and making a game which - apart from pure aesthetics - is completely previous-gen. Backwards-gen. And I’m kicking and screaming wondering how they can care so little given this opportunity at greatness.

What have they done right? Graphics and sounds. Aesthetics. This game is a visual treat. Each level could be taught in videogames design schools years from now in terms of attention to detail. A ton of original textures all in high resolution (sparing that moment when you walk upto a wall to check just how how detail they are - sometimes blocky) that perfectly fit the worlds they’re trying to create - be them moribund and grisly medical clinics or riverboat steamers. Character models which - whilst reused in basic form from level to level (sparing main characters) - are kitted out with an array of different costumery that will hide this fact unless you pay particularly close attention. The models of special characters in the levels are emotive and variously gorgeous and ghastly. As for the sound and music, everything works right, be it Jesper Kyd returning for another brilliant score (Budapest Symphony Orchestra in tow) or the ambient clicks and hums and whirrs that will fill the gaps between the splodes and kapows as you rain bloody hell upon your victims.

So that’s what they’ve done right.

On the flipside you have a million missed opportunities and game-breaking goofs that will be responsible for equal amounts of heartbreak and heart-attacks, and Io should be nailed to the roof and poked with spiky things for letting them pass into the final product. Basically, all the foibles of the previous games are here in abundance: clairvoyent enemies, rote AI, inflexible game mechanics and trial-and-error gameplay (mostly error). These things were so apparently wrong in the previous games that it’s achingly disappointing to see them again. On top of those series favourites you have the total misnomers: things that are present or missing and make everything a lot less fun that it should be.

47’s hideout is a fully fleshed out location which you only see once at the start of the game (unless you visit it via the level select), and serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. There’s racks for your guns that you’ll collect, a shooting range, and the familiar Agency laptop, but all you can do is enter and leave via the front door. So what could you have done with it?

- Trained weapons (although 47 is highly skilled so this might be redundant)
- Selected weapons for your next mission (as in Hitman 2).
- Viewed information on the next target on your laptop (news articles? maps? information on the target?)
- Walked around the wider area, the town itself, buying disguises or weapons or information.

That’s just a few ideas off the top of my head which would have improved the game. I would even go so far as to imagine that Io planned for things like these to make an appearance but the game was rushed out without having time to finish them off. As it is, the trip to this level just highlights their absence.

So instead of planning a run before you start, you turn up on the doorstep of your next mission without any clue of what you’re meant to be doing, wearing the characteristic suit which should mark you out as prime target. Ideally, without this planning stage, you’d look at a map with notations and so forth. But the maps are blueprints that merely show you the exact locations of your targets as they walk around, a bizarre (returning) inclusion that undermines any sense of excitement or intrigue. Of course, it’s needed, because otherwise you’d have to search every single room for the enemy, but it shouldn’t be needed. It’s a weak design crux that spoils a certain element of the game: the excitement of not knowing exactly what’s around the corner, or having to track down the targets based on prior research. Hitman is an assassin and you’d think he’d be able to plan things a little more carefully. But as it is you simply have to play each level many times on a trial-and-error basis before you understand what you should be doing. This is stupid.

The trial-and-error gameplay is the largest factor marring Blood Money’s success. At the start of each level there is a huge desire to play out the role of 47 to the letter, executing a careful and largely problem-free hit on a unsuspecting target. This is always impossible thanks to the aforementioned lack of data, and the existence of many game-breaking bugs which will scupper your chances time and time again. Most of the time, even given the lack of information, you can sucessfully navigate the various danger zones and hazards of each map, but when you have to actually execute (mostly literally) everything falls apart.

If you’re stealthily creeping up behind someone ready to give them a stab in the back, you can expect that nine out of ten times when you try to do it the victim will somehow avoid death completely and spin around to witness you. Once this happens, if you’re going for a Silent Assassin rating (which you really should be) the only option is to restart. Given the 20-some second loading times on the Xbox 360 this quickly becomes intolerable, so you pick another method which should work perfectly. This time, instead of knifing the guy, you creep up with your pistol, grab him and knock him out. Then you throw his body over the edge of whatever chasm he was looking over. Unfortunately, asshole physics is not about to let you get away that easily and what was deftly executed manoeuvre is ruined when the body flies twenty feet skywards and spins back impossibly to the same place you threw it off. This is about the point where the guy’s buddy turns up at the door and you get a faceful of lead.

Setting aside glitches in the game code, often the actual design of the game leads you inexorably to restarting a level. Io have actually placed elements in missions that lead to unavoidable death or at least complete fuckups when first encountered, the likes of which will be famililar to anyone who played the first few Tomb Raider games, or many platformers beforehand. This is gaming design sin (and indeed was referred to as one of the seven deadly ones in an excellent old PC Gamer article). If the player cannot avoid an obstacle, then it is pointless to include it. It merely highlights the separation between him/herself and the game character or the game itself, since the character would never fool for it. Lara Croft didn’t become such a successful treasure hunter by failing to avoid hidden spiky death pits. Likewise, Hitman 47 didn’t get to the top of the food chain by being murdered by female assasins - unfortunately if the player follows certain courses he will be auto-killed in an FMV (or locked into extremely tedious cut scenes leading to eventual mission failure).

When you finally stagger to the close of each mission it is with a huge sigh of relief and a growing understanding of what Phil Connors went through in Groundhog Day.

There are other issues with Blood Money. The story is convoluted to the extreme and lacks foreshadowing (in other words: good storytelling) to the extent that when it draws to a close it’s not at all obvious what is going on. In general the environent lacks interactivity so the gameplay experience feels extremely limited in terms of playing a role. There is a significant lack of dialogue or interaction with people (dialogue options would have been a boon). There are many instances of illogical or bizarre behaviour on the behalf of NPCs which go a long way to destroying the atmosphere. And so on.

Blood Money is not particularly fun or satisfying to play and is a disappointingly standard entry to the series. Rent or miss.

In this first part of what shall I hope become a long-running series of letters to editors, I’ve written to ‘The Editor’ of gamedaily.com, an impoverished videogame site, about an article published yesterday which (after three previous pieces) really set them up for a taste of their own medicine.

To: editor@gamedaily.com
Subject: Chris Buffa’s ‘How to Become a Better Videogame Journalist’
Date: 29 July 2006 11:20 GMT

Dear Ed,

It seems that Chris has forgotten the main rule of any soon to be ignored ruleset and that’s never to follow any ‘how to be a good X’ guide, especially when considering journalism. You don’t read about how to write, you write.

That said, I think the best tip he could have offered to misty-eyed future journalists would have been to pointedly avoid reading any of the review material on gamedaily.com. Let’s take Mr Steven Wong’s ‘Night Watch’ review as a first example. The opening paragraph is wanky, meandering, pretentious and grammatically  challenged. The next paragraph: “the underlying premise is..” launches into the predictable cliche of summarising the entire game plot in one block. How is it the ‘underlying premise’? It’s not underlying in the least. And so on.

The rest of the article is dull as dishwater and you surely appreciate me not analysing each sentence for errors, god knows you probably had a hard enough time passing it through (you edit these things, right?). It never steps outside what is expected for a short review about a crappy game no one is going to bother playing: there’s no personality and it’s a list of features with basic criticisms. To learn how to write entertaining and informative short reviews, Mr Wong should refer to PC Gamer UK’s John Walker who wrote the ‘They’re Back’ short review section in the magazine for years.

Let’s pick another review at random: Zoo Tycoon 2: African Adventure. Oh, okay, it’s Mr Wong upto his old tricks again. I stopped reading after the first paragraph. STOP. STARTING. NEW. SENTENCES. WITH. NO. CONTENT.

Prey review by Robert Workman. A very workman like review. Yeah, don’t thank me. We’ll ignore the fact he gives the game 4/5 when it barely deserves 1. What on earth is this:

“The gameplay feels just fine, with your typical first-person shooting controls reacting very well, and some puzzle-solving coming into play so you can push ahead or find some extra ammunition and health packs. These usually come in the form of disgusting alien eggs that you can roll along, and then blow up to clear the slime off a door or open up a pipe to a lower level. The action never really gets over the top (even with the promise of an enlarged foe), but it’s sufficient for a game of this nature, and, let’s face it, it’s fun to lay out enemies and even sacrifice a few disturbed humans in the process.”

The gameplay FEELS JUST FINE. The controls REACT VERY WELL. Some puzzle-solving COMES INTO PLAY. The action NEVER REALLY GETS OVER THE TOP. This doesn’t tell anyone any single thing about the damn game, however, and it seems like Mr Workman is pushing on for his 1,000 word limit so he can cash in his paycheck. What a load of bollocks.

Cloning Clyde review: “The end result is a game that probably won’t be one of the most memorable platformers for the system, but is a good time all the same and worth a few hours of play.” Robert Workman what would the world do without your mind-numbingly pointless verbiage?

I’m going to avoid picking out any more examples. I’ve actually never read GameDaily before but since one of your writers (I don’t know, maybe you’re Chris Buffa) is ‘ragging on’ the rest of the journalistic community and you’re getting picked up by Google News, you’d think that GameDaily would be coming up with some pretty hot reviews to afford to level out such high-horse criticism. Frankly I’d be ashamed to have published any of it.

I also read ‘Why VG Journalism sucks’ (how edgy is that title?!) and ‘How to Fix Videogame Journalism’. These are laughable. Mr Buffa can’t even write a good article himself and yet somehow he apoints himself worthy enough to criticise what he perceives others are doing wrong!

“What many of us need to do is brush up on the basics. Grammar and punctuation need to be studied, and after we’re able to craft good (even great) sentences, then we can explore how to string them together to produce articles that have an even flow.”

Thanks for stating the bleeding obvious, Mr Buffa, even if you clearly don’t have any concept of what good (or even great!) grammar or sentences might look like (in fact does anyone understand what he might possibly mean by good or great grammar?). I’m beginning to wonder whether Mr Buffa had this shopping list of good reviewer skills scrawled out somewhere with a mind to actually embodying some of them in his later work, and yet through some brilliant happenstance it was written up and published on your site. “What many of us need to do is brush up on the basics.” No, what Buffa needs to do is stop patronising people and start including himself in the problem. “Grammar and punctuation need to be studied”. Sure, grammar and punctuation (more accurately known as syntax) need to be studied by kids in elementary school. Writers write for a living, they don’t need to study anything. Buffa again fails to notice the shocking irony in the sentence where he himself cannot string an interesting or informative prose together and yet criticises others. “we can explore how to string them together to produce articles that have an even flow”. Oh, now it’s ‘we’ is it? At least he’s now being honest with himself, although nobody on this everloving earth knows what ‘even flow’ could ever be understood as).

Are you getting bored of hearing your writers criticised yet? Well, I’ll start on you, assuming that you’re not any of the people I’ve already mentioned. Frankly, as I have said, if you publish articles slinging dirt (however inaccurately they might be constructed) then you have to be prepared to both receive some back and to look a little closer to home and give your site a health check. GameDaily has no redeemable features whatsoever. The writing is often incomprehensible, always information-less and about as exciting to read as love letters scribbled up the sides of school toilets, some of which probably possess a better grasp of the English language anyway. Buffa cannot write articles, as much as they miss the point, from this standpoint.

So shape up.

–

Rob

I actually got so bored thinking of synonyms for ‘worthless’ that I forgot to launch into an attack on the editor himself, whoever he is.

Every online game has them - moments that you remember long after the scores fade into obscurity, in fact, moments that make the scores all but secondary even as the match finishes. Years after it’s been stashed in the cupboard to gather dust for a rainy day, these are moments that will define the game for each player for years to come. Online games are defined by the players that make up the matches.

After nearly 18 months of online gameplay with Halo 2 I’ve accumulated a whole bunch of them, but today I think I had two in particular that I’ll recount as an example of the often bizarre-then-brilliant style gameplay that made up Halo 2’s mainstay. The design of the game is such that the fine line between brilliance and blind luck is constantly highlighted. There’s the perfectly judged grenade over the towering wall of Zanzibar that prevents the attackers from capturing the flag, or the grenade accidentally released on Lockout that ends up nuking some explosive barrels and throwing the flag carrier off to his doom. Perhaps both aided by luck, but when the intent behind something actually comes off it’s wonderful to witness.

Today the match in question took place on the barren dunes of Burial Mound. After three closely fought rounds the score was 1-0 to my side, and we were placed on defense for the final round. The blue team knew that they had to come up with something special, or at least unpredictable. So, for the first two minutes, we waited for them. Nothing. The clock continued to run down. Someone returned to the base structure and reported that he couldn’t see the other team at all. We took up positions all around the base. I stood on the turret, looking out over the sands.

“…where’s the Warthog?”

Then I heard the Warthog’s sinuous choking engine roaring behind me. I swiftly turned, and promptly ate a mouthful of jeep as the beast motored along the central stage of the base and crushed me against the turret. One down. The other players reacted quickly, and dispatched one of the attackers, but the other two held the sword and the rockets, and they weren’t about to let their plan fail. The sword guy took another life before he was assasinated by a teammate. The rocket guy let off his barrage at that point. Four down. Another blue appeared and made off with the flag, not taking the usual route across the empty stretch of sand in front of the base, instead heading off to its left and under the bridge. His teammates spawned and ran to help him.

A blue hung around for extra kills. He picked three of us off again before he was taken down, finally weakened, by the last of us; myself. This was a game over situation. They were no doubt ammassing on the flag-carrier who was more than halfway home. I had no weapons and I was outnumbered. Then I turned again and confronted the Warthog. Except this time, empty. I strapped in. Beeping the horn frantically at one of my teammates, who leapt in the gunner position, I revved up the beast (which was now covered in flames) and gunned it for the blue base. We sped across the cliffs overlooking the path, trying to spot the carrier. He was nowhere to be seen, which meant he was about to score it. I throttled it for the end of the cliff and we flew through the air, o’erleaping the jubbilant opposing team, careering midway with the flagman who had foolishly jumped to reach the flag spot. INCHES from the base, the Warthog pulverised his body and threw the flag - and us - into the rocky wall ahead. We exploded. Everyone died.

The clock ran down the final seconds as the blue team failed to reach their quarry. GAME OVER. FADE TO BLACK.

What made it a moment was the post-game lobby that followed. Not, for once, full of sweary cross-atlantic banter, but instead full of people repeating ‘holy shit’ in disbelief at how damn close the final moments were. And then the moment was recounted from each person - the gunner in the back who said that I definitely needed to take driving lessons, and the flag carrier who saw the flag spot approaching until he was swept up at 200 miles per hour.

Never let it be said that Halo 2 is not a fantastic game. Now all we need is a bloody sequel..

THE LAST TIME I SAW THIS TITLE SCREEN about ten years ago it heralded twenty minutes of cursing and one broken gameboy. Ah, the innocence of youth.It’s pink, because that will stop me getting mad at it.

That decided, Macro Zone here I come…

In its constituent parts, San Andreas is no short of fugly. It’s something of a modern-day miracle therefore that it outsold its rivals in 2004, and continues to be extremely lucrative after its recent release on PC and Xbox. But then, who cares about constituent parts when the whole is so fantastically gorgeous. It’s a masterpiece of gaming design across all its particular facets - the hilarious and bitingly satirical radio output, the billboards that mock everything from so-called rival game ‘True Crime’ to cars and drinks manufacturers, the various clothes outlets (with perennial target Gap, now ‘Zip’, née ‘Gash’) and all the characters that roam the streets and take their part in the massive storyline, the gangster rappers and the homies and the hoes and the corrupt officials. Brilliant.

It is bizarre, though. Almost every frame has some kind of graphical glitch, be it clipping or frozen models, misaligned textures, grotesque sprite based ‘lighting’ or any combination of the above, and yet we the gaming community have given Rockstar and GTA some pseudo carte blanche to use its now-ancient (at the time stunning) GTA III engine (or a modified version thereof), if only for the likelihood of getting a speedy sequel release. It’s cool. In one way it’s like the community lessening their demands on a developer, which is almost unheard of (think of the demands rightly placed on EA to upgrade and improve with every subsequent addition in its sport franchises). In another way - and without getting too analytical - it’s as if nobody really cares about the graphics, for once, and it’s all about the power of the authorial rhetoric (the ‘text’ if you will) that Rockstar line up to do battle with modern America (or whatever era they pick, in this case the 90s). The idea of them as videogaming soothsayers is rather neat, I think.

These screenshots come straight from the Xbox version of the game, en lui of various USB-based transfer melarky. Of course I could have taken a screenshot in the PC version, but running around San Andreas with a camera (as well as a load of heavyartilleryy) never ceases to be a hilarious sideshow - and playing GTA on a console just feels right. It also allows semi-serious appreciation of the game as a collection of graphical elements rather than the individual bits which may or may not have their faults, which is perhaps why Rockstar added it. I’ll forgive them their moment of hubris because it’s all so.. well, gorgeous.

Expect some kind of picture-based travelogue soon*.

* if I hadn’t been so enamoured with playing it these last few weeks, I’d already have posted it!