New Releases – Duke Nukem Forever & Child of Eden

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

I’d like to weigh in on two new releases today. One of them I got to play during my visit via Shaggy at Uberfriendship to Oddly studios the other night, where I met some especially cool people. We ended up playing Duke Nukem Forever for a bit — I probably had the controller in my hands all of a half hour before casting it off, adrift like an unwanted child of ancient myth — and I can’t help but feel like Gearbox and everyone involved had wasted millions of dollars.
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Analysis of the Wii U

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

With the Wii U looming on the horizon, I as a Wii owner and gamer have had some pretty big questions on my mind. Do I sell my Wii when I upgrade? How much does the Wii U cost? What kind of media can it play? DVDs perhaps? Is it wi-fi only, or is it also equipped with an ethernet port?

From what I can glean thus far, there are some concrete answers to a few of these, and some shakier ones for the rest. Going down the list, here’s what I think is going on:
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The Nintendo Conference @ E3

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

The Nintendo conference at E3 was one of the best (if not outright the high point of the show thus far), revealing a slew of games and, most importantly, Nintendo’s new console: The Wii U.

Between being a peripheral, a console in its own right, and a promising innovation in virtual space interactivity, the Wii U is pretty mind-blowing. At the start I was prepared to write it off as another bid to extend console life. After all, that was largely the purpose of Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Kinect. Both have done respectably, but overall they haven’t changed the home experience in a meaningful way. Even the Wii’s original motion controls weren’t a huge leap, though they did open new doors in the console market.
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What Makes an RPG?

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Roleplaying is probably my favourite genre of gaming. Classically, the RPG has been based around “save the world” stories, sword-and-sorcery themes, and variations on turn-based combat. In addition, there have also been action-RPGs (where combat is in realtime), strategy-RPGs (where combat is a glorified game of chess), and dating sims (wherein combat is usually absent).

As time marches on, the RPG has become more and more poorly defined by its makeup. Developers have grown the genre out to such extremities that it’s really hard to pin down just what qualifies as an RPG. Many fans would argue that Zelda is an RPG series, while others peg it as an Adventure game. This kind of classic debate has brought up a lot of suggestions as to an RPG’s major foundations. Experience points, level building, focus on characterization, focus on plot, having numeric statistics, and so on. But in all of the arguments I’ve either made or seen made in the past, there’s always one major logical flaw that bothers me: The idea that RPGs have unique foundations.
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Playing Outside Your Stereotype

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

By now, you may have heard that there has been some protest against the romantic options included in BioWare’s Dragon Age 2. There’s a sufficient amount of, shall we say, homosexually-oriented content involved. And “exotic” sexual content, whatever that means. So much so, that apparently some gamers feel like the “Straight Male Gamer” is being ignored. Others feel like the homosexual content is being misrepresented, and that it should have been pared back. While I can’t really speak for the game’s mechanics, I’d at least like us all to talk about how we as gamers explore sexual archetypes, and what it means to think outside the [sex]box.

Let’s dig in.
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Socially Responsible Gamification

Friday, April 1st, 2011

Let’s talk about gamification for a moment.

Gamification is, simply put, the integration of certain game-like features into everyday tasks and chores. Gamification can be found in our culture today, and it’s quickly spreading.
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Excuses, Excuses

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

As a child I was a pretty avid reader, raised until the age of 13 without a TV in the house. I read the entire Lord of the Rings at eight, and most (though not all of Dune) by 10. The Tale of Genji was quick to follow, and then (oddly enough) Cosmos by Carl Sagan at 13. Tintin and Asterix were the rich, european comics in my life, and while I still read things like Spiderman and Green Lantern, American comics were more or less a sideline in my literary education. I liked larger narratives.

When I finally did get a gaming console, I immediately took to RPGs. It seemed a pretty natural fit, and I used to spend days transfixed by one digital adventure after another. My earliest experience with RPGs were Final Fantasy VI and Breath of Fire II for the SNES. Great games, and while I realize now that the stories aren’t complex by any measure, they’re nonetheless entertaining.
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JRPGs

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

I dunno what it is about Japanese RPGs in the last few years, but I find myself invariably disinterested with them lately.

Every new title seems very “same-y”, and I can’t help but question whether the companies on that side of the Pacific have just run out of ideas or something.

That can’t be it, right? Surely, with the thousands of creative minds in the bright nation of Japan, someone, somewhere near the top of an RPG developer has a bunch of great ideas and the power to implement them, yes?

I really hope so.

The Japanese market is emerging from the same crunch everyone else felt over the last three years, which has had a profound impact on how games look. With not a lot of money to go around, the rising cost of development, and the fact that North American companies have leapt forward in recent times, most Japanese devs are probably weighing their options really carefully. But there comes a time when you have to stop nickel-and-diming the creative process if you want to continue being ahead in the industry.

I’m not suggesting that a company needs to throw all its money into risk ventures. That’d be silly and irresponsible. But you do need to throw money at your production values and creative team so that your product either stands out as a unique experience, or a highly polished one. People don’t love Valve’s Team Fortress 2 for being high-end and having all the latest tricks. They love it because TF2 has vision. It’s a complete experience, from the memorable graphic style right down to the play mechanics. Even the voice clips have become part of the mythology surrounding TF2, and for good reason: They’re tightly integrated with the look and feel the game provides.

Now, TF2 is an FPS, and I’m talking about RPGs, but in terms of product vision and brand recognition, I think it makes a strong point.

RPGs are supposed to be giant, sweeping adventures. I don’t care how many maids and catgirls you throw into your product, if it doesn’t hold up where it counts, no one is going to remember it. Does anyone care about Star Ocean 4? No. Have any NIS products besides Disgaea been memorable? No. Because they’re either poorly made, heavily dependant on formula, or just plain boring.

It’s not all bad, of course. Atlus is still doing good stuff, and the new Golden Sun looks promising. But overall it feels like the big ticket console RPGs are really lacking in substance these days. Final Fantasy XIII was… awful. Being an entry in a series known for adventures of epic scope, it gave its players tiny, linear corridors to run through, both in terms of physical design, as well as story. Completely superficial characters (with one important exception – Sahz), a huge step backwards in battle system integration, and generally poor voice acting all hurt it really badly, and it’s from a major Japanese publisher. What a shame.