Category: ramblings

E3:2012 keynote impressions

[It appears that the office internet seems to be functioning somewhat normally today!]

Normally, E3 is an exciting time; a glorious week where I spend every free moment frantically refreshing Google Reader and doing the arcane mental calculus required to make sure I have enough money saved up to buy all the things that need to be bought.

(*apologies to Hyperbole and a Half)

But I’ve been saying for a while that I had pretty low expectations for this year’s E3; I never thought it was going to be all that exciting.  Most developers are seemingly reluctant to release new and exciting IP this close to the end of the current generation, and the console developers themselves can’t really reinvent the wheel at their keynotes at this stage of the cycle, either.  Nintendo has the WiiU to push; that’s really about it, as far as hardware.

Even so, it’s hard not to be totally underwhelmed by this year’s keynotes.  I was really hoping Sony would be able to sell me a Vita; did they even mention the Vita, beyond COD:BLOPS2 and AssCreed3?  Likewise, Nintendo went to great lengths to say that they could only spend about 5 minutes on the 3Ds during their presentation, and most of the 3DS section was spent apologizing for their lack of presentation time, rather than maximizing what they had.   Microsoft’s “SmartGlass” thing sounds intriguing, but it also seems mostly like a way to render the WiiU’s new tablet controller irrelevant; and in any event, the only big exclusive stuff they have coming out this year is the usual – Halo 4, Gears, and whatever that Forza Horizon thing turns out to be.

If anything, I do have to give Sony a lot of credit for not totally giving up on new IP – I’m really intrigued by Beyond and The Last of Us, both of which have been picking up a lot of positive buzz.  (Not as sold on the new God of War game, though.)

In the meantime, I’ve been thoroughly devoted to Diablo 3.  It does seem to be running smoother!  My monk is now at the beginning of Act 3,  either Level 46 or 47, and thoroughly decked out and dealing much damage.

I can’t be certain that my office’s internet hasn’t totally crashed, so I’m going to cut it short here.  Look for a CouchCast coming up later this week, though, wherein Gred and I will continue to whine and moan about what we’ve learned about this year’s E3 purely through hearsay and Twitter gossip.

of lag and right-clicking

[The internet at my day job has been pretty much broken all week; this is the first time since Tuesday that I’ve been able to load up the “Add New Post” page without everything crashing.  If this post feels a little rushed, just know that I was trying to cram in everything I wanted to say within the short window I’ve been given.]

In keeping with this post’s preface, here’s the short version:

1.  I beat Diablo 3 on Normal earlier this week; my level 32 Monk got through the end in a little over 18 hours.

2.  I went on a little bit of an iOS binge/bender last week, as lots of companies were offering Memorial Day sales that were too good to pass up.  I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much I picked up, considering how broke I’ve been.  (The TouchArcade app is a marvelous tool, by the way – it does a great job of letting you know if stuff you want is on sale.)

[Internet still seems to be working, so let me try and expand a little bit.]

re: Diablo 3:  Yeah, so, hmm.   Everyone seems to agree that the game doesn’t really start to get good until you start on Nightmare mode, which is (a) true, perhaps, and (b) a ridiculous supposition on Blizzard’s part that you’re going to invest 16-20 hours before you even get to the good stuff.  Especially since the single-player experience – well, my experience, at least – has been totally screwed up by lag and latency and random server disconnects.

Like I said above, I finished the single-player campaign on Normal in around 18 hours, and in that time I probably only died 3 or 4 times, but at least 2 of those deaths came at the expense of sudden server latency/lag issues, where the game would freeze for 10 seconds and then dozens of enemies would be standing over my dead body.  I never lost all that much progress, but since every dungeon is randomly generated, I’d have to re-play the entire map again once I regained a connection, and this started to get a bit annoying.

After beating the final boss – an experience  so underwhelming that I initially thought I’d done something wrong – I immediately started up again on Nightmare, and even though I only played for 20 minutes or so, there was a noticeable difference in both enemy toughness and the quality of dropped loot.   Again – everyone keeps saying that Nightmare is where Diablo 3 really becomes an experience instead of just mindless left- and right-clicking – you have to think about strategy and tactics a little more, and your build becomes something to seriously consider, rather than something to experiment with.  I suppose that’s true, although I still found myself clicking furiously; perhaps there was a slight uptick in clicks-per-second.

The lag is goddamned intolerable, that’s all there is to it.  Or maybe it’s my computer, although I refuse to believe it’s my computer.  I’ve tried the game on both my super-PC and my regular-strength MacBook Pro.  The PC can run at insanely high specs, and it has a wired connection with the router, but it’s laggy and stuttery (as it was in the beta).  The MacBook has to run things at lower resolutions and with bells & whistles turned down, and it’s wi-fi only, and yet while it’s true that it’s not as stuttery , the whole game feels like it’s running through water, or maybe it’s just capped at 20fps or something.   The point is, I have not yet had the silky-smooth experience that I really ought to be having – the experience that I had with, let’s say, Torchlight.

More than the lag, though – I really do wish the story and the characters were more interesting.  Not that they have to be, because honestly who cares, but it would’ve been nice to see the same level of care on the story that there clearly is in (mostly) everything else.   It’d enhance the experience just enough to actually keep you invested in why you’re right-clicking 1000x per minute, and not simply just because that pleasure loop of clicking/equipping is so addicting.

Anyway.  As we’re still in the release calender doldrums, I expect I’ll be playing Nightmare quite a bit, and I might experiment with other classes.  As it is, the Monk was a bit of a surprise for me; in every RPG I’ve ever played, I’ve pretty much always gravitated towards the Barbarian/Warrior/Tank class, but the Monk was quite enjoyable.  I might give the Witch Doctor a try;  a friend brought his Witch Doctor into a co-op game with me and it was pretty far out.  (Speaking of which, should you care to look me up, my battle tag is JervoNYC#1540.)

 

further thoughts on Max and Diablo

Gotta say – it’s really nice to be playing real games again.

I ended up finishing Max Payne 3 in one 12-hour sitting on Thursday, and then dabbled in enough of the multiplayer to unlock a few new modes, although I haven’t messed with those yet.

Patrick Klepek, on the most recent Giant Bombcast, said something that’s stuck with me for the last few days, the general idea of which is that he liked the game a lot but wasn’t sure if it was special, the way that GTA or Red Dead was.  I’ve been wondering the same thing myself.  I kinda wish I hadn’t finished it in only one sitting, that instead of powering through it in one day that I finished the campaign over the course of a dew days or a week.  The thing is, the game is exquisitely paced and it’s very hard to put down, and when you’re stuck at home feeling shitty, and there’s nothing else you’d rather do (especially since the Diablo 3 servers are still crap), why wouldn’t you keep playing?

You know what it reminded me of, even though the two franchises couldn’t have less in common?  Uncharted 2/3.  Bear with me here.   The thing that struck me the most in those two Uncharted games was the art direction’s astonishing attention to detail – every single nook and cranny of every single area looked different and unique and lived in, with very few obvious shortcuts.  Lots of games repeat themselves – walls will have repeating textures, buildings on opposite ends of the city/country/galaxy will have similar floorplans, and every enemy you kill might as well be a clone of the one before.   Not so in Uncharted, and not so in Max Payne 3.  Every chapter had its own unique look and feel and rhythm, and while Max might not look as jaw-droppingly beautiful as Uncharted, it’s still pretty damned close.*

Another thing that Max and Uncharted have in common is that there are thousands of enemies, and a lot of those enemies require a LOT of bullets in order to die.  At least in Max’s case, though, having him kill that many people doesn’t cause as much of a weird disconnect, the way it does with Nathan Drake.  Nathan is a charming, adventurous, personable guy who happens to kill hundreds of people during the course of his journey.  Max, on the other hand, is a man who has been through more terrible shit than pretty much any man alive, a man who can only function in this fucked-up world though the total and constant obliteration of his senses through whisky and pills.   According to my Social Club stats, I’ve killed over 1600 enemies during my campaign (and a few runs through one level of Arcade Mode), and Max is a character who feels the weight of every single kill, even if they all deserved what they got.

I only finished the game on Easy Mode.  Which is kind of bullshit – I still died a lot.  As far as I could tell, the only real difference between Easy and Normal is the aiming (i.e., Hard Lock or Soft Lock) – and there wasn’t much of a difference there.  I may end up playing through the campaign at least one more time, all the way on Normal, just to find all the hidden secrets and collectibles (of which there are many, and which scratches a favorite itch).  And I do plan on playing the multiplayer a bit more, too – it’s a lot of fun.  I’d really like to see some co-op modes eventually – if there are any announced, that might just be enough for me to buy the Season Pass.  (If I remember correctly, Red Dead got some co-op modes a few months into its DLC schedule; maybe there’ll be something similar here.)

*        *        *

I’ve continued to plow ahead in Diablo 3 – my lady monk is now level 15, I think – and the game is enjoyable when the lag isn’t killing the experience.  I’ve only been booted off the server once, but I’d say 80% of my playtime has been under some sort of lag duress, and it’s annoying as hell.  (I did end up installing it on my MacBook Pro, and the experience is roughly the same – my MacBook isn’t quite as powerful as my PC, so it runs a little bit slower anyway, but the lag was still an issue.)

It’s weird; I never played the original games, but I played a bunch of their descendants – Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance, Titan Quest, and Torchlight, to name a few.  I’m a fan of the genre, if not of the genuine article.  There’s something weirdly intimidating about Diablo 3 for me; maybe it’s just that the dungeons have long paths and I never know if I’m going in the right direction.  (Which is sort of the point, right?)

I guess I’m still mostly annoyed at the lag.  As much as I suppose I understand Blizzard’s reasoning behind having an always-online structure, I still find it baffling that I’m experiencing so much lag in a single-player-only experience.  It’s ridiculous.  And while it does seem to be improving with each passing day, it’s still not as good as it should be.

I seem to be running out of steam; that’s it for today, then.

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* When I think about Rockstar games – which I do, quite a lot – I don’t necessarily think of them as a graphics powerhouse, the way I do with a studio like Naughty Dog or Epic, but I must admit that both Red Dead and Max Payne 3 are near the top of my list of this generation’s best-looking games.

compare/contrast: Tintin vs. Uncharted 3

Last week marked the DVD and On-Demand release of a whole bunch of films that the wife and I wanted to see in theaters but missed, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (which was pretty good), David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (which was OK), and The Adventures of Tintin.

I have no connection with the Tintin source material.  I recognized the cartoon character’s visage but never read the books, and my only interest in the film was that it looked amazing, and that it had a bunch of voice actors that I liked (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost) and that Edgar Wright had a hand in the script.  And, of course, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson considered this a passion project of sorts, and who am I to argue if two titans of film want to collaborate on something near and dear to their hearts?

The movie itself?  Kinda dumb, actually.  I mean, it looked incredible – it’s probably the best looking CGI film I’ve ever seen – but we had a lot of problems with it right off the bat.  Tintin looks like a teenager, but he lives alone and carries a loaded gun, even though he’s just a newspaper reporter.  (Indiana Jones never carried a gun!)  Tintin befriends a sea captain locked away in his cabin – this captain turns out to be, among other things, a serious alcoholic, and this is ostensibly played for laughs even though the depths of his cravings become somewhat ludicrous.  It’s also got the worst score that John Williams has ever written – I mean, it’s bad, to the point where it was literally distracting from the scenes it was meant to accompany.  (His scores have always been emotionally manipulative, but that’s usually the point.)  And the film doesn’t really end so much as kinda peter out, like a slowly deflating balloon.

It kinda felt like we were watching a videogame, to be honest.  And the more I picked up on that feeling, the more I realized just how similar Tintin was to Uncharted 3.

from inappropriatelyadorable.tumblr.com

(Amazing Nathan Drake pic via inappropriatelyadorable.tumblr.com.)

Consider:

  • Tintin has incredible visuals and features highly realistic motion capture animation; Uncharted 3 is one of the best looking games ever made and features highly realistic motion capture animation.
  • Tintin stars Andy Serkis, a ubiquitous presence in motion capture performances; Uncharted 3 stars Nolan North, who is arguably even more ubiquitous in video games than Andy Serkis is in CGI films.
  • Tintin is followed by his trusty sidekick, Snowy; Nathan Drake is followed by his trusty sidekick, Sully.
  • Tintin is a nice enough kid, but isn’t afraid to fire a gun; Nathan Drake killed over 700 bad guys in my U3 playthrough.
  • Tintin, in his search for a lost artifact, finds his way to an old chateau; Nathan Drake, in his search for a lost artifact, finds his way to an old chateau (although Drake’s chateau also has millions of spiders and is consumed by fire.)
  • Tintin then finds his way onto a gigantic ship, although I forget exactly why; Nathan Drake also finds his way onto a gigantic ship, and I also forgot why.  There are even parallel shots in both the movie and the game with the main character running along the ship’s sides.  (I’d find youtube video here, but I’m lazy.)
  • Tintin is involved in a plane crash in the middle of the desert; Nathan Drake is involved in a plane crash in the middle of the desert.  Mirages galore.
  • Tintin is involved in a chase scene in a Middle Eastern market; Nathan Drake is involved in  several chase scenes in Middle Eastern markets, although Drake is also pretty heavily drugged.

I could go on, but you get the idea.  I’m not suggesting that there was plagiarism at work; both the game and the movie were in development for years, and aside from Nathan Drake’s obvious inspirational debt to Indiana Jones, the two intellectual properties couldn’t be more different.  But the similarities were striking – not to mention the fact that despite the enormous technological prowess that went into making these two entertainments, they were both, ultimately, disappointing.

weekend ramblin’

Ever since I finished Mass Effect 3 last week, I’ve been in somewhat of a holding pattern as far as writing goes. Hell, I guess that extends to playing, too – I honestly haven’t been playing very much, aside from half a dozen apps on my “the new” iPad.

I suppose I should talk about the iPad, right? It’s my first venture into the iPad universe – when they announced the first one, I didn’t understand why it needed to exist, and when they announced the second one, I found it a bit more intriguing but felt I could wait until they hooked it up with a retina display. Which is what I’ve got, now. There’s no question that it’s a stunning bit of tech – say what you will about the sexiness of the Vita’s display, but when I first laid eyes on the iPad screen I was like Alex in “Clockwork Orange”:

Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.

Frankly, the display is so amazing that it kinda renders my iPhone obsolete, as far as game-playing is concerned. It’s so goddamned tiny in comparison!

The problem with the iPad, then, isn’t the device itself – it’s that there aren’t a hell of a lot of apps that really push the hardware. Sure, stuff like Infinity Blade 2 and Angry Birds Space HD look amazing, but Infinity Blade 2 looked great on my iPhone 4, too, 6 months ago (or whenever it came out). Honestly, the iPad game that’s taken up most of my time since I bought it is Draw Something, which – while fun and entertaining and frequently hilarious, especially given that each person’s drawings appear in real time, so you (the guesser) can watch the artist try to figure out how to draw their subject – is not exactly taxing the hardware. I think it’ll be at least 6 months before we start getting some serious business on the new iPad, and I’d imagine that a lot of iOS developers would be concerned about pushing the hardware too much and therefore alienating the owners of older hardware.

I don’t regret the purchase, though, by any means. There’s plenty to do on it as it is – my compulsive/impulsive nature means that I already had, like 100 apps for it when I first plugged it in – and there’s lots of cool music-making apps on it, too, which is partly why I was able to justify the purchase in the first place. It’s a gorgeous device and it’s everything I’d hoped it would be. If I’m disappointed, it’s that I was hoping it would somehow exceed my expectations and do some truly next-level shit right out of the gate – and I’m fully prepare to concede that I’m being a little bit unfair in that regard.

———–

What else, what else… I had a weird dream the other day where I was either playing or actually in the motorcycle gang in GTA4’s “The Lost and the Damned,” which was strange, since I never got particularly far in that particular bit of DLC. In any event, it caused me to pull GTA4 out yesterday afternoon and I jumped back into what appears to be the last few missions of “The Ballad of Gay Tony”. Time has not been kind to GTA4, which is a painful thing to admit. It’s just that, for me, Red Dead Redemption is a superior game in pretty much every way that matters – combat is far more approachable in RDR, for one thing, and the penalty for mission failure is a lot less devastating, which makes the overall experience a lot less frustrating. There’s no doubt that Liberty City is an absolute marvel of game design – I still love driving around and seeing what there is to see, and I especially love that the developers really understood New York City and its feel. Even if GTA4’s gameplay is antiquated at this point, it’s still got the finest open-world city ever designed. The city makes sense. It has personality. Every block is different – there aren’t any cookie-cutter building designs. You might get lost at first, but it wouldn’t be because everything looks the same. I fully concede that my status as a life-long New Yorker might bias me in this regard, but I must also acknowledge that it’s the only videogame that ever got New York City right.

———-

According to my to-do list, the next must-play GOTY contender is Max Payne 3, which doesn’t come out until mid-May. Yikes. Tiger Woods 13 comes out this coming Tuesday, and I will play it because that’s what I do, but I’m no longer as enamored of that franchise as I used to be. Ever since the current generation of consoles came along, that series has lost its way – the games on the original Xbox were insanely addictive and goofy and fun as hell, even if they weren’t truly groundbreaking on the graphics side. As the series has embraced realism, though, it’s lost a lot of what made it truly engaging on a primal level. So let’s just say I’m keeping my expectations suitably lowered for this year’s edition.

———

I went back to KoA:Reckoning yesterday, just to see if some time apart from it would make a difference. (I hadn’t played it since before Mass Effect 3 came out.) It’s still pretty mindless; I don’t know that I’m ever going to finish it, beyond just pecking away at it during slow periods in the release calendar.

———-

Hopefully there’ll be a new Couchcast this week, schedules permitting.

Mass Effect 3: the ending, and what comes next

[I’m doing my damnedest to keep MASS EFFECT 3 SPOILERS to a minimum, but you know how these things go.]

I finished Mass Effect 3 very late last night.  It wasn’t my intention, necessarily, but I’d finished every other side quest I could find and there wasn’t an easy place to stop.

I’d been trying to live in a spoiler-free world regarding the game for the last 6 months or so, but I also spend a lot of time on the internet, and so it was impossible to ignore the controversy brewing about the game’s endings.  I didn’t know why they were upset, or how many of them were out there, or if it was even something to take all that seriously, being that there’s a riot goin’ on over the internet at pretty much any given time.

And anyway, I wanted to see the ending for myself.  (My “galactic readiness” was somewhere in the low-to-mid 60%, but my strength was in the mid 4000s, high enough to get the best endings.)

As it happens, I saw my chosen ending at around 2:00 in the morning, after a 6 hour marathon, and as such I’m probably not in the best shape to discuss why it’s a terrible ending or why Bioware needs to change it.  I’m not entirely sure they do need to change it, anyway.  I made my choice after what felt like 30 minutes of hemming and hawing, and when I finish this post I’m probably going to head back to my apartment and fire up my last save just to see the option I almost picked instead.

It was a tough choice, there’s no doubt about it.  It was absolutely the toughest choice I’d made in the entire series, especially since none of the three options were terribly appealing, and also since I was exhausted and forgot what the choices actually were for a little bit there.  But it would’ve been silly to hope for a “happy” ending – in a series where millions and millions of people/creatures died over the course of a years-long galactic war, having an Ewok dance party would’ve been stupid.

In any event, it wasn’t a cop-out, which (to me) is what’s most impressive.  Even in spite of the fact that it’s a literal deus ex machina.  I did what I did and the war ended, and it hurt a little bit, as it should’ve.

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I’ve read in a few places that even though the trilogy is over, Bioware isn’t done with the Mass Effect franchise, which is good.  I don’t want to leave this world they’ve created.  They’ve created one of the most compelling sci-fi universes in any medium, and there’s a lot more to be seen and done.  But there are some game things that need to be addressed.

For one thing, is there any game franchise that would benefit more from L.A. Noire‘s amazing facial tech than Mass Effect?  As it stands right now, all of the otherwise excellent dialogue sequences are hampered by robotic facial expressions and the occasional strange, unconnected wandering around by a speaking character.  (This happens a lot in The Old Republic, come to think of it.  In fact, some of the wandering-around animations might be identical.)  Better facial tech would go a long way towards making these characters feel even more real than the script allows them to be.

I might also add that a lot of the optional crew conversations in ME3 – the ones where you finish your mission and then wander around the Normandy – were almost exclusively of the pep-talk variety.  Everybody’s feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, sure, but I felt like I was having the same conversation with 12 different people.

The quest system was more than a little messed up – at least as far as the optional side stuff went.  For one thing, picking up side missions by overhearing conversations in the Citadel just felt lazy.  Secondly, the quest system never updated itself, so it was hard to know what you’d actually found and what was ready to turn in.  At one point, I’d kept a notebook on my coffee table so that I could keep track of what I was doing.  This seems insane, given that the game has a built-in quest log already.

One of the things I liked in ME2 was that not every side mission involved combat – sometimes it was just exploring an environment.  As far as I could tell, there was only one (1) mission like that in ME3, and it was a neat change of pace (even if it felt like a puzzle idea that only got half-baked), and I wished there was more.

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My big dream for the next console generation is for a mega-hybrid RPG combining the sci-fi world and strong character development of Mass Effect, the wide-open expanse and the sense of discovery of Skyrim, and the true open-world freedom of GTA.  You put that together with a truly kick-ass graphics engine (idTech5? UnrealEngine 4?) and maybe a multiplayer component worth a damn and  you’ve got yourself a monumental work of art.  Make it so.

decisions, decisions

I’ve been wanting to talk about Mass Effect 3 all week.  I’ve had 1000 different things to say, at varying times, covering wide swaths of opinion and analysis and bitching and fanboy swooning.  I’ve also had a hellaciously busy schedule, and what free time I’ve had has been spent playing instead of blogging, hence the recent radio silence.  Apologies, etc.

ME3 is a hard game to talk about without spoiling; certainly my podcast co-host gets almost violent if I even hint at a spoiler without inserting proper precautions, so just know that there may be spoilers to come.  In fact, I suppose I might as well just tell you where I am, so that (a) you can judge for yourself if I’m ahead of you or not, and (b) you can see why I’m treading water a little bit.

I think I’ve been playing for around 16-18 hours, but from the little I’ve heard about the game’s structure, I’m probably only at the end of what would be considered Act 1.  (I’d also say that a good 5-7 hours of my playtime has been me just wandering around the Normandy, which is as close to a virtual “home” as there’s ever been in a videogame.)

(MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)  My current mission, the one I’ve been trying to avoid confronting, involves me going to the Krogan homeworld to wipe out the genophage once and for all.  I’ve been dawdling because the mission involves me making perhaps the most difficult choice I’ve had to make in the entire franchise.  If you’ve gotten to this point, you’ll know what I’m talking about; if you haven’t, well, it’s a doozy.  All the different races hate each other (and with good reason), and in the midst of my trying to form a very fragile alliance/treaty, I’ve basically been asked to perform the ultimate backstab, a backstab that I could conceivably get away with without it getting back to me.  My reward is the enduring friendship and scientific/military support of this particular race (and, obviously, the loss of the race I’d be backstabbing); and vice versa.  Being that the ultimate enemy here is the Reapers, I feel obligated to set myself in the best possible position to take them on, and so this opportunity to get the Salarians on my side feels rather crucial, even though it goes against my deepest beliefs as an ethical, rational human being.  I have to believe that the game is set up so that you can “win” regardless of which option you choose, but FUCK.   (END SPOILERS)

The game’s got problems, too.  I don’t want to parrot this week’s Giant Bombcast too much, but they bring up a number of valid points:  a lot of the side mission stuff is poorly conceived (i.e.,  picking up missions simply by overhearing conversations), and poorly executed (the mission log does a terrible job of letting you know if you’ve picked up a missing item, or who you need to give it to, so you often spend a lot of time just wandering around the Citadel hoping that some idle NPC will have an action reticle on them), and the planet scanning stuff (always a problematic feature in this franchise) is now so stripped down that it seems unnecessary, basically.  (Bioware’s strengths have never been with the side stuff, and TOR is no exception, either, but ME3’s side stuff is particularly weak.)   I’ve also run into a number of weird bugs, sometimes where my AI companions refuse to move, and other times where enemy turrets become impossible to destroy – I’ve had to restart a few missions more than once, which is frustrating.

I haven’t touched the multiplayer.  I want to, both because it sounds kinda interesting and because I’m wanting to increase my Galactic Readiness Rating at all costs (including playing the iOS Datapad thing, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the crafting stuff in Old Republic, actually).  But my focus is primarily on the single player – as I imagine it would be with most hard-core ME players, who’ve been in it for the long haul.

Despite its problems, I love this world.  I love the fiction.  I love the characters.  I love my Shepard, and I love that it’s been my Shepard for the last 5 years.   I’m glad to be playing it; but I wouldn’t have minded if they gave it a little more time to cook.  There are elements of this game that feel rushed (as noted above); there’s also certainly the obvious mass marketing ploy to get this game into the hands of new players, which I understand from a business perspective but which still stings a bit, as a hardcore player who’s been here since the beginning.

More on this to come, as well as a bunch of words and thoughts about Journey, which really does deserve its own post.  The short version – it’s amazing.

further adventures in Amalur

I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older and my hand-eye coordination isn’t what it used to be, or if it’s that I just don’t have the enduring patience that I used to have, but I’m finding that I’m no longer compelled to finish games that I’m not enjoying.  I used to be obsessive about this, spending hours and hours playing games that had stopped being fun shortly after the opening cut-scene, just so that I could get Achievements, or just to have said that I’d finished it, or (worst of all) because there wasn’t anything else I felt like doing.

Whatever the reason, I’m most likely done with both Final Fantasy XIII-2 and The Darkness 2.  I’d already put some quality time into FFXIII-2, and even sorta enjoyed myself in spite of its ridiculousness, and so I don’t feel badly about giving up on it.  (I’d put it down a week or two ago; my current quest involved me going to previous areas and looking for hidden objects, which didn’t sound terribly compelling, especially since I couldn’t explain why.)  As for the Darkness 2, well, I think it’s just straight-up shooter fatigue.  The art style is really remarkable, the story was moving in an interesting direction, and it puts enough of a spin on traditional shooter mechanics to make it compelling, but at the end of the day I’m still just shooting monsters in dark corridors, and I’ve done that before.

And so it happened that I was home sick yesterday, which was as good a time as any to devote some serious time into Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which is yet another game that I’d been having a tough time sticking with.  As noted a few entries ago, I’d dabbled in it for a few hours, but there wasn’t really anything terribly compelling about it, and I couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed in it, considering the named creative talent on the box.

I’m now around 15 hours in, and my dude is somewhere around level 18 or 19 or something.  (I can’t remember; it doesn’t matter.)

I will concede that the game does have some addictive qualities – this is certainly one of the best combat systems in an action RPG that I’ve ever played – and there’s lots and lots of loot, and the crafting systems (of which there are many) yield some pretty kick-ass rewards (i.e., almost everything I’m currently wearing/wielding is something I made, salvaged from stuff I picked up along the way).

Addictive though it may be, it’s still serving something that feels, for the most part, inconsequential and derivative.  The game’s outdoor environments are nicely varied (and are pleasantly reminiscent of Fable)*, but the indoor environments are just as reused and revisited as those in Dragon Age 2, which is saying something indeed.   The voice acting is fine, but the script is dull and charmless, and I am constantly skipping over conversations because they never, ever matter.  The quests themselves are pretty much all of the fetch variety, anyway.  I’m not playing the game for the story, in other words – I’m playing because the combat is fun and I get lots of treats.

In any event, this is probably all moot, as 2012’s first must-play just arrived at my desk.  I don’t know how much SSX I’ll get into tonight (as my wife and I are going to try and finish the last few episodes of Mad Men), but that’ll be occupying the majority of my playtime for the foreseeable future – at least until Mass Effect 3 shows up.

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*  Before I turned the game off last night I entered a totally different environment, one which had a lot more in common with Road Runner cartoons and the Mexico of Red Dead Redemption than the foresty areas of Fable.  So that’s something to look forward to, I suppose.

long overdue

Once again, I apologize for the lack of posts of late.  There’s a good reason for that, though – we were finally going to be launching the first-ever CouchCast this past week, and I wanted to have some stuff to talk about there.  Alas, we got held up at the last minute, and since I’m not sure when we’re going to be able to reconnect, I might as well get some of this stuff out of my brain.  Consider this a transcript of a solo podcast.

[cue “What Have You Been Playing?” music]

Old Republic:  My bounty hunter finally hit level 40.  And I was all excited to FINALLY start using my custom-build speeder, after spending hours and hours power-leveling my crafting skills just to be able to gather the materials to make it, only to find that the cost of training to use the damned thing is more money than I’ve ever had over the entire course of my playtime.  So, that was a little discouraging.  Also, Hoth is very white and boring to walk around in.  I ended up revisiting my level 3 Jedi, who I’d abandoned in the Jedi Temple for almost a full month – I quickly got him halfway to level 8, but I’d forgotten how goddamned SLOW the default walk speed is in that game.  Good grief.

Twisted Metal:  Does nostalgia matter?  And is it fair to judge a game based on your first 5 minutes with it?  I’ve never played the original games, and the only other David Jaffe game I played was God of War, and I preferred God of War 2 (and wasn’t he off to other things by that point?).  In any event, the game isn’t for me.  I watched the opening cutscenes (which looked like Sin City outtakes), and for someone new to the series, it felt a little distasteful for me to be excited about playing as a homicidal maniac.  I finally got into some actual playtime, and fought with the controls for 5-10 minutes, and turned it off and sent it back to Gamefly.  I will admit that I probably should’ve spent a little time getting used to the controls before writing it off completely, but it also would’ve been nice for the controls to have made sense (and also to have been in any way related to the way most driving games have been controlled for the last 5 years).  I also gather that the game is a lot more fun playing either online or with friends on the couch, but since I was renting it I didn’t have a code for an online pass, and there’s absolutely no way that my wife would be interested in playing with me.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning:  I am trying very hard to give a shit about this game, but it’s just not doing anything for me.  Everything about it feels borrowed and unoriginal.  I can’t get over how much it looks like Fable – but it should also be noted that Fable hasn’t looked good in years.  The inventory UI is bulky and cumbersome, which is a pain in the ass since there’s a TON of loot that needs to be dealt with.  I don’t really give a shit about the story, and the quests feel generic and contrived.  The best thing about the game is the combat, but if that’s all there is to this game, then, well, ugh.

Final Fantasy XIII-2:  It’s not like I can take FFXIII-2’s story seriously, either, since it’s completely insane.  A more interesting question to me, though, is wondering if it has any idea how ridiculous it is.  It goes out of its way to have the characters emote over every little plot development, but then it has Mog, one of the most annoying characters ever created by man – possibly more annoying than Jar-Jar Binks, for fuck’s sake – this flying little marshmellow beast who incessantly adds “Kupo” after every sentence like a nervous tic.  And I’ll be honest – one of my new favorite things to do in the game, now that I’ve unlocked this ability, is to throw this little thing off of every cliff I can find.   So, yes, it’s completely batshit insane and I have no idea what’s going on or why any of it matters, even though the characters go out of their way to explain what’s happening in every cutscene (of which there are dozens) – and yet there’s something utterly compelling about it, and I find it hard to stop playing.  The combat system is still as engaging as it ever was, and considering how much of it there is, that’s a good thing.  I’m a little stuck in the story right now, though, and as such I’ve found my attention wandering.

The Darkness II:  I’ll be honest – I liked the first Darkness game well enough, but didn’t really have any plans on playing this sequel.  I’m not even sure why I put it on my rental queue, to be honest.  And yet I did, and I got my copy on Friday, and while I’m only 2 hours in, I’m totally hooked.  The art style is fantastic – I don’t recall the original game having this quasi-cel-shaded look to it, but it looks great.  The gameplay is fun, fast and sometimes frantic – I’m fighting with the controls a little bit, but (to be fair) it’s a bit more complicated than just running and gunning.

Oh, and I gave the Mass Effect 3 demo a spin, which was maybe not the best idea.  I think I’d rather just wait for the full, final experience.

Most of what I’ve been playing lately, though, is on my iPhone – which is especially handy now that my gadget lust fot the Vita is peaking.  I’m way overdue for a Subway Gamer column, so let me just quickly run down some of what I’ve been playing:

  • Triple Town
  • Zen Pinball
  • Pinball Arcade
  • Fairway Solitaire
  • Ghost Trick

Those deserve a column of their own, but the short version is – yes, you should be playing them.  All of them.  Both pinball games in particular are outstanding, although they make me want an iPad because the iPhone screen is very small.

kickstart the jams

I’ve got things I want to say about Final Fantasy XIII-2, and also Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning, and a few more words on Skyrim and the 1.4 patch.

But first I’ve gotta talk about Double Fine’s Kickstarter campaign, wherein Tim Schafer & Co. asked the community to help fund an old-school point-and-click adventure game.  That it’s raised its initial ask amount of $400,000 in 8 hours is amazing.  That it’s now almost a million dollars over its initial ask amount – in less than 3 days – is nothing short of extraordinary (indeed, it might break $1,400,000 by the time I finish this post – it’s a little over $50,000 away as of 12:34pm EST, 2/10/12).   I contributed $40, and I will play it on every platform it arrives on (especially since, with all this extra money, it appears likely that it’ll head to iOS devices), and I will devour the accompanying documentary.

I’d like to think that this experiment would radically change the current development system, which every small developer has repeatedly described as “fundamentally broken.”  Double Fine owns this project outright, and since they’re distributing it over Steam (and presumably other download services), they don’t have to pay retail costs – and consequently, they don’t really need a publisher, either.  It’s pure profit after they recoup their expenses, they retain complete creative control, and they’ll deliver a product that lots and lots of people apparently want.  Why can’t this work for other game developers?

Well, the answer to that question is very complicated, and I’m not going to pretend that I can answer it.  From my limited vantage point, the only real thing I can compare it to is Radiohead’s “pay-what-you-want” release of “In Rainbows”, which they released without a label behind them.  (Similarly, one could also bring up Louis CK’s recent “pay-what-you-want” release of a filmed comedy special.)

The worlds of game development, music and stand-up comedy are so different that to compare them is almost meaningless, but in this particular case these three entities (Double Fine, Radiohead, Louis CK) do share one rather important thing in common – they are adored by their fans, and they have many, many fans, and those fans very much want what these artists are providing.

This is important, I think.  These three entities are in unique positions within their respective industries – i.e., they are near-universally loved from both without and within – and they have a certain amount of clout that allows them to pull stuff like this off.  Tim Schafer’s past work has made him an adored cult figure, and yet none of his games have really sold in huge numbers.  They’ve sold well enough to make back their costs, and he’s retained an adoring fanbase, but he’s not pushing GTA or Call of Duty off the bestseller charts.  That he’s going back to his roots to make the sort of game that made him famous is, for many people (myself included), a dream come true.  That he knew that no publisher was ever going to give him the money to make this sort of game is, sadly, a reality of today’s marketplace.  New IP is very, very risky, and new IP in the shape of a point-and-click adventure title is basically asking to set your money on fire.

I’m not sure Tim Schafer expected this kind of success this quickly, though; I’m not sure anybody did.  And let’s also be clear here – at this point, he’s only raised the money; we haven’t actually seen the game yet.  The game could very well be terrible.  (Unlikely, but hey – Brutal Legend wasn’t nearly as good as I wanted it to be, either.)

Are there any other developers that could pull something like this off?  I’m not sure.  Rock Paper Shotgun is reporting that Obsidian is considering it.   You could see Jonathan Blow (of Braid) working in this way in the future, perhaps.  (My personal dream would be for Erik Wolpaw to break off from Valve to develop his own game.)  You’d need a developer with vision, is the thing.

The great irony to this whole thing is that not 48 hours before Double Fine’s Kickstarter kicked off, Minecraft’s “Notch” was offering to fund Psychonauts 2.   Tim Schafer’s said, though, that such a project would cost between $20-40M, and that kind of money isn’t going to come through Kickstarter, and I can’t imagine that Notch has that much money to kick around.

Anyway, this is a very exciting time, and it will be very interesting to see what happens next.  If Radiohead is any example, though, this sort of thing might not end up catching on beyond artists who are big enough to support such an endeavor in the first place; considering the prohibitive costs of game development, I have my doubts that lightning can strike twice.  Still, we can always hope.