Puzzle Gaming After Tetris

You had a good run Tetris, but let's face it. It's over.

Sure, you'll limp on into eternity, forever chasing former glory. But you'll never be new or exciting again. Your brand relies on delivering the same, familiar thing instead of providing anything new or ingenious. No reason to be upset. Just think of how many different renditions you've hard over the years. The sheer number of corny spin-offs you spawned is probably the highest praise of all.

(Tetris Attack rocks)

To call the puzzle genre of gaming dead might be too generous. Tetris represents the metaphorical Byzantine Empire of the gaming world - a tenuous shadow of past glories. What I want to know is this - where is the puzzle game to inaugurate the genre's new era?

Console puzzle gaming has probably lost the most ground to mobile gaming, which offers a thousand different cheap and accessible options. You can undoubtedly find an unlimited supply of cheap games (sudoku, crossword, etc.) via the app store. Is there a Tetris app? Probably. And really, isn't Angry Birds just a species of puzzle game?

Is there any hope for console puzzle gaming? No. Not until some developer takes full advantage of the consoles available. Seriously, where is the rule that states that all puzzle games must involve multi-colored blocks falling from above? Someone, at some point, decreed that puzzle games have to all seem retro. If Red Dead Redemption can look as good as this...

...then why can't a puzzle game?

Probably the closest thing to what I'm talking about would be the Portal series, which, I admit, I haven't played yet. Yet the popularity of the Portal series seems like fairly solid proof that there's still a market for that sort of game. But Portal isn't totally a puzzle game, not in the same way that, say, Tetris was.

Come to think, you know what I'm missing? Tetrisphere. Tetrisphere was probably my favorite Tetris spinoff, probably because it had almost nothing to do with the original Tetris. Plus the soundtrack for Tetrisphere was incredible. Check it out, if you can.

K

Video Games, Difficulty, and Battered Controller Syndrome

I feel uniquely qualified to soapbox about video game difficulty. I've beaten most of the Call of Duty games on Veteran difficulty (which isn't all that bad), I've beaten every Halo on Legendary difficulty. Way back in the day I even beat all of T.T.'s ghost times in Diddy Kong Racing, which was a real pain in the asshole.

Here's the bottom line: gamers want to be challenged. I don't want to play a game that's so easy I breeze through it in an afternoon. Here's the but. BUT, I don't want to play even one more game that substitutes "difficulty" with "horse shit".


horse shit

noun
1. As it pertains to video game difficulty, horse shit refers to the developer's tendency to opt for cheap ersatz solutions, such as reducing your health bar, increasing the amount of damage done by enemies, removing necessities such as ammunition and health, etc.

In almost every video game, cranking up the difficulty just means making the game stupid. Right now I'm playing through Dead Space, probably one of my favorite survival horror games ever. I'm going for the last achievement, which is to beat the game on Impossible difficulty. First off, Dead Space takes away your equipment on a new run through on Impossible. Second, they give you less ammunition, ratchet up the enemies' health and double their damage. But really, the enemy is behaving exactly the same whether you're playing on the easiest or the most difficult setting. And that's the problem.

Playing through Dead Space on the easiest or the most difficult setting renders almost the exact same experience. There's no extra missions or bosses or weapons. The exact same enemies appear in the exact same place. Only on the hardest difficulty, they're stupidly powered up. Which, in my opinion, amounts to sheer laziness.

Video game AI has come a long way since the early days. But it hasn't come far enough to allow for games like Dead Space or Call of Duty or what have you to really provide an adjustable difficulty. So, instead, game developers subject their fans to frustrating conditions, little better than nonchalant sadism. Problem solved.

While we wait for gaming AI to catch up to the rest of the field, what can we do for a solution? I think there are some positive examples out there. The one game that comes to mind is StarFox 64. The cool thing about StarFox 64 was that depending on what you did in a certain mission, you could unlock new paths to completing the game, some which were more difficult than the original, vanilla way.

I still remember having mild panic attacks on the lava planet level. The point is that Starfox had a fairly unique method of providing a new experience for more skilled players, without making enemies more powerful or making you suck more.

Imagine a game like Dead Space, where playing on a different difficulty made the game entirely different. So, if you play on easy, you play as character A. Normal, character B. Hard, character C. Now imagine that to fully experience the game, you have to play as all three. Their plots could intersect at points, rewarding the player with character and plot insights otherwise unavailable. Nothing I'm suggesting is out of the question either.

Dead Space has 12 levels (or so?). Rather than make you play through the same levels over and over, doing the same shit, why not have 4 levels in sets of three. Meaning that on easy you have 4 levels, then you've beaten the easy game. 4 levels for Normal and 4 levels for Hard. Then game developers would actually reward you for multiple playthroughs, rather than punish you with stupid, lazy difficulty outs.

-K

I miss: Star Wars Galaxies

I flushed at least half my freshman year of college into Star Wars Galaxies.

I didn't come to Star Wars Galaxies on my own. Back in the early 2000s (it came out 2003), my house was still running on AOL dial-up. Needless to say, online gaming lay beyond my grasp. My friend Tom would tell me the funniest and coolest stories about the game. I could only glimpse the burgeoning world of online gaming through the peephole of text-based MUDs like Turning Point.

I graduated high school in 2005, at the age of 17. As a gift, my parents bought me a Dell Inspiron 6t000 (I think, I forget the exact number). Tom and I would be moving into the UNF dorms in the fall, finally with access to high speed internet (I'd be lying if I said higher education was at the top of my priority list).

Star Wars Galaxies goes something like this. You pick your character's race, sex and physical details, you play a brief tutorial, and then the game drops you off in Mos Eisley. You can continue on some basic tutorial-esque quests, or you can strike off on your own and do whatever you want. If I'm not describing the levelling system, it's because I can't keep the different systems straight. You see, they changed the way levelling worked at least 3 times. There was the original game, then there was the combat update, and later the NGE (new game experience). I played the game predominantly during the CU and NGE days, so I'm unfamiliar with the way the game was originally.

I started playing SWG while still on dial-up, at home. It took about 4 days for my laptop to download all of the updates for the game on my connection, which was quite the nightmare. That was only the beginning of my problems, however. As I mentioned earlier, the game drops you off in Mos Eisley, which is a pretty busy place. Unfortunately, my connection simply couldn't handle going to the busier cities. A lot of the cities on Tatooine were just impossible for me to visit. Right before my friend Tom left to go to Japan on vacation, he dropped my newbie Wookiee ass on Rori,  a moon of Naboo (a planet which almost nobody bothered going to). Still, I had problems with connection. I wandered off into the wild with a stick to learn the basics.

The combat system of SWG wasn't exactly inspired. Basic attacks, power attacks, special attacks, items. You've played one MMO, you've mostly played them all, I find. I think pre-NGE I was a rifleman/doctor combo, which was fairly useful. The NGE got a lot of hate from people (mostly from Jedi who were upset that now everyone in the game was allowed to be a Jedi). I didn't mind the NGE because I mostly did stuff alone, occasionally with Tom and/or Mike. Being a Jedi let you fight a lot of people all on your own, which made it so I could do the more difficult stuff without having to get together some massive party of people.

For whatever reason, I was never big on the PVP aspect. I could fight pretty well against monsters, but I just didn't have the patience to figure out how the different classes interacted with one another to really stand a chance against other players.

Where SWG really stood out was in its space combat system. Space had only been added to the game in an expansion pack called Jump to Lightspeed, which come to think was a pretty radical addition to the game. Space wasn't just some afterthought - space combat in SWG was almost a completely new and different game tacked on to the original. You could choose between fighting for the Empire, Rebels, or neutral smuggler-types. Space let you choose what ship you wanted to fly, what kinds of weapons, engines, boosters, shields and missiles it had too. Probably coolest of all, you could bring multiple people on board certain POB (Person on Board) type ships. POBs didn't function so well in combat, but the concept was cool. You could even decorate the inside of your ship, the Star Wars equivalent of "Pimp My Ride", I suppose.

(Cockpit view like a boss)

Space combat in SWG wasn't perfect. Probably the most frustrating thing was having to go back down to the planet just to get your missions, which added hours and hours to the whole schebang. The actual space missions themselves were pretty dull - escort this ship here, protect these ships there. Once you jumped through all the hoops, you graduated to the real space experience. SWG required that to fully graduate into the big boy world of space, you had to take down a Star Destroyer (if you were rebel, if you were Imperial you had to fight a rebel blockade runner).

At this point in the game, you could engage other players in the PVP zone, known as Deep Space. Fighting it out in space was probably the most fun I ever had in Star Wars Galaxies. Some people were impossibly good, with ridiculously overpowered gear that made them impossible to shoot down. Those players were also part of the shipwright class (which I never chose).

So, why hasn't there been any attempt at all to try something like this on the console? Perfectly doable.  Certainly the game doesn't have to be Star Wars. Come to think, are there any space combat games for the 360? I can't think of one. Seems like a big gap, doesn't it? Come to think, remember that short space sequence in Halo Reach? 

Halo tried branching out with Halo Wars. Makes one wonder what might be possible, doesn't it?

K

Miscellany 2

Halo kart racer: doable?

Holy shit. DragonBall Z games multiply like viruses.

There's been a thousand dirt bike games. Is it too much to ask for a monster truck game?

If companies are determined to make movies into games, could they at least base them off good movies?

The only dancing game I'll ever play is one based off Breakin' (1 or 2, no preference).

My favorite Call of Duty is World at War. I think I'm the only one.

Ryu, Ken and Akuma aren't the only characters in Street Fighter.

Red Dead Redemption. A.K.A. Cowboys doing bizarre shit.

Halo Kart sounds decent, now that I think about it.

Now that I think about it. Kart racers used to be everywhere. Now they've almost completely vanished.

Oh please, please god, I want to play Jet Grind Radio on the Xbox 360.

K

Irrefutable Proof of God's Nonexistence

There has yet to be a good Mobile Suit Gundam game.

If you know anything about the Gundam series, you'd know that Gundam would potentially make for the most awesome video game ever. Let's be clear - I'm talking about the original Mobile Suit Gundam series (or the U.C. universe, for those in the know). I don't know anything about the more recent Gundam series, except that they're terrible.

The original Mobile Suit Gundam anime series almost seems like a video game, if you're watching for it. The protagonist has a learning curb for the mobile suit. Scaling difficulty, bosses like Ramba Ral, the Dom brothers and, of course, Char. They actually made a game based just on Mobile Suit Gundam that I thought was passable. I played it like a motherfucker back in the day.

The actual story mode was somewhat dull. My favorite part of the game was actually the bonus missions, where you got to choose whatever mobile suit you wanted. The problem with the game is that you can never tell how much damage you're doing to the enemy. Doesn't sound like much, but it's pretty debilitating, prevents you from having any sort of strategy towards fighting besides shoot, dodge, shoot. Also, the controls were pretty sluggish.

For some reason, there were quite a few Gundam games for the PS2. There was also a Dreamcast game called Gundam: Side Story, which wasn't very good (surprise). Still, starved for a good Gundam game, I played the living shit out of it. Best thing about the game was that it actually offered a cockpit view of the action, which I thought improved the game over some standard 3rd person crap.

I think a cockpit view would've vastly improved another Gundam game called Zeonic Front (for PS2), which was sort of a Gundam Rainbow Six. It takes a while to get used to the complicated HUD, but once you do the game is serviceable. The problem is that it just doesn't feel like Gundam - I don't know what it feels like, to be honest. Some sort of weird strategy/action combo. I know I ended up ignoring my allies and doing all the work on my own. The AI sucks in the game. Bad AI ruins lots of games, come to think.

The best Gundam game I've ever played is Fed vs. Zeon, for the PS2. It's probably the closest I'll ever get to a real Gundam game. The story mode was decent. But really, what a good Gundam game is going to need, is multiplayer. Fed vs. Zeon has multiplayer! I remember playing with my friend Tom (a fellow Gundam fan). There was a lot to like about Fed vs. Zeon, especially the variety of mobile suits you could use. Another good thing about it was that you could fight in SPACE, finally! The space system was actually much better than the crappy combat in Encounters in Space, another Gundam game for the PS2.

Since the halcyon days of the PS2, there haven't been many playable Gundam games. I refuse to acknowledge the existence of Dynasty Warriors: Gundam. I was super excited about a Gundam game for the Xbox 360. Forget what it was called, but it was never ported over to the states. Which seems to be the problem with the Gundam series. There doesn't seem to be an attractive enough market in the states for Gundam games.

The problem is that it isn't enough just to release a Gundam game. Someone needs to make, you know, a good Gundam game. Given the source material, it doesn't seem like such a Herculean task.

At this point, though, I'd probably play any Gundam game at this point (excepting the Dynasty Warriors series).

K

Game Movies

So, a little while back I posted about Movie Games and complained about stuff (which is generally the tenor of every post here on Video Game Seppuku). Yesterday in Gamestop I saw the "Komplete" edition of the new-ish Mortal Kombat game.

Besides the usual bevy of characters and new features, this game also comes with the 1995 movie Mortal Kombat in digital format. Which got me thinking about video games which have been made into movies.

I'll say right now that the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie is probably the best game movie there has ever been. 

Despite the miscasting of Christopher Lambert as Raiden and the cheesiness of the ninja character costumes, the movie hits all the right notes. It's got action, violence, fan service moments (Johnny Cage's friendship, anyone?) and, maybe most importantly, some pretty well choreographed fight sequences. The guy who plays Shang Tsung (don't know his name) does a pretty admirable job acting menacing. Robin Shou is a pretty awesome Liu Kang, to boot. Mortal Kombat still might prove as fertile ground for producers, especially given the response the Mortal Kombat legacy video received. If you haven't seen it, prepare yourself.

The honest truth about game movies is that they're almost all complete garbage. You can count the decent ones literally on one hand: Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil 1 and 2 (sort of, if you ignore parts of them), and Silent Hill. The actually watchable game movies are a hybrid of fan service, loyalty to the original game material, and a willingness to contradict the game's lore.

What made Mortal Kombat good? Good fighting, fan service, and the movie's willingness to poke fun at itself. Movies like Final Fantasy and Super Mario Bros. took themselves way too seriously (to be fair, there were lots of other problems with those movies besides that). Super Mario Bros. went more than a little over the top with camp. Plus the setting and tenor of that movie are way off:  someone, at some point thought Mario should visit the apocalyptic urban setting of Blade Runner and that that would make for good film. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is preachy, boring, uninteresting romp through weird faces and bad vocal performances (Alec Baldwin being the worst offender).

I'm not sure why Silent Hill has such a bad rep (it has a 29% on Rotten Tomatoes, which I think is wholly unjustified).

 

Sure, the performances aren't great, and the movie more or less collapses into the third act. Still, there are some genuinely creepy moments. The movie never descends into emotional schmaltz either. Seriously, what is with the sub-genre of "Mother loses child" horror films? They're almost uniformly unbearable with the teary embraces and declarations of undying maternal love. I guess they're making a Silent Hill 2 (starring everyone's favorite, Sean Bean). Not sure how to feel about that, but I'm willing to give it a chance. Which, you know, the critics won't.

What does all this tell us about future game movies? It seems increasingly dubious that they'll ever make a Halo movie. Which, I think, is a good thing. Halo might make for a serviceable movie if they set out to make a stand-alone film based on the original game. Because face it, the actual plot of Halo disintegrates after the first game. You know, come to think, ODST or Reach might make for decent movies. Or maybe they should start with Reach and then make Halo. The problem with a Halo movie is that the director will probably be loath to mess with the gobs of canonical lore heaped onto the games (the novels, etc.) So, maybe a Halo movie wouldn't be so bad.

I have hope for the new wave of game movies. Dead Space and Assassin's Creed seem like fertile ground for films (provided that Dead Space takes inspiration from The Thing and from Alien and that Assassin's Creed doesn't delve into the herp derp aliens shit). Just because they're game movies, they have to be twice as good to receive half the credit. Oddly enough, the biggest obstacle for these movies might be the game fans themselves. Fans need to recognize that loyal adherence to the plot of the game does not a good movie make.

K

Miscellany

Remember how cool Assassin's Creed was before herp derp aliens?

The only people still playing games like Mortal Kombat 3 or Street Fighter online are the people you will never, ever beat.

Besides occasionally shooting people, the one thing you do in L.A. Noire is ask people questions. Somehow, I suck at this.

I returned Street Fighter X Tekken because E. Honda wasn't added.

I remember back in the day I wanted to play a Pokemon game for the N64. You know, a real one.

What are the chances Rockstar could make a Firefly game? Think about that a minute.

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon for the N64 had the best video game enemies ever.

Dead Space should be subtitled "Stupid People in Space".

I play Red Dead Redemption with my friend now and then. I tomahawked his horse and he got mauled by a bear.

EA games is the Circuit City of the gaming world.

Seriously. Ubi Soft shouldn't have hired the guy from Ancient Aliens as a writer.

Still waiting for an Army Men: Sarge's Heroes sequel.

The Dead or Alive franchise has a 10:1 babe to hideous men ratio. The Street Fighter franchise has a 10:1 hideous men to babe ratio.

The top ranking Mortal Kombat player also has 1000 of 1000 gamerscore in Just Dance.

All of the party members in Dragon Age are insipid morons. I want to make them all hate my guts. Can I still have sex with them?

Enough with the sequels already.

You can't have a franchise game unless you have a series.

Halo 4 is coming out relatively soon, no doubt it'll break all records and make gobs of money, ensuring that there's a Halo 5 (or 4.2 or DLC or whatever). Halo 4 really isn't the fourth game in the series though, it's really, what, the sixth or seventh? It all depends on how you count.

Video games and movies are quite different in this respect - movies that launch into their 6th or 7th title run into the trouble of alienating their audience. Games like Halo, Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed defy this trend, and seem only to improve as the years go on. Maybe it's because games are less prone to the whims of a single director (Lucas, for instance). There's something more democratic about gaming - if the fans are outraged and concerted enough in their efforts, they can enact (some) change. This is especially true of PC gaming. Modders have become so good at making their own games, they often eclipse the initial product.

It'd be a mistake to think that just because a series has been successful doesn't mean it will continue to bring in the big bucks. If a director makes a bad movie, usually they get called out on it. Games, on the other hand, are gradually replaced (Medal of Honor was gradually swept aside by Call of Duty, eventually some military shooter will probably usurp Call of Duty's multi-billion dollar throne).

But are gaming developers just the games they produce, or are they something else? Let me put it another way. If you were a developer, would you want to be known as "We're the group that brings you X game", or would you want to say, "We offer a variety of quality games set to our standard of excellence".

There are a few groups who fit that business model, I think. Rockstar games, Nintendo. Back in the day Rare games were quite good. Anyone remember Jet Force Gemini? Sega games used to be reliably good. Sega was really on a roll for a while: Jet Grind Radio, Shenmue, Phantasy Star Online, The 2K sports series, etc.

Again though, the onus is on gamers. Stop wanting to play the same game over and over, instead demand more variety, more ingenuity from your games. Either that, or we become a gullible herd, playing the same shitty FPS as last year.

K

Defining 'Sandbox'

Sandbox games are more or less a new thing. Sure, a lot of games in the past have had sandbox features (like create your own character, create a level or whatever), but games which are entirely sandbox are relatively new. It might be useful to try and define what makes a game sandbox, and which games seem sandbox but really aren't.

Minecraft immediately comes to mind. Some other sandbox games come to mind, though. Does anyone remember RPG Maker?

I remember playing RPG Maker with my friend Travis. The game had a dizzying level of complexity (which wasn't really interfaced that well, making it pretty difficult to actually do anything). We had a lot of fun with the game (despite the fact that we never actually made anything close to an RPG [The only thing we made was a spell called the WrathOMoses because the game had inexplicably  provided a clip art of a burning star of David]). I remember really wanting to make a whole game from the ground up to give to my friends to play, only I just never got around to it. That, and I hated the Sony PlayStation.

Certainly there have been plenty of games with sandbox features. Let's be clear about what really makes a game sandbox by defining what sandbox isn't: changing your character's features like they were a Barbie doll doesn't make it sanbox. I remember the game Re-Volt had a pretty awesome track editor option, maybe one of the first games to do so with sufficient depth to make it actually usable.

I frequently hear Skyrim described as being a sandbox game. It isn't really, Skyrim is really just a massive theme park with sandbox elements. You may have a hundred choices as to what you want to do in Skyrim, but the bulk of the game lies in completing quests, killing enemies and levelling up. You can't, say, decide to build a castle somewhere, or explore beyond the limits of Skyrim - the game doesn't allow that. Fences define a theme park. Skyrim has fences all over the gaffe. I can't kill such-and-such a Jarl and usurp his throne because if I do I'll lose the ability to do this key quest at some point later in the game. Don't get me wrong, I love Skyrim. But is it sandbox? Not entirely.

Racing games by their nature offer a pretty limited scope of what you can do: with that said, Trials Evolution is probably about as sandbox as racing games will ever get. It's probably one of the most sandbox games of all time, when you look at it. But then to really embrace the game as sandbox, you need to spend hours on the track editor, which isn't the easiest thing to navigate (or I'm just a bit dense with editors).

So what's the point of all this? Clearly there's still a place for character driven games (i.e. Red Dead Redemption, or what have you), yet it seems to me we're entering into an age of complete customization. I find myself yearning for both - truly novelistic video games with fully developed characters, and sandbox games where I can do whatever the fuck I want.

K

We seriously can't figure out first-person sword fighting?

I'm writing this after spending the day hacking wave after wave of Falmer in Skyrim (just bought Dawnguard today). As much as I like Oblivion and Skyrim, the combat still leaves me dry.

Bladed combat in Skyrim goes something like this: attack, power attack, block, parry. Add some briefly amusing kill animations that add nothing to the gameplay and a slew of mostly useless melee abilities and you have a pretty bland, repetitive mix. Skyrim (Oblivion too) have a massive pile of other stuff to do, so that a moderately dull combat system doesn't matter so much. It's a pretty dull Elder Scrolls player who does nothing but hacks and slashes their way through the quests. Magic, stealth, archery, quests, exploration and all the other features easily paint over that gap to make highly enjoyable games.

I can't be the only person who remembers Call of Duty 2 for the 360. Shit, I reviewed even older Call of Duty and Medal of Honor games for the St. Augustine Record back in the day. First person shooters, in comparison, have become dizzyingly complex since those days. Observe.

This post isn't about the evils of the Call of Duty franchise, so much as I'm using it to make a point. The Call of Duty games have gotten increasingly complex over time (perhaps too much so). First person sword fighting games, though, have a long way to go before they hit the sweet spot between blessed simplicity and byzantine complexity. 

What is it about sword fighting anyway? I can think of so many games that fail when it comes to producing a compelling, bladed combat system: Assassin's Creed, The Elder Scrolls, any Lord of the Rings game you care to name, and on and on. Has any game ever really done it right? I don't think so.

I constantly fantasize that someday, someone will make an online FPS in an ancient or medieval world setting, complete with castles, sieges, spears, bows, swords and axes. Could you even imagine the satisfaction of smashing your enemy's skull in with a warhammer over the web? I'm fully convinced it's coming, eventually. But first things first, let's try and establish a baseline for sword fighting in gaming, one that can translate sufficiently cleanly to multiplayer.

K

Movie Games

Just how many video game/movie tie-ins have gamers suffered through?

An innumerable number, to be sure. So many of them have been utterly terrible games, too, which is the real tragedy. In some ways, movie games are probably one of the major obstacles to the whole "Video Games are Art Too" movement (akin to the comic books are art too movement). Movie games can, at times, be utterly reprehensible cash grabs, meant to suck the blood from eager fans (I'm looking at you, slew of terrible Lord of the Rings games).

Not all movie-games have been completely terrible. In fact, there have been a number of really great movie games. Star Wars Battlefront was a great game, probably one of the best Star Wars games ever. Battle for Middle Earth II was also quite good. All agree that Goldeneye 64 is a classic. You could list plenty of other decent, good and great movie games.

I don't necessarily have a problem with movie games. My beef is with shitty games period, and movie games are some of the worst offenders. What typically holds these games back is the utter lack of creativity that usually goes into them. Finding a movie game that doesn't follow the plot of the film word for word, letter for letter is something of a challenge. Ignoring plot (as gamers tend to do) most movie games offer repetitive, ho-hum action (come to think, I wonder what percentage of them are beat-em ups). The graphics tend to be lazily slapped together.

Here's my point in all of this - why do movie games have to come from current movies?

I can't be the only one who wants to see a Seven Samurai video game. The awesomeness of such a thing  cannot be understated (as long as it isn't a beat 'em up). If the game replicated the movie's most dramatic moments, supplemented them at times, brought in the soundtrack, kept that iconic black-and-white look, it might redefine what makes a movie game. The problem with all this is that there's not as much name recognition of the Seven Samurai as there is with Pixar's Brave or Star Wars or whatever. But if the gaming industry is out to make good games and not just capitalize on the flavor of the month, why not? The possibilities could be endless.

Philip Marlowe, Fistful of Dollars, Tora! Tora! Tora!, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (!), and on and on and on. The pool is endless. Unfortunately the burden is on the players, and not the industry, to demand change from the status quo. As long as we keep forking over 60$ for the latest Transformers nightmare, the industry will keep shilling the shit and rolling in the dough.

K

I miss: Phantasy Star Online

I miss Phantasy Star Online. 

I bought PSO back in the halcyon days of the Sega Dreamcast. At that time, the DC was the only console capable of connecting to the internet. This was before high speed internet, so the only way to play was via dial-up connection. As such, I couldn't play the game online (and never gained the capabality, coincidentally) so I mostly played solo.

The story of PSO doesn't really matter that much. You're part of an intergalactic seed ship trying to discover the fate of a previous ship. More specifically, you're supposed to be tracking down Red Ring Rico, sort of. What PSO lacked in story it made up for with slick graphics, a high degree of customization and excellent multiplayer. 

It's hard to remember, but I think I convinced my friend Travis (who was my great friend and literally the only other person I knew who owned a Dreamcast) to get PSO. Playing PSO at Travis's house opened up new possibilities: I could finally play online. The dial-up cable was like some kind of genie's lamp - free items, free weapons, quick levelling, rare weapons, powerful MAGs. Online play was treacherous, though. You could join a bad room and get all of your stuff stolen by douchebag players - or they could kill you for no discernible purpose.

Eventually I moved on from PSO (as gamers do). Even then I remembered it fondly as a really cool game with almost endless replayability. The Dreamcast dwindled into obscurity, breaking my gaming heart. And then...

The Gamecube version of PSO contained both the original and the inferior but fun sequel. The graphics had improved slightly, the gameplay was a bit smoother, and (as the picture indicates) you could now play with up to 4 people. I distinctly recall playing PSO with my friends Travis, Tom and Kyle on four player splitscreen on my then 14 inch television (giving us all frequent headaches). Still, it was a total blast. While Episode II of PSO still wasn't as good, the game gave you the option to play 1 OR 2 with the same character, the kind of option you just don't get very often from most games these days. Imagine if Halo 4 let you go back and play the previous campaigns (!).

We played PSO to death in those days. The PVP was wildly unbalanced (if you play an android, you've basically got no chance against someone who can cast electricity spells at you), but was also a nice feature.

Needless to say, I was insanely excited for Phantasy Star Universe for the 360.

PSU seemed to promise everything that PSO had brought to the table and more. And yet the game was an unmitigated failure (the game itself was, whether or not it was profitable I have no clue). The story still sucked, but that wasn't the problem. Ultimately PSU suffered from over-complication and sheer cluster-fuck syndrome. The streamlined setting of PSO was scrapped in favor of massive cities (which I thought resembled the giant settlements in Star Wars Galaxies) that were bizarre and confusing. Playing online didn't seem to help matters, as the moment you arrived in a city, you were bombarded by hundreds of players shouting that they're selling this or that.

The actual combat in the game had become much more complex and confusing than the streamlined system in the earlier PSO. I'm not sure I ever got a handle on it. You could wield multiple weapons at the same time, which profoundly confused a PSO veteran like myself. Even the graphics (I thought) looked less stylized than in the DC version.

Ultimately, the worst part about PSU was the ridiculous "Hunter's License" fee you had to fork over just to play the game. That ensured I wouldn't stick with PSU. Single-player had become a total bore as well. That, and the simple fact that PSU wasn't PSO probably doomed the 360 rendition.

What kind of future does PSO have? Undoubtedly you can find some server somewhere to play the original online. With all of the Dreamcast games being (at times unnecessarily) ported to the 360 these days, maybe someone will have the sense to port PSO to Xbox Live Arcade. Hell, I'd pay 20$ to kick Dark Falz's ass again.

-K

Byzantine Fighting Games

Think of some of the oldest, most venerated gaming franchises. What comes to mind?

Street Fighter pops into my mind. I spent countless hours playing it as a kid. I fought my sister, dad, mom, friends. I got really cheap with E. Honda and still, to this day, can't beat Blanka to save my life. The M. Bison theme still gives me a sort of panic attack.

So today I went to go pick up Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade for the 360. I liked Street Fighter 4 (even though in a rage I had hurled it against the wall like a discus and shattered it), and I knew I would enjoy the game. Problem is that the person behind the counter got it mixed up with Street Fighter X Tekken.

I'm the adventurous type, so I figured I'd try it. The game held absolutely no appeal to me, mostly because I've never liked Tekken at all. But whatever, let's play. There's an achievement in the game for completing the tutorials, so I figured hey, what better way to acquaint myself with the game?

It starts off simple enough. Kick, punch, special move, super art. Familiar enough stuff. Then there's cross hits, tag switches, gem powers, ex power ups, assist gems, bonus gems, quick combos, Pandora mode. Holy fucking shit, when did fighting games become so damned convoluted? Street Fighter X Tekken is Byzantine with its myriad of special features, none of which really add much to the basic formula of the game (punch, kick, special move). The possibility of tagging up with your friends is nice. But if you're anything like me, you have no friends (at least none who are half as into games as you are), or you just don't care to wait around for them to sign in.

My brief and mostly unpleasant encounter with Street Fighter X Tekken reminds me of an even worse foray with Soul Calibur 5, a game with which the developers must have sought to inflict as much pain as possible on players.

It's amazing how little sword fighting there is in Soul Calibur these days. SC 4 annoyed the shit out of me with its new special moves, super-art esque moves and seemingly unending combos which made online multiplayer an exercise in aggravation and misanthropy. SC 5 ratchets up the pain on all levels - and the bizarre thing is, the basic movepool for characters seems to be shrinking! The Mitsurugi sword-sheathing moves seemed to have been completely removed, probably in favor of some stupidly complex combos (or for that idiotic costume creation mode, which legions of fans haven't quite yet realized is nothing more than digital Barbie mode).

So, are these games fun? Sure, for a little while. But they're so complex, so mired in years and years of bullshit from endless sequels and spinoffs, that the original winning formula which propelled them to such heights has been completely buried. I reflected on this as some god-like character repeatedly dropped a granite throne on me in the Soul Calibur 5 multiplayer - the series has completely lost its way. SC is one of the worst offenders (Street Fighter is bad too, but not quite as bad). Mortal Kombat is pretty bad as well.

Is it too much to ask that Capcom or Midway or other studios try something like creating a new franchise? Think about it - imagine the hype if Capcom decided to make a whole new fighting game from the ground up. Of course it would sell, but then it would require a lot of time and preparation, not like simply repackaging the same fighting game over and over, this time with a slightly sluttier Chun Li on the cover.

K

The Best Kept Secret in the Video Gaming World

Graphics aren't as important as they used to be.

I heard recently that Minecraft recently became the second-most played game on Xbox live, which is an incredible achievement. Minecraft's simplistic graphics and sandbox gameplay have proven to be a winning formula. Minecraft is a sort of antithesis to the Michael Bay school of video gaming (see Black Ops or the Modern Warfare series for  reference). I suspect that the success of Minecraft is due at least in part to the slew of repetitive FPS action games we've had for the past few years. With the promise of more miserable COD games on the horizon, Minecraft is quite like a splash of cold water to me.

Will the gaming industry take note? We can pray, anyway. The lesson to be learned from Minecraft is that one can eschew state of the art graphics and still make an extremely fun, addictive video game. My question is this - can developers apply that logic to other genres?

When's the last time you've played a good turn-based rpg? Wouldn't it be reasonably simple to make a turn-based, massive MMO rpg with simple graphics on a console like the 360? Of course it would. At least part of the problem is that it would be a significant risk for a company to invest so much into what amounts to a risky venture. It's simply safer for the big game companies to continue releasing the same video game over and over. Why tinker with a proven seller? Simply make minor tweaks to play, repackage, resell and repeat. Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty come to mind (I'm beginning to think they're my whipping boys). Let's not forget the absolute worst offenders: sports games. At this point, I'm quite convinced that Electronic Arts no longer employs human beings to make their video games and rather employs a complex algorithm that computes player stats and adjusts their game stats accordingly.

We gamers need to demand more from our video games. That means publicly calling out games that fail to meet expectations. But then again, Black Ops 2 will undoubtedly sell four hundred trillion copies, and then Activision and Treyarch or Infinity Ward will get busy repackaging the same shit sandwich they've been selling and go laughing all the way to the bank.

In the end, though, every series lives on borrowed time. Few have proven capable of lasting for time immemorial (curiously, most of them are Nintendo products). My point is that there's a lot of money to be made in anticipating the winds of change. The 360 brings a huge level of exposure to a game like Minecraft (and other arcade titles like Trials Evo, etc.)

K

Fantasy Beat-'Em-Ups

I love me some beat-'em-ups. 

BEU's sure are an old genre of games, when you think about it.  I’m betting they were a  pretty natural evolution of the standard sidescrolling platformer (think Mario, Sonic, etc). Some of the BEU’s that come to mind are the Streets of Rage series, a slew of really fun TMNT games (I played Turtles in Time for the SNES to death), various X-Men arcade games, one of the only decent Simpsons games, and a whole bunch more.

BEU’s made the switch to 3d and next-gen consoles pretty smoothly, I’d say. Games just feel different sometimes when they make the switch. Mario being one of the exceptions, platformers like Sonic and others ended up either losing their soul or becoming completely kinds of games. Beat-‘em-ups never really had that problem, the same sort of mash the buttons, kill the enemies gameplay remained mostly the same.

Making a BEU out of the Lord of the Rings film series is a pretty obvious choice, when you think about it. 

The frenetic action scenes of the movies quite resemble a BEU once you’re looking for it. And boy, have they made Lord of the Rings BEU’s. Probably upwards of 90% of the LOTR games released thus far have been BEU’s of one variety of another. There are a few notable exceptions: the Battle for Middle-Earth series, which is an RTS, and Lord of the Rings: Conquest, a disappointing Star Wars: Battlefront type (which I’d argue is a sort of species of BEU).

The Lord of the Rings juggernaut shows little sign of slowing down. Hollywood, in a move of brazen mercantism, pulled a “Deathly Hallows” (or a “Breaking Dawn”, if you prefer) and divided the book into two movies. You can bet there will be a fresh onslaught of Lord of the Rings video games accompanying its release, capitalizing on the eager hordes of new and old fans alike. No doubt there’ll be a BEU in there somewhere. Choose your dwarf! Play with 3 friends online! Level up and learn new combos and collect new armor!

Detecting some bitterness? That might be because I recently picked up Lord of the Rings: War in the North for the 360. 

I wouldn’t say I was disappointed. Rather, my expectations for an $18 bargain bin game were neatly fulfilled. Anyone remember the hype for this game? It came and went like a pang of spring fever. Promising footage and developer promises just couldn’t change the fact that the game ended up being a run of the mill beat-‘em-up, without a single ounce of creativity invested in the project. You pick one of three appropriately bland Tolkien-esque characters (an elf, a man and a dwarf, a warrior, a ranger and a caster, of course) and you stroll through featureless amusement parks devoid of any interest, discovery, or fun.

Does the game deserve this torrent of criticism? Not fully. There’s a far worse offender amid the sub-genre of fantasy BEU’s, which would be Conan, a game notable only for its frequent display of female breasts and the most irritating platforming this side of Assassin’s Creed. 

The one saving feature of Conan is that it only costs 5$ (I pity the poor fools who spent 60$ for it back in the day).

No doubt there’s a few more fantasy BEU’s coming down the pipe. Some acquaintances recently expressed excitement for a new LOTR game displayed at E3 (which looks suspiciously like a BEU).  At this point, I'm not sure LOTR needs another beat-'em-up, really. At least if they do make another, I hope they're able to blow the dust off the genre and take something in a new direction.

It's sort of strange that LOTR has never been made into an Oblivion/Skyrim type game. There's something more appealing about exploring Moria or the Lonely Mountain than some random locale in an unfamiliar realm. Wouldn't it be nice to choose to play as an orc, or a dwarf, or an Easterling, or whatever, and then quest in the world to choose your path?

 Jeez, even a traditional turn based RPG set in the LOTR universe sounds fun. They seldom make those any more. But then, at this point, even a LOTR kart racer sounds better than yet another BEU.


K