The Gamer’s Quagmire #69: Heeding the Wisdom of E.E. Cummings
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less
by Jamison DeLorenzo
Finding required viewing in the world of video game writing is a rare event. Over the past five years the cornerstone of my gaming bookmarks has been Penny Arcade. I realize that this is a lot like saying people swear by ESPN for sports news, so that statement has far less impact that I would want. I have often found that my style of humor is right in line with their strips, and that is what drew me to make them required reading.
With the many web comics and regular columns devoted to gaming you are probably wondering why I haven’t mentioned any others. There are many interesting and unique reads that people absolutely love. XKCD and Ctrl-Alt-Delete immediately come to mind as solid reads, but for whatever reason they don’t have the pull on me that they probably should.
The only sites I ever bookmark are sites that I see that offer something unique and either informative or entertaining. Based on that criteria there should probably me more sites inside my gaming radar. Still, this article is not about me and my overwhelmingly bad reading practices. This is about something that’s been bothering me about my #2 reading destination.
It wasn’t all that long ago that this second destination was added. Within the past 3 months Zero Punctuation (think about the pun embedded in this week’s title - it’s subtle… and, now that I think about it, not all that funny) has become a Wednesday mainstay. Yahtzee has become the latest gaming culture phenomenon and with good cause. Again, that statement doesn’t have a whole lot of impact. That’s okay - that wasn’t the intent.
If you’ve been reading the Quagmire for with any regularity you have seen my relative apprehension of Nintendo’s success. I never thought about it when I was young, but now that I’ve managed to entire my cranky old man stage early in my gaming critic life (which appears to have happened prematurely) I have a hard time not thinking about the number of times Nintendo added another title to an existing franchise. This is my current favorite double-standard to harp on with respect to gaming, and when this was brought up in ZP the first time I couldn’t have been more delighted.
Please understand that schadenfreude is not a common problem for me. I don’t take delight in flame wars, but sometimes I feel like I need to step up and say something. Super Smash Brothers is going to be the target, so if you have trouble handling any comments that do not involve slobbering all over the franchise you should be prepared for some artillery fire.
Brawl is the first game in the franchise I have owned but not the first one I have played. This game has never had that much appeal to me, but playing this game with three friends has been a good amount of fun. After extended service time with the game I had many negative things to say about it. My biggest problem with this game, and most 1st party titles for the Wii, is that the games are not deep. Okay, the perceived depth of a game is highly subjective, but as a fighter the gameplay in Brawl does not feel any different than its predecessors. I certainly don’t buy the argument that it is a masher, but I don’t see it as the complex fighter so many fans try to make it out to be (if you want a complex fighter I strongly urge you to play a Tekken game).
Not long after I start jotting down all the complaints I have about SSBB, ZP came out and said everything that was in my notes. This made me happy, not because laziness was once again paying off, but because someone that I would consider paying attention to about games can’t stand mediocre gameplay, highlighted characters being complex unlockables, and off-chance random character movement. This still was not my favorite part of the review.
Two weeks later the SSBB review prompted a response to e-mail feedback which took great strides towards proving that people who hated the comments had no idea how to properly respond to the comments made. This response also highlighted, inadvertently perhaps, that the phrase “I am not a fanboi” is a tired cliché that now almost always serves as proof that the writer is, on top of everything else, a hypocrite.
I realize it took a heck of a long time to get there, but it is time for another Public Service Announcement from the Quagmire - please stop using that phrase to begin your arguments. Every single time this phrase is used to make a point, it proves the author is too scared to let their argument stand on its own merit. It is not as if I expect to see witty discussion every time I read through a message board or walk into EB. In fact, more often than not I expect a bunch of idiots making incoherent statements. Certain phrases become overused way too often, and “I am not a fanboi” is now on the list along with “Nintendo just makes fun games”, “I prefer gameplay over graphics”, or “I’m tired of boring old sequels.”
Please understand that fans of any console who feel the need to attempt to validate themselves by shooting down other consoles are all guilty of use of at least one of these comments. Somehow there is this great divide in the community with respect to each console, and I feel like people are searching for catch phrases to make their points. I won’t shoot down anyone for enjoying a Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, Halo, or any other gaming franchise just because I don’t happen to enjoy it. I will, however, rip you apart if you are unable to handle people pointing out flaws they see without babbling on incoherently. In other words, I’m only here to help.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go prepare for another SSBB party.
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May 9, 2008
The Gamer’s Quagmire #68: Lucky Number 4
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less
by Jamison DeLorenzo
Promises are promises, and, this amazing revelation aside, I figure if there is a week to talk about GTA this would be the week to do it. There are very few stories in gaming news this week that do not involve this game, and rightfully so. Considering the sales numbers this game is putting up (6 million copies sold in week one) it would be rather silly to ignore this landmark game.
That was far more than just a play on words relating to the number of NYC landmarks in the GTA IV version of Liberty City. This is one of the few games I have ever seen released where every major gaming publication and review site is giving this game near perfect marks. I am not saying this should drive you to your nearest store and pick the game up, but so few games are ever given a high score, let alone from everyone. After taking a week off from work to plow through this game, something which I had planned since the beginning of the year, I find it very difficult to disagree with the notion that this game isn’t as close to perfect as a game can get.
There are many things this game does that its predecessors have done. All the basic gameplay elements that you love (or hate) about the game are back, the satire is still present, the detail in the city environment is amazing, the story is engrossing, and the characters and dialogue are movie-level quality. These are all things I expect from GTA. Games that step up to this level are almost always highly praised, including last year’s icon in this department - BioShock.
Where GTA has stopped before, IV has kept going. Let us start with what is in the forefront – the graphics. The work Rockstar has put into Liberty City has definitely raised the bar in the realm of the free-roaming environment. Combine the graphical power of Crysis with the city detail that went into Assassin’s Creed and what you get is Liberty City. Downtown is littered with gigantic signs that make you feel like you’re on the strip in Vegas. Seeing the city skyline light up at night is just like looking out of a hotel window. Those are the big visuals. The details - like movie posters and other ads inside buildings, the geysers of water that shoot up when you knock out fire hydrants, the debris that gets caught in a cyclone when a helicopter is flying nearby, being able to hear your car radio while outside the car - all of these experiences make you feel like you are inside a real city.
Next to the basic gameplay elements that make GTA what it is, the satire embedded in this game is easily the most enjoyable aspect of this. This is not anything new, but being able to see this in the form of television and the web are brand new experiences. One day I spent hours just watching TV in one of my safehouses. Is there any point in doing this? You don’t get missions or any real information on backstory in the game, but it sure is entertaining.
The only complaint I have is that the character movement is still a ways away from smooth. Running around, moving through crowds of people, breaking into cars or just hopping in them all have very natural movements. Jumping, however, is still atrocious. Trying to get Niko to jump between ledges, onto or off of a boat, or in between rooftops is still an ordeal. Jumping in wide open spaces is not nearly as frustrating as cramped spaces (I got stuck once under a staircase which forced me to reload because crouching and walking wasn’t working right), but jumping in a straight line can be a major ordeal at times. One mission I failed because I tried getting onto a dirtbike from behind it, only to walk in circles for over 10 seconds before my target escaped.
If those problems were not present in the game I would easily be able to state with conviction that this game is perfect. When I say a game is perfect, that means that while the game can still be improved to do things in different ways, there is nothing that I feel the game is lacking. For example, the cover combat system could be a little easier to use for getting in and out of cover or sprinting between cover spots, but it didn’t really cause any problems. The combat system was still much better than anything that has been in GTA games to date, so I cannot state with a straight face that the combat was difficult or frustrating.
There is one thing I should make a special note on. There is a mission that involves a bank job in this game. I thought this was going to be as annoying as the Vice City mission was, but it turned out to be the best mission in any GTA game I have played to date. The tedious parts of the robbery - securing the bank, subduing employees and customers, busting open the vault, were all scripted. The entire mission revolved around the escape from the bank. The adrenaline rush in running through the streets taking out cop after cop, running through the subway, avoiding helicopters, and the final escape back to the house provided more adrenaline and energy than I could ask for. I would need 3 Red Bulls back-to-back to recreate that sensation. This mission was the defining moment for the game.
Coming up with something different to say about this game is tough. You know it all and you’ve probably seen it all. The highlights of this game were the graphics, fighting system, environment detail, voice acting, character animations, story, dialogue, satire, and length. The driving, movement, and missions were good but could all have been improved. The multiplayer was new and fun, but still could be so much more. Every one of the highlights were near perfect if not perfect, which means that GTA IV probably didn’t exceed many people’s expectations, but it matched what most people were expecting from Rockstar. If that doesn’t say something about what the value of the GTA franchise is, then nothing really does.
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April 25, 2008
The Gamer’s Quagmire #67: And Internet Justice For All
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less
by Jamison DeLorenzo
Pay attention to enough news stories and you can see pattern with the media extolling the negative qualities of the Internet and what they refer to as the gaming subculture. It’s not that I am any different - I do what I can to provide negative comments every week for parts of the industry that are negative influences. Today, however, things are going to be different. Oh yes, they will be different.
Within the past month there was a proud owner of an Xbox 360, laptop, and a few other possessions, who had his house broken into and items stolen. In what feels like nothing more than a transparent attempt to land a spot on America’s Dumbest Criminals, the thief messaged a thread through Xbox Live a ransom demand for the stolen 360. Anyone who has ever watched even one episode of any crime drama, or has an ounce of common sense, can probably guess what happened next.
Only, you probably can’t. The police involved in the case worked more slowly than people on the Internet. After the person who had his possessions stolen was not receiving the desired help from the police he posted his grievance up on the Internet. Many members of the networked gaming community sprung into action, found detailed information on the person who was connected to the account from with the ransom demand was initiated, and soon afterwards property was recovered. The police finally helped out after this happened.
From this there were several interesting responses. Let’s start with the fact that Fox News managed to squeeze in a story covering this saga. I found the timing of this amusing because the first thought that popped into my head was that they felt guilty about their Mass Effect story and thought this was a great opportunity to endear themselves to the gaming community. Sorry, you didn’t sucker me in! In the story the kid who had his stuff stolen was mention to be an aspiring Guitar Hero legend, or something to that effect. I’m saying this kid is going to grow up to be a rocket scientist, but it picking that header for him was funny. It’s almost like a smack in the face. Was that the most notable thing in his life so far? Guitar Hero is the pinnacle achievement to date? Really?
(I do not mean to imply that I have any better things to do than write about or play video games - that would just be insane)
Another miss in this situation was the fact that Microsoft missed this message completely. In my paranoid little world where all digital communication is monitored I seriously expected there to be some built-in monitoring of all communication, or at least the text-based communication, so that when something criminal were sent over the wires, say, for example, a ransom note about stolen property made by Microsoft, that the monitoring software would see it and disable any offending party’s account. I want this to be bad news, but maybe the fact that this did not happen is good news.
While the Big Brother justice system is not quite in place yet on Live, this does make me wonder a little more about the technical proficiency in the standard Law and Order segments of our society. In modern times a controlled Internet account handle is just as good as a mailing address. You would think that if the police were notified of an address in a ransom situation that the case would be solved in a matter of hours. Technically you could throw the term “vigilante justice” around here. How can you just skip over using inflammatory comments in topics related to gaming? The news outlets missed an opportunity here.
Seriously though, this ties in to my main point - that there has been a steady stream of negative stories about video games for a long time. Video games cause obesity in kids, they make people shoot each other, they’re killing simulators, they are too sexually explicit, they have no redeeming qualities, and so on. We’ve been seeing these stories for years. We now have a story about how a community rallied around a theft that was largely being ignored by the police (or, at least, ineptly handled) and the community was able to get the person most, if not all, of his belongings back.
We praise the neighborhood watch for their efforts, do we not? Look, I can’t sit here and claim that perhaps some of this information should not have been obtainable by average citizens (i.e. Xbox Live account info), but this information was used to get stolen property back. I am never one to ignore exceptions to rules. In the scenario dealing with the what the road to hell is paved with, I have no issues with whatever non-physically threatening tactics were used to get the property back (keeping in mind that I am not someone who’s opinion regarding moral tactics you should necessarily listen to).
The lesson in all this, aside from needing to be a smarter individual when attempting to extort money from someone, is that we are still living in a world that predominantly is incapable of understanding technology. Things that seem simple to many people simply do not translate to people in an older demographic. Naturally, this isn’t a new trend. It’s going to happen to us too. A lesson that I took from this, which I feel may benefit many people, is that until a changing of the guard occurs in the media, we are going to have to continue dealing with gaming stories in the media being constantly mishandled. Anyone who is unable to grasp this will eventually go insane when the next Mass Effect controversy hits front and center on the 6 o’clock news.
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April 4, 2008
The Gamer’s Quagmire #66: DLC: It’s Easy as 1-2-3
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less
by Jamison DeLorenzo
This week marked a first for me in gaming. It wasn’t anything as groundbreaking as my first perfect song for Guitar Hero on Expert, completing a Mario game without dying, or roasting the CPU in a regulation hockey game by over 200 goals (thank you, NHL ‘94). This week marked the first time I participated in obtaining game-related material via digital download. I should point out that this is much more commonly known as DLC thanks to overwhelming pressure to cram every important idea in society into a three letter acronym (TLA, sorry).
While visiting a friend this past week we talked about all the usual stuff - work, women, socio-economic disparities across the heartland, clubbing baby seals - and inevitably our latest technological gadgets. I got to show off my new camera and he got to show off a brand new subwoofer so powerful it could easily be mistaken for a herd of charging rhinocerii. The second game used to showcase the beast was a download from the Playstation Store - Super Stardust HD.
For my first exposure to the store this was not a bad start. This game is over a year old, and I must say I’m disappointed in not having tried it sooner. If you enjoyed the game Asteroids you would like this one too. In fact, if you took Asteroids and poured a six pack of triple espressos down its throat you would get something quite similar. For $10 there a bunch of games like this you can get for a PC or console. If you can remember what games made the original GameBoy so popular (not to date you or make you feel old) that is today’s current Indy gaming market.
I never really thought about it before, but the fact that there is a ton of entertaining arcade games all over the Internet at a dirt cheap price is a good thing. This is a great alternative to the $60 console games and provides to our current crop of young people the sustenance they need to become a lifelong gamer. I realize that I am late to the party on this one (the invitation must have been lost in the mail) and that this is not some groundbreaking discovery. We can’t do that every week here in the Quagmire - that’d be far too predictable.
The other half of the online delivery system that we are integrating into the gaming community comes in the form of obtaining additional content for already released games. As much as I relished downloading GT Prologue that is hardly going to happen often. The most popular notion of adding content onto games comes in the form of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. This is a very welcome addition to anyone who has pined for certain songs to be in the game.
I have to admit that although there have been several great songs in GH3 and Rock Band there have been plenty of songs that I have been dying to get my hands on to play. Imagine my joy when the Still Alive and the Boston pack was released recently for Rock Band. It may sound strange, but one of my current favorite gaming moments of the year now includes cranking my stereo and playing lead on More Than a Feeling. While realizing admitting this makes me look like an even bigger dork, I felt the need to share this because I feel that this is a revolutionary step for the rhythm gaming market.
The only thing that makes me more excited about what the future might hold for these games. In a perfect world there is going to be a way to point a game towards a digitized master of a song and have the game translate it into a song that you can play. Considering the number of fans of current rock monsters (U2, Radiohead, Dave Matthews) and past monsters (Van Halen, Led Zeppelin) you cannot tell me there isn’t a gigantic market for this feature. Whoever gets this working first without requiring the utter destruction of a gamer’s bank account is going to cement themselves in gaming legend.
Long story short - I’ve only gotten my feet wet in the world of digital downloads for gaming and I really love what I see. I’ll be taking more steps into it this weekend and hopefully go for a swim (whether a lifeguard is on duty or not). If the industry as a whole starts to get in on this then not only will obtaining games be a whole lot easier, but Valve will undoubtedly be seen as the pioneer in this area for the more expensive segment of the gaming market.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go locate some more songs to download and get another late night gaming jam session going.
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March 28, 2008
The Gamer’s Quagmire #65: Getting Fallout Boy a 9 to 5
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less
by Jamison DeLorenzo
Understanding the role of a game critic has become a rather difficult task. Game critics have many different facets to their job - advertising for games, informing the public, washing hands with publishers, entertaining viewers, and so forth. Knowing how to handle all of these so-called responsibilities can be difficult. Sometimes you get fired just for speaking your mind.
During my early years of writing about games I took it upon myself to write reviews whenever I could about any game in my illustrious library. There is always an uphill battle due to having to front the costs for every game and getting new people to pay attention. Coming up with a system that you are comfortable with and having it mean something to people is always the biggest challenge. There is almost nothing to gain by copying systems that are already in place because regurgitating information is never original or interesting. In fact, regurgitation is often quite disgusting.
It took me a couple of years to realize that writing reviews was largely for my own edification. I did get occasional e-mails from people asking questions about games I had not reviewed yet, which was refreshing, but it was never a fulfilling hobby. Gaming was the primary hobby, so the futile reviewing was put to bed and the endless gaming continued.
Several years later my semi-weekly rants starting to become a norm. I had built up a lot of anger over many years of playing horrible games, listening to idiotic reviews, and seeing idiotic mistakes made with console technology. Eventually these rants started to become relatively coherent. This was a big development considering the number of e-mails I got when writing about things I didn’t really understand. Still, they always served as a highly customized aphrodisiac to calm my nerves.
Today, I find myself wondering what the real role of a game reviewer was in today’s gaming culture. This sounds like an asinine question, but there is a philosophical question at hand. We have so many different reviewing publications and sites that hand out numbers and awards the accolades have almost completely lost all meaning (this is more commonly known as the Jiminy Jillickers Effect). For example, you must find it disturbing how many different video games can become a Game of the Year.
In a sense that sounds like I’m suggesting that only one group should be able to give a game this, or any other title. The Ivory Tower approach is hardly the situation I think we should be in either, but the number of reviewers should be trimmed down. Reading differing opinions on games is always a good thing, provided that there is anecdotal evidence backing up the claims that are made.
A lot of what you read now about games is very comical. I don’t even mean funny comical - I often mean comical with respect to degree of incompetence or integrity. Once we started having visual proof that reviewers were being paid money to say positive things about games the game reviewer in the public eye shifted from honest reviewer to company spokesperson. You cannot take these people seriously. They are paid to write positive things or too scared to write negative things because they won’t get advanced copies of future games (which is the crux of my argument that most video game reviewers are inconsequential).
More to the point, sometimes money was never needed to get reviewers to write positive things about games. Lawsuits, or even the lingering stench thereof, kept certain reviewers from saying what they really wanted to say about a game.
This was part of larger problem that the Jeff Gerstmann firing raised. He wrote a game with a score that was deemed to be too low by his employer, so he was fired. Naturally, this was not the reason GameSpot gave, but you cannot expect a company to ever seriously admit fault no matter how transparent the lie is.
Think about what sources you implicitly trust for honest game reviews. How many different sources are there? If it’s a publication, how many of the reviewers that work there do you trust? What is the lowest score for any game you have seen from them? Which games have received the highest scores? Are they owned by a parent company that also produces games or consoles? Do they provide concrete reasons for why they like or dislike certain games? If you have not thought about these questions before it is time you start doing so.
To me, the mark of consistent reasoning behind reviews is not the most important ideal anymore. I need to see a publication have the testicular fortitude to give bad games bad scores. Find a game that is absolutely terrible on almost every level (e.g. Apex, Driver 3) - did they get a score below 30% (or even 50%)? I need to know that a site is willing to completely bury a game when it is deserved.
If you want to know the worst about games you need to find people that work on the entertainment of how games are described and ignore the professional reviewer. My current hypothesis is that web comics are the most informative game reviews we have going. The weekly Zero Punctuation web comic, one of the funniest and most entertaining running pieces in the known universe, is popular because he is, along with other reasons, willing to completely skewer a game when necessary. The same thing holds true for Penny Arcade.
Look, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a subscription or two to gaming magazines or monitoring several gaming websites to get information. Getting previews and detailed descriptions on games far into the future are very invaluable. All I am saying is that placing your faith in one source for video game reviews, or any other form of information for that matter, is always a bad idea… except for me.
You can always trust me.
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