It Came From E3: Sony Versus Microsoft

This next generation of consoles is proving to be far, far more interesting than I would have thought.  Early rumors and expectations seem to suggest that if anything - this generation would basically be two consoles with little distinction except a brand, and something called a Wii U.

But then Microsoft had to go and throw sand in the face of my long standing prediction that no console manufacturer would be so stupid as to actually try and block buying used games.  My assumption has always been that eventually everything would just go disc-less ... but just not this generation.

Oh no, Microsoft is proving to be just that stupid.  The Xbox One (more on that later) will require an Internet connection at least once every 24 hours to play even offline games and the ability to use a game has been left completely to the mercy of the publisher.

Microsoft has made a clear stance: you do not really own any actual physical media.  You are paying for a license to use software and perhaps that software happens to come on a disc - perhaps not, but it does not actually matter.  Once you've bought a game, you are only buying the privilege to use that game in the manner the publisher desires.  Technically and legally, Microsoft is on strong footing - this is actually pretty much how software distribution has always worked.

But nobody ... nobody, has ever considered taking it to the draconian levels the Xbox One will enforce.  Purchasing an Xbox One is effectively voting against your rights as a consumer, plain and simple.

Microsoft's missteps don't end there.  First of all - I don't know what marketing genius decided on "Xbox One" as a name ... but it is clearly someone who thinks of themselves as a "marketing genius".  It is an utterly moronic name only held aloft by a cool factor in itself supported only by clever advertising.

The Xbox One is the third Xbox.

The Xbox One has two distinct pieces.

The Xbox One has many different purposes.

In short, there is nothing "One" about the Xbox One except that it sounds cool.

Sony has made it pretty clear that they don't share Microsoft's beliefs about sharing your games - and that alone is going to give them miles and miles of traction with gamers.  Also, "PS4" has a very nice logical feel to it.  But then they had to go and give the coup de grace:

The PS4 will also be cheaper.  Even though it will probably be marginally more powerful.

If you twist your crystal ball around just enough, you can maybe, almost possibly, perhaps see what Microsoft was thinking: They assumed that Kinect would be a huge value add, one that Sony can't compete with.  They assumed Sony would probably duplicate their mistake with the PS3 and charge a premium.  They possibly even assumed that the lucrative potential of DRM was too attractive for Sony to pass up and that gamers could hard grumble much if both major consoles had matching handcuffs.

Except none of those would seem to be true.  Finally, Microsoft seems to have fallen back on their original strategy - dating all the way back to the first Xbox:

You'll buy our console because of the exclusive games on it.

And why wouldn't they think that?  Halo single-handedly launched a million Xboxes, or you know - something like that.  Gamers might forgive having their purchasing power tied behind their back, a console that is more expensive with less power and name that reeks of marketing stiffs if only they can play the next Halo.

And while Microsoft's exclusives - which comprised the majority of their E3 keynote if you have no doubt that this is there main strategy - are interesting, the flagship title appears to be Titanfall.

Titanfall looks interesting, but brothers and sisters - I've played Halo and Titanfall is no Halo.  Halo was a ground-breaking shooter on many levels whose mechanics still echo through virtually every FPS game on any platform.  Titanfall is pretty, but it is basically a futuristic shooter with parkour and mechs.

Honestly - what all the talk about Titanfall reminds me of?  Brink.  Think on that for a moment.

The thing is - Sony is doing nothing terribly revolutionary here.  The PS4 is a PS3 with modern hardware and something more akin to PC specs and less Cell Processor weirdness.  The next generation PlayStation Plus will be pretty much this generation of PlayStation Plus.  The OS will get some updates.

Sony isn't going to win the next generation - it's more that Microsoft is going to lose by constantly punching itself in the face.  For Microsoft to even keep pace with Sony at this point, Titanfall would need to be the best game ever made in the history of gaming ... but unfortunately for Microsoft, Bungie is already making Destiny.

Don't get me wrong - the XBO will sell plenty of units for sure ... the brand has too much raw weight and inertia.  But it's going to sell like ice for igloos abroad where its already-too-high price point will be painfully-that-much-higher (one forum comment noted that the XBO would be higher than than their month's rent by far too wide a margin) ... and even here in the good old US of A, loyal 360 users are going to start wondering about their ability to buy cheap games from the used racks between now and the holidays.

Nintendo has basically nailed third place into the ground with the Wii U being far too little and way too late.

Microsoft apparently found second place too tempting to pass up.

Game Play: Minecraft

I had peered over the shoulder of other Minecraft players via tweets and YouTube videos and to be quite honest, had no idea what big deal was all about. If you've been living under a rock, Minecraft is an indie sensation; grabbing awards and selling like hotcakes. And when you first look at it, it looks basically like a game about punching blocks.

And even once you first jump into the game, the game seems like it's just basically about punching blocks. You may have seen videos about people creating enormous towers and elaborate traps, but you've got a fist and mountain full of dirt to get through and little idea of what else is out there. Then night falls and there's a lot of groaning going on and a pretty good chance you might just die.

Maybe it's a sign that gamers have gotten so used to in-game tutorials and intro level handholding that there's an expectation that you simply shouldn't need documentation anymore, but trust me when I say the first thing you'll want to do in Minecraft is read the tutorials to get a grasp for the basics of the game, how to build important little things like torches, and surviving your first night.

Once you've gotten past that step, and especially if you're a child of the Lego generation - there's a good chance you'll be addicted to the game right away. Minecraft is essentially a lightweight RPG for the Lego set, where mining for materials means that you can control the world more and more - and eventually you'll be trying to do things like carving out an underwater observatory for simply no other reason than to see how what it's like when you're done.

The mechanics of the game are, to be honest, quite fascinating. It's not questing as much as exploration and the risk to reward ration is heavily tied to investment in time rather than loss of save points or experience. I've been playing the game quite a lot and really my most horrible fate to date is losing a diamond pickaxe while I was trying to tunnel a water plume from the ocean to my dungeon's floor. It's annoying - but it really just means I have to go find another diamond vein somewhere. The monsters, part of the creatures called mobs in Minecraft jargon, are more parts of the environment than encounters - they're something to be tamed just like that landscape you'd rather seen turned into a castle. The emphasis on the sandbox nature of the game is important, and really what makes it shine.

It's also interesting to look at Minecraft's roots - the game essentially takes Infiniminer, which was intended to be a team game about, well, mining blocks and building things, to solve the complexity issues around Dwarf Fortress, a game about mining, crafting and defending yourself.

It's a relatively untapped subgenre of the sandbox variety - very different from the GTA concept of simply running around a moderately fixed environment. But the appeal is now officially undeniable, and I'd keep an eye out in this space in general.

Obviously, highly recommended.

Early Look: DC Universe Online Beta (PS3)

It shouldn't really be surprising to anyone that currently DC Universe Online is a buggy mess. For one thing, it is technically a beta ... but also a beta of an MMO from SOE, who doesn't exactly have a long track record of deploying stable products in their first iteration or so. Take Planetside, for instance, where I routinely spawned into walls.

So when I spawned into floor while playing DCU, I was hardly surprised. Course, this is now many years later and I would thought SOE would have had a few new tricks to keep this kind of thing from happening. Other common issues: sound will disappear, you'll occasionally be unable to jump into a new zone (including logging out), odd delays between doing damage and actually seeing the effect, graphics detail jump here and there (DCU uses the Unreal Engine - though it seems to vary between UT2004 and UE3 sometimes. I think the detail settings are TBD), random complete lockup, mission items may be missing, etc. etc.

If you squint really hard and ignore the bugs, what remains is a fairly by the numbers MMO experience. The character creation is quite decent, perhaps not quite as impressive as City of Heroes, but offers a gamut of physical options for your comic avatar. You can create a hero or villain, and select a specific mentor - all of which will guide the missions you get out of the gate. Power selection is fairly shallow, you select a power base (Fire, Sorcery, Ice, Nature, Technology, etc.), a weapon (from hand blasting to massive hammers), and a movement type (flight, acrobatics or super speed).

Much of the game feels like a fantasy MMORPG with a comic book theme and the action setting set to high. That might sound like a bad thing, but it's really not and offers a solid and familiar core to the gameplay. You do gather gear as you go along, but you can equip the gear without having to change that carefully selected appearance of your costumed crimefighter. You can swap out the appearance of your gear at any time without having to change what you actually have equipped, making it easy to toy around with the look and feel of your character. You select a gear palette when you create your character which all new gear conforms to - meaning that even that Amazonian helmet might suit your wardrobe.

If I ignore the complete lack of stability - my real complaint about DCU is that I've actually found it very hard to engage many things which warrant the MMO side of the equation. Sure, when I'm running around Metropolis there are umpteen other heroes fighting around me - but often that's a liability more than anything else as they're in competition for the same rats I need to kill for my "Kill Five Rats" mission. At least on the console, the interface for creating groups on the fly seems clunky at best and my time waiting outside zones for a party only ever resulted in one invite ... and then the zone itself was crashing.

DCU does have the ability to create quick groups for instanced quests, such as the "Alerts" - where Martian Manhunter will teleport you and a few other heroes to a specific location. While this could potentially create some greate Pick Up Game potential, I would generally teleport into a location unable to find half the party and on one Alert, kept getting trapped in a room with no doors (literally).

It's bizarre to me that I can load up Borderlands - also on the Unreal Engine, and grab a pick up game in minutes, and the experience is seamless ... and yet DCU is an actual MMO and I've spent 99.9999% of my time solo on it. As a solo RPG, it might be worth the price of admission without the monthly cost, if made to actually work, but I'm certainly not getting anything from the game I'd pay monthly for right now.

If they make the game stable, look a bit better, and fix the grouping - DCU might be a big draw for MMO fans on the console. You can see the potential in the game right now, but there is plenty of work to be done for sure.

What Sucks In Black Ops (And Most Online Shooters)

I had been playing with "tips & tricks", or "notes" or "thoughts" on Black Ops, but honestly nothing will really sum it all quite like of stuff that sucks about the game.

Conditional: It's a pretty great game, and honestly these are complaints not really aimed at it specifically. It's not like the game crashes repeatedly at a crucial moment unless you wore the right in-game hat or anything (because that would just be insane). No, some of these things have been true since I was an admin on a Counter Strike server so, so, so many years ago.

Second conditional: Many of these things are resolved by having a solid set of people (or even a clan) to play with. But most aren't completely.

But that doesn't change the fact that they suck.

Lobbies Suck
Once, there were dedicated servers - and they were good. Well, mostly good - but the nice thing about dedicated servers is that once you found one you liked you could stick with the same crowd every time you wanted to play - day or night. Our Counter Strike server was a full blown community where you could easily find people you were comfortable playing with and then chat with them on forums after the game.

Lobbies, on the other hand, are nothing more than random groups of people. The connections suck and honestly the whole system rewards you for jumping from one lobby to another lobby often during a game session to get into existing games quickly - and before the you get the dreaded dropped connection.

Oh, right ... speaking of:

Server Disconnects Suck
With dedicated servers, it was very rare that the game dropped you. You may have dropped from the game, or your cat might have kicked out your cable or whatnot ... but the servers were usually up and running. With the peer to peer lobby system, all it takes is a drop between you and random user 22, or maybe random user 22 decides they doesn't want to be on the losing team anymore and drops out - taking the ball, the game and the whole enchilda with them.

It's double annoying since games like Black Ops make tracking experience and stats a big portion of the game - and you may play through 90% of a match only to have the connection pulled out from under you. Ironically in what is probably an effort to punish players who drop out early because they're losing, nobody keeps their score in this case.

VOIP Sucks
I know I've harped on this before, but dear god almighty is VOIP the most wasted technology on the planet. At it's best I occasionally hear useful tips from someone on my team. There's a chance of like 1:1000000 that might happen. There's nearly a 1:1 chance that I will hear random music, someone's kids, their dog, their significant other yelling at them, heavy breathing, or whatnot. Also common is just idle chatter between two players who know each other ... which is usually not rude as much as it's just completely unnecessary background noise.

At it's worse? You might get berated by a player who got killed in the first two seconds of the game. Or sexually harassed by another player. Or threatened, or called any number of pretty impressive insults. And if you aren't the target of all this - you still get to hear it.

I've actually started syncing my bluetooth mic, muting it ... and then setting aside on the floor. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - every online game should have a fast "mute all" option.

And actually, Sony and/or Microsoft should offer teamspeak options at the OS level. Every game should have "talk only to people on your friend list" as a possibility. That way I only talk to people I care about, and nobody has to listen to me do so...

Campers Suck
And I'm going to do everyone a favor here and define a camper as:

A person more concerned with their kill to death ration than actually playing the game.

Honestly, I'm not even going to get into the argument about whether it's bad pool to hide in a fern for five minutes during team deathmatch. However, when I run pass someone hiding in a fern for five minutes while trying to cap a domination point, the urge to TK rises. "Hiding in a fern", mind you, is different from "sniping in a fern" - the distinction is that a sniper will take out opponents in my way. Hiding just makes you decoration.

Matchmaking Sucks
Honestly, Black Ops handles it better than most. However, sometimes when three people drop out right before a match begins and you're stuck with 3:6 for the first ten minutes, or when all the other team is on the same prestige clan, etc. - it sucks the fun out of the game.

Worse, I used to consider it a cardinal sin to drop out of a game which I knew was doomed. Honestly, if I'm in a lobby with a bunch of people yelling into their mics, hiding in ferns and probably ready to drop their own connection ... I'm pretty willing to bail and find a real game.

Knife Fights Suck
Knife attacks have somewhat annoyed me since Counter Strike, and they occasionally still annoy me today. For one thing, in a semi-realistic military shooter - killing someone with a quick swipe of a knife is pretty unrealistic. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that people dying in a modern gunfight from knife attacks are probably statistically low.

But worse is that the mechanic is flawed. OK, if you sneak up behind me and stab me in the back ... you win. If you rush me and I miss you you completely and you stab me ... you win. But there's just no way in hell someone should take three bullets and still get to stab someone and get an instakill from point blank range. At the core, these games are gunfights - and guns should trump knives.

Game Play: CSI Fatal Conspiracy

I'm not entirely familiar with the shovelware genre in general, so perhaps there is a subculture out there of people who are used to franchise cash ins which they might find appealing, but I'm going to have to guess there probably is not.

In some ways, the gaming community should see the release of this game's demo as a kind of blessing. It's a free package which shows just how bad gaming development actually can be. Thought Doom III was bad? Ha. If you put Fatal Conspiracy on a spectrum of bad to good, most of your least favorite games would probably not even be visible on the other end.

Start with the production value, or the complete lack of it. Most of the menus and images look like they were designed and developed by someone putting their first website together. I honestly can't tell if the voice actors were used to deliver dialogue, because the sound quality is so uneven that I couldn't tell if that was Marg Helgenberger doing a bad Willows impersonation or somebody else.

If you squint enough that the poorly formatted menus don't annoy you into oblivion, you can stumble around the lackluster interface which appears to be specifically designed to slow the user down and confuse them. Possibly the most important thing to do in the game - investing evidence for "trace", either stopped working for me completely during the demo or the secret combo of buttons to get it working again was lost on me.

If you're a fan of the show, you should hate the game. If you're a fan of self-flagellation, then this might be the game for you. Games like this make me mourn what has become of the adventure genre in general, and despair for where it might go.

First Impressions: Call of Duty Black Ops

Faithful Cathode readers know that I was somewhat torn about the release of Modern Warfare 2.  In one hand, it was a slick looking military shooter with some brilliant cinematic scenes and lots of stuff blowing up.  One the other hand, it felt like it was written by a frantic monkey with homicidal tendencies and the entire No Russian controversy was clearly absurd sensationalism.

Black Ops sees the franchise in the hands of Treyarch and the early review is that they've handled it quite well.  I can't speak to the single player campaign yet, going to crack that open over the weekend - so it's difficult to say how reviews claiming it is "the best story in the series" compares to, well, actual storytelling - but I can be hopeful.

Multiplayer is still the tightly designed gameplay that military shooter fans have grown to expect.  There's little variation here from past editions - thought I have to say that I often forget how important it can be to play the same online game as a few hundred thousand other people at the same time.  Stability still seems to be a bit of a concern, and can certainly be annoying when you've had a particularly good round and get dropped - but hardly a big deal when you can just jump right back into another game in about a minute.

In the hours I spent in the game, I tended to drift to the more "strategic" game modes.  I never seem to do well point wise when it's pure deatchmatch, but I am glad to see objective based game modes which actually work.  I still remember back in the CounterStrike days how nearly every game, no matter the mode, descended quickly into Team Deathmatch - and there's occasionally the same here, but for the most part you have a game which helps team quickly organize for specific, simple goals, and it just works.

Tentatively a huge thumbs up - I'm willing to say this may be the game I wanted Modern Warfare 2 to be.

Fallout: New Vegas ... A Game So Buggy Good Luck Finishing It

This is a follow up to the post from Friday which noted that while Fallout: New Vegas is pretty fun, it's also full of bugs which are completely ridiculous for a console game in this day and age. I challenged anyone to find a buggier game in the history of the console.

I'm going to up the ante on that. I think Fallout: New Vegas may be the buggiest game ever released.

On any console.

Ever.

My evidence? I can't finish the game. I've tried previous saves, I've tried cleaning the disc, I've tried giving the PlayStation 3 a good old reboot, I've tried moving to other locations and then back - but I can't get into The Strip. The load screen appears, and then there is a black screen. And where do I need to go to finish the game? The Strip. Is there any other way to get there? No, Bethesda didn't have any of the locations in the The Strip as a named location. You can't even go directly there via fast travel, you have to go to a gate first and the walk in ... which is where every thing just fades to black.

And that's it. I've played this game for hours, I've gone on dozens of quests and in an effort to stop the game from crashing I decided to just sprint for the finish line and get to the end of the main storyline. But I'll never get that. This is how the game ends for me:

The load screen appears, and then there is a black screen.

That Bethesda has released a game of this low quality is bad, but it's equally bad that the gaming media has decided to give them a pass. IGN rates this game an 8.5, or "great". Really? Let's recap.

The load screen appears, and then there is a black screen.

That is not a great game. I might be able to give it a good, but a game that can crash consistently after only running for thirty minutes or less with nor rhyme or reason is probably barely worthy of even being a good game, even if everything about the gameplay was stellar.

So Bethesda: don't count on me buying any DLC for this game. Hell, don't even count on the disc ever gracing my console again. And if any game from Bethesda ever has a review with the word bug in it again, I don't care if the rating is off the chart - it's not a purchase option for me. I'd be irate if this was a PC game, but on a console? This lack of quality control is simply idiotic.

Gameplay: Fallout New Vegas

I'll start with a confession: I've been playing the hell out of New Vegas. And I could rattle off all the reasons why that is so - except none of them would surprise you if you have already played Fallout 3 in the last two years. Bethesda has managed to sneak in a few new details, most of which add at least a few new concepts - most of which are pretty sound but don't really do anything to change the core gameplay from when Fallout and Elder Scrolls first got mashed together.

And there have been many, many reviews which have mentioned all of that, and how wonderfully the mechanics hold up over the last couple years. So lets' talk about something else.

Let's talk about just how often this damn game crashes, and how completely wrong that is for a console game in the year 2010. The level of instability that this game has is so far off the charts compared to every single other title I have ever played on the PlayStation 3 that I challenge any other blogger or gamer to argue the case that this is not the buggiest release in the history of the console, with the only other contender being Fallout 3 or the even buggier DLC for Fallout 3.

Let's talk frequency: Nightly. At least once a night that I've powered this game on, it has crashed. Let's talk severity: It completely locks up the console, requiring a manual reboot. Let's talk about predictability: There is none. You'll just be walking down the street, turn and look at something and ... bam. Instant lockup. I've had it happen at least once in between locations, causing nothing but a black screen to stare at me while I wondered if I should wait or go reboot the thing again.

The only saving grace is the frequency of the saves in the game: it does an autosave when you change locations or when you sleep. Course, the location autosave may not work correctly if the game crashes at the right moment, so unless you remember to save after every important action - you might be completely hosed anyway. I've lost hours of gameplay by not being absolutely draconian about saving after key points, a habit I've now fallen deeply into for the sake of my own sanity.

And it's not like the game itself is spotless. I walked right past a quest item because it was buried mostly in the ground ... not in "oh look, buried treasure" kind of way - but rather a "model was graphically blended with landscape" kind of way. While talking to a major game character, the conversation was stopped for cinematic animation ... which was blocked because the character for said animation was stuck on a chair. There are times when VATS goes completely on vacation. I'll be swarmed by evil poisonous creatures and tapping the shoulder button like a madman, and absolutely nothing happens.

So it's hard for me to be excited about things like factions, weapon mods, reloading benches or the nifty new companion wheel (though, it is kinda nifty) when I know every time I load the game, I'll end up rebooting my console. I said this about the Fallout 3 DLC, and I'll say it again: this is why I left PC gaming for a console. That Bethesda has had two years to work the kinks out of the engine and it's just as buggy as it ever was tells me one simple thing:

Bethesda needs to ditch this engine. While playing New Vegas, I was also playing the new Borderlands DLC and realized: it looks better, plays faster and never crashes. Yeah, I know it doesn't have the same dynamically loaded overworld that Fallout does, but these are things engines like Unreal and Id's latest have been working on. The Gamebryo engine has always been a burden on Bethesda games, it's never been able to deliver the same graphical quality of contemporary engine and apparently porting it to the consoles saddles the consoles with PC level bugs. It's ridiculous that in a two development timespan that Bethesda has released a product with this few updates, that looks exactly the same as the game before it, and is buggy as all hell.

Is the game fun? Yes. Does it offer hours and hours and hours of play? Yes. Do I recommend it? Yes. Well, if you liked Fallout 3.

Does that justify the level of instability in this game? No.

There, quite honestly, is no justification for the level of instability in this game.

Is Good Old Games Dead, Or Just Playing?

Apparently over the weekend, Good Old Games, a digital distributor of old Windows games from the Polish company CD Project, went bully up with a public message that it couldn't exist in it's current form anymore:

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We've debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We're very grateful for all support we've received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn't mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

Following this, however, has come the announcement of a re-release and more information to arrive later this week ... fueling the notion that this is more publicity stunt than funeral wake. Stunt might be harsh - though the overly morbid tone of the plain home page message doesn't lend to mere restructuring ... so if GOG returns in a week or so, they could certainly be accused of being overly dramatic.

Game Play: Blur (and a little Mod Nation Racers too)

A twist on an old joke: multiplayer would be a lot of fun, if not for all the people. Bringing a bunch of random people from the intertubes repeatedly to game together has had a pretty uneven history - with the addition of VOIP to online gaming resulting in a thunderous din of people singing, cursing and warbling.

That said, Blur manages it pretty well. I played the hell out of the online only demo and now haven't even bothered touching the single player of the full version. It's very pick up game oriented and since the action is pretty intense even when you're trying to catch up to the pack - uneven skill levels across player don't feel quite so bad because you can still wreck the hell out of other cars.

And it doesn't hurt that as kart racers go, Blur is very good. Driving feels tight and controlled, there isn't a dramatic emphasis on drifting and the power-ups, while mostly classic renditions of favorites from the genre, do the game justice to helping even the score. The graphics are great and the presentation is geared to getting you in a game, out, and back in again as swiftly as possible.

I'm light on complaint - I wish there were more powerups, and that the mods were more varied and arrived a little sooner. But it's hard to complain about a game I'm enjoying this much and yet haven't even played it's "other half". Definitely recommend.

A quick side note: Blur was actually a trade in for Mod Nation Racers, which I was somewhat looking forward to and yet found the racing itself, well, really frustrating. Seems to place a heavy, heavy emphasis on drifting and drafting and not so much on just pure driving. I get the modding aspects are pretty powerful, but if LittleBigPlanet was any indication, I won't have time to really get into it.

For Sunday: Sonic 2006 Bug Reel

Via Wired and @kobunheat.

Ebert Folded

This may be the best evidence to date that film critic Roger Ebert's very public stance that games can never be art was, at best, fodder for flame wars. Ebert recently retreated, saying:

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn't seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

At this moment, 4,547 comments have rained down upon me for that blog entry. I'm informed by Wayne Hepner, who turned them into a text file: "It's more than Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov." I would rather have reread all three than vet that thread. Still, they were a good set of comments for the most part. Perhaps 300 supported my position. The rest were united in opposition.
If you assume I received a lot of cretinous comments from gamers, you would be wrong. I probably killed no more than a dozen. What you see now posted are almost all of the comments sent in. They are mostly intelligent, well-written, and right about one thing in particular:

I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games.

-- Okay, kids, play on my lawn[Chicago Sun-Times]

Emphasis is Ebert's, not mine. He continues to ramble on, sometimes his original stodgy stance reappearing but in general giving gamers the due they rightfully deserve. Yet the response now has been largely silent - Ebert is just reassuring us what we already knew, that he was clinging on to a position he didn't have any real reason to have except because it was generating controversy.

Kudos to him for reversing that, of course, and hopefully in doing so it will serve as a guidepost to others in similar fields to do a little research on modern gaming before trolling for posts, but it still feels like the opportunity to have a decent conversation on the subject was tossed away.

Stick to movies, Roger - Transformers 3 is coming out soon and probably won't be art either.

Game Play: Warpgate (iPhone/iPad)

Elite is considered by some to be one of the greatest games ever made - but at the very least you have to give credit that it was a seminal piece of work. Creating a massive world (using some creative procedural methods), players could simply fly their ship around and ... well, do whatever they want for the most part. Fast forward a couple decades, and we have Grand Theft Auto IV.

Well, OK - similarities are there but we can save that for another post. We also have Warpgate for the iPhone and iPad. Longtime Mac game publisher Freeverse drops you into a galaxy, puts some touch controls on your free starship and lets you run around. There is a story, but you are welcome to ignore and wander around blowing stuff up, finding viable trade routes, and essentially just exploring.

The core of the gameplay is quite good. The touch controls work well, the graphics are great and the level of detail given to the different ships, planets and galactic factions provide plenty of depth. Combat is pretty simple button mashing affair, not exactly strategic - but at offers little in the way of frustration. The story missions often manage to offer twists to the gameplay so that not every one degenerates into "fly to X and then fly to Y" type affairs.

Actually, my only core complaint is the difficulty. Or the lack of it. At one point in the game I realized I could essentially hover around for some two factions to duke it out, and then pick the (occasionally very valuable) cargo that was left floating around. Wash, rinse, repeat ... and I had a shiny new starship. After that, some shiny new weapons and after that I don't think I lost many battles until much later in the game.

There's also the occasional bug - but in the latest release nothing too crazy. Worst one is when my ship would mysteriously freak out and the appear in a random spot in the map - but that generally just takes some patience to get back to civilization. I'm also suspicious of some of the battle math, occasionally it feels like all my big guns do no damage at all.

However the bottom line is that even after I have finished the story (which I wouldn't call a good story - but it was some fun twists and turns and a great dose of humor), I'm still playing it. You can easily listen to your own music while smacking down space pirates - and there is also the challenge of hunting down even better trade routes while trying to catch to everyone on the online leaderboard.

And Freeverse, this would be a great game to offer some DLC for - new ships, new missions, new weapons. I'm sure there are many Warpgate fans willing to shell out a couple bucks for an extension to the storyline.

Thumbs up, easy recommendation for the iPhone / iPad lot.

Bogost On Heavy Rain's Interactvity

This is pretty brilliant:

Narratively speaking, the scene is abysmal. It is forced and obvious and unbelievable, and questions abound.

What ten year old begs for a balloon? How can such a slow-moving car fatally injure a child? Is Jason really so stupid as not to know how to cross the street? Why does Jason feel so compelled to leave his father in the first place?

But we don't really need narrative success to appreciate how truly frenzied the scene feels. In a film, that frenzy would be best carried out through a series of quick cuts: Ethan looking in different directions; a fast pan of the crowd, left and right; Ethan's movement through the mall concourse; a handheld first-person view down the escalators; more visually confused panning; a glimpse of a balloon; and then a cut to a different boy grasping it.

-- Persuasive Games: The Picnic Spoils the Rain

I've never managed to get the "spoiler heavy" review of Rain together - but this article is in line with how I feel about the game in general. The narrative, by itself, is certainly not without fault - though I would stand by my argument that it gives breadth and depth that it can at least be critiqued as an actual story, which is untrue of 90% of games. However, the implementation of the QTE in Rain combined with the storytelling is a fine accomplishment for games in general.

Bogost argues that the game, because of how it differs from cinematic editing, is not really an "interactive movie" - and while I think that term works mostly for marketing purposes anyway is as good as a place as any to try and define what it actually is in the long run. It is certainly interactive fiction, and I still think anyone with an interest in IF needs to put the game on their must-play list.

I did play The Taxidermist recently, (short) review to follow.

Developing in AIR on Android Versus iPhone

Performance-wise, AIR for Android is fast. When I was making iPhone apps with Adobe’s Packager for iPhone in Flash CS5, I had to make heavy use of hardware acceleration to make even the most basic animations run smoothly. On Android, my games are all rendering in software, and they feel no less responsive on the phones than they do on my desktop. As Lee Brimelow pointed out, “[Adobe is] able to get tremendous performance on Android devices because Google and the various handset manufacturers have chosen to work closely with us to provide the best possible experience to the end user.”

-- Adobe AIR for Android: Chroma Circuit, Gridshock, and Qrossfire Preview Videos

I downloaded Chroma Circuit for iPhone while poking around the whole Jobs thing yesterday, and it performs quite well. Nice to hear that AIR is even faster, and easier to get fast, on Android. So, Apple, apparently it isn't that Flash is difficult to get performance on mobile devices in general ... just your mobile devices.

Steve Jobs Isn't Wrong (But That Doesn't Make Him Right)

Steve Jobs has written one of his rare open letters, this time about the whole Apple versus Adobe thing.

Please assume all the following quotes are from the above link.

Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true.

Just keep that in your hat for now, we'll return to it later.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc.

This is largely true, although Flex, which compiles into Flash, has open source components, and Flex Builder is based on Eclipse. Adobe has other side projects available as open source, but in large - Flash is a black box product.

The setup is similar to Apple's. Darwin is open source. OS X is not. Jobs describes this as such:

Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript...

The short version of this is: Apple is closed too, except when it comes to the web. Unless that part of the web uses plugins.

So what of plugins?

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices...

So there is an interesting slight of hand here. You can't access YouTube videos using Mobile Safari. You need to go to the YouTube app from Apple. So Job's "open" version of the web is whatever can be accessed via Mobile Safari, unless it is a plugin - and then you need to get an app from the App Store, written primarily in Cocoa (which is not open) and view it from there.

Of course, developers could also use the video tag implemented in HTML5. While that would reach the entirety of iPhone users - it would only reach a small minority of Internet users in general. Apple could solve that dichotomy for developers by allowing Flash, but they won't.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free.

Interesting how Jobs has gone from saying "we're open, and they aren't" to "if you can't use their closed system, you should use our closed system."

How was this not about business again?

Besides, it misses the point entirely. The Flash developer community is huge, second only probably to the more generic "web developer" title - which pretty much describes anyone with anything more powerful 1998 Thinkpad and an HTML reference guide. The Flash game developer community is likewise huge. It's also important - Flash is an entry ground technology. Alien Hominid, a popular console game which began life as a Flash game. Tower Defense didn't really exist as a genre until Flash TD.

Cocoa ... and don't me wrong, I rather like Cocoa as a language, but Cocoa is none of those things.

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash.

From everything I can ascertain, this is true. Daring Fireball summed up the stability question quite well. However, as Gruber also points out, Flash is one of the most widely used and processor intensive functions for OS X. So, this statistic probably should be no big surprise. If everyone out there used Eclipse instead of surfing YouTube, it would probably be a different story.

Will HTML5 based video be more stable than Flash? Who knows. Possibly. Possibly not. Again, the usage of the new media tags is so small and the implementations of them so new, the jury hasn't even convened yet. Personally, I can crash a browser pretty easy double buffering two audio tags (don't ask) with enough time. And I can do that in WebKit.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.

Well, that isn't entirely true. There are Flash games which got compiled into iPhone apps with beta versions of CS5. Adobe has a list of them. And they perform just fine. But if Flash isn't performant - isn't that Adobe's problem? Along with the stability question - Apple leaves the ultimate responsibility of these things, whether built with Cocoa or WebKit, on the developer. If my web page or app crashes, that's not Apple's fault - that's mine. So why does Apple take the stern parent approach with Flash?

Again - how is this not about business again? What Jobs is saying isn't false or wrong, not entirely or mostly at least ... it's just a massive distraction from the real topic at hand. Developers could create apps with Flex or Flash that don't crash, that look good and that perform well.

So why should Apple stop them from doing so? Remember - even if Apple didn't allow plugins to operate within Mobile Safari because of performance, stability, security or whatever - Adobe's compromise was to have Flash be reviewed and deployed just like every other app on the App Store.

Job's response:

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

So, dear reader, you see - Apple is protecting you. It isn't that Apple is blocking a massive community of developers from offering their applications from the App Store ... it's that Apple is keeping those substandard apps which might not take full effect of Apple's innovation. You didn't buy that fancy iPhone to get the same Flash app that can be played on a Google smartphone, after all.

No. Apparently, you bought it for the fart apps, which at one point were making $10,000 a day off the App Store. Or perhaps you want an app about smoking in a group.

And if you want an app about shaking a baby to death or political satire ... you may or may not be out of luck - Apple approves and then later rejects those kinds of apps. Or the other way around. It's hard to keep track.

So just remember:

Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true.

Remember that when you are using your iPhone in its sealed case, connected to your computer with a proprietary cable, which connects to the closed source iTunes which downloads DRM controlled content written in a closed source language to be run on your closed source operating system, provided that content passes review by a process so secret that most people at Apple can't even describe how it actually works.

God damn you, Steve Jobs - now you have me sounding like Cory Doctorow. For that alone, I should buy a Nexus One. I was willing to put up with all of the above and even the obnoxiously chaotic App Store review process when I thought Apple could at least embrace a development community which wasn't controlled by Apple. I even like HTML5 quite a bit, but I don't believe Apple should be in the business of telling me I have to use it over Flex simply because Flex is built by a different company.

That's not a technology strategy.

That's a business one.

Plain and simple.

Join Dead Space In Facebook

As the marketing for Dead Space 2 ramps up, EA is making Facebook one of their beachheads. You can follow the the Dead Space page, which just dropped the HD version of a new trailer. Also, if you wanted to have played along with the same letters Destructoid got in the mail (ARGmail, as it were) - they were posted there as well.

Dead Space saw a lot of creative marketing leading up to it's launching, including an exploratory web site, backstory comics and eventually even an anime. We don't have a release date yet, but looks like fun will be had while we wait.

Game Play: inFamous (...and boss fights in general)

I'm not going to spend a lot of time about the virtues of inFamous - the game has gotten a decent amount of coverage since its initial release and largely lives up to the hype. The open world is well constructed and imaginative, Sucker Punch really nails the postmodern urban comic book thing. At the core of the game: blowing stuff up is a great deal of fun - chaining attacks against enemies and environment alike is engaging (though I would love to see a truly destructible environment in a game of this style).

For the core mechanics, I only have two real complaints: repetition and intelligence. Most of the missions devolve into run, run, run or blast, blast, blast ... or sometimes run, blast, run ... or - well, you get the impression. This is why the fact that Sucker Punch made both the running (be it the parkour style climbing or skate style "grinding") and blasting so much fun is critical. Intelligence wise - well, the AI is not exactly Einstein ... rather the game seems to really on every enemy having really, really, really good eyesight. You'll constantly get sniped from enemies from afar - which can be fairly annoying early in the game when your powers are limited in scope and you're trying to snipe back.

Which, allow me to nominate the floating cloaking grenade-launching robots later in the game as some of the most annoying enemies devised - they aren't particularly tough, they just buzz (literally, the noise is irritating as hell). And so glad they decided to show for the final boss fight.

And that final boss fight. I'll keep this spoiler free, but the final boss fight is representative of everything I hate about boss fights. Most of the game and missions are well designed, but the final fight goes right to every cliche every put out there: the boss is largely invincible except for a random period of time you need to keep an eye out for - all the while you'll be running back and forth avoiding a relatively random array of attacks.

The reason why the final fight was such a downer for me is this: for a game that was all about revealing the escalation of a simple bike messenger to city superhero the final fight made me feel pointless and weak. Pointless because it was quite obvious that the final boss could tear me apart in an instant if it really tried and weak because all I could do was run around a lot and wait to throw off a few shock grenades ... and then repeat.

And then repeat.

And then repeat.

And then repeat.

At some point - can't we just skip to the end? I can't count how many games have built up layers of anticipation only to have the end scene be the result of some kind of old school slugfest followed by a cinematic. Gaming evolution has given us emergent gameplay, open worlds, freedom from counting down player lives or even keep track of the score - but in many ways we're still stuck with the bonus level notion that everything should be capped with a button mashing showdown.

So that's kinda more of rant about games in general, of course. The other good bit about inFamous? A pretty decent story handled well by the comic style cutscenes. OK, I still have questions and general huh's about the ending in general, but at least it kept things interesting.

One last note: I think it is curious that inFamous, Assassin's Creed II and Uncharted 2 all have very similar core mechanics: parkour style movement, third person action, emphasis on unlocks and exploration. Yet UC2 is not an open world setup and, no offense to other two - I think easily the best of the bunch. Homework question: what exactly does an open world give players?

Anyway, if you haven't played it - you probably should. And it just recently hit Greatest Hits for the PS3 - so you can get it cheap.

Lament for Basic Dungeons & Dragons

As I flip through the beautiful hardcover books comprising D&D's 4th edition core rules set, I can't help but think back to that time in 1981 when my dad finally allowed me to pick up the D&D Basic Set--you know, the red box with the hot wizardess holding a glowing green orb, Keep on the Borderlands inside.... In any case, that purchase altered my life in ways that I could not, of course, describe then, but are clear now; any bit of imagination I possess, my literary interests, my gaming interests, you name it, are all on account of the old D&D--the pen and paper version.

Remember rolling characters with an intelligence of 6? remember when Elf was a class? Remember when a 1st level character's survival rate was 4.8%--less if you created a wizard or a thief? Well, I do, and I miss it. I also miss mapping--that was my favorite part. The DM says, "You open the door to a 20'X30' room with another door in the middle of the east wall." Ah, those were the days. Too, I didn't have to crunch 4,000 numbers before swinging a sword or shooting a bow. Roll the d20. Hit? Roll damage. We had so much fun, and could easily complete a module (remember how fantastic those were?) in a day-long session.

-- A Curmudgeons's Lament Regarding the Death of the Imagination

My brother and I used to spend whole days with nothing more than the old red box starter set - exactly the one described here: some paper, some dice, a set of rules and Keep On The Borderlands. Borderlands was essentially a mini campaign, a brilliantly designed area for simple exploration which we plundered over and over again.

I can see the rationale behind a D&D based board game, having enjoyed games like Doom: The Board Game and Zombies, not to mention older games like Talisman - but I can concur that a truly simplified RPG ruleset would and should have a place in the franchise's lineup.

I've been poking at a web-based RPG parody using dice (think Munchkin) and I was pulling up the code - thought this was a poignant thought for a Saturday morning.

Zelda Is Totally Like That Guy From The Odyssey

Because he rides in a boat, and he fights monsters and other stuff.

There, someone has compared a video game to one of the great pieces of literature and can apparently now be elevated to the level of art. Now maybe Roger Ebert can go shut the hell up. So, I was seriously thinking of titling this post Oh right, Roger Ebert is full of shit - but I do try and keep cursing to a minimum here, in general.

When, many moons ago, Ebert suggest video games can't be art because interactivity violates the director's concept - I was willing to at least accept it as an interesting argument. It is pretty easily ripped to shreds when one reminds Ebert that games aren't movies, though - and so then he suggests that art can't have scores and rules and what not. And if the game doesn't follow along with Ebert's thinking - he just assumes it isn't a game.

This really should have spiked my bullshit detector. When someone constantly has to shift the definition of what "it" is to keep the argument going - well, then you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. Flower is a game, whether Ebert likes it or not, and it is a very artistic one at that. But Ebert can't accept this - so he just whines a lot and then goes back to this thumping point about how he won't accept games as art until someone compares it to great literature.

Which is also complete bullshit. And if mindful readers think I'm using a slightly less rational tone than yesterday's post, you would be right. And this is because I've realized that Ebert isn't interested in an actual debate on the subject, he just wants to brag about how many comments he can generate and then will finish with a flaming flourish:

I'm not too old to "get" video games, but I may be too well-read.

-- @ebertchicago

Yeah, it's not that he is wrong about games. It's just that he has read so many books that he has surpassed our capacity to comprehend of his understanding of games. For the record, I don't why Ebert assumes that everyone thinks he doesn't get video games because he's old, the truth is he doesn't get video games because he has no experience with them. He does not play them. He does not write about them (except apparently once in 1994). When confronted with games like Braid and Flower, he writes about them as if they are some alien construct from the moon and can barely seem to grasp them as games, much as less accept them as art.

People: Ebert is not an art critic. He reviews bad movies for a living. Movies which are, largely, not wildly artistic. He has no real grasp of modern gaming. He takes delight in creating a lot of angry comments and then insults an entire subgenre of readers in a single dismissive tweet.

Roger Ebert is not an art critic.

Roger Ebert is a troll. And sometimes he reviews movies.

If you want to read if Death At A Funeral (which he apparently adored) will make you laugh, then go look him up. If you want to debate about how games are evolving as a medium - go read a writer who writes about games. There are plenty. The next time he tries to form a position on games, I will treat him as I would a talking dog - extremely curious but unlikely to have much wise to say about the subject at hand.

He's a troll, let's put him back in his troll box and out of the limelight.