I made a few posts in reaction to the Xbox One news, but they were on sites where access is private.  Feel free to read through them if you so desire.  They’re complete with comment sections, though those were trimmed for clarity, continuity, and relevancy.

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Xbox One owners will have to pay a fee in order to play pre-owned games.

If the PS4 doesn’t secretly end up also doing this then Sony has my money next gen.

http://screencrush.com/xbox-one-will-utilize-pre-owned-fee-for-secondhand-games/

Comments:

• Alex: Microsoft just put out a article saying that there will be no fee. http://news.xbox.com/2013/05/qa Q: Will Xbox One allow players to trade in, purchase and play pre-owned games? 
  A: We are designing Xbox One to enable customers to trade in and resell games. We’ll have more details to share later.
• Me: That does not say anything about there being no fee.
• Alex: No but this was released after they saw uproar about it. I don’t see them doing a fee, they know that would hurt the system.
• Me:  I’m pretty sure they just flat out said there will be a fee, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
• Alex: They can always take it back. Even if there is a fee, what price do you think it’d be set at?
• Me: No price is acceptable.
• Alex: TRUE! That’s why I see them recalling the entire price ordeal. It’s not like it’s too late or anything.
• Me: You say it’s not too late to change their mind, but people were already responding to these rumors long before today’s announcement. They already know it was going to piss people off and the fact that they’ve stuck with it anyway means they probably don’t give a shit. It also requires an internet connection. It’s basically every horrible thing people thought it might be, meanwhile the PS4 is looking pretty nice and not anti-consumer.
• Mike: Even if they remove the used game fee, which I doubt, the fact that they considered and confirmed it is reason enough to never give them your money. I wouldn’t even want one off the truck.
• Keith: Exactly, because you don’t know yet what other bullshit they’ll be okay with in the future.
• Alex: Major Nelson put out a little thing a while ago that almost makes it sound like there won’t be a fee as long as you are a gold member.
• Me: Do you know why he said that? Because he’s a PR guy. Their entire job is to tell the truth in as misleading ways as possible without straight up lying. Tell me when he explicitly says that there will be no fee, because until that is specifically said everything else that he hints at is just creatively worded bullshit.
• Jason: Phil Harrison, AKA the fucking VP of Microsoft Studios (and as such much more important than a Twitter mouthpiece) says you have to register your game, online, and that afterwards the disc is useless because anyone else using it will have to pay full price to do so.
• Ben: Yup, maybe in 50 years when internet is as available as oxygen I will buy a console…but by then, console will be dead anyways and everything will be like VR Troopers. Virtual Reality!!!!!
• Andrew: Welp, I guess having gamefly is completely worthless now.

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The Xbox One is not backwards compatible to Xbox 360 Discs or Xbox Live Arcade Games.

Looks like I was right about this one. Ever since Harmonix mysteriously stopped making all DLC for both their aging Rock Band franchise and their massively popular Dance Central series I said it was because they knew something that we didn’t: The Durango (now Xbox One) would not be compatible with Xbox 360 content. When the Rock Band news came I chalked it up to the last game being several years old, but Dance Central? You don’t just stop making Dance Central DLC when it’s doing so well unless something’s up.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/xbox-one-backwards-compatible/

Making sure that gamerscore transfers over is a nice touch at keeping some customer loyalty since people are already invested in that system, but it’s not enough for me. I own a ton of Xbox 360 content and the number one move that could have increased the chance of me buying the NextBox would have been the ability to keep using that content on the new console. Now that I know that isn’t the case I’m hesitant to leave my 360 behind until I finally polish off my huge backlog of content, and now that I know the Xbox One is on the attack against used games I have zero reason to ever buy one.

Comments:

• Pernell: Part of me isn’t TOO distraught as it is always nice to be given a reason to keep my money.
• Zach: What is Microsoft thinking.
• Me: They’re thinking that a subscription-based entertainment box has a larger market than a video game console I’m guessing.
• Justin: Steam doesn’t have physical media, and it doesn’t let you buy games used (nor resell.) Despite that, Steam is the best thing going right now. Let’s not pretend that those reasons alone will hurt this system. It will be hurt because MS controls the prices, and they’ve never shown willingness to be fair/competitive with digital game pricing… The new XBOX is trying to emulate a PC, now in full – but without the cheap prices and streamlined process. So it fails. The same goes for PS4, to any and all degrees I care about. I’m very happy/lucky to have assembled a good computer back in late 2011, and it will be serving me well for some years to come. As will my 360/PS3. I have no need for these new consoles anytime soon.
• Me: Consoles will always fail in attempts to emulate PC because, well…PC still exists. I have no desire for an almost-PC, which Microsoft seems desperate to put out. The restrictions and limitations of PC gaming are acceptable because they come with additional freedoms and capabilities. It often seems like Microsoft is only emulating the parts of PC gaming that suck, including none of the parts that make it special such as the massive mod and free indie game communities.
• Justin: Amen to both of those posts. And this is nothing new; both the 360 and PS3 ended up becoming glorified faux-PCs by the late part of their cycles (but without many of the most-essential and dev/consumer-friendly aspects of actual PCs.) This was stated very eloquently in that old Jimquisition episode.
• Me: This is why I have to respect Nintendo. The PS4 is obsessed with sharing game experiences over social media and the Xbox One is all about changing the ways that we don’t play video games, but the Wii U is actually designed to offer new ways of playing games. The concept seems novel, but for a while that was true for most new consoles. The Wii U has an excuse for existing that isn’t graphics.

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A post I made in immediate reaction to Call of Duty Ghosts.

I’m currently sitting through the Xbox One conference and I’ve found myself shockingly happy to see Call of Duty news. Not because I particularly want Call of Duty, but because up until this point (the conference is almost over) I’ve been completely starved for video game content, especially actual gameplay. So far it’s been apps, fantasy football, more apps and stuff my phone and PC can do, television, more television, holy shit they started talking about fantasy football again, sports and driving games….and finally some Call of Duty footage.

There’s some amusing stuff to be had, particularly the full motion capture of dogs because neon shaded doggy spandex covered in ping pong balls is the bestest. I actually laughed when the guy on stage said that making Modern Warfare 4 would be the safe thing and they want to do the right thing instead. They of course proceeded to show footage that is everything you would expect from a new Call of Duty game while talking about it as if it’s super edgy and risky.

I couldn’t help but notice that the Call of Duty segment started with them unveiling that they were using an Oscar-winning director, which was followed by a video of someone saying that Call of Duty works because they focus on the gameplay, which was followed by the guy on stage touting the game as the most emotional game in the series.

MOVIE! DIRECTOR! OSCAR! STORY! (hey guys the gameplay is super important and stuff) EMOTION! DOGS! UNDERDOG NARRATIVE! IMPACT!

Call of Duty: Ghosts – Anthony Edition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ9NOB0Ta3k

The following was written in response to the recent “deal with it“ controversy and the rumors that Durango (the next Microsoft console) will require an always online internet connection in order to function.  It is also rumored that this restriction is designed as part of a strategy to remove used games.  I write this knowing full well that these are just rumors that may not come true.

As it stands right now despite having it for about three years my new Xbox 360S will lock me out of a large portion of my own digital content when not plugged into the internet because despite transferring the licenses I never wanted to deal with going through my THOUSANDS of pieces of content and clicking “download again” for hours and hours in the 360′s laggy interface.

Local multiplayer is also almost always the only way that I play multiplayer, so I’m constantly taking my console or my flash drive with my profile and digital content over to other people’s houses. This is because I also am a huge supporter of XBLA and often play those games more than retail ones. Unfortunately I often don’t know whether we’ll be actually able to play until I get there because of how many annoying variables can end up ruining the evening when I dare do anything other than sit in my room at home with my own 360 and my own internet. I’ve lost track of the number of times where I’ve tried to set up Rock Band for a large group only to have certain songs not work for no explicitly given reason, causing all sorts of troubleshooting headache in what should be a fun evening.

I’ve tolerated these issues so far because what DRM we currently have mostly makes sense to me and I chalk a lot of the problems up to bad implementation. The fact that the license transfer is shit and requires many other steps is an oversight to me rather than overt anti-consumerism and I don’t think that the 30 minute download involved with retrieving my profile is out of spite. It’s just something that sucks.

That said, if always-on DRM starts affecting my games on purpose, especially discs that I bought at retail, fuck off. This goes into a lot of the same arguments that I’ve used in the past with the Online Pass because it deals with many of the same concepts.

First of all, every time you add another barrier to your games you screw over a legitimate part of your audience. People like Jake who simply don’t connect to the internet because they don’t see value in it are screwed. Anyone with spotty internet is screwed. Anyone who goes on a trip and takes their console along is probably screwed. Additional complications are created when you bring your content to other people.

Second, used games are a huge deal for me. I use GameStop and RedBox all the time for video games. Prices have become absurd to the point that even when I have the money $60 feels wildly irresponsible. On top of that, used games also includes my favorite part of console gaming. “Hey, this game is pretty cool, check it out” ceases to be a simple case of handing a disc over. If they were to truly use always-on DRM to stomp on used games then I’m out. You’ve officially ruined console gaming by removing the thing that makes it not a PC. In this case a console will merely be a shitty PC with no capabilities that make it worth owning separately.

Finally, there’s the issue that we simply don’t benefit from this decision. Much like the Online Pass, always-on DRM is a decision that benefits the company and no one else. Something is being taken away from us and nothing is given in return. There simply isn’t some neat new functionality that is only made possible by the new restriction. It is a case where we are only being taken from. That’s pretty much the definition of anti-consumer activity. I’ll tolerate bullshit in the occasional game, but the whole console? Fuck that, I’ll jump on the PS4 in an instant. I’ve already been playing my PS3 a lot this year, and guess what? I’ve been playing it with other people’s borrowed games.

Online Passes are Absurd:
http://www.tekgoblin.com/2012/02/05/online-passes-are-absurd/

I’ve posted an additional video and writing of mine because they further expand on my feelings on heavily related concepts.

If you aren’t up to date with the show then you shouldn’t read on. It’ll spoil things for you or make no sense.

Every episode where Carol doesn’t off herself irritates me because throughout this season she’s the one who represents how the show is constantly different yet annoyingly similar to the comics. The baby is the same way for me.

For the first time that wasn’t really an issue for me. This episode was so wildly different from the source material that I got to just enjoy it for what it was rather than what it almost was. Now Andrea is dead, who was an infuriating version of the character. They’re still in the prison, the governor is alive, Tyreese is alive, Farmer Jesus is alive. All of this points to the idea that the show might finally diverge completely from the comic, which is something that I’ve been wanting ever since I started reading the source material.

I say this because the show has an awful tendency to recycle scenes from the comic without bothering to properly develop the context behind the scene. The biggest example of this for me was when Michonne went after the Governor. In the comic he tortured and raped her for days on end, so her gut-wrenching revenge made sense for her character. It was a fascinating scene because you’re completely on board with her triumphant revenge, but then they make you feel guilty when she goes a little too far and becomes just as much of a monster as the man who beat her.

In the show the Governor at that point is just a creepy man who is most definitely up to no good. Merle on the other hand tries to hunt Michonne down when she leaves. When Michonne comes back to town with Rick there were three reasonable choices for her to make.

1) Find and kill Merle. Revenge.

2) Try to bring Andrea back. The show constantly stresses that they had become good friends so it makes sense that Michonne might give her one more chance.

3) Stay with Rick you stupid bitch. This is the one that makes the most sense. Michonne had no particular reason to be out on a personal vendetta against the Governor in the show. Instead she should be on her best behavior with Rick so that she can ensure herself a safe place to sleep back at the prison. By suddenly leaving she betrayed what little trust he had. Worse yet, she kills the Governor’s daughter. This enrages him and fuels his hatred and much of the ensuing war. Michonne is portrayed as a calm, cool-headed, thoughtful woman, but she suddenly does something wildly out of character for no well-established reason. This bullshit move then drives the entire second half of the season.

It’s clear that the daughter had to die in order the second half of the season to happen, but it makes no sense for Michonne. It should have been Glenn. He had the most reason to go after the governor. Hell, he and Maggie actually took Michonne’s place in the show during this segment. That’s proper character motivation. Instead they just copy/pasted the scene from the comic, made it less brutal, and didn’t give a shit about whether it made any sense.

This what makes me happy about the finale. There are enough signs to say that we just might be able to avoid this stuff in the future by having the show just make up its own story. After all, that’s when the show is at its strongest. Daryl and Merle were completely made up for the show and have been one of the best parts. The completely different Morgan episode was phenomenal. Pretty much every episode that people have praised took nothing from the source material. That episode where Lori and T-Dog died? Totally made up, and people loved it. More of this, please.

That said, even as something new this finale was pretty weak. The war that the entire season built up to was hilariously weak. The Governor had more effective raids earlier in the season with hardly any troops. The Doctor’s death was foreshadowed pretty well, but watching Andrea struggle for a third of the episode was mostly just annoying. If you hadn’t liked her up to this point then you aren’t given much reason to change her mind. Daryl just had a pretty important episode but is now wallpaper. Allen is dispatched almost as unceremoniously as his son, closing the book on another character that was never developed into anything interesting.

The most interesting bits are that Carl is beginning to make his own tough choices and the Governor has officially gone over the edge and lost his mind. Rick being the leader of a settlement that now features 15 more people also means that he could be in a position for some interesting character development. He now has to lead a group that features many people who can’t really defend themselves. This move however doesn’t really jive with how he left that hitchhiker to die earlier on in the season. Oh well, at least I’m interested in what’s to come.

“The comics still exist and I’d urge those people to continue reading the comics where Andrea is still alive,” comic scribe and series executive producer Kirkman told The Hollywood Reporter. “Just know the show is something different and we are telling different stories. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to see a lot of the big stories and big events from the comic book in the TV show eventually; it just means those things will be a little bit altered from time to time. Hopefully it will be exciting, new and fresh just like it was the first time you read the comic, which is really the goal.” (via Huffington Post)

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I went on this rant in a Facebook discussion of the Walking Dead show.  I figured I could go ahead and post it elsewhere.  Lo and behold, my last post on this site was exactly one year ago.  Perhaps I’ll continue to post copies of my rants here since I seem to go on them a lot and this page has gone unused for so long.

I beat Mass Effect 3 last night (spoiler free). It was certainly interesting. I had been exposed to so much anti-hype before even starting the game that it was hard not to be worried about the whole thing, but I found the story of the game to be incredibly satisfying throughout. Some of my favorite characters died, some didn’t, but I thought all of them got pretty satisfying conclusions to their story lines. I was shocked at times, and actually cheered at others. Jacob’s was perhaps a bit boring, but that might just be because he was a character I always found boring. It reminded me a lot of the final Harry Potter movie, which was pretty damn satisfying for people who cared about the series.

I thought the conclusion was great, but perhaps that’s because I only really think about gameplay when I talk about endings. The final level felt every bit as desperate and epic as I thought it should be, and the final decision was pretty damn difficult because there was no clear answer. I ended up choosing something for reasons that felt pretty personal and unique to myself.

The only thing I didn’t really like (aside from the new quest log, but I’ll skip that) was the final cut scene that happens after your final decision. My mind kind of turned off at that point because I always feel like a game is over the moment you stop playing it, and my life is packed with a long history of bleh cut scenes at the end of games. I thought it was fine at first, but when I started thinking about it again today there were three very specific things that bugged me about it (which I won’t discuss). One problem was a character issue and two were science fiction hiccups.

Still, this sequence of events that lasts only a few minutes isn’t something that particularly bothers me.  I view games as an interactive form of entertainment and whatever happens outside of that scope often doesn’t matter at all.  I spent dozens of hours with the characters in Mass Effect and was glad to see their journey.  No lackluster video is going to steal that from me.

Bioshock’s lazy CG endings never hurt my experience with the game nearly as much as the final level did.  Half-Life 2′s cliffhangers never deleted my previous fun.  The crappy text crawl at the end of Dragon Age didn’t stop me from remembering the game fondly.

In preparation for Mass Effect 3 I played the first two games once again back to back, and I was actually shocked by how appallingly uninteresting and even cheesy their endings were.  Their final endings, anyway, not the last levels which left a much larger impact.  How could I be shocked?  Because ultimately a non-interactive sequence at the end of a game isn’t what I remember when I think back to it.  I remember my final showdown with Saren and my suicide mission on the Collector base, not what came after.  For that same reason I’m going to remember the struggle to fight the Reapers for the sake of Earth, not what came after.  I’m one of those people that thought Return of the King should have ended with Frodo and Sam on the side of the mountain after the big ending rather than have the running time stretched out by a long chain of scattered, colorful scenes.

If Bioware were to change anything about the ending I would only want it to be a bit more accurate to how certain characters would behave.  I’d also like it to hold the previously established science fiction more closely.  Aside from that? I’m happy.  Thanks for the experience.

Valentine’s has come upon us again, and for reasons I can’t quite pin down, I don’t hate it as much as I used to. Maybe it’s the presence of no adverts about Valentine’s being slammed in my face (which I am more than grateful for). What my concern is at this point in this year is the astonishing amount of artform-crap that has been spewing out of everywhere. No movies are remotely interesting to the point where I think that This Is War looks quite good. No books have come out that make me want to cower in Waterstone’s for fifteen million hours. And most disappointingly, almost every selling game has next to zero appeal. So instead of having a rant about Valentine’s Day, I’m going to have a rant about recent popular games.

I have never been in any long-term or short-term relationship with anyone. And it may sound sad and cold and embarrassing, but I don’t care. I’ve seen relationships that have been sabotaged from the inside and from the outside and from a diverse range of people. My parents, my brother, my friends, my old friends, my old bandmates, the people I used to work for, the people I work for, the people I work with, my postman, my aunts and uncles. What’s interesting is the amount of trinkets each buys the other, and this is at times horrifically funny. People start to hate over possessions and material things that the other bought/didn’t buy them. It’s strange. At least to me. If you haven’t seen Othello, this is pretty much why things pan out the way they do, although you have to add in the brilliant stirring of the spot from my favourite villain in fiction.

Don’t paint me with the wrong brush, I’m not the one stirring the pot like Iago. I’m the one who would rather let the pot go unwatched and happily enjoy it when relationships are” going strong”. From the way I see it though, Valentine’s isn’t much more than a way to say “Your relationship sucks and you need to buy something for your loved one. Here’s some milk chocolate and champagne.” Milk chocolate and champagne are vomit inducing substances, so I can’t see how they are the least bit romantic. But if I was to buy a perfect game for a loved one of mine, not only would that be a stupid idea, but I would be doing it to send a message without having to actually say it.

Modern Warfare 3

A first person shooter from a series that has almost completely lost what it was about to begin with. Modern Warfare 3 is a typical example of putting a lot of stuff somewhere and then making it do something and polishing it up so it aesthetically looks nice. I’ll admit I like how it’s gone back to the jump-in-jump-out casual play if you ignore the fuckload of advertising, references and fanboys thrown at you, but most of it is worthless tripe to add-on to worthless tripe from history.

“You’re not intelligent, you get excited over bright shiny things. You also like to brag over meaningless events and showboat.”

Battlefield 3

I was excited when Battlefield 3 was announced, Battlefield 2 was one of my favourite games made. This as a sequel is just poor. It’s hopelessly uncomfortable when you start playing and when you finally get comfortable you realise too late that all the good weapons are given to those who got and played the game early. It’s heavy advertising campaign, going so far as to make a webseries out of it was more of a dissuasion than a plus point. This is meant for the hardcore shooters, and there are much better shooters out on the market right now. Much less irritating ones too.

“You think that you’re more sophisticated, suave and intelligent than those who play Modern Warfare 3. In reality you like more bright shiny things than those guys.”

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim/Final Fantasy XIII-2

I don’t want to paint these with the same brush but I’m going to. These were both made to fix “problems” with the predecessors of those games that players didn’t like. So they decided to develop them and put them out as broken and as terrible as they are.

Skyrim is supposed to be an “epic freeroaming adventure” packed with weapons, panic-battles and exploring. Hang on, isn’t that what MINECRAFT adequately achieves, without the need of trying to force a story and lore down your throat? Skyrim is pure nonsense packed in nonsense packed in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Sorry that’s not being fair. Oblivion didn’t break down every half-an-hour.

XIII-2 on the other is what happens when developers fall to peer pressure. XIII wasn’t really Final Fantasy at all, but was still enjoyable as a story and a game however unnecessarily long and drawn out it was. The criticism of ‘linear’ gameplay was largely pointless, as it was necessary for that style a game. If the developers decided to plonk you down with the mechanics it used in the middle of nowhere that game would be vastly unplayable.

What upsets me though is that both these games at their core aren’t nearly as “epic” as they are portrayed to be. Take away the branding and the style and the characters and change that with something else not readily identifiable and these would be nothing more than just average action-RPGs.

“You have no imagination. You believe that you keep many things open as possible when you are actually closing yourself off and living the same boring routine. You find that fun and I find it stale.”

Just Dance

It’s not that I hate Just Dance. Just Dance is fun, but pales in comparison to Dance Central and is made by a company that makes Kinect feel like such a cheap peripheral. Michael Jackson was a perfect example of pathetic implementation.

“You can’t dance.”

YourShape

I’m sorry, I fail to see how a game that thinks A CHAIR can burn more calories than a sprinting human can be useful calorie-burning tool.

“You’re out of shape.”

Mario Kart 7

The only bad I have to say about this game is that it is made for a console which is terrible. It is no less fun than it’s predecessors and very enjoyable.

“I know you miss your youth and the energy and the body you once had. At least this will help you reminisce.”

SoulCalibur V

Fighting game with swords. I’m bored.

“You have an unhealthy fascination with blades and knives.”

FIFA

EA Sports strategy is to make the same game with a few more tweaks. It is worse than Call of Duty in its “Reselling the same game”. FIFA 12 had NOTHING different to last year’s tripe apart from how it was presented.

“You wish you can also earn $12,000,000 a year from missing a kicking a quarter-pound ball at a fifteen square metre target from twelve yards away. Get up and play a proper sport!”

Any Nintendo 3DS game.

3DS is an incarnation of the DS that makes the DSi completely pointless and an absurd waste of money. It is entirely centred around a gimmick which will die out eventually if it hasn’t already and it’s accessibility of it should have been implemented in the DSi in the first place. The 3D games are terrible but the non-3D games made for it aren’t terrible. Also, 3D sucks.

“Your eyes are ugly.”

Mario and Sonic at the 2012 Olympic Games

This is the exact same as the one from four years ago, except set in London. Also, how does Mario run as fast as Sonic?

“You are in a relationship with someone who wants you out of their life.”

Any (other) game

“You have no concept of romance and I don’t love you.”

As much as my bitterness is towards this day is, this is the best ‘Valentine’s’ advert I’ve ever seen. And I’m one who think’s sex jokes are not funny.

P.S. Catherine hasn’t come home yet. That bitch…es.

It seems that Bioware is including same sex relationships in their popular Star Wars MMORPG in order to satisfy fans, but Family Research is up in arms over the issue.  I normally wouldn’t bother talking about something like this, I mean the title itself is already redundant.  What, you mean that one anti-gay religious organization with a misleadingly neutral sounding name is against gay people being in something?  What a shocker!

Things get interesting however when you take a look at Tony Perkins’ incredibly poor word choice during the broadcast.

“In a new Star Wars game, the greatest threat to the Empire may be homosexual activists.”

“It’s time to show companies who the force is really with.”

Wait, threat to the empire?  You mean the bad guys?  Did Family Research just imply that homosexuals are going to save the day from the tyranny of the evil empire lead by Sith and murderers?  Better yet, Perkins mentions the force in a manner that sounds like he’s encouraging people to stand up against that homosexual threat so that the empire can continue unchallenged.  Family Research is clearly being manipulated by a Dark Lord.  It all makes so much sense now!  How else could they be so filled with hate?

All joking aside, I can’t help but ask why the throngs of complaining parents bought their children a T rated game.  T for Teen.  If they’re already teenagers then I’m pretty sure their sensibilities aren’t going to be scarred by the knowledge that homosexuals exist.  If they’re younger then that then the most concerning factor to me is that they’re letting their nine year old play a massively multiplayer online RPG.  By definition this means they’ll be spending hundreds of hours with total strangers that average out to be over 30 years old.  That alone puts them at risk to being exposed to a whole lot more worrisome issues than catching “the gay.”

I’m sorry, I just can’t keep this joke running for any longer.  The above claims were actually made by Fox News, and are you really surprised?

Read the rest of this article over at TekGoblin.

The EuroGamer Expo 2011 is my first gaming expo I’ve ever been to.  I had already bought a ticket so I decided to go despite not feeling close to half-health or fitness.

Modern Warfare 3

The place was only sparsely populated in the morning, so I made a beeline for whatever would likely be heavily queued up later in the day. This seemed like the logical place to start.  At first glance it looks like Modern Warfare 2 and it feels almost the same. If it weren’t for an entirely new map layout and a big MW3 logo on the start screen I’d have probably mistaken it to be DLC. It’s a shame they decided not to include Multiplayer, seeing as the Call of Duty XP event in California showed that it was possible.  Maybe they just didn’t want to fight with Battlefield 3 which was just around the corner.

The demo that’s playable on the show floor contains only two levels of survival, which seems like a cross between Spec-Ops and Zombies. You are plonked in the middle of a map and have to fight wave after wave of enemies. Unlike the previous two modes you start off with a bit of armor which slowly diminishes as you take damage. Once it’s depleted you’ll be back to the standard health and regeneration system. The enemies aren’t zombies, but rather wield a weapon and run around actively searching for you. You are armed with nothing but a pistol at the start but this doesn’t seem like much of a challenge as you can kill an enemy, steal their weapon and then run around like a prat and keep getting more.

Each kill rewards you with money and if you accomplish challenges such as getting a certain amount of headshots or a chain of kills you can get bonuses. You also get bonuses at the end of each wave depending on accuracy, kills and speed. The money can be spent at any time at select drop boxes: a weapons box, an equipment box, and a perk box. These aren’t readily available and have to be unlocked one by one as you play through the waves; which I though was a dumb design idea. Between each wave you have 20 seconds to reload, rebuy, reset and recuperate before the next one comes your way, or you can press “jump” to immediately bring them on. Why that button? Because Activision never expect you to jump to climb up or through anything!

While the perk system and unlocks were quite fun to acquire, I couldn’t help wonder if only putting this for show was anti-climatic. It wasn’t the most challenging thing on the floor and doesn’t seem like something that’s completely new, original or game-changing. They might as well make a DLC add-on for Modern Warfare 2.

Battlefield 3

Oddly, an EA game is hotly tipped to finally beat out Call of Duty. Throughout the day Battlefield 3 had queues that took forty-five minutes to play a fifteen minute trial, whereas Modern Warfare 3 had barely a five-minute queue.

It’s quite hard to see why, other than an aggressive advertising strategy, it has become so popular. The demo showed us a standard “Rush” game mode – the attackers must destroy two objectives to continue on, and they lose if they exhaust all their reinforcements. Battlefield 3 was a full 24-player game that showcased multiplayer on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Throughout the fifteen minutes of play and quite easy winning, I couldn’t spot a difference between this and Bad Company 2. Four classes, similar weapons, similar ranking, similar scoring, similar HUD, same game mode. I didn’t bother with Bad Company 2 except for the demo, but I couldn’t find much any part of this game that was an improvement from the last. And it wasn’t without its weird bugs which made the game unplayable at times. Nevertheless it was fun, although I’ll have to attribute that more to me doing well and our team winning than the game itself.

Dance Central 2

Sadly, there was only one outlet for Dance Central 2. Maybe Microsoft know it wouldn’t be as popular here as it was at E3. Nevertheless, not caring that people were watching I had a go.

The story tends to be the same with the second in a series of Harmonix games, such as Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero II. The second has more modes, is more accessible and a little more challenging. It seems that the calculation for how well you do a move is a little stricter, or maybe it had to do with the fact that I was dancing alone with thirty people watching me.

The training mode, aptly named Break-It-Down, is a lot more manageable than it was before.  It allows you to select moves you want to practice rather than having to go through the whole song, and unlike the previous iterati0n you can learn all the moves at your own pace rather than it forcing it to move on.  The pair mode works perfectly as long as you have enough space to avoid smacking each other. The freestyle section has also had an overhaul.  If you do a move highlighted in a freestyle section you score bonus points!

Dance Central 2 was one of the very few games I looked forward to and actually enjoyed, that is before my self-consciousness got the better of me.

Final Fantasy XIII-2

Due to the news that the main composer and producers from the FFXIII left, I didn’t have high hopes for FFXIII-2.

The biggest complaint about the first game was that it was too linear.  I didn’t mind, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t have its flaws in other places, too.  Instead of fixing what didn’t seem to work  in the last game, (such as the ridiculous amount of training you had to do, or the fact that it was tactically advantageous to Game Over so you can reset your paradigms) Square Enix added in a whole mess of crap which they thought was “cool”. Cinematic action sequences (which are really Quick Time Events) rarely ever work. From my own memory the only game that made QTEs work was Paper Mario. Actually the Mog Clock, is another interpretation of a Paper Mario mechanic; rather than being wild in the field enemies pop up with a clock. If you attack them with your sword in the field while the timer is in the green zone, then you start with a Preemptive Strike which grants you bonuses (although not exactly the same bonuses) at the start of battle. If the timer runs out, the enemy starts with bonuses.  If you just make contact with the enemy or hit them in the yellow zone then battle will take place on even ground. You can also run away if enemies pop up.

If you defeat a new creature with a high enough rating you capture the creature for future use in battle. You can have up to three at a time and each one has their own role so they essentially function as a new character. While they all share a HP gauge,  they each have a special bar that can be used to trigger an underwhelming special attack when filled.

The core gameplay hasn’t changed.  This is another one of those “look what we can do, look what you can do” over-the-top type games. I don’t doubt that people will be attracted to it.  I just find it hard to enjoy when I know it’s free roaming and has alternate endings, which should never work in a story-driven game.

Mario Kart 7

I’m not a big fan of the 3DS. While the changes are more substantial than previous versions of the DS, 3D is only useful for making your eyes sore and making sure the battery runs out faster.  I do like the Mario Kart series, however.  They are so simple and addictive, yet it still manage to add enough chaos to make any player go through a full range of emotions. I’m glad to say that MK7 is no different.

MK7 is a 3DS exclusive, but the 3D is still not necessary so it might as well be a DS game. In fact it’s still essentially Mario Kart DS, but now they have paragliding! I can spot a gimmick from a mile away, but much to my surprise paragliding is fun and challenging.  More importantly, it works! You glide automatically when you are airborne and can still control your car. Glide well and you can gain a hefty advantage, glide poorly and it would have been better if you had just made a landing. Whilst in the air you cannot pick up or use items, although you can still get hit by flying blue shells.

There are now also fully underwater levels, but in other levels you can somehow still drown.

Kid Icarus: Uprising

This is one of the games I wasn’t planning on seeing, but it perked my curiosity and I had a go at it.

Uprising is barely like the original Kid Icarus. You control Pit in three different stages, the first of which is a flying stage. While pit flies forward you can control him over two planes using the circular pad.  Shooting is done using the touch screen and the trigger, much like Metroid Prime: Echoes. It is an arcade style shooter and simple enough to get to grips with easily. The second stage has him running on the ground level and the final stage is a boss fight.

What annoys me about this game is that while all attention is paid to the top screen (again in 3D) there is stuff going on the bottom screen! It is mostly dialogue, but some of it is useful. How the heck am I supposed to pay attention to that while playing?!

Not much more needs to be said. The 3D is annoying but utilised well so I could see how far away enemies are when I’m shooting. I have high hopes for something I never expected to be enjoyable.

Burnout: Crash!

If you compared today’s Burnout with the original game you would think that they were two completely unrelated. Burnout Crash takes a mechanic of Burnout: Takedown and gives it its own game. The idea is to drive a car into an intersection, blow it up repeatedly and cause as much damage as possible. Scored are determined by the dollar value of destroyed objects.

That’s it. Not a particularly enticing description, but it was enjoyable and challenging enough to warrant more attention. It uses Kinect, but I found that to be pointless and just went ahead and used the controller.

The Gunstringer

A Kinect shooter that doesn’t use some gun peripheral?! The Gunstringer has already been released, but that didn’t stop me from trying it here. You control The Gunstringer, a puppet in a rogue theater wild west situation. I couldn’t quite make out what it was but that wasn’t the point.

Your left hand controls him like a string puppet. Swing it left or right to move him left of right and pull up to jump. Your right hand controls his shooting hand. How do you shoot without a trigger? You hover the aiming cursor over targets, then make a bicep curl to fire at the targets, all the while moving the Gunstringer out of the way of incoming bullets.

Most of the time he is running forward, but there are some stand-off situations where he has to shoot enemies from behind a barrel that you peek out to shoot or get shot. There are also little bonus mini games where you can fire two guns at once at pigeons, and all these transition beautifully into each other. This is one of the most ingenious uses for Kinect I have seen, and the on-rails move and shoot works a lot better for this game than it has for others in the past. That doesn’t mean it won’t be a bit weird to get used to.

“Really?  Brand new, brown military shooters are lacking in innovation? I would have never guessed!” – SebastianSB

Patches and title updates aren’t a bad thing when used properly.  Hydrophobia was released in working condition, but it was plagued with design flaws that annoyed players and led to a lot of complaints.  In response to criticism, developer Dark Energy Digital set out to revamp their entire game for free in order to please those who felt let down by the title.  This gave us Hydrophobia Pure, an update that reworked the map, controls, physics, dialog, HUD, cutscenes, camera, and even graphics in the game.  They had clearly put a lot a love into their game and wanted to make it better once flaws has been brought to their attention.  I think that we can all agree this is a perfect example on how to improve your game with patches.

We start having a problem when developers and publishers use patches as an excuse to catapult sub-par products onto store shelves.  Dead Island is the latest example of this, releasing a day one patch that contains thirty-seven changes ranging from minor tweaks to a fix for a glitch that would make your entire inventory vanish.  Dead Island was heavily reliant upon provocative advertising for sales, so the guys in charge of the release were more than willing to cut some corners in order to honor that heavily publicized release date.

I want to make it clear that the people behind Dead Island were well aware of these problems when they shipped this game.  Due to the incredible complexity that games have today, there are guaranteed to be glitches somewhere.  We tend to trust that the developer will hire testers to iron out all of the major issues and give us a smooth experience.  A minor quirk might get through and make a funny video for Game Fails, but those hiccups are rare and difficult to replicate if the testing process was handled properly.  The important thing to recognize in this situation is that the millions of hours of combined play time that a game gets after its wide release creates an opportunity for finding glitches that is hundreds of times more effective than any group of game testers could be.  This is not, however, how the Dead Island crew discovered their problems.  The speed at which this patch arrived means that they had to have been working on it before the game even reached reviewers.

There are three problems that this creates for players.  First, all of these reviewers complain about the game feeling unfinished and unstable, but we get a day one patch that they never had.  How do we know whether or not the problems addressed are the same ones that colored their reviews?  Players like Philip Defranco are still mentioning glitchy experiences after the patch was meant to fix them.  This undecided final quality level will likely be more than enough encouragement for PC players with itchy fingers to download the game illegally.  There’s also no guarantee in this situation that players will be allowed to download the patch when the developer would like them to.  Each platform has its own process for approving game content, and any mixture of technical difficulties could delay the patch.  Finally, every time you create an additional step that one must take in order to reach the optimum experience in a game there will always be a group of players that do not take it.  You may be able to assume that Steam players will get every update automatically, but there is still a percentage of players on the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 that don’t connect their consoles to the internet.  You can make all of the rude comments that you want about how they need to get with the 21st century and whatnot, but these are loyal paying customers that do not deserve to be swept under a rug after they pay $60 for a game.  Whatever content makes it onto the disc, glitches and all, is the only version of the game that a developer can guarantee every player will experience.

Ultimately, that’s the moral issue that we run into in this situation.  The game that comes on the disc is the game that the developer and publisher are saying is worth your money.  There may be a free way to improve it somewhere at some time, but the contents of that box are the experience that you’re being sold.  It’s disgusting to know that they’re willing to put out something that they know is flawed just so that they can meet their heavily advertised release date.  As a result they come across as a high school student who failed a test that he didn’t study for last night but is promising that he’ll study really hard for the next one.  Whose fault is this?  As a consumer I have no reason to care.  All that I am concerned about is the fact that I’m being sold an unfinished game in a box that proudly displays the names of a series of companies that shouldn’t be so pleased with themselves.

I’ve heard people joke that playing a shooter online during the first few weeks is the same thing as playing the beta, but how far from the truth is that?  If we continue to be so accepting of issues like these there won’t be much left to stop publishers from simply testing each title on us.

You play as “The Kid,” a white-haired boy who wakes up one day to find that his world is simply gone.  An event referred to as The Calamity has wiped out the landscape and turned your people into ash.  The entire story is narrated by an old man named Rucks, who you meet when you reach the Bastion.  Aside from orating your trials Rucks also fills in a lot of details about what the world was like before the Calamity and why it happened.  Everything is cleverly paced with plenty foreshadowing and well-time revelations.  The true strength of this approach to storytelling is that it never interrupts the gameplay.  A friend of mine that goes by the tag dudecrazy108 has a tendency to skip through conversations and cut scenes as quickly as possible so that he can get back to the action.  When he completed Bastion he didn’t just understand the story, he actually cared about it!  The developers got him to care about the world and its characters by teaching him about them in a way that didn’t bring the gameplay to a screeching halt, and I applaud them for it.

Best friends forever, right Zulf? Uh...Zulf?

The gameplay feels like a breath of fresh air for a genre that has been largely stagnant for the last decade.  For the first time in a long while I found myself not referring to a dungeon-crawler as a Diablo clone.  Rather than having hundreds of nearly identical clubs and swords that differ only in their stats, Bastion gives you a dozen weapons that each encourage their own style of play.  There’s a slow, powerful hammer for those that just want to smash stuff, an even slower mortar for players who want to plan their approach and rain destruction down from afar, and a war machete that unleashes a flurry of weak, very close range attacks and doubles as a throwing weapon.  When you’re under attack you can either block or roll to protect yourself.  Blocking is effective against most of the smaller enemies, but relying too heavily on it can quickly get you surrounded by enemies.  More capable players will instead use it only at the instant of the attack in order to unleash a powerful counterattack.  Rolling away is very effective for avoiding damage, but finding a safe direction to roll in becomes more and more difficult as you traverse the narrow paths made of floating debris.  The result of all this is that you end up with a dungeon-crawler whose combat relies more on timing and strategy over monotonous grinding.  Rather than functioning as simply a means to an end the fighting feels rewarding in itself.

The visuals are stunning, and clearly got more love than what you see in most AAA titles these days.  The environments have been hand-painted and look beautiful.  Characters and enemies are rendered in a cartoonish style that allows for quick identification while still leaving room for a lot of detail.  Early screenshots made me worried that Bastion would be plagued by visual chaos, but once everything is moving it becomes very easy to tell what’s going on.  Did I make a cut scene’s painting my desktop background for several weeks?  Of course I did.

This won't be leaving your head for quite some time.

I have a bad habit of listening to podcasts and custom soundtracks while I play games because the audio of a title often becomes either boring or grating for me after a few hours.  With Basion I never even considered turning on the Drunk Tank or TED Talks because whenever I wasn’t hooked to Rucks’ story I was enamored by the incredible music in this game.  Darren Korb’s score seamlessly blends a wide variety of instruments and digital sounds together into a very modern take on folk music, and the beat just keeps pushing you to play forward.  I purchased the official soundtrack as soon as I beat the game and now know a few people who don’t even play games that are listening to the soundtrack in their cars on a daily basis.

I would estimate Bastion to be about five hours long.  That’s plenty content for $15 when compared to the many popular retail titles that often clock in at the same length for four times the price, but RPG fans used to longer games may be disappointed.  If you think that paying $10-20 for a memorable-but-short game is worth the money (see: Portal, Braid, Limbo) then Bastion should be right up your alley.  Players looking to squeeze more time out of the game will be pleased by the New Game+ feature, the series of gods you can invoke for additional challenge, and trial that can be run for each weapon in the game in order to put your reflexes and creativity to the test.  The only other complaint I can predict is that some hardcore RPG enthusiasts might look at the changes that I loved so much and refer to the game as shallow in much the same way they would talk about the changes between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.

Where it all begins.

Overall, I’m glad to give Bastion a glowing review and recommend that everyone reading this at least try the demo.  It is one of the best titles that I have ever played on XBLA (of which I have quite a few) and a serious contender for Game of the Year.

Quick tip for anyone who buys this game on Steam:  I recommend playing this game with a windows controller or any other compatible gamepad that has two joysticks.  Navigating various diagonal catwalks with the WASD keys while trying to aim at distant opponents with your mouse can become incredibly awkward, and feels like you’re being told to maneuver two small objects on the screen while only being able to look directly at one at a time.  Being able to move with one stick and aim with the other on a radial plane lets you focus all of your attention on your character and his immediate dangers, making the game a lot less frustrating to play.

P.S. Did I mention the damn soundtrack?!