Happy Birthday, To Me!

Also known as Kyburz's office code, or Australia Day, in Bioshock!

Thank You, EA

It shouldn’t bother me as much as it did, because it is expected from Fox News to disregard fair and honest journalism, but they went way too far this time. In this clip, from a segment called “Se”Xbox, the host, an “expert” psychologist and a panel of ill-informed reporters spout off on a number of blatant inaccuracies regarding Mass Effect. I give a lot of credit to Geoff Keighley, for whom I also have new found respect, as he attempted to get a few words in edgewise. The words he did get in were to the point and achieved the desired effect of pointing out that they had not played the game and were in no place to make hearsay judgments about the game. The gaming community responded the best way possible by spamming the reviews of the psychologist’s book on Amazon and venting in forums.

However, in a move that I’m not sure that anyone expected, based on the reaction, EA stepped up and defended Bioware’s work in a letter to the show’s producer asking that the inaccuracies be addressed on the show.

The resulting coverage was insulting to the men and women who spent years creating a game which is acclaimed by critics for its high creative standards. As video games continue to take audiences away from television, we expect to see more TV news stories warning parents about the corrupting influence of interactive entertainment. But this represents a new level of recklessness.

It’s encouraging to see EA, who is usually cast in a malevolent light, sticking up for not only their newly acquired IP but for video games in general in the mass media. Our medium is a threat not only because it is an unknown to them but because it takes away viewers and therefore advertisers. We’re still waiting for that apology and I hope they take legal action if needed since they’ve used the word “slandered” to describe the hard working folks at Bioware.

The worst part of the situation is that Fox News clearly neglected to do any research on the topic or game itself. It appears as someone caught wind of this rant on the conservative Townhall Blog (which, curiously, is no longer available) and ran with it. If they had done a quick search on their own website, they would have seen it was “one of the best-written and best-looking games in a long time,” earning three and a half stars out of four, and one of their top ten games of the year.

Update: Cooper Lawrence, the psychologist on the show, admitted that she received bad information about the game and has since seen someone play the game for a couple hours, saying that she has "seen episodes of Lost that are more sexually explicit."

Turning Point Demo

Speaking of demos, the Turning Point: Fall of Liberty hit Xbox Live the other day and failed nearly every aspect of David Edery’s suggestions for successful demos. I had limited awareness of the game play (I actually thought it would be a strategy game based on the title) and was only vaguely aware of the alternate timeline, Nazi invasion of the United States storyline prior to playing the demo. Needless to say, I will be skipping this game when it hits store shelves.

Edery’s first point is that a demo does not need to be the opening level or the tutorial, but that’s where Turning Point places the player. The game opens with the Statue of Liberty be blown to pieces and then the player finds himself in control of an iron worker on the top of building that is also being bombed. So not only is the tutorial level chosen for the demo, but this first-person shooter game starts with a platforming and balance beam section. It’s quite odd.

He continues to emphasize that the demo should not confuse the player. Unfortunately, and everyone’s experience may differ, but my first encounter with a Nazi soldier was thoroughly confusing. In an attempt to demonstrate the game’s close quarters combat, tutorial text quickly appears on screen leaving me to mash buttons in an attempt to figure out what I was supposed to do. I wrestled with the Nazi for a couple of seconds and then let go, only for the Nazi to stand as still as a statue totally oblivious to the person behind him who just grabbed him. I then ran a circle around him and then he turned around and shot me in the face. After reloading the last checkpoint, I trained my eyes on the small text and finally figured out what I needed to do (press any direction on the D-pad).

The next point, making the player wait for the fun, was the killing blow for this demo for me. It only took about fifteen to twenty minutes to get to the end of the demo and not once did I feel like I was having fun.

This brings me to the next feature of a successful demo: length. Edery suggests that the demo should find a happy balance between being too short and too long. Since it was over before I was having any fun, I would say it was too short. But since I was not impressed by the graphics (which frankly resembled an Xbox title), boring and weak weapons, and silly enemy AI (I don’t think they teach soldiers to run straight at the enemy, do they?), I don’t any length of time would have swayed my opinion of this game.

When it was all over, I was left with a very empty feeling. As Edery suggests, there was no suspense, no curiosity. Why should I care about this iron worker that the player takes control of? Does he have an interesting back story? Is his family in immediate danger? With no motivation, I feel no compelling reason to experience more of this game.

Edery then points to the upsell screen as possibly the last image of your game the player will be left and should highlight what sets your game apart. I don’t know, being an American, I was a bit put off by the constant reminder on this screen that I get to experience the Nazi destruction of US cities and landmarks. This is not a really compelling feature, especially with the final images of the demo in which people are running from a collapsing building in New York. And while I enjoyed Cloverfield, at least it was a fictional monster that allows us to deal with some of these fears, not terrorists or invaders attacking our country.

Trial By Fire

This week saw the topic of game demos pop up in several places. Most notably, David Edery the Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade, shared some wisdom on the Game Tycoon blog about creating better demos.

A downloadable game's trial is everything. It doesn't matter if you licensed the three greatest IP of all time and fused them into the holy trinity of game design itself.

If the trial stinks, most people won't bother to lift the curtain on the full experience.

Demos have become one of the most important features of Live for me and there have been several games that I wished I had a demo before I made a purchase (I'm looking at you Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell). These games weren't bad but they weren't for me and I suffered some buyer's remorse. Demos has also saved me the trouble of each and every racing game that has hit the market over the last couple of years. No matter how many demos I play, I just can't get into racing games.

The article got me thinking about the demos I have played on Live and how they have influenced my buying habits.


FIFA Street, NFL Tour, Def Jam: Icon, NBA Street – Each of these games throws you into the mix with little to no introduction. Since these games are about pulling off some over the top, in-your-face moves, they should how me how to do some and then let me pull them off against the AI. Don’t let me get pummeled by the AI’s obviously perfection of them. Frustration ensued and quickly led to deleting the demo. NBA Street was an exception as it was a lot easier to pull off the special moves. In the end however, it wasn’t enough to warrant a purchase.

THP8 vs. THPG – After skipping THUG2 and American Wasteland for delving far too deep into the Jackass/Margera nonsense, Project 8 felt like a return to form that made me fall in love with Pro Skater 2 through 4. They give a small area from the final game and showed the player the new additions to skating. The game then lets the player loose to shred to your hearts content. Proving Ground gave me the exact opposite feeling. It felt like they took the things that worked from Project 8 and reworked them for all moves and then compounded those elements with more new features. All in all, it evoked the bad taste left in my mouth from Underground. By throwing everything in, including the kitchen sink, it becomes overwhelming and the fun was lost on me. It made me long for a simpler game where the player can just concentrate on skating. I bought Project 8, not Proving Ground.

Skate. – Did I enjoy the demo? Yes. Did I find the simple controls and return to earth game play refreshing? Yes. Did I buy the game? No. Although I still might some day, I think the fact that setting up a line in Skate is a lot a work and less improvised turned me off. That and it was a full line-up of releases this season. In the same way that FIFA lost me, Skate was far to simulation and less like fun. Maybe Skate 2 will alleviate these concerns.

Bioshock – The demo drops the player into the tutorial section but is slightly altered from the final version, giving you access to some different weapons, powers and enemies from the final version. The atmosphere and tone was set perfectly, leaving the player absolutely salivating with a nail-biting cliffhanger. 2k Boston has said that they spent a lot of time on their demos and it showed.

Dead Rising – Capcom boiled the demo down to the game’s purist mechanic: hacking, slashing and bludgeoning your way through a zombie infested mall. Awesome. It was pure gold.

Overlord - Gave me just enough to see what the game was about: wild minions, witty sense of humor and fun hack-and-slash game play. I was on the fence about this game and after the demo, I was swayed. I wanted to see how evil you could play and explore the strategy behind the different types of minions.

Fun Friday: 2D Bionic Commando Looks Hot

All remakes for the future will have to live up to standards that the Bionic Commando remake has set. Not only have they updated the graphics, but they've updated the music, added weapons and bosses, and co-op. Not much else we could ask for. Unfortunately for the developers, I'm more excited for this than the full, 3D version they have in production.

Gamestop, For Better or Worse

Gamestop is evil. At least that is the premise of a recent article on Next-Gen by Colin Campbell. While I don't agree with everything he has to say on the subject, I have been more than frustrated with the franchise in the recent past, leading me to personally boycott the retailer. From becoming the last , "lucky" person to get a copy of Halo 3 on day one without a pre-order and not being able to get Guitar Hero III, only to walk into Best Buy and see palettes of them throughout the store, I couldn't understand why people still shop there. Apparently, many people still do if their holiday season is anything to go by.

As someone who works at a publisher, it is very easy to get riled up by their practices. We get the short end of the stick when they base their entire model after the used games market. This allows them to keep their initial orders low while reaping the profits off of every resale and no incentive to place future orders once the initial rush for a game dies down. Since they do place such small orders, consumers have been trained to ensure that they've given them their five bucks months in advance in order to reserve their own copy. This all but kills niche and risky titles as they stick to the safe bets of franchises and licensed games.

My coworkers aren't making things any better. In QA we get all of the games we work on. Usually, these copies are instantly traded in for credit or a new game. For the local Gamestop, there is probably little to no incentive to place orders for our games if they know that they are going to get numerous "new" copies that they can sell as used. We are hurting our own company. Although there is probably nothing that will change in the near future to alleviate this problem, I have taken it upon myself to only buy new and from big box retailers who have a tendency to keep things in stock and have sales that make new games cheaper. And I call for others in the industry to do the same.

On the other hand, while at lunch with some friends the other day, one of them was complaining that Gamestop essentially lost one of his five dollar pre-orders. As it is, there is no way to manage your pre-orders unless you go into the store and have the clerk print out a list of your pre-orders. I thought, that in this era of MySpace and FaceBook, that Gamestop should have some kind of social network where you could create wish list, manage your pre-orders and share those lists with friends. Seems like it would be fairly easy to implement and would be kind of cool. But I still won't shop there.

Gamestop seems to be a necessary evil in the industry as the continue to garner more strength and clout in the industry, even if it is only in their best interest. The only thing that we, the content creators can do is go on the offensive. We can shift our buying habits and encourage others to do the same. All the while looking for alternate means of getting our games into the hands of gamers, either through digital downloads or demos that they can try before forking out for a game that he or she may want to quickly return, which is the subject of my next rant.

Autosaving for Peace of Mind

With all of the current generation of hardware supporting built in hard drives, the use of autosave is proliferating. From a developer’s perspective, this should be considered highly sought after functionality as a means of creating a save system that the player can forget about and get lost in your game.

In Oblivion, for example, once autosave is turned on, the game practically saves every time the player passes through a door or when traveling from one area to another. Many hours can quickly pass without the player giving a thought to the last time he saved (unless a lot of time is spent roaming the countryside, then you are on your own). Similarly, in Gears of War and Halo 3, there are several checkpoints throughout each level that keeps lost progress due to death at a minimum.

On the other hand, in Mass Effect, autosave occurs only after key events in the game. Since much can happen between these story events due to the sheer size of the universe to explore and accomplish, a player who has not saved in a while can be frustrated by an unexpected death and a loss of progress. This forces the player to consciously stop what they are doing and remember to save on their own in order to minimize the amount of progress that is lost. Bioshock also implements an autosave feature that only saves at the beginning of each area but is far less intrusive due to the Vita-Chambers which bring the character back to life with no loss of progress.

While these examples only cover a few games and genres, it can be applied to nearly all games. Platformers and puzzle games can save after each level is completed, such as in Zach and Wiki. First person shooters and adventure game should drop the random save points in lieu of the autosave at these checkpoints. Role-playing games should follow Oblivion’s example and save very often. Finally, since loading screens will not be going away anytime soon, it is always good to autosave at this point as well.

Text vs. Voice

I started playing Zach and Wiki which I received for Christmas. So far it is a great game with challenging level design and a whimsical cast of characters. I also noticed that it has a vibrant and distinctive art style and animations which go almost unseen as I spend most of my time with my eyes diverted towards dialog boxes.

I had the same problem with Okami and Twilight Princess. Instead of being drawn into the game world, I’m constantly pulled out to read what the characters could just have easily told me, especially in these text heavy games. In what I can only imagine to be budget issues with hiring a voice over cast, games seem to fail a little bit for me when one is not included. I happy with a silent protagonist like in Grand Theft Auto III, but there is really no excuse for voicing the rest of the characters while providing subtitles for those who need them.