Fun Friday: Halo 3 Edition

Halo 3 came out this week so needless to say, posting has been a little thin. Bungie has put together an amazing package with this game. In addition to standard campaign and multiplayer, the theater and forge elements are well above and beyond what anyone could have expected from this game. I believe it is safe to say that I will play this game for months to come. Inspired by N'gai Croal's posting earlier this week, above is my first multiplayer kill. That's me in the background and a very unlucky HARASSMENT OWNS getting splattered.

Ready to Finish the Fight!

It took almost three years, but I finally played all the way through Halo 2. I spent the last couple of nights playing through the original two games to refresh myself on the story and actually complete the second game. I did it on easy, which many may feel was cheating, but I wanted to get through the games quickly and it made me feel like the bad ass that Master Chief is as I stormed my way though waver after wave of the Covenant and the Flood.

Many people seemed to dislike the end of Halo 2 for it's abruptness, but I liked it. The game did a good job of setting up the third and the alliances between the Master Chief, the humans and the Elites, with converging story lines on multiple battlefronts. It's kind of like Empire Strikes Back in that sense. Although, I may not have liked it as much if I had to wait three years to find out what is going to happen. However, I think it's clear that the human race survives due to the museum and the "Believe" commercials, the questions remaining seem to be who will survive.

Fun Friday: Want to Get Away?

Resident Evil 5 Rumored to Resides in Haiti

Kotoku is reporting that a very reliable source from within Capcom is confirming that Resident Evil 5 takes place in Haiti, the supposed birthplace of voodoo and zombies. That's what I said.

Lesson Learned: Motion Control's Big Assumption

The summer before second grade, I fell out of a tree on a camping trip and broke both bones in my left forearm, the ulna and radius. Ever since them my left arm has been slightly more "bowed" than my right. It's nothing crazy. I'm not a mutant or anything, but if you compared my two arms side by side, they would look a little different. However, it wasn't until very recently that I realized that my left arm has a minor limitation as well.

We have a racing title on the Wii in test now that switched up the controls from last year's version. Last year we went with holding the Wii Remote horizontally and steering like a real steering wheel. It seemed to work fine, but in this year's version, that's a secondary control scheme. The new default scheme has the player holding the Wii Remote in one hand and the Nunchuk in the other. So far, there are no problems. However, while racing, if the player wants to powerslide around a sharp corner (which is somewhat necessary throughout the game) they have to twist the Nunchuck from left to right, or vice versa, to powerslide in that direction while turning with the Control Stick. For most people this would probably be no problem, except it has been for me.

Due to my injury sustained about twenty years ago, I have trouble twisting my left arm outwards, away from my body, making left turns while powersliding nearly impossible. Since it is not a motion I do very often with my left arm (even my right for that matter), I never really put much thought into my own limitations. And my own issues are not even a real problem, as there are people out there with far more severe limitations.

As motion controls become more and more the norm and game designers look to eagerly implement them into their games, this is hopefully something that they take into consideration more often than not or risk alienating a segment of our gaming brethren. Not to say that all motion controls are bad, I just hope that they aren't shoehorned into games and then forced upon the player.

Goose Bumps

I'm a sucker for stark, moving music and movies that evoke emotions of honor and duty, movies like Saving Private Ryan, even Armageddon (I know it was cheesy). The new Halo 3 ad "Believe" gave me the same chills. Very nicely done.

I Needed More Motivation To Be Bad

Bioshock has succeeded. It has already garnered the level of cult status and it is a classic experience that all gamers should enjoy. Still, I have a tiny, tiny bit of a problem with the game that in no way hindered my original experience but I think could have given much more weight to the dilemma that the player is faced with early in the game. I hadn't even really thought about it too much until reading N'gai Croal and Stephen Totilo's face off. Croal writes:

My finger was hovering over the X button, ready to harvest...and all of a sudden, I couldn't do it. There was a little girl, albeit virtual, cowering in front of my avatar, and I couldn't bring myself to harvest her, as she'd been presented far too sympathetically. At the same time, I couldn't bring myself to rescue her either, because I wanted that Adam. Yet there was another complicating factor, one which is the true mark of the brilliance of BioShock's fiendish conundrum: the promise of an unspecified reward from Tenenbaum for rescuing the Little Sister.

What was puzzling me was the nature of Levine's game. He was pitting my basic humanity against my greedy self-interest and against my curiosity--a cruel hybrid of a moral dilemma fused with the Trust Game. This was a far more devilish problem than had it been a simple binary either/or, and it had completely paralyzed me. Should I treat this game as a Rorschach blot and do what I would do in real life: rescue the Little Sister? Or should I treat it solely as a fantasy and do precisely the opposite, explore the road I'd never take in the real world. I didn't know what to do.

While I totally hesitated in that moment over whether to save her for the promised reward or to put her out of her misery, the ADAM was never really a major draw at this point in the game. The game offers that if you do harvest the little sister, you will gain more ADAM for spending on plasmids, but does the player actually understand at this point what that means?

Our only experience up until this point in the game with plasmids in the electricity plasmid. It is very useful and fun but there is no hint at what comes with enhanced powers. You could use your imagination but it's easiest to see this power only becoming stronger. So what's the draw for more ADAM? Is it the desire to become as powerful as possible? Curiosity? I felt more sorry for her than anything, so I chose to save her.

Now, let's suppose that the game does something a little different the first time you inject yourself with a plasmid. You body has no idea how to react to this genetic mutation and you suddenly have a vast array of powers at your fingertips that is unstable (very similar to a sequence later in the game when you have an adverse reaction to an antidote). After experiencing all that ADAM can offer and its power, it is taken away from you only to be offered a way to get back by taking it from the little sisters. Like a drug, it has been taken from you and you now have a way to get back but at a terrible moral cost. Now here's a dilemma!

Now, while this borrows heavily from the Metroid formula, as well as adjusting the a bit of the story line, I think it would have added a lot more weight to the harvest/save problem. Now I wasn't the game designer and maybe they thought of this and thought the game was better their way. Either way, it is still an experience that transcends the norm.

It's Not Worth It

In preparation for the arrival of the the September issue, I flipped through the August issue of Game Developer Magazine. I reread Steve Theodore's latest Pixel Pusher article entitled Fight the Good Fight. He puts forth more strong arguments against the self inflicted practice of crunch time, many of which I strongly believe and attempt to convey to others around me, unfortunately, not to much avail. A couple of the things he stresses is pacing yourself and then learning how to manage your own time so you can foresee problems before they get out of control. However, the message that comes at the very end of the article hit closest to home, especially as I look to expand my own family.

There has never been a game that was worth a single divorce, but anybody with a few shipped titles on their resume could name you a title or two that cost that much.

That's why it's up to us to grapple the crunch monster. Growing out of our frat house work habits isn't just good advice - it's a deadly serious duty. The family wants you home from the trenches, safe and sound, not just another anonymous game industry hero in the small print of Mobygames. Don't disappoint them.

Fun Friday: Guitar Hero vs Rock Band

With the impending release of two rhythm game heavyweights, someone has created two sites with YouTube clips of most of the songs to be featured in Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. I'm still partial to Guitar Hero based on the track list. See the mind blowing video below for some Tenacious D awesomeness (and with dancing robot for the win!) But I have to admit that the drums, as well as some of the menus and player customization stuff in Rock Band, look pretty sweet.

Does One Game Make a Franchise?

On Friday Evening, I finished Bioshock while saving all of the Little Sisters. By itself, it was a very emotional and powerful ending but the themes of fatherhood hit particularly close to home. The game was phenomenal from start to finish and it will easily be the game of the year.

Earlier today, Take Two held their earning call and praised their hit title. Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick said of the game's success "Clearly, we have a new hit franchise on our hands." This stuck me quite odd. While the game is clearly a critical and financial success, I don't see one game as a "franchise." Zelda and Madden are franchises, long running series that have been successful year in and year out.

I understand that this talk came from the people responsible to the shareholders that want a promise of more success to come. Games that transcend the banality of our industry are not immune from the franchise mentality that plagues this industry. Shareholders want high returns on little investment, they want sock prices to go up. Unfortunately, they want to capitalize on this success.

But it has not always worked out. Great games are not always the launching pads for viable franchises. For many reasons, consecutive titles in a "franchise" fail to meet expectations: KOTOR, Maximo, Prince of Persia. On the other hand, the major franchises have all started all small, developed a cult following and progressively improved from year to year: GTA, Final Fantasy, Tony Hawk, even Halo. Bioshock set the that first franchise step pretty high and its going to take quite an effort to maintain that level of excellence.