I've been keeping myself busy the last week with the new job, and a whole lot of pieces for FileFront , here's this week's rundown: For Gamers Weekly, Vol. 4 UT2k4 Strategy Guide, Pt 1. UT2k4 Strategy Guide, Pt 2. - Frag.Ops Gamers Are Growing Up Editorial The Suffering Review

My Top Ten Games of 2005 list started on a whim on a bleak afternoon on January 3, 2006. I thought, hey, I like to write and I sure have played a ton of games so I might as well contribute to the gaming society by writing a top ten list. Yeah, that would be fun. I also like ranting about nothing, so I'll just make every article a few pages long, with most of the text not even directly relating to the game at hand. So, I did. And it took me over thirty-two days before I was finally even able to w...

As Intellisponse recently discovered: it's not a very intelligent maneuver to, as a marketing research firm with clients like Microsoft and Activision, leave the company's data backend in a state that can be easily accessed by the public. When such a thing occurs, and this is just an example, the gaming press may get their hands on a great deal of unannounced information. So far gamers have discovered that the Xbox 360 has a Wii-like avatar system forthcoming, a third Forza game is in the works (yay yay yay), and that some company called Trioxide wants to do something where people could play console games on their PCs. That doesn't sound like a lawsuit waiting to happen at all. Anyway, thanks for the information Intellisponse and I hope you can still get clients in the future.

In the wake of Tomonobu Itagaki's resignation from his directorial position at Team Ninja it has now been revealed that every Tecmo employee is suing Tecmo. Tecmo instituted an illegal "flexible hours" scheme that allowed the company to avoid paying their employees overtime; the company was ignoring over one hundred overtime hours worked by its employees every month and falsified documented to cover the whole thing up. The filing was handled by two Tecmo employees (one of which was the head of Tecmo's Labor Division, Hiroaki Ozawa) and asks for 8.3 million yen ($77,000 USD) per employee as compensation. Basically, Tecmo has been a bad, bad company.

 

 

Following my cohort 's lead, I'm going to list some things or trends in video games which bug me in some way shape or form. Poorly-Placed Checkpoints : In games which have a checkpoint save system, the checkpoints are occasionally very poorly laid out; when the player overcomes a particularly difficult/annoying puzzle or makes it through a rough combat scenario not having a checkpoint immediately nearby does not add to the game's difficulty level. All the lack of a checkpoint does is make...

It seems like it's time for the video game industry to grow up and realize that it needs to start producing games with the idea that the experience they provide to gamers is one wholly unique to the industry. I finally saw There Will Be Blood earlier this week and, after witnesses the absolutely mind-numbingly fantastic performance of Daniel Day-Lewis I came to a fairly obvious realization: games will never provide an experience as fulfilling, captivating, and, most importantly, truly ca...

Weeks simply shouldn't feel as long as this week has. It just should not be allowed by whatever governing force remains in charge of determining the relative length of a week for a certain individual. This is week that a majority of my classes decided to cram the rest of the out-of-class homework into due dates, so I had a nice, full schedule of things due every day of the week that kept me all sorts of busy. Next week, other than reading The Martian Chronicles (and writing a short paper o...

Metal Gear Solid 4 is a strange game to discuss. As a long-time fan of the series it is both a superb gaming experience and an absolutely infuriating one. The game presents itself to players as being almost two separate entities: the one the player is engaged in and the one that Hideo Kojima wants the player to watch.

For a game like Metal Gear Solid 4, franchise history is of paramount importance to any discourse regarding the game. Metal Gear Solid is a franchise that got its North American start back in 1998. The Playstation game was released to pretty wide critical acclaim and commercial success (shipping "six million units worldwide. The game made good on its tag line of "Tactical Espionage Action" by merging its action and stealth gameplay better than any game that preceded it -- a feat that went unmatched until the release of Splinter Cell four years later. Metal Gear Solid was, above all else, a game with sublime pacing throughout its duration; the gameplay was the focus, the cut scenes were lengthy for the time, but rarely excessive. The game's sequel, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, was released two and a half year later and, despite critical and commercial success exceeding the original game, is considered a misstep in the series due to the change in protagonist, a pronounced increase in tangential storylines (especially the romance of two main characters), and more and longer cinematics.

When Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater was released in 2004, the gameplay, characters, overarching story, and level design were all better than they ever were before. And it was with Metal Gear Solid 3 that the franchise's penchant for unnecessarily lengthy storytelling through non-interactive cut scenes was most pronounced. The increased length of the cut scenes (along with an increased number of them) seemed to also go hand-in-hand with a poorly-crafted script that seemed to rely on a pure bulk of dialogue to present information and storylines. The franchise was always fond of its own verbosity, but each game in the series took it one step further.

And in 2008 Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was released.

It's been a superb year for gamers. There have been such a vast number quality major releases across any number of genres that the idea of a given gamer feeling "left out" is near unthinkable. The major, well-received releases can be categorized as a 4X RTS or simply a great 4X turn-based game. There are open-world shooters in Africa and two types of open-world games in the vein of Grand Theft Auto. Superb cooperative games involving things like zombies, chainsaw-mounted assault rifles, and a throwback to the days of Golden Axe. And then there are major sequels like Grand Theft Auto 4, Fallout 3, and Metal Gear Solid 4. Oh, yes.

The deluge of gaming was good to me this year as well as, for the first time in a few years, I was actually able to play every title that I had any desire to play across all non-Wii platforms (and even then, I'm currently borrowing one of those to play No More Heroes). Not since my 2005 games of the year have I felt well-informed enough to write about some of my top picks for a given year. Granted, I can't objectively write about games like Galactic Civilizations: Twilight of the Arnor or Sins of a Solar Empire -- both of which are games that I, as a gamer, hold in remarkably high esteem.

This year I'm doing something a little bit different. I'm not sure if I can really classify a deviation from a one-time top ten list as something "different" or not but I will continue to think my actions in this matter as such. It's no radical change, but I'm just going to write up three-four articles on games I consider to be the best of 2008's best with no regards to rank or categorization. At this point, I still have yet to figure out what I want to make two of the four games. They will be from the following list of games I'm in the process of choosing from. The following games are all superb and remain in my mind at this point in time as equally superb.

Esquire's Future of Video Game Design is considered required reading in these parts from today onward. And, given this revelation, Jason Rohrer's Passage is also now considered required playing.

The Esquire piece brings about one of the game industry's favorite set piece discussions (along with digital rights management and booth babes): games as art. It's a topic I've discussed once before but don't relish discussing at length all too often. Discussions that wiggle around the specific semantics of a term as loosely defined as "art" aren't really conducive to any sort of definite conclusions; it's as subjective a viewpoint as the concept of "fun." Everyone knows art/fun when they see it or experience it, but trying to describe it as a definite concept is considerably more difficult. We can all point to examples of games which make us, as the player, feel artistically enlightened such as Braid and Rez just as easily as we can point to games that serve as their antitheses like Madden NFL 2009 or Gears of War 2. The same can be said for music and cinema. It's not about the definition of art, it's about the experience. And an experience isn't a conclusive piece of evidence either way.

I believe that anyone who plays Passage, in particular, will agree that it is an emotional experience. If one allows themselves to enter into the type of mindset when trying out Passage that he/she would when listening to music which conjures up pleasant or enjoyable memories or emotions, it seems a near-certainty that he will come away feeling something after the five-six minute journey. Passage stands out to me as the product of someone that has the ability to channel so singular a vision into a program and the result is, basically, an interactive emotional experience. That said, I'm hesitant to call Passage a game. Sure, it has all the trappings of a typical game: a linear progression composed of love and death and a metric by which progress is measured (the score counter in the upper-right), but these features don't make the title a game so much as they seem like set dressing for a just-interactive-enough movie that uses basic keyboard controls as a way to ensure it has the viewer's attention.

The current search for artistic games within the game industry is a witch hunt. But no witches will be burned in this witch hunt, no. The end goal is to make the witch be our friend. We want to make our witch famous so we can take her by the hand and show our friends in other industries that we have our own witch too -- one that is unique to us. The casualty in this search is the game; videos games are a medium which sacrifices that other stuff, like narrative, for the sake of the player. We all want our games to tell unique stories that could rival that of any book or movie but the concept of the narrative is diametrically opposed to the intrinsic dynamism of video games. The more a writer tells his story, the less the player controls his.

Then again, Jason Rohrer seems to have found a way to maintain gameplay and a dynamic story. But can it be extrapolated to a AAA game?

I just got another mission from the unnaturally quick-speaking warlord of the African UFL -- one of two warring factions in Far Cry 2 -- when one of my buddies gave me a call on my cell phone telling me to meet them if I wanted to make my mission take twice as long as it would if I simply followed orders at no real additional benefit to me. I guess I could just do it, though. I mean, my buddy Nasreen is, apparently, one of the only two women in all of Africa. It wouldn't hurt to endear my playing character to her a bit more. It's an awfully big safe house, after all.

Wait, why is my screen pulsing and turning yellow? Oh, it's my Malaria. It's flaring up. There's an on-screen pill bottle that's telling me I should press my left shoulder button. But, I'm also in the middle of driving through the jungle since that checkpoint I just cleared out before getting my new mission already is restocked with new people. Maybe they're just meandering civilians? Probably not. They have guns. Do civilians in Africa have guns? All right, I'll just slow down my truck and take my pills. Done. No more yellow screen. I'm also out of pills, but I just got them refilled after I delivered some transit papers to an African family hiding in a broom closet in a veterinary office (under control by the African Underground). Am I really out of pills or do I just need to deliver more transit papers? Africa has a strange exchange rate.

With the development of Fallout 3, Bethesda Softworks faced a dilemma: they had to make a first-person RPG engine that was typically used for high-fantasy RPG/adventure games handle the intensity, gore, and statistical probability of the gunplay in Black Isle's cult-legend Fallout and Fallout 2 in such a way as to not annoy either first-person shooter gamers, fans of the Fallout games, and long-time patrons of the games in The Elder Scrolls series.

The problem with mixing a first-person shooter with a role-playing game is that they are, basically, as diametrically opposed as two genres can get. The cornerstone of an FPS is in the feel of its gunplay and player movement; the questions players subconsciously ask themselves while playing are: how does shooting feel? How accurate are the weapons and are the bullet spray, recoil, and weapon damage consistent with what a player would expect from the weapon? Is weapon behavior relatively reliable? Are the player's skills in targeting his own or is the game modifying them to an unexpected degree? A first-person shooter places the gamer at the helm of the game; the more a player feels like he/she is in charge of his in-game avatar, the better. With this preconception at the forefront of the game experience, players enter into a game world with expected grounded in their reality and expect somewhat realistic or reliable behavior. Shooters that have unrealistically-behaving real-world weapons will seem immediately "off" to any gamer whether he has real-life weapon experience or not; a shotgun which behaves like a sniper rifle will seem strange to anyone while a sniper rifle that has a large box of possible inaccuracy around a gamer's targeting reticule will be a source of future gamer rage-quitting.

Interfaces of all sorts are one of the most game-specific features of any entertainment medium; there's never an ammo counter on-screen when watching John McClane do Die Hard thing or a health indicator attached to Forrest Gump's forehead in his movie -- that would be ridiculous. Yet throughout the history of the gaming industry UIs or HUDs are featured in just about every game; it's not a question of whether or not to have a HUD in a game so much as it's a question of what kind of graphics should comprise the HUD, what should be featured on-screen, how big should the health bar be, or how translucent should the minimap be? A couple of games released this past month have realized: wait, what?

Ubisoft Montreal's Far Cry 2 is a game that takes great pride in its consistent usage of the first-person perspective to keep the player as immersed in the fictionalized portrayal of an African warzone. With a tap of the heal button the player's in-game character will, if his health is low enough, look down at his body and find a bullet wound; if that's the case, the animation continues by having the player character pry out the bullet with players or, in some cases, with his teeth. If the player's wounds aren't bad enough, a mere injection into the character's forearm will do the trick. Yet, despite such animations the game still reverts to showing an ammo counter or health bar if the player's health is in the process of increasing/decreasing (or alarmingly low), same with the ammo counter. Presumably, this is because Ubisoft Montreal could not figure out a way to properly convey this information in-game, but what they did figure out is how to convey locational information through an in-game map and GPS transmitter. When the Map button is pressed, the game's player character will whip out a map and GPS transmitter (shown below) and the player is tasked with finding his location on the in-game map and swapping between various "zoom levels" (shown in-game as separate pieces of map paper) to determine his position and plot his course of action to an objective.

Everyone likes candy. Diabetics or people on a strict diet may nay-say such a statement but, for the rest of us, a bit of candy here and there is a little treat composed solely of sugar and happiness. Achievements in video games are similar class to a piece of candy. Players can gain achievements for beating a level in a normal progression of the game, beating a hard boss without using certain items, completing an entire playthrough of a game without dying, or, in the case of the recently released Mega Man 9, beating the entirety of the game five times within twenty-four hours. Once these achievements are earned, gamers can wear them as a nerdy badge of honor for others to gaze in awe upon. Or something. When done correctly, achievements are a source of positive reinforcement that encourage forms of player behavior or, better still, can foster an entire metagame with the potential to drastically increase the amount of time players can get out of a single game.

As far as the nonexistent history books on modern game designs goes, the originator of "achievements" as a term and systematical categorization of gaming accomplishments began with the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, the 360's online system/marketplace. A "gamer score" is displayed prominently for every Xbox Live player profile (see mine below) and points are added to this score whenever an achievement is unlocked during the playthrough of any given game. Microsoft's system allots 1000 gamer points (G) to any retail game and 200 points to any game distributed through the Xbox Live Arcade Marketplace. A typical achievement, then, has anywhere from 5-50G attached to it and when it is unlocked by a player's in-game exploits, a box pops up saying that an achievement has been unlocked. And, in a majority of cases, this elicits a very positive player reaction. Achievements have become such a mainstay of the Xbox 360 that there sites that are dedicated to categorically listing every achievement for games. For some gamers, the concept of having a high gamer score is important enough to some gamers that games are played solely for the purpose of getting easy achievements.

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What is most astonishing about F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is not its poster-child of horror: that Gothic-looking nine-year-old child look is about as familiar to anyone who has seen any of Hollywood's reinterpretations of certain Japanese Horror flicks. Nor is it astonishing that F.E.A.R. 2 fails, like so many sequels recently, to convey any narrative points of significance. Nor is it astonishing that the prominently-advertised mech segments feel as out-of-place as any player of the original F.E.A.R. would have imagined them to feel. No, what is astonishing about F.E.A.R. 2 is how little of what made F.E.A.R. such an engaging and refreshing first-person shooter is present.

One of the commonly-echoed complaints about the original F.E.A.R. was the "bland" or "repetitive" level design that filled the game's superb single-player campaign. As heavy into the supernatural as the game's narrative got, the gameplay always remained grounded in, more or less, a commonly-understood vision of reality. As such, a large chunk of the game took place in abandoned or decrepit buildings, office buildings, warehouses, garages, corporate atriums, and other such staples of modern life in any large city. Other than the decrepit buildings, though, the environments in F.E.A.R. were all highly representative of everyone's commonly-understood idea of an office, a warehouse, a garage, and so on. The prime example of this are the office levels which make up a decent portion of F.E.A.R.'s campaign: there are a number of cubicles and office floors which are in clean, tidy order when a player enters them. Some of the cubicle phones have messages on them for the former occupant of the cube and, through these, a portion of the game's narrative is told.

What made these areas interesting is not that their surface appeal is intriguing, they're offices after all. These environments are intriguing due to how these offices were put to use when enemies came flooding in though doors, windows, and ceilings. Suddenly cubicles became cover. Glass was shattering from every window or glass panel, sparks were flying from broken computers and monitors, and giant holes filled the walls (example). It was an arena of chaos that was once an everyday environment.