Benefit of the Doubt

Ok, so I may or may not have just placed a pre-order for Halo 4 on ShopTo.net. With 343 taking the helm, there’s a lot to be apprehensive about when it comes to this new ‘Reclaimer’ trilogy which Microsoft are pushing, and whilst I believe that they’ll probably be good games, whether they strike a chord with gamers like myself who remember the Bungie games fondly is another matter entirely.

I wasn’t going to pre-order initially, but looking at what’s in the special edition there’s actually quite a lot of good stuff there, you should check it out. ShopTo is my current go-to place for games at the moment. They were pretty good at getting me a Mass Effect 3 copy to me on launch after GAME couldn’t honour my pre-order, and they got Darksiders to me pretty sharpish as well.

Thinking about it, and especially after having a chat with another writer for a project of his a couple of weeks ago, I reminded myself of the impact that this franchise- and especially Combat Evolved – has had in terms of my personal history as a gamer. It’s the game that really switched me on in terms of the Xbox, it’s the game that really got me into First-Person Shooters, and in terms of memories and moments, it’s the game that I’ve have the most fondest memories of. That’s not to say of the massive impact I personally believe the franchise has had on gaming – Halo 2 and Xbox Live in my mind completely revolutionised the industry’s attitude towards online gaming and multiplayer, and Combat Evolved help put the first Xbox on the map, despite not initially being considered as a poster child for the console (there’s a great four part series of articles done by Patrick Garret over on VG247 that you definitely need to read).

Anyway – long story short – Halo 4 gets the benefit of the doubt for the moment. From recent experiences, I can’t help but feel that in situations like these it’s dangerous to put your trust and faith into something without having really seen anything beforehand. There’s a lot riding on Halo 4 being good, not only because Microsoft wants to keep their golden boy making money, but 343 themselves have to prove that they can do it without Bungie. It’s almost like the Treyarch/Infinity Ward divide, and I hope 343 don’t change too much for the sake of making the franchise their own.

Couple of things that have me concerned though at the moment:

* The new ‘Spartan IV’s’ – how they are going to fit in lore-wise it going to be something I’m going to pay attention to, since to be honest Halo: Reach and the official acknowledgement of the Spartan III’s, was handled rather cack-handedly I feel in terms of the official timeline (I’m a bit of a lore buff, what can I say) – it was like Star Wars all over again. I don’t see how the universe allows for the existence of a fourth generation of Spartan soldiers, but there you go. Mind you, from what’s available so far, the Spartan IV thing seems only to exist to allow for a plausible plot reason for multiplayer to exist. Unnecessary I feel but fair enough.

* Halo 4 is apparently relying a lot more on trans-media to help promote and tell its story, in a way. The Forerunner Trilogy of novels is supposed to have considerable relevance to Halo 4′s story, and Karen Travis’ Glasslands’ novel is as well. I have mixed feelings about this as I rather resented Mass Effect 3 for bringing in someone from the novels to be part of the story of the game, although in principle it’s not so bad I guess. Problem is, I’m rather disappointed by Travis as an author, not only because when I met her in person she seemed rather soulless for someone dealing with IP-fiction, but also reading reviews of Glasslands’ it doesn’t sound like I’ll like what she’s done with the story post-Ghost of Onyx. Plus I wasn’t that impressed with her work on Gears of War 3 either, but that’s different.

I don’t want to sound too negative before I’ve even seen the game though. Even though I care about lore and story and continuity more than I probably should, it didn’t completely stop me from enjoying Reach, and it won’t stop me enjoying Halo 4 either. If this doesn’t work out though, then that’ll probably be it in terms of investing in aHalogame beforehand.

What was that? Diablo III? I have no idea what you’re talking about:

It’s well good by the way Sian.

Report

Dear Mr. Robinson,

I, your very pixelated yet oddly cute secretary who you may or may not have banged yet, have compiled a detailed report and analysis as to how well your Videogames Development Company- DigitalX Media, has performed over the past 160 minutes twenty years:

Capital: $216,121.2k (upon close of year 20)

Highest Selling Title: Samurai Online 2 – 20,007,093

Highest Rating: ShinobiX3 (37 points) & Medieval Wars 2 (37 points)

Awards

Best Design: Lost Count, Consistently won over the last five years at least
Best Music: Lost Count, Consistently won over the last five years at least
Worst Game: Never
Runner Up: Lost Count, Consistently won over the last five years at least
Grand Prize: Once – Year 20 – Medieval Wars 3

Console: The Xplayer – 32-bit Chip, DVD-Rom Drive – sold 9230K units and currently holds 10% of the market share.

Total Staff Salary: $2,6557.9K per annum

Staff: Two Directors, a Producer, a Designer, a Writer, a Sound Engineer, a Hacker and a Hardware Engineer

May I just be the first to congratulate you sir on getting through your first 160 minutes twenty years of business. DigitalX Media has flourished over your wise and oddly precognisant reign. It’s almost as if you knew certain things were going to happen before they happened. Perhaps you owned a videogames company in another life or something. To think, it all started with that PC game that I can’t even remember the name of anymore, because clearly the PC no longer matters as a platform and we should just keep churning out random console games to get sales.

Also, congratulations on winning the Grand Prize award before your best friend from back home, may your bragging be as epic as your game making skills.

Now, since you’re inexplicably closing down your business for reasons that defy logic and even sanity, I best go find another malible wise business owner whom I can tell what to do assist.

Yours Faithfully,

Secretary #1

I… What just happened?

I think I may need to lie down. It’s not often that I get sucked into a game so completely and so fully that I find myself ‘waking up’ a couple of hours later, physically shaking as I step back say ‘enough is enough’. It does happen… Hearts of Iron III, Civ V when I was reviewing it… games designed a certain way are actually pretty good at keeping players ‘looped’, with no natural cut-off point with which to take a break. Never did I think it would happen with GameDev Story though.

As is my trend, I was fashionably late to the scene with this title. I remember it being all the rage last year (or was it the year before?), but I didn’t even have my ‘roid phone then, let alone an iPhone which is where it came out first, if I remember correctly. I’m not really a heavy mobile gamer… I’ve got Angry Birds, as I thought I’d try it out and see why everyone rates it, and I downloaded a version of old school Snake for old times’ sake (it’s not very good, to be honest)… but I’m a PC/Console gamer at heart and that’s my main source of gaming entertainment. These mobile games are just a distraction for when I need them… much like my DS Lite, actually.

But GameDev Story… sweet Jesus. I decided to buy it outright as I’d heard good things and I doubt I’d be disappointed, and to be honest I felt professionally compelled to see what the fuss was about. I just didn’t expect to get so hooked. The power of managing your own studio, putting out games, levelling up your dudes… it’s all so intoxicating. And it was funny to watch the scores come in as well, and get a taste of what it must be like to be on the receiving end. I wonder if there was deliberate social commentary there or whether it was designed that way simply for simplicity’s sake – scores seem to have no impact on sales what so ever, and are only relevant in getting a game into the ‘Hall of Fame’ (which allows you to make a ‘sequel’, which to me is kind of a poor gameplay mechanic, but whatever).

It’s a shame it doesn’t paint the complete picture – I’d love to have seen the Publisher vs. Developer relationship dynamic represented in some way… bigger studios should be able to start several projects at once (and the management challenges that inherently creates). The fact that you have a choice between bug-stomping or shipping as is is kind of diminished because, so far, I haven’t had any disastrous consequences from waiting until it’s all done. I think one time a game that was ‘similar’ to the one my guys were making was released, but you know what, it still sold well. The combination of games is also a bit odd (No strategy genre from what I’ve found yet!)… But it’s fun experimenting and making different combinations.

Anyway, kudos kairosoft, for well and truly surprising me with your insanely fun little game about game development. Well Meta’d. I’ll be honest, I can already tell this probably isn’t going to have much replayability (had to start again, and already I’m feeling the numbing that is repetition), plus now that I know what is in later stages I think I’m obsessing a bit too much about planning for the best outcome, which isn’t good as that tends to just ruin the experience.

Hmm, some of their other games look tempting too….

(AND SO IT BEGINS)

Not Alone

I’m rather chuffed with myself I have to say -I completed Darksiders over the weekend! Yay me!I think this is actually the first game in a long while that I’ve just sat down with the aim to complete a game, outside of the fact that I had it for review or whatever. I’m not much of completionist as you may have picked up on by now.

Story driven games like Darksiders pull me through the most, but then I’m liable to get bored if the game mechanics are too boring or grindy, which was in danger of happening here but the key difference I think is that I had a purpose. You may remember I was in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago seeing the sequel, and in preparation for that I actually read up on the first game. Kind of spoiled the ending for myself, but it actually sounded like a decent, iconic moment for a videogame, and so as soon as I got back I bought it from ShopTo.net (GAME were out of stock), and the sometime last week I think I started playing it – doing a couple of hours every night before marathoning it during the Easter Weekend to finish it off.

It’s weird – knowing the ending beforehand gave me an end goal, a reason to put up with the oddities, the repetitions, and the rushed plot devices that littered the game, and when I got to that scene I wanted to see (which I probably could have easily looked up on YouTube), I had a real sense of achievement. More so perhaps than if I didn’t know what was coming. It was definitely worth it, and I don’t mean to make Darksiders sounds rubbish, because it really isn’t. Other people I talked to said the first hour or so was really boring, and I could kind of see that but again I knew what the game was about, and I knew where I was headed so it was easier to bear – perhaps foreknowledge really isn’t such a bad thing after all.

It’s a shame really that the second game isn’t going to continue on from that ending – it’s very much a “Can’t wait to see what happens next” moment, but given that the first game was a tentative first step into a new IP, the second is going to expand on the universe and the lore more, and then probably bring it all together for the third game where they’ll continue on from there. Assuming THQ survives long enough to help Vigil get a third game.

It’s like I said in my preview though – parallel stories are a dangerous thing, and I hope it doesn’t prove to be too tenuous a link to the original game – but it does have to account for the time of the other three horseman whilst War was incarcerated for 100 years at the beginning of the game. One of the game’s leads mentioned to me in an interview that they’d gone into the first game very much with a sequel in mind, and you can see that with the amount of loose ends they leave.

I doubt I’ll pre-order it though – too much potential to disappoint right now for me to commit financially for it, plus I’d like to get it for review if possible, but being freelance now there are even less guarantees.

Hope you all enjoyed your Easter.

Oh

So. Let’s talk about Mass Effect 3, shall we? I know I’m a week or two late, but like I’ve had work to do and then that thing happened last week and I’ve only just gotten around to completing it Monday night. In a word: unsatisfying. Which is weird because I enjoyed every single second of that game, right up until you go into the Citadel for the finale – which according to my save data happened at 45 Hours and 51 minutes. That’s nearly 46 hours of awesome followed by ten minutes of “oh”. Considering how much effort you put into that game it could almost be a slap in face.

Now, I’m no stranger to ‘er, what?’ endings – Battlestar Galactica I thought handled it as well as it could, and I liked that ending. The ending to Joe Haldeman’s Forever Peace is similar to what Mass Effect 3 has seemingly tried to do – I won’t go into details, but in many ways it does way more, and yet far less than Mass Effect 3‘s ‘ending’, and I was still satisfied. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that I only had to read one book to get there, as opposed to playing through three games, but my point is it’s not the fact that they introduced a seemingly all powerful being right at the very end that’s responsible for everything which is why it was unsatisfying – it’s the way it was handled.

Assuming this is the ‘real’ ending, the framework there could still be interesting, it just needed more exposition: some cataclysmic event persuaded say the ‘first’ races that something like this should never happen again, so they create an army of all powerful machines to ‘cull’ the galaxy every 50,000 years to make way for the newer, younger races, and so the cycle goes. “All this has happened before, and all this shall happen again”, as Battlestar Galactica puts it – the ChildIllusion at the end, an avatar of this ideal and probably the remnant of whoever’s idea it was in the first place, again, that’s fine. The Illusion Baltar/Number Six in BSG, the Enigmatic Voice of God from Forever Peace… that all works fine for me. IF that’s what it is. However…

Now, interestingly there’s a popular theory circulating around about the ending not being the ‘real’ ending. What this video, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, and give this article a read to, as it analyses that theory as well as the current ending in general. If the indoctrination theory (or a similar result – the supporting evidence could point to a number of things) turns out to be true, then I take all of this back – bravo Bioware. However, there’s still the fact that, as of yet, we are left with the ending as it is, so regardless of what happens next, Bioware still presented us wither something that is either quite possible the most unsatisfying ending ever, or a poor the worst delivery of an ending ever (even if the ‘real’ ending is far better).

It still doesn’t account for things like the Normandy crash landing on that planet, because if there is something going on here, I don’t really see the point including those scenes, unless it’s to feed the illusion that this is the real ending. But then it’s so poor I don’t see why you would do that either.  The thing that upset me the most though is that, regardless of what’s real, or what’s not, I didn’t get what I was promised. Not sure how familiar you guys are with the choices, but I chose the Synthesis ending as I wanted to see what that would look like. They didn’t show me what that would look like, so that was kind of annoying.

Interestingly though, I have a save file for the start of that ending sequence, so I can go back and change which ending I choose if I want. I probably will, because if rumours are true then the ‘Destroy’ option is the one you want to be choosing anyway. So we’ll see.

Whilst I’m here, a couple of other general points that struck me:

* Kai Leng – this character should have been Ashley or Kaiden, whichever one died in Mass Effect 1. Not only would it be a perfect addition to the whole stand-off they developed between Shepard and the alive one (which was over a bit too quickly for my liking, but at least you could see it brewing), it would have really played on the fact that Shepard was straining under the weight of all those who had died. You hear Kaiden’s (and Ashley’s, I assume) voice during the nightmare sequences, so it would have been a nice transition for Shepard’s regrets to be literally thrown in his face like that.

Plus, I don’t really like the whole idea of adding in someone that brand-new at this stage anyway – Kai Leng seems to have an unjustifiable amount of hatred for you considering you’ve never met him, and the only method the game has to try and balance it out is via Anderson, as in the book Ascension (which is where Kai Leng comes from), it’s pretty much Anderson vs. Kai Leng.

* The Citadel – is no one going to ask how the Citadel was attacked, taken over, and then physically moved across the galaxy to earth in the space of what could only be a few hours?

* Limitations of the Formula – It’s sad, but in some cases the formula for the franchise – i.e. the decisions that have far reaching consequences – seems to have limited them slightly when it comes to the first game. A lot of time is given to Liara, and Kaiden/Ashley, as they were always going to be in the third game. However other characters get proportionately less time, with the odd exception of Garrus who gets a truck load of time – but then I think its set up so that it’s highly unlikely that he dies. Even Kaiden/Ashley’s screen time gets dramatically reduced after the Cerberus Coup (assuming you’re not romancing them), as it’s possible for them to die during the coup. With all these different combinations, Bioware obviously had to choose carefully where to devote resources, but in some pits it’s disappointing how little there is. (Wrex for example, despite being there from the beginning, doesn’t get much time. Tali, who was my romance option, didn’t get as much time as I thought she would) Speaking of screen time…

* Legion – He remains one of the best and most interesting characters in the series, and it’s a shame he couldn’t have done more. Like ME2, Legion appears late in ME3, and whilst to be fair he’s there right up until you finish the Quarian segment, I still wished we’d had more time with him. His mission where you infiltrate a Geth server (i.e. go into cyberspace) is, like Operation: Overlord, one of my favourite missions. It’s different and interesting, much like Legion himself (itself, whatever).

* The Crucible – smelled of Deus Ex Machina from the moment I heard of it and given the context of the ending (what it is now, what it could be etc…) its very existence doesn’t even make sense.

I’ll think I’ll stop there for now – I’m rambling and in danger of not making much sense myself. You get the idea I hope, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Bioware’s next move is.

Oh… spoilers, by the way.

Forever Free(lance)

I do like Joe Haldeman’s Forever trilogy – Forever War especially was a very interesting read, especially in context with Starship Troopers (the book) which was written at a similar time. And then of course Forever Peace‘s “What the Bitch?” ending was actually pretty funny… Forever Free though I just couldn’t get into. It was set in the same ‘universe’ as the first two books, but it was more about setting the scene for certain events and people that you encounter within the first book, and it just felt really disjointed and stand-alone – there’s barely any mention to the ‘Forever War’, despite the fact that it’s supposed to be raging across the cosmos at the time. Anyway, enough of that – I have an announcement to make:

I’m going freelance.

Have to say, not quite according to plan but regardless of the circumstances, I’m now stepping down as Deputy Editor and Marketing Manager of Strategy Informer, and giving proper freelancing another go. That’s not to say I wouldn’t consider another job if it was offered to me (and I’m still going to keep an eye out and apply), but I’ve got to do something in the interim to live so freelancing it is. Didn’t do a great job of it when I first started out, but then I had just come out of Uni and didn’t really know what I know now.

Time to dust off the old CV, update my LinkedIn profile, and do a whole number of other things I haven’t really had to do in a while. Hell, I might even revive my personal website again. I’ve always had leave to go and do the odd piece of freelance here and there, provided I prioritised Strategy Informer work first, but to be honest I rarely had the time as I was very much focused on those guys. Now let’s see what I can do… should probably brush up on some of the multi-media skills I picked up at uni, like audio & video editing, podcasting… my rudimentary HTML… even my InDesign skills, which I rather liked doing.

If you’d like to help out on the war effort, feel to do any/all/some of the following:

* Recommend me to your bosses and friends for work, if you happen to think I’m worthy.

* Give me work yourself.

* Point me to any job ads you think I may have missed. It’s quite easy to let things slip by.

* Buy me drinks and otherwise be emotionally supportive.

* Give me all your moneyz.

Also feel free to provide suggestions of what I can do to spread my overhead – many of my fellow peers will know that writing in and of itself doesn’t pay very well, so I’m going to have to think of other avenues. Several people I know have started consulting, of all things, but I wouldn’t really know how to get into that.

So, here’s to major life changing events, eh?

Dutch Courage

So, more ‘firsts’ have happened to me this past week – first time I’d fired an authentic WW2 sniper rifle (or any gun, for that matter), first time I’d been to Amsterdam, first time I’ve left it more than two weeks in-between posting… also, during the writing of this post, first time my new computer Blue Screen of Death’d on me, which is worrying but a problem for another time. It’s been a good week, overall – knackering as hell, but good.

It also bodes well for the fortunes of the site (I hope) -  the trip to Amsterdam were in the company of magazines and websites that I like to think off as ‘higher’ up the proverbial ladder. It’s not that healthy to think of one’s site in terms like that, but there are certain realities that many of my colleagues can understand – some sites, either by connections or raw “we’ve got more traffic than you”, get priority treatment over others. With everyone and their mum opening a videogames website, it’s expected, so it’s alright. Anyway, this marks the first time though we’ve been invited to a press preview overseas for a single game. It felt good, and it was a good trip – can’t really talk about what I saw or anything like that until Friday though, so perhaps I’ll do another blog post at the end of the week.

Typical me though – I managed to spend a whole three days in the centre of Amsterdam and not see anything that you’re supposed to see.

The trip to the place where guns are fired equally as interesting, although  we’re not actually allowed to talk about where we went for reasons of privacy and security, it’s basically some guys house but it’s a place where the Army and the Police force train as well, with only a few public days. Guess they don’t want the location going viral. Also can’t talk about what I saw there until Thursday, but it was some good stuff, brought back some memories. Anyway, they each gave us our own paper head to fire at, and we fired three rounds with two guns – a Springfield and a Mauser, and I managed to get a hit with all six (although the accuracy wasn’t amazing, but all technically ‘kill shots’, the dude told me). It was an odd experience – the guns were loud, even with noise cancelling headphones on, and evening standing in the room can be a bit jarring. Probably not something I’d want to do as a hobby, but it’s something I can say I’ve done.

On a completely unrelated note, I’m near the end of Mass Effect 3 (you can read my review here, will post more once I’m done), and I picked up Darksiders on the 360. Heard some good things about it, especially the ending so I want to experience it for myself. Also, finances are going to be a bit tight this month, so I’m going to have to batten down the hatches a bit I think… unless anyone fancies giving me some moneyz?

No?