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| Jeff's Gaming Rants; Game makers and fans beware. | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 28 2008, 09:53 PM (628 Views) | |
| Dietaku | Feb 13 2009, 03:13 PM Post #41 |
Grade A /B/tard
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Yeah, I should've added the addendum to that. I haven't played any RTSes on a console since the PSX. Now, this was about five years ago, but still. In the era of crap (Good Crap, not the stinky kind) like Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, I'd much rather have a keyboard and a mouse to handle all my sepcial units and their super abilities. But that's just me. I have been meaning to try Red Alert 3, though. Super Japanese sound like an awesome way to round out the other factions of RA. Also, I apologize for the spelling of my rebuttal. I did it in like five mintues, and my fingers are faster than my brain sometimes. I try to catch it all, but, yeah. Anyways, PEACE! |
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| Sean | Feb 13 2009, 03:24 PM Post #42 |
The ⑥of Four Against Nature
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Telekinetic Schoolgirl and Rocket Equipped, Jetpack wearing Dominatrixes with Laser Whips. That's all that needs to be said about the Empire of the Rising Sun. But perhaps we should continue this discussion in another topic lest we derail Jeff's ranting thread, |
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| Jeff | Feb 17 2009, 11:38 PM Post #43 |
Destroyer of Worlds
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Today I want to talk about something a lot of gamers seem to be talking about as of late. Are video games easier today than they were 20 or 30 years ago? I say "No". First point of interest is that after the Video Game Crash of '83, Atari was kicked to the curb and not too long after, a new generation of game-making enthusiasts took the stands. We're talking guys in their early 20's to their mid 30's at best. Those guys who started the industry are largely still there - and why they'd change formulas that otherwise work comes off as a little silly. Genres and consoles may have come and gone between then and now but a lot of the same minds and principles are still employed to this day. Next, and I suppose this is probably the most obvious reason, is you must bare in mind that gaming is a niche demographic. True, video gaming is a far bigger past time now than it ever was in the past, but it's still small compared to lots of other major hobbies. The industry was quite literally founded on the hopes of finding a key target audience of males between the ages of 5 and 20 once gaming really got off the ground and I'm talking the era before the home console market came to exist. 30 years ago the term "home console" would just make people stare you funny but the words "penny arcade" were a quite literal sentiment for the era. I want to go ahead and make an aside here before I go on with the previous paragraph's thought process - lady-gamers out there, I'm aware that you enjoy playing just as well as any guy and some of you could play circles around some of us males. The fact is that the original and primary-even-to-this-day demographic for game companies is young males. Sorry. I don't mean to sound misogynistic here, but that's how it is. I think girl gamers rock, but that's just me. But as I was - the fact remains that young boys grow up to be adolescent boys and if they were like me, they were gaming the entire time. This means that they have/had obscene lengths of time to experience new games and new titles for as many as 30 years now. With each game comes new challenges to overcome and a gamer's core skills lie within certain key elements. These elements include (but are not limited to): hand-eye coordination, reflexes, reaction time, puzzle solving and strategy to name just a few. Considering doing anything repeatedly for over a year alone would give one considerable expertise on whatever it was they were doing. Multiply THAT times 30 and you sudden get a convincing argument that maybe the games aren't getting easier, but the hardcore gaming demographic becoming a tougher nut to crack. You can argue about the innovations and evolution of games all you'd like but, in truth, gaming itself hasn't really changed all that much. Sure the controllers have more buttons now or in some cases require spastic arm flailing or stepping on a big pad and some genres incorporate these elements in different fashions but no matter how you slice it, the core idea hasn't really changed since the first video game was made. So the next semi-logical argument would be "Hey, why not make games harder?". Well, that sounds very well and good until you consider that not everyone started gaming 30 years ago. No one on FAN is even 30 years old, let alone having played games since then anyways. With the advent of things like the Wii, gaming has reached ages and demographics that until now were an untapped reservoir of gamers - or what is called the "casual gaming" demographic. As a result, increasing the difficulty would be effectively shutting this new, profitable margin out into the cold - which the gaming companies would not look favorably upon. The best option in this case would be to simply allow the player to pick their own difficulty settings from a list - the more options the better. Also, a dynamic difficulty system ALA God Hand could really challenge hardcore gamers and still give leeway to the more casual crowd. Sound good? Good. More next time, let me know what you think! |
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Come visit me and my thought processes at my website: http://www.publishedauthors.net/tdotdw/news.html "In the cold light, justice and morality always look corny and you can't wave the flag and look cool. But like it or not, society needs its heroes." - John Hart; actor who played The Lone Ranger. | |
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| Dietaku | Feb 18 2009, 03:44 PM Post #44 |
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Grade A /B/tard
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Hear, hear! In fact, with God Hand, it gives you BONUSES when you choose to go the extra distance and go higher in difficulty, as opposed to say.....Megaman, which is like hammering your gonads for an hour. (Classic, not the others) |
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| Root | Feb 18 2009, 10:25 PM Post #45 |
The Speaker for the Dead
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I agree with both Dan and Jeff's post. I enjoy gaming casually, and if I want a challenge, a difficulty setting would be great. And yes. Dan is correct in the fact that Megaman is ... like that. |
Does being the only sane one make me the insane one, in a sort of way? Though my eyes could see, I was still a blind man; Though my mind could think, I still was a madman... "Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run...there's still time to change the road you're on" | |
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| Sean | Feb 19 2009, 03:15 PM Post #46 |
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The ⑥of Four Against Nature
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Dan should read your rant on Megaman, Bryan. 
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| Jeff | Mar 15 2009, 03:29 PM Post #47 |
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Destroyer of Worlds
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It's been far too long since I've done one of these, so let's have some FUN! To Start: SCREW PROFESSIONAL GAME REVIEWERS This may sound a bit asinine as I rather strive to become one myself, but I say this for a very good reason. Every reviewer on Earth, the tall and the small, have an angle to play. If a reviewer is working for Nintendo Power magazine, of COURSE they're going to give Nintendo games good scores. The mindless drones even gave Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - I believe - and 8.-some out of 10 even though it is an unambiguously horrible game. If a reviewer works for, say, PSX Magazine, of COURSE Playstation games will be heralded as awesome - it's just the way the medium works. And if they work for IGN, having a full frontal lobotomy and abnormally high levels of pretentiousness is a mandate. Every allegedly-professional individual who sits on their ass, plays games then writes up a review for it to earn their bread and butter has 3 key elements working against their credibility. 1) Console/Genre biases. They rarely even try to hide these. Look, I don't call, for the sake of argument, RTS or FPS games my favorite genres but I damn well TRY to like a game before I kick it in the teeth. 2) Time constraints. Reviewing magazines often times get review copies of a game prior to it hitting market, but if they take too long (like, say, oh, wasting time by actually trying to play the game) their competition will overtake them by any means necessary. 3) They usually only have one (maybe two, tops) talking about any given game. One man (or woman) might feel differently about any given game, and the more opinions you hear from varying sources will give you a better indication of the game's quality as opposed to just hearing one. So, what's one to do? Ignore the magazines, ignore the "pros", ignore the pretentious pricks passing themselves off as "pros". If you want the down-n-dirty of any given game, ask a GAMER. Ask your friends, ask other gamers - the people who pay to play the games and their sole reward is the experience and fun from any given title instead of a paycheck at the end of the month. Ask LOTS of people, see if you can't find a general consensus. That's an easy way to get opinion on the quality of any given game. If you want to cut the nonsense out of the way, then rent the game for yourself and give it a whirl. Make your own opinions. Then post them on FAN 'cuz I'm not the only person here allowed to do this kind of stuff, y'know. However, this transitions rather nicely to my next point. If you review - or even just offer an opinion - on any given game, be prepared for the shitstorm. What do I mean by that? Well, the best way to demonstrate would be to offer up an example. Let's create a hypothetical situation between "Bill" and "Sue". Bill: Gee whiz, I do so love Super Mario Galaxy! It's a solid game. Sue: Ah, I see, you're a Nintendo Fanboy! So, obviously, you love the Wii but you hate the PS3 and Xbox 360! Bill: What? No, I didn't say that. Sue: But I just assumed, since you said something positive about a 1st-party Wii title, you must be a Nintendo fanboy! This isn't a huge stretch of the imagination - at least not for me. And this isn't a Nintendo-exclusive phenomena, it can apply to virtually any console of any era. If you say something nice about a game or a console or anything related to either without immediately following it up with a negative to balance it out, you will be labeled a *Insert console name here*-tard. It's annoying, it's immature, but compartmentalizing and dehumanizing other humans is what humans do best. It's a part of our inner nature - a particular part of our brain which rewards us with a happy buzz for validating our beliefs and preconceptions of the world around us. Yes, our own brains reward us for being closed-minded douchebags. So, what to do about this? Well, don't be a douchebag I guess would be the short answer. Live and let game, perhaps? Everyone has their opinion - including this very rants topic. Yes, that's right - I state OPINION. Just because I have one doesn't mean that those around me can't have one of their own. I suppose people need to just relax more, I guess. Yes, this point also applies to Portal fanboys claiming it to be the "Perfect Game". Speaking of which~ There is no such thing as a "Perfect Game" or "Perfect Console". You have no idea how much the very TERM "Perfect Game" pisses me off. Allow me to draw up three examples of games called "Perfect Game" within recent memory. 1) Super Smash Bros Brawl. 2) Halo 3 3) Portal Why are these games not perfect? Well, long list made short it comes out as: 1) Sausage fest, only +10 more characters than previous game in a game priding itself on its roster, repetitive single-player campaign, obvious character biases, schizophrenia, making "Hard" the new "Normal". 2) It's "Doom" with prettier graphics and a plot that makes LESS sense. 3) Spoonfed puzzles, zero replay value, obscenely short story mode, made ludicrously popular due to decent humor and a catchy ending song. Oh, and 1st-person platforming, let's not forget THAT sin, shall we. So, what would make the perfect game? Nothing, you twit! That's my point! There is no conceivable thing as a "Perfect Game", just as there is no "Perfect Book" or "Perfect Movie" or a "Perfect Painting"! The medium is ever-evolving and if there ever was some theoretical plateau that it could end up stagnating on, I will be forced to kill myself because it'll be the end of innovation in a medium just getting the hang of walking (though it does have this strange tendency to randomly regress for short spurts, but it's getting better, slowly). I know I said earlier all these rants are opinions - but it is a FACT that there will never be a "Perfect Game". Period. There will be good games, there will be great games, there will even be mediocre, bad or poor games and the occasional "video game market-crashing"-ly bad game ALA E.T. But we should be happy by this - that means video games will continue to evolve as a viable medium. New patents, new ideas, new games and new series are being made all the time. Some will be hits, some will be misses, but either way the industry marches on. And, finally, some speculation. Making a console generation with photo-realistic graphics across the board... will it end the medium? Every 5-10 years, a new console generation gets birthed. Each generation, the graphics get better. Entire game franchises have been launched on graphics and character design alone - I'm looking at YOU, Tomb Raider - so what'll happen when we have a console generation who all have the graphical processing power to make virtual reality-level graphics that make it so that it can become hard to tell where the TV screen ends and the real world begins? Well, I present you two scenarios. 1) The video game market will crash and burn. Why? Back in the pre-Nintendo era, when Atari was actually making good games, several consoles were available. Not the least of which including: Atari (and its many iterations), Colecovision, Intellivision, Odyssey, Apple II, Bally Professional Arcade, Commodore PET, and others. What was the key difference? Well... the control schemes were slightly different. That's about it. Not too long after, every single one of the systems I mentioned above and many I did not crashed, failed, burned and were never heard from again. Why? They were essentially the same damn thing - there was no competition in a market where every product was the same. So, if every next-gen console was the exact same... well, use your imagination. Alternatively, the other option would be-- 2) People remember that real life blows goats and more games like God Hand, No More Heroes, MadWorld, Katamari Damacy and more begin cropping up. Original games with quirky stories, characters and gimmicks become the heroes of the era and under-appreciated game companies finally make a name for themselves. A good time is had by all the medium evolves in a new way. Which pretty much guarantees Microsoft will drop out of the console battles by then, but, hey, that's just speculation. Realistically speaking, though? Don't count on Option 2. It didn't happen the first time, and most companies have already forgotten about '83. Those who don't learn from history... |
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Come visit me and my thought processes at my website: http://www.publishedauthors.net/tdotdw/news.html "In the cold light, justice and morality always look corny and you can't wave the flag and look cool. But like it or not, society needs its heroes." - John Hart; actor who played The Lone Ranger. | |
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| Root | Mar 15 2009, 08:06 PM Post #48 |
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The Speaker for the Dead
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Sadly, though, this is not the only area where you'll see such close-mindedness. Other subjects that are still prone to this kind of treatment are politics and religion, because as you said the human mind seems to enjoy shoving it into other people's face that one person's opinion is better than another's. Well, what can you do? |
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Does being the only sane one make me the insane one, in a sort of way? Though my eyes could see, I was still a blind man; Though my mind could think, I still was a madman... "Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run...there's still time to change the road you're on" | |
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| Jeff | Aug 27 2009, 11:56 AM Post #49 |
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Destroyer of Worlds
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I have 30 or so minutes before I need to get to my classes, and since Thursday is my late day, I figured I'll do a quick rant here before I mosey on. The following is purely opinion and speculation, and you may feel free to disagree. There's also spoilers ahead, so read at your own risk. Mother 3, AKA: EarthBound 2, did not come to the American side for one simple reason: Mother 3 is not a good game. I know, I know, how dare he spit upon the Mother franchise. Well, I'm not. Mother 1 and Mother 2 are great games that have a lot going for them. Mother 3 has none of that. You start off in an overly-idyllic little island world, isolated from the evils of mankind's own folly where everything is free (but useless for gameplay balance reasons) where you get to name your little family of four: Daddy, Mommy and twin boys. The game also starts off in EarthBound's quirky style, guiding you around the plot early in the game by silly things, such as paths being blocked by lines of tiny ants, or the save points being frogs. This is all well and good, and early on you get the chance to play as several different characters as the primary protagonist, giving the game a feel of a grand, epic tale told from multiple vantage points. So far so good, right? Not really. The combat system is copy-pasta'd straight from EarthBound, limited item space, PSI menus, etc, except replace "Psychic Abilities" and "Bombs" for some characters with "Totally worthless techniques you'll use maybe twice". Also, the primary attack can function as a combo, assuming you know the enemy's "beat". How do you learn that? By putting the enemy to sleep. This lets you rack up to (I believe) 12 hits in total, which sounds very impressive, but isn't. After the third hit you cease inflicting any damage of consequence and start seeing a string of 1's. Might I ask the obvious question: WHAT'S THE POINT?! Super Robot Wars: Original Generation: Endless Frontier: Dear God This Game's Name Is Long: I Really Like Colons did something similar, but actually made the system intuitive and usable. Oh, and *gasp* FUN! Anyways, you start off a bit of the prologue as the family's dad who, frankly, was my favorite character because his powers were useful and he wielded a FUCKING FOUR-BY-FOUR AS HIS WEAPON. Now that's manly. And as you may have guessed, you use him for one chapter before he becomes completely inconsequential to the rest of the game. Later, you play as Duster, a thief who... doesn't steal anything. Terrific. You're instructed to break into the Castle of No Real Significance and retrieve and item that doesn't become relevant until way later into the plot. Duster's grandpa joins you, but he sucks too, so let's just move right along. Let's see... oh, eventually, Mommy dies for no justified reason except to piss the player off, and then your brother "dies" (don't worry, he comes back as the penultimate boss of the game in a twist even a 12-year-old fanfiction writer could've conceived off-the-cuff) and Pokey/Porky, an antagonist from EarthBound, returns as an emperor over fat, lazy, pig-like storm troopers who take over the island and turn it into a thriving capitalist nation. The game seriously wants you to believe that this is a bad thing. Seriously. And it's at this point the game stops being funny. The cute, quirky enemies common to Mother 1 and 2 are replaced by chimera-like beasts and cyborgs whose names could almost be funny if they weren't supposed to inspire fear and loathing against capitalism and science. The sole cool character spends the rest of the game moping at his wife's grave and the game is handed into the hands of Lucas, the mute protagonist. Oh, and his dog, Boney, is the second character to join your party permanently. Yes, the JOKE CHARACTER of EarthBound joins as a PRIMARY PROTAGONISTIC FORCE. ... What the hell? Who thought this was a good idea? The thief and a tomboyish princess (why does it sound like I'm reviewing Chrono Trigger here?) join you as backup-hitter and Oh, and before I forget, you get PSI Rockin' (your primary offensive PSI) through implied rape/sodomy with a minor. I am not making this up. I couldn't, because I'm not as sick and deranged as to even BEGIN to imply that the scene was funny - it wasn't. I know Japan has a different caliber for what's "funny", what with Razor Ramon Hard Gay, but all I could think of was just how not-funny this game had been and that it better start being more entertaining, or I was going to cease trying to care about it. And let's not forget the Magypsies. A group of transvestites (the game tries to write this off by playing the "genderless" card, but fuck that noise, it's obvious what they're doing) who talk in the stereotypically "gay" fashion and hit on male cast members only. Are you shocked, because at this point, I really wasn't. You're then told, in a very round-a-bout fashion, that in order to stop the EEEEEEEEEEEEVIL capitalists and scientists, you would need to remove the 7 needles from the Earth, which would awaken a powerful dragon. The catch was that only someone with the PSI Rockin' powers could remove them, which was a very small number (AKA: The protagonist and his allegedly-dead brother, who is proven to be very much alive sometime in chapter 3 or 4) and the dragon's behavior would be influenced by the heart of the one who drew out the most needles (good person = good dragon, bad person = bad dragon). Who wrote this story? The producer's grandkids? The only particularly interesting part of the game was a boat tour through a museum which showed off landmark events of EarthBound, but that hardly made it up to me because the game is so damn dark and depressing that I had long since forgotten that Mother's credo involved off-the-wall humor and a unique sense of style. Mother 3 has none of this post Chapter 1. And the great climax? The dragon wakes up AND EVERYBODY FUCKING DIES. THE END. No, I'm not joking. They say "the world restarts" but what the hell do you think THAT means?! All-in-all, Mother 3 has no redeeming value. The gameplay is weak, its "innovations" scarce and the few that are present are laughable, the story is comparable to a root canal in terms of its humor value, and it touches themes I wouldn't want little kids exposed to. It's a BAD GAME. That's why it never left Japan, not because of Reggie or some kind of vast conspiracy. That's the simple truth, as told by the Jeff. See you next time! |
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Come visit me and my thought processes at my website: http://www.publishedauthors.net/tdotdw/news.html "In the cold light, justice and morality always look corny and you can't wave the flag and look cool. But like it or not, society needs its heroes." - John Hart; actor who played The Lone Ranger. | |
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2:59 AM Dec 6
