Virtual Adept

Wow, is this a blast back to the past. I played Lemmings on the PC back when it came out for the PC in the 90’s. This is a classic puzzle game. You have these Lemmings, little green haired dudes that will gleefully follow the leader to their death if you don’t use the Lemming’s special functions to make a safe path from them to the level exit. You will have many obstacles, many of them deadly to the Lemmings, and the goal is to get a certain percentage of Lemmings as dictated by the level goals to the safety of the level exit. This is basically a remake with slightly improved graphics over the original, plus some 36 bonus levels never before seen, and a level editor and the ability to download new levels from a web site and share you levels with other PSP users. I haven’t tried sharing levels. I did play with the level editor for a bit and it’s pretty easy to use. I completed 29 or so of the Lemmings Original levels, and about 12 or 15 of the new ones. So far it’s pretty fun, although it’s getting pretty difficult now, and I may need to get some hints soon. I’d rate this at least a B+ so far.

More bad news for Sony fans. You won’t get any lovin’ from the developers of Splinter Cell Convicted or Bioshock.

Bioshock is going to be the spiritual successor to the System Shock franchise, set in some kind of underwater utopia where genetic experimentation went horribly wrong. If you have not yet seen the developer-commentary gameplay videos of Bioshock, definitely check it out, this game looks great and will be far more to it than just a typical FPS shooter. I think some of their claims about the AI are stretching it a bit, but even if the AI isn’t as awesome as they claim it will be, the game still looks great and has a lot of unique gameplay to it.

As for Splinter Cell, I’ve never been a big fan, but it’s got to suck for Sony since it is a very popular franchise now. Oh well, I guess Sony has Metal Gear.

Bioshock and Splinter Cell Convicted are supposed to come out for the Xbox 360 and Windows.

 

Microsoft announced a X06 today that there will be Halo Wars, a Real-Time Strategy game set in the Halo universe, coming for the Xbox 360 sometime in the next year or so hopefully (no launch date has been given yet). The trailer for it they showed looked great. You can get the trailer and more info over at GameSpot. This is a really big deal. If done right, Halo Wars could bring a whole new batch of gamers to the Halo franchise. I just hope they decide to do a PC version.

Just read a nice article on Wired about The Mythical 40-hour Gamer (via Slashdot). This article talks about the frustrations that a casual gamer goes through when trying to play games that are usually designed with the hardcore gamer in mind.  It’s a really good article, I recommend reading it.  He claims that hardcore gamers, meaning, gamers who play games in large blocks of time over short periods of time, can blow through a long game in a relatively short period of time because they are able to concentrate fully on that game and learn it in and out much more quickly.

In contrast, folks like me — “soft-core” gamers? — also crave to play these richly narrative, long-lasting titles. But we can only play in dribs and drabs — an hour here, an hour there. The unspoken truth of gaming is that this creates a vastly different, and vastly inferior, mental space for game playing. If you’re continually loading the game into your mental RAM, only to dump it out again an hour later, you can never concentrate as fully on grokking its internal mechanics.

This is the problem that developers are facing - their core audience, the hardcore gamer crowd, is far more advanced and can finish games in a fraction of the time that the mass market casual gamers can. So you end up with a supposed 40 hour game that a hardcore gamer can complete in 20 hours or less, but that takes a casual gamer 50 or 60 hours. Those are vastly different, and people who can do the former obviously get a much more focused and entertaining experience than the latter.

Is there any solution to this? Well, obviously one thing that can help a great deal is for developers to build in different levels of difficulty ratings into the game. I have long since gotten over having to select “Easy” from the difficulty settings list. I almost always pick Easy to start with now. Why? Because I have a limited amount of time that I can devote to games, and so for me Easy means I can get through the game pretty quickly and not spend month after month on it. If I find that a game is actually too easy (rarely), I can always bump the difficulty up.  But not every game has difficulty settings, or doesn’t implement them properly.

I find myself enjoying shorter and shorter games more, and not feeling “ripped off” because it only took me 15 hours to finish it. GUN, for example, was a short game, but I really liked it because it was focused enough that I was able to complete it and enjoy the epic narrative without spending weeks and months on it in spurts so that I never did understand the story. Maybe what game publishers need to do is market to casual gamers and hardcore gamers specifically. They could rate the game as to which group it caters to the most. This way casual gamers wouldn’t have to get frustrated with too hard and too long games, and hardcore gamers wouldn’t get “ripped off” by finishing a game in 10 or less hours.

Are you more of a casual gamer or hardcore gamer? Do you prefer longer or shorter games? Easy mode or hard mode?

I have a tremendous backlog of games to play now. It’s just not even funny. And the sad part is the Holiday rush is coming soon and there are at least two dozen games I must have now that I have to buy. Realistically there is no way I will get to all of them, but I am obsessive about it and will buy them all anyway. Lately I only play a not too great percentage of the games I end up buying.

If I had to break it down into percentages, I would say I probably end up opening and at least trying for an hour or so about 60% of my games I buy. I know that sounds rediculous but I buy a lot of bargain bin PC games that I think I want to look at but never get around to so that brings my percentage down quite a bit. I probably only actually play maybe 20%, as in, really get down to spending quality time with a game. This means I spent at least 5 or 6 hours on it and at least got into the main gameplay and not just the opening acts or whatever. And finally, I might finish maybe 2% of the games I buy. Finishing a game demands a lot of time and persistance on my part, and usually before I can find the time to do that some other game has caught my fancy and I drop my last obsession without a thought.

I know those percentages are aweful and many of you are thinking “what a waste!” but that’s about accurate. I really have more money for games than time to play them so it ends up this way. I could probably save a lot of money if I just made a commitment to at least spend 10 hours with every game I buy before I buy the next one. But I’m not sure I can do that. I guess if my financial situation greatly changed I could do something like that. So I end up being more of a game collector than a game player in some ways. I buy some games just because I own another game in the series even if I have no intention of playing it. It’s crazy.

Part of the reason I am like this is because I hate it when a game I wanted to play becomes “rare” so that I then have to spend a lot of money to get a copy of it. That means I buy a lot of games out of fear that I either won’t find a copy later or will have to spend too much on it. I have had this happen to me several times so it’s not like it never happens. I paid through the nose for Valkyrie Profile and others.

I usually tend to wait for sales and bargains. I rarely spend more than $25 for a game, except for the RPG genre which I probably average out around $35 for. RPGs tend to hold their value longer anyway, and I tend to buy more of them when they first come out, because it’s my favorite genre. I also tend to spend more for portable games for some reason. I think it’s because portable games tend to disappear faster and become harder to find, so I fear not getting “my copy” and end up buying them while they are still around and before they ever get cheaper (if that even happens). Sometimes it just depends on the game, of course, but I have had a few cases where I had to spend extra for a rare portable title because I waited too long and it went out of stock.

So am I the only one like this? What are your percentages of games opened, played, and finished?

Just saw the list of games to be released this week over on Joystiq. Their full list is amazing, there’s going to be over 20 games released this week. Here is just a sample, the ones I might actually be interested in:

• Baten Kaitos Origins (GCN) - this is a must have for me.
• Mario vs Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis (DS) - will wait on reviews but this looks great.
• Just Cause (PC, Xbox, PS2, 360) - liked the demo for this for 360, might try the PC ver.
• Mage Knight: Apocalypse (PC) - I’m mainly interested in this so i can get the cool dragon pack-in.
• DEFCON (PC) - this is from the makers of Darwinia. Might be good, I’ll wait and see though.
• Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria (PS2) - this is a must have for me.
• Caesar IV (PC) - will look at reviews.
• ParaWorld (PC) - will look at reviews.

I am really getting behind on my RPGs, There are now like 6 or 7 out for the PS2 that I haven’t aquired yet. I am kind of obsessive about collecting all of them so I will probably be dishing out some dosh soon. But on the downside, I really wanted to save my money to get a Wii in November.

 

This long winded titled RPG called Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion for the PSP has been taking up a bunch of my portable gaming time lately. Developed by Japanese RPG developer Falcom, apparently this game is actually the third in a series of games that started on another platform. However, knowledge of anything from previous games is not required at all. Legend of Heroes is a story based RPG with a turn-based combat system. The graphics are kind of old school 2D top down view with very well drawn artwork and some nice 3D special effects for spell effects and such. The water effects look very nice and other environmental effects, but the overall graphical feel is somewhat retro. This is actually part of the game’s charm.

You play as a young man named Avin who was seperated from his sister at a young age when an evil wizard broke into the church where they were raised and tried to capture her. They were seperated during the fighting and Avin as taken away to be raised by a sage in a small village. After he grew older, the sage died and entrusted Avin with a quest to deliver a sacred artifact to another sage in another village. Avin met another young boy Miles and the two became good friends as they grew up together in the small village. Miles decided to go along with Avin on his quest. And so the two young men set out to find Avin’s sister, and along the way they had many adventures.

The combat system used in Legend of Heroes is a turn-based system where you select what you want each member of your party to do and then the action occurs in an order determined by each combatant’s speed rating. Movement and placement on the map is actually important, because for melee attacks you must be able to move within range of your target or you can’t hit them, and for spells you must be able to get within the spell’s range or area of effect for them to work. You kind of have to do a little guesswork there because you pick what you want to target at the beginning of the turn, but they are not guaranteed to be in the same place when that character’s turn actually comes up during the fighting. This gives the game a bit of strategy in choosing what targets you want to attack.

In addition to normal attacks with normal weapons like Avin’s swords or Miles’ boomerang, you can use spells. Avin knows black magic and Miles knows white magic, which is about what you’d expect. Black magic is more for offense and white is more for defense and healing. There are other types of magic too. You will meet one character early on who can do something called spirit magic which lets her bring forth elemental spirits who can attack all enemies at once. In addition to spells, which use magic points, you also have skills, which are kind of like spells or more like unique character-based powers, but these skills do not cost any magic points to use. Then there is also something called “deadly”, and that is a massive deadly attack that does a great deal of damage and is customized for each character. You can only use deadly when your deadly meter is full, and it gets full by doing regular attacks on enemies, each regular attack adding a bit to the meter until it eventually fills up. Knowing when to save and when to use your deadly attack is an important strategy.

The story so far after about 6 or 7 hours is very well developed. The characters actually feel more realistic than the typical kiddie type characters you get in most RPGs. Yes, you are playing a young man, Avin, but the characters do just feel more realistic in many ways. For example, the methods of speech used by the characters just seems more grown up and less contrived as you might expect in other Japanese console RPGs. The plot itself is actually pretty deep and it involves quite a bit of politics and deception, so it’s less childish in many ways than a lot of other RPGs I have played. This has drawn me further into the game world and keeps me wanting to play more of it.

I will report more about the story and any flaws I happen to find in the game as I play further. If I had to rate the game today I’d probably give it a A, it’s really entertaining so far.

At the Tokyo Game Show Sony hinted that they will be charging about $1 for game demos on their online service (via G-Pinions). A lot of gamers are up in arms about this, but it really doesn’t come as a big surprise to me. We all know that they have to figure out a way to pay for their online service, it can’t be totally a money pit for them. I’ll actually be surprised if they don’t start offering some premium services add ons to the basic service that will entice most hardcore online gamers to pony up a subscription fee too. Sure, the basic gameplay will be free, but if you want to be able to display your Entitlements (still LOL on that one) to other gamers you need a subscription, or some such thing.

I just got a PSP so I am kind of in love with it, and I’ve been giving my previous love, the NDS, the cold shoulder, except for the occasional short session with Brain Age. I have about 80 minutes of bus ride every day, so that is one place I usually play portables, and I sometime whip it out at lunch for a quickie, if I’m not feeling too insecure that day about showing my hardware in public.

I also have taken to spending about an hour each evening right before going to sleep playing my PSP or NDS after the wife goes to sleep. It’s great to play them in the dark, and it usually helps me wind down (picking the right game here is important).

Other than that sometimes I’ll play a game if it’s not too intense while watching TV shows. I did this with Final Fantasy I & II on the GBA SP while watching Batman reruns and Teen Titans on the DVR. It takes the kind of game that is repetitive enough that you can spend almost all of you concentration on the show and not have to spend much on the game and turn-based games are pretty much a must here. Playing through the commercials at least.

So when do you play your portable gaming devices?

I read over on G-Pinions some new PS3 games were announced at TGS and the videos looked great. I have to admit, the videos look… great. Stellar.
But…

Graphics aren’t going to convince me to buy a PS3, but some new game with a killer gameplay AND great graphics or using that 7 core cell processor to do some amazing shit with AI might convince me. I am going to need some next-gen gameplay, I don’t care about 1080p (my TV only does 1080i or 720p), and the Xbox 360 looks great to me anyway. Even if PS3’s graphics blow the 360’s away (and I’m very, very skeptical), that’s not enough for me to justify a $600 system.

I need a justification to spend $600 and Resistance, yet another FPS/shooter, is not it. I liked the shots of Resistance they did at E3 but it didn’t look like a system seller to me. I was more impressed with Gears of War’s gameplay to be honest.

I’m buying a Wii at launch because of Zelda primarily, but I’m also interested in several other launch titles. I can’t see myself picking up a PS3 until 2008, after Final Fantasy XIII is out and maybe a price drop on the system.

Here is what would convince me to buy a PS3 at launch, if we did the time warp again.

1. Final Fantasy XIII @ launch.
2. God of War 2 as a PS3 exclusive.
3. A new Jak or Ratchet game @ launch.
4. Something really new and cool that is not a sequel but really pushes the limit and is truely next-gen.
5. Something quirky that doesn’t really do anything amazing as far as processing power but just has amazingly addictive gameplay, much like Katamari. I don’t mean a Katamari sequel, I mean a game that comes out of nowhere like it did.

If any of those things happened, maybe 2 of them anyway, I’d be much more interested in PS3 @ launch. I really think Sony is only doing this launch now because they have to save face and not lose another Christmas with no PS3 launched. They obviously are just not ready yet.

Even Nintendo seems not quite as on the ball as they should (but they seem much more prepared than Sony does). Microsoft kicked everyone’s ass. Yes, they made some mistakes, like a too-small 20gb optional HDD (WTF were they thinking?), but overall they’ve done pretty good, and they’re only doing better lately.

I was reading on Interscription yesterday about Saint’s Row and Khidr posed the question “what would you like to see in the ultimate urban sandbox adventure?” I wanted to take some time and write a meaningful response, so I decided to think on it a while and make that a post on my own blog.

First of all, lets go into the background of this “genre” of game so we know the current state of the art in this style of game. This “genre” really didn’t take off until Grand Theft Auto 3 came out. There were games before that that were open ended and offered similar freedoms, but GTA3 defined the genre as a genre, and was also the first to be widely imitated.  GTA3 took elements of a bunch of other genres and mixed them together to form something refreshing and something that really had a lot of immersion because of all the things you could do in the game world.

Over time, the GTA series has improved and added more and more features. In the latest game, GTA San Andreas, elements of RPG and strategy were added to give the game even more depth. Tons of new minigames were added. The game is still primarily an action/adventure but because of all the added gameplay elements it feels like much more. Saint’s Row is a lot like GTASA except it’s in high def.

So, back to the question. What would be my ultimate urban sandbox adventure?  I think first of all I would ditch the whole “gangs and thugs” theme, which is way overdone at this point. There is no reason that this same “genre” of gameplay can not be done using different themes. Here’s some suggestions:

Grand Theft Horse - a wild west themed “urban” sandbox game, where you move from frontier town to frontier town doing missions, defending the town from injun uprisings, pony express, rescuing the rancher’s daughter from her virginity, the stuff of true grit heroes. GUN sort of did this but it messed up by making it mission based rather than a seamless world where you could do all the stuff it did without jumping into a “jarring” misson mode. And honestly GUN just didn’t have enough content, it isn’t a third the game of GTASA. Still, it did an okay job and is well worth a play if this subject matter interests you, especially at it’s bargain prices you can find it these days.

Grand Theft Cyber - How about a game set in William Gibson’s dystopic future of Neuromancer? Samurai chicks with razor claws and mirrored shades. Cyberpunk or just science fiction settings in general would be a refreshing change from the tired old gangsta urban themes. They could do one set in Shadowrun, also, that would so own. If Microsoft did something similar to the gameplay of Shadowrun for Sega Genesis, but in 3D and more mini-games and things to do, wow, I’m getting wood just thinking about that game.

Grand Theft Chariot - how’s about a game set in Rome during the height of the Roman Empire? You cold do chariot races, participate in trecharous sentate politics, be a mercenary or a legionaire helping to keep the territories in line, or so much more. Ancient Greece would also be a good setting, or just about any historical setting that there are good movies and books about. Gone With the Grand Theft Wind. Grand Theft Tank circa WW2. Grand Theft China. Grand Theft Privateer (aka Pimps at Sea ).

Grand Theft Dragon - fantasy themes are still very popular if a bit overdone, but I could still enjoy a good game set in a fantasy setting with gameplay similar to the GTA series. This has been done before, of course, the latest game of this sort being The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Oblivion is an action/adventure and an RPG. It’s action oriented, but it is also an RPG with levels and skills and stuff. If it had more mini-games and if the horses had worked more like GUN it could have been even better. More interativity is needed, more care taken to individualize the NPCs, and such, but overall a very good job, and easily one of the best games of 2006 if not the best. Morrowind is a bit dated but it offers a lot of the same “non-linear, immersive world” fun that Oblivion does. The Gothic games are another good example.

But lets get back to “urban” themed games. I would like to see even more mini-games seamlessly built into the game world. And not just about killing or driving, we need lots of new kinds of interactivity. Pick up a basketball and get into a game with some kids. Buy a skateboard and take it to the skating park and it switches into Tony Hawk mode. Buy some bait and go down to the docks and fish. Buy a bunch of ingredients and become Chef Boyardee. Visit a casino and play the slots, blackjack, or a nice round of Texas Hold’em. Visit the arcades and play Pac Man or Spy Hunter. Have gratuitous sex with your girlfriend and prove your sexual prowess. Okay, just kidding on that last one, I’m sure no one would even think of doing that.

I should be able to do some normal jobs too, instead of just being a thug all the time. Like maybe I can do a mailman job or delivery boy, or I could be a taxi driver, a fireman, putting out the fires that got started when I wrecked the SUV into the gas station, an ambulance medic (including CPR mini-game), a cop, a detective, a construction worker, etc. Why not let me be a computer geek programming in a cubicle all day long?

Another thing I think is essential to the ultimate urban adventure is for the game to include more RPG elements like GTASA started doing. My favorite genre is RPG after all, and what I really want is a game that is fully immersive but with RPG stats like Oblivion and in other settings besides just fantasy. There should be some experience points system so you can improve your character over time. Having the ability to customize the character would be nice (and not just looks), and the choices you make should have an impact on what you can do in the game. You should be able to learn different skils and make choices while developing the character.

 My last point I want to make about the ultimate urban sandbox game is that it needs to be more targeted toward a mass, casual audience. The GTA games are too hard. Casual gamers do not like repeating the same extreme difficult missions over and over and failing and having to drive back to the mission place over and over again. Turn down the difficulty and/or add difficulty settings to the options so that casual gamers can get in on the fun too. Ideally the game should be able to turn on and off settings to make the game more or less difficult.  Oblivion has a slider bar. And keep the mini-games easy enough that a beginner can do them, and then gradually ramp up the difficulty to them or something. The goal here is not to challenge the player but to give them freedom to do whatever they want.

Another big, big help to this kind of game would be to add Save Anywhere ability. Repeating hard missions would be a lot less cumbersome if I didn’t have to drive back to the start of the mission and then restart the mission cinematics over and over. Saving mid mission would really help. I don’t care if you want to give me the Big Pussy Achievement on XBL if I chose to use it, I still want that option.

While I’m sure no game could ever be the “Ultimate” game, it’s fun to think of all the options. What are the features you would want in your “Ultimate Urban Sandbox Game”?

Read an interesting rumor over on Joystiq about the next Gran Turismo going to not really ship with that much default content forcing gamers to pay for new cars and tracks via micropayments.

We’ve already seen “micro-content” for other games on the Xbox 360, such as Oblivion’s infamous “horse armor” that cost microsoft points to add to your game, or new cars for racing games, or new multiplayer levels and content for first person shooters, etc. It seems pretty obvious to me that in a lot of cases game developers are intentionally leaving out content in their games and then pulling the old nickle and dime routine on their fans so they can get extra money for the game through micropayments.

I personally dislike this trend intensely. I want the whole game. I do not want to have to spend another $50 or whatever to get all the add-ons and crap to your game. If you want to release some additional content say six to eighteen months later, do it as an expansion pack which includes a bunch of new stuff, don’t try and milk us for each little minor addition.

Honestly I am pretty sure I will pass on any game that abuses this feature too much, or try and get it as cheap as possible, used, so that I am not contributing to the developers or publishers that think it’s okay to treat gamers like this. The Devil’s Advocate says, “But you don’t have to buy them. They are optional add-ons.” While this is true, I feel that in a lot of cases content is being intentionally left out of the game proper so that it can later be introduced for a fee, and that really bites.

How do you feel about this? Let me know in the comments section.

EDIT: via G-Pinions I found this article, which seems to indicate this is actually fact not fiction. Gran Turismo, at least in Japan, is going to ship with a paltry number of cars and tracks and require gamers to pay out the nose if they want all of the content. That’s just crazy, insane, Sony!