Virtual Adept

Whatever you do, do not ever pre-order anything from bestbuy.com, ever. You won’t get your item. I pre-ordered Neverwinter Nights 2 from them, the Limited Edition, because their online store was the only store that was offering pre-orders for the limited edition. Now after two frustrating phone calls from their customer service center in India, I have come to the conclusion (although I have not been told this by them, because they refuse to just tell me the truth of the matter) that I will never receive my game. So I did what any red blooded American would do - I went to eBay. And I paid. Through the nose. Because Best Buy Sucks.

First, a little background into this story. Most of you probably know about the infamous “Hot Coffee Mod” in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which was a hidden x-rated sex mini-game built into the initial version of the game that shipped for PS2, Xbox, and PC. You could only get to this mini-game if you used a cheat tool like GameShark to enter codes to unlock it (or for the PC, download a “mod” patch to unlock it). However, this was, of course, found, and released by some clever little deviants out there on the big bad internets.

Enter the ESRB, who, in a horrible decision which will no doubt have unfavorable repurcusions on the mod-ability of future games, under media pressure decided to re-rate GTASA from being M rated to be AO rated. The difference between an M rating, which means “Mature”, for ages 17+, and the AO rating, which means “Adults Only”, for ages 18+, seems to be only one year. But the real difference is that AO games are reserved for softcore porn software, while games with a lot of violence but no sex always get an M rating. Due to the hypocrisy of American culture, where we’d rather let our kids see people killing each other rather than making love, an AO rating is a death sentence in the retail market. Wal-Mart will not carry an AO rated title, and neither will most other major retailers. All of this would have been justifiable if the sex mini-game in GTASA was part of the game, but it was not. It was never intended for release, and could only be accessed via a mod or hack.

By making a decision to re-rate a game based on a mod, the ESRB has opened the proverbial Pandora’s Box, where now any game can be re-rated to AO because someone decides to mod it. Elmo’s Playhouse could get modded to Elmo’s Penthouse by some sick and twisted internet freak, and the ESRB could decide to re-rate the game. Would they? Probably not, but they are using this new power they’ve given themselves irresponsibly and at their own whim. Game makers are at the ESRB’s mercy now, because they can get screwed out of the profits for their game after it hits the shelves due to no fault of their own. This has already happened, to Bethesda’s Oblivion, which got re-rated from a T for “Teen” rating to M for “Mature” based on someone doing a mod that took the clothes off off NPCs in the game.

Now enter the villain and comedic relief of this grim fairy tale, Jack Thompson. Thompson is a media whore, and he also happens to be a lawyer of sorts. Thompson is on a one man mission to destroy the gaming industry, or at least, to bend it to do his bidding. Thompsons tactics are so vile that even people who are generally on the same side of this issue have made efforts to disassociate themselves from Mr. Thompson. The comedic relief part about Jack Thompson is his willingness to engage with members of the gaming community in childish antics, arguments, and outright name calling. He is the inventor of the term “pixelante“, which he uses as an insult, but some gamers have now adopted the term and wear it with pride. Jack has tried to get the Grand Theft Auto series banned with little success. He believes that Rockstar is the tool of Satan himself, and he will do anything in his power to bring it down.

Now back up about a year and a half ago, when Rockstar announced a new title for a game that is not in the popular GTA franchise. It’s a game called Bully, and what people originally thought about the game was that players would engage in school ground shennanigans, being the school bully, running around and beating the crap out of little kids and taking their lunch money. Pretty tame compared to beating and killing prostitutes, drive by shootings, drug dealing, and assassinations like you get to do in GTA, but hey, it could still be fun.

Thompson decides he is going to do everything in his power “to protect the children” and prevent Bully from ever hitting the store shelves. He and his allies actually did manage to get the game delayed. Even though Rockstar claims this was a delay for polishing, I honestly believe the game was delayed to let the “hot coffee” incident cool down a little bit. Thompson even went so far as to sue Rockstar in Florida to ban the sale of the game as it presented a “public nuissance” and that Bully was a “Columbine simulator” (even though Mr. Thompson had never even seen the game). Now the really sad part about this is that this case wasn’t immediately tossed out of court. I mean, this is supposed to be America, land of the free, and especially land of the free speech, and no court has any business deciding what media should or should not get published. There aren’t any laws prohibiting the sale of video games, and this should have been tossed out as soon as it hit the Judge’s desk. But it wasn’t, and Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Ronald Friedman decided to hear Thompson’s case.

Now here is where Rockstar pulled the whammy. Rockstar had no intentions of releasing a “Columbine simulator” of any sort. Bully isn’t about you running around being a school bully. It’s about you being a new kid in school and being the victim of bullies, and then fighting back and ridding the school of the bully menace while improving your own social standing in the school. The violence in the game is very tame, nowhere near the level of a GTA. And now after Thompson’s case got started, the ESRB decided to give the game a T for “Teen” rating based on the content. That’s right, it’s not even an M rated game, this “public nuissance” and “Columbine simulator.” This is why Rockstar was happy to let Judge Friedman see the game and see for himself what kind of content was in it. And that is why Judge Friedman in his infinite wisdom has declared that there is nothing in Bully which you can’t find every day on regular television, and has ruled against Mr. Thompson. By keeping mum on the true nature of the game until the last minute, Rockstar has let Jack Thompson dig himself into a hole that he can’t come out of without seriously losing face. Rockstar has made Thompson look like a clown, by allowing him to take a Teen rated game to court. He did it to himself, by insisting on trying to ban a game he’s never even seen, but they helped him bury himself.

And that is why Rockstar is the coolest game maker on the planet.

 

Quoting YouNEWB about EA’s latest online shooter, Battlefield 2142:

When you open the box, a big slip of paper falls out first, preceeding any discs or manuals. The slip of paper says, essentially, that 2142 includes monitoring software which runs while your computer is online, and records “anonymous” information like your IP address, surfing habits (probably via cookie scans), and other “computing habits” in order to report this information back to ad companies and ad servers, which generates in-game ads.

This is an outrage. I can’t believe anyone will sit down for this. I hope this game tanks and tanks badly, sending a message to those asshats that we’re not putting up with this shit. This makes me want to start a bonfire and toss every EA game I ever bought into it. I feel ashamed of having bought Burnout Revenge recently.

Oh well, now is the time to change. I won’t be buying any more EA games until they remove this from Battlefield 2142 and make a public apology, and make a public promise never to use spyware in any of their products ever again. I doubt that will happen, considering how little EA respect’s gamer’s privacy on Xbox Live. Gamers, do not give up your rights. You can live without this game, there is no way one game is worth handing over your life’s details to EA.

The latest Carnival of Gamers is up on Man Bytes Blog, so when you have an hour or so to kill, go check it out. This is the first time I’ve submitted a post to the carnival, so I hope you enjoy my article about Ultimate Urban Sandbox Adventure. There are some really good reads in this month’s carnival. Here were a few of my favorites:

Kim at “pampers…” posted a really good bit about how Nintendo could be missing a hallmark moment by making their Wii controllers so expensive.

Scratcher at king lud ic talks about how Indie game developers have certain advantages over big game companies like EA.

AFK Gamer has a hysterical comedy bit about World of Warcraft and the Emo Tank.

I hope you enjoy the carnival, and for you carnival readers stopping by, I hope you enjoy my posts.

 

I’m proud to be an American, in the Land of the Free! I thought we learned something from the 1920’s Prohibition but apparently not. This is so stupid on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin. How exactly are they going to enforce a law like this? Seems to me it just hurts the bigger, safer companies in the industry. Americans will find a way to keep playing, on that you can bet good money on.

 

Jason at Unfettered Blather relates a story about a gaming company CEO on a rampage. He has an intersting bit about how much we should care about “bias” in the gaming press.  In a nutshell, Jason’s point was that if you’re not making any income off of a game, you don’t really have any bias towards it. Not sure if I agree 100% with that but in this particular case I do agree.

The article Jason linked to was from Bill Harris’s blog dubious quality, in a post that gave most of the gritty details about the “scandal” between notable game reviewer Tom Chick and the CEO of Kerberos, Martin Cirulis. Apparently this Cirulis guy likes to play Net Nazi and do whatever he can to prevent all the bad press about his sucky games, the latest being the game of “dubious quality” called Sword of the Stars. Apparently this is some kind of turn based space themed strategy game.

Tom Chick wrote a scathing review of Sword of the Stars, and Cirulis is accusing Chick of being unethical because he wrote a manual for Galactic Civilizations II. Never mind the fact that almost no other reviewer has liked Sword of the Stars so far. Chick gave it one of the lowest scores, 4 out of 10, but the reviews for it have all been under 80% on GameRankings with many in the lower range than that.

Did Tom have some bias? Well sure, everyone is biased about pretty much everything. There is no such thing as a non-biased review. But was Tom’s bias financially motivated? No. Not in this case, his work on GalCiv2 was on a contractual basis and he was paid a flat fee. He’s not going to make any more money on GalCiv2 if people decide to buy it instead of SotS. So yes, Chick is biased, like anyone, but his bias is based purely on his previous gaming experiences, not on any kind of financial opportunity. I see nothing ethically wrong with Tom reviewing a game just because he has previous experience with games in the genre. He may be a GalCiv2 fanboy, but that could be just about any reviewer.

Bill’s main point was this:

When has this strategy of attacking your critics EVER worked for a gaming company? Has it ever generated goodwill and additional sales? I can’t remember a single gaming example where this didn’t end very, very badly. This never works. And somebody at Kerberos should have had the stones to say that to Cirulis before the post-demo forum messages started getting out of hand, because those messages absolutely killed any good will the company had built up over the game.

I agree 100% with Bill on that point. In being this anti-press and anti-free speech, by slamming reviewers, deleting posts on their forums, and such, all they have done is make me not even want to look at their demo. I now will have zero interest in games from Kerberos. Not just this Stars game but ALL of them. I can’t trust them to be honest about their own work. Any company can make a bad game, but the ones that try to silence the critics are the ones that I can’t stand.

What do you think about this situation? Tell me in the comments!

Update: added more links.

Microsoft has started a new branding system for games that run under their Windows XP and especially Windows Vista operating systems that conform to certain standards. This new logo and brand is called “Games for Windows“. They even bought a magazine, Computer Gaming World, and are renaming it “Games for Windows” so they can pimp out their new brand and games with it. They’re dumping a lot of advertising dollars into this new campaign in an attempt to keep the PC gaming industry from bottoming out.

Will it work? Is this the real goal, or is Microsoft just trying to dominate PC gaming like they do Xbox gaming?

I personally think this is a good idea. Having a certification process to ensure a certain level of quality is only a good thing. Games for Windows games have to have a certain level of hardware support and a certain base feature set to get to use the logo. If this can improve the consistancy of PC gaming, that can only be a good thing in my book. I don’t really care if MS is trying to get a cut of the PC gaming market or not. Let them. I just want games that work right out of the box the first time. I want games that support my hardware that is Games for Windows certified. I want support for my Xbox 360 controller on the PC. I want all that shit.

What do you think?

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 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!

Joystiq posted up a plea to kill off the demo disk. Here’s the relative quote:

As a medium of distribution, it’s time for physical media to die and never come back. Internet users have for years now been downloading game demos from myriad websites, and console gamers are now getting the chance to do the same. With the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo “Revolution” all promising digital downloads, isn’t it time we did away with ecologically disastrous demo disks for good? And once we’ve ditched demo disks, let’s work on tossing those dastardly CDs, UMDs, MDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs, and Blu-Ray disks too, like so many cookies after a rough ride at the amusement park.

Everytime I read something like this I just laugh and wonder how the writer could be so short sighted. Yes, being able to download demos is nice, but it is certainly no replacement for having demos on a physical media. Broadband penetration in the US is only at around 60%, and there’s a LOT of gamers that live in remote, rural areas that can’t get it even if they want it. Even then, a lot of so-called broadband connections are crappy 128k connections that are fine for web surfing but painfully slow for downloading 300mb demos. On top of that, the hard drives in consoles aren’t all that large (esp. the 360), and unless people are happy with downloading, playing right then, and deleting, there’s going to be a demand for a more permanent storage.

And as for full fledge games, we’re nowhere NEAR ready for digital-delivery only. Not even on the PC, where hard drives are large and cheap. With games regularly being 5gb+, that’s just too big, even for fast broadband, to put up with when buying a DVD is so much quicker, more convenient, and above all, permanent. Sure, you’ll always have people who like digital downloads, and that’s fine, but there’s a LOT of people not ready for that yet who prefer a physical media.

Even in the music world, where songs/albums are relatively painless and quick downloads, there’s still a demand for physical media. In conclusion, we’re not there yet, and we won’t be for quite a while. Broadband is going to have to get much faster, storage capacity on our devices bigger, and even then there’s still advantages to a permanent physical media.

What do you think? Tell me in comments.

Henry Jenkins, MIT professor, has written an excellent, well documented, and not too terribly long essay on eight different myths about video games and why they are myth, not fact. The myths that he debunks are:

• The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence.
• Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression.
• Children are the primary market for video games.
• Almost no girls play computer games.
• Because games are used to train soldiers to kill, they have the same impact on the kids who play them.
• Video games are not a meaningful form of expression.
• Video game play is socially isolating.
• Video game play is desensitizing.

All false.

Go read the article now! What do you think?