Site Update – I’ve moved

Don’t know how everybody else feels, but I’m kinda getting tired of this “Bowlby” schtick, so I’m moving blogs.  All the content listed here will stay up for the indefinite future, but any new posts I write will be featured at http://www.mcraymond.wordpress.com.

“I’ve made a huge mistake”

I just realised that I never actually got around to giving my impressions on the iPad, despite making several fervent statements elsewhere. To sum up my original position, I thought it would underperform, and I happened to mention this on a friend’s status update on Facebook:

Turns out I didn't need to wait more than two months, let alone two years.

So, essentially my reasoning was: they’re entering into an unproven market; it’s too big; it doesn’t do all the things a laptop/netbook can do; it looks delicate; and it will become old tech within a short period of time. Ergo, it’s likely to fail.

Unfortunately, I underestimated one thing: the Apple factor – by which I mean the strength of the brand and Jobs’s (or his team of engineer’s) uncanny talent for designing accessible, shiny-looking user interfaces.

And why am I mentioning this all now?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/31/ipad-apple-tablet-sales

Taken from The Guardian.co.uk (obviously)

Oops.

The summer drought; finally my final impressions on Final Fantasy XIII; and so-called misogyny and misandry

Well, the summer drought is well and truly here. Just looking at the GiantBomb release schedule for the UK, there looks to be very little in the way of major releases coming out in the next month or so. Got to say, it’s kind-of welcome, since I’ve quite a few games on my shelf I’ve been meaning to play more of. Bayonetta, in particular, is one regret of mine, and its presence on the “To do” pile is a symbol of great personal shame.

I’ve just managed to finish Final Fantasy XIII, and, I’ve got to tell ya, reviewing that game would be an absolute nightmare. Fortunately, someone’s done my job for me. That man is Chris Kohler from Game|Life, Wired’s online gaming publication, and you can read his review here. It’s definitely a weird one, FF XIII. In some areas it makes some rather brave steps forward, but they feel misjudged, yet it’s also a game trapped by its heritage and its conventions; and, not unlike the recent Alan Wake, it also looks like a game that started out as very ambitious in the original design but was then scaled back to fit time and financial constraints. So, a bit of a mixed bag, then.

From the gaming blogosphere, there have been two instances of controversy: one from Hoyden about Town, where they accuse the creators of the Xbox LIVE edutainment title Privates of misogyny; the second, a reaction against the satirical Hey Baby FPS game, in which you, playing as a woman, gun down dozens of men who are catcalling, harassing and chasing you through the streets of some modern day metropolis.

For the moment ignoring the ridiculous uproar against Hey Baby (mostly of it seemingly coming from the male camp, I have to say), there are some valid points hidden within the Hoyden about Town article, written by Lauredhel. Most of it arises from the Privates press release, which states:

Britain. Land of Hope and Glory-holes. Where pregnant, waddling teenagers take up the full width of the pavement with their oversized triplet pushchairs, unaware that their rampant, perpetual humping has filled them to the brim with all manner of grotty infections.

Now, if you didn’t know that this first part of the release was actually a targeted satire at the Daily Mail’s hyperbolic, social-panic-inducing “news” stories, you could conceivably think that this is a game that considers women to be stupid diseased nymphomaniacs. It took the creators posting on the comments section of the article saying that this wasn’t the case – that it was written as a parody, that they never intended it to be taken as offensive – for some people to get it (and I say “some” because there were others present on the site who were clearly just looking for an excuse to feel morally outraged, and who were unable to listen to reason).

The bottom line here is that if someone has to explain the joke to you, then it was likely never very funny in the first place. You could point to cultural differences (Lauredhel is writing from Australia), but even to me, a native Englishman, the satire part didn’t come across very clearly when I read it. It’s a shame because the creators seem like nice, reasonable chaps, and the mere accusation of misogyny is really quite damaging publicly and hurtful on a personal level. It’s a message badly communicated, PR gone wrong, and it sucks.

(As an aside, misogyny seems to be a rather hot topic at the moment. Michael Winterbottom’s latest film, The Killer Inside Me, has caused an outcry due to an extremely graphic, violent scene where Casey Affleck’s character beats a woman to a pulp with his fists. My stance on this issue is pretty straight forward: as long as the scene doesn’t glorify the violence, it’s not immoral; and as long as it doesn’t unbalance or take away from the film as a whole, it’s aesthetically justifiable, but which is not to say that it’s necessarily a good idea.)

Just to wrap up, let me just say a few words about Hey Baby, and that is this: I don’t care. Seriously, I really don’t give a shit, and I don’t get the fuss about it. Someone has made a game, very clearly tongue-in-cheek, that’s an expression of the frustration they feel when they are harassed by men while attempting to go about their daily lives. I don’t think it’s anything more than that – it’s not, like, a general political statement against men, or something. I get it, I really do, and I think it’s great that we now have this new interactive medium for people to express themselves creatively and emotionally.

Honestly, it’s amazing how many words are being wasted debating this on various blogs and forums. Sometimes I think people really need to get a fucking grip on themselves.

Steve Jobs: the iPad offers “freedom from porn”

A little background first. Ryan Tate from Gawker.com recently got into a heated e-mail exchange with Steve Jobs, chairman and CEO of Apple.Inc. Within this back and forth between the two, Ryan criticised the iPad for having too many restrictions for it to be described as a revolutionary device, which Steve and co. are currently advertising it as. Jobs responded back with this:

Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom.

Ubisoft’s always-online DRM: where it went wrong; and how you fix it

I’m not a fan of DRM – fact. But the reality is that piracy is a threat to sales and very few publishers are going to send their game out to the marketplace without sufficient copywrite protection. Who can blame them? They want to protect their product, the jobs of their colleagues and, ultimately, the industry. However, DRM, if it is either too intrusive or hassle-some, will only alienate customers and, in actual fact, fuel piracy. After all, why pay for a product which offers less functionality than download one for free that offers more? If you feel like you’re being treated like a potential criminal, then why not act like one, too?

‘(500) Days of Summer’ (2009) Impressions

I think it’s very easy to dismiss Days of Summer as being twee, overindulgent, contrived and unoriginal – i.e., worthless. Oh, all those adjectives do suit the film fairly well. (I mean, it is basically the old Annie Hall formula rehashed for a new generation.) However, I laughed at least a couple of times while watching it, and there were some genuinely touching moments. More importantly, when the script didn’t do a downward spiral into indie – “Oh, look how precious, weird and cute I am!” – land, the actors were given the material to make their characters believable. And, on the whole, they were. Both Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel should absolutely feel pleased about their performances.

The problem is, for every scene that’s well-written, there’s another scene that’s stupid and implausible. For every scene you’re engaged and invested in the characters, there’s another where BOOM! We’re back in indie land. For example, the precocious kid thing? I hate that. It’s awful; it needs to stop. It has been done before, like, a million times already – very rarely successfully, because mostly it just looks plain dumb.

So yeah, it’s worth checking out. (Just remember to keep any knives, guns or any potentially lethal weapons out of reach when you do, just in case.)

Now is the time for a ‘Road Avenger’ HD remake

Back in 1997, when video games were super awesome and not totally lame, Road Avenger was released for the Mega CD, Sega’s ill-fated add-on for the fairly popular at the time Mega Drive (or Genesis, if you’re a yank). It was an FMV-based interactive movie video game, similar to Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. The plot was simple: you play a dude whose wife gets murdered by a biker gang; said dude then takes revenge by driving his big red sports car on a homicidal rampage, directly into the faces of evil crooks, thugs and, very probably, innocent people. (Collateral damage, y’know? Such a bitch.)

The gameplay was, what we would describe now, a series of Quick Time Events. No, really, it was literally just that. This isn’t the ol’ “Oh, Heavy Rain is just a series of QTEs, wah-wah-wah” line – this was the real deal. Honestly, it has to be seen to be believed (along with the intro):

It was a terrible game. But, to a kid at that time, who probably didn’t know any better, it was brilliant.

And now – I say – now is the time for a full-blown sequel/HD remake of the genre-defying, literary magnum opus that was the original Road Avenger. I present to you, the reader, a fully and completely rational, absolutely non-sentimental, three-point argument as to why this is the case.

1. We have the storage space in our hands to make it possible: Think: PS3! Blu-ray! 50 gigs of empty space just dying to be filled by cheap, low-budget Japanese animation and god-awful 80s-throwback American rock! It’s the murder-filled, completely illogical and utterly nonsensical road-trip that never ends!
2. Interactive movie-games are the new Wii Fit: look at how surprisingly well Heavy Rain is doing in terms of sales numbers. And then there’s Final Fantasy XIII, a game which is basically a movie with moving-game-parts soldered on in-between major plot developments, which surpassed the one million sales mark in the U.S. within a matter of days. The gaming public has spoken, and it has very wisely come to its senses and is finally ready to take that next revolutionary step forward – towards badly acted, poorly dubbed movie-games.
3. Potential motion controller support: you can make car revving noises as you physically lean your way around corners while looking like an idiot in the comfort of your own living-room – and, really, isn’t that what it’s all about?

So, I implore you, e-mail G-mode, who now own the rights, and petition them for a sequel. Then, once you’ve done that, please let me know what their e-mail actually is (since their website’s written in Kanji, and I only speak the Queen’s English).

Chim-chimney cheerio for now, my lovelies.

Mass Effect 2 Dissapointment

I can’t lie, I am more than a little underwhelmed by Mass Effect 2. But before you all start shouting at me that I’m wrong, let me get this straight: I like Mass Effect 2; it’s a good game; it’s just not a great game – at least, not in my eyes.

At the moment I kind of feel like I must be taking crazy pills, since it appears that everyone else in the world has fallen head over heels for the game. Whatever; everyone has a right to their own opinion. But let me just raise at least one criticism of the game, and that is the conversation/morality system they’ve got going. The problem I have with it can be split threefold:

1. Conversation reply options are sometimes ambiguous or vague, misleading the player into saying something different from what they thought they were going to. Reading up on Wiki, this appears to be as designed, but it could have been done better. For instance, instead of displaying a sample of dialogue indicating tone, the conversation wheel options could display intentions.
2. Moral choices are basically divided between being a jerk or being a saint, or whether you put ahead the good of the many over the few. In other words, the dilemmas you’re forced into are boring, simplistic and uninvolving. They do not represent a challenge, and most of them have an obvious “best” solution – usually the compromise solution.
3. The morality system scores players and aggregates each saintly and dickish action on their own distinct scales. This means you can technically be both a Renegade and a Paragon at the same time. It’s not only the same old good/evil scale; it’s completely incoherent. People are complex, contrary creatures, but they’re rarely schizophrenic.

The first point relates to me wanting an aspect of the game to be better. Simple enough.

The second and third points are more difficult, and it’s here that maybe I expect too much of Mass Effect 2. I think it’s also the same reason I didn’t get into Dragon Age: Origins, and I think what it comes down to is that I’m fed up with these black and white morality axes. What I would prefer is a game that responds to the player purely in terms of the decisions themselves, and not whether it was a “good” or “evil” decision.

I could go on, but James Portnow said it best in his article:

The first step is to back away from thinking of moral choice as a system and start considering individual moral choices. This mindset makes it easier to craft ambiguous moral choices because it lets us build scenarios that have no clear “good”. Ambiguity comes from tradeoffs; it comes from having to decide what is the most good in a situation that is mostly bad.

‘Every day the same dream’ Impressions

Every day the same dream is a curious indie Flash game from Molleindustria. It was made in six days for the Experimental Gameplay project and is self-described as a “little art game about alienation and refusal of labour.”

In terms of communicating its message, the game is a resounding success. Every critical aspect of it reinforces the theme of being held in a terrifying, banal, futile existence. The characters and environment are all drawn in a kind of 2D Art Deco style, and, save for a few unique objects, the game world is devoid of colour – bleak and monochrome.  There is very little movement and energy from scene to scene, and the animation is regimented, disciplined, almost machine-like.

As the nondescript husband of the nondescript wife going to his nondescript job and every day waking up to perform the same routine, the player can only move linearly through levels, walking either left or right. There is no ‘run’ toggle, and the only interaction with which you have with the world is through a single button, the space key. The game is cyclical, in that it repeats itself as the player repeats, what seems like, the same day over again each time – or is it that every day is the same as the last? (Strange is it sounds, the phrase “Flashback meets Groundhog Day” comes to mind.)

Special mention must go to Jesse Stiles for his work on the soundtrack. His rhythmic, hypnotic mix of electronic beats, drums and acoustic guitar is fantastic and arguably the best part of the game.

It’s a short, succinct experience, granted, and I admit to getting slightly bored before even “finishing” it, but it’s well worth playing simply for the experience. Though I am reluctant to say that it has much replay value, it is a very clever, creative bit of game design, and it is yet another example showing us that it’s possible for games to be both art and, well, games at the same time.

“You know, not every game needs a RPG levelling mechanic”

Castle Crashers is a game I’ve been dipping in and out between more heavy-weight titles such as Borderlands or Halo 3: ODST. While it has a fantastic presentation and a lot of content, it doesn’t come across to me as that great a brawler, and here’s why:

1. AI enemies can continually hit you while you’re incapacitated on the ground (cheap and irritating design).
2. RPG stats levelling dictate, to a good extent, how fast you progress through the game.

Recently, it seems that you can’t find a game that doesn’t have some form of RPG levelling mechanic in place. In many games they are well implemented and compliment the core design, adding a layer of superficial depth and giving the player incentive to progress. Batman: Arkham Asylum, incidentally, does it pretty well.

Unfortunately, sometimes the shoe just doesn’t fit, and here we come to Castle Crashers.

The problem with Castle Crashers is that you are forced to grind and repeat levels over and over so you can progress through to the next one. Now, if the combat was as well designed to allow a player to win purely through skill, this wouldn’t be an issue. As it happens, it’s not. Because your attack and defense stats are directly tied to the levelling system, you just aren’t going to get very far on skill alone, unless you are also very, very lucky.

Another perpetrator of this kind of design philosophy was Dead Rising, which used roughly the same system. Again, all it meant was that the player had to replay sections of the game over and over, just so they could get their stats up to a certain level where they could get through.

Now, I’m sorry, but at what point did playing the same part of a game over and over equate to fun? I must have missed the memo or something.

Castle Crashers would have done far better not having stats levelling in there. It would have been a better game for it if all enemy stats were balanced against the player’s in a fair and even-handed way. If they felt they just had to have some manner of RPG-style progression in there somewhere, it could just be that for every level you gain you unlock a new combo – something ancillary like that, something that doesn’t totally unbalance the game and arbitrarily prevent the player from advancing.

Overall, Castle Crashers is a game I’d recommend, in spite of the flaws I’ve just outlined, because of its “charm”, in the way it references and pays homage to the genre. Purely as a brawler, though, in terms of the combat mechanics, it is merely competent and not much more.