Year: 2009

Cherry-Picking Easy Targets

Martyn Zachary 4 Comments

Dragon LollipopI have been, for some time now, ever-so-slightly weirded out by the overall response to recent trailers for both Dragon Age and Mass Effect II. I hope you guys aren’t getting all high-brow on me now, because with each release of a new trailer, a progressively growing influx of critics seems to creep out of the woodwork, fighting for a better seat in the great ivory tower of condescension.

Beyond the hyperventilative and the hyperbolical, I am nevertheless genuinely surprised at the magnitude of the negative reaction; Even several favourite blogs and bloggers of mine – that I thought were above and beyond this sort of moral mongering – have engaged in the beatdown. Obviously, I’d rather not single any particular example out (sorry Nabs!), but I do hope you’ve seen and read posts discussing the trailers so as not to think I’m stark raving mad!

Finally, because this post is essentially complaining about complaining – or torpedoing, as this activity is called – we’ve dedicated an all-new category, the Devil’s Advocate, to it. I do detest this type of thing out of principle, harping in on someone’s cause in an attempt to prevent any potential success in its very infancy. If you really are that worried about what BioWare or EA are doing, by all means, continue to try to get your voices heard.

(more…)

Read More

The Celeb Pong Trap

Martyn Zachary 2 Comments

pongThere’s a recurring pattern to interviews that never fails to amuse us me: Often, when musicians, actors, artists or other celebrities get polled for their favourite video games, there is a great, great tendency on the interviewers’ part to home in on their formative experiences.

“What was the first game you played?”, we often ask.

This is all fine and dandy – that is, up until someone falls prey to Pong. Don’t get me wrong; having to quickly bring up a childhood experience can be extremely difficult, especially so in the context of a fast-paced interview, and it’s only natural that these factors result in the interviewee resorting to examples that seem both fitting and illustrative. Only, due to the very relative age of the video game landscape, this effectively means games such as Pong, Space Invaders, Mario or Zelda, all suitably ubiquitous, canonized and readily accepted.

“…Pong. We were obsessed with it. That was it, man.” 1)http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/03/21/metallicas-james-hetfield-calls-guitar-hero-a-gateway-drug-inside-the-bands-new-game/ –James Hetfield

“Let’s go back to the beginning…Pong.” 2)http://videogames.yahoo.com/celebrity-byte/dwayne-the-rock-johnson/532302 “I looooove video games, absolutely. POOONG!” 3)http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009/03/13/dwayne-the-rock-johnson-honestly-discusses-infamous-doom-movie/ –Dwayne Johnson

Part of the problem is the established practice of luring interviewees with leading questions. The other part, then, might have to do with the interviewee’s need to satiate the perceived target group of the interview. And heck, we gamers are notoriously hard to please!

“I’m still playing Pong.” 4)http://www.latinoreview.com/news/interview-michael-clarke-duncan-neal-mcdonough-and-taboo-on-street-fighter-the-legend-of-chun-li-6259 –Neal McDonough

“Frankly I would rather go fishing than play Pac-Man, or I’d rather go play golf with Alice Cooper than play Pac-Man. And I hate golf and everything to do with it. I hate golfers. [laughs] I’m just not a game kind of guy.” 5)http://www.rockband.com/zine/tull-interview-part-two –Ian Anderson

Surely, we still boot our NES from time, but whoever plays Pong these days? In this way, it’s ultimately our fault that our questions do not allow for more breathing space and room to our interviewees. Should we not allow our interviewees to cite games that we’ve never played ourselves, games that we have never even heard of? Games not called Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Halo or Grand Theft Auto? After all, there has to be someone out there to cite a Russian real-time strategy, or a German-only point and click.

“Galaga, Space Invaders, Pac-Man … I’m not much into games now” 6)http://videogames.yahoo.com/celebrity-byte/hugh-jackman/1308738 –Hugh Jackman

“I was a huge Defender, Galaxian and Space Invaders fan back in the day.” 7)http://videogames.yahoo.com/celebrity-byte/slash/1158324 –Slash

Next time you read or hear anybody cite a game in this manner, you’ll knowingly shake your head, smirk and think to yourself: It’s a trap – the celeb Pong trap!

References   [ + ]

Read More

Dark Forces, Rogue Leaders and Goodwill

Martyn Zachary 1 Comment

LucasArts recently re-released their long-running, beloved Jedi Knight series digitally on Steam to a rather ecstatic response to boot; only, a major wrench got thrown in the gears when the parties responsible failed to appropriately revise the games for the most current generation of operating systems. As a result, the three earliest releases – Dark Forces, Jedi Knight and its expansion disc, Mysteries of the Sith – suffer from instability, incompatibility, crashes, bugs and other lesser issues.

Steam Ad for Jedi Knight Collection
Steam Ad for Jedi Knight Collection

This is a rather shocking turn of events after a wildly successful reintroduction of the classic LucasArts back catalogue to audiences old and new, and indeed strikingly qualitatively different from the previous batch of releases, especially so when taking into account that fixes to some of the aforementioned issues are in fact readily available! For instance, players who already own the games on CD can simply extract the original wave audio for their background music to work (thanks Richard!).

It is only natural, however, to find the company trying to think up ways to maintain the newfound revenue flow and subsequently benefit from the excitement caused by these re-releases. Therefore, it’s also all the more disappointing that oversights such as the aforementioned might considerably affect the public perception of the company’s current endeavours.

(more…)

Read More

Eskil Steenberg’s Love

Nabeel Burney Leave a comment

LoveWhat you see here are not watercolour paintings, but screenshots. The vibrant and beautiful images depict not static, empty scenes but living vistas soon to be inhabited by thousands of people. Love is an upcoming MMO, to feature a huge dynamically alterable world and innovative interrelated gameplay systems. It is the work of a single person, Eskil Steenberg.

The game’s stunning visuals are thanks to clever procedural programming, which dictates much of Love’s underlying design as well. One-man-band Steenberg utilizes intelligent techniques in order to reduce the workload and create vast amounts of content; he has created his own tools to aid his development process, which are even available for anyone to try.

Love Alpha Client Love Love

The game surfaced early last year during GDC 1)http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/02/20/for-the-love/, immediately drawing attention with its impressionistic imagery. It was at this year’s GDC, though, that substantial information was finally revealed, detailing the fundamental world-building mechanics, resources and communications system 2)http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/10/23/rps-interview-love/. Steenberg initially released a haunting first trailer, embedded after the jump, and later a full gameplay demonstration in which he gives a walkthrough of the basic mechanics. And last week he released an alpha client to the public, so that people could finally witness the game running realtime in full glory.

(more…)

References   [ + ]

Read More