Okay, once again I have dropped off the face of the earth, and I apologize. This time I have a valid reason, I swear! At the beginning of this month (August) I started working for KizToys, Inc., in Charleston, SC; since then I’ve been working quite a lot on their very cool MMO for kids and have been pretty unenthusiastic about sitting on the computer when I come home after a solid stretch of it at work (as fun as it is to work there). Anyway, lately I’ve been playing loads of Puzzle Quest thanks to finally getting around to hooking up my 360 again. Puzzle Quest is supremely awesome for someone who likes sitting down to play a game for 15-20 minutes at a time, or even a much lengthier commitment, so it’s been serving my new schedule quite well. (Also just biding time until I can afford to pick up Ghostbusters and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Oh and a PS3 Slim would be super also, thanks Santa.)

Puzzle Quest honestly baffles me, though, because I’ve been a longtime Bejeweled player, and since the basic mechanic is the same, I always looked at it like, “Well, it’s a casual game I’ve played to death, with leveling? What? Weird, ok.” I mistakenly attributed the addictive power of the now-wildly-popular game to the basic mechanic of play, which helps of course, but in this case is at least equally matched by the actual content added to it. I would never have imagined that somehow I could be leveling a Knight in a fantasy world, equipping all sorts of magical equipment (some I have crafted myself), riding a mount captured in battle, and throwing enemies in the Dungeon until I can get around to learning their spells… and yet be playing fancy Bejeweled at the same time. It’s really pretty ridiculous. As frustrating as the random game board can be (Why does the computer get so lucky?!??!) it’s overall a ridiculously successful idea that’s been executed so, so well.

Other than that, I’ve been sometimes watching The Life of Mammals ondemand and learning new things such as the behavior of kangaroo rats and the types of moles that live in deserts and how they have adapted to the shifting sand to ’swim’ through it oh and also their eyes have been covered with skin and fur. FREAKY. Also, the baby of nearly every mammal is adorable, but marsupials got a really short stick in that draw. And I’ve also been psyching myself up for the new season of Heroes (Yay!!!) and a new season of Dexter (omg!!!) as well as watching True Blood and wondering why I never got around to publishing my vampire novels before the whole idea became so wildly generic. Sigh.

Final note: A while ago I put up my website, http://www.jmecannon.com, and it needs more updates but bookmark it anyway. kthnx

I have a defunct laptop with a harddrive I can’t seem to get out of the case – the screws are stuck and stripping.
My sister’s response: “Can’t you use the bone from your roast beef to open the hatch?”

Thus, today is a new commemoration: the yearly joke that is in reference to Shadowgate 64. Not a technically impressive game, but it was a sort of childhood landmark for me and my sister. For me, because I had no familiarity with the idea of “First person without being a shooter” (My childlike translation, scary enemies should be jumping out from everywhere), and I was also completely stumped by the beginning. The game begins with you, a prisoner in a small cell, and very little direction. It took me forever to figure out that I needed to find a bone (a pixellated N64-quality bone on a similarly textured floor) and use it to pick the lock on the hatch – a hatch which I believe was underneath some hay, but I could be overcomplicating it – to escape…

…maybe I can’t get the laptop open until I find the right tool… I better go around a hardware store and mash the A button until I activate something secretly awesome…

I would have written this great commentary on Final Fantasy VIII. As it stands, this entirely summarizes why I fondly call FFVIII “My favorite Final Fantasy game unless you are only counting Final Fantasy games I have managed to play all the way through in which case it must be removed from the list.” Anyway, I highly recommend this article. And hopefully I will be updating with some more of my own here pretty soon. (Yes I say that a lot every time.)

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/70336-remembering-the-orphan-final-fantasy-viii/

Yesterday I felt a compulsion to shop, so I went into the local Gamestop and wandered until I found something that looks good. I actually haven’t been able to spend a lot on games recently, so I have been keeping deliberately uninformed as to what is coming out (silly I know). I was really amazed to see so many new interesting titles, though I was only craving RPG at the time, most of THOSE are on the DS or the Wii, and I was specifically looking to avoid the “You are a young boy who…” beginning. Eventually, I ended up picking up Star Ocean: The Last Hope despite its brand-new-just-came-out-today price tag. The staff at the store was supremely useless in telling me about it, so I went in with the safely pessimistic assumption of: “It’s similar to Star Ocean: Til The End Of Time, which I played for a while but found slow and difficult, eventually getting stuck on a boss fight with no health items and no ability to return to town, though this was years ago anyway. It could end up like that, although the better graphics and everything will hopefully add to the experience.”

I think I owe this game a pretty huge review, but right now I’m about seven hours in, so I can at least verify a few things.

• The first hour is extremely uninteresting. Like TtEoT, it’s entirely a tutorial where you learn the battle system.
• Said battle system is, in fact, at times annoying and confusing. It takes getting used to. For that matter, the whole “blindside” system is hard to pull off without a lot of practice, especially considering each character’s different fighting style makes the usability of this different for all of them.
• When the battle system isn’t annoying or confusing (most of the time), it’s pretty fun. Definitely picks up a lot when you get >2 party members.
• There is no prolonged agony of “I’m the only person in my party” where everything is really difficult.
• The first few hours make you play without an item store and without healing magic, but if you are careful (and okay with running around in the yellow a lot) that doesn’t really matter.
• First boss fight was somewhat confusing and I got KO’d because of said lack-of-item-shop, but the second time I kicked its ass, so it wasn’t by any means unbalanced.
• Probably the most annoying part about playing is the whole hour-between-most-save-points. I have somewhere to be tonight, but I stopped playing a lot earlier than I wanted to because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to save before leaving otherwise. Also, this is a big annoyance if you do get a game over…
• The storyline kicks serious ass. There are a nice balance (so far) of cutscenes vs. action sequences. The characters seem likable (except for the occasionally over-the-top staged dialogue that plagues most translated-to-English RPGs, i.e. “I was just getting warmed up! Bring it on!” and the use-your-whole-arm-to-point thing that girls apparently must do), though they definitely fit a fantasy-RPG stereotype of roles, and the sci-fi aspect of the game is mostly in the story and not so much in the actual gameplay, at least not yet.
• Lots of really long sessions where you can’t go back to the local city/spaceship and sell or create items, so far anyway.

Anyway, it’s really fun if you have enough time on your hands to play a somewhat lengthy session each time. I am a really big fan of the skill system, of this and all Star Oceans, except it is somewhat nonintuitive until you get the hang of it. Item creation I haven’t gotten to play with a lot, as I’ve only now maxed out some of the skills which improve item drop rates.

That’s all I’ve been up to on the gaming front. I was originally going to sit down and try to finish Final Fantasy XII, but my game disc is somewhere not inside its box. :[

Here’s the opening cutscene to the game (this movie plays before you press Start on the main menu).

I know I have been exceedingly lax in updating this blog. However, it’s not because there’s nothing going on, but rather because I became so worried about flooding this blog with unrelated posts and nonsense and things that I have been treating it like it’s made of glass and I’m all thumbs. (Translation: Carefully.)

Maybe this is silly of me; it’s not as though any game designer, writer, programmer – hell, anyone who’s worked on a game project for more than five minutes – would believe that we are so prim and proper and upper-crust that we pause every day for tea time. No, we’re usually weird, ridiculous, goofy, sometimes creepier than is socially acceptable, and nerdy. I would like to think I myself am all of these things (except the creepy part), so I might as well act like it.

Last night Steve and I started really hammering out some concepts for a game project we’ve been talking about for months now. And since I recently purchased a computer – thus raising the number of actual, working PCs I own to the count of ‘one’ – I’m now installing Visual Studio and with any luck will be cursing my memory lapses of .dll’s and #includes creating something great very soon!

Anyway, it’s too early to really talk about the game, but it’s going to be primarily educational, though I’m aiming for a fun, accessible, as addicting as Tetris sort of play style. Since it’s just the two of us going to be working on it (for now, anyway) I’m sure the progress will be infinitely slower than I would prefer, but side projects are always suffering while we deal with those things in life like “paying bills” and “working.”

Speaking of working, though I’m still not ‘in the industry’ so to speak, and I would still like to be, I do think I’ve been doing pretty well for myself. My fourth novel, Dawn Shatters, is coming along really well and has been receiving most of my creative TLC for the past few months. Meanwhile, I have nearly completed the revamped (haha almost a pun it’s about vampires) version of Night Falls, the first book in the series, because I have simply got to get these things published somehow! A lot of what I find online is not helpful in the slightest, but my ever-attentive mother got me two books that have been very informative on the process. What it comes down to is simply that my life has been such a crazy rollercoaster over the last year (since moving to New Jersey) that I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. And it makes me want to punch myself in the face – I mean, who has three-and-a-half novels just sitting around without even trying, right?

Silly Jamie, that’s who. Anyway, consider this message a forewarning that my game-designing life may be about to get a lot more volatile (designers being put into programming roles… it’s like a bad horror movie) and therefore I will have a lot more things to complain about discuss in this blog.

Meanwhile, you should all (whoever actually reads this) go to www.wildlife-research-team.org and help a valuable nonprofit organization restore the environment! Any contributions help, even if you just tell your friends. Go! Go!

Okay. So I’m finally back here to review something. This time around I decided to mix it up with a newer game for the Wii, Boom Blox (May 2008), created by Electronic Arts in cooperation with Steven Spielberg. His name is on the main title screen, and most people will probably never have any idea what he actually contributed to the project, but I liked seeing it because it reminded me of Animaniacs. It’s rated E for Everyone. Boom Blox isn’t something I technically own, but whoever lent it to Steve has left it at the apartment for so long that I keep forgetting it isn’t ours. And, we’ve played it obsessively for weeks now, which is obviously the only qualification necessary for me to compliment/mock any game.

The box art for the game Boom Blox.

The Gist Of It: Like nearly every other game on the Wii, Boom Blox makes exclusive use of the Wiimote. You don’t need the nunchuck to play at all. It has several different game modes, but the main idea of the game is that you’re either basically playing a game of complicated and shiny Jenga, or throwing balls at an intricate tower of blocks in order to knock them down and earn the most points. In single-player, there are over 300 levels broken into two categories, one with a sort of ’story’ to explain why you are flailing around in the living room. Usually, it has to do with a city or town of animals; in the first group of levels, a medieval culture of sheep-people need shiny jewels, then they are attacked by another various animal group, etc. One look at the cover art can give you an idea of what these animal people look like – blocky, squarish things that tend to wiggle to express any and all emotion.

Anyway, before I was sidetracked by the jell-o creatures – the second single-player mode is one that basically familiarizes you with the controls. In multiplayer, things really get interesting. You can have usually two and sometimes four players doing anything from pulling blocks out of a precarious tower, trying to avoid collapse, to chucking bowling balls at the opponent’s block castle, or throwing baseballs at a mountain of gold blocks trying to knock those with high-point values into oblivion. It has some original details as well, like a color-coded tower and a random pick of which color you’re allowed to remove, or giant green blocks that explode when they touch each other, or good old-fashioned bomb blocks that simply go boom.

Technical Notes: The music and sound effects are entirely secondary in this game. You could just as easily turn your sound off and play a CD on your stereo at the same time. That said, if you do listen to the music, it sounds so much like it belongs in The Sims that it tends to make you want to go control virtual people rather than progress beyond the main menu. However, just because it doesn’t add anything to the game doesn’t mean it takes away, either. Most of the time you will be so engrossed in your careful balancing act or trying to aim that perfect shot that you won’t even realize there is music playing. Likewise, the actual graphics are pretty much irrelevant, because to make it look good, it only needs nice-looking explosions and scenery.

Boom Blox is, without a doubt, a game that completely depends on a physics engine, and it’s kind of neat to see it in action. If you ‘grab’ a short block and pull it carefully out from under a long one, the entire structure will shiver and shake as the long block settles down lower – and if you’re not careful, it’ll all come crashing down. In levels where you throw baseballs or bowling balls, the physics is definitely evident – hitting a block at the corner is usually unbelievably more effective than hitting one square in the center. That, combined with the ‘boom’ aspect of the game, can create some really interesting sequences. In fact, single-player mode frequently forces you to set up ridiculous chain reactions in order to conserve a limited number of projectiles. It’s fun to play, and fun to watch, as well.

Control Freak: Since it’s played with the Wiimote, there are only a few buttons at your disposal, and most of them are irrelevant anyway. You hold down B to rotate the camera, and to throw a ball you take aim, hold A, then flick your wrist and release A at the right time. When in grab mode, you just point to the block you want and hold A to take hold of it. This sounds simple but is in fact often frustrating and annoying. If you think you need to mime actually throwing a ball, you’ll be rewarded with a ball tapping lightly on the block or even falling uselessly short of the whole scene. Whether because of the hardware or the way it reads input, the key to throwing (as far as I can tell) is just in moving the Wiimote as close to 180º as possible. If you get your shoulder involved at all you will probably fail. This is the cause for much frustration in multiplayer games when your ‘perfect shot’ fails miserably, and the next person takes it instead and wins the game. Even in single-player it can be annoying because you are frequently limited to a certain number of projectiles and wasting one can eliminate your chance of getting a gold medal, or even the bronze medal needed to pass.

Sweet Details: If nothing else, Boom Blox is a really great idea. As a kid, I played tons of Jenga with my family, and I was actually more excited about that feature than anything else. But once we started trying out the other modes, I was hooked on just about all of them. It’s a fun game you can play with your friends for any length of time, and unlike a lot of puzzle games, it gives you the option to create your own level and share them with people online. I experimented this mode a little bit, and again was distracted by the physics system – I would build precarious structures and then hit “play” to see how long they could stand under their own weight before it all came crashing down. As you play through single-player, you unlock additional scenery pieces and blocks to put in your custom levels, which adds to the replay factor if you’re really into the design aspect.

Annoying Stuff: Aside from the occasional tirade brought on by the controls and a bad throw, I found the game to be rarely annoying. Most of the irritation comes from single-player, where you will be faced with a puzzle in the purest sense, as your ammo is limited, the towers are large, and the varieties of blocks will be quite complex. In these situations, I would often find that clearing every last block from the level was quite a challenge, because even in the largest explosion, unless you are very lucky, a few of the smallest blocks will land just on the edge of your platform, leaving you mere inches from a gold medal. If you’re like me, and you want to beat every level with a gold score before you move on, you will probably be annoyed pretty often. If you’re okay with passing with silver or bronze, you might have fewer problems.

I also encountered a few minor annoyances while playing in co-op mode, which tends to be more about pointing and shooting than it is careful planning. The targets move so quickly that I can’t imagine how people could enjoy the mode on anything smaller than our 47″ television. Even if I only focused on half the screen, most of the targets would zip right past. Maybe it’s me, but I’m not a big fan of anything resembling button-mashing.

Is It Worth It: Considering the current generation of games, a pricetag of $49.99 is on the low end of the spectrum for a new game. Still, I would really only recommend buying it if you can play with friends. Single-player is fun, but party mode is far superior in terms of replayability and general shenanigans. It’s cute to rescue the Baas, and it’s fun to play around with the editor by yourself, but most of the appeal to the game lies in any moment where you can say “Did you see that?!”

Fun Facts: Steven Spielberg is slated to make two more game titles with EA Los Angeles. I can keep hoping that one of them will feature Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, but I’m not holding my breath.

My Rating:

• 5/5 Originality
• 3/5 Storytelling
• 4/5 Technical
• 4/5 Difficulty Scaling
• 4/5 Replay Value
• 20/25 points = 80% Kickass.

So, since I have heard good things about my last review (though no one has left me any actual comments q_q) I’ve been compiling a list of other games to review in the near future. I have a large variety of games and consoles at my disposal, but I’m not sure if I should stick to one theme over another right now. What I mean is, since I started off with an SNES RPG, should I deliberately not review an RPG for a while, or maybe should I aim to review something new? Or should I just go with whatever comes to mind? I would rather try and write about things that aren’t already widely renowned as being amazingly good or bad, since that would make the informative value of the review pretty low. Any feedback on this would be appreciated. I’ll try to post another review before the end of the week. Ciao!

Well, to start my review category off right, I’m going to write about something that I played on a whim and was immediately sucked in beyond all hope of rescue. That would be Earthbound, a game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System originally released in 1994 and developed by Ape, Inc. Like many games of this time, it is a sequel to a title that was Japan-exclusive; its Japanese title is Mother 2: Gyiyg Strikes Back. Anyway, let’s get on with it.

The Gist of It: Earthbound is a role-playing game following the adventures of Ness, a boy living a regular life in America in the 1990s. When the game begins, you are literally controlling a pajama-clad Ness while you run around your hometown of Onette at night to see what all the commotion is about. Turns out, a meteor crashed near your house during the night – or that’s what everyone believes! In actuality an alien lifeform from the future – an insect named Buzz Buzz represented by very few pixels – has come to warn of another alien named Giygas who controls the world in the future. Naturally, Giygas is evil and horrible, and of course Ness must go on an adventure to prevent this from happening.

Apparently everyone is cool with the idea of a kid running out to save the world because your mom only suggests you change out of your pajamas, your sister gives you a baseball bat to fight with – and your dad, as follows throughout the game, talks to you on the phone in weird metaphors and monologues before asking if you’d like to save your progress. It comes out pretty early on that Ness has some sort of psychic powers as you’re contacted early on by a girl named Paula calling for help. Throughout the adventure, not only do you rescue and join up with Paula, there’s also Jeff, the boy genius who fixes random household objects into powerful weapons, and Poo, who is the prince of distant Dalaam and fights with martial arts (translation: there is hardly any gear for him to equip in the entire game).

Technical Notes: The sound quality and animation is very good for its time. Though Ness looks a lot like an emoticon (._. to be exact), the scenery will be nice looking on your newfangled televisions because, well, it’s colorful and pretty, like most SNES games appear on modern TVs. I was pleasantly surprised to find Ness has an “auto fight” option for those times when all your party members can melee and be done with it – but also surprised that it took care of things like using items to restore health or revive dead characters. I guess I was expecting “auto fight” to mean “just like mashing A but you don’t have to burn the calories,” but it actually attempts to fight in a way that makes sense. You’d still probably get owned most of the time for using it, but only because the SNES-level of artificial intelligence is thankfully not up to par with a human’s… well, not mine anyway.

Control Freak: No problems with the controls. I never had to look into configuring anything because it was all fine and dandy. Not like you have to worry about “To Invert Y or Not to Invert Y” on the SNES anyway.

Sweet Details: First, the design. Nothing I can write here will accurately describe the sort of bizarre actions you must go through to save the world. Maybe it’s just me, but when a game makes me do something completely weird and unexpected, no matter how mundane, I think it’s awesome. In my experience playing games for the SNES, that frequently translated to strange levels, enemies, bosses, or actions. By ‘actions’ I mean things like Enix’s Illusion of Gaia making you stand around on a raft, lost at sea, for several minutes of serious nothing (except eating raw fish) or wait in line with a bunch of NPCs. Earthbound, however, took all my ideas of ‘weird but cool’ and threw them in the Crazy Blender. My first example, the most similar to what I mentioned from Illusion of Gaia, is the way you break into Belch’s Factory, in the first half of the game. (Belch is a boss enemy that is literally a pile of goo – it might be vomit, I’m not sure – who belchs a lot and controls an army of zombies. Zombies which you best by catching them on sticky paper. Hmm.) In order to get inside, you have to go behind a waterfall (standard) and say the password (duh). However, the password is three minutes of silence. So you have to put down the controller and do nothing for three minutes. Maybe I haven’t been playing the right games, but three minutes of nothing is certainly not very common in my dungeon-diving experience.

Another, more disturbing example is when you are first getting Prince Poo in your party. (Don’t ask me about the name, because I couldn’t begin to explain it. You do have the option of renaming all the characters, though, if you can’t take a monk named Poo seriously.) Poo has to pass his final test of Mu training before he can learn the last technique and, you know, go join up with everyone else. You take control of Poo, who you have never seen before, and spend a little while running around his hometown before climbing to the top of a very tall hill for your ‘meditation.’ After you’ve meditated for a little bit, a woman comes up to say your master wants you to stop right away and come back to the palace. Silly me, I listened, and wasted a good three minutes of my life because you’re supposed to ignore her. So I climbed the hill, waited again, and this time ignored the servant. Afterwards, the screen goes into combat mode and a strange ghost appears as your enemy. It’s ‘the spirit of your ancestors,’ and it’s not very nice, because it asks if it can break your arms and legs, poke out your eyes, and finally, take your mind. You have to say yes to all of these to proceed. Once you lose your eyes, the screen goes completely black; when you agree to lose your mind, the trial is over.

Call me crazy but in the context of the rest of the game I was thoroughly disturbed. I could go on and on with examples of how this game is just nothing like anything else I’d played in terms of level design - Moonside, the town where everything is opposite and colored like it’s made of neon lights; Saturn Valley, where every resident looks the same (a little like Ziggy), speaks in weird handwriting-style font, and spouts total gibberish; or maybe the dungeon that’s actually a man whose body you run around in (which actually looks like a brown cave). However, hopefully you get the idea that Earthbound doesn’t follow conventional rules in storytelling or progression – and it’s infinitely better this way.

Another pleasant detail is that Earthbound attempts to use ‘modern technology’ in everything (the game does take place in the 90s). That means that enemies drop regular old dollars, which you can lose half of if you die, so you better keep your money in the bank and only visit the ATM when you are ready to shop! (Yes, Ness has an ATM card. It’s annoying just like it is in real life.) You also have to use a phone to save which means you will sometimes have to suck it up and use a payphone (most of them cost $1. Damn high prices!)

It should also be noted that Earthbound received critical acclaim for the quality of its music. I’m currently on a Depeche Mode kick so I enjoyed it, but it’s what you would expect from an RPG circa 1994 – electronic, just above a MIDI, but jammin’.

Annoying Stuff: Combat. The system itself is fine – it’s better than some new RPGs I’ve played, actually, as far as abilities, and it’s certainly up to SNES standards with a turn-based system and enemies that can stand in multiple rows. But you just have to see it to realize why it doesn’t get to be a Sweet Detail. Here are a couple of screenshots (I took them from the Starmen.Net Earthbound walkthrough, which is amazingly useful if you decide to play the game):

Okay, you might be able to see what’s wrong with this. First, the background is, and always is, a trippy blend of colors a la a very early iTunes Visualizer. The music, however, never at any point corresponds to the “ooh pretty colors” backgrounds. Instead, it’s sort of like very early electronica or techno. The color of the boxes representing your party members is adjustable to your liking (mine are pink!) but there is never any animation beyond full-screen effects.

In the first picture you see Buzz Buzz is casting a spell on Starman Jr – the spell is that horizontal-line effect making a nice diamond pattern. Second you see Master Belch floating in his boss-battle chartreuse and maroon ocean.

The last picture is nothing in particular except a very great example of how truly bizarre the combat settings are. Yeah the enemies look weird – but it’s from 1994, and the fact that there even are so many unique enemies is enough for me. But the morphing colors and sound really don’t do anything except make you try and get out of combat as fast as humanly possible. A real shame considering, like most RPGs, you can certainly benefit from grinding experience points out of dungeons.

Aside from this, most of my annoyances with the game could be applied to nearly every RPG in existence. You can’t save anywhere. Items that restore characters from death are ridiculously hard to find for most of the game. Getting a new member in your party means you will have someone ridiculously low level and useless for a while (so Ness ends up being ridiculously powerful by the end of the game; for me, he could solo a lot of bosses thanks to all the grinding I needed to get Poo up to a level where he could survive).

Is It Worth It: Earthbound is not a short game. I spent probably close to a month playing it for a couple hours several times a week (yay, unemployment). I found myself addicted in the usual “must level up” sense as well as greatly enjoying the story, as you’ve by now realized. It’s definitely worth playing once. For one thing, it’s a cult classic and will make you seem like a well-learned gamer in suitably nerdy conversations. Other than the fact that anyone who comes over will take one look at the combat screen and say “What the #@!$ are you playing??” it’s actually enjoyable to watch due to the humorous story and well-written dialog. And things like “wait 3 minutes” are good for having a friend or significant other around, so you can get into a conversation like “Who really DOES that in a game????”

Fun Facts: Ness is playable in all the Smash Bros. games! Go hit things with that bat!

My Rating:

• 5/5 Originality
• 5/5 Storytelling
• 4/5 Technical
• 4/5 Difficulty Scaling
• 3/5 Replay Value
• 21/25 points = 84% Kickass.

…which is hopefully nearing its end! Life has been keeping me on my toes and trying very hard to keep me from accomplishing anything beyond bill paying and menial work. But I am starting to get the hang of Pretending To Be Grown Up and therefore mastering the art of Appearing Grown Up But Really Thinking About Video Games All Day. (OK I’m done with the lame titles and capitalization. Sorry.) Anyway I don’t know WHY I didn’t start doing this months ago but I’m going to start writing random game reviews on this blog – random meaning whatever I can write without having taken notes along the way, and not presently anything new since I haven’t been entirely up to par on the new games scene. But, I have a big HD TV and a whole ton of consoles (just no PS3) so, really, I should be able to get something out there.

This entry isn’t going to be anything but what you’ve read so far: introduction to what’s coming. I’ll still try and blog about serious game issues and such when it comes to me, but I think writing reviews is going to take the majority of my blog. At least… FOR NOW!

Susanna told me something the other day that made me think quite a lot of things about video games and the media and my brain created a lovely tangent that inspired something to blog about. The subject of our conversation, though not this blog, was the offensive webcomic drawn of Assassin’s Creed producer Jade Raymond. The comic itself seems to be removed from all known hosts (surprise) but what I read about it (and Ubisoft’s reaction to, for some reason, the Something Awful forums) can be read here.

Pretty sure the reaction to this is kind of self-explanatory. It’s a horrible thing to do, of course, and I could probably blog/rant about it all day, so for now let me stick to what I really wanted to write about. I told Susanna that I haven’t been following Assassin’s Creed (or really a lot of games) over the holidays because of lack of consoles in my house (T_T), being broke, and playing World of Warcraft. So she told me that it was “kind of disappointing” which I was surprised and sad to hear, since I’d wanted to play it.

So anyway, while my brain stewed over this webcomic, I looked up the game on Wiki to see what had been the horrible flaw that would make someone so upset as to publicize their angry web art in such a way. This is what I found, summarized:

• The average (Metacritic) review for the game is 83/100
• EGM is the only listed review that was below 70% though there are a couple other mentioned that are around the 70% mark.
• Several reviews were for very high or perfect scores – X-Play, Game Informer, GameSpot, for example.
• Complaints listed seem to be about lack of fast-paced action, stupid AI, and repetitive combat (one-button combat)

I was pretty surprised after I read this. There was no “The game broke all the 360s that came out” or “The game was only 3 hours long” or “The game only had a small number of levels” or anything that usually killed a game. I guess what I was expecting to see was that the game failed miserably, but Ubisoft is quoted as selling more than 2.5 million copies, which is higher than they expected. To put this number in perspective, I started (further) digging on Wiki, looking at things like “Best Selling Video Game Franchise” and then, “List of best-selling video games.” As far as games go, this is no Halo 3 (over 8 million copies) but as far as OTHER 360 games go, it’s well within regular margin (the same estimate as Bioshock, Oblivion, and more than Dead Rising, Mass Effect, Call of Duty 4). (I’m not making a similar PS3 comparison due to lack of data and the fact that the console has only sold 13.something million games so far, which is like a fraction compared to the 360.) To put Assassin’s Creed sales in the same perspective as other games – this is the same number of Guitar Hero 2 (PS2), Devil May Cry, Resident Evil 4 (PS2) and quite a hoard of other games. So the sales aren’t really a failure, in fact the sales are better than expected. I figured by this stage that Susanna was talking about what she heard by word 0f mouth and rather than fill this blog with a huge section on further research into that I think I will get on with what I wanted to say.

This game had a huge buildup. At least a year ago while I was still at Full Sail, people were talking about it excitedly. I remember seeing new videos released at E3 and huge discussions about them on G4. People were constantly talking about this game for one reason or another – the graphics look great, the gameplay is open, there’s a somewhat-almost-famous girl (Kristen Bell) starring in it, the story is historical… Everyone had something they liked about it. The hype was immense and the pressure put on the game to be incredible was palpable.

This is not unlike what happens to movies. Blockbusters are often given near-ridiculous amounts of media attention to try and entice people to come see the film. Let’s relate this to the current “mega hype” movie Cloverfield. (The upcoming info sourced from this article.) The movie was first given a strange teaser preview before Transformers, which was anticipated to be another huge blockbuster movie, guaranteeing lots of viewers to said teaser. For months it floated around the internet as “Untitled J.J.Abrams Project” and plenty of other names, which gave it a level of mystery unlike most hyped movies. And here we are at its debut weekend with all the pressure – and it’s broken the record for movie releases on this weekend, and has made (so far) over $44 million. This is phenomenal and I’m sure there are many parties happening in California because of it Of course, there are MANY equally-hyped movies that just do absolutely horribly and people try very hard to forget it ever happened and wish they could erase it from their resume. A lot of these movies are especially close to home for gamers (BloodRayne, anyone?) but the list would be immense if ever fully recorded… Batman & Robin springs to mind, but I remember quite a lot of wasted brain cells on trailers for movies like Catwoman, Premonition, and SO many “Christmas Movies” it’s not even worth mentioning. Movies fail all the time. I have heard (though now I’m not sure where…) that it was something like a 1/4 success rate and studios quite often expect the other 3 movies to fail. But they have to make them anyway in case they do well and just to make any money at all.

Major game publishers are probably in about the same position, but game developers (the poor saps writing the dialog, programming the AI, and bug testing the crap out of it) would be hard-pressed for such a situation. If they anticipated 3/4 of their products to fail it would be near impossible to even get funding for development, or media coverage, etc. Add in the fact that it takes most developers over two years now to create a “hit” game (state of the art graphics, gameplay, etc – note, this may still fail miserably) that would mean that in 8 years of your life you only managed moderate success one time. But an actor, a director, a screenplay writer could create how many products in 8 years? The 1/4 ratio would be easy then. Sure it would suck if your brainchild flopped, but barring EXTREME disaster it wouldn’t kill your resume forever. A development cycle that short for a video game would allow us some room for error, but of course it would also flood the market with crappy games – just like every time I go to the movies I stare at the other things that are playing and imagine all kinds of physical pain I would rather endure than watch said film.

Video games can’t succeed without the media, at least not yet. Psychonauts received immense critical praise but sold fewer than 100,000 copies causing a class-action lawsuit of Majesco shareholders against the company in retaliation. Common explanations for this sales flop usually involve bad marketing and a high ($50) price tag. Well, plenty of games are $50 (though now $60 is the high end price for 360/PS3) and they sell enough to keep the shareholders happy and the CEO from resigning, so I’m inclined to say the media is key. Without the media, no one will care about your game in the quantities required to keep you employed. Sad, but seemingly true.

But what can be done about it? Without the media, there’s only word of mouth, usually over the internet these days. While that helped put Psychonauts on the map (that, and Steam) it didn’t get the CEO his job back or the shareholders their money. It’s only one of many elements required for good game sales. The thing about Assassin’s Creed is that it had the hype and the media pressure, so it sold copies, and it sold them regardless of content. A lot of people complain now about the game not being what they expected. This isn’t any different from being upset at how a movie turned out compared to the previews, but here you’ve just shelled out $50+ and several hours (6+ usually) on a game to finish it, and you’re unhappy. A bad movie is usually less than $10 and less than 2.5 hours. The movie industry can get away with people being unhappy because you haven’t lost enough to be really upset about a movie being bad. It usually won’t bar you from going again. But when a studio only puts out a few games a year if they’re lucky, frequently just one every 1-2 years, your audience is unforgiving and has a good memory. Personally, my most recent total upset was SNK vs Capcom Card Fighter for the DS, which had a game-killing glitch that prevented you from finishing the game or even collecting all the cards. Sure, Capcom isn’t really to blame, but I guarantee everyone who bought SNK vs Capcom would be hesitant over buying another title from the same studio.

It’s almost as though the studios are expected to fail at a 3/4 ratio instead of the games. In school I was constantly told that the turnover rate of employees is frequently 2 years, just like the development cycle length, go figure. I was frequently told that you have to be careful working at a startup company because everything is riding on that first game, for them. All kinds of words of wisdom that have led me to believe that no one really expects studios to be around that long. They expect you to merge with others, get bought out by giant enterprises who will take and manipulate your IP, (Goodbye Sigil, hello Sony Online – Vanguard also upset me a lot last year)… pretty much go through hell and back on the way to finding enough money to either switch industries or retire.

I could go on, and someday I probably will. The harsh critical nature of the average gamer is something else that fascinates me – if X person tells me a game is good, I probably won’t believe them because I’m smarter than they are, but if they bitch about a game enough I’ll believe that it’s bad and not spend money – and it’s very relevant to this topic. But I think for now I’ve gotten my point across. Without the media, games have little to no chance, and it’s massively more important than the game content itself as far as successful initial sales, just like a movie at the box office. But the consequence of failure is harsh compared to Hollywood.