Archive for the ‘Playstation 3’ Category

Maybe “suck” is not the right word here but I still ask myself how come so many sequels don`t quite reach the quality of their predecessors?

I guess we`ve seen the scenario too many times – a company takes the time and effort to make an amazing game, the cash is more than good and in no time they suddenly want to dip their greedy little hands in the Leprechaun`s bag of gold again. The developer is being rushed to create a sequel as fast as possible and they usually take one of the following routes:

• change too little and serve us more of the same “dish” garnished with some uninspired story which the screenwriter made up in about 5 minutes while sitting on the pooper;
• change too much and create something that, if not outright bad, simply isn`t what the players expect from this particular game;

This is, of course, true for books and movies, too, but I would like to focus on the most interactive form of entertainment here.

Some examples from the Industry`s ever growing reserve of garbage:

My first ever encounter with a bad sequel was at the fragile age of 9. An innocent 3rd grader who goes to his friend`s house for some cookies and Nintendo-fun… After my classmate inserted the cartridge and assured me that I will be playing not just any sequel but Super Mario Bros, I still remember my reaction which was the closest thing to “WTF is that piece of crap” a kid is capable of. Well, I know kids are pretty extreme nowadays and I realize how absurdly it sounds when a young person speaks about “the good old times” but times really were different.

Now I know that Nintendo just re-skinned one of their other titles (Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic) and offered it as Mario 2 because they felt the real sequel (Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels) was beyond the skill level of their non-slanted-eyed brothers from the West. Now that seems like a good marketing move from Nintendo but back then you can imagine my disappointment.

Anyway, the most recent major disappointing sequel that I can think of right now is KOTOR II (“Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords”). Not that the game was bad or something like that, it simply did get anywhere near the greatness of its predecessor and that in itself was a disappointment for me. Some of my friends loved the game and coincidentally those guys haven`t played the first one.

I am sure that there are better examples of crappy sequels and new ones join the collection every year but I actually tend to avoid games that are obviously bad so I don`t get too much exposed to “low quality gaming”. Feel free to add as many as you can think of in the comments!

Now, is it so difficult to make a descent successor to your already good game?

I assume some steps in the right direction would be to:

1. research the opinion of the community about your previous game, I mean really take the time to read comments at least in the major gaming forums;
2. analyze the whole gathered data and figure out what elements the gamers LIKED and which were DISLIKED;
3. build your sequel with the focus layed on fixing the problematic areas and only MINOR tweaks of the good elements (“we know you’re creative and have plenty of new ideas but if something isn’t broken don’t fix it, please”);
4. think about what new gameplay mechanics can be added while taking into acount the gamers’ feedback on the old ones;
5. alpha-beta-and-gamma-test the s**t out of your new infant game WITH fans of your previous game as well and not only some middle-age-unemployed men who last time played Super Mario Bros. on the original NES;

What similar games were you disappointed from and what other steps do you think developers can undertake to make better sequels?

Next time I will write about the games that not only nail the sweet spot but surpass their predecessors and I have one particular title in mind. Can you guess which (hint: not yet released!)?

What`s up with this game? What do you think of it, what attracting do you find about it?

No, these are not rhetorical questions, I`m seriously asking and I would like for someone to explain to me the deal about this game.

When this game firstly got some attention at E3 I thought “Well, ok, some jap has been high again, no big deal”. Then the game was released to us poor souls living outside of  Japan and I decided to give the Xbox 360 demo a try before I get back to Germany. This was a week or so ago and yes, my Xbox is still dead, I played the demo on my brother`s machine, whose DVD I killed some time ago when messing around, basically its only way to obtain games right now is via Xbox LIVE.

The opening scenes were actually kinda cool, I thought that it reminded me a lot of Devil May Cry simply as settings and style, which was a good thing! Well so much for wishful thinking…

Fifteen minutes later my head is aching from the amounts of nonsensical things happening on the screen and my eyes are on the brink of actually popping out or simply melting in their sockets… Well maybe slightly exaggerated but my head did really ache a little.

My father sitting next to me had stopped doing what he was busy with and stood with his jaw hanging, he too couldn`t believe what he was seeing. I actually decided to try some blind-folded button-mashing and it worked pretty well. In fact I succeeded in playing the battles that take place in closed scenes with my back turned. Now, I know that this game has a very complex fighting system, in fact one of the best in the this genre I`ve been reading in reviews. Still, this is not my point. I would not drop 60 euro for a good fighting system and well… to get some of this to the right:

Fight crazy doped angel creatures in style?

I`ve seen plenty reviewers mention that this game is all about style. What style? If we refer to the broadest definition of “style” as something “particular, distinctive, a type” then it certainly has tons of style. I on the other hand think Hideki Kamiya simply got really drunk on Sake mixed with God knows what with his friends some fine evening in 2007 and said “uh, guys, why don`t we make a game an insanely hot heroine doing absolutely amazing shit to the bad guys”. Apparently his drunken blabber was met with approving grunts since we can see the result of the team`s hard work today.

The only part which I really found stylish were some architecture elements. Everything else, the characters, NPCs, the absolutely irritating soundtrack and the heroine of course seem just as a mish mash of random nonsensical things. Speaking of absurdities, please tell me that what I`m seeing on this screenshot is not Bayonetta`s hair in the form of a giant boot (facepalm):

“Suspention of Disbelief”? What? What`s that?

Apparently the designers from Sega haven`t ever heard this term. I thought that video games were simply a medium for telling interactive stories and as a form of ficton the Suspending of Disbelief shoud play a major role. The idea is to make the player/reader of a novel/viewer of a movie believe in the story. Why should you even care about it if it cannot immerse you in a believable world?

I have always thought of japanese games with their flashy colorful particle effects triggered by the player`s every move as quite distasteful, but Bayonetta seems to be bringing this craziness to a whole new level of absurdity. Dante and Nero from DMC 3 and 4 (those are the only ones I`ve played) are actually cool. Their coolness makes me forgive the flashy shits flying around the scene. That`s one thing but since when is it cool to impersonate an infantile chick with big boobs and absolutely insane clothing (not insane as “very hot”, but as “in need of medical attention”)? She`s got guns strapped to her boots for God`s sake!!! How does she even pull the triggers (because I`m sure I`ve seen on some screenshots that they have triggers!)?

“Oh, you are a bad ugly creature, I`m going to shoot some bullets atyou, so stay still and don`t move while I get on the ground… oookay, ouch I broke a naaaail (cries)(picks one leg in order to shoot with its gun while maintaining ballance”

Also correct me if I`m wrong but last time I checked a giant hair in the form a boot as a weapong wasn`t really cool…

I have actually taken more time to write this then that which I spent with the demo of Bayonetta, so my impressions are quite shallow and I really mean the questions at the beginning of the post. Please, can someone explain to me why is this game given such high ratings? It seems to me that you can experience the same overdose of extraordinary events that don`t make sense by simply growing hallucinogen mushrooms and eating some in a sandwich. It would cost much less than 60 bucks I assume!

Three days ago I finally got my chance to play through the highly hyped sequel of Infinity Ward`s block-buster, sales-record-breaking Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I completed the whole action-packed campaign in around 6 hours in a sleepless night before my flight back to Germany. I decided to go to bed at around 07:00 AM and while I layed there for some time, completely awake, I startet pondering upon a question that has previously come to bother me many times…

Do video games actually have souls?

Was there even at The Beginnig in the 8-bit Era of Atari 2600, something special about certain games, something beyond the circuit boards of their cartridges?

30 years later, what makes a disk bored with billions of nano-holes, spinning at a few thousand RPM in the drive of our console or PC move us emotionally and leave an imprint on our memories just like a darn good novel can?

I have realized that these questions are rather subjective and one cannot really get a straight answer as easily as it sounds. Just think about it!

The gaming industry has expanded in the last two decades to a multi-billion-dollar business ($44+ bn last year!). Players` experience has evolved from spending twenty minutes with friends at the arcades for some Donkey Kong to being completely engrossed by all senses in a living and breathing world with nearly photo-realistic visuals. Simply said, people are not as easily impressed today.

Can you sit down and really imagine how you would react if you were able to catch a glimpse of some Crysis or Killzone 2 footage exactly 10 years ago, when you were scoring frags in Unreal Tournament on your Playstation 2 or PC?

Can you find the differences? Please do click on the images, resolution does matter.

My point is that this is an ever changing medium where your experience depends not only upon time but on your environment, views on life, etc. In spite of all the globalization stuff people like to worry about, an American, for example, might have a totally different emotional experience playing CoD: MW2 than me, having grown up in post-communism Eastern Europe (no, people, for the last time: eastern Europe doesn`t mean war destroyed land inhabited by wild savages like in Fallout 3!)

So basically, a game has a soul for me when it does something more than simply entertain me for a couple of days and then collect dust on a shelf forever forgotten. It has to induce really strong feelings in me, be it happiness, anger, fear or even sadness. I think that highly atmospheric games achieve that without even having to bother with some deeper meaning and enlightening truths at the end.

The sadly buggy S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was exactly such a game for me, I really felt the sorrow of its desolate and dead world. Mafia was one of the first games to really impress me on the emotional front, it simply had it all: pretty amazing graphics for its time, engulfing and highly atmospheric world and a very dramatic story. It spanned some years of the main protagonist`s life. You got the chance to really get know him and the other characters, to see them evolve and when shit happened to them you could empathize.

I think that exactly empathy is the key to the dramatic experience! I personally won`t be moved by the death or misfortune of a main character if I don`t give a shit about him, would you?

We see that the “soul” that those really special and memorable titles poses is a complex thing with many ingredients:

• detailed and realistically created world;
• believable and interesting “3-dimensional” (meaning not flat!) characters;
• dramatic story;
• some kind of premise or meaning;

Of course there are other many important aspects like fluid and intuitive controls, interesting gameplay mechanics and so on, but I think these things contribute more to the fun side of the game and not to this thing that I call “soul”. So in my opinion, a game has to fulfill at least one or more of the above mentioned criteria in order to offer a really memorable experience to us players but of course not all are necessary.

I think that Fahrenheit (aka “Indigo Prophecy”) is the best of example of what I mean. When this game came out it already had annoyingly dated visuals at first glance. The thing is, this game engrossed me in such a way that I was completely lost, not paying attention to crappy models and low-res textures. I was part of its magical world, totally oblivious to the fact that I was already late for school the first time I started it. All this now I realize was mainly due to its unique and quite innovative at the time implementation of quick-time events, quite an interesting story and a character I really cared for.

What games affected you in similar ways? Which titles had such a big impact on you?

Now that I defined what I understand under a game`s “soul” I will explain what does this all have to do with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Crysis in the second part.

to be continued…