What's wrong with the games industry today?

This is what's wrong with the games industry today.

Why bother talking about the actual content of a game or demo, when you can nit-pick minutiae of frame rate, resolution, and pixels that no player will ever notice in practice?

That way, you can encourage both pointless system fanboyism that never gets anybody anywhere, and a worthless race for slight graphical superiority that also never gets anybody anywhere.

And while everybody's worrying about this shit, and spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on wages so that their game will be imperceptibly better looking, we can all just hope that enough staff are left over to make sure everything else that's meant to be in the game makes it.

I'm a self-confessed graphics whore, but really this has got to stop.

Oh, and go out and buy Batman: Arkham Asylum when it comes out at the end of the month. If the demo is anything to go by, it is a really good game. With some nice graphics.

Bitch stole ma skull

Look, it's not dead! I've just been very busy, as usual. It turns out working in America for months really gets in the way of writing stupid things about videogames.

Anyway, I have found some time to play a few things, so here are some short reviews.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a fairly decent hack n slash that could really have done with more variation in environments and enemies. And fewer puzzles. Who buys a Wolverine game for puzzles about teleporters and power cells? And why does the futuristic weapon X facility only have enough power cells to power half of the things in it at once?

I started off thinking that Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena was as good as I remembered, but then quickly realised it wasn't. If you were a fan of Butcher Bay a few years back, I don't recommend picking this up unless you want Vin Diesel to stomp on your rose tinted glasses.

The level design is patchy, the action sections are trudging and monotonous (with some horrible repeating sound effects), and the generic badass dialogue and delivery gets annoying after about 5 minutes. The Dark Athena bit is not nearly as well put together as Butcher Bay, either.

Prototype is pretty much the definition of a 7/10 game for me. It's sort of pretty, with sort of good presentation, sort of fun combat, and sort of fun movement.

But the more I play it, the more it annoys me: every mission seems to go on long past the point where it is fun, and generally seem to end up with repeating the same action over and over, waiting for a bar to fill up or an arbitrary number of enemies to die; the protagonist is a complete emo arse; the enemy AI is stupid to the point of making a nonsense of the stealth mechanics; there are some very odd control mappings; selecting which of your powers to use doesn't pause or slow down the game, so you really need to have chosen which power to use before an encounter starts; the "hold one button to traverse anything" system felt nice at first, but then I realised it had removed any sense of achievement for scaling a tall building, or getting across the city; and the map is often quite useless, with targets being shown somewhere inside a block, but with no alleyways being visible, so you can't tell where the way in is.

I like the web of intrigue and the upgrade progression though.

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand surprised me by genuinely being a very good arcade shooter. Okay, so you have to either a) look past the gangsta rubbish, b) enjoy it in a tongue in cheek fashion, or c) enjoy it in a genuine "they know how we roll, but still they frontin' on us" way.

It doesn't do anything terribly original, but every feature that is in there (and there are quite a lot of elements to the game) is well implemented and nothing feels horribly out of place or useless.

It's surprisingly long as well - I thought I'd reached the end (I reached a boss fight with a helicopter, after about 6 hours of play and killing everyone who had been involved in the stealing of ma(sic) skull), but looking on the internet it turns out that I'm only half way through, and more skull stealers are about to come out of the wood work in their helicopters (every boss fight in this game involves a helicopter, oddly).

Probably the game I have enjoyed most out of the four in this post (I am halfway between b and c, if you were wondering).

Obviously the question on everyone's minds right now, though, is whether I will remember to update my blog again in the future. Tune in next week to find out the answer (most probably no).

You're not the boss of me

I've recently been playing through Creative Assembly's Viking: Battle for Asgard. It's an open-world brawler, and I've generally thought it was quite a decent game - a solid 70%er. It had a few too many flaws to be a classic, but generally was a fun way to pass the time.

After this afternoon though, I'll have nothing but bad memories of it. I've just spent an hour trying to beat the final boss, and have eventually given up in frustration.

Things that I hate about the final boss in Viking, in no particular order, are:

• It offers nothing new to experience (at least, the bit I gave up on doesn't). No new enemy types, no new weapons or effects. It is entirely unspectacular in any way.


• It swarms me with tough enemies, who respawn whenever I've whittled their numbers down.


• It traps me in a series of small locations, surrounded by walls of health-sapping fire. Have I mentioned that the camera doesn't cope well in confined spaces yet?


• It forces me to survive for an arbitrary amount of time before it will let me into the next identical area. If you miss the opportunity to move on (perhaps you're being attacked by respawning enemies, for example) then you have to wait (and fight) until the next window. My record, at the point of giving up, was to reach three of the four quadrants.

It is possible that I'm missing something about the combat system, or the layout of the fight in general. This is quite likely, since the game never really gives you any kind of proper combat tutorial, aside from briefly checking you're physically able to perform the button press combinations required for each new move.

So yes, it is quite likely that I have managed to not pick up on a finer point of the system, that would allow me to defeat the boss. Though, if that does prove to be the case, that will be rather poor - making a game that an average player can bumble through by blind luck without understanding what they should be doing, only to fall at the last hurdle.

And just while I'm on a roll about the combat system in Viking, I will mention something else (though again, maybe I'm missing something here). It's a game that prides itself on combat in numbers, and rarely will you be fighting a solitary enemy. But the enemies, their attack sets, and their AI, can combine in such a way that attacks from a few enemies will land in a row, while you're in a knockback state that stops you blocking. By random chance, it's entirely possible to lose more than half of your health to three mid-range enemies, through what appears to be no fault of your own.

I'm of the school of thought that holds boss battles to be an antiquity of the arcade days - a way of artificially forcing players to pump more money into a machine, that requires minimal effort on the part of the creator.

In a modern game, if you absolutely must have a final boss (and I understand that a lot of games have stories that would feel incomplete without a climactic showdown), then I think they should be fairly easy to overcome. The player has bested your entire game (including the final level, which I can entirely agree with making more difficult than the rest of the game) - allow them this final victory, and allow them closure on your story.

The design team on Viking has decided that, as wafer thin as its story is, I shouldn't be able to see what happens at the end. Effectively they've pressed STOP on the DVD, when I only had 5 minutes of a 10 hour movie left to watch.

And because I fell at the final hurdle (and I know it's the final one, I checked a FAQ to see if it could offer any tips), I'll not bother ever playing the game again. I don't want to experience another half hour of frustration, just to get a brief cutscene.

Bye, Viking, it was (kind of) fun playing you.

Games Reviewed in Ten Words - F.E.A.R. 2

Not quite as good. Still fun though. Shut up Cortana.

(Thanks Shallow for the suggestion.)

Not Some Experimental Indie-Darling

James Parker is a games writer and former colleague who I've briefly mentioned before. His blog is always good reading, and I thought this recent article was particularly interesting. Here's a chunk...

You can't go anywhere on the internet where they are talking about game stories without some enthusiastic comment poster presenting their incredible and unique vision of the future where games provide a truly interactive storytelling experience. "Not just branching plotlines", they continue, "but genuine non-linear storytelling!" and the world is rocked to its very core!

But I would argue that there already exists a genre that presents exactly the kind of non-linear storytelling that their visionary eye can predict, and not only that, but that it has done so for a number of years, although it isn't necessarily the first place you’d look – it’s not some experimental indie-darling, it's not a text-based adventure from a veteran of the industry...

Go and read the full article to see which game he's talking about.

Games and games and games and games

I've got nothing specific to write about this week, so I've gone for the tried and tested route of rambling half-coherently about a bunch of games that I have been playing.

First up is Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise. Two years and three days ago I wrote about the interface to Viva Pinata. I played the first game a lot (980 points, gamerscore fans!) and though I'd got used to the annoyances (the loading delays, the odd pauses, the haphazard layout) I couldn't understand how they had made it into the finished game.

I also thought it was fairly obvious where the weaknesses were, so for a sequel it should have been quite an easy job to fix. It's not like there's a lot else different, so some staff could spend the full development time making it, if not a joy to use, at least not a chore.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the crap interface is back. There are some minor improvements (some shortcutting to the seed menu, for example), but they are far outweighed by the sheer stupidity of one addition.

Question: how do you take the horribly unintuitive, complicated, slow interface from Viva Pinata, and make it worse?

Answer: by adding randomly flashing elements that serve no purpose but to confuse people.

I'm not even kidding. Watch this Youtube video, and skip to around the 30 second mark. Can you see the little coloured tabs with symbols on that are flipping in and out around the dialogue box? That happens all over the place, and it's horribly distracting and confusing. Especially during the tutorials, where the game is trying to bring your attention to something else, and there are randomly blinking elements animating all over the place.

Speaking of the tutorial, they've got that wrong again too. It's entirely overwhelming (keep in mind I played the first game a huge amount two years ago, and I was lost following it) because the game runs normally in the background. So while it's slowly trying to take you through things step by step, it's constantly being interrupted by cutscenes to show new Pinata arriving, or messages about you levelling up, or something else that doesn't matter at all at the time, but that the game can't help itself but pop in your face.

Not only is it distracting, but it's a lesson in false cause and effect. Did the new Pinata arrive because of what I was just doing, or because of some other random occurrence? You end up battling to work out what elements are a direct consequence of your most recent action, and which just coincidentally fired off at the exact time you did what the tutorial was telling you.

And then once the fairly short tutorial has finished, you're just left on your own. No gentle diminishing of the hand holding. It's just there, leading you through each step, then suddenly not there at all.

I feel slightly ashamed that I'm this baffled by a game that's aimed at a younger audience. Are my synapses really past it?

Anyway, that's enough Pinata bashing. I doubt I'll bother to fire it up again.


The other game that's been getting a lot of play time is Viking: Battle for Asgard. It's a you-vs-insurmountable-odds hack n slash, where you spend the majority of the time wandering around the huge open maps hunting out trapped vikings.

The demon forces of Hel have captured them all you see (most are in cages, but some are just tied to sticks), so you need to free them in order to build an army big enough to trigger the level's climactic assault on a demon stronghold.

Though it's mostly a button basher, there's some strategy to be had - you can pick off some enemies with stealth attacks, if you hide along their patrol route, and most enemy camps have multiple ways in. Though you can always just Rambo it through the front door if you're a double hard viking bastard. Throwing axes and molotov-style fire pots add another level of options as you progress, too.

Not many people I know have picked this up, but I'd definitely recommend it. It's pretty, it's gory, it's fairly non-strenuous. How Eurogamer thought it only justified a 5/10 I'll never work out.


Some other quick thoughts on some demos I've played:

Killzone 2 - Doesn't set the world on fire with ingenuity, but it's a solid shooter. Annoyingly short demo. Will pick up the full game.

FEAR 2 - Predictable "scares", fuzzy controls, doesn't seem to be much different from the original that I found painfully dull. Pass.

HAWX - I'm pretty sure being able to see what direction I'm flying in is quite important when you're in control of a jet plane. The cinematic mode camera is very far out too, giving you boring shots of two very small planes against a big blue background.

Halo Wars - Eventually someone's bound to stumble upon the magic control set that makes RTS games work on consoles. I'm sure this will be good if you're one of the odd people who think Halo has a gripping and interesting back story.


PS - This is the first post I've written entirely on my new laptop (a Dell Studio 17). I like it a lot. Their courier company (Walsh Western) leaves a lot to be desired though, as do the Dell customer support who blatantly lied to me on the phone.

PPS - Also starting to see "the point" in Twitter. It turns out a version of Facebook that just has status updates is what I wanted. Starting to filter out the people who I'd initially followed but who I don't really want to read about, and adding more people who are interesting.

PPPS - It's good to see a lot of positive press about our last game when it hit the NY Comic Con too. People saying nice things about 25 months of your hard work is very gratifying.

The Tomb Raiding Prince of Persia

Over the past couple of months I've been playing both the new Prince of Persia game by Ubisoft, and also Tomb Raider underworld by Crystal Dynamics. The two games are very similar, both recent takes on the 3d platforming genre. But which one is better? There's only one way to find out, as Harry Hill would say ... fight!

Graphics
Tomb Raider doesn't look bad (you can almost feel the spray from some of the ocean bits), but the settings are fairly generic, and the art style is the same as ever. But it's clearly an early lead for Prince of Persia here. In motion the game looks lovely, but when you stand still it is just gorgeous.

Story
Underworld continues the tale from Tomb Raider Legend, with Lara still searching for her mum, while being set back by the white haired Amanda. It's no epic, but it does its job of carrying you around the various world locations. PoP's story is something about an ancient evil being unleashed, and a magical princess who must defeat it. I don't think either game scores points in this category.

Characters
Thankfully TR keeps interaction with anyone who isn't Lara to a minimum, the extended cast of Legends either dropped or kept very much to the sidelines. They seem to have decided that Lara is now the sort of person who will not only fill endangered wildlife full of lead, but will also happily kick priceless ancient vases to pieces, in search of whatever trinkets she can find.

PoP, unfortunately, forces you to spend the entire duration of the game in the company of two unlikable forgetables. The prince is some generic thief with a heart - basically Disney's Aladdin. The princess is ... actually, aside from glowing blue, I can't remember anything in particular about her.

Tomb Raider gets a point, by a whisker.

Platforming
Both games set out to do different things here. PoP's idea is to take the motion of free running, and make it easy to pull off. You spot a point you want to get to, and with a series of simple button presses and some visually impressive acrobatics, you'll be there in a few moments.

Underworld gives Lara a similarly accomplished set of moves, but they're performed more deliberately, and with less speed. The paths through levels are much less obvious (though just as linear once you get going), and the result is a game where you spend a lot more time working out your route.

To me, TR's approach is much better. I felt a sense of achievement after working my way through a section, as if I was exploring it, instead of just passing through.

Combat
Combat in Tomb Raider: Hold down lock-on button; hold down fire button; jump about to avoid being hit; wait for enemy to die. Combat in Prince of Persia: Hold down block button; follow on-screen button prompts; wait for enemy to die. No points awarded either way.

Anything Else?
Tomb Raider has a nice series of difficulty setting options, and also has a nice in-game hint system. You can get a hint about either your general goal at the time ("I need to get that door open"), or the specific task ("I should try the switch over by the door").

PoP has some utterly hateful yellow "special move" pads that make me think of turning the game off every time I have to use one.

The Ronseal Test
Tomb Raider Underworld - You raid some tombs, and explore the underworld of Norse legend. Prince of Persia - He's not a prince in this one, and it isn't set in Persia. Pretty conclusive, that.

Conclusion
To sum up, if you're after a 3d platforming game to play, get Tomb Raider. If you want someone else to play while you watch something pretty, get Prince of Persia.