Push B, Stupid

Fight For The Future

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:28:00 +0000

It's time to move on. Simple as that.

For those of you whom have looked at more than one post on this blog over the past few years, you've probably surmised a few key things. Firstly, dorkcollective may have started as such, but in no way has it been a "collective" since maybe its first month as a blog. Nothing against the other writers, but they've moved on to do other things and live separate lives, and that sort of pulls the rug out underneath any collectivity that people go for with this stuff. So the title, at least the title, had to change for this site to make any semblance of sense.

But that was just a jumping off point. The second thing you may have gleaned from this space over time was that it was sort of a dumping ground for other work that I was trying to do around the vast internets, and because of it, was never upheld to any standard of timing or responsibility. When the mood would tickle me, I would write something or, more accurately, migrate other things from other blogs over here. Since it was mainly for writing about games, and still probably is, this worked just fine. But I, like my errant "previous writers" have also moved on. There's a lot more to say and lot more to do these days, even though a lot of what you would find on here is probably going to be games related. But it can't --and won't-- be only that. While it seems pretty obvious from what I've just said that we won't be altering the course too much, the helm's going to turn a little bit more than it used to.

So here we are again at a kind of Post Zero. The old stuff will still be archived, the name might change again (I was thinking of "B Attacks," but I actually think that it would make a better name for a feminist gaming site. That is neither a joke or a dig at feminism), and things will be prettier when I can find time to make it that way. But the blog that we originally tried to create so many years ago about three people posting games, beer, and other whatnot had its impetus in personal growth. That won't change. This site needed more than a shot in the arm, it needed to be absolutely resuscitated. It needed something.

So let's do something, yeah?

The Path of Radiant After Markets

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 19:18:00 +0000

Since having recently finished Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones in preparation for playing Awakening -- like the good Nintendo Ambassador that I am -- I found myself very taken with the game. It being the first one that I've played to completion because I'm something of a philistine, I finally see how the FE faithful have become such a ravenous audience. If anything, the love/ hate relationship that I formed with Sacred Stones brought me back to the first time I went through Demon's Souls, and by that I mean that when I finally delivered the killing blow to the last boss and watched the credits roll, I felt like I had been through some shit. Since Demon's Souls has seem deep sentimental meaning to me, this is praise (if you can call it that) that I try not to heap on to a game very often.

Naturally, I started doing research into the other localized Fire Emblem games, and was caught by a fair amount of surprise. After taking a quick look on eBay, it seems that Path of Radiance, the series' first and only GameCube release, has catapulted in price over the years. I clearly remember its release when I was working in retail, and I have routinely seen it in used shops and shows as the years have gone on, but it seems as thought I've completely lost track of its status as a collectable over the years. The $75 that this example auction is calling for right now caused me some serious sticker shock. The other entries into the series, the GBA Fire Emblem, Sacred Stones, Shadow Dragon for DS, and the Wii release Radiant Dawn, all command close to full retail price for their respective consoles, too. Clearly, the community around these games hangs on to them for dear life.

Is this hike in price caused.by the recent release of Awakening? I'm going to speculate so, since most of these games are still fairly common. Are they worth investing in to pad out a back log of games I'll probably never get through? I'm sure you all have some thoughts on that, but for close to a c-note it's looking more likely that these games are just going to be curiosities to me rather than actual life experiences. Then again, St. Patrick's Day is on Sunday, and I've made some costly eBay decisions before when I was not so sound of mind.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things Revisited

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:22:00 +0000

Now a few days removed from finishing Lords of Shadow: Mirror of Fate, I can see where some of its criticisms have come from. Mechanically, the game is kind of an uneven mess. I’ve mentioned before that the combo-heavy combat like this doesn’t work so well on a 2D plane. Once you start to rev up your moves, your basically locked in place where other monsters can swarm around you; whereas with a z-axis on a 3-dimensional plane, you have more options in regard to movement in case an enemy digs in a blocks attacks or the plodding of your own swings causes other foes to try to get cheap shots. Here, it’s either roll forward or roll back, and can often times lead to enemy disengagement (which means you have to start all of your fighting processes over, making battles a drag) or you’ve just put yourself in harm’s way because of other monsters that have boxed you in. The addition of rolling in and out of the plane, like in 3D games like God of War or the Devil May Cry series, eliminates those issues by virtue of space. A nice try, but again, Bloodrayne: Betrayal proved that this didn’t work the first time, and it sure is busted here.

That doesn’t hold a candle to the fact that most fights are partitioned off which drags any momentum you might have for exploration (at least the first time you’re in an area. Return trips don’t unnecessarily block you from proceeding) to a halt. I get that MercurySteam really wanted to find a way to blend Lords of Shadow with Metroidvania, but forcing players to stop in their tracks so they can fight a few enemies with their hack battle system is both boring and broken. It also robs players of choice. In exploration-heavy games like this (tries to be), you really don’t have to fight much of anything if you don’t want to, other than bosses. Sure, it makes sense that you would so you can build levels to make these eventual boss-walls easier to conquer, but they’re not necessary. What’s important in the post-Symphony of the Night games is that you mill around the environment to either find the next location to explore, obstacle to overcome, or secret to uncover, not delivering beatdowns to skeletons. In those games, you can decide if you want to grind for levels/gear/souls or to uncover your next destination, and these can be mutually exclusive. Not in Mirror of Fate where it’s enter into hallway, stop and fight, look around, stop and fight, enter next hallway. That got old fast.

The last problem worth pointing out is that this game had no teeth. In the early Castlevania games, which Jeremy Parish took great pains to point out, are designed around Belmont movement flaws. They struck that balance that everyone wants between tough and fair. Part of the reason that it, and most other games, is that difficulty was based on risks and penalties for dying. You only had a set amount of lives, and if you didn’t complete your objective, well, tough cookies. The post-Symphony games updated this to a more RPG stance in that if you died, you’d be placed back at your last save. In Mirror of Fate, the game is auto-saving constantly. Enter a room, find an item, open a chest, hit a cut scene and the little icon at the bottom right of the screen will blink to remind you that your safety net is clearly underneath you, so go ahead and mess up as much as you want. Forget the common complaints about how easy and compartmentalized the boss fights are, the real problem with the balance of this game is that the auto save took risk out of the equation altogether, making for some weak sauce. There’s no reason not to finish this game as long as you keep playing. Earlier Castlevanias? No such luck.

But this game wasn’t the butt smear that certain corners of the intertron are calling it, either. Of the last several games bearing the name, I think that this one has some of the most consistent art direction since the NES era. While I’ll agree that dungeons and caves eventually look a little same-y, I find the tone consistent in lighting and mood, which is something that a lot of the other games just didn’t do. For as much as the audiovisual experience this series gets so much attention, it has always created a sort of cognitive dissonance between levels. Think about going from the Outer Wall in Symphony of the Night to the Library. The muted color tones and string-heavy music jerk into brightly colored décor and a harpsichord. Individually, they’re both brilliant. One right after the next is still jarring to me. It isn’t always like this. The bleak aesthetic of the Abandoned Mine a little later followed by the Catacombs is the perfect example of how everything fits together which is something that I’m guessing MercurySteam wanted to recapture with specific sections of Mirror of Fate, especially since the Catacombs is very platform-heavy.

I didn’t find the plot convoluted, though, which might make me a minority. In fact, I thought that the way MercurySteam reconciled strands of the previous continuity’s lore and brought them together was pretty agreeable. I’m probably going to SPOIL some things for you if you care (though you probably shouldn’t), but making Trevor into Alucard makes a hell of a lot more sense than in the previous continuity. Be with me for a second; Dracula, whom is the corporeal Prince of Darkness, decides to put aside being the World’s Ultimate Evil Satan figure for a brief moment so he could fall in love with a human woman named Lisa and knock her up. Then he goes back to be the World’s Ultimate Evil. This is pretty close to the dumbest origin I’ve ever heard, because brief lapses in defining character traits are about as clever as a fart joke. If you need further proof I have some Red Kryptonite for you. Though probably equally hackneyed, the idea of Gabriel Belmont having a secret son spirited away from him at birth and turned into a vampire later to save his life is a teensy bit more plausible. There certainly was a feeling of anticlimax after Mirror of Fate ended, but it did a fine enough job squeezing Trevor/Alucard and Simon into a continuity that doesn’t really need them to begin with. Which should be good enough, but I know for most people probably isn’t, so I’ll go ahead and drop it.

It’s an ok game, I guess. I’m a little let down that I threw forty clams at it when it only took a couple of sit-downs to finish, but I knew that coming in so shame on me. I still have some hopes for Lords of Shadow 2, but a whole lot less out of Konami if further handheld games in this series follow this same format. Points go to MercurySteam for trying something a little different from all things IGA, but not enough for me to place it among the better games in the franchise.

Freelancer Blues Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Here we are at the third installment of our aesthetically-unappealing-on-purpose look at the highs and lows of trying to write about games for gelt. I hope that you have a six pack handy, because today is all about sadness, horror, and maybe reading a blog while you're drunk (if you read slowly).

MYTH-SQUASHING REALITY OF THE DAY

You need to have a job.

There.

It doesn't have to be a high-paying job, or even a full-time job, really, but a job is a job, and if you're writing for a gaming website or two, then an actual, stable stream of income outside of that is pretty important, especially if this is the only thing keeping your gas turned on. Let's say that you turn out to be a pretty good writer. You've gotten a fair enough amount of experience and have put together a half-decent set of samples that you've parlayed into a relationship at Gaming Site A (because calling it Gaming Site X implies that it should be snowboarding). This means that they are paying you a flat rate for each individual piece that you write. This is just an example, but think they're giving you about $150/ article if you're writing a feature or review, though that might vary depending on the size of the feature, the work involved, and necessary research (there are pretty similar criteria for reviews). Let's do some simple math: if you score one article per week (which is pretty darn good sometimes), that's roughly $600-750 a month depending on the month, what the site needs, and if you're reliable and fast. That's a pretty good chunk of change all things considered, but how much is your rent? You're food? Are you paying for internet, or do you have to live in a coffee shop, and even then, that's a couple bucks here and there for their mediocre dark roast so they don't kick you out. Do you have roommates? Insurance? Other things that your parents are really concerned about and you, maybe not so much?

The consistency of the work you're getting is going to turn out to be monumentally important. HORROR STORY: Remember my friend Brian? Good guy, great writer. He used to be one of the news guys for a larger site when they were relying on freelancers to publish a certain amount of articles a day. It wasn't great cash, but it was consistent, and with the other work that Brian was pulling in, he could make ends meet (Brian also has a wife and newborn, by the way). All of a sudden, the website did some rejiggering with their staff and he wasn't on the news anymore. This severely threw a wrench into Brian's day-to-day affairs and what he was bringing in every month. Brian wound up being ok, he had other freelance clients to fall back on (Bonus ProTip: diversify your clients if you can swing it), but there isn't an umbrella in the world that will cover you when the shit comes down. Editors will come and go, and this might change your relationship with a company. My advice is to at least try to work at this coffee shop you've been playing Phantasy Star II in. You'll be making tips and keeping yourself fed with their day-old bagels, and if anything, they won't kick you out when you've been sitting there for five hours mooching their free wi-fi.

MANAGE YOUR TIME. THIS IS NOT AN OPTION.

This might sound completely contradictory to what I just told you about keeping steady work in- and out of the games writing bidness, but once you start getting down with reviews and features on the regular you will soon struggle with this as I (and many others) have. I'll cut to the chase: You're not going to have a lot of time to turn around an article after it has been offered to you by an editor. The most you might get is about 4 days (more or less) to put together a feature if the place you're writing for is thinking ahead with their content plans (and that's pretty generous in some instances). That's kind of a lot of time, but that can depend on your situation. Let's say you have a 25-page slide show that you need to write 75-100 words apiece for, plus finding all of the art for them, resizing them and/or Photoshopping or GIMPing something for them (plus intro and extro slides), and this assumes that your editors have given the list of games to you and not relied on you to think them up yourself (and then send them prior to writing for approval). If you did this and nothing but this, then it might take you a few hours or even a day to kind of pound something out. The rest of us have a lot of other stuff going on, so they have to compartmentalize and prioritize their time a little differently.

With reviews, sites want to publish their thoughts on something as close as humanly possible to the release of the game that they can pull off. Sure, sometimes this works and other times it doesn't, but getting things finished, and finished correctly, at a deadline is what they're hiring you to do. That means that if you're getting a review, you have to drop everything that you're doing and begin inhaling whatever they sent you. This can be very stressful. Most of the time, it's only about 2-3 days between getting a download code and having the work published, so you have to be not only quick on your feet, but also decisive with your judgments. But a lot of times, that even gets thrown out the window depending on the game. When you are offered a random twin-stick shooter exclusive for XBLA or something like DLC for Skyrim, that potentially pedestrian twin-stick shooter is going to be a hell of a lot easier to soak up and accurately review in the time you'll be allotted. But I know, you really want to review Skyrim DLC. We'll come back to that.

I have a full-time job, and there have been plenty of times that my lunch hour is taken up sitting in front of my laptop either transcribing notes and forming them into complete thoughts or screwing around on Google Images trying to get art together because the ftp password that came with press credentials isn't working and I can't get pictures for an article. There have been times where I do this during the day, play games at night to review, and then repeat the process until it's done. It ain't always like this, but it happens. One more thing: It might be tempting to try to do some of this stuff at work, but try to be disciplined with it. No need to screw it up with the people that might be paying for your insurance, whether you like the gig or not.

This brings up the subject of playing games for enjoyment, which you will want to do. Well, I can't tell you what you should and shouldn't do with your free time, but trying to squeeze all of this stuff together -- writing your articles, playing shitty games for review (we'll come back to this, too), proofing, making more contacts, living an actual life -- it can get a little difficult sometimes to just, well, play games that you want to play. Way back when on an episode of the Oddcast, Chris Plante pretty much came right out and said that it doesn't happen very often if you’re trying to be a good writer. The more you do this, and the more the work comes in, the more you might find that he's right.

To sum up, don't quit your day job. For real. I hope you can get to a point where you're turning down work because you're over cooked with what you have, or that you're just been offered a staff writing gig at your favorite shop. Until then, though, keep this as a really great hobby, and just do good work.

ENOUGH PREACHING

I promised terror, and terror I will bring. Here are some brief anecdotes of things that happened whether they could have been avoided or not.

- Remember when I told you not to pack your bags so you could make it in New York? Well, this might be the most practical advice I can give you because I once met a guy that, yes, packed up his shit because he had a job at Game Site A in a city far from where he was. He got there, unpacked his stuff, and was downsized within three months. Most of the time you can't see this coming, but still. Be careful, man.

- You are hired to write something for someone, and it will almost never be something of profound interest to you, in my experience. Maybe you have a really great article in mind about the state of achievement in games, or how gamers themselves stereotype each other based on what games they're playing. Tough cookies. Give us 10 slides about Lara Croft's chest. Yes, you write for hire, not always for art.

- When you are writing something on the internet, you must prepare for a certain decimation of your ego. Brian has done articles for sites that were very large, had a copious research component, and paid kind of lousy when all things were said and done. His real reward were the 4 people out of around maybe 70 that commented on the article he wrote (that wasn't even his idea) that didn't call him an idiot, a bad writer, or a thousand times worse. The thing with the internet is that everyone has a voice, and they will use it to yell at you no matter how well-intentioned you are. From Brian's own [typed] lips: "internet commenters exist to a) point out every last typo, b) pull up some obscure fact that invalidates yours, or c) generally make you feel that the article you wrote kills puppies." I can site more articles than you have the time or patience to digest as proof. Thicken your skin, son.

- My first routinely-paying work was doing news for a site that expected you to find something online, pitch it to them, and then turn it around to them in less than 30 minutes. It was a great learning experience, and I still keep in touch with the editor. The bad thing is that this guy was fired about 8 months or so after I started. They kept the same schedule for news, but started giving it only to certain freelancers without pitching, and they did this without really telling anybody. This was their call, and while I was a little let down that I wasn't in on the plan, I had to remember that I was still working for hire, so I didn't really need to be. Surprise, doing news was a thing of the past.

- I've visited the home offices of one larger site in the past, and it was creepily silent. These places are not club houses where everyone's playing Halo. This is a business.

- Putting up with shitty assignments will reward you with getting exactly what you want when you want it, but very rarely.

- Editors are really, really busy. As such, they don't have a ton of time to give you feedback or offer you constructive criticism. When they do, sponge it all in.

- On the flip side, other editors will pass your work around the office to give everyone a read and then send you thoughts via Google document or maybe even a .doc file. Chances are, that masterpiece you wrote just got brutalized by someone. Try not to take it personally. If errors are particularly eggregious, you might make a short apology after you do the rewrites, but just do the rewrites quickly and correctly if you have that chance.

- Of the above two examples, the worst thing in the world is when a writing team will take your work and rewrite it to put in their own humor or attempt to "fix" things. I made a large slide show for a site once that was supposed to be funny, but the editors clearly didn't get the jokes that I was making. After sending it back to me for some rewrites, they went ahead and did their own share of rewriting while completely restructuring the slide show. Some jokes fell flat because of their new placement, others made absolutely no sense because of retooling, while others had added text to slides that made them...icky. My name was attached to this, so I was a bit furious, but there really isn't anything I could do. Either I complain and risk loosing them as a client or hope that the article gets burried as soon as possible. Thankfully, the latter happened.

- The games that you will get for review will be, for the most part, small-time. This, in no way, implies that you're writing about bad stuff, but places have in-house staff to review the Final Fantasies, BioShocks, and Mass Effects. When pitching to editors and asking for games to review, keep in mind the smaller and mid-tier games that come out as downloadables or for niche audiences. A lot of times, places don't have enough man power to get to that stuff.

- This was sort of my fault, but one time a game got announced to release on PSN two or three days before it actually dropped. I emailed the reviews editor for a site to see if I could write up the review for it right when the news broke, but he was out of the office. Thinking I was being pro-active, I sent a message to his managing editor explaining the situation and asking for the review. This person saw it my way and sent me a download code a day later (thankfully giving me until the day after the game's release as a deadline). Going over the original editor's head didn't do me any favors, though, as he proceeded to give me the cold shoulder for close to 8 months. I didn't get review work from this place again until he left for another opportunity.

- If you don't calmly remind certain places, you might not get paid for months at a time. I wish this wasn't the case, but always make sure that you send your invoices and your follow-up emails in a timely manner.

I hope this was helpful for, well, someone. I'm sure I'll remember a little tidbit that I left out and will blog about it when it comes to mind.

Thanks for reading the Long Stuff (because people hate the Long Stuff).

Freelancer Blues Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:34:00 +0000

Yesterday, I talked about the necessary first steps into trying to make money while writing about games. Notice that I could have dressed that up into saying something absurd like "first step into a larger world," or whatever, but I didn't. Frankly, that's bullshit. This immediately brings us to our first myth-crushing point of the (again picture-less) day:

THE WORLD IS SMALL (AND IT'S GETTING SMALLER)

Ok, yes, the internet is as mysterious as it is vast, and you can absolutely make a name for yourself writing for tons of smaller sites or getting your podcasts bandied about on reddit, but if we're talking about cash money, the stuff that buys you food and keeps your heat on, the world is shrinking. Yes, there are places that pay, but think of them as the Majors: IGN, Kotaku, Joystiq, Polygon, GamesRadar, Gamespot, VG24/7, Game Informer (and I don't even know if they publish freelance work. I'm really thinking no), and maybe Kill Screen to a lesser extent. There are probably more places, but these are the ones that come immediately to mind. For the most part, they publish a steady stream of good, easily-read (that's important) work, and they get their share of hits per day.

But, as we also observed yesterday, things change all the time. You know what my dream gig was? Working for 1Up...in 2008. The fact that I didn't turned out to be in my favor after we've seen what's happened to that site and many, many others over the course of the last five years or so. Jeremy Parish has now worked for three separate parent companies (and now back to the first). Future Publishing owns an awful lot of print and web publications and they have restructured more times than I can remember right now. One of those pubs was Nintendo Power, which we all know went poof a few months ago. See where I'm going with this?

So there really aren't that many places out there that will shell out for your work. Be patient, and be diligent about checking back to see if anyone's willing to pick up your work. Another myth that I'm going to crush is that staff writing jobs at these places are about as common as plutonium deposits in your back yard. Don't expect to score one of these things very easily, if ever. On that note:

ABOUT THAT 'WORKING FOR FREE' THING

I kept a MySpace blog for two years (I think more) about used games and collectability before getting set up with a couple of free sites. From there, I probably had two, maybe three articles posted at these places and thought that I had my black belt in games writing, so it was time to drop these fools that have lent me a hand and move on. This was a mistake.

It was over a year (closer to two) with the free sites when I finally found a place that would pay for work after doing free stuff for three or four years at that point with the blogs. I was starting to get resentful and discouraged. One of the free sites kept making promises about payments (though I was getting the occasional free game), but never came through. My ego's trajectory started from gratitude that I was being published, to "I'm too good for this place," to "why the hell can't I find work," to "maybe I'm just not that good of a writer" (which is still very probable). I'd like to tell you to try to just stay happy that you're getting published, but I'm not an idiot. At least try not to burn any bridges or piss off other writers you work with. Eventually, everybody might know each other in some capacity or another, remember?

ACTUALLY GETTING WORK

I'm going to be totally honest with you and say that I find this to be the hardest part. Once I had what I felt was a pretty decent set of samples, it was time for me to try to pass some around. If you're curious, I placed in two or three reviews (one game I loved, one I hated, and one that I thought was mediocre) to show some range, a news roundup article that I was doing at the time (I picked one that included what was happening at Infinity Ward when West and Zampella left to show how I covered Big News), and one feature article. If I were to do this over, I would probably put in more features, because many, many sites are going away from the boilerplate news/previews/reviews format in favor of feature-based content. But I knew at the time that my reviews were strong, and that's what I was most comfortable doing, so that's what I wanted to show. Other people might tell you different if you ask them, especially these days, but it worked for me.

Then, I started babysitting the internet. Seriously. Since I'm in the Midwest and there aren't a lot of events or shows that happen around me, I didn't have a lot of opportunities to meet people for some face-to-face time, but I'll come back to this in a second. Once a month or so, I would go to every site that I could think of and looked at hiring pages. Occasionally, some had open call-outs for good freelance work. I would type a brief, neat (both of which are monumentally important) intro and links to my published work and hoped for the best. Some places gave me nibbles, others didn't get back to me. One of them finally replied to the email and gave me a shot with a short news clip about Split/Second screen shots. It was the most slaved-over 150 words I have ever written.

Here's something else I've tried to very mixed (meaning, sort of lousy) results: contacting people directly. A lot of sites have their writers easily message-able or with their email address plainly displayed on their articles. I would try to find whomever the executive or managing editors were and directly send them inquiries. This has never, ever worked for me. You might get a different result, especially if you have a lot of published work under your belt. My advice, though, is just stay far enough away. These folks get an awful lot of these (Stephen Totilo, ME over at Kotaku, did an online Q/A in the a few months ago. Guess what a huge chunk of those questions were about?). Better to just leave them alone

Actually meeting people has turned into a pretty good approach for me, but only after I've had some stuff published so I could say, "I'm the guy that wrote ______ for _______." Once I had one contact, they could introduce me to other contacts, too, and this was a pretty big help. But once the door is open, it doesn't mean that the whole party is coming in. You have to be smart and diligent about making contacts and meeting people, and you can't just expect that more work is going to come your way just because you've gotten one story written for x site.

Take this as friendly advice: remember to BE COOL to other writers. I cannot say this enough. At one point, a guy sent me a PM on a message board because he'd seen some work that I had done, and it was totally out of the blue. It didn't turn into a ton of work or money, but it was still very welcome and downright flattering. I sort of paid this forward to another writer that I've read on other sites when I knew an editor that I occasionally work with was looking for more freelancers. I don't know if this person's picking up any work out of it (yet), but it can't hurt to help other people to ultimately help yourself.

Want to know what else you should never do? I'm going to out myself in some way by telling you that I've never been to PAX or E3, but I have been to other industry events (and I have certainly written coverage for both sitting with a laptop in a coffee shop, but not playing Phantasy Star II). I had a chance to shake hands with a few people from larger websites that I really wanted to meet and toss business cards around with. Most of them aren't there for that, though, they're there to work. It's totally cool if you introduce yourself and if you're at some after party and you see a couple of these cats around, then yeah, a "hey, I'm John, and I write for _____" is fine. Doing it during the day when they want to talk to developers and see alpha builds of games is a serious no no. If the time comes for you to be in their shoes, you would want it the same way. Also, make sure the business cards that the place your writing for has your correct email address on them. I once walked into a place a couple of years ago with a box of cards that were shipped to my hotel that had all kinds of bad info on them. This full box of useless crap sat in my room for two days when they should have been given to certain people.

COAST TO COAST

Here's something a little stupid about me. In college, I used to do freelance storyboards for the film majors, and I even took a crack at doing some independent comics for a second. Everyone I spoke to on the subject told me the same thing: If you want work in storyboarding, you have to go where the money is, and that meant Las Angeles. I wasn't so in love with it, and for a bunch of reasons unnecessary to explain, I did not move to LA. The games writing industry, in its way, isn't really that far removed from that. Future, IGN, and GameSpot are all located in San Francisco, and a ton of stuff has their roots in New York City. In fact, every time recently that Kotaku, for example, has put up cattle calls for part-timers it's for NY-based writers. While this isn't always the case for other large publications (Game Informer is in Minneapolis of all places, which, actually, is a much cooler town than you think) and the internet makes it doable if you live almost anywhere to work, full-time office kinds of work are basically on one coast or the other.

That doesn't mean pack your bags, sell your car, and plan on having dreams as your only income. But we'll talk about that and other horror stories tomorrow.

Have any questions about any of this stuff? I promise to be as brutally honest as I can within reason, so ask away.

Freelancer Blues Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:15:00 +0000

This is something I'm republishing here from an old 1UP.com blog. It's a little on the long side, so go get a beer. Before I begin, though, I have to mention something that Bob Mackey wrote in his farewell blog when it was announced that 1UP would be winding down: If you want to write about games, you should be doing it for yourself first. I thought this sort of went without saying, but it can't hurt to point it out again.

Anyway.

Ok, so writing about games. Wait, no, you want to talk about writing about games for money. Let's think about this for a second.

When this blog was just a bad idea that I tried to push out of my head early this morning, I knew that I should let it settle for a second before I started typing. These faux-"in the trenches" articles about writing for pay and how to break into it are usually pretty trite. I asked a friend of mine, another freelancer we'll call Brian, his opinion:

ME: This probably isn't a good idea, but I think I'm going to do a blog series about freelancing
Brian: Oh yeah? Hah...I'm guessing it won't all be rosy.
(We then went on to talk about poop schedules. Yes, seriously)

It won't. I've been freelancing for a couple of gaming sites on and off for the past four years and I've seen just as much bad as I've seen good, and I really haven't seen that much in the grand scheme of things. I don't want to scare you off from doing what you love for a little bit of cash, but it ain't as easy as sitting around with a laptop in a coffee shop and pouring your guts out over Phantasy Star II.
Still interested? Then in this series I'll offer the best advice I can from my own personal experiences: some general advice to start, meeting people and making contacts, and dealing with the pains and joys of working with people that have been in it a lot longer (and sometimes a hell of a lot less) than I have. I'll also throw in some bits about other friends of mine that freelance and some of the experiences they've had for comparison's sake.

A note before we move on: I'm going to make this as frank as possible without naming names and citing specific projects that I've worked on for whom. Again, I'm not going to complain about doing this; in fact, writing about games and getting paid for it is what just about everyone with an internet connection wants to do for a reason (because it's awesome), and this is one of the problems. This series is meant to give you both a reality check and some practical advice if this is something you really want to do.

Also, I'm not going to put in any stupid pictures of a typewriter or note pad or anything else that is a cliche "writer" thing. Just fair warning.

THINGS YOU'VE HEARD BEFORE THAT SOUND LIKE BAD ADVICE BUT ARE HONEST-TO-GOD TRUE

1: This is going to sound crass, but I've found it to be a cold reality: this shit is hard. It's difficult to get your work noticed (even if you're good, and I'm not talking about me), difficult to maintain relationships in such a changing niche market, and difficult to pay bills if you want this to be your only income. We'll get into all of these individually as the next few days ramble on.

2: Ever go to a gaming site when the editor is answering questions or listen to a podcast where your favorite writer/personality giving thoughts about this stuff? Yes, you have, and that means that you've also heard them tell you time and again that you need to keep writing constantly. Start a blog (like this one), get your thoughts down, do it often, and get comfortable writing. There is always a difference between natural talent and hard work, but how you treat both of them are equally important. Maybe you weren't the best student in your middle school English classes, or maybe you taught high school Language Arts. Yes, one sounds impressive compared to the other, but if the person giving students the rundown on Nathaniel Hawthorne isn't writing on the regular like guy that might fail their Scarlet Letter exam, then all of that skill that they think is innate will atrophy while the other person's growing. It doesn't matter what you write about when it all boils down to it (but routinely writing about games is kind of helpful), but you need to keep writing.

3: When I first decided that I wanted to write about games for dough, I asked a person that works for a very, very large gaming site for some hints on how to break in (whom was really cool about giving over some helpful advice. BONUS PROTIP: not everybody is). His best advice after #2 above: you need to read, and you need to read everything. Magazines, books, internet articles, the sports section, the financial reports, whatever you can get your hands on. You need to see how other writers write, and you need to notice the differences between the good stuff and the bad. This is mucho important, and more so than a lot of people think.

4: Persistence is key. Don't be a nag to people, but try not to get discouraged. You will be shot down for work more often than it will be offered to you by a landslide. Get used to that.

5: This is the biggest eye-roll advice you'll probably read, but you need to be flexible. Burn this into your psyche now. The games-writing business (whether you want to be called a "games journalist," a "games blogger," or just a "games writer") is changing pretty dramatically and constantly. You need to be able to adapt to the needs of the people you're working for and diverse enough to find other work when what you were doing dries up. That last part also super sucks.
Now that we have some of the yes-I've-seen-these-bullshit-tips-before-get-to-the-actual-advice section, which you should probably re-read if that's your reaction, let's move on to some the first big practicality:

YOU NEED TO WRITE FOR FREE
I bet you've also heard about this little nugget in the past, too. "Hang on," you're thinking. "I have a journalism degree from the University of Iowa (or wherever). Why the eff should I be giving away these pearls for nothing with that kind of credential?"

People are already taking a shit on your ego because now you haven't done anything, just expected it to be done for you. Without a body of work to prove that you A) you know what you're talking about and B) you (and future editors) can cite your strengths and weaknesses then you just bought yourself a very expensive piece of paper from a very prestigious place that prints them. Am I saying that your high-profile degree is worthless? Absolutely not, but a lot of people that write regularly in the gaming press don't have backgrounds in journalism, or even, in some cases, anything related to the English language. While this might be changing as the years go on (again, because everybody and their dog wants to do this just like you), being a sound writer with a good portfolio of work can go a long way.

As I see it, there are two ways of doing this:

1: This, incidentally, is the route I have taken. Find a website that you enjoy that welcomes new writers. This doesn't mean places like 1Up, IGN, Kotaku, Joystiq, Polygon, GamesRadar, VG24/7 or just about anywhere else you might conjure up immediately off the top of your head. These folks are the big names, they pay, and everyone knows it so they're beating cats like you and me off with a stick. Smaller, more audience-specific places are a better start. Think spots that are specific to Nintendo exclusively, or are about nothing but retro games, or maybe one of the scoreboard sites. These places are doing the best they can with what they have, and most of the time they’re just happy to keep the lights on, so they need decent writers that can work for free. Find your specialty and run with it. Content is king on any website and even smaller places know that if they want people coming back, they have to post new stories. That's where you come in.

What you get out of the deal:

-Exposure first and foremost. This is important. When you can refer back to work that was published and can link to it, you're way ahead of a lot of other people. It's easy to form a body of work here, so as long as you know that this is your best reward (and it is), it's always worth it.

-More eyes on your work, meaning better editing than your brother, your significant other, your parents and other people that don't want to hurt you. This is your chance to grow, so soak it in as much as possible. I'm not saying that you have to agree with every edit that's made of your stuff, but you should definitely take it all seriously. Listen to your editors and hone this stuff.

-Become diverse. What I mean is that if you're writing for a place that isn't paying you, they're probably open to any kind of content that you can pound out, as long as it's good. Reviews are what everybody wants to do, which is fine, but make sure yours stand out. Try to do some news, too. A lot of sites, other than the bigger "blog"-types, are starting to shy away from doing regular industry news, but it's a good exercise to know news cycles, and to crank out small stories on a timer. This doesn't mean that you should try to publish things every 20-30 minutes like Kotaku or Polygon, so maybe pitch little weekly news round-ups to editors once you've proven you can work on a schedule and under a deadline. You should also go to an event, maybe even one with another writer for the site, and cover what you see. Editors for the site should give you some direction as to what kind of content they want from these things, and these can be previews of game builds that you see (just the facts, no opinions unless they ask for them), interviews with developers (which is a huge deal if you can do these at events. REMEMBER TO BRING A RECORDING DEVICE or get an app for you phone), or color commentary on your experiences there. A lot of events are invitation-only, but going to PAX or something is still a good place to start.

-Move up within their ranks. Sounds little dumb, but if they have some sort of hierarchy like Senior Writers and Assistant Editors this means that you might learn to use their CMS (content management system) to post articles. Really, what we use to blog on 1Up is also a CMS, too, so you already have some exposure, but other places have proprietary stuff that is good to learn just for diversity's sake. Also, you may get the opportunity to coach other writers. This is definitely not for everyone, but if you're down for looking at other people's work, you can sort of watchdog how you do things as well. That never hurts.

-Everyone wants to start with writing reviews, and that's fine, but just know that you're probably buying your own stuff before anyone starts coughing up download codes for things, but those may come. Getting free junk is way awesome, but just you have to remember that you are not working for the people that provide the site this stuff, you work for the people that are receiving it. If a game is good, say that it's good. If it's shit, don't be afraid to tell people this, even if you scored it for free and you're trying to be cool. Effectively writing about how something isn't good is as much a skill as saying that it is. Want to know what's really hard? Trying to convey how something's just "all right." Trust me on this, if you're writing for place with a 1-10 scale of reviewing and you've got a game that's a solid 6 at best, trying to straddle the line between praise and punishment is tougher than you think. DON'T BE AFFRAID TO ASK YOUR EDITORS FOR ADVICE.

-Meet people. Meet people, meet people, meet people. I can't stress this enough. Brian, the writer I mentioned above, is a really great friend that I met through writing for a free site. We trade freelance tips together, brainstorm ideas off each other when paying places want us to make lists, let each other proof things, the works. He also lives in Canada, so we don't get to see each other often, but that's the beauty of the Internet. The writers and editors for the places that you cut your teeth at could be your future editors, colleagues, and even friends. Start a friendly rivalry with another writer and see how both of your work grows. Keep in touch with the ones that you trust because you never know what tomorrow will bring. Go to events with some business cards (if you can get some) and shake some hands. We'll come back to this stuff later.

The flip side to all of this is that, well, things happen. Web sites restructure and sometimes forget to archive their previous content. Meaning, all of that writing that you've slaved over for nothing might be lost (this has legitimately happened to me) so you have even less to show for it. Also, you're doing this for a pat on the back and maybe the occasional free game or promo t-shirt. Fun in the moment, but that won't pay your gas bill. Still, there are serious benefits if you're willing to put in the time and ready to stick with it for a while.

2: Internships. If you're still in college and you are thinking of a career in games writing, this is something you should be thinking seriously about. Larger sites and their parent companies largely advertise their internship programs, especially in the summers between academic years. From what I understand, they tend to get competitive, so just know up front that there are an awful lot of folks out there thinking the same thing you are. Get to know what these people want to see if you can (strong portfolio, a decent resume, knowing that it's "video games" and not "videogames"). Write for your school paper or maybe a local free paper. Even if you think that people aren't reading it, you are growing your body of work, and experience is pretty important.

What are the potential benefits to this stuff? Honestly, I don't have firsthand knowledge of it, but other people that I know and have met have started their staff writing careers at one site or another because they interned first. Sorry that I can't be more specific, but the end result is what everyone wants, and if this is a way that you can logically get there, then start paying attention to hiring schedules and other information that turns up at the beginning or end of semesters. It can't hurt to try to inquire about these either, but, like everything else, don't be a dick to other writers. One email and maybe a follow up a week or two later is fine, but if they don't respond from that, then drop it. Chances are you'll see a similar sentence later on, too.

Ok, so that's a lot to digest for right now. The next one won't be as long, but we're going to get into some more personal experience in the next couple of days, so at least you can see what worked for me and what really, really didn't.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:02:00 +0000

I’m roughly three hours into the idiotically named Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Mirror of Fate, and I’m finding myself liking it. It has its problems, mostly dealing with some really suspect jumping mechanics that make me feel like I’m floating toward nothing in particular, but I’ve sort of wrapped my head as best I can around the combo-heavy battle system, even though it shouldn’t really exist in this form. If you can recall WayForward’s Bloodrayne: Betrayal then you can see the same problem; combo-intensive combat like this just isn’t supposed to exist on a 2D plane. It locks your character into place for unavoidable counter attacks from the enemy AI, and the player’s lack of mobility around an erased z-axis renders what should be agile characters very still and sometimes bizarrely inert.

Both of the above mentioned problems, along with an overall nonsensical plot that I haven’t quite made through myself, are the primary criticisms of the game. On the surface, Mirror of Fate was supposed to be a sort of marriage between Mercury Steam’s God of War-like Lords of Shadow and the traditional Symphony of the Night/ Metroidvania games of Castlevania’s more recent history (even though those aren’t even “traditional” in the true sense of the series, something I think people forget a little more than they should). So far it’s been pretty light on the world exploration, and fairly heavy on popping zombies into the air and yelling in a Scottish accent –both of which I kind of dig for the moment. But I’m not going to sit here and defend the game from its detractors. After only a little bit of time to fumble around with it, I’m not qualified yet. Instead I’m just going to say that I told you so.

Castlevania needed a reboot in the worst possible way. The games were becoming split into two very distinct but structurally similar categories: the 2D explorative sprite games a la Symphony and its lineage found on handheld systems and the 3D console games that tried to replicate the formula. The handhelds, while consistently good, were worn out. Playing them as they were released had become routine, you may as well have just bought one of them (by that I mean either Aria or Dawn of Sorrow, which were probably the best, even though Order of Ecclesia ended the subseries on a high note) and played it from scratch once a year. The console games were dry and lifeless. The locations were simply a handful of large rooms connected by corridors with a smattering of locked off areas that could be accessed if you were just a little more patient. They were confining and boring with 3D combo-driven combat that, at that point, was shown up handily by the contemporary God of War games. The stories were the worst kind of straw-grasping, basically giving any potential excuse for Dracula to be resurrected outside of the established “happens once every century” bullshit. The series didn’t need a stake in the heart, it needed to be taken behind the shed for a bullet to the head.

So we got a reboot, and a pretty good reboot. It didn’t check off all of the boxes to make it a masterpiece, but instead of going back to the exploration-equals-enjoyment chalkboard of previous games it decided to take an obvious if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em approach. It adopted the mechanics of Sony Santa Monica’s God of War. It dropped what had become very anime-inspired character traits and went for the gruff machismo of faux-realism western action games. It restarted the lore from zero, the primary focus of what makes any reboot work. Of course it couldn’t please everybody, nothing can. Even though the franchise was finally making its way back around the Belmont family, it barely touched upon Dracula whatsoever (until the stinger ending). Exploration had taken a backseat almost completely, pushing for more of a level structure that the GoW games had established, making it feel claustrophobic for a series that had tried to identify itself with limited exploration for more than a decade. Folks lost their cool over this stuff, mostly the absolute ‘vania faithful unhappy with whatever direction the series would take if it wasn’t made by the guiding hand of Koji Igarashi, franchise overseer since post-Symphony of the Night.

So Konami and Mercury Steam relented, and what we wound up with is Mirror of Fate, a linear 2.5D platformer with a convoluted plot revolving around the old series three most beloved heroes (all according to its critics). If all of this is true, then this is exactly what we deserve, and both the publisher and developer should have stuck to their guns and left well enough alone. The point of a reboot is to start over, the wipe the slate clean. In Castlevania’s case, this meant eliminating its overbearing plot continuity, starting with new characters, and making different types –or perhaps subgenres – of games. By the simple act of greenlighting this game, Konami turned around and said “fine, if this is what you want, then this is what you get.” The team at Mercury Steam, clearly capable of making sound 3-dimensional action games, were confined into constructing something similar to Symphony’s quasi-open castle; something that the “linearity” detractors have pointed out they have no acuity for. The people that still work at Konami that have a background in this stuff have nothing to do with Mercury Steam, and even console or handheld action games at this point as they have been relegated to social game development for the Japanese market. Does this pardon the developer for making a somewhat limited framework? Not really, but if you take a step back to look at the level structure, it’s basically the same way that they handled it with Lords of Shadow; large, linear, and made to be re-explored with new equipment not because it’s necessary but because it’s worthwhile to see what’s around every corner. If it doesn’t hold up by the time I actually finish the game –and I will, it’s going to happen – then that’s fine as long as it’s not downright awful. But to poo poo on the game because it’s not built like nearly all previous handheld games since Circle of the Moon might be a little unfair given the circumstance.

The plot, though, is what’s really worth mentioning. Again, I’m not done and I haven’t seen everything. Some of the reviews I’ve read mention that there are actually four story threads instead of the three, the last of which involving another key character in the Castlevania lore. I’ve also read overwhelmingly that they, and the way they’re told, are straight up awful. To that, I say tough shit. There was no need to cram classic characters into Mercury Steam’s new continuity, but enthusiasts of the old franchise pissed and moaned about how they would be left behind and forgotten in favor of screaming meatheads. Part of me agrees with them, but not enough to justify making a video game for the sole purpose of appeasing these people. Simon, Trevor, or Alucard could have been left for further games in the proper Lords of Shadow console series and it would have worked just fine, but they weren’t even necessary for those, in my opinion. Art is both for the artist and the audience, but not beholden to either. If you wanted classic Castlevania characters in a handheld “exploration” game after a successful reboot of the franchise, then this is what you get, and if it’s bad, then this is what you deserve, because this is what you asked for.

There’s a lingering feeling within me that thinks Mercury Steam did this kitchen sink job on purpose to get it out of the way, to make room for the game they obviously want and are capable of making –this year’s Lords of Shadow console sequel. I’m not saying they intentionally made a game that’s terrible to shut people up, but I would get the fact that they wanted to be done with old characters so they could make way for the new, and therefore make this whole reboot thing actually work. So far, I even like it.

You Should Be Playing Parameters

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:14:00 +0000

I have a feeling you're reading this at work (because that's where I'm writing it). No, don't feel guilty, it's your five minutes and you should enjoy it. "But, wait!" you say in an inpatient huff. "I have more than five minutes, and I need a browser game to kill that time. Help me!" Worry not, discerning reader. The good taste that lead you here will take you to even brighter things.

And these things include Parameters.

While it doesn't look like much, Parameters is basically a free, browser-based clicky RPG that does away with pretty much everything but combat, grinding, and stats, and it's amazing for it. If you're the kind of person that loves RPGs but can't stand the trite cliched hooey, Parameters was basically made specifically for you.

The basic gist is that you click around on boxes gaining money and experience, and then click on yellow boxes to attack monsters. The goal is to conquer all of the yellow boxes and not necessarily to clear the board, so part of the fun is the race against time that the game concocts without you even knowing it. Each action is time stamped, and when you finally finish the last enemy, you can tweet your final time to compare to other players. This really only serves to fuel that junkie compulsion to go back in and top your own score, though, so make sure you have the spare minutes to play a few times over.

Bare-bones as it is, Parameters does cram as much into it's numbers and wire frames as it can, complete with stat boosting "achievement" boxes, shops to purchase equipment and an optional Yiazmant super boss.

(Image courtesy of the hepcats at Game|Life where I found this yesterday)

Square Exit: Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 21:06:00 +0000

Particularly poignant this week after Friday’s release of the superb Xenoblade: Chronicles (which you should be playing), today we’ll talk about perhaps Square’s most famous prodigal son, Tetsuya Takahashi and the cats and kittens running the show at the Nintendo-owned Monolith Soft. Be sure to bring your DSM IV.

A lot has been said about Takahashi. Or rather, a lot has been said about his work. Straddling that razor blade-sized line between ambition and ludicrous hubris, Takahashi’s calling card for game making has been his penchant for Big Ideas. That isn’t to say his designs have been big, though Xenoblade certainly seems to counterpoint that argument. No, Takahashi’s work as a scenario writer and director seems hell bent on cramming as much psychology and religious allusions down the player’s throat they need only-released-in-Japan supplemental material to sift through it all. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Takahashi first started working for Square on Final Fantasy IV as an artist. Prior to that he worked on one game for Nihon Falcom before moving to the big leagues (that one game was released NA on the Tubrografix-16, and later remade for the PSP). And big leagues they were: concept art and design for Final Fantasy IV-VII, map designs for Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 (with our dude Kikuta), and art design for the first Front Mission (with our boys from G-Craft). This career arc effectively made him a proto-Tetsuya Nomura (and Jeremy Parish?) as he went from art duties to eventually running his own shop.

Xenogears

…but not before making Xenogears first. Perhaps his most beloved contribution to gaming, Xenogears is still frequently cited in silly arguments over Best RPG of All Time for its sprawling story of Jungian psychology and Christian iconography. Released in Japan a year and a month after Final Fantasy VII, it made some minor headlines in the US over a non-controversy revolving around its religious tones and imagery and whether or not it was going to make the localization cut. Square, now flush with dough from FFVII and freshly coupled with Electronic Arts for distribution help in 1998, released a small slew of games that year in NA to strike while the iron was hot (this included the spectacular Einhander, something else that you should all be playing).

Big Ideas were prevalent. Not only was there religion and psychology, gamers got their first taste of Takahashi’s penchant for Nietzschean philosophy – something else that would live through his game designing career. Perhaps it wasn’t gaming’s first example of an ubermensch, his id, the out-of-body automaton experience and an incomprehensible ending, but it may have been one of the most compelling at the time. If that last sentence means anything to you, then the 80+ hours of cut scenes during your first trip through will rock your socks.

Time has not been so kind to Xenogears. The then-novel blend of traditional 2D sprites and 3D mech models and backgrounds looks even more disjointed now than it ever did. The story, though frankly more mature in tone and execution than most other JRPGs out there even today, is overwrought, a little pretentious, and about as easy to firmly grasp Masters-level discrete mathematics. At the time, though, many players and reviewers looked upon Xenogears as a masterpiece of forward thinking game writing (if not design). Plus, they still had something to look forward to: The ominous, “New Hope”-style declaration that you just finished “Episode V” during the end credits.

You can grab a GH version of the game on eBay for roughly $35, or you could just be smart and download it on PSN for less than a third of that.

Xenosaga Series

But Episodes I-IV never wound up materializing; at least, not at Square. Even though the game sold well enough to warrant a Greatest Hits rerelease in 2003, Takahashi and crew (including another ex-Square employee; His wife, writer Kaori Tanaka) left to form Monolith Soft with a publishing deal from Namco. With this deal, we can assume that Namco was really ready to take a big leap into worldwide RPG development in a post-Final Fantasy X PlayStation 2 world. The deal with Takahashi and Monolith promised a six-game saga spanning releases all the way until the PS2 was on its deathbed. Appropriately titled Xenosaga, true believers of Takahashi’s past work were flipping their collective (consciousness) shit hoping that it would be the prequels that would lead to Xenogears. But this didn’t turn out to be the case. The notoriously cagey Japanese development ethos of Takahashi and co. neither confirmed nor denied any actual connections to Xenogears until after its release, and by then, fans were starting to connect the dots while wading through hour-long cut scenes.

It turns out that since Square owned Xenogears, any true sequel/ prequel wouldn’t really happen once the developers left the company. Instead, the world received the first part of a spiritual successor in 2003 (NA), chock full of Nietzsche, robots, and religion like its forbearer. But not being connected to his career at Square wasn’t really Takahashi’s problem, the marketplace was.

While well reviewed, the first Xenosaga game sold well enough to follow up with a Greatest Hits edition to the game, a Japanese rerelease called Episode I Reload, and a supplemental “game” called Xenosaga Freaks (also only in Japan). So far so good. Episode II (2004 NA), though, effectively tanked Takahashi’s magnum opus all by itself with its reworked combat system, plodding and introspective story, and re-tinkered visual style. The game sold badly, Namco restructured the deal, and Monolith had to finish the series with the next game. Luckily, Episode III would be regarded as the most even of the series from a gameplay standpoint, but again, Big Ideas were kitchen-sinked into the game, with an appropriately head-scratching dénouement.

The first two games be can had for a song off of eBay or any used shop that still carries PS2 games (a Record Exchange literally gave me a copy of Ep. I just to cut down on the amount they had. Not kidding). Curiously, Ep. III has turned into something of a rarity on eBay, fetching between $35-50 depending on condition.

Baten Kaitos and Nintendo

While still under the banner of Namco, a second Monolith team began co-developing games with tri-Crescendo (of Eternal Sonata sorta-fame; and yes, it really is capitalized like that) for the RPG-dry GameCube. Released in 2003 (NA), the fruit of that labor was the card-based Baten Kaitos. As most games on the GameCube went, BK didn’t burn up the sales charts even with its favorable reviews, but a sequel was still planned for both the GameCube and the DS in the impending years, with only the GameCube game, Baten Kaitos: Origins, ever being released (also to low sales). But this was still a turning point for the developer. The first BK was published by Namco, but at a time when the Cadillac of their relationship was turning into a lemon that was stalling fast. Nintendo, probably realizing that they needed a capable RPG developer, tested the water with Monolith and published BK: Origins themselves in Japan and North America. Evidently happy the results, Nintendo then bought a controlling share in Monolith from Namco in 2007, and acquired them wholly sometime after.

Post Nintendo acquisition, Monolith has been surprisingly quiet, all things considered. Three games were developed for and published by Namco Bandai in Japan, with two being Super Robot Taisen games (one actually making it to the US), but none of them were helmed by Takahashi. His only game until Xenoblade was for the DS; an RPG called Soma Bringer in 2008 that hasn’t been localized. The same year Monolith developed Disaster: Day of Crisis for the Wii, but it was only released in Japan, Europe, and Australia.

Square Exit: Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:29:00 +0000

More of what Square hath wrought...

G-Craft
There isn’t a lot of info out there about the 90s Square defectors that would form G-Craft, the studio behind the first two Front Mission games and Arc the Lad I-III for the PlayStation. Honestly, the only tangible knowledge that we have that these guys came from Square at all other than the Front Mission connection is from old issues of Diehard Game Fan that previewed the first Arc game back around 1994/95 (and that’s not an exactly credible source). But even though there isn't a ton of info floating around about them, these were developers that worked, at least to some degree, with one of the biggest Japanese developers in the world.

Still, the Arc games are worth mentioning, especially now that they’re readily available for PSN download on the cheap. If the above information can be proven factual (and I'm pretty sure it is), then the acquisition of ex-Square staff at the birth of the PlayStation’s life was something of a coup. Remember that the PS was released in Japan in December of 1994. Square was still developing for the Super Famicom/ SNES, and RPGs were just starting to get some attention in North America. Sony had proven that they weren’t stupid with the launch of its first console and had a wide variety of genres represented at launch with a good supply of titles released and ready to be localized by the time the machine was ready for other regions in September of 1995. Even though games like Jumping Flash!, King’s Field, and Tekken were clear indications that Sony was more interested in 3D than sprite-based 2D, having a good old fashioned Square-developed RPG near launch would have lured away 16-bit holdouts toward the Next Big Thing. Logically, this makes good business sense.

Arc The Lad

What the Japanese players of the time got, though, was more like an extended tech demo than a full game. Though well animated and not without its charm, Arc I was a very short, almost toothless experience. A strategy RPG more akin to the Shining Force series on the Genesis/ Mega Drive, Arc I was definitely a product of its time complete with boy-hero-takes-on-evil-empire plot. Enemies on the field were overly aggressive and could be easily bated by the player, and some areas featured repeatable battles so one could easily power level the seven team members and steamroll upcoming foes. An optional, 50-floor dungeon was available to pad the length of the game, but it was the only minor diversion from grinding levels and finishing the main plot.

This isn’t to say that Arc I is bad. In fact, it’s a very competent game and still fun to play. In a move that may have influenced later PlayStation RPGs like Suikoden, clear data could be saved (after watching Arc I’s Empire Strikes Back downer of an ending) for further use into Arc II. The backgrounds still look very good after all of this time, too.

Arc The Lad II

If Arc I was an appetizer, G-Craft’s second Arc game was definitely the meal (and other overused metaphors). Substantially longer than the first and loaded with piles of side quests, Arc II is fair example of a game that took what was good about its predecessor and built something larger around that framework. The strategy RPG battles were still present and encounters were again repeatable, but now players had towns to explore and guild hunts to accept to flesh out not only some of the play mechanics (like monster taming) but also more of the plot – though it still isn’t exactly Dostoevsky.

As mentioned above, one of the better additions to the game was the ability to import your clear data from Arc I; essentially bringing in your wrecking ball characters from the first game. This turned out to be a downfall of sorts as these characters could basically shit all over your enemies while still gaining levels far outside of the team you already had, making them the only logical choices for most boss battles. Balance issues aside, though, the longer game and monster hunting (more on that in a second) makes it perhaps the best in the series. Plus, the main character wears the hood ornament of a Mercedes Benz as an earring. If that isn’t a sign of quality…

Arc Arena: Monster Tournament

Not much to say about this game other than what the title basically implies, Arc Arena is a small, though separate side game that allowed players to import their tamed monsters from Arc II to duke it out in arena battles. Players could also trade and import saved information for further, um, monster battling.
Remember: there are monsters. These monsters battle in an arena tournament.
There you have it.

Arc The Lad III

Along with the general lack of knowledge about G-Craft is a void of information concerning ARC Entertainment, the team behind Arc III, though it would be pretty logical to infer that G-Craft reshuffled themselves into a new studio. No matter; they made more Arc, and if Arc II was your thing, Arc III will give you the payoff that you’ll certainly dig.

Ditching the pleasant 2D art in favor of more contemporary 3D models, the core game didn’t change much and still offered an import feature to bring in your cats and kittens from the first two games, though a bit more limited in their involvement. Arc III also puts a period on the series in some ways as it ends the story of recurring main (and more often side-) character Arc before the license moved on to two PlayStation 2 games: the moderately successful Twilight of the Spirits and the more universally maligned End of Darkness (which, for some reason, was also an online game).

Both of the PS2 Arc games are listed on Wikipedia as being developed by a studio called Cattle Call. Again, without some concrete information we can’t exactly be sure of this, but it’s not so outside of the realm of possibility that that G-Craft was owned by Sony Computer Entertainment (the publisher of all of the Arc games in Japan), which begat ARC Entertainment, which then begat Cattle Call –something that happens all of the time with studios that work directly for large publishers (RIP Sacnoth/ Nautilus). Since the last Arc game was something of a flop (and not entirely loved by the Arc fan base, such as it is), we can also assume that Cattle Call was wholly absorbed by either Sony or another one of its second party studios, or disbanded altogether.

You can get the first three Arc The Lad games and Monster Arena on PSN, or get the whole PSOne box set (released by Working Designs in NA) in all of its absurdity on eBay for a pretty reasonable price, all things considered.

Square Exit: A corporate father and its rebellious children

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:05:00 +0000

In the gaming industry, it isn’t so uncommon that a studio or even a publisher dissolves, splits, goes bankrupt or finds another sad way to close its doors and cease operations. Thankfully, often times new studios rise from these crises to form new organizations, or maybe even find more creative outlets or vision for their craft than what they left. Maybe it was poor work conditions or the stress of churning out yearly high-profile sequels, but studios beget studios rather frequently these days. If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the last few years, you’re probably surmised that this happens all the time.

In the 90s, though, the concept of little guys breaking the shackles of their corporate overlords to form smaller, creatively-focused outfits was pretty new. In a Japanese-dominated world of 8-, 16- and 32-bit game design, it was almost unheard of. The Japanese work ethic may sound overly harsh to the outside observer, but corporate tactics on the other side of the Pacific breeds and then rewards a high level of employee loyalty. Then again, everyone has a breaking point.

Back then, Square had a hand in running Japan’s gaming economy, and was poised by the end of the decade to become a dominant force in the global publishing landscape. But that hand was something of an iron fist. Talented designers and programmers began a tango of quitting, reforming and selling out over the course of last 20 years. Some even went full circle to work with each other again, while others were gobbled right back up by the publishing giant after a minor success or two. Now that the company is beginning to finally move in a new direction, here’s a look at some of the studios that they birthed and some of their games.

Sacnoth

You may have heard of Hiroki Kikuta. If you haven’t, chances are you’ve heard some of his music. As a composer for Square in the 90s, he wrote the music for Secret of Mana, its sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3, and a never-localized PlayStation action/RPG called Soukaigi. What people rarely take into account is that Kikuta had coding chops as well as an artistic background; he was actually a manga artist before being picked up by the Final Fantasy factory. Shortly after completing Soukaigi, Kikuta jumped ship to form Sacnoth with other ex-Square staff and some financial backing of NEO GEO maker SNK. Wanting to be more hands-on with designs and believing that a smaller staff can make a more focused product, Kikuta made exactly one game with the developer before resigning from the outfit altogether.

Koudelka

The first game from the developer is something of a microcosm of their forward thinking ideas and financial, as well as internal, conflicts. Released in 2000 (NA) at a curious time when RPGs were becoming a small goldmine in the west, the publishing deal with SNK that staked the developer early was getting closer and closer to disaster as the SNK was collapsing under its own financial troubles.

An ambitious game to a fault, Koudelka was originally planned as something of a Resident Evil/ RPG lovechild. Taking place in the Nemeton Monastery in Wales, the game was built with atmosphere in mind, and given Kikuta’s history, sported a rich soundtrack to accompany his programmer’s dark and morose graphical choices. Environments were somewhat claustrophobic, adding to the horror nature of the game, but more free moving than the stilted, cylindrical crawling of the Resident Evil games. Battles were still random, though, and happened on a SRPG-like grid. Attacks were based on the position of your three-character team compared to their adversaries. Still only their first game, Koudelka laid the blueprint for the sort of left-of-center of RPGs that were still fairly uncommon to western players.

Koudelka tanked. Reports eventually leaked out that internal struggles at Sacnoth pitted Kikuta’s more action-oriented approach to the rest of the team’s traditionalist mind set, and the game absolutely shows it. Battles move at a painfully glacial pace, and feel almost out of place compared to the structure of the game’s more horror-centric elements. On a programming side, players were forced to wait after every combat action for character models and weapons to separately reload off of the disk before taking another action. Critics were unimpressed, citing an impressive story and graphics, but lousy gameplay. It didn’t help that SNK was only months away from selling off to pachinko manufacturer Aruze, too. Marketing for the game was minimal at best, and the poor critical response didn’t help to carry sales. Kikuta resigned, and Koudelka became an odd footnote in the RPG boom of the era.

Faselei!

Having the distinction of being the final commercially released game for the criminally underrated Neo Geo Pocket Color, Faselei! was originally released at the beginning of the millennium, presumably as part of the original publishing deal with SNK. Only a few thousand copies made it to retail in Japan before the game and the machine was recalled by SNK following their bankruptcy and sale to Aruze, it eventually made it to other territories in 2004 without proper retail packaging or even a manual.

Faselei! is a curious game, but nobody could possibly call it a fun one. A strategy game by design, players took control of a mech to do battle with enemy tanks and rival mechs in a story that you probably won’t really care much about (and you won’t if you play it) to begin with. Though turn-based, controlling the mech happened through a series of movement and firing inputs that played out over the course of one turn. Say you want to move three spaces up, turn left, and then fire on an opposing target. That means you had to place three “forward” inputs, one “left turn,” and finally one of the various attack inputs into a command prompt and then watch is it all happened. Then it was the computer’s turn. Then you came to your senses and turned it off.

To be fair, Faselei! has some redeeming qualities. Visually, it doesn’t exactly stand head and shoulders over some of the other games to come out for the NGPC, but it is impressive nonetheless. A lot of color is crammed into the handheld’s tiny screen, and brief cut scenes (though still kind of generic) are presented well. The game also has some depth if you can make it past the idiotic movement functions. The mech’s customizable weapon loadouts are fun to play with in anticipation for upcoming battles. It’s not the easiest game to pick up and play, though, and even though there’s a passable tutorial for playing it, this is one that greatly suffers from no manual to fall back on. Still, Faselei! continues Sacnoth’s mantra of doing things differently while still being confined to common RPG tropes.

Shadow Heats Series

Their best known work and strongest critically, the first Shadow Hearts would be the last game made under the Sacnoth name, as the studio restructured after being acquired by Aruze and renaming themselves Nautilus. Released the week before Final Fantasy X in NA, Sacnoth was easily overshadowed by its former masters, but remains as a competently-made RPG at a time when a tidal wave of them were being released in the west. Set up as something of a pseudo-sequel to Koudelka, Shadow Hearts still retained some its survival horror influences as players still had to find random key items to unlock the next area of the game or to move on to the next objective.

By and large, the Shadow Hearts games range from curiously quirky to batshit nuts. Its main gameplay addition, the Judgment Ring, gave a fresh twist to contemporary RPGs. The strength of player attacks against enemies was dependant on the timing of button presses on large disk. Hit the targets on the disk and your attacks will connect. As an added dose of risk vs. reward, smaller shaves of the disk were set aside for critical attacks, but were much easier to miss and can thereby stymie your whole turn. The ring was customizable by the player and open to negative modification by enemies, too, making the battles an absolute blast to play.

The plot and setting are where things take a left turn to crazy town, though. Taking place in an alternate early 20^th century, real life historical figures like Roger Bacon, Rasputin, and Al Capone blend with main characters that can blend with demons to lay waste to their foes. Machine-gun toting mariachi guitarists are aided by giant, drunk cats and ninjas wielding oversized fish. A family of vampires reappear as companion characters over the course of the three games, and one of them is a pro-wrestler the fights with a broken mailbox. There’s also collectible porn. Seriously.

The Shadow Hearts games are the definition of “cult.” The games are well-crafted and great to play, but just goofy enough to be pretty far outside of the mainstream. But doing things differently seems to be where Sacnoth’s (and later Nautilus’) heads were at.

feelplus Inc.

Nautilus eventually folded entirely into Aruze, whom dissolved the developer in 2007 after key staff left for AQ Interactive (whom, at one point, owned other batshit RPG developers Cavia until recently dissolving them as well). Newly formed as feelplus Inc. specifically to aid former Square honcho Hironobu Sakaguchi (whom you may have heard of) with his early Xbox 360 Mistwalker projects, feelplus worked with The Gooch on Lost Odyssey in 2007. Their influence is readily apparent in the title’s combat system, returning to the timing-based attack structure of the Shadow Hearts games. Today, they survive as something of a consultant firm, helping to either port games to various platforms (like the recent No More Heroes PS3/ 360 release) or to lend visual design help to the odd RPG or two (such as the DS Blue Dragon release – also with Mistwalker – and Star Ocean: The Last Hope).

Development work has brought them full circle back to Square Enix, having made the universally spat-upon MindJack PS3/360 and quasi-Strider revival Moon Diver for XBLA and PSN for the publisher.

A Requiem

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 21:09:00 +0000

People of the intertron, my PlayStation has come back to me. You probably don't give two shits, but bear with me for a second. For my wife, it was a happy day because she could finally watch that Blu-Ray of The Social Network that I bought two weeks ago. For me, I could finally get back to mowing down my neighbors in HD Remix.

Then the other shoe dropped. There is a cost to getting your PlayStation 3 repaired by Sony hatchet men, above the $140 you've already shelled out for them to muck with it. For those that have also had this done, they know of which I speak.

They're going to wipe your hard drive.

No, there isn't anything you can do about it.

While the bright side to this (if there can be one) is that you can simply get on the PSN and redownload stuff that you've already bought and conveniently leave out the junk that didn't belong there (I'm looking at you, Samurai Shodown. Like Kathy Ireland, you haven't aged well), all of those save files from games you had sitting on there for years are gone. Lost in ether. While it's true that, unless it's a BioWare game, this saved data is ultimately meaningless, to me they we're more appropriate trophies than the metagame BS that's attached to the console anyway.

So alas, I must say goodbye and continue in my stages of grief for all of the blood, sweat, and wasted time that I've put into the following games.

DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS (+DLC and Awakening)

This one probably hurts the most because of the impending DA2 save data transfer, but I went through this game four times. Four fucking times. That's a whole shitstack of Ferelden. Now, I loved this game an awful lot, and going through it now would be much, much shorter than the 75 hours or so that the first trip took me, but these were different characters with different endings making different decisions that I really wanted to see with DA2. Unless I simply decide to take an entire month off of work to reclaim all of that, there's no way in hell that I'll have the time to refill that vault. That's a lot of lost time, and it's driving me to drink.

DEMON'S SOULS

Similar to Dragon Age, I ran through DS roughly three times. The first time felt like I just finished a Ph.D. in thermodynamics. Subsequent trips through the game were not nearly as difficult, since further research led me to believe that I was unnecessarily tough on myself, albeit unwittingly, during the initial run (it wasn't a great idea to choose the Wanderer class, I guess). Yes, this game was pretty hard, but not so much that I wanted to kill animals like the internet seems to believe. The problem is that I got wrapped up in the larger world tendency events in the game and weapon forging to the point where I was spending absurd chunks of my life grinding for soul levels and loot. Think two characters at 150+ hours apiece kind of absurd. Just typing that makes me feel like an idiot.

Of course, I played a ton of DS over long weekends of chemotherapy recoup, so I don't feel as though that time was completely wasted. But when I say that save files are good trophies, I basically mean this solely in the case of Demon's Souls. That game made me work for it, man.

METAL GEAR SOLID 4

The first play through was a week-long blitz of long nights and painstaking detail sponging thinking that this was going to be the fitting ending I deserved from this series. It...kind of wasn't. So when I finally played it for a second time I skipped through most of the cutscenes and just enjoyed the combat with it's faux New Game+ features. I'll probably never play this again, but it was kind of nice to know that if I ever wanted to just go throug the superb opening mission in this game with added hardware I could. Oh well.

BORDERLANDS

Though I only completed the game once and was just getting around to the DLC, losing that character was a bit of a kick in the teeth. See, I'm not really down with first-person shooters. I don't dislike them, they just aren't for me. The only reason I was playing BL at all was because it was the only game that my friends that live great distances away and I could agree on to play together. I'm absolutely stupid for this game now, but starting from scratch to catch up with my pals kind of... well, it fucking sucks. I know that they can just run me through stuff, but that's just wasted time when we could be in the Underdome or whatever. Bunk, I say.

FINAL FANTASY XIII

I think this game is just a step below "pretty good" and just a hair above "piece of shit." Sorry, internet. In fact, I rambled on about it (a bit incoherently) at other places. Why am I sad that the save file is gone, then? Maybe it was a sign that getting old really does stink. My recollection of past Final Fantasy games is starting to get in the way of what they are actually becoming, and waking up to this fact is assy. FFXIII, once was enough, but I'm still sorry to see you go.

ROCK BAND 2

Yes, I know that it's not Rock Band 3; and yes, I know that there really isn't that much that's absolutely necessary to save since you can just unlock all the songs when you just want to quick play them (which is pretty much the only time I want to play Rock Band) in an option menu. The thing is, I have a metric shit ton of music that I need to download and install again. Frankly, I'm way too lazy for that shit.

ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION

This game for me was kind of like Disgaea on the PS2 -my white whale. I got so wrapped up doing other things in them both that I never got around to "finishing" the game. It was the kind of game that I would just pick up and play here and there just to dick around until I would grab something new or I would just quit out of disgust after it locked up on me again. It doesn't look like my character, Fuglypants, would be taking a nap in a random cave to gain a level any more. Them's the berries, I guess.

I'd like to say that these save files are gone but not forgotten or they're in a better place or blah blah blah. But gone is what they are.

Tatsunoko Vs. Schizophrenia

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:42:00 +0000

I guess I should have titled this Autism Vs. Capcom, because if I ever really get consistently good at this game I'll be able to do absurd mathematical calculations at Rain Man speed. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Yesterday, I told you that my PlayStation took a shit on me. In what I'm now thinking was probably disgust, I decided to play my Wii for the first time since... well, you know. Anyway, after doing what little research that I deemed necessary on the subject, it seems almost abundantly clear that last year was a pretty damn good year for Wii games: Super Mario Galaxy 2 is on many (many, many) best-of lists, Kirby's Epic Yarn has seen universally strong reviews, as have Donkey Kong Country Returns and Cave Story. And that's just the big stuff. A lot of people, though, seemed to have forgotten Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom.

This is fine, really. It did come out last January, and unless your name is "Mass Effect 2" then coming out in January means that folks are going to forget that you exist when the spring rolls around. This is where you also pour one out for No More Heroes 2. Sad, but I don't make the rules. Now, to be fair, this wasn't exactly a game that got completely looked over when it first hit retail. From what I recall, sales numbers were pretty good; at least good enough that Capcom went ahead with plans for Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 (which, and I could be wrong about this, but TvC was the deciding factor).

Now, I'll preface this by saying that I play a lot of Street Fighter. Notice that I didn't say that I was especially good at Street Fighter, but a SF game is played more often in my home than just about anything else by a landslide. My fundamentals are good, and I can hang pretty well online in 4 and HDR. When I finally met my local crowd of tournament players, I could hang with them, too. This is about where they decided to try and teach my Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 -a game I have never cared for. Too little choice at high level. Too frenetic. Too much. Not for me. Anyway, the guy whom I was learning from, a hepcat named Chris who runs a bigger midwest tourney called Seasons Beatings in October, told me completely straight faced that by learning MvC2, I would be good (or at least better) at every other fighting game I'll ever play. At first, I thought this was arrogant. After a while, I see what he meant.

Fast forward a year or so and we get TvC, a game I bought day one. Now I won't bore you by bringing up the common mud slung at it like "it shouldn't have been on the Wii" and "there's no competition, it's a dead scene." But I will level a few strikes against it now a year removed from a release date:

First, it is a misconception that there is not crowd or competition for this game. It isn't often that I go online with it and not find an opponent. The problem is that fringe players are gone at this point and we're mostly left with the hard core. This is something that you should expect; even Super Street Fighter 4 will ge to this point eventually. It just happened a bit faster in TvC's case, making picking it back up after nearly a year like climbing Everest without a rope. This being the first game I played when I decided to started playing my Wii again I knew what I was getting into, but I still needed to spend some time in Training Mode to get my thumbs up to snuff.

That brings me to the second major problem: there just aren't that many stick options. Yes, you can find the MadCatz Fightstick on the internet for around 40 bones (which is a pretty good deal), but your only other option is to get a PS-to-GameCube converter and plug in a custom (if you have one) or an older stick that may just have laying around. Me? I live in a smallish apartment with a wife and wifestuff (which is now a word), and the PS3 MadCatz TE stick is about all I can justify, especially if I'm not playing this game every night to get ready for a tournaments (which I'll probably enter as far as this game is concerned). I'm stuck with a classic controller. I am gimped.

Lastly, and probably most crushing, is that the Wii's online components just aren't that good. Now, I will say that I just started Monster Hunter Tri (we'll get to that later) and haven't fully tested that game's online portions yet, so TvC is really the only litmus test that I have, but it never feels like 100% to me. The thing is, the Wii is a wi-fi machine with no innate hard wiring. In comparison to playing online via wi-fi to my PS3 and Street Fighter 4, there are more consistent lag-free matches on the PlayStation (I tested this. You should have been there; it was downright scientific). After grabbing the USB LAN adapter for the Wii things got a little better, but probably 50% of the time I get a good, stable fight. This is a problem, especially if you want to get better at the game. If there's no level playing field, it's just about impossible to rise to the level of an opponent better than you.

But TvC is good. It's not as chaotic as its Vs. game predecessors, but still nuts enough that you have to be acutely aware of everything around (meter level, opponent meter, height of attacks, how much beer you have left, etc.). In flipping on the Wii after so long, I actually feel kind of bad that I let this game languish for so many months. I find myself back to looking up combo videos on YouTube and checking the Shoryuken message boards for the first time since Super SF4 dropped. As far as Wii games go, it looks pretty effing good. But I don't need to sell it to you.

All I need now is some local competition. Online, too. That's where you come in, I guess.

The Yellow Peril

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:47:00 +0000

So two weeks ago my PS3 decided to take a shit on me. Cruelly, right in the beginning of Armory DLC for Borderlands. Much, much more cruel, it was a week before the release of DC Universe Online; something I've been planning on playing with a large group for months now. For those not in the know, your game will freeze on you briefly before the machine shuts itself down, followed by the fuck-you of a blinking red light. When you try to turn the thing back on (because you can delude yourself into thinking that it simply overheated), you'll be greeted with something of a bitter rainbow of blinking lights as it cycles from green to yellow to red. See, the yellow is the writing on the wall; you get that and you may as well chuck the thing out the window and into traffic. If you plan on sending it back to Sony to fix, though, then a cat will do.

Shitty as this happens to be, it's hardly a surprise. Between my own gaming habits and my main squeeze's use of Netflix, the thing is basically on at any given moment when either of us are home. I'm (usually) pretty good about keeping it tidy and vacuuming the air vents, but this was bound to happen eventually. It isn't exactly a precedent, either. I sent my PS2 back to Sony twice for repairs back in the day, but at least they didn't charge me. It's $140 to fix a 60 gig backward compatible model. Do you know how many Snickers bars you can get for 140 clams? Well, none in your case. You just broke off a chunk of your soul that could be refilled with caramel and peanuts and handed it over to Sony via your credit card.

Now, as one of those nuts (there it is again!) that found the need to own all three of the current consoles, you would think that I would naturally just shift over to my 360, especially since the thing's only about 6 months old and I haven't gotten a ton of use out of it. However, maybe it's because I played it so much when I got it that I became burned out quickly. Or maybe that since I played all of the exclusive games for it right off the bat that I feel that there really isn't that much left. Maybe I'm spoiled by not having to pay for internet play with the PS3 and am still disgusted at the notion of it. Maybe I feel especially gun shy about it Red Ringing on me given what just happened. So I decided to play the Wii.

Sit down, because this is going to sound stupid: it was weirdly liberating to turn on my Wii and play it. Sure I'll occasionally flip the thing on when other people come over, but anybody that even comes close to reading about this stuff on the internet will agree that this is becoming an exceedingly rare occurrence. In fact, I'm not that far off in saying that the Wii takes its share of shit on the intertron almost daily. This always bugged me a little bit in that I'm pretty good about being impartial in my love for my console children. But since I never really play my Wii either, I can't help but to agree a little bit deep down in the cockles. Hitting the power button and seeing a field of downloaded games (good ones. I don't buy shit) after a pretty long stretch gave me an oddly warm feeling, though. Kind of like when you first buy a system and realize the scope of games you can pay now that you have one. Sure, it wasn't exactly like that, but still kind of close.

Outside of the normal "lose a little weight/ drink less beer/ stop getting into bar fights" bullshit resolutions, I think I finally found one to stick with: This year, I will rekindle the love affair between myself and my long-dormant Nintendo Wii. For the cynical, we can say that this year, I will rejustify having it hooked into my TV. As with all resolutions, we'll see how long this actually lasts, but I think I'm off to a pretty good start. I'll tell you all about it later.

Ok, So It's Been a Month...

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:22:00 +0000

... and since I've basically been mainlining Xbox 360 games lately, I think that now is a fine time to look back and reflect. Meditate, even. I think I might have mentioned this before, but I'm pretty lucky in that I have very giving friends (and even friends of friends of friends) that have been steadily unloading games for me to play like a Darma supply crate (or is that too soon?). It means that I've only actually paid for two games outside of the pack-ins that came with the machine; and I haven't even come close to touching those.

What have I touched? Perhaps more importantly, what has touched me? Lovingly? Well, shit, let's do some short reviews. It's my List Issue...

Halo ODST:
Again being the first Halo game that I've even considered playing, a lot of people are telling me that I started at the bottom of the quality totem pole and should have just started with Halo 1 and moved chronologically. After playing ODST, though, I'll say that I still really don't give much of a shit, but that doesn't mean that I didn't have a good time. The combat was fun and the first mission in the 'sploded city was pretty neat. However, it didn't really do anything that touched my soul like the many, many other Xbox people out there. Yeah, yeah, I know it's not fair for me to judge the series based on this one, seemingly weak game, especially since I just said that I liked it. But the setting and story just didn't really do it for me.

Plus, I'm too far removed to start playing these games competitively online. For one, it looks like a lot of work for me right now to really learn the ins and outs of the game mechanics for competitive play, and since I barely play first-person shooters at all to begin with means that I'd be almost starting from scratch. Thanks for the memories, Halo, but you may be on the way to the resale shop this weekend.

Mass Effect:
Being nearly the sole reason for me to buy a 360 that I didn't really need, it's time for me to suck it up and say that I was a little bit let down with its brilliance. Is that a sentence your noggin can't reconcile? Ok, then. I really, really dug ME, but it wasn't half as great as I made it out to be in my head. I think after hearing all of the good press that ME 2 has been getting and all of the Dragon Age that I've played since November pretty much made Mass 1 into a rock star that I met in real life that just didn't stack up to my idol worship. The lunar tank thing was a total drag to drive around, even stressful at times. The graphics were really good for a lot of it, but the backgrounds got pretty bland, pretty fast. And on that note, a whole lot of locations were recycled throughout the game that made me wonder how many original areas there really were. This game also had the misfortune (like Persona 3 and Final Fantasy XIII) of being one in which when the main character gets killed off its game over, even though your comrades get popped constantly and get up after the fight is over and they're totally fine. I get why, but still. Stupid.

Though there really wasn't that much to make me want to run through the game again (although I still probably will at some point), I did like the skill building system enough that I'd be interested to see how I'd use more weapons than just the assault rifles. The morality system of the game was fine but very binary. The good vs. bad choices were really easy to spot, and I climbed to number one on the Paragon charts (as well as number one in your hearts) steadily without much trouble. I didn't really use a lot of special skills and powers during my trip through the game since I found it easy enough to just rely on blasting people, but the few times that I used them made for some diversity from pointing, shooting, and hoping the craps game of RPG shooting landed in my favor. So to sum up, another play through as an evil female space wizard that packs pistol heat seems to be in my future. Yeah, that sounds about right.

On the absolute plus side is the stellar voice acting. I know that many prefer the female Commander Shepherd voice over the male, but he did a pretty good job if you ask me. The characters weren't as memorable to me as the Dragon Age ones, but they were still a bunch of cool people. I was surprised how pro-Christian some of the tone (and one specific character) of the game was, almost refreshingly so. Not that I think that a video game should be pushing a specific religion to the player, but since the topic of God is something either danced around (Xenosaga) in gaming or completely against (see Final Fantasy IX, X, and to a lesser extent, XII and XIII). Sure, Ashley turned out to be kind of a bitch by the end of the game, but I appreciated that faith was a defining character trait.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2:
The biggest video game release of all time. Ok I've gotten the requisite finger pointing out of the way. It was pretty fun for the same reasons that I liked Halo, but I honestly didn't have any idea what was happening half of the time. At least with Halo I was pretty good about keeping a level head, but if Modern Warfare 2 is any indication, I would be the worst infantryman in the history of armed forces: comrades would be shot on sight, running would happen in complete opposite ends of where objectives would be, and gunfire-induced panic would usually overtake me during the first 45 seconds of any mission until I died once or twice and got my head straight. Still, I can see why people like this game and it's brethren. The game certainly looks pretty and the online modes that I actually tried out where pretty fun, albeit overwhelming bloodbaths (I was never against anyone lower than level 43).

Ok, Modern Warfare. I get it. You're just not for me.

Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition:
Though I'm man enough to admit that I was more hungover than I usually am at 8am on a Saturday and that that may have played a part of it, I really didn't like the beginning of this game. After all of my friends gushed over how deep the customization was and how vast and varied the world was and blah blah blah, getting out of Vault 101 and getting my ass constantly kicked by monsters from the blue lagoon and Thunderdome rejects because I was better with a lead pipe than the fucking hand gun my stats said I would be fine with made the Fallout 3 feel more like work and less like fun. I like fun, and I sure as shit don't like work. Persevere, they all said. So I did.

Fallout 3 turned out to be one of the better games I've played since, well, Dragon Age. Though I didn't really think the story was as great as it could have been (though that ain't Liam Neeson's fault. He's a cool guy), turning my lowly vault-dwelling jive turkey into a walking death machine is one of my favorite things about RPGs, and by the time I was done with Fallout 3 I felt empowered with every single shotgun blast that killed my enemies. But maybe that just makes me weird. I'll probably go back and play the game again someday, especially since I only finished half of the packed-in DLC for the GOTY edition.

I also finished the game one night, and spent nearly eight straight hours the next day collecting all of the missed bobble heads if that tells you anything. Fallout 3 was really, really, really good.

Brutal Legend:
With my limited exposure to Tim Schafer games, I'm starting to think that he's a better writer than he is a full on designer. That isn't to say that BL isn't an alright game, but that's just what it is: alright. The single action goes out the window almost right away (one of the things I thought was stronger than the rest of the game) in favor of really jank RTS trappings that make it feel like a bastardized Overlord than a bastardized Starcraft. That's not a compliment.

On the flip side, the dialogue is really hilarious. Jack Black stood right at the edge of the annoyance cliff, but didn't take the plunge with a somewhat restrained performance, and the metal icon guest stars like Halford and Ozzy were surprisingly good actors. Sure, they were kind of just playing themselves (well, not really Halford, but still), but Ozzy in particular delivered his lines perfectly. I find that I can't really play this game more than maybe an hour at a time because I get stupid bored, but I finished it because of the characters, not the gameplay.

On Deck and in No Particular Order:
Bioshock 1 and 2
Gears of War 1 and 2
Mass Effect 2
Shadow Complex
Alan Wake
Blur
MagnaCarta 2
Forza Motorsport 3

So if you've been paying attention, that's two 360 exclusives and three multiplatform games. I probably wouldn't have gotten around to playing those multi- titles if the goodwill of some folks hadn't led them to loan them to me, and for that I'm pretty grateful. The BioShock games fall into that category. Not that I've ever been opposed to playing them in the past, they just happen to fall in my lap right now, so I'll be giving them a shot sooner than later.

Mass Effect 2, being on of the two games that I've actually purchased, is something I'm excited to play. Since I own it, though, I feel a little guilty about playing that instead of the shitload of stuff people have thrown my way. Same goes with Shadow Complex. I played a demo of it last night and was very happy with it.

I am morbidly curious about MagnaCarta 2. Reports from across the internet mix from "worst RPG of the last decade" to "most underrated game of last year." It's usually that kind of wadded up spaghetti press that attracts me to niche games in the first place. I own the last one for PS2 and even though it sure wasn't all that great, it still wasn't too shabby, so I'll probably grab this one.

Probably see you in a month. Go Comments!

Hello and Hello

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Wed, 12 May 2010 17:25:00 +0000

Cats and kittens, ladies and germs, you and you and you and you...

Sorry that I've been away. I rarely get a ton of time to do bloggy writing these days now that I've taken up the Senior Editor gig at Twin Galaxies. Life, as it happens, tends to keep me pretty busy, too. So here's a quick rundown of what you missed in the last 9 or 10 months:

I write a lot for TGI, but you knew that already. I've been keeping busy with writing reviews and news. The Straight Dope is my baby (as well as the ones from my Lothario travels throughout the world. One day I'll unite them and appoint them code names and THEN YOU'LL BE SORRY), so go read it.
I think I've put some weight on, but am assured that much of it is muscle. Now my biceps are nearly as big as my ego!
The above sentence aside, I still hate exclamation points. Just sayin'.
I got hitched in September. Boom.
I bought an Xbox 360 two weeks ago. Refer to number 4 and know that it was her idea.
I've played a lot of video games over the past year. Many of them have sucked.
I turned 30. And into a werewolf. So I'm no longer a teen wolf.

For the purposes of this video game blog (which is what I think this has just finally become), let's concern ourselves with numbers five and six. While it isn't exactly unheard of for me to buy video game consoles, a couple of questions come to mind in regard to the 360: why did I buy it, and maybe more interestingly, why did I buy it now?

Well the answer to that first question is just as easy as you think it is. I play a lot of video games, and I kinda wanted one. There. Other than that, I do write about video games on the regular, so having one of everything (I already own a PS3 and a Wii) kind of helps in that regard. Sure, I have access to a 360 for game reviews and other journalistic ventures when absolutely necessary, but I've never had one laying around for personal amusement, so I finally get to catch up on stuff that I've been missing over the last few years.

But what took so long? The machine's been out for five years now, so what gives?

For some reason I feel ashamed to admit this, but part of it was do to brand loyalty. I've never been the kind of person to hold to particular console manufacturer for very long. When I was a young'n and had my NES, the prospect of a newer, swankier machine appealed to me very early on, so I didn't wait for the SNES and went right ahead to the Genesis (a decision that I do not, under any circumstance, regret). After that my options were pretty wide open. Being an early adopter at an early age, I wasn't about to sit on my hands and watch until a one machine came out on top the other, and at the time, the choices were the Sony Playstation and the Sega Saturn with the Nintendo 64 still a ways off. I mowed a shit load of lawns that year and shoveled a metric fuck ton of snow, but the deciding factor finally boiled down to the fact that my brother worked at a Camelot Music (remember those?) in a mall and that he got a discount, and they just happened to have a Playstation and not a Saturn. From here on, we can call this game/set/match for Sony.

It had a slow start, but I was very happy with my PSOne until I basically ran the thing into the ground. Like many of my nerd peers, I had to play with the console upside down due to heating issues in its waning years. I call that a badge of honor. But it wasn't to last; there will always be evolutions to video game consoles and I couldn't just sit by and watch my beloved Playstation die of old age and over abundance of Tekken 3. But the choice was clear for me: I would be buying a Playstation 2, and this was without question. Sure, I got starry-eyed like Davey Jones on The Monkees when I first played Soulcalibur on the Saturn, but I knew that all of those pretty graphics and steering wheel- like controllers won't hold my interest as much as whatever Sony's got cooking in their mad laboratory. History has shown that I was correct, but if not for one small, though significant, factor I would probably be writing either requiem for the Dreamcast right now, or perhaps nothing at all (the PS2 had quite an effect on me).

I speak, of course, of backward compatibility. Amen, I say to you, the prospect of building a video game library only to sell it off has always been the catch-22 of video game collecting at a young age: you may want to play these older games again, but you need the capital to buy stuff for that new console. I'll remind the world that emulation was still in something of an infancy, so the idea of playing all of those old PSOne games that scrimped and saved for in high school was almost kablammo if not for a new machine that played old games, and it was practically a god send.

Fast forward to the current console generation. While I had a bit more disposable income than I did in my poverty-stricken college and immediate post-college days, I tried to be a bit more discerning about my future purchases. Having gotten over a previous prejudice against Microsoft (you can thank Fable and Ninja Gaiden for that), I was more than willing to give them a chance very early in the 360s life cycle, but once word came down from the Sony mountain that the Playstation 3 would not only be backward compatible with PS2 and PSOne games my fate was sealed. Plus they it was going to have Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII as exclusives, so it wasn't that hard of a call to make.

Now just try to imagine my fury when, scant months before finally buying one, Sony decides to cut backward compatibility for their machine. Multiply this rage when I hear, a few months after tracking down a BC PS3, that Final Fantasy XIII was also coming to the 360. The five stages of grief set in hard for me, and the worst of it was acceptance where I found that I was a mope for months after deciding that I probably backed the wrong horse.

Don't get me wrong, I'm quite pleased with my Playstation 3. Demon's Souls, Valkyria Chronicles, and the Uncharted games are some of the best I've played in this generation, and most of the stuff I would have played on 360 ended up being multi-platform anyway, so I eventually got over it. But the larger player-base (aside from their negative reputation for being childish assholes), strong exclusives (I'm looking at you, Fable II), and feature-rich online components were something I knew I was going to miss. Though, like the tenth person for caller nine of a radio station contest, I got over it.

Know this: the best and worst shopping decisions you make are while you're inebriated. Those Britney Spears disks of my wife's, that SportsNight boxed set, the wooden sign above my microwave that reads "cooking is love:" all made after beer number 4. I stand by them, even if I have to piece together why I did it in the first place. Then again, these are purchases that are under $250, but whatever. Walking through a Target about week and a half ago after an early dinner and having your wife tell you that I should buy an Xbox? That, friends, is what love is.

But what can we take from the concept of "brand loyalty?" Personally, I felt cheated that Sony would remove a feature of their high-powered super computer that many people see as important. With a tradition and promise of backward compatibility, you send a message to your user base that you thank them for their continued support and welcome them into your plans for the future with open arms; almost transitioning the user from one generation to the next. In the PS3's case, it made the outrageously high price of the machine a bit more palatable: you could sell your old PS2 to help curb the cost and get the same service. To maintain that high price and disarm the machine of that feature was like dropping trou and pissing in my face after punching me in the stomach. It sent a message to me that cutting costs of the system to lower overhead was far more important than keeping your return customers satisfied, and forced me to give my money to the used market instead to the company. At that point I was completely fine with that, though.

The bottom line is that I had exclusives to look forward to and older games that I still wanted to play, and it seemed to me then (and still does now) that Sony did their best to bungle both of the reasons I wanted a PS3. It almost came to the point of sending an irate letter to them explaining my concerns (their continued high price and botched lock downs of exclusives was slowly killing them), but they didn't need me to tell them that they were fucking up; the sales alone were letting them know. But it doesn't mask the fact that I bought a Playstation 3 anyway, and I did it because I was loyal, though with definite feelings of dissent. Does this make me an idiot? Maybe, I guess, but I've definitely learned to love my monstrous, though sleek, black machine. My past few years with it have been far from awful, but like turning down a job or not calling someone back, you sometimes wonder how things could have been. In this case, though, I actually get to find out.

So it's been almost two weeks. I bet you're wondering how that Xbox thing's going, right?

Ok, forget a bunch of that bullshit that I told you up there, because I wanted to get a 360 for Mass Effect and that's pretty much long and short of it. I'll tell you all about my experience with it when I'm finished (I hope), but I'm happy with my decision with less buyer's guilt than I thought I'd have. So far, I'm finding that paying for an Xbox LIVE Gold account a bitter pill to swallow after years of not shelling out for online gaming. And since I've been playing Mass Effect almost exclusively thus far, I'm not even using it so I feel kind of guilty.

But to say that I feel "complete" still seems weirdly inaccurate. That doesn't mean that I'm wishing that there more systems for me to buy or that I now need to go trick out my PC to effectively play Crysis or something. No, I have come across a surprising feeling of emptiness now that almost all of gaminghood is open to me on a personal level. There's no more hoping that a game that looks good on x system will show up on the y system that I own. There's no more feeling of superiority when the exclusive game for one console rakes in the GOTY awards, or that great downloadable content is available only for that one machine. Having all three of the current generation of home machines simply means that when something comes up that sounds good, I go get it, and that's that. I never thought I would lament what I used to think of as a limitation. I feel like I've exhausted my possibilities when all of them have just opened up to me.

You know, just something to ponder.

Oh Vacation...

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:02:00 +0000

So I found myself on vacation last week and instead of continuing with the Summer of Phantasy Star (which will happen) I wound up playing through Dragon Quest V for the DS. Strike that. I suckered myself into playing Dragon Quest V for the DS. You see, while my experiences with the DQ series isn't that extensive, every time I think it may be a good idea to start one, I find myself bored stupid within the first few hours of the game. Somehow, somehow, I slog through it anyway to completion; all the while thinking to myself, "they can't possibly take this game that much further if this is all it is". And there I sit; wrong every time.

I'm not a very vocal opponent of the DQ series, really. I respect that it's big business in Japan and that the original Dragon Quest is the founding father of what we know as console RPGs. But after decades of development and various sequels and spin offs, there just isn't that much of a clear evolution of the series outside of aesthetics. In fact, you could say that the DQ series represents everything wrong with console role playing on a technical level: you find yourself in a location, locate the nearest town, level grind, conquer a dungeon, get to the next town or location. That's it. There's a story in there someplace, but really, in an endless cycle of RPG rinse-and-repeat it gets pretty meaningless awfully fast. They make me feel every minute of the experience as opposed to sweeping me off of my feet like, say, many Final Fantasy games try to (in their way, I suppose).

But wait! Are Final Fantasy games -the only real competitor to the Dragon Quest series (even though they're published by the same company- better? Why do 2.3 million people buy DQ games in the first week? Why do Americans tend to drift more to what seems more Final and less, um, Dragon-y? So after some brief bathroom meditation, I present you the major differences between Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy and what, potentially, might make the former better than the latter (at least to those wacky Japanese, God love 'em).

The Plot is Rarely Incomprehensible Trash It seemed unfair to rag on Dragon Quest V for being as straight up as it is, or really, the entire franchise. Never has an amnesiac kid from an orphanage (built by his future enemy) grown to wield unreasonably absurd weapons before massive plot twists happen (because he was the dream of dead people all along). While there's something to be said about more involved stories -and really, the FF games have them- DQ games are all about one thing: good guys and bad guys. And I'm gonna make those bad guys pay. Over time, it's fair to say that the Final Fantasy franchise has tried to outdo itself with each numeric entry, only to have their epic and grandiose stories fall flat by the end. Sure, there are tons of those that love a specific FF game and its cast of characters, but they just end up trying too hard to be transcendent of its genre. Not DQ, where it's just a fun romp through a fantasy world. I have to respect that.
The Mini Games and Side Quests Are Just That Too often, Final Fantasy games either end after several (meaning multiples of 10) hours of backtracking and side questing for either completion's sake or to find those crazy extra weapons that, in reality, take away all semblance of challenge anyway. The newer entries are worse offenders than others (I'm looking at you, FFXII), but the focus is just about lost when the end is nigh. Now, I'm completely behind wanting consumers to get their money's worth out of your product, but Dragon Quest V had, perhaps, 2-3 real side quests to it. This meant that I, in absolutely no way, was going to overpower the end boss and finish the game as a god. After a whole lot of RPG conditioning, I was pretty put off by this, but when it finally came down to killing the end boss with just my wits and what was left over in my inventory, it was pretty satisfying delivering the killing blow, and just as exciting that all of my party members lived through the fight. That, friends, is a sense of accomplishment.
Charm That's right, charm. While some of the recent FF games have been much, much better about this, I find myself reflecting my ire a little and blaming them for everything that's wrong with console RPGs on an artistic level. Overly cheesy and ridiculously chirpy anime characters were built by the dynasty that is Final Fantasy while Dragon Quest is perfectly content remaining as, basically, a somewhat British adventure drawn by manga legend Akira Toriyama. Characters speak in cockney accents and the setting is always decidedly medieval. Sure, credit is due to the Final Fantasy games as evolving popular RPG tropes past sword-and-sorcery, but it's a little difficult to give too much respect to them knowing how absurd those settings and stories are now. Final Fantasy XIII, whenever the fuck it comes out, seems to be basically Final Fantasy VII with a fresh coat of paint and a unwieldy- sounding combat system (it may sound like I'm judging it, but I'm not). Final Fantasy games can't fall back on their simple charm anymore, and Dragon Quest will/ does, and it works for them.

So thems the berries. I'm still very excited for FFXIII when it launches next year, and probably won't start playing another DQ game anytime soon. But it does go to show that it pays to step back and be a bit more critical.

SOS

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:43:00 +0000

I'm modding a super old Hori Fighting Stick PS from, like, 15 years ago. I need to drop some new buttons into it, but it has a really specific wiring harness. The buttons looks like these pictures. Anyone have any ideas?

RE5

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:01:00 +0000

For the two or three of you that want to know what I think of Resident Evil 5, you can read my review at twingalaxies.com. Dig it

Why All Heroes Should Be Named "Chaz"

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:24:00 +0000

Phantasy Star IV is a game of sunny disposition. It starts off kind of fun and lighthearted and ends on a serious high note. As stupid as this is going to sound, this made my return trip to the game after several years ...well, kind of lame. After blasting through PS2 a few weeks ago (which, I'll remind you, was hard as shit) and taking into account how that game ended, I guess I was expecting some deep layers of ennui that I might have overlooked when finishing PS4 at a tender young age. This isn't the case. Sure, bad stuff happens in this game (dude, Alys gets killed. KILLED) and the universe sure as shootin' needs a bit of saving, but I never felt like life was just plain out to get me. PS2 was cool in that respect, I guess, and PS4 is kind of mundane because of it. But, for all intents and purpose, PS4 is still really f-ing good.

One gets the impression that series architect Rieko Kodama was probably at the end of her rope trying to make good games for SEGA (knowing the she would one day produce the deuce that is Project Altered Beast) and knew that the PS series would fall into the wrong hands (it has) and pretty much wrapped up everything she knew to be good with the series. What this all boils down to is that PS1,2, and 4 represent a trillogy in what the Algol star system is, its relationship with series antagonist Dark Force, and how everything is pretty much cyclical after a millennium. What that means to you and me is a game that elegantly touches upon plot elements of all three games while trying to tell its own story and refining PS2's game play. The graphics and sound are significantly improved over its predecessors (and a vast majority of its contemporaries), it's battle speed was amped up and adjustable (!) to ease through game pace issues, and its cut scenes are probably the most brilliant example of low-rent genius in that they simply use comic book frames that layer on top of each other when something new happens. And it was long without feeling grating, something a lot of other games could do think about, especially today.

Really, there really isn't much for me to say about PS4 that hasn't already been said by about a 1000 other people, which should also tell you that it's really, really good. Finding a copy for the Genesis is pretty easy through eBay and other means, and the Wii's Virtual Console has it for the low, low price of eight bucks. It's also represented on the Sonic Genesis collection for 360 and Playstation 3, so go getcha some. PS4 was intended to be remade through the previously mentioned SEGA Ages label in Japan but was dropped sometime during its development in favor of putting out a collection of the initial four entries in one Playstation 2 set. Of course, this was all Japan-only anyway, so you and I probably wouldn't have to sweat it.

Next up on the Summer of Phantasy Star is me forcing myself to either beat PS1 (also really f-ing hard) or to slog through PS3 (which really isn't that bad, just not that good). Eventually I'm going to have to make the hard decision of whether or not find English fan translations of PS Gaiden and PS Adventure, both for the Japanese Game Gear, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I already feel as though I've screwed myself by playing the two shining entries of the initial series first, but I'm trying to hold judgment until August 31st rolls around. Keep the faith.

Bidnes

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:42:00 +0000

Recently, I agreed to write reviews and some features over at Twin Galaxies' website, the first of which is a review for recent WiiWare addition, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. It seems that my thoughts on the game are mostly in line with other reviews that I have read (if I were to boil it down for you, I'd probably give it a B+), but some are pretty wildly different. While I know that no two people can totally agree on anything, I'm finding a morbid fascination in how some (*cough*cough*Gamespot*cough*) rag on the game and my reaction to those reviews, especially now that I'm not so far removed from game magazine websites like IGN or Gamespot. This, in no way, is me knocking anybody's website or the reviewers that write for them, but I really expected Lark Anderson to like it a little more than a 5.5. But again, that's just me.

Though this does seem like a good point to mention that Gamespot has seemed a little more harsh in their reviews over the past year or so than I seem to remember. I'm too lazy to actually do the research to see if this is fact or not, but some games look like they get slightly lower total scores from ~~CBS~~-er Gamespot than many of the other major sites. Then again, being a little more citical never really hurt anybody, I guess. So carry on, Lark Anderson, and go ahead and save CNet's Wii Points for something else.

Phun Phriday Phantasy Phunk

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:42:00 +0000

Yesterday, I decided to return to one of my other great white whales of gaming: Phantasy Star II. See, as a young'n that bought a Sega Genesis fairly shortly after it was released, I had a real need to try anything and everything that I could, so my brothers and I would rent games at least once a week. This was also right about the time that I had played Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy for the first time with my friends, so now that the threshold had been crossed, I was much more willing to give some games that I wouldn't have normally touched the time of day. Now that I had some context to what a traditional RPG was like, playing Phantasy Star II was like going from Metropolis to The Jazz Singer. Over the years I would rent it numerous times, not really getting too far into it (late fees are scary). When I eventually got heavily interested in collecting sometime in the late 90s, I wound up with a boxed copy and began to really give it the time it deserved. One day it all came crashing down; after about 2/3rds of the way through, the battery back up in the cartridge took a shit (which I actually thought of doing on said cartridge at the time) and erased my game and I haven't gone back to it since. A few days ago, I was speaking to a friend of mine on how a few years ago I had the Summer of Shining Force where I plowed through as many SF games as I could to get a perspective on the franchise. This summer will thusly be the Summer of Phantasy Star, so I started, essentially, where I stopped.

Graphically (which was what might have been one of the more important things to an 11 year-old), the extra visual touches like overlays in the dungeons and colors to the expansive over world were a sight to see, but the smooth animation of the enemies and characters during combat was striking. Really, the FF and DW, what animation there was ended up being minimal at best. In PS2, not only would enemies wind up before spitting shit at you, but you actually saw your purple anime coiffed female lead gear up and slash through that same enemy with a pair of claws. The sound, while not even that much to write home about then, was still above its predecessors in that Genesis synth beeping was very neat for the time, but not dynamic or particularly amazing. What gave the game its charm was its overall presentation. Characters have character portraits when and hold conversations with each other at certain places, and actual (albeit primitive) cut scenes where at important story beats making it, basically, the most immersive game since Ninja Gaiden where cut scenes where made common.

Somewhat also like Ninja Gaiden, then, is the fact that the game is hard as shit. Seriously, it's a kick you in the face and drive you to the nuthouse difficult. Enemies gang up on you pretty quickly after leaving the starting area of the game, forcing you to level constantly. This leveling also gets you used to saving your pennies because, like a gay bar in Detroit (don't ask), everything is expensive. When you want to upgrade your entire party's weapons and armor, get yourself a sixer and make some pizza rolls because you're not going anywhere for hours. The dungeons are particularly insidious: multileveled back tracking, pit traps, mostly useless treasure inside of them, mobs of difficult monsters out to get you, and little or no direction from NPCs as a guide mean that you need the drive of a marathon runner and Apollo Creed as your corner man to complete the game with any of your sanity left. At the time of release, the game came packaged with a walkthrough booklet that had maps of the entire game inside, but that didn't necessarily make life easier. The dungeons were so complex that without carefully planning where you were going ahead of time you were left to wander within them aimlessly for hours and, sure as shit, you were going to run out of valuable medical supplies if that was the initiative you were going to take.

But all of that stuff above doesn't hold a candle to the freakish slow pace of everything. Because the game was so well animated (at least, that's where I lay blame), the combat absolutely drags out. With a frame skipper or other form of emulation that spikes the speed of combat, PS2 can take a measly 10 hours instead of probably three times that. It crawls.

The biggest plus, though, is the setting and story. Really, Phantasy Star II is a bleak game. Ok, it's really fucking bleak. Follow me here, because here's the whole plot: The game takes place in the Algol star system (as all Phantasy Star games do) which consists of three planets, Palma, Dezolis, and Motavia. Your character, Rolf, is an young agent of the Motavian government that is haunted by recurring nightmares which happen to be the ending of Phantasy Star 1, which takes place an entire millennium beforehand. Anyway, it turns out that Motavia used to be a desert planet that was terraformed to lush pleasantness with the help of a massive computer called Mother Brain in the time between the two games. Bio monsters are starting to overrun this utopia, so Rolf is assigned by the government to find out what's what. He takes his adorable little half human, half bio monster companion, Nei, with him and it turns out, through a series of wacky, slapstick adventures (alright, that's bullshit, nothing is wacky or slapsticky in this game or, really, life) you find that the cause of the bio monster outbreak is a failed biological experiment called Neifirst that happens to be the evil half of your buddy Nei. Neifirst was so pissed off at humanity that she constructed all of the baddies in a bio systems lab and unleashed them throughout the world. Neifirst then proceeds to kill Nei for the rest of the game (which sucks). After the lab blows up, the monsters of the world are gone (which is good!), but are replaced by an army of robots bent on killing you specifically (which sucks) because Mother Brain branded you as a terrorist. Eventually, the robots catch you and throw you in an outer space penal colony so someone -or something- can use you as a patsy because the penal colony smashes into Palma (the setting of the first PS game, I might add) and blows up the planet. It gets better. After a space pirate saves your ass from jail, you decide to see what's poppin' on Dezolis only to find out that one of the original PS characters has been in some cryo-sleep for however long so he could wake up and tell you that Mother Brain was made for people to be lazy slobs for the rest of eternity and now that it's getting mucked with, it's only a matter of time before the star system sinks into its own despair-fueled destruction. So, being the swell guy that you are, you find your way into the cosmic work station called Noah (where Mother Brain is busy being bad) only to find that a cosmic evil had control of things there which you don't find to be much of a surprise, but it's the same cosmic evil that had control of things in the first game (always back to that) and that it had been biding its time for a thousand years. The big twist is after you do away with that thing, you fight it out with Mother Brain only to ultimately find that an army of Earthlings -yes, the last survivors of our planet- are living on that space station and have constructed Mother Brain because they were slowly taking over the planet anyway. The game ends on kind of a cliffhanger when the whole cast decides to fight all of these guys to the death. The last bit of text in the entire game? "I wonder what the people will see in the final days." Dude. BLEAK.

When you're a kid, stuff like that stays with you. Sure, I didn't finish the game when I was young, but the oppressive murk that hovered over you during your entire journey was obvious to me even then. More so now that I've finally overcome the game, the ending is just plain dark. Still, I have to appreciate that because, especially for the time, video games didn't tell stories like that. They were fun filled treks through mushroom kingdoms and green hilled zones. Somehow, and I'm even more amazed at this accomplishment almost 20 years later, Ps2 found a way to masterfully add gravity to most of its scenarios and situations. This is especially punctuated by the fact that there are only 3 (well, technically 4, but you're supposed to lose one) boss fights in the entire game. When you duke it out with Neifirst, you know that big shit is happening that's going to change the direction of this game, and you're right.

Before recently, Phantasy Star 2 was regarded as something of a real collectible. As one of the real standouts of the early Genesis catalogue, people would search far and wide for it, especially boxed and complete with the afore mentioned strategy guide. I know that when I obtained the game a little over 10 years ago it was going for a hefty amount on the secondary market (though, not as much as, say, M.U.S.H.A.). These days, it's pretty readily available through the Wii's Virtual Console (along with Phantasy Star IV, a superlative game), as well as Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection (along with the rest of the series) for Playstation 3/ XBox 360. It was also released as part of the Phantasy Star Collection for the Japanese Saturn and the GBA in the US, as well as a Dreamcast compilation. With all of these other versions easily obtainable, an original cartridge copy can be obtained pretty cheaply, even though prices on eBay fluctuate wildly. The legacy of the PS2 is really something, though, as it was a seminal step forward in early console RPGs.

To be totally fair, I went back and finished this game because of sentimental value. Someone curious about entries into the genre of yesteryear are going to be put off by its somewhat arcane menu navigating, lousy English translation, and the sheer force of will that necessary in completing it, so it's tough to recommend it to the average person. Still, I sleep a little easier now that I finally put it to rest. Curiously, Sega of Japan had released a remake of the game (along with a remake of PS1) for the Playstation 2 that never materialized in North America under the Sega Ages collection. A shame it didn't end up here, but them's the berries.

Next up on the Summer of Phantasy Star will be PSIV, the most direct sequel. I find that I'll finally force myself to play through III after that knowing that it has little bearing in the overall scheme of the Algol star system. Afterward, I'll blast through the original PS as fast as I can. While I did play PS1 and PS3 before, it was only in passing and didn't have as profound an effect on me since I played them nearly a decade after they were released and I was bit too old to remember them fondly from my youth. Stay tuned, suckas.

Ahoy

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:42:00 +0000

Cats and kittens, I'm now doing some writing for Twin Galaxies. They called me and said, "Kidgorilla, we could use your brand of pure rock fury. How 'bout it?" I responded that my fury is pure rock, so I had to accept. Read my reviews at www.twingalaxies.com. My first is for Final Fantasy IV: The After Years.

Cross Up Shenanigans

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:30:00 +0000

I love fighting games. Love them. I loved them when I was a kid, and I love them even more now. But, as anybody whom has ever really loved a competitive video game can tell you, there's a breaking point; the part where you start getting pretty good. Sometimes, you start getting a little too good, even. By this, I mean good enough that your friends just don't want to play you any more. After all, you're the guy that sits around and plays it all the time, you're the guy with the opportunity to train, and you're the guy that's more immersed in the experience. Unless you know other people just as devoted to it as you are, you're just going to widen that new found gap.

This turns out to be a downward slide. Sure, there are tons of characters in, say Capcom Vs. SNK 2 to choose from, or maybe you haven't completed all of the sub modes in Soul Calibur 2 through 4, or maybe you find great practice in the survival modes in Tekken Tag, but you're just delaying the inevitable truth; and that truth is the cold realization that no matter how hard it can be sometimes, and how cheap you think Gill is to fight, the computer just not a very good opponent. Ok, now by "good opponent" I can mean a lot of things, but honestly, how fun is it to play a competitive fighting game when you're only really competing against yourself?

Then the zeitgeist started. You know what I'm talking about: the current rebirth of the 2D fighting game scene. It started with Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix and is continuing to supernova with Street Fighter 4. But when you take a clear look at the playing field, you cannot honestly say that the 2D fighting game left. The Guilty Gear series has been going fairly strong since the Playstation One, the Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox all had ports of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, and Arcana Heart and Battle Fantasia are both modern day competitive fighters that pre-date SF4. There are tons of great 2D fighters that have been steadily released over the last 10 years to keep the hard core satiated. So what happened? Is it because Capcom finally released a proper Street Fighter sequel that the scene is back in the mainstream? Others have called SF4 more accessible than a lot of the other games out there right now, and it's true; SF4 is a lot more forgiving with its combos and super moves than even HD Remix. But my fiancée can't pull off a Shoryuken, and I bet your kid brother can't either, at least at the onset. You can't tell me that a game with these kinds of complex movement and button mechanics is completely accessible. So what's the straight dope here?

The answer is online fighting. But not just online fighting. Be with me for a second: the Xbox had online fights with SVC Chaos and Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, and the original Street Fighter 2 Turbo showed up on Xbox Live. All of these were massive mistakes. It's not that the games weren't great (except maybe kinda sorta SVC Chaos...), the online play simply wasn't stable. Getting dropped from fights or crippling internet lag makes competitive fighting games require precise movements for higher-tiered play nearly unplayable. Fast forward to today, however, and things are a bit different. Fights are more stable with SF4; you can not only choose your opponents based on their internet settings, but also their perceived skill. Now that games are global and you could logically play against me if you live in the UK and I'm here in North America, a more stable online experience is really turning it around for either the lapsed fighting game Catholic or, at least in my case, their noob loved ones. For me, it was even a weird form of salvation, at least in the beginning. Finally! More than just the computer!

But it still isn't perfect. One cannot do anything about physical distance between players that causes internet hiccups. Capcom still has problems with fights "not counting" in their Championship Mode that takes GP away from you. Even players that are mediocre can tell you that loosing piles of points to someone you know is beneath you due to slow button reaction caused by a lousy internet connection makes you want to throw a cat out of a window.

So there I sat last night with perfect strangers in a beautiful home about 40 minutes from mine. To you, this may sound absurd. To me, it seemed to be the only answer. After playing countless hours of Street Fighter 4, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, Soul Calibur 4 and whatever else I can find online (and a few more emulated on a PC from time to time), a level playing field was now a necessity, and a long drive was the only option left. After reading this article over at Gamasutra.com, I was given a new hope and a lot of renewed interest. The article, basically detailing the regional match-making that is becoming more common around the country for guys to get together and play, led me back to the forums at fighting game super source Shoryuken.com which has forums ranging from specific character match strategies (for a variety of games) to how to best modify your custom-built joy pad/ stick. I set myself up with my regional crowd -guys that have been playing together for a couple of years, at least- and the host was very welcoming for new people to pop in. Last night was that first pop.

I expected... well, shit, I had no idea what to expect. One part of me thought it was going to be a bunch of highly elitist dicks: the kinds of guys that I couldn't tell that I've been primarily using a game pad over the last however many years, or that I really don't care for Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 all that much. The other part was worried that we were going to be sitting in some kid's parents' basement ("Mom! MEATLOAF!") and having conversations about anime chicks. Both of those possibilities are weirdly intimidating. The reality, strangely enough, was a mixture of both. The host, let's call him Paul, was a very welcoming and cheerful guy in his early- mid 20's. He shook my hand, greeted me with a smile, and then introduced me to his mother as we walked inside the palace that he called a house and moseyed down the basement. The others, a heavier set African American guy with slammin' hair and fellow of Latino descent, were much quieter, and after we started turning machines on, I found out why. I was fresh meat.

As the host began setting up another TV for HD Remix, the other two guys and I began a winner-stays-looser-walks rotation of SF4. Everyone, not counting me, brought their own sticks with them -some personally customized. Billy, the African American guy, was proficient with just about everyone he used. Probably more so with Balrog and the Shotos, he firmly established himself as king of the hill early on, and he barely spoke a fucking word. Mike, the Latino, brought a newer stick with him and mainly used Sagat, whom would pull of cancelling/ ultra move combos that made my head spin. He played very much like me in that when he lost, he didn't just place blanket blame on the game or the other player as being cheap, he knew it was his own fault if he blew it. It was clear from the second I walked down to that cold, messy (though large enough to fit my entire apartment, maybe twice over) basement that these two guys were going to drop me like a bad habit. I picked up a spare stick to play with, and a little unaccustomed to the controls, I did what I could until I started to learn their play styles so I could adjust mine to compete. These two, though, were all business. I tried to ask questions to get a dialogue going that met with blank stares. I tried to converse about the ins-and-outs of the SF4 game system only to get quick responses. It's not that these guys were off putting, or even just assholes, though. These guys were there to play, not chit chat, and they wanted to see what I was made of.

Things lightened up a bit when Drew, a younger, almost freakishly cheerful guy of Asian lineage arrived with a Hori Real Arcade Pro fight stick (if this is the Cadillac of sticks, the HRAP is probably the Lexus). Now that I was fairly sure that the United Nations was all accounted for and ready to throw down on some Street Fighter, the night went on a little less silently. That is, at least, on the HD Remix side of the room where Drew and Paul were having a great time beating the snot out each other with Dee Jay and Sagat. Things were still a little quiet and tenuous for me until I started to step up my game when I would hear a "nice" thrown out ever now and then. I was beginning to break Mike's Sagat game with my Ken and as my ego was starting to boost his blood pressure was starting to rise, but not maliciously. All of us began to throw out help with tactics for each other, but not enough to tip our hand to the next guy up (you don't want to tell that guy that uses Balrog that you let yourself sit in a corner and bait him, do you? No, you sure as shit don't.).

A few hours, a lot of SF4, and a little Third Strike later, I was out the door with a handshake from Paul and an invitation to come back every Monday night. It's funny, the older I get, the less likely I am to just meet people like this and expand my list of people that play. I can't help but be grateful for the opportunity, but daddy's got some practicing to do. I see your Balrog coming, Billy, and I'm not falling for that Head Butt/ Ultra combo again. At least, not next Monday, I won't.

CCAG 09

noreply@blogger.com (John Learned) — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:12:00 +0000

Just a shout for the Cleveland Classic Console and Arcade Game show going down on May 23rd from noon until 8. Want to find some wacky old stuff that only your dad's weird uncle remembers (like the Vectrex)? Yeah, there's tons of that shit there. Come on out and support Escape From Rungistan... meaning old games that are still awesome. When you get there, you can go ahead and buy Escape From Rungistan. When you get home and finish Escape From Rungistan, you can go ahead and thank me for putting you in the know. I'll be shimmying around the show myself, so say howdy if you can figure out which one is me...

I can't link to their flyer, so check out their website for details.