Matt writes things [title TBA]

E.T. go (Playstation) Home

2013-02-28T13:54:00.002-08:00

So, last night there was a press conference held by Sony in which they discussed the future of Playstation and some other things about polygons that was about as interesting to me as going down a slide made of cheese graters.

Nonetheless, it was apparent before the thing actually started that I needed to at least find some way of watching the event. My laptop is about as dead as HMV, and I couldn't stand watching 2 hours of conference on an iPhone screen, if that even worked. So, last ditch efforts meant that I ended up on Sony's prime entertainment experience, Playstation Home, as it was the only way I'd actually be able to watch the conference. Having never used the 'game' before, I swiftly created a character that was notable for having shades and an Afro by default for some reason and proceeded to join the game's server to watch the event and get out as soon as possible.

First impressions were pretty simple - it's Facebook for people with no friends. Naturally, I fit in pretty well, with my Afro and shades making me look like some badass 70's cop and by extension, far cooler than I actually am. Controls were about as legible as someone attempting to write Chinese using only a Spirograph set and I ended up accidentally dancing for no real reason in the middle of the 'main square' area, which prompted some 'wtf's from the Playstation Home regulars. Evidently I'd embarrassed myself even further beyond actually being on Playstation Home to begin with, but after some guesswork I managed to Cha-Cha Slide all the way over to the 'Cinema' area where the conference was being screened.

Things seemed normal, people were sitting down on seats for some reason to watch the big screen, despite the fact you could just stand in front of people and block their view of the screen whilst watching (something I personally found hilarious). Similarly, this is where I found the chat box commands, and proceeded to ask random people "quesadilla" which again prompted very unusual responses, most of which (I think) were in German for some reason. Not even kidding, everyone in the cinema was speaking German which I think is a very poor local player matching issue or something, but whatever. As it happened, I may have been blocked by practically everyone in the room for asking whether everyone was excited for the big WiiU reveal, at which point I was greeted with jolly pleasant responses that had some words in that I can't reprint here. Ah, the wrath of the Sony fanboys.

So, anyway, things were going just swell 15 minutes before the show. Then the Combine showed up, as well as someone on horseback. In the middle of the cinema. I understand that a truly realistic life simulator is just boring floating in a sea of mediocrity, but... really? It definitely adds something to the whole thing (I'll call it an app from now on) but I can't help but feel it's a bit silly.

That said, I don't think it's supposed to be taken seriously, even if the people take it as such.

And then everything crashed, as the Playstation Home servers imploded on themselves. And by servers imploding, I mean the toasters with Java installed on them broke. Thus ended my time with Home, and as such abruptly ends this article.

Don't worry, it's not from a lack of enthusiasm. Oh, no - not at all.
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Bandwagons

2012-07-21T15:25:00.000-07:00

Bandwagons – Did they ruin games?
Another moderately old one, not many more after this...

I know this is a tad bit different to usual in that it’s not a review, but instead I think this is a lot more interesting than my Metroid Prime Hunters review.
So we’ve had the announcement for an announcement for Modern Warfare 3, or MW3 as supposed leaked boxart names it. Along with that, we’ve got Battlefield 3, and already had Homefront, Crysis 2, and many other first person shootermabobs. I’ve also been thinking about buying A PS1 and a ton of old games for it, because they were undoubtedly so much better. It might just be me thinking differently now than before, but I’m certain it’s because of the high profitability and bandwagoning in the gaming industry. Put it this way – Call of Duty became popular. How many people then added in Call of Duty-type features into their games?

Lots. Even Halo: Reach seemed to have Call of Duty influences in it.

This really concerns me. Are we entering an age, as has already happened with music and film, where people are simply making them for profit, not to make a good game? I really hope not, but I think we are. Look at Modern Warfare 2 – undoubtedly a good game but was rushed at the last hurdle by Activision so that it would be released before the Christmas rush. It sold like crazy, but was a glitch fest at the end of it, though a pretty fun one at that. Same with other big releases – Fallout New Vegas, for example, and even The Orange Box on Ps3.

This worries me, and it’s why I’ve begun to side with developers like Bungie and Valve, who are committed to making games they enjoy, not games that will just sell like crazy because they’re shooters. As a result of their gamer work force, they know what we like to play, and they engineer games for fun, not realism as seems to be the case nowadays. That’s why I’m a big fan of Halo and Half Life.

Newer games all seem to fear breaking the mould and actually doing something different because games such as Okami or Mirrors edge that are unusual don’t sell well. People just won’t fund stuff like that now because you just don’t get a return on the money invested. And for that, I blame the gaming community as much as I do developers – The majority of people just want to shoot people in realistic, gritty environments, and that’s all that the majority of developers want to fund.

That’s why I applaud developers such as Valve that took risks with Portal – Portal sold moderately well (I think)and it’s a nice thing to hear, to be perfectly honest. It’s a shame that games that are a bit different don’t sell as well. The only other explanation I can think of is the ‘I’m not sure what it’ll be like, so I’ll buy it preowned’ approach, which obviously doesn’t help developers at all.

There’s good games out today that are new and somewhat follow the whole FPS movement that are really good, such as Battlefield Bad Company, which is one of my all time favourite ‘realistic’ shooters, but stuff that’s out today seems to generally be of a lower quality fun-wise than games that were on, say, the Ps1. I remember enjoying every game I owned on the Ps1/Early Ps2 days, regardless of graphics or anything – Everything was built from the ground up as a game, not a technical showcase as most games seem to be now. It’s sad, but true.

It’s like the games that are ‘smaller’ in terms of revenue seem to do better. Metroid Prime 3 and Twilight princess are two of my favourite games, but in the big scheme of things didn’t sell quite as well as some other major games did. Nintendo would have known this from day one, and the games are actually mostly fan service above all else. There isn’t a Zelda game every year, because they take time in ensuring that “this stuff’s damn ready before they release it into the wild” to quote Cave Johnson. This makes me happy, and makes it a good game.

I could go on for ages about this, but I don’t want to be taking up a large chunk of the magazine with this...
TL;DR: N00 ga3mz R teh sux, 8uy v4lv3 ga3ms bcu5 th3y r t3h w1n 4n th3y l00k af7ur they’re f4ns moar.

Things that are annoying #1

2012-07-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

Things that are annoying #1 -‘Take Me Out’ and other related TV shows
Another older post, purposely ignorant for comedic effect...

Alright, I can’t deny that the TV program ‘Take Me Out’ has its followers, but it honestly has to be the single biggest piece of garbage I’ve ever had to sit through in my entire life. Seriously, everyone else in the room wanted to watch in and I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I think the phrase ‘much ado about nothing’ is very apt in this scenario.

For all those that have yet to insult their intelligence and watch this horrible, horrible show, the basic premise is that one man comes on to the show, at which point he attempts to find a date from the 30 or so girls that are on as ‘regulars’ of the show. If the girls dislike the man, then they are able to press a big red button that turns out the lights on their name pedestal thing. If all the lights go off, it’s a ‘blackout’ and nothing happens. If lights are left on, a date is chosen and they go to this fictional island somewhere on Holiday called Fernandos or something. It’s probably somewhere like Spain, but they don’t tell you that.

The first problem that I have with this is it goes against practically all the smart things to do before attempting to start a relationship (i.e. actually know the person for more than 15 minutes beforehand) and the whole setup means that the people can literally lie their way around things to get a free holiday, which is all well and good but it’s not really the point of it all. I greatly dislike the workings of the show anyway but I’m going to overlook that for now because there’s greater things that I really hate about it.

Like for example, the one that I watched a couple of weeks ago basically had this guy come on, and the girls were relatively impressed at first. Then, they went ahead and put this video on that basically is him describing himself and his life and the moment he said ‘I work as a cash machine engineer’ about 10 lights went off at once, likely because they were expecting a footballer to waltz onto the show with a few million quid in the bank.

If you’re that desperate for a date of some kind that you have to resort to going on Take Me Out, I don’t think you can afford to be that choosy to be fair. It just goes to show that some of them are there for all the wrong reasons which is a shame really, or it would be if it weren’t a hopeless idea for a show anyway.

I suppose it’s ‘Blind Date’ for this generation, but it’s not got any better in that sense, only much bigger scale, which is silly. Though Blind Date, going with the whole ‘blind’ theme meant that you couldn’t go entirely on looks which is a much better idea than what they do on Take Me Out, where people turn their lights of before the person has even spoken a word. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but apparently all the ‘contestants’ on Take Me Out can, so fair play to them.

I do greatly dislike all of these relationship-themed ‘game’ shows, since it just shows how stupid everything’s getting nowadays – people are only focussed on looks and/or money it seems, and that’s a really sad state to be in. It doesn’t bother me, mind – I don’t intend to be in any sort of relationship anyway but I feel for the people who get caught out like this. And I’m not saying that absolutely everyone’s like this either, but that’s what it appears to be from my view, however limited it may be.

It does make me chuckle though that people actually take this stuff seriously though. Without intending to offend anyone, Take Me Out is honestly one of the worst excuses of a TV program I’ve seen in a long, long time, but the thing is that it’s now got its own aftershow and all sorts, it’s really quite ridiculous. And the best thing is that practically every single follow-up I’ve seen on the show they’ve said that there ‘wasn’t anything there’ and went back to square one. Even better, one said that they weren’t ready for a relationship as they were going to university, but went on the show anyway. The idiocy of some people...

I might be taking this a bit too seriously. Obviously the show’s only designed to be entertaining, not as a serious long-term matchmaking solution, but I can’t help but notice that it’s a bit too silly at the best of times, especially the people that are on it. That Paddy bloke is pretty funny at times though, I’ll give it that.

Fans n stuff [old post]

2012-07-14T14:44:00.000-07:00

Fans n stuff [old post]
Note: did this for a school newsletter. It's very ignorant of many factors, and it's supposed to be just to take the mickey a little bit!

I’ve never quite understood football. Don’t get me wrong, it has its fans who enjoy watching the sport very much, but I personally don’t get what’s so great about some people kicking a ball around a pitch for an hour and a half whilst simultaneously attempting to receive the Oscar award for best acting when they fall down and ‘break their leg’. It’s nothing they can’t get over of course, just until a member of the opposing team is sent off, and then magically the leg reheals, and he’s off sprinting down the field with the ball once more.
I suppose with absolutely anything out there, you get people that hate it, and the ones that are die-hard fans of it. It’s those die-hard fans that provide the most entertainment and cringe-worthy moments following events such as football matches, for example those people that, despite their team losing, argue that their team was the best of all time and would have won if the game was ‘fair’ and the referee wasn’t taking bribes or something ridiculous like that. I wish this were an exaggeration, but I’ve heard it far too many times for it to be unrealistic and every single time I hear something like that, I don’t know whether to laugh or just despair. If team X beat team Y, then they were clearly better in that occasion. Get over it.

It’s not just football either that causes scenarios like that. I do a lot of writing for a newsletter on a gaming website, my own blog which can be very gaming-influenced at times and also a Youtube channel which is pretty much videogaming-only. If you so much as attempt to compare the ‘Xbox 360’ to the ‘Playstation 3’ then you might as well go and build a concrete bunker and wait for the fallout to clear. World War 3 will not be initiated by conflicts in trade routes, or countries gaining power, or oil disputes like people have predicted it could, it will be started by an argument about which videogame console is better. Despite being a big videogamer myself, I could not care less which is the ‘better’ console, but people on the internet try to convince me that I should care, and that it is a ‘super serious issue’.

I kid you not, I once got a message on Youtube from some guy who threatened to hack my Playstation 3, and then into my bank account (which I don’t have) and home internet if I didn’t buy an Xbox 360 immediately. I asked if he worked for Microsoft, as some sort of freelance salesman or something and he said he didn’t, he just felt like burdening himself with bringing failure to the Playstation brand because he didn’t like the PS3. No words can describe the immense stupidity of that ideology.

It doesn’t even have to be limited to gaming either; I’ve regularly heard people complain about opposing sporting teams all the time for the stupidest reasons. One time I overheard a conversation somewhere, which went something like “I can’t stand Wednesday. They’re terrible” “Why do you hate them so much” “Because they’ve got owls on their shirts and I don’t like owls”. I waited for one of them to laugh, but this man was indeed serious about his dislike of a football team simply because of the animal that represented them on a shirt. Whilst there are many valid reasons for disliking a football team, I’m not entirely sure a simple hatred of owls and therefore Sheffield Wednesday is that valid, if I’m perfectly honest.
There are some legitimate reasons for loving/loathing a football team, with the most common one being ‘because they’re good/bad’ which is fair enough, but I can’t help but think that people just choose random teams and then try to argue that they’re the best. ‘The best’ is subjective, unless you’re going on points or something. A team could also be the best by being the most entertaining team, like by having a sense of humour in the interviews or something after the match instead of saying things like “Well there were only two teams and there could only be one winner” which is something that we all knew anyway before we’d even seen the match.
In fact, I’m sure that cavemen would also have been able to figure that out.

So, after going quite horribly off the point a bit, I’ll try and get back to the original topic. It’s fine to be a fan of something, but it’s never a good idea to believe a one-sided argument. X is not better than Y simply because ‘X is better’, likewise if Y is the inferior in all respects, it doesn’t mean it can’t have fans.
I just wish people would start to understand these sort of things before giving me grief over the fact that I use Google Chrome as a web browser instead of Mozilla Firefox because at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
And everyone knows Google Chrome is far superior anyway.

Black Ops 2 Campaign Trailer

2012-07-10T14:07:00.002-07:00

Black Ops 2 Campaign Trailer

So, as it turns out, Treyarch have graced us with a new Black Ops 2 Campaign Trailer and I have to say, it looks pretty decent to say the least.

It's one of those things that I'm really hesitant to say something on just yet - we all know how everyone reacted to the last Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3. We all also know how reactions to the game were when everyone actually played it.

I'll give Treyarch their due however, whilst I usually can't stand Call of Duty Campaigns, Black Ops' campaign was good and World at War was phenomenal so they've got that proven track record. Taking it to a new timeframe (modern-future) may also work in the game's favour since they can do sniper missions with X-Ray scopes and exploding ammo or something, or have RC drones command troops throughout a mission instead of the AC-130 watching them from afar.

The new sandbox aspects and the 'choose your action' aspects will also play well for the game - Call of Duty is one of those titles where it feels like everything is force-fed and pre scripted so having that freedom to choose different plans of action and alter the story will make it feel so much more authentic and really make it feel as though you're playing a game, not watching an interactive movie.

Again, I'm not going to say definitively whether it's worked or if it's the best game ever until I've actually played it myself but Black Ops 2 really is shaping up to be the Call of Duty that changes it all and brings back that 'Call of Duty 4' sense of freshness and originality. At the end of the day, all the titles past CoD 4 have tried to be CoD 4 again - Black Ops 2 seems to throw that mentality out of the window and starts again from the ground up. In fact, the only negative I can see at present is that it's not released until November. A week after Halo 4.

This is going to be a very long Summer indeed...

Combat Robot build | Part #0

2012-07-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

Combat Robot build - for a laugh.

Well, not really. I'm doing a combat robot build for my EPQ project, so I thought I'd share some of the build on here. Unfortunately, I don't have a great deal of the build pictured and all that to put up here just yet (need to transfer them all from the camera, takes ages) but I'll post some pictures once I've got the proper build underway. Might get pictures of the model up ASAP.

Modern Warfare 3 | Black Ops 2 | Gameplay Commentary

2012-07-08T14:23:00.001-07:00

Short Modern Warfare 3 | Gameplay Commentary I did, it's one of my better ones to be honest with you. Generally just a rant about Modern Warfare 3 (or MW3 as the Boxart says) in Gameplay Commentary form. Got some stuff in there about Black Ops 2 as well, so that's good.

Modern Warfare 3 | Black Ops 2 | Gameplay Commentary

New Blog! Again!

2012-07-07T13:52:00.002-07:00

... and also I need a new title D:

So yeah, I got a new blog again to concentrate properly on, since the old one again got bogged down with irrelevant posts. Chances are, I'll get most of the posts from the old blog put onto this one, but all the trash will stay with the old one.

Or at least, that's the plan...

The evolution of gaming

2012-07-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

Evolution and you.

Shock horror, a new Call of Duty’s out soon. There’s also another Pokémon game out and FIFA is getting a ‘13’ version. I’ve heard so many people criticise these games for staying ‘too close to the formula’ and not innovating enough, which I can sort of empathise with. There’s not a whole lot else you can do with Football now to make it completely new (the sport’s probably as old as time itself) and CoD will never change things up. Pokémon will always be a game about imprisoning various animals and forcing them to fight for your own entertainment.

But what happens when games do change it up? Apparently, the apocalypse. For instance, Halo 4 was shown for the first time ever at E3 recently, and many people complained that it was ‘changed things up a little bit too much’ and that they ‘should have just made a better looking version of Halo 3’ but if they were to actually do that, they’d be burnt at the stake for a lack of innovation. To some extent, I can agree with what Reggie the CEO of Nintendo America (or something, idk) said about the fact that you’ll never be able to make all gamers happy. It’s almost entirely true – make a new CoD game that’s set in the Modern Times, and it’s unoriginal. Make it in the Future, it’s too original and ‘not CoD’.

It’s the eternal problem when it comes to gaming – how much do you change? You can never release less than a previous game because it leads to a lack of features, so you can’t go back to the ‘good old days’ without backlash, but you can’t advance without it either. Some additions in the past to various games have been sheer stupidity to say the least (Dead Man’s Hand on MW3, anyone?) but at the end of it all, there’s bound to be the odd hiccup before you stumble upon the perfect formula. Sadly, very few games have beta tests so it takes years to get things sorted through subsequent broken releases and community backlash on what should be changed.

But there’s that ugly monster rearing its head once again. Community feedback. What is actually broken, and what’s nothing more than a minor inconvenience to the individual. For instance, a player might think that certain ability is overpowered because they’re ineffective at countering it in game, however it might work well in the big scheme of things. Unfortunately, it’s also apparent that community feedback isn’t the most helpful. “ARMUR LOCK SUX U SUK BUNGIE I WIL NEVER PLEY HALOAGAIN” isn’t something that can be directly used by developers to improve their game. “Armour lock lasts for too long, it should be reduced by 15 seconds” is an example of productive criticism and helps developers out greatly, as they can see what they need to do to improve their game to cater to the fans.

That said, you don’t always need to religiously listen to the fans – sometimes going and doing something a bit more different despite the fans demanding that you cease and desist can greatly improve the game for everyone. After all, the developers made the game – they know how it works and they probably see a lot more than the fans do, and as a result could lead to the game evolving further.

Because I’ve seen a lot of people complain that their favourite games are evolving into something different, let me ask you this – You complain that CoD: Black Ops 2 is different to post-CoD4 games by adding in a point-based loadout and other nice things but what would have happened had CoD4 not introduced classes and perks? These sorts of people just negate their own arguments. If you don’t like the way a game is going, play something else. Don’t want to? Play the ‘perfect’ version of the game, the one you expect every subsequent release to be.

Meanwhile, the rest of us normal people will sit back, relax, play some games and watch how the whole thing evolves into the gaming industry of the future.

It’s not the strongest, nor the quickest species that survives – it’s the one that’s most adaptable to change.