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You can buy GameSpite Quarterly 4 now
28 February 10 | 22:59 | Posted by:
Ladies and gentlemen and frothing Internet user types,
GameSpite Quarterly 4 is now available for your purchase. For your convenience, here is a direct link to the
GSQ4 standard edition page ($13) as well as a link to the
hardcover deluxe edition ($36).
I wasn't planning to make the book available for another week, but then every pre-slim PlayStation 3 on the planet decided to take a simultaneous crap, which sort of mucked up my plan of spending the weekend reviewing
Final Fantasy XIII. So, hey! Sony's failure is your victory. Unless you own an old PS3 which no longer works, in which case, my sympathies. I was relatively fortunate in that I was working with a debug system when the death march kicked off, so my precious backward-compatible system was disconnected at the time. With luck, things will be patched up soon and I will still have a piece of hardware capable of playing PlayStation 2 games in progressive scan.
All of this has nothing whatsoever to do with the latest issue of our quarterly venture. Although the articles within do touch on many PS3 games! Despite the slightly retro bent of GameSpite as an entity, you'll find this issue has far more to do with current-gen gaming than with older titles. I hope we can still be friends.
Please spread the word of this delightful new publication!
And of course, to help inaugurate the debut of
GSQ4, here is the first posting for the issue's online edition:
How RPGs Lost Their Way by Jake Alley
At first glance, this article may seem (according to the author's own words) like a "damn kids get off my lawn" rant. But it's actually an insightful treatise that scrutinizes the RPG genre and its tendency to cling to outmoded mechanics that no longer make any real sense. Oddly enough, it makes no direct to FFXIII, yet it's done a lot to open my mind to the game's slash-and-burn approach to design.
category: games, gamespite | forums |
18 comments |
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Overstimulus package
28 February 10 | 10:04 | Posted by:
This is one of those weekends where I've done nearly nothing besides sit in front of videogames with every waking moment. When I'm not at a game, my head is filled with the sound of the
Final Fantasy XIII battle theme accompanied by
Mega Man sound effects. It's a weird combination. I need a break.
I finished
Mega Man 10 yesterday. Well,
beat it, anyway -- there's a lot I haven't done yet with the game. It was very ________! In about 23 hours, I will be legally allowed to fill in that blank. Yes, my job is very silly sometimes.
category: games | forums |
twelve comments |
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Commence the growing pains
26 February 10 | 14:45 | Posted by:
GameSpite Quarterly 4 has arrived in press proof form. That's great. Less great is the fact that this is very obviously a transitional issue once you look inside. The interiors have not turned out exactly as I'd hoped. The PDF workflow process worked out perfectly, with clean images and crisp text. So that's not an issue. No, the problem is that InDesign handles type differently than BookSmart did, so the text is larger, more roomily spaced, and more crowded to the page edges than in previous volumes. It looks uncomfortably amateurish, and I'm disappointed... and while I could feasibly fix it, the process would take several weeks. So I hope you'll simply except the slightly awkward interiors as a lesson learned, and rest in confidence that
GameSpite Quarterly 5 will be
perfect.
The book should be ready to go up for sale in about a week. I was hoping for Monday, but I have to beat both
Mega Man 10 and
Final Fantasy XIII over the weekend, so that kind of eats up any hopes I had for free time. The good news is that the issue's text is excellent and should more than justify the wait and the slightly gawky layouts.
category: gamespite | forums |
ten comments |
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Stop Dragon my heart around
25 February 10 | 10:56 | Posted by:
I could use a break from all my writing about/talking about/playing of
Final Fantasy XIII, and Nintendo's little event yesterday has offered the perfect excuse -- and I don't even have to leave the comfortable confines of the role-playing genre. Happily, though not at all surprisingly, Nintendo has announced it will be publishing
Dragon Quest IX in the U.S. sometime this summer. I doubt we'll see much more about their plans surrounding the game until E3, but it's still great news nevertheless. Based wholly on its Japanese sales, DQIX may in fact be the single best-selling third-party DS title to date. I think it's at, what, 4.1 million, now? 4.2? You can understand Nintendo's eagerness to duplicate that success worldwide. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but selling several million copies of a game is a very profitable business to partake in. And Nintendo alone seems to possess the secret alchemic formula for convincing middle America that it really needs to buy these esoteric little Japanese games the company keeps peddling. If anything could ever possibly transform Dragon Quest into a hit outside Japan, it is Nintendo.
Even though Nintendo didn't have any official announcements regarding the game, I poked around for more information on a more casual basis. Unsurprisingly, no one was saying
too much, though I did manage to sort out the fact that Square Enix will be handling localization; Nintendo's mainly on board for publishing and marketing. Though it does sound like Nintendo has been providing feedback into some of how the localization will be adapted -- not the text part of the localization, but rather the social mechanics of the game.
That's a very important consideration. Essential, in fact. The single most fascinating thing about DQIX is that its sustained success doesn't revolve around its name or franchise. Yeah, something like two million copies of the game sold that first week it was available, but what's allowed DQIX to thrive (doubling its sales and remaining a pervasive presence on commuter vehicles) has been its
visionary social element. It's literally a viral form of success, as fans pass by one another and trade information, sending characters and treasures and maps into others' games through fleeting physical proximity. This works in Tokyo, because it's one of the densest cities in the world, and mass transit is a given; I think someone yesterday said that 60% of the population passes through the four or five busiest train stations on a given day. Here in America, that's not really the case.
So, DQIX needs a new vector if its social elements are to work. And they
need to work, because without the ability to swap data and acquire new contacts and quests from strangers, the game would be a mere shadow of itself. Beating DQIX is almost incidental to the full game experience, and certain elements of the post-game randomness enabled by the passive communication mode have passed into legend. (When I mentioned having explored
surechigai tsushin mode to Bill Trinen yesterday, the first thing he asked was, "Did you get
the map yet?")
So how could this possibly work? The obvious answer, I think, is to combine the concept of the existing DQIX passive communication with the Mii Channel parade. Miis circulate virally through Nintendo's servers, passing along to friends of friends of friends. I input 100 friend codes within the first few months I owned a Wii and haven't touched my Mii Plaza since then, but nevertheless new Miis appear in my parade every time I use the system. It's at something like 4,000 Miis last time I checked, and that was months ago. Of course, DQIX is for DS, which doesn't have an always-active online mode like Wii Connect 24, but no matter. DQIX does have a wi-fi connection feature -- two, in fact. One is a wireless shop whose offerings change daily, and the other is a weekly update which makes new quests and characters available every Friday for the first year of the game's life. There's no reason the passive communication element couldn't be piggybacked aboard the wi-fi shop.
And there are certainly plenty of other possibilities. Nintendo-sponsored wireless hubs already dot the country at places like McDonald's and GameStop. And, heck, there's no reason the existing communication features can't remain; if the game does mutate into an unlikely success, there just might be enough people carrying the game around to make it worthwhile. And let's not forget the numerous nerd havens around the country, like Comic-Con, Otacon, and PAX. Kohler and myself and a few other people were chatting with Reggie Fils-Aime last night about a number of things including (but not limited to) DQIX. "Far be it from me to tell you how to run your business," I said to Fils-Aime, "but it would be a really great idea to have this game out in time for PAX." Here's hoping. None of Nintendo's representatives are talking about how they're adapting DQIX just yet, but everyone I talked to did pause for a moment and look into the distance when I asked about what's happening with its social elements before saying, "We have some thoughts about what to do with that." I take that as a good sign.
Anyway, you can expect me to promote the crap out of DQIX in the coming months. I have no stake in it whatsoever besides believing that it's a really fantastic game -- a solid, traditional RPG to be sure, but the peer-to-peer interaction adds an enormous amount of depth to the whole experience and makes it quite unlike any other game I've played. It's not the first game to employ this sort of passive, asynchronous multiplayer component --
Spore has done great things with a similar concept as well -- but its implementation in DQIX takes both the technology and the RPG it's wrapped in to a new level.
Until Nintendo drops a little more info on the game, though, I hope you'll settle instead for my arguing about
Final Fantasy XIII with Kat, Kohler, and Christian Nutt
on this week's episode of Active-Time Babble. We keep the spoilers to vague statements about game flow and character arcs, so I don't think listening to this will particularly ruin your own time with the game once it launches. Really, we're talking more about design philosophy and the RPG's existential crisis as they're crystalized in FFXIII rather than FFXIII itself. Listen with confidence.
category: games | forums |
17 comments |
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GSQ3: Mos' D-E-F
23 February 10 | 07:39 | Posted by:
GameSpite Quarterly 3's "journey through the gamer's alphabet," as GoNintendo keeps calling it, returns back to the earlier portions of the alphabet now that we've filled out the index's fourth column with links. Luckily, there is no
fifth column to this issue -- at least,
none that I know of. (Cue ominous music.)
Anyway, today's entry features the Perfect Machine of Snipe, and that is rad.
- Duke Togo (Golgo 13): Face it, you've got Golgomania bad!!
- Erdrick (Dragon Quest III): You'll notice that we're not calling him Roto. That is because Roto is the name of a device that helps dig into your yard to resolve septic issues, not the name of a legendary hero.
- Firebrand (Gargoyle's Quest): Firebrand is a hero. But sometimes, Firebrand is also a villain. It's complicated.
category: games, gamespite | forums |
three comments |
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GSQ3: Updates "R" us
22 February 10 | 07:44 | Posted by:
Time to get back into the habit of posting more of that ever-popular
GameSpite Quarterly 3 material. Today's posts mark the halfway point for this issue. That's terribly exciting! Well, perhaps "exciting" is not the proper word. I suppose "a relief" is more accurate. Today's content includes:
- Ralf Jones & Clark Steel of Ikari Warriors fame. As you can see from the image above, they are two deeply ugly men. And they seem rather confused about the proper application of the M-16, as well. Or is it an M-80? Whatever. That's not how you shoot guns, guys.
- Rick Taylor of Splatterhouse. It appears, based on this entry, that Mr. Taylor is actually an Adam Sandler character, which is something I'd never have guessed on my own.
- Roderick Hero of H.E.R.O. fame. Mr. Hero is one of this issue's rare Atari 2600 figures -- not that we deliberately snubbed the system or anything. It's just that few 2600 developers bothered to design characters who were more than a monochromatic block or jagged abstraction. Roderick Hero is among the elite, the few, the distinctly humanoid.
category: games, gamespite | forums |
two comments |
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Cover system
21 February 10 | 10:38 | Posted by:
I've settled on a final cover for
GameSpite Quarterly 4. I respect the fact that so many people seem to be in love with the lawn gnome, but aside from a rather esoteric connection to
Half-Life 2 it doesn't really say "videogames" to me. But, as it happens, the back cover illustration -- a minor edit of a lovely photo my fiancée shot a few weeks ago -- has continued to grow on me. Much like Adrian Belew, the more I look at it, the more I like it. So, a simple switch and that back cover photo becomes the front, and I will keep the lawn gnome on the back side of the book so as to satisfy reader demand.
If you'd care to have a glimpse of which cover is in store for you (along with what will be between those covers), you can have a look at the
GameSpite Quarterly 4 index page. Handy, eh?
category: gamespite | forums |
eight comments |
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Going fourth
20 February 10 | 11:54 | Posted by:
It's away! I've uploaded a test version of
GameSpite Quarterly 4 and should have the proof in my hands in about 10 days. Maybe sooner, if they decide to be awesome and expedite things. Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah, I'm not counting on it.
Um, I think now would be a good time to emphasize that
this image is not the actual cover art, fantastic though it may be. I'm still contemplating what to do for the cover art, and in the meantime I just threw in a random image from my iPhoto library as a placeholder to ensure the colors are correct and so forth. Speaking of colors, I'm most likely keeping the orange trim. It's pleasantly eye-searing after the last issue's muted, monochromatic blues.
There was a near-disaster in the production process, which I kind of expected. This is, after all, the first issue to have been assembled in InDesign rather than in Blurb's craptacular BookSmart app, and I figured it wouldn't go off without a hitch. I had the page bleeds and sizes wrong and ended up being forced to remove about a quarter of an inch from the layouts all around -- which would have forced me to work my way through all 184 pages resizing every single element by a set percentage if not for the fact that I tend to design with a little breathing room around the edges of a page. So instead of being a crippling error, it simple means everything is going to crowd the edges of the page a bit more than I prefer.
(The 184 page count is the deluxe edition, by the way. The standard book should come in at around 156.)
So, let's all cross our fingers and hope that the printed proof looks as lovely as it seemed in PDF form.
category: gamespite | forums |
17 comments |
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Faces of death
19 February 10 | 23:25 | Posted by:
The responses everyone posted to yesterday's request for more games that handle the concept of player death in interesting ways are pretty great. So thanks for those. Granted, a lot of them are games I already knew about but which slipped my mind -- senility, and all that. Others, though, I'd never known about. I am eager to try some of them out.
But first! First I have to finish playing through
Final Fantasy XIII for review. FFXIII takes a pretty fascinating approach to death in that it's a mere interruption. Lose in a battle, you're kicked right back to where you were immediately before the battle began, no worse for the wear. It works pretty well, because rather than neutering the game's sense of challenge it emboldened the developers to make individual battles more difficult; I've lost more battles in 18 hours of FFXIII than I did in the course of who knows how many hundreds of hours of
Final Fantasy VII through
XII. It's never frustrating. Sometimes annoying, sure, but in just about every instance it's my own stupid fault for getting careless or taking too many risks. It's a fine example of developers thinking about how death works in their game and deciding to go with a fairly mundane expression of it -- but building an interesting experience around something which could have completely undermined the game.
Saving's another story, though. Given the loss of real setbacks and the density of save points, I kind of wonder why they didn't just go with a save-anywhere system. As it is, you rarely go more than about five battles between save stations. They feel like a formality, something the team included simply because that's how these things are
done rather than because they were necessary.
Anyway! I expect to submit
GameSpite Quarterly 4 for a press proof tomorrow. I just need to write the foreword and the interior will be complete. I've yet to decide on a cover, though, but that can wait until I'm finished with copy edits. As it stands, I fully expect the next issue to be available for purchase by about March 5, which almost exactly three months after the last issue went on sale. I guess it won't be late after all, provided the InDesign/PDF workflow works out the way it's supposed to. Here's hoping.
category: games, gamespite | forums |
nine comments |
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2D: Death's sweet embrace
18 February 10 | 10:45 | Posted by:
If you listen to this week's episode of Retronauts --
now available on an Internet near you! -- you'll find a significant portion of the show is dedicated to death in games. Not just death, but interesting applications of death as a mechanic with a function beyond simply forcing you to try again. Early on, we delineate our belief that while "death" and "failure" are almost always conflated in games, they're not absolutely the same thing. You can fail in a game without your character dying; and, in very rare cases, death in games isn't strictly failure. A setback, perhaps, but not necessarily the end of the road.
This topic, not surprisingly, grew out of my recent flirtation with roguelike games. It's a genre with arguably steeper penalties than any other kind of game, except in a few rare instances like
Nethack (with its persistent bones files) and the original
Shiren (with its world that slowly evolves as you affect changes throughout the course of your efforts to reach the top of Table Mountain). As I've lamented before, gamers have grown increasingly risk-averse in recent years, or perhaps gaming has simply grown to encompass a wider audience of people who don't see the appeal in applying determination and risking frustration in a medium that's ostensibly designed for entertainment. I've been happy to see that the concept of character death has been integrated into a key component of two of the biggest releases so far this year,
Mass Effect 2 and
Heavy Rain. Both games present situations in which it's possible for characters to suffer permanent, plot-based deaths based on the player's actions, yet in neither title are those deaths strictly considered "failure."
Naturally, though -- me being the nostalgia-addled navel-gazer that I am -- all this dwelling on death has sent my mind spinning backward to think about older games that incorporated death in interesting ways. I'm sure there are plenty, but for some reason none of them are springing immediately to mind. None but
Herc's Adventures, a mostly forgotten Saturn/PlayStation title by LucasArts. Effectively the sequel to
Ghoul Patrol and
Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Herc's Adventures was an odd little hiccup of a release: It boasted really nice hand-drawn animation and featured a rather open-ended world in a time when the former was on its way out and the latter hadn't yet caught on. Its close proximity to the release of Disney's
Hercules didn't help matters much, either.
But the most interesting thing about this forgotten gem is the way it handled death. Herc (or Jason or Atalanta) could die, but that death wasn't strictly permanent. Instead of slapping you with a Game Over screen, Herc's Adventures cast your character into Hades and gave you the opportunity to fight your way out. Kind of like
Doom, I guess, but a bit more cartoonish. The creatures of Hades' realm could hurt you as your battled through to the overworld, and if you died while in Hades that
was a Game Over. But it wasn't too tough to slug your way to freedom.
And then, eventually, you would die again and be cast back into Hades. This time, though, you were deeper in the underworld, facing tougher foes, dealing with steeper odds of escaping safely. And your third death would send you even further into Hades. And after that... you ended up with Hades himself, and it was Game Over.
This unusual death penalty created an interesting and unique sort of tension. When you died, you had to ask yourself: Should I try battling my way to freedom, or would I be better off just resetting and accepting the loss of progress since my last save? If I accept my trip to Hades this time, am I dooming myself at a later point in the adventure when I'll face tougher odds and be more likely to die multiple times?
I really love when games stop and question conventions and do something new and unique with elements that everyone normally takes for granted. And I promise, when I finally get around to designing
Jetpack Goonies, I will try to make death more interesting than a Game Over screen. After all, Goonies never say die.
category: 2D, games | forums |
24 comments |
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Thy blade, forged of irony
17 February 10 | 10:18 | Posted by:
As you probably know if you've poked around in the numerous articles at this site, I really like
Final Fantasy XII. As in,
like like. The game gets a lot of flack in certain quarters, most of which seem to revolve around its story. To me, that sounds like a point being missed, like buying an extraordinary lobster and steak dinner and then complaining because you don't like the color of the plate it's served on. FFXII is great because of its expansive world, its great balance of structure and freedom, and its seamless, non-nonsense combat mechanics which often turns enemies into obstacles but never impediments. Its plot is really a secondary consideration at best.
I was convinced, back in 2006, that the rest of Japan's RPG developers would be hopping on the FFXII bandwagon, offering up countless games that built on the model offered in the most recent numbered Final Fantasy. I was sadly mistaken; instead, Japan retreated from its design, offering up either dated, bog-standard, PS2-style RPGs with shinier graphics (see:
Star Ocean), tiny handheld RPGs (see: everyone), or stripped out anything resembling freedom altogether (see:
Final Fantasy XIII).
At last, though, someone has spoken up about their intent to deliver a new RPG in the FFXII mold -- a big, free world; seamless, automated combat; less emphasis on story. Great news, right? Well, the final kick in the pants here is that this RPG is
Xenoblade, the spiritual follow-up to
Xenogears and
Xenosaga. Yes, my old nemeses have birthed what sounds like one of the most intriguing RPGs in years.
Enjoy having your laugh at my expense, Tetsuya Takahashi. You've earned it this time. At least I can take some pleasure in the fact that, for the time being, an image search for "Xenoblade" mostly brings up images of "
X-Blades," last year's embarrassingly pandering action crapfest. Pettiness is my only refuge in these darkest of days.
PEE ESS:
Here are some screenshots! They're very pretty. Look at them vistas, guys. Even if these are bullshots, hot dang.
category: games | forums |
40 comments |
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A belated memo of love
15 February 10 | 12:09 | Posted by:
Guys, yesterday was Valentine's Day. I dunno if you heard about that, but it was. I realize it's silly to schedule your declarations of love around a commercial holiday, but I bought my fiancée some roses anyway, just to be safe. I also would like to make some other declarations of love right here on my blog!
I love
Etrian Odyssey III in a platonic silly sort of way. I love that it will probably devour another 100 hours of my life, and I love that it is set on the high seas (at least in portions) in which F.O.E.s appear to be sea monsters and rogue schooners. But mostly, I love it for the intriguing new character classes. Like the monk class, which offers this piece of art as an option for a character portrait. This ensures the fact that everyone of a certain age -- that is, the age to have been into anime between, say, 1994-96 -- will have a warrior on their team named "Ranma."
Also, I love InDesign, in a less silly way. I'm nearly done with
GameSpite Quarterly 4's layouts (I just need to finish the deluxe edition section and put together some things like cover art and whatnot). I have accomplished in two days what normally takes two weeks. And with much less frustration and cursing and crashing and slowdown and general awfulness. And also....
Two-page spread layouts! Yeah, I can't wait to see this one in print.
category: games, gamespite | forums |
fifteen comments |
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GSQ3: Characters 'R' us
13 February 10 | 09:07 | Posted by:
At this point, I don't think we'll be able to get all of the contents of
GameSpite Quarterly 3 online before the fourth book launches. That's OK, I guess. We'll just keep plugging away at it until it's done, however long that takes. (I'm not sure why I'm saying "we" when I'm the one responsible for doing all of this, though. Spreading the blame around, I suppose.)
Today's tripartite update brings us a bevy of recognizable faces for you NES fans. (Cue angry Europeans and Australians insulting us for not focusing more heavily on various platforms that were never properly available in the U.S....
now.) The list includes Mega Man's pal
Rush, Argool's hero
Rygar, and the eternally sexist
Ryu Hayabusa. Not to be mistaken for Fighter Hayabusa, who I'm sad to say we totally neglected to include in this encyclopedia. I apol-- I mean,
we apologize for this oversight.
P.S., if you aren't sick of roguelike talk yet,
this week's episode of Active-Time Babble dedicates an hour to discussing the genre. Featuring Talking Time's very own
Angband hero, Stiv!
category: games, gamespite | forums |
seven comments |
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Shape and form
11 February 10 | 21:32 | Posted by:
So, hey, I'm happy to say that
GameSpite Quarterly 4 is taking shape nicely. The text is all in, and I've proofed half of it. I've also placed half of it! And this is going far more smoothly than with any previous book, because I'm not using Blurb's terrible, terrible text editing software. No, I'm using Cat's copy of Adobe InDesign so that I can make use of Blurb's PDF workflow feature.
This might actually turn out to be the best idea I've ever had, because Blurb BookSmart is designed around photography, and it is absolutely rubbish for text. As you may have noticed,
GameSpite Quarterly includes an unusually large amount of text (looks like about 60,000 words this time around), and dealing with all of that in BookSmart often made me think about how appealing the embrace of death seemed in comparison.
InDesign is
slightly frustrating, because ten years of QuarkXPress is deeply ingrained in my brain -- and InDesign is very similar to Quark, but just different enough to be annoying. A minor complaint. It's faster and more flexible. It is rad.
GameSpite Quarterly 4 will be rad. Maybe a little late... but rad nevertheless.
Oh, sorry about the military censorship blackout there. Text isn't final and all that.
category: blog, gamespite | forums |
eight comments |
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Reaching out to the risk-averse
10 February 10 | 17:50 | Posted by:
My
1UP review of
Shiren the Wanderer went online last night. I'm going to be completely frank, here: I'm not very happy with this review. Atlus' annoying effort to disavow all knowledge of the word "roguelike" is partly to blame, because Shiren is very much of that particular school of design, and it's important to have that fact available up front so that gamers know exactly what's in store for them. Of course, once that's made evident, chances are pretty good the average gamer is going to tune out the rest of the article because they either don't like roguelikes or don't care. So then the review would mainly be a matter of preaching to the choir and should concern itself with the way specific mechanics work (or don't work). Except that I don't
want the genre to remain a closed niche of disinterest, because I find games like Shiren very interesting for a lot of the same reasons that people went nuts over
Demon's Souls and
Torchlight last fall. So then all at once I was trying to clarify the nature of the game, explain how well it works as a roguelike, and convince nonbelievers that they might actually enjoy it if they gave it a fair try. And I'm not sure I really accomplished any of that! Oh well.
Look, Shiren is good. I like it a bit less than the DS game from a couple of years ago, because its structure is different; the main quest is a bunch of smaller dungeons with a fairly flat challenge level, with most of the really interesting dungeons reserved for play after the story is complete. More disappointingly, though, it largely neuters one of the original Shiren's most compelling design elements, the ever-evolving world. The hero in the earlier game was caught in a perpetual, sisyphean loop of death and restarts, but his efforts effected small, persistent changes in the world through which he traveled -- changes that slowly pitched the odds in the player's favor. The Wii game more or less abandons that element, with tasks to complete for townsfolk that work more like traditional RPG quests. But even with that subtle yet significant change, Shiren is a big, interesting game -- if you're willing to take it on its own terms.
If anything, games like Shiren should be commended: They're some of the last bastions of genuine challenge in games. Likewise
Dead Rising and
Demon's Souls. Even
Mass Effect 2 turns the possibility of death or failure into a strength in its endgame, presumably with ramifications for the sequel, and I've heard
Heavy Rain (much as it otherwise fails to impress me) does likewise. Rather than skirt around the possibility of failure or try to completely obliterate it, they turn it into a strength -- a core tenet of the game design. Death in games isn't always a good thing; countless games pride themselves on their purported difficulty, but arrive at that level of challenge through poor design, making players feel like they're being punished for failures that don't really feel like the player's fault, or like they could have been reasonably avoided. That's the
worst. But I really savor games that push me to the limits of my abilities -- regardless of whether that's my reflexive real-time motor skills or my ability to survey a turn-based situation and respond tactically -- and make me work for a victory that is in no way assured. And I admire a game that can transform my failure into something interesting, possibly even advantageous.
If I ever have a chance to make a videogame (though at this point, it's pretty likely that I'll never have the freedom to do that; I'm much too busy pouring my every waking moment into simply sustaining my existence), I hope I can come up with some clever way to turn death into an outcome that players may not actually
embrace, but that they'll at least respect rather than resent. Of course, in saying that, I'm dooming this nascent proto-game to niche status, because the gaming public has grown incredibly risk-averse. The words "death" and "failure" have become conflated with "losing," which isn't always the case. And it's an understandable reaction in light of all the badly made games that have trumpeted their poorly implemented challenge as a selling point; games are meant as entertainment, and there's nothing really enjoyable about being thwarted by poorly-designed obstacles or unresponsive controls or cheap "gotcha" gimmicks. Don't let badly made games dissuade you, though. Death (in a game)
can be a good thing! Honest.
Anyway, I really love the Shiren games, and I hope everyone reading this gives the new one a fair try. Even if it's just a rental, your doing so would make me happy. Maybe you won't like it, and that's cool. But there really is something fascinating about games like this, and I'd be happy if my continued stumping for the game turns a few more people onto the series or genre. Needless to say, you're invited to share your thoughts in
the requisite Talking Time thread.
And no, I don't have a personal stake in extolling the virtues of this game, aside from the fact that someday I'd like to be able to play
Shiren 4 in English. It's a pure, chaste sort of love, untainted by publisher kickbacks.
category: games | forums |
17 comments |
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It came from the aughts!
09 February 10 | 10:40 | Posted by:
After a tremendous amount of debate and discussion and writing and revising and editing, the first part of our
Best of the Decade feature is up. I'm pretty happy with how this has turned out, especially given all the effort poured into it. It looks like it's being largely ignored (probably for being too wordy), so I do hope the fine people who regularly tune into this blog will at least give it a read.
Incidentally, John Riccitiello originally made the list, and I'd even written up his entry... and then EA's financials for last year broke and we realized that it's too early to say, precisely, what Riccitiello's legacy will ultimately be. But that let us add the Penny Arcade duo to the list, which reflects the increasing influence of gamers upon the medium and the industry surrounding it, so that's pretty OK.
And now, it's time to pester Yoshinori Kitase about
Final Fantasy VIII. Oh, he
thinks we're talking about
Final Fantasy XIII, but he's mistaken.
category: blog | forums |
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Springtime for El Spite...ler
07 February 10 | 22:07 | Posted by:
With the Japanese release of
Etrian Odyssey III edging up (along with the presumed U.S. release, because dur hur
of course), I'm making another concerted effort to finish the second game. I always seem to get to the end of a stratum, die horribly at the boss, and find my attention whisked away by some other game that I actually have to play for work before I can level up and tweak my specs enough to win.
Yesterday, I managed to complete the third stratum with a nail-bitingly desperate victory that burned through all my expendables and ended with a single character standing, her health in the red. (And I probably wouldn't have made it that far if not for the fact that the boss wasted about half a dozen turns trying to use its one completely ineffectual attack over and over again.) It's a pretty good instance of the tension and challenge that I love so much about the game... and the fact that I'll be able to return and crush this same boss with little effort before I've bested the spring-like fourth stratum is doubly great. And so, guild El Spite presses on toward the end.
category: games | forums |
22 comments |
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The legend of chocolate continues
06 February 10 | 17:13 | Posted by:
Hey, look, it's another entry in the Kit-Kat Densetsu series.
category: blog | forums |
one comment |
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GSQ3: Writing S-says
06 February 10 | 10:38 | Posted by:
So, the takeaway from my work in podcasting this week appears to be that I'm a horrible person whose voice should never be heard aloud. Don't worry, though: All future episodes of Retronauts will be conducted entirely in semaphore.
- Sabreman (Jake Alley): You want to know how to make an English major happy? Refer to the style of writing in this article as "old English." They love it when you do that.
- The Safari Hunter (Justin Fairchild): Apparently the hero of Congo Bongo doesn't have a proper name, leastways not so far as it's actually given to us in the lore. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that The Safari Hunter's real name is "Nario," though. Or maybe "Muigi."
- Samson (Mike Zeller): Not to be mistaken for the real Samson. You can tell the difference because this one has short hair.
category: blog | forums |
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Shiren call
05 February 10 | 20:32 | Posted by:
Another day, another failed pun in the blog title. This one would work if "Shiren" were pronounced the way my coworker Justin pronounces it --
shy-rin -- but every time he does that my ears explode in agony. Which means that I'm inflicting pain on myself with this one. I guess. I dunno, I just work here.
I mention
Shiren the Wanderer because I'd noted before my intention to record a roguelike-themed episode of Active-Time Babble next week to mark the launch of Shiren on Wii. Our ATB plan still stands, but David talked me into appearing today's episode of
4 Guys (I agreed mainly to redeem my dreadfully awful work on
yesterday's Retronauts), and I ended up going into a fair amount of detail on both the genre (which I imagine is well outside the purview of this particular show's primary audience) and on Shiren in particular.
I'd like to take a moment to note that I played a fair amount of Shiren today and my criticism of the game in the show -- about it possibly being a bit too unchallenging -- has been washed away. I still haven't seen a game over screen, but once I made it into the Karakuri Mansion, the game upped the stakes. A good roguelike isn't necessarily one that kills you a lot, it's one that keeps you stressed out and anxious with every step, and Shiren definitely works in that regard. I've found myself measuring each action carefully and constantly riding the ragged edge of loss as the monsters take my hit points down to 1 or 2 and I take a desperate last swipe in the hopes that my killing blow will be the first to connect. Shiren's structure had me worried at first, but no: This is no
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. Chun Soft is playing for keeps.
Of course, the real star of the episode is Ray, making his debut on the show and showing the rest of us up. These days, I'm pretty much just marking time until he takes over my job.
category: blog | forums |
seven comments |
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GSQ3: Samus it ever was
04 February 10 | 21:09 | Posted by:
I'm pretty sure I've used the joke "Samus it ever was" before, but do you know what?
I don't care. It's just that good.
I'm sorry to say that this update includes my very worst entry of all from
GameSpite Quarterly 3, the piece on Shadax. I probably should have just cut it, because it's not good and it doesn't actually make sense. To even begin to understand it, you have to be familiar with the image above, wherein Shadax resembled a buffed-up rock 'n roll roadie. I went from there, but sadly it was all downhill. Anyway, everyone else picked up my slack, so it's all good.
We are (Angband) Borg
03 February 10 | 21:00 | Posted by:
I guess that last post deserves a little context.
Angband is a PC roguelike, and a pretty detailed one at that. As you can probably suss from the name, it's built around the lore of Tolkien. Sure, most fantasy is, but Angband is courteous enough not to maintain any pretenses about its inspiration. It's an adventure into a Middle-Earth dungeon, and you fight orcs and Gollum and so on and so forth. I appreciate that kind of honesty in my games.
Angband Borg is a program that sends an AI-controlled player into the dungeon to see how far it can advance; since computers are infinitely patient, the Borg tends to be very conservative and advances very slowly. But advance it does! My Borg -- in the form of the Angband Borg screensaver for OS X which runs on my email computer at work during office hours -- has managed to reach level 37 and floor 37 since setting out, I dunno, sometime in October, I guess? It's a slow, steady adventure, and sometimes I spend a day watching it kill infinitely respawning lice for negligible experience. He's a Dunedan Paladin. You'd think a holy warrior of a noble race would have better things to do with his time than scum-camp lice, but roguelikes are unpredictable that way, I guess. But regardless of the outcome I
do spend some time every day watching my little Borg buddy. I'm rootin' for him.
You can read a great deal about Angband in Stiv's
phenomenal Let's Play, which recently came to a close. I bet we'll also be talking about it in next week's roguelike-centric Active-Time Babble, too! This is a safe bet, seeing as how Stiv is slated to join us for the discussion.
category: games | forums |
ten comments |
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Resistance is futile
03 February 10 | 15:30 | Posted by:
I'm getting a little worried about my
Angband Borg. He's been standing in this same room for most of the day, surrounded by giant white lice. They can't seem to harm him at all, but he's too stupid to use any sort of area-effect power that would clear out the room, so he just keeps killing the same creatures over and over. I've never seen a more frustrating screensaver than this -- I wish I could jump in and take manual control of the idiot, but of course any time I touch an input device it wakes the system and pauses the simulation.
Stupid, stupid Paladin!
category: games | forums |
six comments |
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GSQ3: Secret unpublished document edition
01 February 10 | 17:17 | Posted by:
So there was a little hiccup at the end of
GameSpite Quarterly 3 submissions and we ended up getting two alternate takes on
Shantae. D'oh! I went with the one that was submitted first for print, but here on the Internet there are no silly rules about page counts and folio pricing, so you can enjoy them both. Isn't that lovely? I vote "yes."
- Shantae (Tomm Hulett): Perhaps you have already read this entry, but now you can read it again without fear of papercuts.
- Shantae (alternate entry, Philip Armstrong): Because one Shantae entry isn't enough.
- Simea (myself): Did you know that the hero of Crystalis has a name? Well, now you do.
ALSO: It is time for me to begin assembling the semi-annual subscriber bonus content. The printed books from last time worked pretty nicely, aside from a surprisingly large number of reports about mailings that were lost or damaged en route. I'll take extra precautions in mailing these, but I would like to know what
you want to see in your book. A ToastyFrog story or comic? Videogame musings? Further tales of the fictional GameSpite staff? That
Onion story I started years ago and never finished? BakeSpite-style recipes? You subscriber dudes have a few days to drop me a line and let me know what you'd prefer to see. I'm open to pretty much any idea that will fit into a 40-page book!
category: games, gamespite | forums |
three comments |
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