Top Six Christmas Video Games December 5, 2014

With Christmas just around the corner and the season’s spirit out in the air, I strongly believe that this time of year is so ubiquitous that it can find itself in almost every single medium.  I’m sure that many of you could spend hours reading out all the books, films, and television shows that featured this holiday front and center, but how many of you can name the video games that show off the spirit of the season in a way that only video games can?

Well, I’ve been following video games for plenty of Christmases and I’m sure going to try.  The important criteria for this list has entirely to do with the game’s use of Christmas, either in the game’s story, visuals, or gameplay.  However, a game can still make this list even if it doesn’t specifically reference Christmas itself, as long as it includes images or story elements generally associated with Christmas, like snow.  So without further ado, let’s count down the Top Six Christmas Video Games!

6. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire – You can’t get more iconic than the Star Wars franchise.  I know we’ve got the start of an entirely new trilogy coming next year, but back in the mid 90s all Star Wars fans had in canon were three beloved films, some novels, and an expanding comic universe.  Before the prequel trilogy was even spoken of in hushed tomes by fans hanging on George Lucas’s every word, gamers got the biggest canonical expansion to the Star Wars universe in the mid-90s in the form of the game Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire.  Set during the events between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the game puts you in control of Dash Rendar and his ship the Outrider as we got to explore the Star Wars universe in glorious 3D.  While the game itself has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, or as its known as in Star Wars, Life Day, what better way for a Star Wars fan to spend Christmas than fighting in the Battle of Hoth?  I’m sure that many early N64 adopters fondly remember receiving this game alongside their brand new Nintendo 64 on Christmas morning, making it a great addition to this list.

5. Faherenheit (Indigo Prophecy) – This is probably one of my last favorite PC titles, even though it is available on the PS2 and Xbox.  Taking us back to NYC, or as the game calls it, the Capital of the Universe, you play as several characters investigating the strange, almost ritualistic killings happening as the city gets blanketed in one of the coldest winters it has seen in years.   It had been years since I played an adventure game on the PC, but after reading the guys at Penny Arcade had recommended it I decided to check out the game’s demo and I immediately was hooked.  The story is fantastic, the motion captured animation was fluid, the soundtrack rocked, and the quick time events, while difficult for some, was a lot of fun for me. This game laid the groundwork for games like Heavy Rain and BEYOND: Two Souls.  Do you want the heroes to overcome evil, or do you want evil to win out and for humanity to be blanketed in never ending winter?  The choice is yours. What happens is left to you.  If you don’t have an original Xbox don’t worry, the game will play just fine on the Xbox 360.

4. Max Payne – This game is without a doubt one of the greatest third person shooters in gaming history, and not only featured some of the best graphics of its time, but entirely new gameplay that is still being replicated to this day.  While the game does not officially take place during Christmas (we never find out exactly what days of the year the first Max Payne game took place), the majority of the game takes place during one of New York City’s worst blizzards.  As we can see immediately following the game’s prologue, NYC is a winter wonderland covered in snow, and if your PC is powerful enough, that snow will fall non stop.   As you look at the images of the snow covered city during the game’s graphic novel segments, you can see that the snow itself is almost like another character in the game.  In this game, Max isn’t going to be checking out the city’s great landmarks, we’re going to be fighting our way through some pretty seedy areas that even the game’s developer admits probably don’t exist anymore.  You will find yourself traveling to some pretty dangerous places in the Big Apple, like Subways infested with gangs of mercenaries, or gothic nightclubs serving as the headquarters for some of the most dangerous drug lords in the city.

3.  Batman: Arkham Origins – Batman had long standing issues in the video game space, but that all changed when Rocksteady released Batman: Arkham Asylum a few years ago.  Last year WB Games Montreal released this prequel title to show the…*ahem* origins of the Arkham franchise.  It is Christmas Eve and Batman has just started his war against crime.  The city’s villains aren’t very happy they have to deal with a giant flying bat and someone places a bounty on the head of Gotham City’s vigilante.  This brings out some of most dangerous super criminals in Batman’s rogues gallery including Bane, Deathstroke, Killer Croc, and Copperhead.  With almost all of Gotham now gunning for Batman, The Dark Knight must defeat his new foes and make it back to Wayne Manor in time for Christmas ham.  I really don’t want to say anything more as it might spoil the game’s story, but needless to say it is a great way to ring in the Holiday season.  Just make sure to save Mr. Freeze’s DLC, Cold, Cold Night, for New Year’s!

2. Parasite Eve – Having grown up on the East Coast of the US, I have to admit I have a romantic fondness for New York City.  While the city can be quite cold during the Holidays, it can also be so charming seeing it covered in snow when all the lights go on, and that feeling is captured quite nicely in Square’s PS1 classic, Parasite Eve.  As the game opens we see snow fall all around the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center’s ice rink is covered in a white blanket of snow, and our game’s hero, Aya, is having a date to the opera on Christmas Eve.  Immediately the city becomes an important staple of the game, and the signs of Christmas are around you.  Sadly, your date goes badly.  So badly in fact that almost everyone at the opera who didn’t flee immediately is presumed dead when one of the stars of the show unleashes an incredible power upon seeing you.  The game takes place over the course of the next six days as you try to determine just what the heck happened at the Opera, and what was so special about you that your life was spared.  If you want to check the game out for yourselves and don’t have an original copy of the game on PlayStation, you can always buy it digitally off the PlayStation Store.

1. Infected – As far as I’m concerned, this game is the definitive Christmas title, and I do my best to try and spend some time playing it every holiday season. One of the most prominent early titles in the PSP’s back catalog, Infected sadly never got the attention I believed it deserved.  The game starts during the lighting of the tree at Rockefeller Center just as a zombie pandemic hits New York City.  Okay, seriously, at this point even I’m shocked by how many Christmas games on this list happen to also take place in New York City.  In fact, you could say it’s sadly comical, as developer Planet Moon Studios did a lot to inject their humor into what would otherwise have been a depressing, generic title.  You are one of the few officers found to be immune to the zombie virus, and you have to spend the days leading up to Christmas eradicating the city of all traces of the outbreak.  As the credits roll, the player is treated to an all new version of “They Don’t Even Know its Christmas” but this one is written on behalf of the zombies.  Sadly, this game has not gotten a digital release on the PlayStation Store, so you’ll have to track down a physical UMD copy if you want to play it, but trust me, it is my favorite game on the PSP system.

Things to Know Before Holiday Shopping for Electronics and Video Games November 25, 2014

With Thanksgiving upon us, the Holiday shopping season is at hand.  Undoubtedly video games and other electronic items are going to be at the top of most people’s wish lists, as three new gaming consoles have been gaining a lot of ground and releasing some amazing new games over the past year.

If you plan to pick up any of these new gaming consoles there are a few things you might need to know before purchasing them.  At the simplest, this information will inform you in advance of some minor inconveniences you may have with your new equipment, but there are some major issues that can prevent you from using your new purchases if you’re not aware of them.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

• You must own an HDMI equipped HDTV to use the PS4 or Xbox One.  Neither console will work on SDTVs or HDTVs without HDMI ports.
• The Wii U will work on older SD and EDTVs, but you will need to use a custom cable that isn’t included with the Wii U to connect it to legacy TVs.  You can get analog cables from Nintendo’s Parts and Supplies website, or use your Wii’s video cables instead if you already own one.
• You must have a home with high speed internet to activate the Xbox One and install the latest system software.  The Xbox One will not function unless activated.
• The Xbox One and PS4 can only play any games designed specifically for them to play, and there are no plans to bring legacy support for retail titles to either console.
• The Wii U can play Wii games, and if you already have a Wii, you can transfer all of the save files and downloaded content from your Nintendo Wii to a brand new Wii U.  However, you will need a home network with a high-speed internet connection and a digital camera’s SD card with at least 512MB of storage to do a transfer.
• All the modern gaming consoles come with HDMI cables, you will not need to buy extra cables if you just plan to plug your HDTV.  In fact, I recommend using the included cables as they are guaranteed to work well with the console.  Some third party cables can bring audible pops or temporary blank screens during gameplay.
• You must pay for a PlayStation Plus membership to play online PS4 multiplayer titles. The price is $50US for one year.
• You must pay for an Xbox Live Gold membership to play online Xbox One and Xbox 360 multiplayer games. The price is $60US for one year.
• Destiny requires an online connection to play.
• If you want to buy a PlayStation TV and don’t have a PlayStation Vita, there are a lot of PlayStation Vita games, including several killer apps for the system, which are still incompatible with the PlayStation TV.  Do not pick up a PlayStation TV if you plan to play a game like Uncharted: Golden Abyss or Silent Hill: Book of Memories on it.  Right now only the PlayStation Vita handheld can play those games.  Here’s a link to the official list of compatible games.
• If you plan to play Blu-Ray Discs or CDs on an Xbox One, you need to download the apps that allow you to do so from the Xbox Store.  Don’t worry, they don’t cost anything to download, but they will need to be downloaded.
• You must update the PS4’s Firmware to play Blu-Ray Discs, but a high speed internet connection is not required.  You can download the firmware to a USB drive and update the PS4 that way.  You can download the latest firmware update here.
• If you have an older legacy surround sound amplifier (like a 5.1 system that does not have HDMI inputs), you still can use the PS4, Apple TV, and Xbox One on it to get full surround sound, but you must buy an optical cable and use your amp’s optical port.
• A lot of new consoles, in particular the Xbox One and Wii U will actually come bundled with full versions of new games.  However, in some cases, these free bundled games will need to be downloaded from the internet, which will require a high-speed internet connection to redeem your game.
• If you plan to pick up a Wii U or any Nintendo product, check out Club Nintendo to earn awesome rewards for your purchases.
• Wii U consoles typically do not come with Nintendo Wiimotes or Nunchucks unless otherwise marked that they do.  You will need those controllers if you plan to play legacy Wii titles on your Wii U.

The Best Movies For LAN Parties September 10, 2014

In high school I was fortunate to be able to attend some incredible Local Area Network (LAN) Parties. At regular times during the year, we would take over the offices of a local Open Source Group to play Unreal Tournament CTF and Starcraft.

The room they kept all their gaming computers in was also equipped with a (then) top of the line projector and 5.1 surround system. The system was pretty flexible and could run content from a variety of different sources including DVD-Video and PC. On the nights they held LANs, the group would run a DVD movie of whatever film they wanted to watch that week.  At one point I remember asking them why choose to play a movie on that system.  They could have run a spectator server on the projector so non players could see what was going on in the game, but they said for some reason having a spectator feed on a screen that big made some of the people watching it nauseous.  With that in mind, they decided to show some amazing movies that in a lot of cases I was ashamed to admit I had never seen before. It added to the atmosphere of the event and was a fun distraction during the levels’ load times.

Even in a fully manned LAN Party, not everyone is going to want to play every second they are at the event and some non gamers may be in attendance too, so it’s a good idea to have something running in the background for those people to watch on their downtime. If you plan to do this, I recommend showing movies that fit three major criteria. First, show a movie that has been universally considered good, unless you’re planning to be ironic in a “so bad it’s good kind of way.” You want people to enjoy their time at the event, so bad stuff is going to be frowned upon.  I’m not saying people will leave if you choose to play something bad, but having something good on might convince them to stay longer.  Second is you’re going to want to show something which can be easily understood in passing, or something that you’re sure your guests are already familiar with. That includes anything popular or straight up action movies. Serious dramas, crime mysteries or twist films are kind of hard to understand unless you’re able to pay attention to every single second of it, and let’s face it, this is going to be a film that’s glanced at infrequently.  I think an argument could be made for The Usual Suspects, since I don’t know a single person who hasn’t already seen that movie, but I’m not going to include it on this list.  Finally I would recommend movies on a darker lighting tone. By that I don’t mean depressing movies I mean films shot mostly at night. Aside from vampires, nobody hates light more than gamers and nothing can kill a gaming mood more than the bright glare from ambient lighting.  Heavy brightness from a film playing in the background can be a distraction or irritation, so brightly lit films are out.

So with all that said, here are some of my recommendations for the best movies to play during a LAN Party.

Blade –  The very first successful movie based on a Marvel property will also be the very first film to make this list.  A vampire-human hybrid gifted with supernatural strength and agility uses his powers to fight the creatures of the night.  When he discovers a plan by one of the outcast members of vampire society to trigger an apocalypse, he must stop them before its too late.  While the film has tons of great action beats culminating with an epic final battle between the two main characters, it is an extremely well written and acted film.  Since it’s a vampire movie, you can be sure most of the movie’s plot takes place at night, and the color palate will not distract from gameplay.  Trust me, the first time I ever saw this movie was at a LAN Party, and I’m grateful for it.

The Matrix – Regardless of how you may feel about its sequels, the original Matrix film is one of the best movies ever made.  When a LAN center briefly opened in my area, I recommended the owners buy a DVD player and keep this film running on loop.  They took my advice, and this film became a staple of the center’s lounge area.  The themes of this movie become quite ironic given the setting.  Here is a future where the world could be interpreted as one big MMO, with players given the ability to cheat if they are skilled enough.  While I admit not much of this movie actually takes place at night, that isn’t much of an issue when you think about the film’s cinematography and colorization.  The directors chose to color tint most of the scenes and intentionally avoided showing the world’s sky, giving even daytime shots a darker tone.  Without spoiling anything, look really closely at the color filters used throughout most of the movie and you’ll notice a specific hue saturating it depending on the location.  While it may be a more complicated film to follow than some of the others on the list, it isn’t as difficult to follow as some would have you believe, and even as just a visual spectacle the movie still holds up.

TRON –   This is without a doubt a generationally defining movie which pushed the limits on what was possible with animation.  The movie’s plot is perfect for the setting.  A game programmer is sucked inside the computer and forced to battle his creations for real.  Once that happens, the movie continues from setpiece to setpiece until the final battle.  Another thing going for it is the entire movie is dark.  The animation effects were achieved by having live action actors filmed in front of a black background on 70mm black and white film.  The director insisted the computer world would not have a sun, instead everything in the world would have its own independent glow, showing they were made of energy.  The first time I ever saw this film was at a LAN Party and I have to give great props for the organizers choosing to show this film.

Blade Runner – This is a film that defies every description but I’m going to try to define it for you guys.  Well, it’s a futuristic film noir starring Harrison Ford, where a formerly retired cop is charged with tracking down and retiring four robots illegally operating in a futuristic Los Angeles.  While some people will have a hard time following the film in passing if they’re not previously familiar with it, the spectacle of the film’s world should be more than enough to impress passing viewers.  The director, having looked at his facilities, decided very early that night, rain and smoke were his three best friends let me tell you those three elements add a magical look to the movie.  Try to get the Blu-Ray Disc release on this one, you won’t regret it.

Batman Begins – The movie that brought DC films back into the public image, Batman Begins is one of the best superhero origin films ever made.  Finally, after years of waiting for someone to tell the story about how exactly Bruce Wayne became Batman, we got one hell of a well acted, well directed and well paced first story in what looked to be a promising new film franchise, and that eventually paid off when Warner Bros released the best film of 2008, The Dark Knight, a few years later.  The reason why I chose this film instead of The Dark Knight is basically because of my lighting rule.  The Dark Knight was shot partially in IMAX and uses more daytime sequences than Batman Begins which could distract players.  Since Batman operates mostly at night (because a guy in a Bat costume isn’t very scary in broad daylight) most of the film takes place at night, making it perfect for a LAN showing.

Iron Man – The movie responsible for ensuring the continued future of Marvel Studios and with it the Avengers movie, Iron Man was the right film released at the right time.  A brilliant billionaire playboy is captured by terrorists while trying to sell weapons to the military.  Instead of making weapons for the terrorists as he was forced to do, he builds himself a suit of armor armed to the teeth and fought his way out.  When his companion is killed in the breakout, he decides to use his knowledge and resources to help make the world a better place.  This becomes the foundation for an entire superhero universe, culminating in one of the best movies ever made, and certainly the best film of 2012, The Avengers.  While some of the movie isn’t shot at night, a pretty good portion of the daytime scenes take place in dark environments, so it shouldn’t be much of an issue.

Terminator 2 – A being made entirely of a metallic alloy able to change its shape to mimic any person of equal size is sent back in time to kill the future leader of the human resistance.  The only thing that can stop him is a fully reprogrammed cyborg made from a hardware line that failed to kill his mother years earlier. It is without a doubt one of the greatest action movies of all time. While it is beyond likely that every person you know probably knows the film by heart, the movie is just so good they’re not going to care. As for the lighting, while not everything in the film is shot at night, a wide majority of it is, including all of the final act.

I hope you all enjoyed the list and if you have any recommendations you would like to add, just post a comment!

You Will NOT be Missed September 4, 2014

In the past, I have lamented on this site about companies and products which are either no longer available or no longer as great as they once were. This is not that kind of article. This editorial is on the companies that are no longer with us and we are probably all the better for it. So sit back and relax as I say good riddance to several entities which have had the decency to go away, although it was probably due to their own incompetency.

Circuit City – Dennis Miller once said, “You could encircle the globe at the equator with just four and a half Circuit City receipts.” I actually remember fondly when this store opened in my area. You could find a decent selection of CDs at the exact same price everyone else was charging for them. You could find a limited selection of PC games, but wouldn’t find competitive prices if you wanted to buy them. You could also find a decent selection of DVDs back when the format was brand new (read: expensive). Unfortunately the good times were not to last. In the last few years of Circuit City’s existence I tried unsuccessfully to find anyone actually working at the store. I don’t mean the stores didn’t have employees, they did, you could find them all over the place just standing around. The problem was the registers were NEVER manned. You’re a retail store, not a museum. How can you sell products if you don’t have people ready to take your orders? Anyone making a new purchase at the store would find themselves in customer service where they would typically have to wait about twenty minutes to ring up their purchase as the eighty year old couple in front of them argued with the clerks over restocking fees for a printer they couldn’t figure out and probably shouldn’t have bought in the first place.

The last time I shopped there was on the day Iron Man was released on Blu Ray Disc. Now, you need to understand that Iron Man up to this point had been one of the biggest theatrical releases of the year. The store sold out its stock by 3PM. The store’s manager was dumbfounded, saying he hadn’t seen such a demand for a Blu Ray movie since Transformers was released on the format some time earlier. I asked him if he took into consideration heavily stocking a new film that everyone at the time thought was really good, but I didn’t get much of a response from him. So they wouldn’t maintain a decent stock of products in heavy demand and wouldn’t keep their infrastructure manned for the people who did want to purchase from them. No wonder they’re no longer around.

Blockbuster Video – Want to go out of the way and spend a lot of money renting old poor quality VHS tapes for short periods of time? Want to watch the movie longer? You run the risk of racking up large late charges, putting your credit rating in danger if you forget to return something. The company’s business plan was based around the early days of the home video market, as the price of movies and movie players were incredibly expensive. They offered short term rentals of films for much lower prices. But like with all technologies, if it is successful eventually the prices will drop. In the days when the prices of DVDs were relatively inexpensive, Blockbuster continued with their antiquated policies as new services with better business models emerged in the changing home video market. As the company started to flounder in the new millennium as better rental options were made available to consumers the company decided to try some more slightly deceptive practices instead of improving their business model. They announced they were dropping their late fees as companies like Netflix had been doing since they started their DVD mail rental service years earlier. What they didn’t tell people in their commercials was they would charge customers full price for the movie if they kept their rental for more than a week. They actually lost in court when someone filed suit over that omission.

About the only thing people remember fondly about this store is they used to have a kiosk where you could print out the pictures you took in Pokémon Snap. That kiosk is heavily sought after by collectors and Pokémon fans alike. I wish Nintendo sold those kiosks, they were so cool.

E for All – After the downsizing of E3 in 2007, several trade shows stepped up to fill the vacuum with mixed results. One of them was E for All (E4), and they planned to offer a trade show like E3 where the public would be allowed into the event. To promote the event, they crashed other people’s expos, offering trinkets and other branded bobbles without the permission of the expo’s organizers. Ever wanted to know what the LA Convention Center looked like when it was empty? Pay 90 dollars for a three day pass to E for All and you will. You could see everything the expo had to offer before the end of the first day you were there, freeing you up to do other things during your stay in LA, like attend the live taping of a HBO show that would get interrupted by truthers. They had another event in 2008, but when E3 returned in 2009 the expo’s organizers just decided to give up instead of competing with the biggest trade show in the world.

Has Zero Punctuation’s Quality Dropped? August 21, 2014

Since 2007, gamers worldwide have flocked to The Escapist website every Wednesday to watch the latest game review by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw for his weekly series, Zero Punctuation.  In his early days, Yahtzee was able to critically slam the mainstream games that we all love with his ability to point out problems with games that gamers and critics could easily miss for a variety of reasons. In a lot of ways, he was the quintessential critic, and his videos made for a wonderful weekly treat.  Not only could he find tons of issues with the games he played during a five minute humorously animated video, I felt watching his weekly reviews encouraged critical thinking over a subject better than anything I ever was assigned to do while in school.

The first Zero Punctuation video I ever watched was a review of the first Bioshock game.  I watched it a few weeks after I completed playing Bioshock for myself, and I was pleasantly surprised.  In his review, Yahtzee said that the game bore far too close a similarity to a game that Bioshock’s director had made before, System Shock 2, and went into explicit detail about each of the similarities.  I still to this day haven’t actually played System Shock 2, but I found myself really impressed by the fact that Yahtzee was able to find so many flaws with a game I thought was otherwise perfect. This made me a weekly viewer of his series.

2007 was a big year for good games, but the year eventually drew to a close. In 2008, several really bad games were released and gamers everywhere asked him to review as many of them as he could.  As expected, he utterly destroyed them with his critical eye.  In fact, I enjoyed watching him slam some utterly terrible games, like 2008’s Alone in the Dark.  Not only did he point out all of the game’s failures in a well written review, he made it hilarious by having it described by two game developers he aptly named “Terry and “Gonad”. However, the streak of bad games would not always be there for him and eventually good games would find their way onto shelves again.

Over the past two or so years he’s still been at slamming the games he reviews, but after watching so many of his more recent videos I’ve noticed a disturbing trend.  The games that he’s been slamming…are actually good.  Typically this doesn’t bother me as I don’t mind having something I enjoy get roasted, but after watching some of his more recent reviews I found myself disagreeing with his points a lot more than I thought I would.  Originally, his reviews would come from the general design of, “well I bet you didn’t see this…or see THAT” and he would point out genuine problems with the game.  That is a good path to take when you’re a critic, point out the flaws that nobody else has seen.  Instead he just seems to attack good games for the sake of attacking them, which is in my opinion a pretty lazy approach.  The general theme of some of his more recent reviews could be boiled down to, “Yeah, I played it, it’s just NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR MY HIGH STANDARDS and that’s what makes it bad.”  While that may work for some if the critic is a highly successful individual, my standards for criticism are higher than that.  He fails to convince me that his standards are anything special, OR that his concerns with the game are in fact genuine problems, failing to provide me a reason why I shouldn’t buy it.  If you’re a critic who fails to get the person reading your review to trust your judgment, then you’ve failed as a critic.

Another issue is a lot of the time he won’t even complete a game he’s reviewing, either out of spite for or due to time constraints.  Deadlines I can understand, but if you’re getting paid to review a game and plan to put your name on that review, you owe it to everyone who is reading that review to complete it. While I understand he is on a weekly deadline for each of his reviews, Yahtzee has made his laziness and inability to finish a game he’s reviewing a point of pride in several reviews. In fact, he openly bragged of the fact that he only played the first five hours of Final Fantasy XIII, a game that typically takes a player around 20-40 hours to complete.  While you might be able to typically forgive a reviewer for being unwilling to continue a game they did not enjoy and give them a pass on that one time, this was no freak event. When Final Fantasy XIII-2 was released he openly bragged he spent even less time playing that game than he had spent on the previous one. He also bragged in his Alone in the Dark (2008) review that he refused to play the game’s final chapter simply out of spite because the game needed him to complete several side missions before he could play the ending.  Seriously?  You’re being paid to do a job, and that is review a game.  Don’t you owe it to your fans and the people who watch your reviews to actually have all the information you can about the game before posting it?

Then there are the times when he is just plain wrong.  Now I know that criticism is opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but sometimes he actually provides opinions which don’t match up to what he says about the game.  Watch his reviews of the three Dead Space games for example, they actually contradict with each other.  In his review of the first game, he complains about how the game’s atmosphere doesn’t measure up to his expectations.  Having played the game myself, I thought Viseral had actually done a pretty good job with that game’s atmosphere, but I guess they weren’t good enough for his high standards.  Maybe if Visceral had added fog he would have changed his mind.  You can tell in the later games that Viseral may have taken this comment to heart by slowly shifting the Dead Space sequels from atmospheric survival horror gameplay to a more action oriented gameplay style.  If you ask me I think Visceral struck the perfect balance between action and horror in Dead Space 2 by making the game genuinely scary but still giving you enough resources to defend yourself.  Yahtzee hated this game too, and he explained it by describing the game’s opening sequence when a man trying to save you is killed and then violently turned into a necromorph.  I’m sure in Yahtzee’s mind, he felt like a member of the Academy ripping into how badly the lighting effect ruined the horrific element of the moment.  To me it just came off as a small child striking out in the dark at the bigger person in the room simply because striking him just makes him feel better.  Typically I would be all for this kind of analogy, but in this case the bigger person wasn’t harming the smaller person at all, he’s just standing there dumbfounded by the smaller person’s violent outbursts.  Yes Yahtzee, I can make crazy analogies too.  Give me a weekly gig on The Escapist.

I came to a penultimate realization when Dead Space 3 was released.  While I admit, the game was flawed in a lot of places, particularly with EA’s decision to nickel and dime gamers with in-app purchases and overpriced DLC, Yahtzee made no mention of any of this in his review of that game.  Instead, all he did was complain about the changes EA made with the game’s horror aspect and the their decision to turn the game into a third person action shooter instead of the survival horror game it was originally designed as.  When he complemented how good the atmosphere was in the first game, I lost it.   I went back and rewatched his review of the first game, and it was exactly how I remembered it.  Yahtzee didn’t mention anything about enjoying the first Dead Space game’s atmosphere in his review of that game, all he did was dump on it and make jokes about all the horror tropes it happened to use.  You shouldn’t spend five minutes trashing a game, saying how terrible it is, why you think it is so terrible, and then complain when the game designers take your advice.  It’s irresponsible and borderline unethical!

Normally, hearing some angry gamer shout at the world about why he hates something will typically have no impact on the world in general, but unfortunately because of Zero Punctuation’s popularity, game developers seem to be taking his criticism as fact, or the decision of the gaming majority when they shouldn’t put any stock into it.  Peter Molyneux himself e-mailed Yahtzee just before the release of a new Fable game with the specific hope that he would enjoy all the new additions they made to game because he saw of Yahtzee’s scathing review of the first Fable game.  Unsurprisingly, Yahtzee still hated it.  The other problem is that his series has had an effect on the mainstream gaming press.  Since Yahtzee has become popular, I can think of a ton of reviews from mainstream gaming publications which unfairly criticized games for the sake of criticism and delivered review scores that were, in my opinion, unjustified.  There are two major review travesties I can think of when decent games were unfairly judged by the majority of mainstream gaming reviewers in the past few years.  The first reviewer failure I can think of would go to 2010’s Splatterhouse, which was a game so trashed by the mainstream gaming press I would not have picked up had it not been for a well researched and thought out review by the Happy Video Game Nerd.  Another complete reviewer failure should go to 2011’s Duke Nukem Forever, which was heavily criticized for being sophomoric and childish when that was the kind of game it was expected to be.  If that isn’t enough for you, their other criticism was Duke Nukem Forever did not implement features from Call of Duty’s gameplay, like the ability to see down iron sights.  Apparently nobody told these “mainstream” critics Duke Nukem Forever was not a Call of Duty game.

Nowadays I honestly can’t think of a reason to watch his videos. He used to be a decent critic but his review of Watch_Dogs has made it clear to me he’s just phoning it in.  I think at this point, he is giving games so much hate because it is what is expected of him to do.  That doesn’t hurt anyone if his reviews are taken under that context, but if one of his reviews genuinely makes you not want to play a game you otherwise would have played and enjoyed, then the player is hurt for not having the experience they were looking forward to.  I will admit to genuinely loving plenty of games he otherwise hated, and had I listened to him and not purchased many of the games he gave negative reviews to, I would have denied myself the rich experience of playing them myself.  Don’t do that to yourself.  Play what you want to play, and don’t let someone tell you otherwise, even me.

Dangers of Time Experiments in Quantum Break Foretold in Star Trek: The Next Generation August 11, 2014

I know the Internet has been speculating for quite some time on what is in store for us when the highly anticipated Xbox One exclusive title Quantum Break finally gets released.  However, I’ve noticed that most of the questions players have asked are pretty simple. Will the game be any good? What are the game’s technical specifications? How will it control?  What I haven’t seen is a lot of speculation on the game’s subject matter, time experimentation. While this is probably because we don’t yet know enough about the game’s story, we do know Quantum Break will give players the power of time distortion, granted after a time experiment went berserk. With just a single day until the game is demoed at this year’s Gamescom, what better time to start talking about the dangers of time experimentation, and did you know that it was something the crew of the USS Enterprise-D already tangled with?

One of my favorite classic television series is Star Trek: The Next Generation, a series which revived the original Star Trek franchise a century after the events of James T. Kirk, and followed an entirely new crew on an entirely new USS Enterprise, as they continued their mission to “explore brave new worlds, seek our new life and new civilizations, [and] to boldly go where no one has gone before.” While most people argue that Star Trek: The Next Generation didn’t get good until the third season, I think there are plenty of great episodes in the first two. In fact, there’s an episode of the series that I am ashamed to admit I’ve never seen before, but one which may have provided me a glimpse into the dangers of time experimentation that Quantum Break also plans to explore in more detail. As I watched this thirty year old episode, I was shocked how relevant the episode was to Remedy’s next game. The crew of the Enterprise D, it seems, have dealt with time distortion experiments, and triumphed.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first season episode “We’ll Always Have Paris”, a scientist now married to a former lover of Captain Picard’s is working on very similar time experiments like what is described in Quantum Break.  He, and a team of other scientists, were trying to unlock the secrets of time on a remote planet.  As the episode begins, time pauses, resets a few seconds, and replays, with no explanation. The effect is consciously felt among crew members not only on the ship, but as the episode progresses we learn the effects are spreading through the quadrant and other ships report being affected as well.  The audience eventually discovers that the scientists working on time experiments had caused an accident, and the accident was causing time to distort all through space.  As the effect gets worse, the crew start coming face to face with their own selves from past and future moments, almost as if the barriers between the past, present and future were breaking down. The scientist responsible for the accident is left horribly injured, with his fractured mind unable to comprehend being able to see the possibilities he is witnessing, making it hard for him to keep his mind in the present to provide essential information to the crew on his activity.  As I watched this nearly thirty year old episode, I wondered if I was glimpsing into a window for what Remedy might have in store for us with Quantum Break.

While the episode’s plot seemed to focus on resolving this temporal incident, we as an audience don’t see a complete picture of just what was at stake.  We are told about the distortions in time in elaborate details, but truth be told, up until the climax we don’t see any glorious set pieces of what it looks like when time begins breaking down.  Most of the time distortion effects shown in the episode are pretty simple editing effects, either through rewinding or replaying scenes, or involving replicating same people in the same shot, kind of like how Haley Mills was able to play two separate people in The Parent Trap.  Instead, the audience spends a lot of time learning about Captain Picard’s character, and the regrets he had over the woman he had lost.  In fact, without spoiling anything, we don’t really get to see any elaborate special effects until the episode’s climax, and even then, the audience only sees the effect in one single room, even though the future of the whole galaxy is at stake.  Regardless, it is a great episode and I would totally recommend checking it out if you’re a fan of the series.

While the episode may have given me an idea of effects of time distortion, either the show’s budget or technical limitations of the time prevented us from truly seeing any elaborate effects, so it was a bit harder for the audience to see just what was truly at stake.  However, what the episode did succeed in doing was make me even more excited to play Quantum Break.  Unlike an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Quantum Break is able to show the audience the true effects of messing with time, thanks to all the power the next generation consoles can offer.  In fact, Remedy’s first teaser for the game, shown at the Xbox One announcement event, teased to an audience of Xbox fans in elaborate detail what we can expect when just a simple event gets distorted.

I know this isn’t the first game by Remedy I have written about like this here. Just before the release of Alan Wake, Microsoft released a trailer for it which teased a scene in the game where Alan was being compelled to write. I wrote about that scene and speculated that Alan had encountered something the Extreme Ghostbusters tangled with in the late 90s. In Alan Wake, Alan’s reality was bound by the writing he had done while in the dark place. In an episode of Extreme Ghostbusters, the boys (and girl) in grey had to deal with the physical manifestations of monsters conjured from the written work of a popular horror writer. In fact in the years since I first pointed that out, that episode was singled out by critic Derek The Bard as one of the oddest episodes of that entire series when he did a review of the show a few years ago. If you want to know more about the Extreme Ghostbusters and the episode in question, check out Derek the Bard’s series What We Watched, give it a look. He and supervillian Andrew Dickman did a great review of this forgotten series.

Should we be messing with time? I’ll leave that one for you. It might make a good idea for a future Science Check article.

Quantum Break is coming in 2015 exclusively to the Xbox One.

The Problem With BitTorrent July 21, 2014

In the original design of the internet, data of all types can be hosted on a server, and when a user accesses that server from their computer (called a “Client”), they can retrieve all the data they need from that server. In the case of video files, the server will copy those files to the client and send that data through the internet. Transfer speed is limited by the top speeds of the Client and the Server at the time of transfer, and either the limitations of the Client’s top internet speed or the sheer amount of users accessing information from the server could affect a user’s download speed. However, due to the existence of an inexpensive high-speed internet infrastructure for servers to be hosted on, internet speeds typically would only be limited by what the client’s hardware would support, and at the time most clients were still stuck with abysmal dial-up modem speeds. By the time the world hit a wider adoption of high-speed internet connections through cable, satellite, and DSL, speeds improved and large downloads finally became practical.  Before the turn of the millennium, some very smart web programmers asked themselves if they really needed to have a client/server interface in order to transfer files. Why couldn’t clients just openly share data amongst each other? That birthed a new protocol that would become known Peer to Peer (P2P).  In the early 2000s, the P2P protocol saw popularity among college students who could share high-speed local networks.  In 2001, Bram Cohen thought he could improve on the P2P protocol and created BitTorrent.

In 2005 I had the pleasure of to watch a wonderful independently produced documentary on Halo fandom. It was released before the days of YouTube and other HTML based streaming content providers were widely available, so if you wanted to view video content you would typically have to download the entire video file to your PC’s Hard Drive.  The host who was providing the documentary was using a new protocol that was seeing a huge degree of popularity online called BitTorrent, and if I wanted to watch the documentary I would need to install the BitTorrent program to my PC and set it to download the file.  I downloaded an installer and completed the program’s installation, after which I was greeted by a plea from the protocol’s creator asking me for money. In the installer’s plea, the BitTorrent creator explained that he had no job or any other source of income except from donations from BitTorrent users. While I wouldn’t call this panhandling I did think this was a little suspicious. I mean, wasn’t this guy hired by Valve Software shortly after creating BitTorrent? He must’ve impressed someone, because Valve is one of the most successful privately held companies in the world, and that is not an easy job to get. I think he had left Valve by the time I had first installed the program, so his message about being unemployed was technically valid at the time.  Apparently he must’ve preferred being unemployed and asking for donations from total strangers rather than drawing a stable salary from a successful software company. There must have been something to that, as he has formed his own company around BitTorrent a few years ago.  While this may sound like a great story about the wonders of capitalism at face value, I cannot help but wonder if he had kept the job he earned at Valve, would he still need to ask people for money in his program installer?

After that negative experience with the installer completed, I connected to the seed hosting the documentary and hoped to download the video quickly on my brand new high speed internet service.  Sadly, it was not to be.  While I was able to eventually download the film, the experience downloading it was just horrible.  I had just come from spending nearly ten years stuck on an abysmal dial-up connection as all the high-speed providers refused to service my area until 2004.  When I finally installed high-speed internet to my home, my download speeds jumped from 2.9Kb/s to speeds hundreds of times faster.  Now, downloading this BitTorrent file, I felt like I was back on dial-up speeds.  My connection speed to the users hosting portions of the film was abysmal.  I was typically getting speeds I would have gotten had I kept my dial-up service.  I would even go long stretches of time where my computer was unable to download the file at all because BitTorrent could not find any connections to users hosting portions of the documentary I hadn’t already received. What I would have normally downloaded in less than an hour took several.  After the experience had left me with a bad taste in my mouth, all I could think was, “I cannot for the life of me understand how a protocol like BitTorrent is as popular as it is.”

So why did I have such a bad experience?  First off, why was the protocol downloading so slow?  I looked closely at how it was designed to work and concluded its entire premise is based on a flawed understanding of what its users should be willing to do.  Users who seed BitTorrent traffic are spreading out their bandwidth among as many users that their connection will allow. When a stable connection is established with the other peer, it’s literally at the lowest speed the uploader’s connection will allow.  Sure a user could change their upload settings manually to support just one or two users at a time to improve their upload bandwidth, but web servers are capable of hundreds of simultaneous connections without flinching.  You don’t have the benefit of millions of users connected to a single download when you’re sharing less popular files.  Most users, if they even allow someone to download from them at all, will typically not adjust their upload settings, and for the users who are lucky enough to get a decent speed when connected to another user, there’s no way to predict how long that other client with a decent upload speed will stay online. A few minutes? A few hours? Data is transmitted with file sizes in the GBs nowadays, and some users could spend days waiting for their downloads to complete. Sure, logging into a user with a decent connection for a few minutes could save a downloader several hours of download time, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be connected to a user with a decent connection for very long, and when they eventually log off you’re back to abysmal download speeds.  When I wrote on a message board about my issues with download speeds I was told I should be forwarding my ports so that my router would allow direct connection for several ports BitTorrent used, essentially punching holes in my firewall. For security purposes, I don’t forward my ports for any thing and in today’s day and age routers are smart enough to adjust traffic without the need of a user overriding their port controls.  I can typically host game servers from behind a firewall without needing to change my router’s settings manually, if BitTorrent can’t work well simply because its user has a router, then that’s another serious flaw.

Speed and security performance aside, here’s the biggest flaw with the service.  It makes the assumption that users will stay connected to the seed after they finished their download. The seed cannot transmit data its users don’t have,  so if everyone with a complete version of the file leaves the seed the seed could become useless, wasting the time of anyone currently connected to it and wasting the time of any new users expecting to download a complete file.   The seed does not shut down or terminate in the event it does not have at least a single a user logged in with a complete file connected to the service.  In all, it becomes a waste of time and bandwidth for everyone logged into it.

Nowadays, with ISPs everywhere forcing arbitrary data caps (with tiered plans on the way) that limit how much data a user can upload as well as download, do you honestly think a user would be as willing to keep the protocol active after they’ve received all the content they requested? I can’t in good consience endorse such a flawed service, nor do I plan to use it ever again. I can assure you I was heavily disappointed that the service which had done so badly for me was being widely adopted by reputable companies who could have done better themselves.  As the Server/Client interface has shown itself to be a superior method for interacting online, this service will likely be looked back upon as an odd little experiment during the development of the internet.  Keep it in the past, where it belongs.

Anachronox: Fan Favorite, Commercial Flop June 21, 2014

In 2002 I had the pleasure to start my career writing about video games by writing for a website operating under the now defunct GameSpy Network.  While the main website hasn’t been updated in several years and the online game server toolsets were shut down just a few days ago, in 2002, GameSpy OWNED PC gaming.  They had a series of successful websites for every game franchise you could imagine, software to help developers provide the best multiplayer gaming experience on the web, and practically ruled every E3 with their intense coverage of the event.  As someone who had, up until that point, spent their life simply an observer of the gaming industry, I knew I wanted the chance to actively participate with it.  In 2002, I got my first chance when I was asked by the website’s founder to submit an editorial as to why Anachronox, a game which had mostly received praise from the players who played it, had flopped.  Twelve years later, I want to give it another look.

I’m sure that many people out there are familiar with the trials and tribulations of a studio called Ion Storm.  It was founded by three industry greats just around the turn of the millennium, John Romero, Tom Hall and Warren Specter, and was funded by Eidos Interactive, who was reigning high on the success of the Tomb Raider franchise.  Two branches of the studio were established in Texas, one in Dallas and one in Austin.  The first game that the studio released which had been developed completely in house was John Romero’s Daikatana, which is considered by many to be one of the worst games ever made.  The second game the studio released was Warren Spector’s Deus Ex, considered by many to be one of the best games ever made.  Few people remember that Ion Storm Dallas released one more game before Eidos Interactive closed them down and kept Ion Storm’s game development from then on exclusively in Austin.  That game was Tom Hall’s futuristic PC RPG, Anachronox.

I first became familiar with Anachronox after stumbling upon the website Planet Anachronox, GameSpy’s Anachronox Site, some time around the year 1999.  As someone who up until that point was purely a PC gamer, I was immediately interested in the game’s premise.  A PC-exclusive science-fiction RPG was a pretty unique concept before the era of the PS2, Xbox and GameCube.  Most turn based RPGs up to that point, like Earthbound or Chrono Trigger, would find themselves exclusively on consoles.  Never having owned a console since the original NES, all of my experience with Console RPGs came second hand by spending hours watching friends play them.  Now, this game gave me the opportunity to experience this play style on my own.

In the summer of 2001, the prayers of many militant gamers who were waiting for Anachronox to be released were finally answered when the game finally went gold.  It received pretty decent reviews from many of the major gaming sites, averaging scores around the mid to high 80s, and was very well received by all the gamers who purchased it.  Whether they got it because they had been anticipating it for years or picked it up on a whim based on initial curiosity, gamers found a lot to like with this game.  Tom Hall successfully took every cliché from the book of RPGs and was able to create a game that worked perfectly on the PC, while still being true to the gameplay design of classic console RPGs.  The game had a great story, an incredible interplanetary scope with each world possessing its own unique design, music, and flavor.  Oh, and did I mention it was just hilarious?

So why was the game, if it was so good, flop so badly?  I think that after the insanely high reviews from Deus Ex, for Ion Storm to come back and release a game that was simply good was just not good enough.  Anachronox used id Software’s Quake II graphics engine, which was a pretty dated graphics engine by the day’s standards, and its art design alone wasn’t able to wow gamers looking for the next big game to show off their high powered rigs.  On top of that, Eidos wasn’t doing too much to promote the game’s release when it launched.  It also had unremarkable previews, Anachronox was named one of PC Gamer Magazine’s Top 10 Games of 1999 back in 1998.  Great way to start off a publicity campaign for a game that wasn’t released until 2001 don’t you think?  In fact, I can’t recall any TV commercials airing or any billboard advertisements posted for this game.  This was in a pretty stark contrast to the never ending wave of commercials that would find themselves on air every time a new Tomb Raider game came out.  I think that Eidos knew that with the Daikatana curse looming over its shoulder and the drudgery of almost four years in development, Anachronox had the worry of a commercial flop even before the game came out.

During the three month lead up to Anachronox’s release, about the only advertising I can remember that was actually done for the game were a few one page ads placed in magazines like PC Gamer.  The ads mirrored the game’s box art, but didn’t really give you much information about the game.  It just had the simple tagline, “All of us have scars, some are bigger than others.”  By choosing to advertise the game in PC enthusiast magazines, about the only people that were being advertised to were the hardcore PC gamers.  Since that point it had to deal with a long journey of mediocre publicity and Quake II engine hate.  Anachronox was an American developed game that took the entire book from Japanese console RPGs.  With that design in mind, it was obvious the majority of the people meant to play the game were gamers who fondly remembered playing classic RPGs on consoles, yet Anachronox was a PC game..  The game that needed to be the product that saved Ion Storm Dallas was simply unable to recuperate the cost of development, and this could be chocked up to a complete failure of marketing.  Shortly after the release of the game, Ion Storm Dallas was shut down.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a PC gamer through and through, and I know there was just no way at the time to get a game as good looking as Anachronox on the consoles of the day.  I’ve been that way all my life and I am more then happy when a great game is released for the PC, but there was a lot working against the game even on a PC end.  When you got mainstream critics unable to wrap their heads around the fact that the graphics engine for a game isn’t top of the line, you get gems like this:  “The maps looked great but could they have done anything with those character models?  I mean c’mon look at how blocky their fists looked.”  Would the writer have said the same thing for Commander Keen, even if it had been re-released with its original graphics?  I believe good gameplay can trump graphics, provided the game is fun, and I believed Anachronox was a lot of fun.  So what if the game didn’t have multiplayer, the game had so much content and was totally replayable,  It’s been over ten years later and even I’ll admit I haven’t found every single nook, cranny, and easter egg the designers left in the game.  Could these mainstream critics honestly tell me that they were not satisfied with the game’s story, gameplay, or humor?

Then there were the tales of huge bugs.  The most famous I’ve heard is a bug I never encountered.  It involved having to follow someone then suddenly when there was a level transition their entire party died mysteriously.   The reviewers might have received the game before the day one 1.01 patch came out.  I know Day One patches are considered the norm nowadays, but typically it would take weeks before a new PC game release would get patched, regardless of the game’s stability.  That first patch fixed a lot of stability issues with the game, but even I would admit I had bug problems too.  Sometimes a few animations were choppy and after a long stretch of gameplay the game would crash while changing maps.  These issues continued to be a problem until one of the game’s former developers released the game’s unofficial 1.02 patch, but it wouldn’t get released until years after the game had left store shelves.  If Ion Storm Dallas hadn’t been shut down as Eidos Interactive thought it was imperative to do immediately, these problems would’ve been addressed and corrected much sooner.  I have to give a lot of credit to Joey, Lucas, Travis, and everyone else that were still working on the game’s issues even though it technically wasn’t their problem anymore.

But there was one thing this game had going for it,  this game has some true fans.  I mean Anachronox is not a casual game to play through.  Anachronox is a sixty-hour game (well, 25 for me).  There is a ton of story, gameplay, puzzles,  cinematics (which don’t have black bars), bosses, and side quests to go through in order to emerge from this game victorious.  Back in the days even before social media, people were really passionate about this game.  It has a near universal appeal.  I remember several years ago an international member of the gaming press flat out told Tom Hall, “We want Anachronox 2” during a major press interview.  This game has fans that have stuck it out through years of development, turmoil, Daikatana, and went to their local game store to pick up a copy of the last game to ever come out of Ion Storm Dallas.   In the days before Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or even Miiverse, game publishers just had no way to gauge how well received a game is by the game’s players.  Eidos couldn’t read that on some pie chart.

Now, Anachronox is available again online through services like Good old Games.  If you haven’t picked up this great game, I suggest you look into doing so.  If you’re a fan of humor, classic RPGs, or love a good Sci-Fi story, you won’t be disappointed.  And as for Tom Hall, bring us Anachronox 2!