Soon You’ll Be Wasting Less Time on Video Games (Maybe)

(Warning:  This post contains boring video game nerd content, which some of you out there who aren’t boring video game nerds (and some of those who are, for that matter) might want to just pass on.  If any of the stuff in this post begins to sound like technobabble, I would recommend just scrolling down for the usual content.)

This post expands on some thoughts that I originally posted as a comment on a thread over at Kotaku, but ended up being a bit longer than I planned on, so I decided to move it here.  The topic of the original thread was a statement made by Warren Spector (a game developer who has made a number of popular games that I haven’t ever bothered to play) which stated that lengthy games were on the way out, being replaced by shorter ones.   As someone who probably plays way too many video games for his own good and doesn’t bother finishing up 80% of them, I realize that the big 100-hour epics have their place in the market, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t fit into the target audience for such things.

For years now, I’ve referred to something that I like to call the “Shelf of Oblivion” (note: Actual shelf does not exist, nor does the Shelf of Oblivion currently contain a copy of Oblivion, although that’s probably because I haven’t ever bought it) which is the nominal place where the games in my collection that I have completely lost interest in seem to end up.  I’m pretty sure that an attempt to catalog the contents of this “shelf” would result in a 15,000 word post that would take me three weeks to write, so I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that a significant number of the games that I do purchase seem to end up here after some period.  There are some big name titles that I’ve put down after 45 minutes, never to touch them again (Morrowind comes to mind, as does Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy III for the DS.) On the other side of the coin, there are games that I have spent hundreds of hours playing, and enjoyed them the whole time. 

The vast majority of games out there fall somewhere in between these two extremes.  Here are some games that I’ve enjoyed playing, but they were just way too long to bother finishing off. Some examples:

-Twilight Princess (Wii): Fun while I played it, but there just came a point when it seemed that I had been playing forever and still had a long way to go in order to finish it. I made it to the fourth dungeon last time I played it, and haven’t touched it since then.

-Half Life 2: Same as TP, just felt like I had played it forever and had way too long to go. I’ll probably finish this off at some point though when I’m in the right mood… On the other hand, I thought Portal was quite enjoyable in spite of its shortness. Haven’t played either HL2 episode because I want to finish the main game first.

-Earth Defense Force 2017(360): Fun for a while, but there comes a point when you realize that things aren’t getting any harder, they’re just getting more cheaty and/or broken as you go along, and you’ve got 25 more levels of the stuff to slog through to get a single achievement point out of the thing (all the achievements are “complete the game on easy/medium/hard/really hard/you’re pretty much doomed” type things.)

-Most modern racing games (Project Gotham Racing 3 and Forza 2 being the most recent examples I’ve played): There’s a certain type of person who loves all the races and events you’re going to find in a typical career mode. I don’t quite have the patience for this, but I’ll enjoy playing for a while nonetheless. At least the majority of these games nowdays provide ways to just race around using all of the cars and/or tracks without needing to unlock a ton of stuff.

-Most modern RPGs.  I actually used to play a lot of these back in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, but at some point, they just became too much hassle to deal with, either by reason of excessive complexity (every Final Tantasy after 6) or just turned into way too much wading through repetitive stuff to get into the story.  How many times do I need to see the heroes celebrating their victory over the 73rd pack of wolves they’ve vanquished in the past hour anyway?  There are exceptions to this, but in general, a game will have to be incredibly compelling in order to gain enough momentum to get past the tedium barrier.  The fact that many of these games seem to come with big heavy overwrought epic stories that make you feel like you’re playing through someone’s weekly visit with the psychiatrist don’t help much here either.

This said, If a game is engaging, I have no problem dumping a bunch of time into it (which is probably how I ended up dumping a far greater quantity of time into Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness on the PSP than I’d care to admit on a Blog that my mother might be reading.)  Since I tend to be, well, less than stellar when it comes to action games (another post for another time) my preferences these days tend heavily toward turn-based and puzzle style gameplay, which gives be a bit more time to think things over and react.  The tactical RPG genre is one that I haven’t explored much, but I found Disgaea to be something of a “perfect storm” combining elements that I enjoy.  If you just want to play through the main storyline, you should be able to do so by playing for roughly 30-40 hours with characters up around level 100-120 or so.  On the other hand, the game allows levelling characters up to level 9,999, then transmigrating (restarting them at level 1 with higher stats) and doing the whole thing over again.  There are bosses in the game with a base level of 3,000 or higher (you can increase the level of enemies by going through the Dark Assembly, a sort of “Parliament” in the game that can approve or reject various proposals put forth by the player) and plenty in between. 

Probably the greatest source of replay value in Disgaea comes in the form of the Item world, which allows you to go inside items to raise their stats by fighting through the hordes of demons that live inside.  This provides a virtually limitless number of procedurally generated levels to fight through, even though you’ll eventually reach a point where you begin to outlevel these (at least for lower level items) this provides a lot of replay value for the game, which accounts for the sheer quantity of time I’ve spent on it (although on the minus side, this means if you get enough into the game, you’re probably going to seriously outlevel the final boss by the time you get there, completely trivializing the encounter.)    Combine this with a relatively light story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and you have a game that is compelling enough to keep me playing it (although I’m sure the exploding penguins don’t hurt either.)

All things considered, do we even really need big 100+ hour games?  If people can figure out how to make the entire experience enjoyable for a significant majority of the people who are going to play the game, then go for it.  The problem is that I’m pretty sure that my definition of “enjoyable” on that type of game is going to expire long before it does for most of the mainstream audience.  Then again, I’m pretty sure I’m a bit of a game snob anyway (more on that subject will be coming up here eventually.)

Finish the Closeout

For those of you out there who might have missed out on the biggest entertainment launch in history back in September, you patience and/or slothfulness jas just paid off.  Owing to slight (or not-so-slight) overestimation of demand for the Halo 3 Legendary edition at your ridiculously huge yet vaguely friendly neighborhood electronics store (of Doom), you now have a choice if you wish to belatedly hop on the Halo 3 bandwagon.  You can either buy the regular edition of Halo 3 for the regular price…

…Or you can spring for the ultra-super-deluxe Legendary Edition (of Doom) for just minus five bucks extra.

But you better hurry, at these pricves, the things are going to be going fast….

…Or maybe not.  Either way, I’m sure that someone over there would very much appreciate the opportunity to reclaim the warehouse or two that they’ve been storing these things in.  And for the people out there who not only paid $129 for one of these, but also camped out in line back in September in order to get one of these things, you have my sympathies…  Sort of. 

Oh, and by the way, your homework for this week is to mentally add the words “of Doom” to the end of any phrase that you see or hear which makes excessive use of hyperbole and/or contains way too many adjectives for its own good, and report back on the results.  Radio commercials for gigantic blowout used car sales or monster truck rallies make a good target for this type of thing.

Italian Plumber Plans to Build New House in Redmond

Update 4/16:  One thing I should probably clarify here is that the existing buildings which are initially slated for demolition to make way for the new Nintendo building are an office park, and do not appear to contain any Nintendo offices at this time.  The building which would be demolished after construction of the new building is completed does belong to Nintendo though.

Aside from Microsoft, Nintendo of America is probably the best known corporate citizen in Redmond, but recent events have led people to wonder if the company might be headed for greener pastures.  During 2007, NOA moved their sales and marketing departments to new offices in San Francisco and New York, and also sold off a large parcel of land they owned at the corner of 148th Avenue NE and NE 51st Street to Microsoft, who will probably use it to continue with the aggressive expansion of their Redmond campus once some of their current construction projects have been completed. 

In spite of these recent moves, a recent land use application filed by Nintendo with the City of Redmond seems to suggest that they intend to use some of the money that the DS and the Wii have been printing for them remain in Redmond for the foreseeable future.  According to the   Notice of Application (PDF link) that was posted on the City of Redmond website about a week ago, the plan initially calls for the demolition of six existing buildings (plus a seventh building to follow once construction has been completed) to be replaced by a new 275,250 square foot building with an auditorium, cafeteria, and exercise facility, as well as a new 820-space parking garage.  It appears that the new building will have an overall square footage that is actually slightly less than the seven smaller buildings that it will be replacing (which total about 283,500 square feet.  Based on the documents filed so far, It appears that the two other Nintendo buildings in this area (including the one where DigiPen is located) will remain undisturbed, at least for the time being.   

To get a slightly better idea of what the new Nintendo headquarters (or at least the grounds thereof) might look like, there is also a Site Plan (PDF) and a Tree Preservation Plan (also PDF) on the City of Redmond website.  For comparison, a map of their existing campus can be found here.  So far, there doesn’t seem to be much to report here just yet (the notice of the land use application was only posted last Friday,) but I’ll watch this and report on any new info that appears on this.

 

Why Try to Be Everything to Everyone?

WARNING:  This post contains gratuitous video game nerd content, and will probably bore some of my regular readers.  The standard fluff you’ve come to expect of this Blog will return shortly.

It’s been quite a while now since I’ve done much writing about anything video game related here.  This doesn’t mean that I haven’t been playing any video games lately, (for the last little bit, most of that time has been spent on Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness for the PSP, which is the type of game that will make insane completist RPG fans and MMOG spreadsheet junkies forget to eat for three days in a row if they let it,) just that I haven’t found a lot to write about on the subject lately.  After the deluge of high-quality games that showed up over the course of the last couple of months in 2007, there’s been a bit of a lull for the past couple of months as gamers digest the pile of late 2007 offerings.  With this week’s Game Developer’s Conference this week comes an early glance into what gamers can expect in the coming months, and the strategies that the companies are pursuing in that time.

By all accounts, Sony has the most to gain from 2008 at this point.  With an apparent end to the high definition movie format war falling in Blu-Ray’s favor (at what cost this was accomplished remains to be seen)  and the shipment of system-selling games they ordered back in ‘06 set to at least partially arrive this year, they will most likely improve over last year.  Over the course of the past year, Sony also seems to have toned down their rhetoric and worked toward getting past the ill-advised hyperbole of Kaz Hirai and Ken Kutaragi into a more customer-friendly public image.  With games like LittleBigPlanet and Echochrome on the PS3 and Patapon on the PSP coming up in the near future, they also seem to be moving in directions that would have been unheard of at the height of the PS2’s popularity.  Part of this is the result of an industry-wide move toward more casual-friendly games fueled mainly by the success of the Wii, but it does also to some extent indicate a greater willingness to cater to niches in gaming than they have previously shown.

It is because of this that a comment (via Kotaku) made by Phil Harrison about third-party games on the Wii at a GDC lunch earlier today seems a bit puzzling:

“Due to competition with Nintendo’s unstoppable games…Your addressable market is only 40% of the installed base.”

The Photocopier of Judgment

As I mentioned in my PAX articles, one of the more interesting concepts to show up there was The Eye of Judgment, a Playstation 3 game that uses the Playstation Eye camera in conjunction with a collectible card game.  The hybridization of card and video games is nothing new, but what sets Eye of Judgment apart from other similar games is the use of actual trading cards, which are then “scanned” by the camera on a special board to keep track of score and show the action on screen using the PS3.  It seems like a rather interesting concept, but as Mike Fahey posts over at Kotaku, it turns out that the game has what could likely prove to be a fatal flaw:

 Despite supposedly being printed using special inks rendering photocopying impossible, reports are sprouting up around the interwebs of people successfully copying cards from Eye of Judgment on the PlayStation 3 and scanning them into the game with little or no problem. One of our readers sent pictures of a card he printed out from Penny Arcade, which despite some curling and color differences from the other cards seems to be scanning in just fine.

After which he proceeds to print out a copy of the scanned card on a cheap color printer, and confirms this to be the case.  According to Wizards of the Coast (who will be printing the cards for use with this game) this should not work.  Since I have one of the cards in question (acquired from PAX) let’s take a look at this:

Here is a picture of the actual Biolith Bomber card in question, with a Magic the Gathering card (which also came from PAX, which is the only reason I even have any Magic cards in the first place) next to it.  Although it is somewhat difficult to see the difference in this picture, there is a slight difference in the surface texture of the cards, which seems to suggest that the Eye of Judgment card has an additional coating on its surface to make it less reflective.  I cannot be certain whether or not this is intended to be an anticopying measure, but most likely it was done primarily to reduce glare, since the cards need to be readable by a computer algorithm, and glare could prevent the camera from seeing a vital element of the card.  It is entirely possible that if someone tried to print one of these onto standard glossy card stock similar to that used by the MtG card it could be rejected by the camera.

On the other hand, It should have been  clear to all parties involved at square one that the first thing people would do with this game is try to use phony copies of cards.  In an interview from PAX at Shacknews, Hasbro’s marketing director for the product had this to say (the relevant quote is on page 2:)

 Christy Newton: You cannot color photocopy the cards and have them read. It has to do with the technology and how they’re printed both. And that’s really all I want to say about that in terms of that end of it.

I can promise you that on the Wizards of the Coast side of the business, obviously one of the first things we did was try to play around and break things. Ultimately, there’s probably nothing in the world that can’t be accomplished if someone wants to spend enough time to go break something down. I think the goal of it is, let’s make it difficult enough that it prohibits people from cheating.

Not that marketing people are exactly renowned for their technical knowledge of a product, but that particular response is just trying to dodge the question, plain and simple.  Unless the QA testers on this project were grossly incompetent there’s no way this scenario would not have come up in testing.  I’d say there’s a 99% chance they are fully aware that copies of cards will work just like real ones, and that they’ve either been unable to fnid a workable fix for the issue, or they’ve been getting stonewalled by the project managers to avoid slipping the ship date.  One way or another, unless they find some way to “break” copied cards, Wizards stands to lose a whole bunch of money on Eye of Judgment due to people just downloading their cards off the Internet.  Given the ridiculous ease with which the alleged built-in countermeasures to prevent copying were defeated, I get the sneaking suspicion that whatever solution they come up with to the problem is going to end up being a workaround, rather than an actual fix.

Oh! What a Failing

Automotive marketing seems to be a rather tricky business to be in these days.  In a crowded field of largely indistinct small cars, marketing is one of the few ways in which one can attempt to distinguish their products from the competition.  To that end, Toyota’s latest effort at capturing the hearts of the much vaunted 18-25 male demographic (or attempt to make their annual quota of loan defaults, I’m not sure which) has just been released on Xbox Live Arcade in the form of Yaris, a  free downloadable piece of advertising with achievement points attached to it, which will probably be the only reason anyone bothers playing the game for more than five minutes.  On the other hand, for those people who might actually consider purchasing a Yaris, the game is packed with all sorts of  useful information.  For example:

• A hood-mounted laser cannon is standard equipment, but you’ll have to pay through the nose to get the car in any color besides red;
• The Yaris is capable of defying gravity and driving on ceilings, climbing sheer vertical walls, and maintaining a speed in excess of 150 miles per hour;
• The car comes equipped with a shield system, and depletion of the shields will cause the car to spin out of control but otherwise remain unharmed;
• The Yaris will be the perfect car for your daily commute, once the highways have all been replaced with giant danger-filled halfpipes with inexplicable sheer vertical drops, hazards deliberately placed in the roadway, and roving packs of roller-skating toasters bent on your destruction;
• Oh yeah, you can also get 15″ aluminum wheels as a factory option if you want them..

I will refrain from going too deeply into the relative (lack of) merits of the game itself, as I’m sure other people more qualified than myself will begin ripping it to shreds soon enough.  A far greater issue lies in the fact that the game does absolutely nothing to tell someone why they should buy a Toyota Yaris, as opposed to a similar car like a Chevy Cobalt, a Honda Fit or a Nissan Versa.  In fact, about the only things in Yaris that have anything to do with the actual car at all are the character models used and the paint colors.  Granted, there are some cases (for example, candystand.com) where you can throw a little bit of branding into some game and call it good, but there’s one major difference:  On that site, they’re trying to get you to spend a buck on some candy next time you’re at the grocery store.  Toyota is trying to get you spend as much as $18,000 on a  car, which you’ll probably be driving for years. 

Most people I know wouldn’t ever buy a brand new car on impulse, even if they had the means to do so (at which point, I seriously doubt a Yaris would be anywhere near the type of car they’d be considering.)  Before I purchased my new car a few months ago, I spent hours on edmunds.com and manufacturer websites going through just about every detail I could possibly think of, in order to make sure I knew all about what I planned to buy, and what I would be getting myself into.  In theory, this would put me into the target audience that Yaris is supposed to be reaching.  The problem with this is that if I had encountered something like Yaris while I was shopping for a car, it would have told me absolutely nothing that I wouldn’t already have found out previously, nor would it have provided anything even remotely resembling a realistic simulation of how the actual car drives.  Am I supposed to believe that a car with a 1.5 liter 4-banger with 106 horsepower and 103 ft/lb of torque can hit 200 miles per hour, while driving up a vertical wall?  In the end, the result is that the game bears more resemblance to a rail shooter than a racing game.

That isn’t to say that this completely ficticious and unrealistic approach to advergaming should be avoided entirely, as long as some means of providing actual useful information on the product is included.  Yaris simply doesn’t do this.  There is little to no information about the actual car included, and I couldn’t find so much as a link anywhere in the game to even tell me where to find such information.  As far as I can tell, Yaris appears to be an attempt to salvage a marginal game concept by sticking a licensed car into it and giving it away as a freebie.  If someone who was shopping for a car were to come across this game, play all the way through it (no mean feat, given the frustratingly broken gameplay) and see everything the game has to offer, by the time they were done about all they would have learned from the experience is that Toyota makes a car called the Yaris, and that you can get it with aluminum wheels and upgraded energy shields to protect you from flying MP3 players and flaming snakes. 

With downloadable games finally reaching the mainstream of console gaming in this generation of systems, I’m sure we’ll be seeing plenty more advergames like this before we know it.  With any luck, marketers and developers alike will look at the example of Yaris and learn some valuable lessons on how not to make an effective advergame.

Finish the Wait - The Halo 3 Line

Over the years, I’ve waited in my fair share of lines for the sake of video games.  When the Xbox360 launched back in 2005, I found myself ignoring my better judgment (it’s a hobby of mine) and camping out in front of the local Costco overnight in near freezing temperatures to get one on launch day.  The cold temperatures were mitigated somewhat  by the availability of electricity, which resulted in a number of TVs and Xbox systems showing up to pass the time away.   In spite of the Xbox 360’s spotty reliability record, I still have my original 360, which has never red-ringed on me.  I suspect the fact that it gets relatively light use probably helps that fact.

More recently, last November found me spending 8 hours sitting in line in a crowded Hollywood Video store (which is about 7 1/2 hours more than I ever care to spend in a video store again) awaiting the Midnight launch of the Nintendo Wii at the attached GameCrazy.  With about 130 people in front of me in line, and only 2 cashiers, I was given ample opportunity to remind myself why I hardly ever watch movies anymore.   There’s something particularly soul-crushing about the experience sitting around bored out of your skull in the comedy section of a video store at 2 in the morning with at least another hour of waiting in front of you, but given the fact that it would turn out to be four months before I’d have another chance to purchase a Wii, I do not regret doing so.  In addition to the usual swag that’s since been relegated to a dark corner of the closet, I was able to get a free totebag to carry the system in for answering a trivia question correctly.  The bag has proven useful, as the Wii has been a hit with the rest of the family and has done a fair bit of traveling.

Fast forward to today, with the biggest game launch of the year, Halo 3.  Since my copy has been ordered already and should be set to arrive tomorrow, I think I’ll go ahead and sleep in my own bed tonight, and skip the long wait.  I did drop by the Bellevue Best Buy to see what was going on with one of the official launch events.  Here we see the front of the line:

 

More pictures after the jump.

Gold Farming in MMOGs - A Modest Proposal

From PlayNoEvil (via Kotaku) comes an interesting suggestion toward solving the ongoing problem of gold farming in MMOGs:

The more I have considered this issue, I think spectacular, arbitrary punishments are the best penalty for gold buyers.

I’m leaning towards “The Roll Back”. The game operator detects a gold buyer. He reviews the account file and makes a notation of where the player was when he bought the gold (or farther back, or at the time he is detected). This state is quietly saved. Then, at some random date in the future - say, 1 to 6 months later, the player is notified that he was busted for gold buying and his account is rolled back. No gains, no experience, no nothing from the time since counts.

This should be done rather publicly on a daily basis… banner headlines - a Player was rolled back from Level 63 to Level 20. He lost X gold, Y experience, the following items….. One of those annoying news tickers (with RSS feed, of course).

This puts risk on the Player… and he doesn’t know when or if he will be caught. And, most importantly, the alleged benefits of gold buying become risks.

Before I launch into this topic, I should first confess that I’m not entirely blameless here, having purchased some items off of eBay on my Asheron’s Call account many years ago (I could probably even use the standard “young and foolish” excuse to justify it.)  I should also say that I have pretty much quit playing MMOGs at this point, primarily due to loss of interest in the genre, although I have devoted not insignificant amounts of time to Asheron’s Call and World of Warcraft.  That said, I will still occasionally play the part of the armchair developer, and although I favor anything that severely punishes those who exploit the system, there’s one element that seems to be missing here to make the approach truly effective:  Paranoia.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature

I’d like to know who in their right mind ever decided that something like this was a good idea.  I guess there’s nothing like a badly edited clip montage to convince the bigwigs to fork out their hard-earned cash for your next project…

(link via Joystiq)

Highlights from PAX ‘07 - The games

For some of the people who attend PAX, the main attraction of the place is the huge crowd to hang around with and play stuff.  For others, it’s the concerts and the panels.  I suspect that for most people there though, it’s the chance to play upcoming games that’s the big draw.  Here are some impressions of a few of the games I tried out.  Unfortunately, my camera doesn’t do a very good job of picture taking in the low light conditions of the exhibition hall, so I don’t have a lot of good pictures.  I did post some of the ones that did come out though:

Project Gotham Racing 4 (360):  At first, this game doesn’t look like a huge improvement over its predecessors.  Then again, they did a pretty good job with the graphics with PGR3, so there isn’t a whole lot of room to do much there (at least on the current hardware.)  Where they did improve, however, was in the sense of speed conveyed.  In a brief play session, PGR4 just seems to be faster than PGR3.  It is apparent that they are continuing to mess with the Kudos system though, and I’m not sure whether the result is going to improve or diminish the experience over previous games.  I also didn’t get a chance to try out motorcycles (even though they were present on the track I wasracing on.)  Given the relative lack of competition in the niche that the PGR games fill in between the hardcore sims (Forza 2) and the pure arcade stuff (the Burnout series,) I suspect that this will do pretty well.

More after the jump.