Guilty Pleasures

I was going to do a bit on the new gameplay footage released for Duke Nukem Forever (source: The Escapist). But, while watching it, something more intriguing came to mind.

During the video (if you watch it, you'll see it yourself), a quote from Xbox Official Magazine is shown: "A guilty  pleasure worth waiting for." This got me thinking about what is usually meant by "guilty pleasure". The Urban Dictionary defines is it as "Something that you shouldn't like, but like anyway." That is to say, a thing normally considered to be of low quality that is still enjoyed, even though it shouldn't be. It usually refers to sweets, drugs , or bad movies.

Whatever prediction OXM is making about how DNF (rolling out the acronyms here) is going to turn out on release, I got to wondering whether a game could become a proper guilty pleasure. I mean, let's look at that in other media a second. A "guilty pleasure" movie is usually poorly made: the script might be bad, the actors could be phoning it in hard, the sets might just be awful, but you like it anyway. For me, I'd say Judge Dredd (1995) fits in there. It's cheesy and silly, but fun. Books (corny spoofs or silly fantasy novels maybe) can do the same, I'm sure. But what about games? As I've said, to be a guilty pleasure it generally has to be poorly made but fun, but poorly made games are rarely fun. Even if you can think of one or two (and I'm sure you can) how many are the sort of thing you would feel bad admitting to liking? There's unlikely to be so much consensus of the game's awfulness for that; you can still be ok enjoying it.

One game did sort of spring to mind when I had a think about this was the Fable series. Any of you who have read other bits of this blog will know of my thoughts on the third of these games (check here if you haven't), but the other two do fit a bit more, the second one in particular. Fable 2 was, sad to sad, a rather flawed game. The story was a tad lame in places, the pacing was off a bit (unless you kept only to the main quests, in which case it was just too short), and there was very little challenge for anything other than a casual gamer. A lot of promises unfulfilled, as only Mr Molyneux can non-deliver. Yet, I found myself truly entertained, taking it all the way through to the end and coming back for more every so often. And yes, I did feel a bit uneasy telling certain friends that I enjoyed Fable 2.


Does this mean that Fable 2 was my guilty pleasure? A bad game I could enjoy, something so wrong yet so right? Sounds like it.

I think the way gaming fits into the "guilty pleasure" thing isn't always about specific games; maybe it's much broader than that. Rather than certain games being considered bad-yet-good, occasionally it can get attached to genres. Imagine telling your action-gamer friends that you liked [Job X] Simulator 2011? Sure, it's not embarrassing per se, but it can be a bit odd admitting to enjoying something that should be boring. Even broader than that, gaming as a hobby could be considered a guilty pleasure. Less and less every day, mind, but for demographics not readily associated with gaming (eg women over 30), identifying yourself as a gamer could generate that "wrong but right" feeling as well.

I think I'm just rambling out stuff now, but one should wonder: in a medium where the skill with which something is made is intrinsic to it's entertainment factor, and mistakes in development are usually just annoying rather than funny, could the traditional idea of the guilty pleasure exist? From the look of this entry, it might look like I think I have the answer, but I'm not 100% sure...and I'm not the only guy on the Internet :)

Comments below, please.

Couple o' New Trailers: Space Marine and Dead Rising 2

Here's a couple of trailers I've looked at today. I got these from The Escapist.

The first is the latest from Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine




Ok, well, I can't say this makes me more excited about this new offering from Relic. After all, I've never been worried that they'll mess this up, given how well they've worked with the 40k IP in the past (Dawn of War, anyone?), and that still stands. My opinion has always been that they know what they're doing, let them get on with it. That looks to be correct here. The setting looks wonderful, the character designs are authentic right down to the colours, sounds and details; even the plot sounds suitably epic for a Space Marine campaign (Orks capturing a Titan? Damn straight we're sending in the Astartes!).

One thing that does worry me, as I'm sure it does many others, is that the game focuses around one Marine. For those who don't know, a large part of the Space Marines' flavour within the Warhammer universe is that they work together, as a unit and as an army. It's a whole brotherhood thing. While we've seen hints at teh supporting cast, the player character does seem to be going lone wolf on this one, which seems to go the wrong way. I'm willing to go along with the justification for now that he's a Captain, and therefore perfectly capable of taking on a small horde of Orks alone, I think that Relic will have to come up with a good reason for this in the narrative. The whole "I'm not playing by the rules" hero schtick won't cut it with the Ultramarines, given they wrote the rules.

Other than that, it looks really good, but not totally awe-inspiring yet. I'm hoping for a demo this year. I don't even mind that the Campaign Lead looks like a nervous 8-year-old.


Next, Dead Rising 2: Off The Record:




Is there a point to this, people? I haven't played Dead Rising 2, but I loved the first one, and I can tell you...Frank West was not my favourite character. Not by a long shot. While most of the narrative was poorly written and the cast badly portrayed, I could get by them. Frank just rubbed me the wrong way, and the fact that he resembled a waxwork Neanderthal didn't help. Heck, he's even worse now, what the hell is wrong with you, Capcom? He doesn't have to be handsome, but we do have to look at the screen here.

Back to my point: Why? Why is a remake being made with this guy in it? Why are they ducking out of continuity issues by making it just a "what if?" scenario? Are these the most question marks I've ever used in such quick succession?

According to Eurogamer, this is being labelled a "fan's version" of Dead Rising 2. I am tempted to go ask a friend of mine who happens to be a big fan if this is what he wanted, but it's obvious that the majority (or, more likely, a loud minority) has spoken. Instead of a (I assume) more charismatic hero with a good reason to go risk his life battling a zombie horde like Chuck Greene, what the folks really want is a selfish reporter who is willing to watch people die, and to kill people, just to get a few pictures. Fair play, if that's what is wanted, more power to Capcom.

What strikes me as odd though is why this is being marketed at a spin-off to the second game. I mean, we've been told its got a whole new story, plus it's being played with a different character, and it's being made as a new game rather than DLC. You know what sound's like? A sequel. Call it Dead Rising 3, I reckon.

Either that, or it's clearly not going to be all it's cracked up to be.

Comments please.

Bring on the Big Bads

I've had a on-off relationship with table-top warming for the last 6 years. And when I say wargaming, I do exclusively mean Warhammer Fantasy/40,000. It's not that I don't like other wargames, it's just that they seem to deal exclusively in metal models, and I can't stand painting metal. There has to be an unwritten trust between a man and his metal model that the latter will not fall apart at any given moment, seriously annoying the former.

When I'm into it, I'll be all over it, using up large amounts of my money (disposable or otherwise) buying little plastic men so I can pretend to command them to kill other plastic men which I pretend are dying. When I'm not into it, I will miss months of development in what have become rapidly changing product lines. It's for this reason that I signed up for the Games Workshop mailing list, so I could actually have some idea as to what the hell is going on while my obsession gland is diverting me towards something else (usually just as useless and just as demanding on my finances, like LARPing).

Like many companies that specialise in hobby games, GW is in the habit of revamping sections of its product lines with new rules and models, as a means of increasing sales. That makes sense, and I'm all for it. Consumers like shiny new things, so you give it to them. However, the trend for these updates seems to be "mostly the same, a few redesigns on some familiar models and a REALLY BIG NEW THING!!!"

Case in point: a new rulebook for the Tomb Kings (basically an army of mummies and Egyptian mythology-inspired monsters) army is out on pre-order. With it come some new Tomb Guard models, and something that looks like a guy riding a snake. These look pretty standard. Then there's this:

WTF is that?! I know what it is, because I looked it up. It's a Necrosphinx. This is the big, bad thing that's going to be sitting across the table from any fool who challenges a Tomb Kings player from now on. It's been happening with nearly all updates in the last 3 months. The Orcs got a Giant Spider, the Skaven (ratmen) got all this nonsense, and even the Grey Knights, a futuristic army of crusading soldiers not know for their monsters, get this Dreadknight. I mean, look at it. It's a giant robot with a friggin' hammer!

And yet, I do think that this is the best part of the wargaming hobby. In every army in every fantasy or sci-fi war, there's always the really big stuff that stands way above the rank and file. Remember that massive battering ram from Return of the King? The AT-ATs from Star Wars? These things are iconic; we not only notice them, we remember of them with that "woah, did you see that?" awe that befits these styles of media. Sure, these products are really suppose to be that got-to-have-them centrepieces of every army of that type (if you don't have one then it's not a real army), but that doesn't matter to me.

Big fantasy battles are really just backgrounds to those few titans in their own epic struggles, so I welcome the big bads onto the table top. Besides, they've been part of the hobby for longer than I know, it's only now they look so damn crazy.

Comments down below :)

If It Ain't Broke...

I've been playing a bit of Lord of the Rings Online this weekend. I might have done a critique of that, but a couple of thoughts hit me while playing:

1) "Hey, this is kind of like World of Warcraft!" Not original, since most MMOs are like WoW. But that brought me onto...

2) "Do MMOs seem to copy WoW because WoW just happens to have cracked MMO gameplay?"

It's no secret (in fact it's the lament of many gamers) that the AAA games industry lacks innovation right now, at least compared to earlier times. Many games just seem to be rehashes of popular titles with different wallpaper, and it's a source of frustration seeing a lot of talent go to waste on rip-offs and copies when new ideas could be nurtured with the right effort and money. Of course, money is too much to risk these days on experimental ideas that don't guarantee profit, not when we already know what sells.

I'm not going to waste any more time on discussing innovation as a thing now. Better minds than I have far more to say on that. What I wanted to talk about was a rather plausible (and almost justifiable) reason for the seeming lack of new ideas in the medium.

We've pretty much cracked it right now. Think of a genre of games, and I bet you can think of one game that pretty much worked out how best to "do" that genre, and is now copied to death. MMOs, as pointed out, have WoW. Fighting games got Street Fighter. Action games have God of War. Shooters seem to get a new one every so often: Doom, Quake, Halo, Call of Duty right now. It does make sense that when making a game, if someone else has made a game (or games, as I'd say a lot of RTSs are amalgams of tried-and-true mechanics) that does want you want really well, you'd want to take something from that and try to shape it in your image a little. Take God of War, for example. You want to make an action game, but Sony basically got hack n' slash awesome down ages ago. You could try to go in a totally different direction that, yes, could bring about a new age of innovation (that's how these aforementioned game began), but you also risk falling flat on your face if your bold experiment fails.So, the option to take more than a bit from God of War sounds more tempting.

I'm not going to say that innovation in gaming doesn't need a sound kick in the arse, because it does. I'm just putting in the point that we shouldn't dismiss the reasoning that someone else has cracked it as a poor excuse; because until the medium undergoes a really big development (I imagine it'll be when someone figures out how to utilise motion controls properly), it's the truth. We've got games more-or-less sorted for now. Don't be so hard on the developers.

Unless it's a truly shameless rip-off, in which case don't buy their shit.

PS: I draw an exception at puzzle games. They have a lot more room to innovate, seeing as there isn't a right way to make a puzzle.

Chronicles of Arax Review

Or: "Dungeon Crawling for Recluses"

I was going to write a review of one of the Gothic games, having just bought them off Steam super cheap-like. However, I found playing the first one too fiddly early on (couldn't work out how to talk to the first NPC you have to meet, maybe I'm not ready for a game made when innovation meant "be different even if it breaks the game"), so I've decided to give my two cents on a little RPG I found for free: Chronicles of Arax.


The basic premise is that only 1 player is involved in the adventure, which comes in the form of a 'choose your own adventure' style dungeon crawl. You are given a pre-generated character at the start (no character generation might sound odd, but this game has been made to be more of a time killer than an evening filler), and fight through encounters randomly rolled from a table. When you need to do something, you roll a dice depending on the relevant stat (abilities are measured in dice rather than numbers: you might have a Strength of d6 and a Reflexes on d8) and try to get a particular number or higher. In fights, you roll Fighting Skill and see who gets the highest. It's really one of the simplest games to play I've ever come across.

Treasure is easily worked out too. Each encounter lists exactly what you get for killing the baddies; sometimes you have to roll on a table for the more exotic magical items (the table in the core book is small, but it turns into a massive d100 table in one of the expansions). Simple and standard.

I went through  the adventure in the core book with my brother (I rolled for the monsters), and we found it to be really fun. The encounters are varied within a theme (orcs mostly), so it all fit together despite the random element. The items were well distributed so it didn't get too easy, and the skill challenges are difficult enough that you'll fail sometimes but not often.

I'd had a go at it by myself before and, well...this where solo stuff falls down: it just felt like a lot of dice rolling, and only dice rolling. Anyone who plays RPGs knows that it's all about the social interaction and shared experience between the group. There's none of that in a solo game, where you just have a book and some dice and hopefully enough patience to slog through before RSI sets in.

And once you slog through...that's really it. There's no guidelines for writing Quests and no monster stats outside of the encounters where the monsters themselves appear. There's only three Quests published right now, so once you're done with them, you're done for good, unless you fancy replaying them with another character type (of which again there are only three), which doesn't sound too inviting to me. In fact, unless the developer, Crystal Star, brings more Quests out, the lovely abilities characters can gain may be wasted.

My final gripe with this game is the way the character types are balanced. They aren't. The character given in the core book, The Adventurer, has a fighting chance of getting through a Quest if you're lucky and the monster aren't. The other two however, which come individually in expansions, are way overpowered. The Battle Wizard might have a hard time with his first quest, but after he levels up and gets some spells he's gonna  blast his way through. The final character, the grandly named Knight of the Steel Fist will just zoom through the encounters easy as pie, simply because he starts with plate armour and a really high armour and Fight Skill stat. Even if the bad guy hits him, he's unlikely to damage him; and even if damage is dealt, the Knight has so many wounds it doesn't matter. Put simply, the character types aren't so much classes as badly made difficulty modes.

I much as all that annoys me, I'm tempted to let it slide for now. It's only a recent release, and RPGs do tend to need a bit of tweaking and errata before they get really good. I can't deny I had a good time playing it as well, it just bothers me that I had to find another person to enjoy a so-called "solo adventure game".

If you're up for a old-school dungeon-crawling time killer on a slow day, pick up Chronicles of Arax. It's free for the core rules and the expansions are only $1 each. Just don't expect to be able to take it too far for the time being.

Chronicles of Arax was created by Crystal Star Games.
The game can be found for free on DriveThruRPG.com

Multiplayer Ramble

I haven't posted anything in a fair while, due to lack of having played or seen anything interesting in games for some time (or at least, anything I can think of a lot to write about). I've been thinking about multiplayer gaming though; I tend to have a love/hate relationship with muiltiplayer. While I do find the social side of gaming fun, I sometimes dislike having to interact with others during play. I think it has something to do with that fact that while I am of course an avid and enthusiastic gamer, I'm just not very good at games sometimes. The ratio of games I've completed to games I own is rather low, and I often end up playing at lower dificulty settings because I find it hard stepping up to the challenge (not that I don't like a challenge, but there's a limit).

The inherent fact of multiplayer is that, well...people can see me fail. I like my failures to remain a secret, so when I've got several people (some of which I may actually know) watching me suck at the game, it's a bit of a downer.

Let it be known: I do like co-op. The thing that attracts me to things like D&D, and which prompted my short spell as a World of Warcraft player, is that it involves peaceful and friendly co-ordiantion between yourself and your mates. My favourite example of this recently: Magicka. I was going to write a full post on this game, but it doesn't work with my new laptop (something about integrated graphics cards), so that went out the window. Quick run-down: Magicka is an RPG that puts you in the role of a wizard, and has you using and combining different elemental spells to combat enemies. There' a big emphasis on experimenting with the different types of spells: eg the Fire spell sprays fire in a short arc, but you can combine it with the Arcane beam spell to make a Fire Beam. The system for selecting spells is a little fiddly for the PC; I found myself continuously staring at the little diagram in the corner before pressing the buttons, by which time I was usually dead. I've been told that it gets easier as you go on, but still no points for intuitiveness.

Anyways, I had a go on the co-op with some guys at university. It's really fun, and it adds more to the game than just more people. When firing beam spells, you can combine beams at a point to make an even bigger beam (think the main gun on the Death Star). I would say that it's a game that really emphasises the term "co-operation", more so than many other games. I had a really good time of it, as we were working together rather than competing.

PvP, on the other hand, can largely take a hike in most games as far as I care. I've been playing some Call of Duty: Black Ops with my little brother today. It's a good game, but like nearly all multiplayer shooters, it strikes me as rather...repetitive. You pretty much do the same thing over and over again until you win or lose. I'm sure any CoD conniseur will tell me why I'm wrong here, but it felt even more grindy than your average MMO; I felt this was due to the lack of a context or story, which is really what a game that has you doing the same thing (shoot people) repeatedly kind of needs to keep me interested. I had the same issue with Counter Strike years ago, and that didn't even have the good grace to offer a decent singleplayer experience,

Wait, what's that I see coming oover the horizon? Dear me, it's an exception!

Anyone who knows me will probably know of my love for Team Fortress 2, a game that has received just praise over the years, and a great community. Yet it's a game I should hate: there's no singleplayer, it's entirely PVP, and there's absolutely no context for the fictional conflict between RED and BLU. But I can't help but feeling that TF2 has miraculously transcended the need for these things. The classes are characterful, the maps are fun and cartoony, and it even stops me from feeling bad about being sucky by making the deaths so damn comical (there' your head, there's your arms, and waaaay over there are your legs); the little message telling me that I nearly got a new personal record on kills is always a nice pat on the back too.

So, to summarise: I don't like multiplayer unless it's co-op...or TF2...ok, Assassin's Creed can come in too...and maybe PVP is ok if it's in splitscreen...

Huh, maybe I just don't like military shooters.

Comment's down below :)

Alice: Madness Returns gameplay demo opinions

Here's a gameplay demo in two parts for Alice: Madness Returns that was showcased at GDC recently (video from IGN's YouTube channel):






What do I think? First off...wow. This game is just gorgeous. The level looks beautiful, the characters, objects and even the GUI look like something I'd frame on my wall (if there's an art book with a limited edition of this game, I'll buy it). The life bar, represented as a string of red roses, smacks nicely of Zelda-style heart containers, which is a nice touch. The baddies are suitably eccentric, and even Alice herself is styled in a traditional-yet-unique way that I'm sure will put her top-10-best-looking-character lists for years to come.

However...

...the game doesn't shock or surprise me in terms of mechanics. Granted, this is based solely on visual analysis of the game in action, and a short section at that, but isn't that all anyone has to go on at this point? I've been worried that it would turn out to be a generic action-platformer, and from this first look alone it seems to have lived down to that. The platform section is almost the most basic gameplay I've seen in years: jumping between level floating platforms. Oh wait, sorry, the platforms are invisible. No, wait again, you can see them if you press a button to go small for a bit, plus they are clearly pointed out by the collectibles sitting on them...erm....

The combat looks nice though. I stress LOOKS. Again, the graphics are bleeding fabulous, the enemies look menacing and the weapons used (I like that hobby horse club a lot) have a great audio-visual character to them. Let's face it though, it seems to play like so many other action games. The weapons seems to operate on a one-button mechanic, which is a good idea for fast-paced combat, but it strikes me as just a light melee/heavy melee/ light ranged/heavy ranged attack system that has been around for donkey's years. The lock on system has been seen before, as has blocking things while locked on.

I'm not saying that the combat is BAD, not at all; it seems to use tried and tested systems that work. This game, in short, works. But only in the sense of there being bare minimum involved. In fact, there seems to be a lot missing that we've come to take for granted in hack n' slashers: where are the finishing moves, the over-the-top quicktime events? It seems that in a quest to avoid being branded "Like God of War but..." it's ended up as "Like God of War but without..." and I have to say I was hoping for more. My worry is that American McGee and the folks at Spicy Horse are being really restricted by EA, which would be a real shame.

I really want to be proven wrong as more of this game is shown. There's a lot of potential seemingly going to waste, and the fact that only a small snippet of the game is demoed is what allows me the hope that there will be something great, just over the horizon. The game will have to PLAY as good as it LOOKS, and if it happens...then we'll have a masterpiece on our hands. I've got my fingers crossed...


Think I'm wrong? Comments down below.

Alice - Madness Returns is the property of American McGee and EA.