So Thursday i had reviewed a game called Redshirt a Narcissistic view on the Star Trek universe, well today i'm going to review a tongue in cheek satire to the Star Wars universe just so i can keep all of your fanboy knickers twist free. If there was a doctor who, Lexx, Stargate, or Battlestar Galactica video game worth playing i'm sure i would have to make a whole series out of this type of thing to quiet the masses. But alas, Doctor Who has not been adapted to video game, thankfully; Lexx was too R-rated at the time to be made into a video game, i don't care enough about stargate to look for games and Battlestar Galactica Online is a sorry excuse (in my opinion) for a game that fits into the canon of the re-imaged series.
I digress. Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe knocks out two birds with one stone, for those who have always said "man, i sure love star wars with such a firey passion that i still own the star wars white-y tighties that i had when i was 4." and the people who have always said "man, i sure love air hockey, the video game industry is really missing out on something special by not making an air hockey simulator!"
Yes folks, that's right. This game is a science fiction air-hockey simulator, featuring low-poly high res models of parodies of all your favorite star wars characters and even some they made up on their own.
Overall the game is very fun for a short period of time. Depending on how quick your reflexes are and how much time you want to invest into the game will determine how far into the "story" you get before undoubtedly walking away from the game or downloading Cheat Engine to just get the game over with already.
Basically you are a United States astronaut who crash lands his command pod onto the surface of an alien world whose only building appears to be a multi-story space casino. Instead of the normal earth casino games they have one game and it's a matter of pride for everyone, even a negotiation tool at times. That game is Air Hockey or Shufflepuck as they call it.
The objective is to build a new space ship to get the hell off this strange planet but in order to do so you need to play and win at air hockey against 13 different opponents spanning across 5 floors each opponent has their very own special move that they can employ upon you. When you beat them you gain reputation, credz and sometimes tokens. Tokens are for these machines that potentially give you credz, reputation, tokens, pucks, mallets, biographies and artwork. With the credz you can buy pucks, mallets, artwork, or biographies on the characters. The biographies are the most important piece to the game as every time you manage to unlock/purchase all 19 biographies of a certain NPC, you unlock their final quest which always involves dueling someone else, when you complete that, you get one part to the space ship.
Overall the game was pretty cool. there was an interesting variety of characters inside the Cantina that represent all of the major character from Star Wars as well as some superfluous ones that have nothing to do with Star Wars.
As i stated earlier, the amount of fun you get out of this game is strictly dependent on how much you're willing to do the exact same thing over and over and how much time you wanna blow on one of the more obscure simulation games out there.
Showing posts with label Video Games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Video Games. Show all posts
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Game Reviews: Redshirt
Space... the final frontier. these are the voyages of some random space station and it's 160-ish day mission to detonate with all of it's crew still aboard except for senior officers.
In a land where social media is the most important meal of the day and your friend count is all that matters, Redshirt is the definition of casual gaming and satirical work on two things the world loves equally, Star Trek and Facebook. With that being said, is this game worth a buy? I'm not entirely sure what it's worth but it sure amplified my Narcissism for the 12 hours it took me to play it twice to get the desired victory outcome that i wanted.
In redshirt you play a generic redshirt in a faux-star trek universe. You're deployed to a station out in the middle of space and one of it's most important features is spacebook... oh yes, you best prepare your anus, because this game is going to throw all manner of Space-puns at you in record speed. Anyways, in the game, you have a job, you have friends and you have activities to do with your friends. How you decide to balance all three of those is entirely up to you and will probably define how your endgame looks.
My first playthrough i decided to climb the social ladder a little more than i wanted and the career ladder a little less than i wanted, what ended up happening was i was 1 day away from the end of the game, without a girlfriend and i was 1 step away from the cushy position that guarantees you get off the station alive. My second play through i went with the fuck bitches make money route and ended up in the highest job in the game with another 70 or so days left before the station explodes.
The game has a tiered job system, each tier except for level 0 and level 7 (the minimum and maximum) have at least three jobs, and levels 1-6 all have 6 jobs, those would be the lowly peasant jobs and the managerial jobs for those lowly peasant jobs. Each job requires a different set of skills which you can acquire through personal activities, purchased goods and other jobs. Each job has a hiring manager that you can get in good with and they'll hire you so long as you meet at least one of the criteria, but be careful how you tread because you could very well end up going out with someone who is the hiring manager for the position you want and achieving that 100% positive relationship only to apply for the job too soon and be told that you're a horrible person for trying to sex your way up the career ladder and never have a chance at that job again.
The entire game runs of karma credits which are the game's currency and with them you're faced with a lot of equally silly named purchased goods that give you certain bonuses. Like, for instance, the robocat which gives you experience in handling small animals and children and comforting voice. But it also increases your happiness daily which is good, because if you're sad you make less in your job.
I think overall to fairly evaluate this game i should probably just tell you that for a better and more grounded life simulator, you should probably aim for Kudos 2 which in my mind is far superior and much more challenging but equally as addicting and capable of wasting your time.
So should you buy this game? probably not. The humor is too exaggerated to be funny to most normal people and the gameplay is narcissistic to say the least.
In a land where social media is the most important meal of the day and your friend count is all that matters, Redshirt is the definition of casual gaming and satirical work on two things the world loves equally, Star Trek and Facebook. With that being said, is this game worth a buy? I'm not entirely sure what it's worth but it sure amplified my Narcissism for the 12 hours it took me to play it twice to get the desired victory outcome that i wanted.
In redshirt you play a generic redshirt in a faux-star trek universe. You're deployed to a station out in the middle of space and one of it's most important features is spacebook... oh yes, you best prepare your anus, because this game is going to throw all manner of Space-puns at you in record speed. Anyways, in the game, you have a job, you have friends and you have activities to do with your friends. How you decide to balance all three of those is entirely up to you and will probably define how your endgame looks.
My first playthrough i decided to climb the social ladder a little more than i wanted and the career ladder a little less than i wanted, what ended up happening was i was 1 day away from the end of the game, without a girlfriend and i was 1 step away from the cushy position that guarantees you get off the station alive. My second play through i went with the fuck bitches make money route and ended up in the highest job in the game with another 70 or so days left before the station explodes.
The game has a tiered job system, each tier except for level 0 and level 7 (the minimum and maximum) have at least three jobs, and levels 1-6 all have 6 jobs, those would be the lowly peasant jobs and the managerial jobs for those lowly peasant jobs. Each job requires a different set of skills which you can acquire through personal activities, purchased goods and other jobs. Each job has a hiring manager that you can get in good with and they'll hire you so long as you meet at least one of the criteria, but be careful how you tread because you could very well end up going out with someone who is the hiring manager for the position you want and achieving that 100% positive relationship only to apply for the job too soon and be told that you're a horrible person for trying to sex your way up the career ladder and never have a chance at that job again.
The entire game runs of karma credits which are the game's currency and with them you're faced with a lot of equally silly named purchased goods that give you certain bonuses. Like, for instance, the robocat which gives you experience in handling small animals and children and comforting voice. But it also increases your happiness daily which is good, because if you're sad you make less in your job.
I think overall to fairly evaluate this game i should probably just tell you that for a better and more grounded life simulator, you should probably aim for Kudos 2 which in my mind is far superior and much more challenging but equally as addicting and capable of wasting your time.
So should you buy this game? probably not. The humor is too exaggerated to be funny to most normal people and the gameplay is narcissistic to say the least.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Video Game Review: Elder Scrolls Online Beta 2/28 - 3/2
So recently i wrote a review on the Elder Scrolls Online Beta for last month shortly before the PVP beta. This week i'm going to write a review for the beta that took place on Febraury 28th through March 2nd. And to tell you the truth not a whole lot has changed in the game itself but what has changed is how much of the game i have experienced myself.
To begin with i'm a huge crafting fanatic. I love crafting with a burning passion and this game does it in a very unique way that feels right and comfortable. It's interesting now because i actually took the time to look at all the dfferent styles of gear, of which they added a few more from the last beta that i reviewed, and they've finally implemented more than one tier of crafted equipment, so i looked at all those, and this is what i can gather. They've removed recipes and tiered equipment knowledge. There are no "let's hunt the world for how to make *Insert item name here* and there is no "oh man i can't wait till i get 3 more levels in *insert craft here* so i can make the middle of the road version of *insert piece of equipment here*. This is an amazing revelation in the crafting world because you're not blowing your incredibly limited crafting supplies in an attempt to reach maximum level so you can start farming recipes/blueprints/whatever to make the not-fail versions of the equipment you want. Everyone starts off with the knowledge of how to make all basic armors which means there's none of the WoW style questers that obviously try to craft their gear (where they're running around with 2/6 pieces from a craftable set because they either don't know how to make the rest or they're too low of a level to wear it.
This raises me to another point i'd like to make: You can fully gear yourself at any level you like granted you have the materials. All Tier 1 armors (iron armors) come in almost every even level from 1-14 the only difference is the number of materials it requires to craft and the stats on the actual armor. This, i believe, is incredibly important, because i actually spent 2-3 hours of solid game time just hunting for iron ore veins so i could craft. And you know how many i found? two. And you know how much ore that gave me? 6 pieces. When it requires 10 to even craft a set of ingots, those numbers mean every resource you have is valuable.
Seeing as i covered crafting pretty extensively in the last blog about it? I'm just going to move forward from here without hesitation.
Combat in this game is very fluid. It has the appropriate look and feel of an Elder Scrolls game. you can traverse the world in both first and third person to your hearts content. There are "recommended" weapon and armor categories for each class but that doesn't stop you from playing a rogue using a restoration staff if you wanted to. The downside to that is: the skills you get are dependent on the class you take, so while you could be said rogue using said restoration staff, it wouldn't do you a damn bit of good because the damage is terrible, the swings are slow and all you skills expect you to be normal and use either a bow or dual-wield 1h weapons of some form. I think this is also equally fantastic because it pays a huge homage to traditional Holy Trinity style gameplay without defiling it and bringing a new balance to the new style of MMO's that are quickly taking over the market by storm. No one person can be proficient at every single thing as it has been in RPG's since the dawn of pen and paper and should be until the day the genre dies.I say this because if everyone could be proficient at everything? you'd just be better off playing the non-MMO version of Elder Scrolls. Where there are no real classes you just pick up some magic and magic away with a sword in the other hand.
Questing is also equally fluid which is perfect for an elder scrolls game. While wandering around the country side for quests, i managed to stumble across a small hamlet who's chief production is mining. Well sure enough there was a quest in the town, picking that up, i followed and entire campaign-sized quest line puts you in the middle of a sticky situation with the plague and a pair of questionable alchemists. This was all just looking for resources. Aimlessly wandering some more i found a cave that was inhabited by insurgents of a renegade High Elf syndicate. Fighting my way through those masses i managed to discover a note on a dead body that sent me on a quest to another major city in which i actively took a part in thwarting some major war between the true high elf monarchy and this renegade syndicate. The world is as close to living as they could possible get it in an MMO that demands structure and i think that will majorly benefit them in the long run.
The official game comes out on 4/4/14 and for those who pre-order the game they will get early access to the game which starts 3/31/14 and as with all traditional pay structures, you get 30-days free with that purchase. They've got two different versions of the pre-order. There's a standard edition, and there's a imperial edition which unlocks the race of the imperials for you to play in whatever faction you choose AND some additional cosmetic features that are not normally offered. None of which, i felt, justified the additional 20 bucks that they're asking for the imperial edition. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who's willing to shell 60 for the game itself (i know it's total bullshit [if you've read my other blog post about the price of video games]) and another 15 a month for the account. I imagine the game will eventually become free to play, and i'll welcome you just as happily when that day comes, but i would love to see you all on release day so we can play it up together.
Questing is another big thing of interest
To begin with i'm a huge crafting fanatic. I love crafting with a burning passion and this game does it in a very unique way that feels right and comfortable. It's interesting now because i actually took the time to look at all the dfferent styles of gear, of which they added a few more from the last beta that i reviewed, and they've finally implemented more than one tier of crafted equipment, so i looked at all those, and this is what i can gather. They've removed recipes and tiered equipment knowledge. There are no "let's hunt the world for how to make *Insert item name here* and there is no "oh man i can't wait till i get 3 more levels in *insert craft here* so i can make the middle of the road version of *insert piece of equipment here*. This is an amazing revelation in the crafting world because you're not blowing your incredibly limited crafting supplies in an attempt to reach maximum level so you can start farming recipes/blueprints/whatever to make the not-fail versions of the equipment you want. Everyone starts off with the knowledge of how to make all basic armors which means there's none of the WoW style questers that obviously try to craft their gear (where they're running around with 2/6 pieces from a craftable set because they either don't know how to make the rest or they're too low of a level to wear it.
This raises me to another point i'd like to make: You can fully gear yourself at any level you like granted you have the materials. All Tier 1 armors (iron armors) come in almost every even level from 1-14 the only difference is the number of materials it requires to craft and the stats on the actual armor. This, i believe, is incredibly important, because i actually spent 2-3 hours of solid game time just hunting for iron ore veins so i could craft. And you know how many i found? two. And you know how much ore that gave me? 6 pieces. When it requires 10 to even craft a set of ingots, those numbers mean every resource you have is valuable.
Seeing as i covered crafting pretty extensively in the last blog about it? I'm just going to move forward from here without hesitation.
Combat in this game is very fluid. It has the appropriate look and feel of an Elder Scrolls game. you can traverse the world in both first and third person to your hearts content. There are "recommended" weapon and armor categories for each class but that doesn't stop you from playing a rogue using a restoration staff if you wanted to. The downside to that is: the skills you get are dependent on the class you take, so while you could be said rogue using said restoration staff, it wouldn't do you a damn bit of good because the damage is terrible, the swings are slow and all you skills expect you to be normal and use either a bow or dual-wield 1h weapons of some form. I think this is also equally fantastic because it pays a huge homage to traditional Holy Trinity style gameplay without defiling it and bringing a new balance to the new style of MMO's that are quickly taking over the market by storm. No one person can be proficient at every single thing as it has been in RPG's since the dawn of pen and paper and should be until the day the genre dies.I say this because if everyone could be proficient at everything? you'd just be better off playing the non-MMO version of Elder Scrolls. Where there are no real classes you just pick up some magic and magic away with a sword in the other hand.
Questing is also equally fluid which is perfect for an elder scrolls game. While wandering around the country side for quests, i managed to stumble across a small hamlet who's chief production is mining. Well sure enough there was a quest in the town, picking that up, i followed and entire campaign-sized quest line puts you in the middle of a sticky situation with the plague and a pair of questionable alchemists. This was all just looking for resources. Aimlessly wandering some more i found a cave that was inhabited by insurgents of a renegade High Elf syndicate. Fighting my way through those masses i managed to discover a note on a dead body that sent me on a quest to another major city in which i actively took a part in thwarting some major war between the true high elf monarchy and this renegade syndicate. The world is as close to living as they could possible get it in an MMO that demands structure and i think that will majorly benefit them in the long run.
The official game comes out on 4/4/14 and for those who pre-order the game they will get early access to the game which starts 3/31/14 and as with all traditional pay structures, you get 30-days free with that purchase. They've got two different versions of the pre-order. There's a standard edition, and there's a imperial edition which unlocks the race of the imperials for you to play in whatever faction you choose AND some additional cosmetic features that are not normally offered. None of which, i felt, justified the additional 20 bucks that they're asking for the imperial edition. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who's willing to shell 60 for the game itself (i know it's total bullshit [if you've read my other blog post about the price of video games]) and another 15 a month for the account. I imagine the game will eventually become free to play, and i'll welcome you just as happily when that day comes, but i would love to see you all on release day so we can play it up together.
Questing is another big thing of interest
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Game Review: Trine
Once again i'm waay behind the the curve on this game review, but i figured why not? I just finished playing the game for the first time and i figured it inspired me enough to write a review on it.
Trine is a side scrolling platformer with mild fantasy combat and full 3D effects with some wonderfully basic sprites that actually go pretty well with the overall art style that the developers went for. Basically you play a trio of people whose souls are bound together by a magical artifact called the trine, and together in the process of trying to get their souls unbound, they stop some evil plot to destroy the world. pretty run of the mill but it is strangely addicting.
The game doesn't take itself seriously. There's a lot of tongue in cheek humor referencing to previous stereotypes of the fantasy genre as well as a lot of the characters don't take themselves seriously. The whole story starts off with a thief, attempting to steal some magical artifact from the mages guild which just happens to be the trine. Then a mage overhears a ruckus in the other room, and comes out to investigate. Well the knight comes barreling in... well... because he's a knight and he likes to come barreling into places. they all touch the trine at the same time and their souls become bound.
SO, what of the gameplay? Each character has 3 abilities that they can use in which you need to unlock as you play through the game by discovering secret and plainly obvious chests. Each ability has 3 levels with which you need to level up, each level has an level cost of either 1, 2 or 3 points. You gain those points by killing skeletons of different armor quality and armament, and finding earlier mentioned secrets and random XP bottles that happen to just by lying around.
Overall this game was addictingly fun, and for only having about a dozen or so levels, it managed to keep me entranced for a good 15 hours. That combined with the special bonus level they give you for completing the game which is a mirror of the final level in the primary story line only with different obstacles and no fancy ohh-ahh's at the end was a pretty neat little incentive package.
I did however find most of the puzzles to be a little less than challenging. Once you got certain items and certain skills the obstacles became more routine than anything. Like a scale that lets one of your characters breathe under water indefinitely. skeletons die when they hit water. So solution = jump into water and keep bobbing your head out from under to trick the AI Pathing into the water. Skeletons are dead, you're untouched and 5 experience up. All in all it was a fantastic game and i enjoyed it, but now that i've lived and seen the first game, i'm having a hard time playing the second game, but i'm sure i will get to it eventually. The humor in trine 2 seems to be even more cynical and more tongue in cheek than the first as well as a stepped up compliment of graphical enhancements.
I would recommend Trine for anyone who happens to come across it on sale and curious about it. It's definitely something you want to experience at least once and at a discounted price lol.
Trine is a side scrolling platformer with mild fantasy combat and full 3D effects with some wonderfully basic sprites that actually go pretty well with the overall art style that the developers went for. Basically you play a trio of people whose souls are bound together by a magical artifact called the trine, and together in the process of trying to get their souls unbound, they stop some evil plot to destroy the world. pretty run of the mill but it is strangely addicting.
The game doesn't take itself seriously. There's a lot of tongue in cheek humor referencing to previous stereotypes of the fantasy genre as well as a lot of the characters don't take themselves seriously. The whole story starts off with a thief, attempting to steal some magical artifact from the mages guild which just happens to be the trine. Then a mage overhears a ruckus in the other room, and comes out to investigate. Well the knight comes barreling in... well... because he's a knight and he likes to come barreling into places. they all touch the trine at the same time and their souls become bound.
SO, what of the gameplay? Each character has 3 abilities that they can use in which you need to unlock as you play through the game by discovering secret and plainly obvious chests. Each ability has 3 levels with which you need to level up, each level has an level cost of either 1, 2 or 3 points. You gain those points by killing skeletons of different armor quality and armament, and finding earlier mentioned secrets and random XP bottles that happen to just by lying around.
Overall this game was addictingly fun, and for only having about a dozen or so levels, it managed to keep me entranced for a good 15 hours. That combined with the special bonus level they give you for completing the game which is a mirror of the final level in the primary story line only with different obstacles and no fancy ohh-ahh's at the end was a pretty neat little incentive package.
I did however find most of the puzzles to be a little less than challenging. Once you got certain items and certain skills the obstacles became more routine than anything. Like a scale that lets one of your characters breathe under water indefinitely. skeletons die when they hit water. So solution = jump into water and keep bobbing your head out from under to trick the AI Pathing into the water. Skeletons are dead, you're untouched and 5 experience up. All in all it was a fantastic game and i enjoyed it, but now that i've lived and seen the first game, i'm having a hard time playing the second game, but i'm sure i will get to it eventually. The humor in trine 2 seems to be even more cynical and more tongue in cheek than the first as well as a stepped up compliment of graphical enhancements.
I would recommend Trine for anyone who happens to come across it on sale and curious about it. It's definitely something you want to experience at least once and at a discounted price lol.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Game Review: Bioshock Infinite
HEY LOOK EVERYONE I'M REALLY CRAZY LATE TO THE PARTY!" i screamed one time as i barged into where a party had been only a couple hours ago, and now i found myself standing in front of two of my very close friends doing the nasty on the floor about 10 feet from me. That's kinda how i feel about Bioshock: Infinite. I'm really late to a really amazing party and boy am i embarrassed that it took me so long to get there; but what i saw when i got there was really kinda hot.
So, with all of those disgusting images tenderly laid out in your head let's get on with the review! Bioshock Infinite is a wolf among sheep when it comes to the bioshock series. A series that has constructed itself on the idea that your choices mean something in the overall scheme of life and your personal and direct effect on certain situations has been thrown out the window for quite possibly the most "on-rails" experience you will ever know in a -shock game since maybe System Shock. But this isn't a bad thing for the game and let me tell you why.
The story itself is compelling enough to grab you by the nipples and jerk you into the story quickly and it keeps giving you occasional purple nurples just to make sure you're still paying attention. So it doesn't really feel like you're on rails any more than you were in the last super compelling game that you played where the story captured you deeply and spoke to you on personal levels.
Don't get me wrong, there are "choices" but they don't bear the same weight as they have any any of the previous games in the bioshock series, and by not bearing the same weight i mean they don't bear any weight at all. It was almost like Irrational was just making Bioshock 3 and then decided half-way through that they didn't want the same thing they had in the last few games so they rewrote just the ending of the story to help you understand why you're not getting 3 different endings.
So to help put all that i'm saying into context here's a brief synopsis (totally not giving anything away by the way):
You play as a Private Investigator named Booker DeWitt who apparently has a gambling problem with the wrong people and also has previous military experience because the game opens up with you on a rowboat being dumped out at a dock leading up to a *drum roll* lighthouse! Oh but wait, this is totally NOTHING like the last lighthouse. This one is all 1912sy and marion harris and will the circle be unbroken. oh and you go up in some rocket that's way ahead of the technology curve for 1918 than is logically safe to announce but whatever. TOTALLY not the intro to Rapture in the opposite direction. Anyways, your one cryptic objective is to navigate this pre-equal rights city in the sky called Columbia to locate a girl. Of course, there are some complications that come in the way and the society ends up being so much more technologically advanced than the rest of the world you wonder why they haven't taken over yet and of course you've got your 1910's versions of big daddies as well as pretty much all the special splicers from rapture turned into new 1910's versions of the splicers and oh they're not plasmids now, they're vigors which have really cool bottles that you can buy online in limited supply for about 400-600 dollars.
This game despite being bioshock in the opposite direction had some really cool mechanics added to it which gives the game a new breath of life to combat as well as the delivery of the story which i thought was incredibly cool. Right about the time you get 80% done with the game your head will be full of the irrational games industry standard "full of wat". But around the last 5 minutes or so of the game they'll take that and break it like they're shooting for the moon. You'll feel yourself lost and confused and a little bit disappointed at the ending until you spend another 5-10 minutes reading some dude's review on the game which will explain everything to you perfectly then your mind will explode you'll instantly want more.
Thinking that Burial At Sea would just be a continuation on the Infinite storyline during the days of rapture you'll probably drop the 20 bucks on the season pass and play it only to find out that if you think of the ending to infinite and what the whole game was about, burial at sea kind of awkwardly fits in but in reality has nothing to do with Infinite itself except for a few cheeky puns. Still worth the play though if you can separate Burial at Sea, the DLC, episodic "expansion" to infinite from infinite itself which is counter intuitive but whatever.
Definitely recommend Bioshock infinite. It was a fantastic 15 hours of play for me that proved to have some challenging points and the ending was mind blowing as usual but in a different way.
So, with all of those disgusting images tenderly laid out in your head let's get on with the review! Bioshock Infinite is a wolf among sheep when it comes to the bioshock series. A series that has constructed itself on the idea that your choices mean something in the overall scheme of life and your personal and direct effect on certain situations has been thrown out the window for quite possibly the most "on-rails" experience you will ever know in a -shock game since maybe System Shock. But this isn't a bad thing for the game and let me tell you why.
The story itself is compelling enough to grab you by the nipples and jerk you into the story quickly and it keeps giving you occasional purple nurples just to make sure you're still paying attention. So it doesn't really feel like you're on rails any more than you were in the last super compelling game that you played where the story captured you deeply and spoke to you on personal levels.
Don't get me wrong, there are "choices" but they don't bear the same weight as they have any any of the previous games in the bioshock series, and by not bearing the same weight i mean they don't bear any weight at all. It was almost like Irrational was just making Bioshock 3 and then decided half-way through that they didn't want the same thing they had in the last few games so they rewrote just the ending of the story to help you understand why you're not getting 3 different endings.
So to help put all that i'm saying into context here's a brief synopsis (totally not giving anything away by the way):
You play as a Private Investigator named Booker DeWitt who apparently has a gambling problem with the wrong people and also has previous military experience because the game opens up with you on a rowboat being dumped out at a dock leading up to a *drum roll* lighthouse! Oh but wait, this is totally NOTHING like the last lighthouse. This one is all 1912sy and marion harris and will the circle be unbroken. oh and you go up in some rocket that's way ahead of the technology curve for 1918 than is logically safe to announce but whatever. TOTALLY not the intro to Rapture in the opposite direction. Anyways, your one cryptic objective is to navigate this pre-equal rights city in the sky called Columbia to locate a girl. Of course, there are some complications that come in the way and the society ends up being so much more technologically advanced than the rest of the world you wonder why they haven't taken over yet and of course you've got your 1910's versions of big daddies as well as pretty much all the special splicers from rapture turned into new 1910's versions of the splicers and oh they're not plasmids now, they're vigors which have really cool bottles that you can buy online in limited supply for about 400-600 dollars.
This game despite being bioshock in the opposite direction had some really cool mechanics added to it which gives the game a new breath of life to combat as well as the delivery of the story which i thought was incredibly cool. Right about the time you get 80% done with the game your head will be full of the irrational games industry standard "full of wat". But around the last 5 minutes or so of the game they'll take that and break it like they're shooting for the moon. You'll feel yourself lost and confused and a little bit disappointed at the ending until you spend another 5-10 minutes reading some dude's review on the game which will explain everything to you perfectly then your mind will explode you'll instantly want more.
Thinking that Burial At Sea would just be a continuation on the Infinite storyline during the days of rapture you'll probably drop the 20 bucks on the season pass and play it only to find out that if you think of the ending to infinite and what the whole game was about, burial at sea kind of awkwardly fits in but in reality has nothing to do with Infinite itself except for a few cheeky puns. Still worth the play though if you can separate Burial at Sea, the DLC, episodic "expansion" to infinite from infinite itself which is counter intuitive but whatever.
Definitely recommend Bioshock infinite. It was a fantastic 15 hours of play for me that proved to have some challenging points and the ending was mind blowing as usual but in a different way.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Why do video games cost $60?
This has been a huge question in the video game industry since the dawn of the "Next-gen consoles" which included the 360, the PS3 and the Wii. Trying to figure out why exactly the cost has gone up because i mean what is really so special about video games now that weren't so special back in 2006/2007 when the gaming industry took that big step forward? well a lot of the information i've found is pretty universal and here it is in a nutshell:
With the increasing graphical quality that newer video games required and the more intricate coding and higher licensing costs the need to raise the cost of video games grows and is justified by giving us this demographic of where every dollar in the 60-dollar schema goes to:
With the increasing graphical quality that newer video games required and the more intricate coding and higher licensing costs the need to raise the cost of video games grows and is justified by giving us this demographic of where every dollar in the 60-dollar schema goes to:
- Developer Costs - $20
- Retailer Cut - $12
- Console Licensing - $12
- Publisher Overhead - $9
- Marketing - $7
So we can take a quick look at this and go okay, that makes sense. Especially of you're a console gamer. It costs a lot because there's a lot of leg work involved in the transaction of video games and everyone needs their pound of flesh. But what about PC gamers? Why are we stuck paying the exact same cost as console gamers? Let me illustrate why we shouldn't have to. There is no console licensing cost. Most AAA companies make their own engines in the first place whether it's console based or not so that SHOULD be bundled into developer costs. With the dawn of Digital Distrbution platforms like steam and Origin, the retailer cut has significantly decreased since there are no CD's to make, no CD's to ship, no storefront employees to pay on an hourly basis, etc. AAA companies generally have their own in-house publishing service so that could also now be bundled into developer costs and decreased significantly. Marketing stays the same. So where does that put us? probably somewhere in the ballpark of the following:
- Developer Costs - $23-25
- Marketing - $7
- Retailer Cut - $3 - $4
so reasonably, computer games should ONLY cost about $33-36 now for PC games instead of the exact same 60 that everyone else pays. Keep in mind for companies like EA who develop, publish, and sell their own products and have their own digital distribution platform, and don't have to pay any royalties to put their ads up. all of that 36 dollars a game would translate raw profit no distributing money to other people it all just goes straight to their pockets.
Now i know what you're thinking? is it really fair that PC gamers should get to pay less than console gamers for their games? Well i think so. The initial investment of a decent gaming machine (not even a ship of the line) is much larger than the initial investment of a console. If even if you build it yourself. And by doing this you have an individual platform with which you can do with whatever you please. Is it the fault of PC gamers that they have chosen a system that does not have licensing fees and has improved access to video games? Not in the slightest. So why exactly should they be slighted for exactly that?
Console gamers walk into console systems knowing that they are purchasing the video game equivalent of an MRE and with that comes more loyalties because companies need to do more on the back end to make your experience as close to a PC's experience as possible. Convenience pays, so i think it's entirely justified. However with the introduction of the XBM and the playstation store could the prices go down a little on microsoft games and sony games? absolutely because it goes back to the most basic argument that i was making that companies like that, who own all the pieces to make games from start to finish independently really don't have the $40 dollars of third party expenses that a third party developer of lesser wealth and status would have.
Take it as you will this is just my belief that game companies are getting away with a lot of things they probably shouldn't be getting away with these days in terms of their pricing structure. in 2006 and 2007 a pricing structure like this was necessary but it has no longer become necessary in a lot of situations in the last 2 years. And the reason they cling to it is we're used to it. 7-8 years used to it and it works for them.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Game Review: Elder Scrolls Beta 2/7-2/10
I know the version of the beta i'm reviewing is a little long gone, but i really felt it necessary to discuss the beta because this game has resparked a passion for the MMORPG genre in me that started dying with World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King and officially died a few weeks after the release of Cataclysm.
Let me start though by explaining what, for me, ruined the genre. Because it was a myriad of reasons, not exclusively World of Warcraft or it's short comings. For starters, i was abrasive towards the free to play movement at first. When it first hit the ground, nobody really had it dialed in with how to do it. It was one of life's great mysteries "what do we do with this? Even if we open a store we won't make the fat wads of cash that we used to make with a subscribe to play format!" Well time went on and it got a little better with the general removal of pay to win stores (i say general because there are still some out there, sadly) and the implementation of fair scaling for everyone regardless of whether you're a monthly subscriber or dumped entire paychecks into the Pay to win store all at once. Another huge reason i got tired of the system was the community. It seemed like World of Warcraft spawned this community of hateful, rude and just overall terrible human beings. I will avoid calling them 12-year-olds because that's largely a farce according to the studies i've read. but never the less that community spread like the plague from one MMO to the next ruining everything in it's path. Even in the ESO beta the chat was constantly alive with the generic "let's compare this MMO to WoW" conversation which is really old and annoying but at least those same players didn't try to ruin the game for everyone else because they see it as WoW's inferior. It's like there's this WoW nazi-esque regime that's out there to create the one true MMORPG master race which consists of nothing but heartless human beings all playing WoW and refusing anything else.
Finally after the Free to Play structure came around this mass exodus from what is commonly called "the holy trinity" gameplay happened where there were no longer identifiers such as tank, healer, or DPS attached to the classes, it was more of a "everyone puts in their fair share" mentality. This approach to MMORPG's is all fine and dandy except for the fact that the earlier games that took this approach, went about the classes in a very definitive holy trinity manner and yet threw all of their trinity specific abilities at the wall repeatedly until they broke. So for instance Tanking classes would exist with real tanking abilities like shout for instance. It would draw aggro for a few seconds until the rogue would use it's new tanking ability and since the rogue did so much more damage, the tank would lose aggro. This caused for a lot of anxiety across holy trinity players and a lot of angst on the forums where tank players would complain that their class was broken and everyone would ignore them because according to some arbitrary master play, they really weren't they were just sharing the wealth. it also had one other effect on the game though. It got to the point where like 60% of players all played rogues because they were a nice well-rounded all-inclusive class. They could do crazy damage, they could tank with the high aggro amounts they pulled and they could keep themselves alive with the crazy high amounts of dodge they could stack.
Now i firmly believe that ESO should be considered a game planted securely in the second generation of this style of MMORPG's because of the way this system has been refined. It is not going to be a free to play with a pay to win shop, it is going to be a subscription based game with AAA-title level graphics. The classes have all been refined so that while no one class performs a specific task they all perform well and balance with each other in a way that won't dismantle the classic make-up of a group, Which may not really be necessary becasue every dungeon can be run with 1-4 other friends depending on the level of the dungeon and the level of you and your friends. As far as i can tell classes generally come with at least some minor healing ability as part of removing that official healing class and spreading the burden of staying alive to everyone in the group.
Anyways, i digress. ESO feels like just the next installment to the Elder Scrolls saga. The race you pick dictates the faction you play and the faction you play dictates the starting area you find yourself in. As a Nord, Argonian or Dunmer (drow elves) you will find yourself on a small island off the coast of skyrim and you fight your way to the mainland, then quickly get transfered to morrowind before you have time to explore all of skyrim. (which is fine with me seeing as Skyrim probably wasn't even recreated for this game, it was probably just copy pasted from Skyrim to ESO). Morrowind gets a breath of fresh air from it's graphical enhancements and takes on a new life of it's own with it's new overtones. As Altmer, bosmer and khajiit, you start on a small island in the summerset isles that is predominately Khajiit and you fight yourself to the small official summerset isle island and i imagine from there you would go to Valenwood but i never made it that far. And as Redguard, Breton, and Orsimer i do not know of where you start or find yourself as i never made a character of that faction to check out but i'm sure i will next time the beta window opens up and then i will revise this blog post.
The questing feels fluid which is important in the Elder Scrolls universe. Where in World of Warcraft all of the quests for the entire zone were clumped up at a central hub that usually has some form of housing near it and then there were a few quests to be had at the actual questing areas themselves, There are very few quests in the central cities in ESO, and the rest are pretty naturally scattered across the entire map. You could be running in the middle of nowhere and notice the little carrot on your compass that lets you know there's a quest to be had somewhere nearby, you go and grab that, and it takes you out into the middle of nowhere again. Or you could be running along and in very Elder Scrolls fashion find some old ruins to go exploring. Come out of those ruins with more experience and a bag filled to the brim with loot to show for it.
The currency in the game is gold. Nothing else, just gold, and to make it fair, most items will not sell for more then 10 or 12 gold pieces. The reason why this is fair is because there is a quick travel system where you can actually travel from one resurrection spot to another for a certain gold quantity that generally starts at 44 gold a jump and goes up from there depending on how far the jump is. I think their goal was to make the quick travel appealing but also make it expensive so that it's not something you just go out and buy every time you travel. They want you to experience the world in the same method you experienced it in the elder scrolls 3-5 and possibly 1. New gear from the store doesn't really help too much with the gold quantity as a new piece of gear in the first major city you land yourself in will cost you anywhere from ~300-750 gold. With the amount of gold you get from gear and exploring at the first 10 levels, that equates to about 4 hours of work per piece of equipment. It's actually much more cost effective to not sell any gear and just craft your own.
Which brings me to the crafting system in the game. It's very intuitive. There's no "pick two professions and have at it!" With this game, everyone starts as level one in every profession. Everyone starts with the ability to make every weapon, and every piece of armor imaginable with the materials they can craft with. The starting metal is iron, starting wood is maple, starting leather is made from hide scraps collected from dead animals with hides and cloth is collected either from other clothes that you dismantle or plants. The catch is: it's only slightly less time consuming to craft your own gear as it is to buy gear, the only difference is, you save boatloads of money, and you get better stats.
You start with Raw materials, you have to "extract" craftable materials from those raw materials at a ratio of 10:8 raw materials to craftable ones. You need a minimum of 10 to craft materials. You can't do any other denominations. So if you have 23? you're only making 2 batches of craftable mats with 3 left over. Once you craft them, every piece of gear (weapons or armor) has a different base value. This base value give you a level 1 piece of equipment. For instance an iron helmet will cost 5 iron ingots to make a level one. 6 iron ingots will craft a level 4 helmet. 7 will craft a level 6 helmet and from there it goes in level increments of 2 per craftable mat. The materials have a max level pre designed in. For the level ones i think it's 15 or 16.
There are specialty metals that you can use to make your gear look faction specific. For instance, bone makes your gear look like Bosmer gear (Wood Elf). Molybdenum makes your gear look nordic, etc. and you can add gems to the crafting process to give your gear special abilities like +2 to armor value and spell resistance. But the catch with those is that you need to have researched them to use them on that specific piece of equipment. Every piece of gear starts at the rating of common (White titled) even if it has gems crafted into it to give it special stat increases. you need craft leveling items to increase the quality of the creation. For instance smithing from common to uncommon (green titled) will require grinding stones. Each grinding stone used will give you a 20% increased probability of succeeding in increasing the quality of the equipment. if you fail at increasing the quality, the piece of equipment disappears as well as it's gems and materials.
For combat it feels just as fluid as it did in all of the other games. There is no more dual wielding magic/weapons like there was in Skyrim as far as i can tell and if you're not paying attention too much, the other players just seem like other inhabitants of the universe which makes for a unique individual experience when you want to play alone and an equally unique group experience when walking through tows.
Overall i would strongly recommend this game, even in it's beta state, to anyone whose a fan of the Elder Scrolls series and willing to pay a $15/month sub fee after purchasing the game. I'm sure we will get years of entertainment out of the game so long as we continue to Support it for Bethesda.
Let me start though by explaining what, for me, ruined the genre. Because it was a myriad of reasons, not exclusively World of Warcraft or it's short comings. For starters, i was abrasive towards the free to play movement at first. When it first hit the ground, nobody really had it dialed in with how to do it. It was one of life's great mysteries "what do we do with this? Even if we open a store we won't make the fat wads of cash that we used to make with a subscribe to play format!" Well time went on and it got a little better with the general removal of pay to win stores (i say general because there are still some out there, sadly) and the implementation of fair scaling for everyone regardless of whether you're a monthly subscriber or dumped entire paychecks into the Pay to win store all at once. Another huge reason i got tired of the system was the community. It seemed like World of Warcraft spawned this community of hateful, rude and just overall terrible human beings. I will avoid calling them 12-year-olds because that's largely a farce according to the studies i've read. but never the less that community spread like the plague from one MMO to the next ruining everything in it's path. Even in the ESO beta the chat was constantly alive with the generic "let's compare this MMO to WoW" conversation which is really old and annoying but at least those same players didn't try to ruin the game for everyone else because they see it as WoW's inferior. It's like there's this WoW nazi-esque regime that's out there to create the one true MMORPG master race which consists of nothing but heartless human beings all playing WoW and refusing anything else.
Finally after the Free to Play structure came around this mass exodus from what is commonly called "the holy trinity" gameplay happened where there were no longer identifiers such as tank, healer, or DPS attached to the classes, it was more of a "everyone puts in their fair share" mentality. This approach to MMORPG's is all fine and dandy except for the fact that the earlier games that took this approach, went about the classes in a very definitive holy trinity manner and yet threw all of their trinity specific abilities at the wall repeatedly until they broke. So for instance Tanking classes would exist with real tanking abilities like shout for instance. It would draw aggro for a few seconds until the rogue would use it's new tanking ability and since the rogue did so much more damage, the tank would lose aggro. This caused for a lot of anxiety across holy trinity players and a lot of angst on the forums where tank players would complain that their class was broken and everyone would ignore them because according to some arbitrary master play, they really weren't they were just sharing the wealth. it also had one other effect on the game though. It got to the point where like 60% of players all played rogues because they were a nice well-rounded all-inclusive class. They could do crazy damage, they could tank with the high aggro amounts they pulled and they could keep themselves alive with the crazy high amounts of dodge they could stack.
Now i firmly believe that ESO should be considered a game planted securely in the second generation of this style of MMORPG's because of the way this system has been refined. It is not going to be a free to play with a pay to win shop, it is going to be a subscription based game with AAA-title level graphics. The classes have all been refined so that while no one class performs a specific task they all perform well and balance with each other in a way that won't dismantle the classic make-up of a group, Which may not really be necessary becasue every dungeon can be run with 1-4 other friends depending on the level of the dungeon and the level of you and your friends. As far as i can tell classes generally come with at least some minor healing ability as part of removing that official healing class and spreading the burden of staying alive to everyone in the group.
Anyways, i digress. ESO feels like just the next installment to the Elder Scrolls saga. The race you pick dictates the faction you play and the faction you play dictates the starting area you find yourself in. As a Nord, Argonian or Dunmer (drow elves) you will find yourself on a small island off the coast of skyrim and you fight your way to the mainland, then quickly get transfered to morrowind before you have time to explore all of skyrim. (which is fine with me seeing as Skyrim probably wasn't even recreated for this game, it was probably just copy pasted from Skyrim to ESO). Morrowind gets a breath of fresh air from it's graphical enhancements and takes on a new life of it's own with it's new overtones. As Altmer, bosmer and khajiit, you start on a small island in the summerset isles that is predominately Khajiit and you fight yourself to the small official summerset isle island and i imagine from there you would go to Valenwood but i never made it that far. And as Redguard, Breton, and Orsimer i do not know of where you start or find yourself as i never made a character of that faction to check out but i'm sure i will next time the beta window opens up and then i will revise this blog post.
The questing feels fluid which is important in the Elder Scrolls universe. Where in World of Warcraft all of the quests for the entire zone were clumped up at a central hub that usually has some form of housing near it and then there were a few quests to be had at the actual questing areas themselves, There are very few quests in the central cities in ESO, and the rest are pretty naturally scattered across the entire map. You could be running in the middle of nowhere and notice the little carrot on your compass that lets you know there's a quest to be had somewhere nearby, you go and grab that, and it takes you out into the middle of nowhere again. Or you could be running along and in very Elder Scrolls fashion find some old ruins to go exploring. Come out of those ruins with more experience and a bag filled to the brim with loot to show for it.
The currency in the game is gold. Nothing else, just gold, and to make it fair, most items will not sell for more then 10 or 12 gold pieces. The reason why this is fair is because there is a quick travel system where you can actually travel from one resurrection spot to another for a certain gold quantity that generally starts at 44 gold a jump and goes up from there depending on how far the jump is. I think their goal was to make the quick travel appealing but also make it expensive so that it's not something you just go out and buy every time you travel. They want you to experience the world in the same method you experienced it in the elder scrolls 3-5 and possibly 1. New gear from the store doesn't really help too much with the gold quantity as a new piece of gear in the first major city you land yourself in will cost you anywhere from ~300-750 gold. With the amount of gold you get from gear and exploring at the first 10 levels, that equates to about 4 hours of work per piece of equipment. It's actually much more cost effective to not sell any gear and just craft your own.
Which brings me to the crafting system in the game. It's very intuitive. There's no "pick two professions and have at it!" With this game, everyone starts as level one in every profession. Everyone starts with the ability to make every weapon, and every piece of armor imaginable with the materials they can craft with. The starting metal is iron, starting wood is maple, starting leather is made from hide scraps collected from dead animals with hides and cloth is collected either from other clothes that you dismantle or plants. The catch is: it's only slightly less time consuming to craft your own gear as it is to buy gear, the only difference is, you save boatloads of money, and you get better stats.
You start with Raw materials, you have to "extract" craftable materials from those raw materials at a ratio of 10:8 raw materials to craftable ones. You need a minimum of 10 to craft materials. You can't do any other denominations. So if you have 23? you're only making 2 batches of craftable mats with 3 left over. Once you craft them, every piece of gear (weapons or armor) has a different base value. This base value give you a level 1 piece of equipment. For instance an iron helmet will cost 5 iron ingots to make a level one. 6 iron ingots will craft a level 4 helmet. 7 will craft a level 6 helmet and from there it goes in level increments of 2 per craftable mat. The materials have a max level pre designed in. For the level ones i think it's 15 or 16.
There are specialty metals that you can use to make your gear look faction specific. For instance, bone makes your gear look like Bosmer gear (Wood Elf). Molybdenum makes your gear look nordic, etc. and you can add gems to the crafting process to give your gear special abilities like +2 to armor value and spell resistance. But the catch with those is that you need to have researched them to use them on that specific piece of equipment. Every piece of gear starts at the rating of common (White titled) even if it has gems crafted into it to give it special stat increases. you need craft leveling items to increase the quality of the creation. For instance smithing from common to uncommon (green titled) will require grinding stones. Each grinding stone used will give you a 20% increased probability of succeeding in increasing the quality of the equipment. if you fail at increasing the quality, the piece of equipment disappears as well as it's gems and materials.
For combat it feels just as fluid as it did in all of the other games. There is no more dual wielding magic/weapons like there was in Skyrim as far as i can tell and if you're not paying attention too much, the other players just seem like other inhabitants of the universe which makes for a unique individual experience when you want to play alone and an equally unique group experience when walking through tows.
Overall i would strongly recommend this game, even in it's beta state, to anyone whose a fan of the Elder Scrolls series and willing to pay a $15/month sub fee after purchasing the game. I'm sure we will get years of entertainment out of the game so long as we continue to Support it for Bethesda.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Game Review: To The Moon
So where do i start about To The Moon? Well, i honestly have to say that i wasn't quite sure how good the game was going to be just by looking at the screenshots that were provided to me on the steam page. I wasn't sure if it was going to be a Final Fantasy 2 meets Prince of Persia style game or what because the screen shots given don't really give too much away. And neither will i except for giving you a brief synopsis as well as a description of some of the gameplay bundled in with my overall review.
To The Moon is a classic 2D rpg with forced perspective. ALL of the controls can be summarized in 9 different keys/buttons: The left mouse, the arrow keys and the WASD keys... in that order. The developers, Freebird Games seemed to realize that in order to make a game of this graphical simplicity work really well for them they needed to keep the controls deadly simple. Everything is intuitive to a T which is necessary since this game is so literally story driven.
Story is everything in ths game and i would like to emphasize this point. If you're not one to do a lot of reading in the text box devision or if you're just looking for another game to spend $10 bucks on and troll your way through expecting enjoyment, you should probably stop reading here because no amount of anything i say or do will make this game pleasurable for you. You really need to be willing to sit down, have zero combat and read everything for this game to be a pleasurable experience.
So enough of the fore-warnings. What is this game about? Well, in a way, the title says it all. What way is that? Probably not the one you're thinking of, and it's definitely not the reason you think it is until you're about 2/3rds the way through the game. Basically you play as a pair of employees from a company that specializes in "granting wishes" to people who are a few days from dead via the manipulation of memories. As this not-so-dynamic duo, you receive a new client who's wish is to go to the moon, and the entire game is the story of not only how you achieve that wish for the client, but also about the clients life, and how even the smallest things can leave a huge print on our souls. So large that they can never be erased.
I was seriously sucked into this game. it took me roughly 8 hours to complete which seems like a short time but to sit down and start playing then finish the game without even so much as getting up to move is the test of an amazing game. And even with that short of a play time, i was able to attach myself emotionally to every character in the story, and i experienced genuine emotion for them as they went through their own arcs.
SO, to anyone who is reading this looking for a reason to buy or not buy this game, i'm telling you right now, it's worth the 10 dollars on steam that it's going for right now, it's definitely worth whatever discounted price it's at when you read this. Buy it, play it, cry a little, get pissed off a little, and get some new material that will make you seriously question the print that you have left on the lives of others as well as the prints that people have left on you.
To The Moon is a classic 2D rpg with forced perspective. ALL of the controls can be summarized in 9 different keys/buttons: The left mouse, the arrow keys and the WASD keys... in that order. The developers, Freebird Games seemed to realize that in order to make a game of this graphical simplicity work really well for them they needed to keep the controls deadly simple. Everything is intuitive to a T which is necessary since this game is so literally story driven.
Story is everything in ths game and i would like to emphasize this point. If you're not one to do a lot of reading in the text box devision or if you're just looking for another game to spend $10 bucks on and troll your way through expecting enjoyment, you should probably stop reading here because no amount of anything i say or do will make this game pleasurable for you. You really need to be willing to sit down, have zero combat and read everything for this game to be a pleasurable experience.
So enough of the fore-warnings. What is this game about? Well, in a way, the title says it all. What way is that? Probably not the one you're thinking of, and it's definitely not the reason you think it is until you're about 2/3rds the way through the game. Basically you play as a pair of employees from a company that specializes in "granting wishes" to people who are a few days from dead via the manipulation of memories. As this not-so-dynamic duo, you receive a new client who's wish is to go to the moon, and the entire game is the story of not only how you achieve that wish for the client, but also about the clients life, and how even the smallest things can leave a huge print on our souls. So large that they can never be erased.
I was seriously sucked into this game. it took me roughly 8 hours to complete which seems like a short time but to sit down and start playing then finish the game without even so much as getting up to move is the test of an amazing game. And even with that short of a play time, i was able to attach myself emotionally to every character in the story, and i experienced genuine emotion for them as they went through their own arcs.
SO, to anyone who is reading this looking for a reason to buy or not buy this game, i'm telling you right now, it's worth the 10 dollars on steam that it's going for right now, it's definitely worth whatever discounted price it's at when you read this. Buy it, play it, cry a little, get pissed off a little, and get some new material that will make you seriously question the print that you have left on the lives of others as well as the prints that people have left on you.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
The Linux Discussion: What happens to Windows
Recently i've been experiencing some customer woes of using a windows machine. I have to admit i'm growing really tired of the Windows Platform, i've been growing tired of it since windows 7 and the new Windows 8.1 really isn't helping much at all. But why am i do i have so many problems with the Windows Platform? It's their ruin everything and make people believe that what they currently have isn't good enough anymore mentality. I understand that for a company to survive it needs to sell product, don't get me wrong and i'm not slighting them for doing that, But the recent release schedule for Microsoft products is getting dangerously close to the release schedules for NFL games for most consoles. In the year 2012 it was buy NFL 2012!! now with enhanced graphics and all new players! In 2013 it was Buy NFL 2013!! Now with even enhanced-er graphics and all new players! Now you can play the water boy! and for 2014 they've got enhanced-er-er graphics and the ability to launder your uniforms or something like that.
Why do people continue to buy the newest NFL Game every single year? the strategies and maneuvers in football have hardly changed since the 80's or 90's. the only thing really that's been updated are the people on the team and the uniforms. It's the same Thing with Microsoft and Windows lately. Microsoft hit a boom with Windows 98, rode that wave until they skid to a halt on the beach and then swam back out with XP and rode that wave even further (Seeing as XP isn't going to be officially de-comissioned until April 15th, 2014 which will mark the end of it's 13-year run on the market. most of that being the number one operating system even over some other Windows Platforms like the horrific mistake we call Vista). But Right around the time that XP popularity was beginning to wane Bill Gates stepped down as CEO and went into early retirement which is where Steve Ballmer stepped in and became the new CEO. And now it's all about re-releasing the same crap with a couple new features every year.
The last brand new operating system to have come out of Microsoft was Vista. No really, look it up, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 are essentially to Vista what Puma, Jaguar and Panther were to OS X. Just the next three updates. the x.1, x.2, x.3 of Windows Vista. Yet what does Microsoft do? Well, much like the NFL Industry, they charge full price for the product again, and they remove all of the old stock off the shelves. Why? Because they don't want you to use the old stuff. In their mind they're completely done with that already. They want you to use the new and improved stuff so that your computers are walking billboards of product placement.
So to curb this problem i've switched to linux which has raised an interesting question in my head. Because the very popular and very free operating system Ubuntu, has a graphical user interface (GUI) that could be the spiritual sister to Windows 8 if Linux liked to rip people off. Whats the only problem with Linux that i can find to date? well... software's a little bit harder to install and there's no native game support which is a massive killer for the operating system.
Mainstream game companies need to make the switch over to Linux, which companies like Valve are doing (with their introduction of the Steam box which runs a completely open source completely free version of linux designed by Valve for their machines and their DDP). Once more companies follow in the footsteps that Valve are placing there for everyone to see then linux should gain traction and then Microsoft will be a thing of the past. It will just be another company like Apple: Foo-foo labels and overpriced shit.
By the way? if you're not agreeing with me, i might have some bad news for you: If Valve's SteamBox hits it off well then it may come to reality. Granted Microsoft support will always be a thing with them, but if a massive player base makes a paradigm shift over to a linux based DDP console? I promise you, you'll see companies flocking to linux like flies to shit.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Star Ruler and other related Drivel
Hey everyone, i just wanted to deviate from the Lore Master series a smidge while i travel for my summer vacation and i wnated to take a little time to share something truly beautiful with you and also get some input from everyone.
Recently (and by recently i mean at LEAST a year ago) i discovered a ground breaking 4X RTS game called Star Ruler which not only claims to have a massive amount of customizability, difficulty and scale, it provides. The game was developed by very little known Indie development studio Blind Mind Studios and their motley crew of 4 permanent employees and 4 community contributors.Basically it offers the users a chance to start their own space empire from the ground up.
When you start a new game, you begin with 1 planet to call your own and a beginning to 1-4 hours of the most intense, addicting and entertaining video game experience i've ever had. But there's a lot of finite mechanics that aren't explained very well at all through the tutorial series even after the 4 updates that have been released for the game which makes the game's difficulty curve extremely difficult to overcome. This also in turn ends up turning down thousands of people who have spent their hard earned cash on the game. But such a great game that was developed as a first project by such a small and unknown studio really deserves as many people playing it as humanly possible.
So onto my reader input question of the day so to speak. Would any of you be interested in my writing a very, VERY in-depth series on all the nooks and crannies that i have discovered in Star Ruler thus far?... go ahead and leave your response in the comments section below and i'll see you next time!
Recently (and by recently i mean at LEAST a year ago) i discovered a ground breaking 4X RTS game called Star Ruler which not only claims to have a massive amount of customizability, difficulty and scale, it provides. The game was developed by very little known Indie development studio Blind Mind Studios and their motley crew of 4 permanent employees and 4 community contributors.Basically it offers the users a chance to start their own space empire from the ground up.
When you start a new game, you begin with 1 planet to call your own and a beginning to 1-4 hours of the most intense, addicting and entertaining video game experience i've ever had. But there's a lot of finite mechanics that aren't explained very well at all through the tutorial series even after the 4 updates that have been released for the game which makes the game's difficulty curve extremely difficult to overcome. This also in turn ends up turning down thousands of people who have spent their hard earned cash on the game. But such a great game that was developed as a first project by such a small and unknown studio really deserves as many people playing it as humanly possible.
So onto my reader input question of the day so to speak. Would any of you be interested in my writing a very, VERY in-depth series on all the nooks and crannies that i have discovered in Star Ruler thus far?... go ahead and leave your response in the comments section below and i'll see you next time!
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Lore Master: Half Life
in the last half of the 20th century there were two top secret companies experimenting with fringe science. One was titled Aperture Science and the other Black Mesa. These two large companies were competing for a government contract to create a means of teleporting soldiers from one location to another. Aperture had made a break through with the invention of their portal gun but were determined to make it the best they could in the time they had so they initiated a testing facility in which they would take human clones and run them through a series of tests with the portal gun to make sure that the guns were at optimum performing efficiency.
Black Mesa however believed in the theory that there are unlimited parallel universes to our own and that if they were to make a conduit from one to another, in essence, the user could travel a great distance in our universe by traveling a small distance in the other, parallel universe (as i understand it). Through extensive testing they accidentally stumbled across a certain element that had a similar color to gold or brass but had a similar texture and crystaline structure to obsidian which allowed them to open small portals to a "waiting room" universe so to speak. This universe was then dubbed Xen (Pronounced zen).
Black Mesa hired on a new Theoretical Physicist who was a fresh MIT grad named Gordon Freeman who was then placed on the Hazardous Materials Unit and was trained in the fine art of pushing carts of the Crystaline test subjects into the generator which creates the portals to Xen. By the control of a higher being known only as the G-Man swaps one of the purest test subjects Black Mesa had found with a tainted sample. Thus influencing a resonance cascade allowing all of the residents of Xen to flood into our universe effectively infesting the entire Black Mesa facility. Gordon freeman being fitted in a Hazardous Environment Suit Mark IV is the only one in the vicinity of the test chamber to survive.
Escaping the test chamber it becomes his primary goal to reach the surface to call the outside world for help of any form. However the Government sensing that their top secret project is getting out of control, sent in a Hazardous Environment Combat Unit (or HECU) to clean up the mess. Shortly before gordon reaches the surface, the HECUs begin to swarm Black Mesa slaughtering anything that moved and wasn't wearing an HECUniform. Gordon manages to evade these people and on many cases outsmart them leading to massive casualties and loss of large equipment such as tanks, artillery turrets, and even helicopters. Gordon is then informed by scientists who had survived by hiding in the worst of elements that in order to send for help Gordon needs to launch a satellite into orbit.
After launching the satellite into orbit Gordon proceeds to make his way to a sector of the Black Mesa Facility called Lambda Core where he reactivated a largest testing chamber on the facility. With the assistance of Dr. Issac Kleiner, he is successfully sent into Xen at the risk of opening a second, even larger resonance cascade. In Xen, Gordon defeats the leader of the assaulting forces, Nilhilanth. Nilhilanth, unbeknownst to Gordon or anyone at Black Mesa, was created by a species known as the Combine (probably because they're notorious for gaining power by fusing their DNA with other superior species to make super races).
The Mysterious G-Man then plucks Gordon Freeman out from our universe into what seems to be a dimensional observation room and forces Gordon into working for the G-Man and his superiors. Gordon is put into cryo-stasis for an estimated twenty years after which he is pulled out again by the G-Man and told that his hour has once again come. This time he is placed in one of the last cities of the human race known only as City 17, located somewhere in the heart of the former USSR. The combine have invaded the human home world in full force and seized control of Earth in 7 days, then proceeded to create the human super soldiers which became a mirror image to the Stazi of the 1960's.
Gordon accidentally runs into Barney Calhoun, a befriended security guard from Black Mesa who guides him the Dr. Kleiner's lab. Dr. Kleiner is about to trade him off to another Scientist from Black Mesa, Dr. Eli Vance, when the newly inaugurated teleportation technology goes awry sending Gordon on yet another epic quest against the entire combine military. Eventually gordon makes it by foot to Dr. Vance's laboratory which was amusingly dubbed Black Mesa East and he is then forced to make his way to the Citadel, the control tower which looms high over City 17. There he destroyed the primary reactor to the Citadel causing a cascading series of explosions which destroy the top half of the Citadel.
The G-man attempts to pull Gordon back into stasis but is prevented by the now liberated Vortigaunt who were enslaved under Nilhilanth. The combine that are now in terror that one human could best their entire army are in full retreat mode and open a massive portal to retreat through above the remains of the citadel. With Dr. Vance's daughter, Alyx, Gordon plunges back into the Citadel's writhing remains and stabilizes the secondary energy core which would have wiped out the better part of City 17 but only to delay it's breeching for a short period of time. The dynamic trio (Gordon, Alyx, and Barney) rally as many citizens of City 17 as possible in the time permitted and gets them safely out of City 17. Gordon and Alyx board the last train out of the city and are derailed by the explosion of the Citadel.
After waking from the explosion Gordon finds himself in an unknown part of the USSR countryside. meeting up with Alyx, they discover that what used to be the Citadel and about 500 miles in every direction surrounding that, is nothing but a giant crater. Alyx, knowing of an emergency research facility run by a Dr. Magnusson leads Gordon through the forested areas which are littered with remnants of the Combine occupation forces and members of the human rebel faction (which receive their sense of direction from the liberated Vortigaunt). Once they reach Dr. Magnusson's laboratory, their objective is to launch a second satelite into space to communicate with the satellite that Gordon had originally launched into space thus creating a means of locking the combine out of earth for good.
After a long and dangerous battle, the satellite was successfully launched into orbit and communications were successful. The final piece to the puzzle was a ship located in the antarctic that was originally owned by Aperture Science called the Borealis. It's contents were rumored to be the long since lost portal technology which was shipped away from Aperture Science's testing facilities some time in the 70's. However right before Gordon and Alyx set off for the Borealis, Eli Vance dies at the influence of the G-Man causing Alyx to be strongly dissuaded from going on the hunt for the Borealis. The rest of this story is yet to be written and this blog will resurface when it does.
Have you played the Half-Life series? If so, what did you think of this post?
Next Up: Fallout
Black Mesa however believed in the theory that there are unlimited parallel universes to our own and that if they were to make a conduit from one to another, in essence, the user could travel a great distance in our universe by traveling a small distance in the other, parallel universe (as i understand it). Through extensive testing they accidentally stumbled across a certain element that had a similar color to gold or brass but had a similar texture and crystaline structure to obsidian which allowed them to open small portals to a "waiting room" universe so to speak. This universe was then dubbed Xen (Pronounced zen).
Black Mesa hired on a new Theoretical Physicist who was a fresh MIT grad named Gordon Freeman who was then placed on the Hazardous Materials Unit and was trained in the fine art of pushing carts of the Crystaline test subjects into the generator which creates the portals to Xen. By the control of a higher being known only as the G-Man swaps one of the purest test subjects Black Mesa had found with a tainted sample. Thus influencing a resonance cascade allowing all of the residents of Xen to flood into our universe effectively infesting the entire Black Mesa facility. Gordon freeman being fitted in a Hazardous Environment Suit Mark IV is the only one in the vicinity of the test chamber to survive.
Escaping the test chamber it becomes his primary goal to reach the surface to call the outside world for help of any form. However the Government sensing that their top secret project is getting out of control, sent in a Hazardous Environment Combat Unit (or HECU) to clean up the mess. Shortly before gordon reaches the surface, the HECUs begin to swarm Black Mesa slaughtering anything that moved and wasn't wearing an HECUniform. Gordon manages to evade these people and on many cases outsmart them leading to massive casualties and loss of large equipment such as tanks, artillery turrets, and even helicopters. Gordon is then informed by scientists who had survived by hiding in the worst of elements that in order to send for help Gordon needs to launch a satellite into orbit.
After launching the satellite into orbit Gordon proceeds to make his way to a sector of the Black Mesa Facility called Lambda Core where he reactivated a largest testing chamber on the facility. With the assistance of Dr. Issac Kleiner, he is successfully sent into Xen at the risk of opening a second, even larger resonance cascade. In Xen, Gordon defeats the leader of the assaulting forces, Nilhilanth. Nilhilanth, unbeknownst to Gordon or anyone at Black Mesa, was created by a species known as the Combine (probably because they're notorious for gaining power by fusing their DNA with other superior species to make super races).
The Mysterious G-Man then plucks Gordon Freeman out from our universe into what seems to be a dimensional observation room and forces Gordon into working for the G-Man and his superiors. Gordon is put into cryo-stasis for an estimated twenty years after which he is pulled out again by the G-Man and told that his hour has once again come. This time he is placed in one of the last cities of the human race known only as City 17, located somewhere in the heart of the former USSR. The combine have invaded the human home world in full force and seized control of Earth in 7 days, then proceeded to create the human super soldiers which became a mirror image to the Stazi of the 1960's.
Gordon accidentally runs into Barney Calhoun, a befriended security guard from Black Mesa who guides him the Dr. Kleiner's lab. Dr. Kleiner is about to trade him off to another Scientist from Black Mesa, Dr. Eli Vance, when the newly inaugurated teleportation technology goes awry sending Gordon on yet another epic quest against the entire combine military. Eventually gordon makes it by foot to Dr. Vance's laboratory which was amusingly dubbed Black Mesa East and he is then forced to make his way to the Citadel, the control tower which looms high over City 17. There he destroyed the primary reactor to the Citadel causing a cascading series of explosions which destroy the top half of the Citadel.
The G-man attempts to pull Gordon back into stasis but is prevented by the now liberated Vortigaunt who were enslaved under Nilhilanth. The combine that are now in terror that one human could best their entire army are in full retreat mode and open a massive portal to retreat through above the remains of the citadel. With Dr. Vance's daughter, Alyx, Gordon plunges back into the Citadel's writhing remains and stabilizes the secondary energy core which would have wiped out the better part of City 17 but only to delay it's breeching for a short period of time. The dynamic trio (Gordon, Alyx, and Barney) rally as many citizens of City 17 as possible in the time permitted and gets them safely out of City 17. Gordon and Alyx board the last train out of the city and are derailed by the explosion of the Citadel.
After waking from the explosion Gordon finds himself in an unknown part of the USSR countryside. meeting up with Alyx, they discover that what used to be the Citadel and about 500 miles in every direction surrounding that, is nothing but a giant crater. Alyx, knowing of an emergency research facility run by a Dr. Magnusson leads Gordon through the forested areas which are littered with remnants of the Combine occupation forces and members of the human rebel faction (which receive their sense of direction from the liberated Vortigaunt). Once they reach Dr. Magnusson's laboratory, their objective is to launch a second satelite into space to communicate with the satellite that Gordon had originally launched into space thus creating a means of locking the combine out of earth for good.
After a long and dangerous battle, the satellite was successfully launched into orbit and communications were successful. The final piece to the puzzle was a ship located in the antarctic that was originally owned by Aperture Science called the Borealis. It's contents were rumored to be the long since lost portal technology which was shipped away from Aperture Science's testing facilities some time in the 70's. However right before Gordon and Alyx set off for the Borealis, Eli Vance dies at the influence of the G-Man causing Alyx to be strongly dissuaded from going on the hunt for the Borealis. The rest of this story is yet to be written and this blog will resurface when it does.
Have you played the Half-Life series? If so, what did you think of this post?
Next Up: Fallout
Friday, May 18, 2012
Lore Master: Deus Ex
!!!WARNING!!! This article contains spoilers to the video game series "Deus Ex"
In the not-so-distant future the technology of the world will go sprinting past us faster then we will ever dream of being able to keep up with it today. Corporations will rise from the ground seemingly overnight and their regime will be that you work for them to make a living or you don't live at all.
Our story starts off with a certain evil individual named Bob Page. A shadow of a man, he is the head of a top secret underground syndicate dedicated on putting their own agenda through the cracks of society in an attempt to mold the society that they want.
Cybernetic implants had been out for several years now first being invented by an individual named Hugh Darrow in a case of necessity is the father of invention. Since then, several corporations scattered throughout the world picked up the technology and pushed it to it's limits in almost every field, medicine, athletics, fashion and (as none of them will openly admit to the press) military.
Bob Page being part of an underground operation with an agenda to control the world governments through use of the newly invented cybernetics technology recruited a lone scientist named Meghan Reed into her regime. Meghan Reed worked for the largest American cybernetics firm called Sarif Industries, in an extensive study to try to resolve rejection symptoms with cybernetic augmentations, an issue which had quickly began to plague the world.
Bob Page located "the perfect specimen". A human being who's DNA would naturally be perfectly compatible with cybernetic implants. Making rejection sickness a thing of the past. Meghan Reed was tasked with getting close to this specimen via any means possible. The specimen's name was Adam Jensen.
Meghan became deep lovers with Adam, they had their turmoils, arguments and an eventual divorce. They still managed to stay friends though (whether for genuine feelings or because Meghan Reed still had work to do is unknown) and Meghan eventually got Adam a security job at Sarif Industries.
This set the stage for Act 1. On the day preceding the release of Sarif Industries newest discovery, how to remove rejection sickness from the face of the earth, Bob Page moved. Running commands down the line to convolute the tracks leading directly to him, he ordered a siege on Sarif Industries. The mercenaries hired to do the job slaughtered hundred of employees, kidnapped Meghan, and nearly killed Adam Jensen. Adam was fitted with the latest cybernetic augmentations and proceeded to hunt down Meghan until he finally found her in a structure built by Hugh Darrow called Panchea designed to seize control of every cybernetically enhanced human on the planet and drive them insane to the point of homocidal.
Meghan escaped Panchea with the help of Adam, still unaware of her alliances, and destroyed panchea. Leaving the world to figure out for themselves whether or not Cybernetic enhancement was good for the human race or not. Through the turbulence of these events two new organizations was formed, the National Secessionist Forces(NSF). A coalition fanatically against bio-augmentation, who in an effort to make a statement decapitated the statue of liberty, and the United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition (UNATCO), an anti-terrorist group designed to combat the NSF and other smaller terrorist syndicates.
UNATCO was lead by previous FBI agent Joseph Manderley, who was secretly in the pocket of Bob Page. Several years after the event's of Adam, society had recovered from the devastation that Hugh Darrow unleashed on the world and the technology for bio-enhancement has advanced to where cybernetic augmentations are nonexistent. All bio-enhancements are now granted to a user by means of microscopic robots. The only telltale sign that users are augmented are sharp blue veins that never disappear.
One fateful day, a UNATCO agent named Paul Denton manged to get his little brother, JC Denton, a spot on the force. After a raid on the NSF in Grand Central Park, Paul uncovers evidence linking Joseph Manderley to a Bob Page's regime. Upon approaching his brother about this, JC Denton taken through a rabbit hole and eventually uncovers Bob Page's organization and kills Bob Page. This is however not before is it revealed the JC and Paul are clones bred to be the perfect cyber soldiers (using Adam's DNA to breed the no doubt). Bob Page, before he was killed was able to release one final, supposedly perfect clone from the Adam Jensen DNA string named Walter Simons. JC Denton destroys Walter Simons, and retreats within the catacombs of Area 51 and placed into frozen storage for several years. When awoken by Alex Denton, a clone, several generations later from Walter Simons, JC Denton continues on his quest to stop the cycle of violence by killing Alex. Unfortunately he fails in this endeavor and the cycle carries on.
What did you think of this episode?
Have you played the Deus Ex series? If so, how accurate do you believe this post was?
Next Episode: Battlestar Galactica
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Lore Master: The History of EVE Online
In the beginning, in a magical land called Earth, the human race had finally discovered space travel. The year was 1961 and the vessel was the Freedom 7. This successful space flight sparked the larger-scale curiosity of "what else is out there?" flash forward about a hundred years and mankind discovers the profitability and efficiency of interstellar mining. Bringing into the world a wide variety of much needed minerals and even some foreign ones. It was not long after this discovery that the humans were able to develop a means of opening micro-wormholes for their ships to go through. This allowed them to travel much larger distances in much shorter times. By this time the human race was already scattered across the entire galaxy like pollen in the wind.
Large corporations began selling out the uninhabited planets for money and life became a living hell for everyone. Galaxy-wide poverty, Sometimes stuck on foul planets with Foul atmospheres causing deadly side effects and the only people well to do where sitting at the top of the corporate ladders.
Then, one fateful day, We came across a naturally occuring wormhole. A phenomenon that had long since been proven to exist but never actually seen before. People were curious as to where the other end of the worm hole would be. So like any logical society, we sent probes to scout out whatever was on the other side, come back and report. When they came back it was announced that there was an entirely new galaxy, unexplored and unpolluted by corporate greed. The wormhole was then duely titled EVE. as it represented a beacon of hope, a fresh slate for the people of the milky way.
Colonization of the new galaxy began almost immediately. Civilian, military, and corporate fleets all gathered together and crossed into the new galaxy that had been dubbed Tranquility. A short bit of time passed and then something terrible and unexpected happened: EVE closed. Leaving all of the settlers alone with hardly any resources, no advanced technologies and no where to retreat to. All of the colonists began to settle on planets that they could find that were ideal for life. In the beginning there were dozens of smaller colonies scattered through out the galaxy just like there were in the milky way. However there were 3 large colonies that would shape the galaxy in the time to come. The Amarr, The Gallente, and The Jovians.
The Amarr, a colony of religious fanatics, strongly believed that they were gods chosen children and that it was their divine right to conquer the entire galaxy and claim it in their name. They were a strict heirarchy, always led by an emperor or empress who was fitted with old and archaic implants to extend their life out to approximately 600 years.
The Gallente was the polar opposite of the Amarr. A democratic society that strongly believed in personal freedoms and individual rights. This disagreement would cause conflicts later down the line which reshape the galaxy.
The Jovians were an isolated peoples. Who believed that the only important thing in the galaxy was information. As such they strove to be the most technologically advanced all the time and devised ways of bringing ears into the core of all other governments. The Jovians themselves, being on the forefront of technology, always leaped at a chance to mutilate their bodies. Of all the human colonies, the Jovians are the least human, in biological structure and in appearance. Their technology is often sold to other colonies since it far surpasses that of anything else ever created.
The first note worthy article after the close of EVE was the rediscovery of Warp. Amarrians were the first of all the colonies to rediscover warp technology and as such it fueled their religious fanaticism and they began to conquer the galaxy. Inside out, they assimilated smaller colonies, turning them into salves and justifying with religion. By the time the Amarrians were ready to fight the Gallente, the Gallente had amassed a noteworthy fleet of warships and the two races had at it in conflict. Both of the colonies were equally matched in strength and for every powerful laser volley that the Amarrians unleashed the Gallentians unleashed just as many rounds from their rail guns and gauss cannons.
After several grueling months of stalemate, the Amarrians decided to withdraw seeing no reasonable way to penetrate the Gallente borders. Unfortunately, the damage was done and the Gallentians were out for blood. The Amarr decided next that god willed them to show their all powerful might against the Jovians. So they assembled a fleet of their 200 most middle-grade ships (oh the ego) and sent them warping straight into Jovian space. However, since the Jovians were so interested in information more than anything else, their spies in the Amarrian government tipped them off on the attack; telling them vital information such as where, when and how many. So as the Amarrians entered the first system and prepared to conquer the first planet, a Jovian fleet of noticeably smaller size jumped in and turned 90% of the Amarrian fleet to rubble. The rest, that did not face their demise that day, fled for their lifes and were turned into slaves along with their families.
The Amarr, having been insulted decided to rally a fleet twice as big and warp it in. That fleet also met the same end as the first. Behind the scenes of these two battles, the Gallentians were secretly arming small factions of slaves within the Amarrian government. Encouraging them to Coup and gain their freedom after the last Jovian Assault. One of the most notable slave factions were the Minmatar.
The Minmatar were one of the first colonies to be assimilated by the Amarrians having no first line defense against the Amarrian navy. By their free nature, they had a very tribal society with very low-grade technology. They were also the largest group of slaves to the Amarrian empire. Once the Amarrians had run away from the Jovians with their tails between their legs a second time, they were left weak and underpowered. At that moment the Minmatar rose up and fought their way to freedom. With the help of the Gallente and the significantly bruised muscles and ego of the Amarrian fleet, The Minmatar managed to get across the galaxy and settled down at the polar opposite side of the galaxy from the Amarr. Not all the Minmatar were freed though, about 2/3rds of the Minmatar slaves under Amarrian rule are still that way to day.
This power play that the Gallente made towards the Amarrians had serious backlash within their own government. As the Gallente Federation was not unlike the Amarrian Oligarchy in that it was many colonies under 1 name (except the Gallente colonies were actually WILLING to be under the Gallente name) there was a lot of diversity in the people and colonies that united under the flag of Personal Freedoms. However, there was one colony that was merely putting up with the personal freedom concept and when the Gallente Federation made the move to arm the Minmatar slaves, they could not take being united with the Gallente any longer. This group called themselves the Caldari. The Caldari started an insurection within the Gallente Federation and seceded from the federation. Placing themselves on the polar opposite side of the galaxy as the Gallentians.
The Caldari formed a more favorable government system which is run and rulled by big corporations. The government itself was run like a corporation and it's board of directors were smaller corporations and controlling them several smaller corporations and the whole matryoshka doll of a government continued further and further down the rabbit hole. Everyone in the Caldari Colony is placed into a corporation and if they aspire to be great and are given the tools, they can live well but rejectors of the system usually live (for a short time) and die in poverty for the rest of their lives.
Flashing forward 400 years, Tranquility is now at peace and has been for a while, however that does not mean that the colonies are not plotting each others destruction. Since the early times, everyone has rediscovered warp technology as well as cloning and memory transfer. There is a new, special breed of pilots who roam the land and are born by the flocks to the different colonies called Capsuleers. Contained in a amniotic sac inside a pod no more than 2 meters tall, they're cybernetically enhanced to control almost every function of a ship with nothing but their thoughts. This is EVE.
Large corporations began selling out the uninhabited planets for money and life became a living hell for everyone. Galaxy-wide poverty, Sometimes stuck on foul planets with Foul atmospheres causing deadly side effects and the only people well to do where sitting at the top of the corporate ladders.
Then, one fateful day, We came across a naturally occuring wormhole. A phenomenon that had long since been proven to exist but never actually seen before. People were curious as to where the other end of the worm hole would be. So like any logical society, we sent probes to scout out whatever was on the other side, come back and report. When they came back it was announced that there was an entirely new galaxy, unexplored and unpolluted by corporate greed. The wormhole was then duely titled EVE. as it represented a beacon of hope, a fresh slate for the people of the milky way.
Colonization of the new galaxy began almost immediately. Civilian, military, and corporate fleets all gathered together and crossed into the new galaxy that had been dubbed Tranquility. A short bit of time passed and then something terrible and unexpected happened: EVE closed. Leaving all of the settlers alone with hardly any resources, no advanced technologies and no where to retreat to. All of the colonists began to settle on planets that they could find that were ideal for life. In the beginning there were dozens of smaller colonies scattered through out the galaxy just like there were in the milky way. However there were 3 large colonies that would shape the galaxy in the time to come. The Amarr, The Gallente, and The Jovians.
The Amarr, a colony of religious fanatics, strongly believed that they were gods chosen children and that it was their divine right to conquer the entire galaxy and claim it in their name. They were a strict heirarchy, always led by an emperor or empress who was fitted with old and archaic implants to extend their life out to approximately 600 years.
The Gallente was the polar opposite of the Amarr. A democratic society that strongly believed in personal freedoms and individual rights. This disagreement would cause conflicts later down the line which reshape the galaxy.
The Jovians were an isolated peoples. Who believed that the only important thing in the galaxy was information. As such they strove to be the most technologically advanced all the time and devised ways of bringing ears into the core of all other governments. The Jovians themselves, being on the forefront of technology, always leaped at a chance to mutilate their bodies. Of all the human colonies, the Jovians are the least human, in biological structure and in appearance. Their technology is often sold to other colonies since it far surpasses that of anything else ever created.
The first note worthy article after the close of EVE was the rediscovery of Warp. Amarrians were the first of all the colonies to rediscover warp technology and as such it fueled their religious fanaticism and they began to conquer the galaxy. Inside out, they assimilated smaller colonies, turning them into salves and justifying with religion. By the time the Amarrians were ready to fight the Gallente, the Gallente had amassed a noteworthy fleet of warships and the two races had at it in conflict. Both of the colonies were equally matched in strength and for every powerful laser volley that the Amarrians unleashed the Gallentians unleashed just as many rounds from their rail guns and gauss cannons.
After several grueling months of stalemate, the Amarrians decided to withdraw seeing no reasonable way to penetrate the Gallente borders. Unfortunately, the damage was done and the Gallentians were out for blood. The Amarr decided next that god willed them to show their all powerful might against the Jovians. So they assembled a fleet of their 200 most middle-grade ships (oh the ego) and sent them warping straight into Jovian space. However, since the Jovians were so interested in information more than anything else, their spies in the Amarrian government tipped them off on the attack; telling them vital information such as where, when and how many. So as the Amarrians entered the first system and prepared to conquer the first planet, a Jovian fleet of noticeably smaller size jumped in and turned 90% of the Amarrian fleet to rubble. The rest, that did not face their demise that day, fled for their lifes and were turned into slaves along with their families.
The Amarr, having been insulted decided to rally a fleet twice as big and warp it in. That fleet also met the same end as the first. Behind the scenes of these two battles, the Gallentians were secretly arming small factions of slaves within the Amarrian government. Encouraging them to Coup and gain their freedom after the last Jovian Assault. One of the most notable slave factions were the Minmatar.
The Minmatar were one of the first colonies to be assimilated by the Amarrians having no first line defense against the Amarrian navy. By their free nature, they had a very tribal society with very low-grade technology. They were also the largest group of slaves to the Amarrian empire. Once the Amarrians had run away from the Jovians with their tails between their legs a second time, they were left weak and underpowered. At that moment the Minmatar rose up and fought their way to freedom. With the help of the Gallente and the significantly bruised muscles and ego of the Amarrian fleet, The Minmatar managed to get across the galaxy and settled down at the polar opposite side of the galaxy from the Amarr. Not all the Minmatar were freed though, about 2/3rds of the Minmatar slaves under Amarrian rule are still that way to day.
This power play that the Gallente made towards the Amarrians had serious backlash within their own government. As the Gallente Federation was not unlike the Amarrian Oligarchy in that it was many colonies under 1 name (except the Gallente colonies were actually WILLING to be under the Gallente name) there was a lot of diversity in the people and colonies that united under the flag of Personal Freedoms. However, there was one colony that was merely putting up with the personal freedom concept and when the Gallente Federation made the move to arm the Minmatar slaves, they could not take being united with the Gallente any longer. This group called themselves the Caldari. The Caldari started an insurection within the Gallente Federation and seceded from the federation. Placing themselves on the polar opposite side of the galaxy as the Gallentians.
The Caldari formed a more favorable government system which is run and rulled by big corporations. The government itself was run like a corporation and it's board of directors were smaller corporations and controlling them several smaller corporations and the whole matryoshka doll of a government continued further and further down the rabbit hole. Everyone in the Caldari Colony is placed into a corporation and if they aspire to be great and are given the tools, they can live well but rejectors of the system usually live (for a short time) and die in poverty for the rest of their lives.
Flashing forward 400 years, Tranquility is now at peace and has been for a while, however that does not mean that the colonies are not plotting each others destruction. Since the early times, everyone has rediscovered warp technology as well as cloning and memory transfer. There is a new, special breed of pilots who roam the land and are born by the flocks to the different colonies called Capsuleers. Contained in a amniotic sac inside a pod no more than 2 meters tall, they're cybernetically enhanced to control almost every function of a ship with nothing but their thoughts. This is EVE.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
The Monty Hall Effect
If you've played an Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMO) in the last two years, you've experienced it first hand. MMO's have become almost a plague to the video game market in the past few years starting with the global sensation World of Warcraft.
When MMO's originally came out, it was all about the challenge. It created such a sensation of accomplishment attaining what is referred to within the communities as "end game". End game is simply the point at which you reach the end of the level cap for that MMO and the real fun begins within the MMO as you are forced to work with other people collectively to defeat the real challenges in the game. Games like World War 2 Online, Everquest, and Ultima Online all harnessed this, leveling to end game could be a long (in some cases, years of your life hard spent), and arduous (in some games [Everquest] if you died, you lost all of your gear and in worst case scenarios you even lost levels that took you days to earn) journey which only sweetened the taste of victory once you made it.
It also stepped up the feeling of mortality as when you died it was a seriously significant loss. In some cases, tens to hundreds of thousands of in-game dollars (back before there was such as thing as micro-transactions) and weeks of work in collecting items to craft your armor, earn that money lost, or gain the levels lost. I would like to refer to this group of MMO's as first generation. These were the games that explored the genre first (after MUD's of course) and they were the most difficult to play and the most rewarding. There was no easy way around playing these games and if you were getting to end game it took determination and dedication to keep playing for long periods of time with no breaks.
2nd generation would be your MMO's such as World of Warcraft Vanilla, Everquest 2, and others that came out around the same time. It was roungly from 2004-2007 if i had to make any estimated guesses. I would consider 2nd generation to be the golden era of MMO gaming. It is now long over, just like 1st generation and will never be found again, however it was an amazing time to be part of the MMO movement while it lasted. Originally these games combined the best difficult aspects of generation one while doing away or easing up the negative difficulty aspects of 1st generation. This included things such as the ability to keep all of your equipment and the removal or decreasing of experience lost when you pass away.
2nd generation was not all good though. A lot of the MMO's that came out during 2nd generation either entered the world as what are commonly referred to as Monty Hall games or became Monty Hall games. This all started with Japanese, Korean, and Chinese free-to-play MMO's and the introduction of something called Micro-transactions which we'll get more into later. Most of the blame however is to be placed on the insane popularity that the MMO world had gained due to World of Warcraft's massive success. When World of Warcraft was originally developed and released in 2004, it became an instant success. An extremely large world that buffered entire continents at once, no load screens unless changing from one continent in the world to the other, the world was massive, thousands of quests, deep storylines, plenty of challenge to boot, and awesome looking gear for your players. Not to mention that the difficulty curve grew exponentially as did the strength of your equipment.
As World of Warcraft prepared for it's first ever expansion Burning Crusades it had already reached a player base of well over 8 million unique accounts. We'll call this original 8 million the foundation. The foundation was comprised of old and new players alike. Old players from Everquest who were disgruntled that Sony had them purchase every expansion for EQ1 only to re-release ALL of the content, with an updated graphics engine in one bundle for the price of one game, as well as newcomers to the scene who had heard about the challenge that MMO's had to offer and wanted to try it for themselves. Those who enjoyed the difficulty and accomplishment of reaching end game stayed for it, those who didn't like the challenge left to play something else.
These players who opted out of the foundation didn't leave before sending several written complaints each to Blizzard HQ, mostly saying that it's too hard, unplayable, and unenjoyable. Unfortunately, Bizzard, being desperate for money (WoW was their last ditch effort to keep from closing their doors for good. It was their attempt to roll a hard six) listened to all of these complaints and leveled out the difficulty curve, unbalanced the game to favor popular classes, implemented welfare epics, and made dungeons mindlessly easy. This marked the turning point where Generation 3 begins. Generation 3 is still continuing today and appears to be going steady and becoming more and more popular.
3rd generation MMO's started off with their primary focus on micro-transactions and the true catalyst was World of Warcraft. Towards midlife of World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard incorporated what have been dubbed as Welfare epics. Essentially, it was originally intended to make it so that complete newcomers to the game would have to spend less time between when they hit end-game and when they could start participating in current raids. Essentially all the player would have to do is, play every non-endgame dungeon once every day for a week and he would be fully outfitted in last seasons hottest items.
Coupled with welfare epics, Blizzard also decreased the difficulty curve of getting from start game to end game so significantly that instead of taking several months to hit endgame, a player could do it in about two weeks of playing four hours a day. Other video games, desperately trying to knock world of warcraft off of it's high horse, began popping up, almost xeroxing World of Warcraft with different names, items and worlds all failed swiftly under the giant's feet. Blizzard seeing this and acknowledging that i now had a player base of over 20 million players continued to unbalance the the player classes to the point where certain classes became unplayable and rode the wave of success as far as they could.
Enter late generation 3 MMO's. After so many MMO's had tried and failed at stopping the behemoth that World of Warcraft became, A few 3rd generation MMO's popped up that went back to basics, did their best not to duplicate World of Warcraft and are relatively successful compared to the rest of the graveyard. These games include games like Rift and SWOTR. The rest of the MMO's that failed or were on the verge of failing started a new trend of going free to play and focusing on Microtransactions. This list is dramatically larger now and includes Champions Online, Fallen Earth, Star Trek Online, Aion, Age of Empires Online, All Points Bulletin, and a long slew of others. These have become the modern propagators of the Monty Hall Effect.
In most of the Free to play MMO's their primary mode of earning revenue is by micro-transactions. As such, for the small fee of all your lunch money for a month, you can gain double xp, double cash, double health, mana and all of your stats, and armor that is unbeatable by anything you would normally find in the free world. This encouragement to make microtransactions has tainted the world of MMO's forever. However, those same people who were not part of WoW's foundation buy into it. and people like the ones in WoW's foundation are being to get a bad taste in their mouth because of how bad the world is becoming. So much so that World of Warcraft's subscriptions are back down to below the 10 million mile stone. The first to go were the foundation members who got sick and tired of the game's constant unbalance and lack of difficulty. Then the players who flocked to those attributes are beginning to lose interest because they are just not dedicated players. Period. End of story.
The intervention of Free to play has made it possible for so many MMO's to lay everything out on the table for people to check out, however, the introduction of real money markets in these games have turned them into nothing but monty halls, and money vacuums. There is no such thing as a genuine experience with MMO's now. In Star Trek Online, a player can get from begin game to end game in a weekend. They can purchase ships that have extra, better features than the standard issue ships and Cryptic is just riding the wave. Making no attempts to add any content. All Points Bulletin started as a pay to play with one of the first real, total real money markets meaning that you could buy ingame money for real money. Eve online, which started as a free to play, now has a legal trade network which is like Ebay where players can pay other players for game time, characters and ships.
My astonishment when people are actually willing to pay real money for digital items that will be gone faster than you can buy lunch is impalpable and i am further and further dissuaded from playing MMO's every day when i see the focus change from making a genuinely fun game to making a game that will reach out and grab hold of the first credit card it can then hold on for dear life. What's your take? have you ever played an MMO? Have you ever experienced the Monty Hall effect first hand? And how do you feel about it?
When MMO's originally came out, it was all about the challenge. It created such a sensation of accomplishment attaining what is referred to within the communities as "end game". End game is simply the point at which you reach the end of the level cap for that MMO and the real fun begins within the MMO as you are forced to work with other people collectively to defeat the real challenges in the game. Games like World War 2 Online, Everquest, and Ultima Online all harnessed this, leveling to end game could be a long (in some cases, years of your life hard spent), and arduous (in some games [Everquest] if you died, you lost all of your gear and in worst case scenarios you even lost levels that took you days to earn) journey which only sweetened the taste of victory once you made it.
It also stepped up the feeling of mortality as when you died it was a seriously significant loss. In some cases, tens to hundreds of thousands of in-game dollars (back before there was such as thing as micro-transactions) and weeks of work in collecting items to craft your armor, earn that money lost, or gain the levels lost. I would like to refer to this group of MMO's as first generation. These were the games that explored the genre first (after MUD's of course) and they were the most difficult to play and the most rewarding. There was no easy way around playing these games and if you were getting to end game it took determination and dedication to keep playing for long periods of time with no breaks.
2nd generation would be your MMO's such as World of Warcraft Vanilla, Everquest 2, and others that came out around the same time. It was roungly from 2004-2007 if i had to make any estimated guesses. I would consider 2nd generation to be the golden era of MMO gaming. It is now long over, just like 1st generation and will never be found again, however it was an amazing time to be part of the MMO movement while it lasted. Originally these games combined the best difficult aspects of generation one while doing away or easing up the negative difficulty aspects of 1st generation. This included things such as the ability to keep all of your equipment and the removal or decreasing of experience lost when you pass away.
2nd generation was not all good though. A lot of the MMO's that came out during 2nd generation either entered the world as what are commonly referred to as Monty Hall games or became Monty Hall games. This all started with Japanese, Korean, and Chinese free-to-play MMO's and the introduction of something called Micro-transactions which we'll get more into later. Most of the blame however is to be placed on the insane popularity that the MMO world had gained due to World of Warcraft's massive success. When World of Warcraft was originally developed and released in 2004, it became an instant success. An extremely large world that buffered entire continents at once, no load screens unless changing from one continent in the world to the other, the world was massive, thousands of quests, deep storylines, plenty of challenge to boot, and awesome looking gear for your players. Not to mention that the difficulty curve grew exponentially as did the strength of your equipment.
As World of Warcraft prepared for it's first ever expansion Burning Crusades it had already reached a player base of well over 8 million unique accounts. We'll call this original 8 million the foundation. The foundation was comprised of old and new players alike. Old players from Everquest who were disgruntled that Sony had them purchase every expansion for EQ1 only to re-release ALL of the content, with an updated graphics engine in one bundle for the price of one game, as well as newcomers to the scene who had heard about the challenge that MMO's had to offer and wanted to try it for themselves. Those who enjoyed the difficulty and accomplishment of reaching end game stayed for it, those who didn't like the challenge left to play something else.
These players who opted out of the foundation didn't leave before sending several written complaints each to Blizzard HQ, mostly saying that it's too hard, unplayable, and unenjoyable. Unfortunately, Bizzard, being desperate for money (WoW was their last ditch effort to keep from closing their doors for good. It was their attempt to roll a hard six) listened to all of these complaints and leveled out the difficulty curve, unbalanced the game to favor popular classes, implemented welfare epics, and made dungeons mindlessly easy. This marked the turning point where Generation 3 begins. Generation 3 is still continuing today and appears to be going steady and becoming more and more popular.
3rd generation MMO's started off with their primary focus on micro-transactions and the true catalyst was World of Warcraft. Towards midlife of World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard incorporated what have been dubbed as Welfare epics. Essentially, it was originally intended to make it so that complete newcomers to the game would have to spend less time between when they hit end-game and when they could start participating in current raids. Essentially all the player would have to do is, play every non-endgame dungeon once every day for a week and he would be fully outfitted in last seasons hottest items.
Coupled with welfare epics, Blizzard also decreased the difficulty curve of getting from start game to end game so significantly that instead of taking several months to hit endgame, a player could do it in about two weeks of playing four hours a day. Other video games, desperately trying to knock world of warcraft off of it's high horse, began popping up, almost xeroxing World of Warcraft with different names, items and worlds all failed swiftly under the giant's feet. Blizzard seeing this and acknowledging that i now had a player base of over 20 million players continued to unbalance the the player classes to the point where certain classes became unplayable and rode the wave of success as far as they could.
Enter late generation 3 MMO's. After so many MMO's had tried and failed at stopping the behemoth that World of Warcraft became, A few 3rd generation MMO's popped up that went back to basics, did their best not to duplicate World of Warcraft and are relatively successful compared to the rest of the graveyard. These games include games like Rift and SWOTR. The rest of the MMO's that failed or were on the verge of failing started a new trend of going free to play and focusing on Microtransactions. This list is dramatically larger now and includes Champions Online, Fallen Earth, Star Trek Online, Aion, Age of Empires Online, All Points Bulletin, and a long slew of others. These have become the modern propagators of the Monty Hall Effect.
In most of the Free to play MMO's their primary mode of earning revenue is by micro-transactions. As such, for the small fee of all your lunch money for a month, you can gain double xp, double cash, double health, mana and all of your stats, and armor that is unbeatable by anything you would normally find in the free world. This encouragement to make microtransactions has tainted the world of MMO's forever. However, those same people who were not part of WoW's foundation buy into it. and people like the ones in WoW's foundation are being to get a bad taste in their mouth because of how bad the world is becoming. So much so that World of Warcraft's subscriptions are back down to below the 10 million mile stone. The first to go were the foundation members who got sick and tired of the game's constant unbalance and lack of difficulty. Then the players who flocked to those attributes are beginning to lose interest because they are just not dedicated players. Period. End of story.
The intervention of Free to play has made it possible for so many MMO's to lay everything out on the table for people to check out, however, the introduction of real money markets in these games have turned them into nothing but monty halls, and money vacuums. There is no such thing as a genuine experience with MMO's now. In Star Trek Online, a player can get from begin game to end game in a weekend. They can purchase ships that have extra, better features than the standard issue ships and Cryptic is just riding the wave. Making no attempts to add any content. All Points Bulletin started as a pay to play with one of the first real, total real money markets meaning that you could buy ingame money for real money. Eve online, which started as a free to play, now has a legal trade network which is like Ebay where players can pay other players for game time, characters and ships.
My astonishment when people are actually willing to pay real money for digital items that will be gone faster than you can buy lunch is impalpable and i am further and further dissuaded from playing MMO's every day when i see the focus change from making a genuinely fun game to making a game that will reach out and grab hold of the first credit card it can then hold on for dear life. What's your take? have you ever played an MMO? Have you ever experienced the Monty Hall effect first hand? And how do you feel about it?
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
The Hype Complex
We've all been victims of the excitement and hype that surrounds something that is highly anticipated. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's a bad thing. I went and saw John Carter the other day, i was rather looking forward to it being a Edgar Rice Burroughs fan myself. I had spent a great deal of time reading the Barsoome Chronicles before the movies had come out so i was prepared for the movie when it did. I thought the writing style of Burroughs was fantastic, i deeply enjoyed his works and i'll undoubtedly be reading the rest of his works with the exception of the Tarzan series as i was never really a fan of Tarzan.
However i found that the movie was somewhat of a disappointment. I understand that they're trying to make a movie series to bring them steady income over the next couple years, however the issue with making a modern movie out of a hundred year old short story is that you need to take a lot of artistic liberties, and i do mean a lot. All of the hype surrounding the movie and it ended up being a surprising let down to critic.
Another shining instance of hype making a product so much more than it is, is the highly acclaimed Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. There is no doubt about the fact that it is indeed a fantastic game filled with hours upon hours of adventures for you to explore with it's two square kilometer world. However, is it really the god send that the public has made it out to be? Probably not. Underneath the sheen of new, shiney and over-hyped, there are the same old bugs and glitches that have been notorious in every Bethesda game since they opened their doors. Most of the bugs get passed of as over-beaten meme's (the much abused "arrow to the knee" jokes) however this oversight is a little disappointing. Bethesda is now on it's fifth iteration of the Elder Scrolls series and they've still yet to fix a few core problems with the video games.
However, all bugs aside all me to posit my theory as to why these bugs were easily overlooked by the majority of the community.
When Skyrim was announced the first people to find out about it was the press of course. The second people were the die-hard TES fans and then the time between discovery was proportionate to how much you knew about the series and how much you enjoyed it's previous installments. However, the community for his video game is so large and so passionate about the video game that the news spread like wildfire as soon as the core community found out. A combination of mystery surrounding the game and everyone screaming with excitement made the game catch a lot of attention. This attracted video gamers from ALL video gaming facets, not just your run of the mill RPG players.
This caused an influx of FPS players from various run-and-gun type FPS games such as COD and Halo. These players are used to massively buggy video games as the same issues hold true with their developers. COD's notorious quick scope bug was accidentally added in COD2 and people have been complaining about it since then. They still haven't fixed it after 6 or 7 iterations (lost the care to count after COD4). As these players are pretty much used to bugs to the extent where they have no issues with exploiting them or playing until they're red in the face from frustration, they tended to look over the bugs.
This combined with the fact that a hefty percentage of the Skyrim players have never even so much as looked at another installment of TES which means they're oblivious to the fact that these bugs have been around since installment one. Thus, their tolerance levels for these errors are significantly larger than the players from day one, installment one.
Never the less, Hype can be beneficial or deadly depending on how it's utilized and whether it's actually deserved. Frankly i would much rather do without the entire advertizing strategy, which is why i wait several months for video games after they're released so i can read reviews after the hype has worn off. What do you think about how developers of all medias use hype to their advantage? Whether it's deserved or not.
However i found that the movie was somewhat of a disappointment. I understand that they're trying to make a movie series to bring them steady income over the next couple years, however the issue with making a modern movie out of a hundred year old short story is that you need to take a lot of artistic liberties, and i do mean a lot. All of the hype surrounding the movie and it ended up being a surprising let down to critic.
Another shining instance of hype making a product so much more than it is, is the highly acclaimed Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. There is no doubt about the fact that it is indeed a fantastic game filled with hours upon hours of adventures for you to explore with it's two square kilometer world. However, is it really the god send that the public has made it out to be? Probably not. Underneath the sheen of new, shiney and over-hyped, there are the same old bugs and glitches that have been notorious in every Bethesda game since they opened their doors. Most of the bugs get passed of as over-beaten meme's (the much abused "arrow to the knee" jokes) however this oversight is a little disappointing. Bethesda is now on it's fifth iteration of the Elder Scrolls series and they've still yet to fix a few core problems with the video games.
However, all bugs aside all me to posit my theory as to why these bugs were easily overlooked by the majority of the community.
When Skyrim was announced the first people to find out about it was the press of course. The second people were the die-hard TES fans and then the time between discovery was proportionate to how much you knew about the series and how much you enjoyed it's previous installments. However, the community for his video game is so large and so passionate about the video game that the news spread like wildfire as soon as the core community found out. A combination of mystery surrounding the game and everyone screaming with excitement made the game catch a lot of attention. This attracted video gamers from ALL video gaming facets, not just your run of the mill RPG players.
This caused an influx of FPS players from various run-and-gun type FPS games such as COD and Halo. These players are used to massively buggy video games as the same issues hold true with their developers. COD's notorious quick scope bug was accidentally added in COD2 and people have been complaining about it since then. They still haven't fixed it after 6 or 7 iterations (lost the care to count after COD4). As these players are pretty much used to bugs to the extent where they have no issues with exploiting them or playing until they're red in the face from frustration, they tended to look over the bugs.
This combined with the fact that a hefty percentage of the Skyrim players have never even so much as looked at another installment of TES which means they're oblivious to the fact that these bugs have been around since installment one. Thus, their tolerance levels for these errors are significantly larger than the players from day one, installment one.
Never the less, Hype can be beneficial or deadly depending on how it's utilized and whether it's actually deserved. Frankly i would much rather do without the entire advertizing strategy, which is why i wait several months for video games after they're released so i can read reviews after the hype has worn off. What do you think about how developers of all medias use hype to their advantage? Whether it's deserved or not.
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