Author: Sonic Rob

Once Again, Incomprehensible Developer Commentary Theater

Kotaku has an interview up with Capcom producer Jun Takeuchi, and while I appreciate that the man has to say things that will keep people buying the new games, he chose a really unfortunate tack to this:

“I think, while Resident Evil 4 is a great game, its appeal was limited somewhat to maniac players,” Takeuchi said. “With RE5, I wanted to bring the series to a larger audience. I think its important to do the same for the next RE.”

Ummmmmmmmm. What?

Resident Evil 4 has garnered significant critical acclaim, averaging a score of 96 on Metacritic.[12] It has received dozens of awards from various organizations and stellar reviews from various video game websites.[46] The game was considered by critics as a top contender for 2005’s Game of the Year. The game was a successful crossover hit as the new gameplay alterations and immersive style appealed to many not previously familiar with the Resident Evil series.[47] Nintendo Power named it their 2005 Game of the Year, and ranked it number 1 on their list of the “Top 20 Best GameCube Games of All Time” in their 20th anniversary issue.[39] Resident Evil 4 was ranked number 1 on IGN’s Top 99 Games of All Time list.[48] The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine named it the Game of the Year for the PlayStation 2. Game Informer gave both editions of Resident Evil 4 a perfect score, and along ranking number one on their list of “Best GameCube Games of All Time” they named it their 2005 Game of the Year.[20] It tied with Kingdom Hearts II as Famitsu’s Game of the Year 2005.[49] Subsequently, Resident Evil 4 was named “Game of the Year” at the 2005 Spike TV Video Game Awards.[50] Also, the G4 TV show X-Play named it the greatest game since the beginning of the series in April 2003.[45]
The Nintendo GameCube version sold over 320,000 copies in North America during the first twenty days. The European release sold its entire 200,000 units during the first month. As of January 2006, over 3,000,000 copies of the GameCube and PlayStation 2 versions were shipped worldwide.[51] According to January 17, 2007 sales figures provided by Capcom, the GameCube version of Resident Evil 4 has sold a total of 1.6 million units worldwide, while the PS2 version has sold over 2 million units.[52]

I wouldn’t call myself an RE fanboy, particularly – I haven’t even played RE5 yet – but I like the games, and RE4 was great. It was a technically impressive and consistently enjoyable action title. I certainly wouldn’t call it a niche game by any means. I know that Mr. Takeuchi is just trying to hype RE5 and the surely-upcoming-at-some-point RE6. RE4 has probably sold about as many copies as it is likely to, so it makes sense to hype the newer titles in comparison. At the same time, what he saying is silly bullshit, and we shouldn’t let that slide when we see it. When developers say things like that, they are treating us like we are milling, dollar-fleeced sheep who gather to the exciting tone of their voices without pausing to listen to the content of their words.

-ssr

[h/t Destructoid]

Chat Box

FyreHaar: That anglo saxon hoard is awesome!!
Sonic Rob: tis
FyreHaar: Second Anglo Saxon hoard ever
FyreHaar: now we can compare Sutton Hoo
Sonic Rob: awesome
FyreHaar: it’s so awesome to imagine all the old english dudes
FyreHaar: so very excited!
FyreHaar: over their tea
Sonic Rob: “I say.”
Sonic Rob: /monocledrop
Sonic Rob: that’s the British version of shitting your pants
FyreHaar: for ril

Mass Effect 2: Form Follows Function

So it looks like BioWare are taking the easy way out. Rather than improving Mass Effect 2’s companion AI so that they don’t charge blindly into storms of enemy fire, cheefully shooting you in the back for getting between them and the enemy, they’ve decided to just write the companion characters as suicidal berzerkers. Time to buy stock in medi-gel. =P

It also looks like this “Subject Zero” tart is the new Vanguard party member, replacing Wrex. I absolutely loved Wrex in ME1; he had the best elevator chit chat and told great stories when you talked to him on the ship. There was none of this silly egotistical “badass biotic” posturing with Wrex; he handled his business with as little speaking as possible. Seeing him apparently replaced in the sequel makes me worry that the non-talky resolution to Wrex’ problem on Virmire has become canon. That would kinda suck; that scene was one of the parts of my Renegade playthrough that actually made me feel bad.

Finally, did anyone else see the trailer and think Subject Zero was Talitha at first? Sure, the personalities are completely different, but their histories and appearances seem similar, and you never know how people will change to get over their trauma. It seems pretty clear now that they’re actually not the same person, but it makes me wonder if maybe somone found Talitha’s little story interesting enough to bear futher exploration with a similar character.

-ssr

Is Kevin Martens Being Foolish, Or Just Bragging?

Gamasutra has an interview up with this Martens fellow from Blizzard, and they’ve pulled out one of the passages from it to entice us to read further. Let’s see what insight he has to offer:

Blizzard lead content designer Kevin Martens has told Gamasutra that the key to Blizzard games like Diablo III is simple enough: “endless iteration”.

Talking in an in-depth new Gamasutra interview, conducted as the Diablo III team begin public showcases of the long-awaited PC title, over 9 years after Diablo II‘s debut.

When asked whether “the development time has been extended to a surprising degree”, Martens made it clear that he thought this was an advantage, not a disadvantage:

“Here’s the secret to Blizzard games, and this is a secret that won’t help any of our competitors: endless iteration. We’ll take something, we’ll put it in the game.

Maybe we’ll like it when we put it in, maybe we won’t. We’ll leave it in there for a while, we’ll let it percolate. We’ll play it and play it and play it, and then we’ll come back. We might throw it all out, or we’ll throw half of that out and redo it.”

Martens believes in this constant iteration as a way to actually keep things fresh when making a game:

“It can be a long time, but it is fun to work on as well. That’s the thing that keeps you going. Multiplayer always works, and the builds are always playable. We’ve played them constantly, and it’s fun. You actually look forward to the weekly play session even though the game is still in progress. That’s what keeps us going, and that’s also why it takes so long. We’ll do it over and over again until it’s just right.”

That’s not a secret – everyone would do that if they could. Valve has said basically the same thing, for instance. I’ve worked on dozens of games by now, and they all change constantly in the course of development. Nobody I’ve worked with stopped iterating their design, trying to get closer to the ideal. They all just got too close to the set-in-stone ship date and had to lock the design down in a stable state. Iteration isn’t special; what’s special is actually having the luxury of doing it for a decade and having fans who willing to wait on you.

Even so, Blizz (and Relic, for another example) don’t try to iterate forever out of the public eye. Half the point of public betas is to put the game in front of the people who will eventually buy it and keep the hype and excitement going. Ideally the excitement will continue to percolate until it reaches a boil at public release.

If Kevin Martens honestly believes that Blizzard has stumbled onto some novel design methodology in “keep working on it until it is good”, he’s kidding himself. Given his little aside about the “secret” not helping any one else, it seems more likely that he’s just sort of swinging his dick around in print: “The secret to being as good as us? Have all the money in the world and never let anyone tell you when you have to go gold master. Suckas! Bwahahahahaha!”

This is the sort of fluff that I expect to read in a press release; it’s the gaming equivalent of a quarterback telling ESPN “We’re just going to take it one game at a time.” I don’t really want to read something this puerile in a Gamasutra interview, and I sure as hell don’t expect to see it pulled out as a featured passage in its own article.

-ssr

Next Year’s Model

Film Century is cracking right along, and I’m already getting ready to plan next year’s project. How shall I torture myself in 2010?

The whole premise of doing this was to drag myself through a journalistic version of Jonathon’s Coulton’s Thing a Week project, where I’d set an ambitious long-term goal, stick to it, and try to develop my writing talent a bit along the way. I’ve already learned a little bit about writing, about cinema criticism, and about epicly shitty direct-to-DVD film. So, whether or not I actually succeed in hitting the 150 mark, this experiment is at least a nominal success.

What’s next? Being that I’m a creative but basically unoriginal internet hack, I was thinking of going back to the “review a number of things in a time period” well, but this time with games. Dear God, what a bad idea.

On the up side, this’d probably be cheaper, in terms of dollars spent versus time occupied, than going to the movies. And I do quite like games and gaming. To be honest, the FC 1.5 project has eaten up a lot of my gaming time; it might be nice to get some back.

On the down side, I probably wouldn’t get to spend as much project time with The Baker, who is perfectly happy to watch any old garbage as long as it’s projected 30 feet tall on a big white sheet and bless her for it. In fact, I’d probably have to reverse the current trend and give up movie time for the most part to make more gaming time. It’s also pretty tough to just up and finish up a couple of games in a weekend; at least with the movie project I can always cram in a 90-minute action movie here and there to catch up. And there’s the tricky issue of deciding just when I’ve played enough of a game. RPGs and a lot of action games have a story that can be started and finished, but when have you really “completed” Madden NFL or Bejeweled?

I’d have to lower the number of reviews by a lot, obviously, but I could make up for it by writing something longer. 2 sentences, perhaps? How about 100 words for every month that’s passed in the year? That way I can start small and ramp up. I know I could just write however much I have to say, but come on. At least half the point of this is to torture myself with novel and arbitrary limitation. It’s like haiku.

Or maybe games aren’t the answer. Maybe reviews aren’t the answer. There’s still plenty of time to come up with something.

I may regret this, but let’s open this up to suggestions. What will be the next year-long journalism project from fns.com?

-ssr

Ordo Cartographicus – A Humble Supplication

Are you there, Relic? It’s me, Rob.

I’ve started yet another DoW2 map, and I’m having some scale troubles. It’s hard to keep the map scale in mind while I’m placing things like requisition and power points. in the map editor it feels as though the place must be amazingly crowded, but when I open the map up in the game, it turns out that the whole thing is immense and everything is far apart.

This is actually affecting the entire map – I kinda didn’t mean for it to take so long to get from one side of it to the other. I suppose this is mostly me noobing it up with the world builder. And I guess I can always open the map up in-game and have a look. I could even take a stab at placing a couple of static soldier models around the map for scale reminders, or using the ruler splats you so thoughtfully included.

But to be honest, it’d be much cooler if you just had the world builder generate a little squad of scouts or something and had them run around the map so I could see how long it takes them from the nifty God’s-eye zoomed all the way out view.

Thanks,

-ssr

Film Century 1.5

PAX took a big chunk out of my schedule, but we’re getting near the century mark nonethless.

Aug. 29 The Hurt Locker – The scariest, most tense war film I’ve seen since Aliens. 89/150
Aug. 30 Thirst – Refreshingly hard to classify – drama? black comedy? vampire movie? romance? – but occasionally gets a bit sillier than it thinks it is. 90/150
Sep. 9 The Fog of War – Is asking to be understood the same thing as asking forgiveness? 91/150
Sep. 11 Ponyo – Hayao Miyazaki is the modern master of trippy-ass acid flashback cartoons. 92/150
Sep. 12 9 – If this isn’t the first steampunk movie, it’s certainly the finest I’ve yet seen. 93/150
Sep. 12 Harakiri – Dear Mr. Tarantino: This is how you make a time-bending revenge flick. 94/150
Sep. 18 The Informant! – The most compelling angle of this story – the question of what it means that someone so greedy, arrogant, egocentric, pathologically dishonest, scatterbrained and ultimately insane got so far in American industry – goes completely unexplored in this film. 95/150
Sep. 21 Bright Star – Victorian period dramas are the 12-bar blues of filmmaking; it’s all the same bits, but the little touches make all the difference. 96/150

Chat Box

FyreHaar: I bought myself a couple of romance novels this week
FyreHaar: for the stress
FyreHaar: and last night
FyreHaar: there was this guy who never drinks coffee
FyreHaar: and he drank coffee
FyreHaar: and it was poisoned
FyreHaar: and he was like: “Gah, I never drink this stuff!”
Sonic Rob: you mean me, then
FyreHaar: I thought of you
Sonic Rob: coffee is actually a sweet delicious nectar, but every time I sip it, it’s been poisoned by ninjas
FyreHaar: no, it’s delicious dirt water
FyreHaar: it’s minerally and bitter
FyreHaar: he was poisoned with digitalis
Sonic Rob: I get poisoned with analogus
Sonic Rob: ew, that looks like analingus
FyreHaar: ahhh!
FyreHaar: stop stop stop
Sonic Rob: which is what coffee tastes like, incidentally
FyreHaar: I wouldn’t know
Sonic Rob: not a coffee drinker?