Gaming's Great Decline

It doesn't take a genius to see that the gaming industry has begun to make huge changes this generation. For some it's only getting better; casual games such as Call of Duty, Guitar Hero and FIFA are being released once every year and are causing other companies to shape their products around these simple formulas. Gaming is becoming less of the hobby it once was, taken up by the dedicated and the enthusiasts, and instead is an easily accessible pastime. It's not just casual gamers that are being appealed to, either. Last month, the family-friendly Playstation Move accessory was released, and we now await the monolithic 500 million dollar release of Microsoft's Kinect, something that promises to make the humble Xbox 360 a home entertainment system that can be used by any and all. Regardless of the cynicism of many, I know there are a lot of families who will be happy to have a machine that needs nothing more than your voice and body to play games and movies, and in that respect I'm glad many minds will be opened to the prospect of gaming. However, it doesn't stop me looking at my old consoles and games and think, 'remember when companies made games for gamers?'

Take a look at who is, effectively, in charge of the gaming industry. One on hand is Nintendo; they tend to make games that are small, fun and suitable for everyone. This is fair enough, this has been their status quo for a good 15 years now. Mario, Yoshi, Kirby, Pokemon - these are kid-friendly franchises and people have become accustomed to them being Nintendo's staple. Sony and Microsoft, on the other hand, aren't the same. They've been the ones to release games (supposedly) on par with PC games; more mature, more advanced and cutting-edge. Despite this, they have a major difference to Nintendo in that they are not gaming-centred companies. Sony makes electronic hardware in countless different categories, and Microsoft have made themselves the most successful software company in the world. These giants aren't just in pursuit of you, the gamer, getting the best experience, they're a business out for profit and will go in whatever direction brings in the green. The only surprise about Kinect and Playstation Move is how long it took for them to catch on to the family gaming market, considering the incredible sales of the Wii.

Taking a look at the movers and shakers in the production of games is even more grim. Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision and aptly nicknamed 'the Hitler of the games industry' has openly admitted that he intends to endorse only franchises that are easily annualized and milked to the last penny. The results of this plan are evident and, most unfortunately, successful. Activision has published the Tony Hawk's skating games (14 releases), Call of Duty (11 releases, now annualized), Guitar Hero (12 releases, not including DS ports) and the Spyro games (13 releases). The quality of these games is no big issue, because the sad fact is that people will buy them regardless. For an example, one must look no further than Modern Warfare 2, Activision's diamond jewel. The focus here is cliched military FPS action, with emphasis on online multiplayer. This game did nothing new and has not advanced the genre in terms of mechanics one bit, but scored the biggest entertainment release in history and maintained the 'Most played game on Xbox Live' title all the way from it hitting the store shelves until Halo: Reach took the crown 10 months later. Why? Because it's a game people know, a safe option, one that doesn't require a great deal of thought or effort. Cheap, thrill-a-minute titles such as this are now everywhere, leaving plenty of thoughtful and original efforts in the dust.

Lastly is the issue of value for money, and this affects all gamers: casual, core and hardcore. We've become complacent with a £40 and $60 price tag per title, as this has been standard pricing for many a year now, and for the most part this has been reasonable considering the quality and playtime games usually offer. However, think about how much money this is relative to other entertainment mediums. Seeing a movie at a cinema is about £6, and about £10 to buy it on DVD. Even in Blu-Ray quality, prices won't usually exceed £20. A movie's average length is about 2 hours, and you'll probably watch it once or twice. So it strikes me as funny when I notice that the average length of a modern game is six to seven hours, and the rest of the content is online-only multiplayer which some players may not have access to. A particularly despicable act made by Activision was the pricing of the Modern Warfare 2's map packs, being priced at 1200msp and £10.79 for a meager 3 new maps and 2 remakes. Capitalising on the release price of the full game being £10 more than standard pricing, I can't help but think people are being given far less than they pay for. I could say the same for many other games, too, that are being released despite severely lacking where it counts. Alpha Protocol is a game fans waited 4 years for, only for it to turn out as a sub-standard, buggy RPG that looks and plays like it was made for the Playstation 2. Mafia II, a game that suffered delay after delay, ended up as a game that offered even less freedom than its predecessor, and was simply a 12 hour story that was hardly good enough to replay. Even the recently released Fallout: New Vegas, which I am currently enjoying, is so filled with bugs that I can hardly believe it has been playtested. 

The worst of it all is that no matter how much it pains me, and how much I write and complain and promise that I'll never fund such terrible fan service, at the end of the day it is the gamer population that makes the difference. The gamer population: a subculture that existed once, that cared about games. My £40 is a drop in the ocean, an ocean that is now hugely comprised of people who think 'multiplayer or no buy', who think Call of Duty is as good as games get, who think 'if I haven't heard of it, it's not good'. I fear that the direction of the industry is in the hands of those who are perfectly willing to ruin it. 

Radroaches aren't the only bugs in New Vegas

I've been waiting for New Vegas to come out for a hell of a long time. I racked up a ruinous 250 hours on Fallout 3 and was totally immersed in its post-apocalyptic world, and with all 5 expansions completed a sequel was, naturally, an attractive prospect. To some extent, New Vegas delivers. It's got a map even larger than Fallout 3, more guns, more enemies - this is a wasteland brimming with adventure, and I have no doubt it'll be a long time before I'm willing to leave. 

However, if you've read anything about the game, you'll have heard about the bugs. I cannot possibly overstate how poorly this game has been polished; for every amazing quest you have, the experience will no doubt be dampened by some stupid enemy stuck in the floor, an item disappearing from your inventory (I even had my armour disappearing off my own body), or a total game crash at that critical moment. It surprises me that a game that uses such a close template to Fallout 3 has suddenly become such a technical mess. Bethesda's title had its fair share of glitches, sure, but nowhere near to this degree. It's not just glitch issues that bother me either, but also things like that frame-rate can be truly horrible at times. The game often struggles horribly to process the number of enemies on-screen, even if there aren't that many - I remember being faced with five radscorpions, but the game became so choppy (with the frame rate dropping to what must have been about 5fps) that it was too painful on the eyes to even look at the screen. 

I won't go into a great amount of detail, as I am saving my ideas on it for my review on ps3xboxreviews, but while I'd definitely recommend the game to anyone who enjoyed Fallout 3, I'd also be prepared for the worst in terms of production quality.

Another soundtrack sharing, and Lords of Shadow references

Keeping with the current Castlevania vein, I've recently tracked down the full soundtrack to Harmony of Despair, organised it and shared it on Megaupload. Includes all the in-mission tracks, menu themes, victory themes... all that jazz. It might be 'temporarily unavailable' for a couple of days after this post, but after then it should be fine.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=O6ER6VFZ

Currently playing the new Castlevania, too, 'Lords of Shadow' and it has certainly exceeded my expectations. Of course, it's a departure from the previous games to fit in with modern games and appeal to a wider audience, and I think the best way to describe it is a cocktail of Dante's Inferno, Tomb Raider and Lord of the Rings. I won't go into much detail until I write a review of it.

What I have noticed, however, is a whole lot of references in the game. While some unfortunately seem to be fairly shameful rips out of other games (two puzzles I have noticed came straight out of Tomb Raider Underworld, meaning I solved them extremely quickly), the game also makes clear its inspiration from Tolkien's work. For example, the mysterious yet wise character Gandolfi is a play on the name of Gandalf, the bear/werewolves are named Wargs and bear strong resemblance to the film's portrayal of them, and many of the lines in the narration are written and pronounced very similarly to memorable lines from the books or films. These won't stand out unless you're a Tolkien nerd like me, but it was odd that a game with roots in vampires and gothic themes was associating itself with a work of classical fantasy. 

Also, bonus points for anyone who spots the Portal reference. It stuck out like a sore thumb to me.

Castlevania: Land of Dracula's Army of Japanese Gamers

The last month, between bouts of being disappointed with Mafia II and frustrated with Halo: Reach, I've been indulging in unhealthily huge doses of Konami's latest (and possibly last) throwback Castlevania game, Harmony of Despair. As 'throwback' suggests, it resembles in all but console the 2D Dracula-slaying platformers of old, only this time with a new co-operative multiplayer component. Instead of venturing into hell on earth alone as Alucard, Soma, Jonathan or any of the other protagonists, Harmony of Despair throws 6 classic characters all into one adventure, thus allowing for fun if not chaotic 6-player online co-op. 

Of course, regardless of the quality of the game, the people who play this online must clearly have a taste for games from the good ol' times when you weren't given any tutorials, you were expected to put in a lot of hours to get anywhere and what we now consider 'hard' difficulty was standard. So basically, the Japanese. 

I'm not saying there were no American or British players online, but even the most hardcore of these simply did not compare to the Japanese - or sometimes Korean - players in skill and speed. My man Ruairidh (LordDoUrden) and I struggled for hours of pure grinding just to beat Dracula by the skin of our teeth on Normal, but I will never forget joining a game with four Japanese players on Hard difficulty and seeing them beat him without Ruairidh or me in under a minute. I've always had a slight apprehension of the Japs due to their utterly baffling culture, but seeing four guys casually pummel through what seemed impossible in such a short time was something I had to admire, despite it being something I'd undoubtedly call 'a bit sad' if it was a bunch of Americans or Brits. It put me in my place as a Western gamer; we call ourselves 'hardcore' with our silly FPS games and our easy RPGs, but at the end of the day we'll always be beaten effortlessly by the people who invented the corn-flavoured KitKat.

I'm thanking my stars Konami dumbed down Lords of Shadow for people like me...

The Reach Report

I'm writing just over two weeks from my purchase of 'this year's most anticipated game', Halo Reach. The anticipation isn't exactly surprising, what with Halo 3 being easily the most successful and most played Xbox 360 game all the way up to Modern Warfare 2's release, but whether or not Bungie have truly delivered in their final Halo outing is another thing.

Most importantly, this isn't just Halo 3 with a few new things added. No, strangely for a sequel, the game takes us back to just before the beginning of the saga, literally days before the beginning of Halo: CE. As any Halo veteran will tell you, this was set just after the obliteration of the human colony Reach and, as you'd expect, the game takes this massacre pretty seriously. I can't really knock them for this - something would probably feel a little off if we were sauntering through a brightly coloured forest with grunts comically yelling 'I'LL KILL YOU, DEMON' in their 6-year-old voices - but it comes to question whether Halo can really function in this environment. A virtually invincible superhero's quest in the 3 original games can be taken with a pinch of salt, but surrounded by millions of innocent being glassed by the oncoming Convenant horde, I felt somewhat out of place. Just one title back in the series, I was having a laugh blasting through this with my friends, crashing into each other with warthogs, finding amusing little easters eggs and, despite having a great time, could never think of it as much more than a bit of sci-fi silliness. Now I almost feel guilty laughing.

My issue, I think, is this. I can have a lot of fun in Halo games, and put a lot of work into them multiplayer-wise, and I'm also aware of the huge hardcore audience, but at the end of the day Halo is really a casual game. The first game of its trilogy did a lot for the FPS genre, but it's also easy to pick up, play, and put down just as easily. Suddenly when I'm being shown brutes tearing civilians to ribbons, however, it's almost shocking. The soundtrack is also particularly unforgiving on the ears, replacing the trilogy's bouncy piano-based theme with a determined, military feel. Sure, it's well-composed as always by Mr O'Donnell, but what I want is mindless explosive fun, not Call of Duty in space.

The multiplayer, as always, is a different matter. Fear not, though; if you liked Halo 3 this will definitely suffice. Playlists have vastly improved, things like the daily challenges keep things fresh every single day and show Bungie's unrelenting service to the fans. As soon as I'd finished the story, I was hooked from the word 'go' for about three days... until I started noticing problems. Firstly, the ranking system has changed from Halo 3's combination of Highest Skill and EXP to just experience points, or 'credits' which can also be used to buy new armour parts. I can't deny that previously multiplayer was littered with boosters, to the point where there would be at least one literally every day, but nonetheless I still believe that Halo 3 had the best ranking system of all time. With just two types of stats, it defined what game types you played most, how competitive you were and, most importantly, how good you truly were. Now, Halo seems to have fallen in line behind every other multiplayer game by having an oh-so-simple experience system where you can only gain and never lose points, meaning in theory anyone can reach General with enough play. Maps are also a definite problem, and anyone who has played with me will have heard me groan 'Pinnacle... again', 'Reflection... again' or ' Countdown... again'. There are 9 maps for competitive multiplayer, even fewer than the previous 11. One of these is Forge World and, it being big enough to be a whole campaign mission, it has been split into 5 different smaller maps, but really they all strongly resemble each other and it's hard to count them as separate. All the maps are also cut-and-pasted directly from campaign missions so don't expect any new dazzling environments. The main problem is that they're all very heavily gametype-restricted, and with such a small number in the first place this limits variety hugely. 2 of the 9, for example, are only playable in Big Team or Invasion. Another 2 are remakes from Halo 2. We waited three years for this?

I can never bring myself to say any Halo game is badly made, because they're all very highly polished, and considering the package you get for standard price it's very impressive: campaign, matchmaking, firefight, forge and theater. However, I also think that it wasn't a very smart move for Bungie to go into a new direction for Halo in their last game, and until we get some map packs, matchmaking doesn't have a great deal of lasting factor either. If you like the previous games, go ahead and buy it because you will like it, but think twice before believing it will be the best in the series.