8-bit hacks

The Scenic Route

Eurogamer has gotten the attention of a select few in the blogosphere for its review of indie darling and IGF Seamus Mcnally winner Crayon Physics Deluxe. It correctly identifies a quirk with the game's difficulty curve:

CPD presents something of a problem. It can be a fantastically fun and challenging game, but often only if you choose to ignore the obvious route to the finish. One level on the penultimate island clearly wants you to create a weight and pulley system around a floating cloud, but it's impossible not to notice you can literally draw one straight line and complete the level. Years of gaming conditioning tell you to do just that, and expecting players to take the scenic route to a star is a problem in the level design. Success is ludicrously rewarding if you steel yourself to do something a particular way, but you'll know you could always have used the old box, rope and weight trick in a fraction of the time.

The reviewer is correct. Years of gaming conditioning do force you towards taking the shortcut because the game doesn't tell you you can't. We have become so coddled by expansive achievement-ridden games that practically include a "to enjoy follow these directions" manual built in to a tee that the concept of having seemingly unauthorized fun with a game seems blasphemous. They didn't reward me for avoiding the obvious solution, so how can I have fun with the game? Would this reviewer have given the game a higher score if there was an explicit achievement for clearing a puzzle using only rhombi, or illustrations of Hobbes? The implication that Crayon Physics would be more fun if the creative solutions were somehow authorized or rewarded by the designer is laughable.

Aliens vs. Predator vs. Sierra: A Cautionary Tale

There was a time (quite some time ago) that I was a big fan of playing Aliens vs Predator 2's online multiplayer mode. In the realm of multiplayer gaming I've since mostly moved on to greener pastures, but after finally getting around to playing the terrible Playstation 2 RTS game Aliens vs Predator: Extinction (and promptly wishing I'd never bothered) I thought it might be fun to wash the bad taste out of my mouth with some AvP2 action. What actually transpired, though, ended up putting an even worse taste in my mouth.

I installed the game, got all set to go online and... nothing. No master server. That means no cd-key verification, no list of game servers, nothing. After some quick searching, I'd found that Sierra has pulled support of the game. If you want to play AvP2 online now, well, sorry. You can't. If it was just this one game, just this one time, it might not be worth mentioning, but what happened here is a sign of the times for the PC game industry as a whole, particularly as we move faster and faster toward a digital-download-dominated market. It is not just a story of one game, but a cautionary tale of what happens when there is a single point of failure.

Running out of Steam

Well, well. What have we here? Another of those rants about how Steam is junk? Basically, yes. After a recent update, Steam has decided that I'm no longer allowed to play most of the games that I own. How very nice. And, for people who don't use Steam, how very boring. For that matter, if you've never had much of a problem with Steam, such a thread is just idle bitching you don't need to care about, right?

Well, you should. Steam is big and it's trying to become bigger. It also has significant problems. You know how Windows is ubiqutious, but everyone hates Windows? Do you want to see this again? The problems with Steam aren't just the idle complaints of a few disgruntled users, they're signs of a significant problem with digitally downloaded games in general. 

A new hope for the PC

No, this isn't one of those PC gaming is dead posts, just so you know. I've had an on-and-off history with PC gaming. I've had PC-building binges that have lasted for months and cost me way too much money, as I've tried to convince myself that I'm a hardcore PC gaming enthusiast inside. Every time I've tried this, I've failed, ending up with an expensive tower with the newest video sitting mostly dormant outside of the initial 3dmark e-peen shot. I always kept one foot in the water, though, and always made time for the biggest releases.

In the last couple years I've admittedly started to fall away from the PC as a gaming platform completely. While the easy answer is "because console gaming has evolved" I'm not sure I'd go with that as this generation of consoles hasn't exactly set my world on fire. However, this is the generation where I feel less compelled to have a gaming-worthy PC than ever before. Here's my read on the problem.

Little boys love shiny toys

When Nintendo unveiled the DSi to the public a week and a half ago to much fanfare, nothing really stuck out at me as a game-changing feature. Nintendo made a bunch of smart revisions to the design, making it slimmer, making the screens bigger and better, and adding in internal memory to open up the digital distribution arena. However, regardless of how minor these improvements and tweaks were in my eyes, there was one thing I was certain of. I have to buy one. This will be my third DS, but even something as simple as screen improvements was all I needed to make the excuses in my head. Therefore, the most heart-wrenching part of Nintendo's much-covered press event was the fact that since the DS Lite is selling so well in America, we're not going to see the DSi until well into 2009 despite hitting in Japan in November. This was enough to send me off to my favorite importer.

Why Wii slight

An interesting perspective, as David weighs in with his thoughts from the perspective of a games journo on the temptations that reviewers face. I'll be back later tonight with more but for now, take a look at this. - Steve

Gamers commonly perceive games not for what they are, but what they aren't. A game's strengths or virtues often pale in significance to the absence of a multiplayer mode or a less-than-perfect control scheme. It is in the game medium - more than any other, I'd argue - that this negativist perspective prevails in the minds of the consuming masses.

Games don't kill people, hard games do.

Pretty much every attempt at legislating violent video game content has derived strength from the assumption that killing people in games can lead to killing people in real life.

My home of New York state has seen its share of absurd legislation aimed at guarding youth from violent games. The recently passed A11717 bill prohibits the sale of video game systems lacking parental lockout controls (thus banning only the child-friendly Nintendo DS from stores) and reinforces the same rating scheme the ESRB has used since 1994. Thankfully, the state legislature discarded a clause that would have deemed the sale of mature-rated games to minors a class-E felony - and locked up the local GameStop counter boy who made such a mistake.

No You Can't Play Games On It

Back in the 80s, life was pretty good for the electronic gamer. Emerging technology was making the games better and better, the hot arcade games of the day were being ported to home systems, and, above all, there were lots of options. The Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Atari ST... and so on. Of course, if you didn't want to play games on a computer, there was the good ol' NES, along with several also-rans. One machine that was not exactly a great game machine is that one over there, the venerable IBM PC. Seriously, it was gigantic, expensive, and the graphics and sound capabilities were paleolithic.

Nowadays, of course, the Commodores and Ataris are long gone, and IBM's framework continues to exist, at least in spirit. The "gaming PC" is also a pretty hot commodity. So, why does it often seem it's still the red-headed stepchild of electronic gaming?

Terrell Owens and Team Fortress

I like football. I also like Team Fortress 2. So far, not exactly any big news here, I know. However, it's not that often that one makes me think of the other, except for the most superficial notions of a contest between two teams, or perhaps thinking of large burly men. However, a comment about Terrell Owens during the Monday Night Football pregame did catch my attention. The quote was, essentially, "He'd rather be the MVP on the losing team than catch two balls and win the big game." While I don't know him personally, and can't say if that's true or not, it does seem to match his public image. Essentially, the conflict was one between individual achievement and team success, and that's something that seems to crop up in more than a few games of TF2. I'm not going to go on a rant about big egos: been there, done that. No, this time I'm going to talk about what structures the game has in place to assuage those big egos (actually quite a few), and toss in my two cents about whether or not they work. (mostly, but not always)

It's Football Season! (Unless you're a PC gamer)

It's football season! Sorry about the lack of image, but I don't want to put in some image of football players and then get us sued, after all, since I don't have the NFL's consent. I also apparently don't have EA's consent to play Madden on the PC, because they didn't release a version for 2009 on the PC. Said Peter Moore of EA Sports, "The PC presents some very serious business challenges to us." Hear that? Serious Business. No, really, what I think what he meant to say was, "The PC versions of Madden games have gotten worse and worse, and we finally threw our hands up and gave up completely." Of course, this is all old news. Why am I just getting to this now? Because, now it's football season. Now is when everyone wants to join in the gridiron action!