Microsoft acted as patron for games such as this until it became easier to just throw moneyhats at Activision for timed-exclusivity of CoD map packs!

Sony Follows Microsoft to the Bottom in the Exclusive Content Racket

The fifteenth day of the eleventh month has come and gone, and with its passing has ushered in the beginning of a new console generation [no, we do not count the Wii U]. With a new console generation comes new console strategies – Microsoft has already revealed their hand with a reliance on television and NFL licenses, and now the pieces of Sony’s console strategy are also starting to come together, and the results are not entirely to one’s liking.

In order to effectively differentiate a new piece of hardware the vendor thereof must be able to depict it as being capable of functioning in ways that competing devices cannot, and the easiest way to do this is to secure some exclusive content that cannot be accessed on any other platform. Throughout the last generation Sony appeared to favour utilising company resources in order to secure wholly exclusive titles for the PS3, while Microsoft for their part quickly dispensed with acquiring entire titles outright in favour of purchasing exclusivity [or timed-exclusivity] of select chunks of content. The effect that this approach has is to effectively compromise the gaming experience that owners of the competing platform are able to have with the titles that they paid sixty dollars for, while at the same time doing very little to positively differentiate the character of one’s own gaming platform. Sony also did this last generation, but only [seemingly] as an afterthought.

This time around Sony appears to have gone after exclusive content in a very concerted fashion. The PS4 version of Assassin’s Creed 4 is set to feature sixty minutes of platform exclusive gameplay, with Ubisoft’s Watchdogs also in line to receive some manner of unspecified exclusive content. Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes is also set to receive an exclusive mission which will see players take on the role of the PS1 iteration of Solid Snake in all his low resolution polygonal glory, while the PS4 release of Diablo III will see the introduction of all new mechanics. Meanwhile, PS4 owners will be granted first access to beta testing for both The Elder Scrolls: Online and Bungie’s Destiny. In all there are twenty publishers/developers who have signed on to deliver exclusive content to the PS4.

While one finds it morally indefensible to deprive someone who has paid full price of the content that is due them, that alone is not reason enough for consternation [they are Xbots after all]. Rather, it is because this approach only subtracts value for a competitor, rather than creating anything of positive value for one’s self – in short, it involves spending money in a way which will not produce anything of value for gaming.

A more regular roster of Japanese releases may ease the burden of the JRT.

Sony Supports the Localisation of Japanese Content

Sony are currently standing at the dawn of a whole new console generation with the launch of their PS4, while at the same time also supporting a hendheld system that is not doing so well in the sales department. On top of that their PS3 is still a going concern at a time when Sony will be looking to transfer the bulk of their support to the PS4. All of these platforms require content and bribing publishers for exclusive mission packs does not look to be capable of picking up all the slack, which is why it is most important that Sony be able to fully leverage the content that already exists for their platforms.

It is with this in mind that Sony established what they refer to as the third-party production team, a group dedicated to maximising the amount of regional content that is able to be localised into foreign markets. When individual gamers harangue Sony staff with their release-begging it is often intuitive to think that their wishes are being consigned to the waste paper basket of no fucks given, yet according to Sony’s Adam Boyes third-party productions director, Giovanni Corsi, has been monitoring social media and Sony blogs in order to compile a list of Japanese content that Western gamers would like to see given a local release – a list that is topped by the PSP releases of Final Fantasy Type-0 and the newest Suikoden title, along with the PS3 release of Yakuza 5, and a possible port of the Dreamcast’s Shenmue games.

“When we started the third-party production team, it was born out of necessity. We had a lot of publishers and a lot of content that had come out for various platforms and various territories that weren’t necessarily coming to our territory, platforms we’d love to see them on.

The key is to bring people that are fans of certain content great stuff. So if people are fans of Japanese content, you can imagine that’s a place we’re putting a lot of effort into. People who are fans of the Vita, you can imagine we’re putting lots of effort into that.”

The obvious candidate for Sony’s localisation efforts is Final Fantasy: Type-0, as the series already has a fanbase which numbers in the millions. The Vita may not be doing so well right now, but a PSN release of Final Fantasy: Type-0 might well provide the push that many PS4 owners need to pick up a Vita for subsequent use in remote play. It would make a lot of sense for this to be one of the titles that the third-party production team is working on, especially considering that Shuhei Yoshida tacitly suggested earlier in the year that something was being done on this front. At any rate, one considers a team dedicated to the localisation of Japanese content to be a thoroughly worthwhile endeavour, and something which stands to positively differentiate Sony from their rivals.

BAN THIS SICK FILTH!

Australia Requires a Molyneux Set of Ratings Guidlines

Upon the implementation of Australia’s very first R18+ rating for video games the celebrations were decidedly short-lived, as it quickly became evident that the misogyny-obsessed and utterly incompetent Gillard government had implemented some utterly arcane and borderline unworkable guidelines when it came to the depiction of female sexuality. Until now one of the most absurd casualties of these heavy-handed guidelines was Atelier Totori Plus, an anime-based game that had been determined appropriate for children under the previous ratings regime, yet earned an R18+ rating for sexual violence under the new botched legislation. Well, as it turns out Fable: Anniversary [the HD remake of Fable] is the newest game to be added to this absurd list.

While one finds it utterly delightful that Fable has been determined as being unsuitable for children of any age, it has nevertheless been designated as such on the most appallingly nonsensical grounds. One curio present in the Australian ratings system with respect to depictions of fornication and drug use, is that they are held to be many times more disagreeable in instances where their occurrence results in a reward for the player. Thus, if a Grand Theft Auto player avails themselves of the services of women of negotiable affections, only to have their health replenished, then this is something that is frowned on by Australia’s dour ratings guidelines.

It is the Grand Theft Auto scenario which appears to have been applied to Fable, only the sex in question consists in its entirety of the screen fading to black, while the player reward is nothing more than the birth of an in-game heir! Yes, that is right, Julia Gillard and her hopeless, bumbling thralls have succeeded in classifying the actual biological purpose of engaging in sexual intercourse as being objectionable contraband – to the extent that a more gratuitous sex scene could have been included in the game while incurring less of a ratings-penalty, provided that the game did not reward the player with the biological fruit of his loins. The original Australian rating of Fable was ‘M’ [the equivalent of America's 'T' rating], the HD re-release of Fable: Anniversary has been rated R18+ for “Sexual activity related to incentives and rewards” because idiocy. Sometimes one truly despairs.

This game is going to be absolutely massive.

Ah, September is here at last. Most of my fellow Americans are excited for cooler weather and the return of American football, but not me. Living in Arizona, I do not get the luxury of cooler weather until sometime in late November, if I am lucky. As for football, I can think of many other things that I would rather do than watch hours of the sport, one of which involves a long stick and my asshole. I look forward to September because, for me, it brings the height of anticipation with it. Summer always brings a long drought in terms on new releases, and this year was no exception, but now that September is here, I can attempt to prepare myself for the onslaught that is October and November.

With Grand Theft Auto V, Pokémon X/Y, and the PlayStation 4 all set to release in the next three months, it is shaping up to be a huge fourth quarter, not just for me, but for millions of gamers. The most difficult part of the lead up to an anticipated game’s release is not inundating myself with every morsel of news about the game. With every video game site having a preview article, this can be easier said than done. While I did my best to avoid Pokemon X/Y news for as long as possible, the announcement of mega evolutions made me crack. Grand Theft Auto V has been a similar beast, but I do not have the same self-imposed ban on news, mainly because such a ban would have chained me to CatFancy for a few months.

In an effort to take my mind off the impending releases, I have begun to play one of the many games I have yet to conquer, Persona 3 Portable. P3P has proven to be a great choice for me as it is a game that requires many hours to complete, and has the added bonus of collecting personas in an attempt to fill my personadex…er, I mean, my compendium. As much as I am enjoying my time with Persona 3 Portable, I fear that it may fall by the wayside once I get my hands on Pokémon X/Y. I may be just a bit late jumping on the Persona bandwagon, but they truly are great games for people who enjoy JRPGs. The added bonus of having them all available for the PS Vita is fantastic as they translate well to the handheld.

Persona 3 Portable is a fantastic game, but it will probably lose to Pokemon in October.

Grand Theft Auto V and Pokémon X/Y are huge releases, but they pale in comparison to the November release of the PS4 and the Xbone. All the tactics in the world would fail at insulating a gamer from the deluge of next-gen console news. While I do not plan to join the PlayStation 4 army at launch, I can not help but get a bit caught up in all the hype that is going on. The release of new consoles is always exciting, but I am most looking forward to the fallout of everything that has happened over the last nine months. It is fun to read the news articles and make premature predictions, but the true enjoyment will come late this year. Between Nintendo’s failures, Microsoft’s u-turns, and Sony’s trolling, the stage has been set for some November excitement, and not the kind I would normally expect to kick off a pair of console launches.

October and November have been favored months for triple-a titles for quite a while now. With Christmas just around the corner, developers strive to get their title to the market with enough time to build momentum. Although gamers are punished with yearly releases like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed, it does not mean all fourth-quarter releases are repetitive bullshit. The holiday season has become the time for large developers to either shock or disappoint, and this year is no exception.

The anticipation for a game can strike at anytime during the year. I find it hits me the hardest during these later months because of all the titles lined up. As any gamer knows, some years present more difficult waiting games that others. This year is proving to be one of those years for me, but I take solace in knowing that my anticipated titles are weeks, not months, away. In the mean time, I’m going to kick back and try to power through Persona 3 Portable while other people go insane.

What are some of the titles you are looking forward to the most this holiday season? Do you have any tactics you employ to make the wait seem more bearable or do you have extreme patience? Lastly, what game(or console) were you hyped up the most leading up to its release?

The same feeling that I get when I realize that I missed something in a game.

I am a completionist. I am not the type of obsessive-compulsive completionist that has a nervous breakdown knowing that I will need to capture over seven hundred Pokémon if I am to become a master of Pokémon X/Y, but I do get quite a bit of enjoyment knowing that I have seen all a game has to offer. The same enjoyment that I get from completely beating a game also can cause me a fair amount of stress during the journey to my goal. Missable items, branching paths, and multiple endings all lend to the headache that is attaining one hundred percent in a game.

The first game that brought out this trait in me was Donkey Kong Country. From the moment I saw the percentage sign next to my save game, I knew I wanted to hit one hundred. Due to my desire to get everything, Donkey Kong Country became the first of many games that I bought a strategy guide for. Since I did not turn ten until 1997, I had ample time to plow through many Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 games in my preferred manner. Soon, the rest of the Donkey Kong Country series was under my belt, along with Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario 64, and Banjo-Kazooie, to name a few. With the help of my strategy guides, there was not one game that could best me in my quest for one hundred percent.

September 30, 1998 marked my introduction to the Pokémon series, and was also the first game that threatened to put a dent in my completionist armor. Pokémon proved to be quite the beast, but part of the beauty of being an eleven-year-old is that I was not expected to do much more than homework and a few chores, and once those minor obstacles were out of the way, I was back on my way to capturing more of the monsters. After a mere one hundred twenty hours, a few trades with my brother, and some skipped homework assignments, I had finally caught my last monster, Dragonite. Pokémon was the first game that took triple-digit hours for me to complete, but it also prepared me for future RPGs.

As I began to delve deeper into the RPG genre, I found myself having to deal with the dreaded “missable item”. These items caused quite a few restarts in my pursuit of perfection of some classic games. While some “missables” were ridiculous to obtain, like grinding Limit Breaks with a useless character just to get her last one, only for her to be killed minutes later by Sephiroth (Thanks, Obama), others did not require much effort to obtain, but missing them would stick in the back of my mind. Once again, thanks to my youth, I had the me the flexibility to restart a game just to make sure I got my hands on that pesky item the second time.

Final Fantasy has always had lots of side quests, but XII went to the extreme.

Unfortunately, the sixth generation was extremely unkind to me. While the first couple of years were fine, I turned sixteen in 2003, and had to get a job. Soon, my shelves were stocked with new video games, just begging to be played, but the time constraints of school and work meant they would be untouched for weeks, sometimes months. This was also around the time that developers begun packing in extra content like mad. Games like Final Fantasy XII and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas offered hours of extra content to keep me busy. This was all in addition to my addiction to the Pokémon series, although I have never attempted to catch all the monsters since Pokémon Red. This was the generation that I begun to learn that a perfect playthrough is not always good for my sanity.

Needless to say, I still love it when I have time to complete a game, but it is rare when the opportunity presents itself. Now, games are stuffed with more content than ever, sometimes to the point where even experiencing half the content is a feat. Skyrim is a perfect example of this and I expect Grand Theft Auto V will be a similar beast. Two other commonly found things games today have also helped change my mindset, glitches and lengthy opening sequences. I have written about both of these items in the past, and they both have contributed to the abandoning of my former mentality. Glitches are the reason I stopped playing Saints Row 4 after only seven hours, completing a story quest four times only to have it negated by a glitch each time is infuriating.

The idea for this article came to me as I was restarting Persona 3 Portable for a third time due to a missed social link trigger. Knowing that the game is a hundred-hour affair, erasing three hours of progress seemed like a small sacrifice to me. The road of a completionist is not easy and I do not strive for it like I used to, but it is still quite rewarding for me to know that I have completed a game to the fullest extent. Have you ever restarted a game because you missed a single item? Do you prefer to blaze through a game’s story or do you play in a similar manner to me?

Payday features six missions, but each one boils down to one of two basic types, either break-ins or escorts. Break-ins require finding and using tools to reach the loot, and escorts, obviously, involve pushing a horribly slow and unarmed NPC through a long level. The break-in missions force players to wait around for a few minutes as the tools do their jobs, all while fighting off waves of police and SWAT members, who easily lose sight of the player and run away if players hide long enough. Escort missions involve a little more run-and-gun, but it is still best for players to totally ignore the invincible escort NPC and hide until the SWAT team grows bored and heads home. The law enforcers are not particularly dangerous, but ammo is so hard to come by that it is simply best to ignore the waves of cops and SWAT that seem to rush the players every five minutes. Gamers familiar with first-person shooters will easily be able to finish missions in around twenty minutes, and could easily clear them faster if the damned tools and escort NPCs did not take over five minutes to complete their tasks.

The upgrade tree, while supposedly full of abilities and guns, seems to hardly affect the game. Completing each of Payday’s missions once does not give the player enough EXP to unlock a new weapon, or even a power-up more useful than an ammo restoring gym bag. Every player starts with a lame SMG and pistol, and every player will be stuck with them for a long time. Luckily enough, the law enforcers are only slightly more varied in their weapons. Normal police officers have pistols, while SWAT members carry rifles, shotguns, riot shields, and the pathetically easy-to-avoid taser. For players that want to constantly grind through levels to get guns, there will be a lot of replay value here, but anyone not willing to invest multiple runs into every level will likely never see a new gun.

One of the more armored SWAT members.

As mentioned earlier, the law enforcers are so dumb that players can simply hide until they run off, and at times, cops will even shoot innocent civilians. Cops hardly pursue players, almost as if they were glued to their spawn points. While they are accurate enough to gun down a player out in the open, the cops’ health are so pathetically low compared to the player’s that it is possible for players to stand out in the open soaking up bullets as they gun down the police officers. Payday, surprisingly, does not feature health regeneration like many modern shooters, and there are absolutely no health packs throughout levels, which would actually make the game much harder were it not possible to rescue a dying teammate and instantly restore his health by a large amount, similar to Left 4 Dead’s bleed-out and revival system.

Payday at least deserves a round of applause for keeping itself somewhat mature. There is no undue violence or gore, players are encouraged to let the civilians live, and players will actually receive penalties for shooting innocents. The party of crooks players can control do use some strong language, but each crook is of a different nationality and keep themselves from falling into stereotypes.

Level up! Finally, a new gun!

Payday is definitely not able to stand up against other sixty dollar triple-A titles, and given that Team Fortress 2 is free-to-play, it is not even able to compare with other low-cost FPS titles. One could argue that Payday should not be compared to competitiv natured titles like Call of Duty or the amazing Team Fortress 2, since Payday is a cooperative shooter. However, Left4Dead and Borderlands are also cooperative FPS games, and are much cheaper and of a much higher quality. Of course, Payday is Overkill’s first foray into the gaming world, and definitely shows that they have a lot of room to grow, but hardcore FPS fans should not expect to find the next genre-defining experience in Payday.

Full disclosure: the author was provided with a free copy of the game for review purposes.

The game is played almost like an offspring of the older, top-down versions of the series, with the camera pointing down at the in-game character and the use of the DS’ face buttons and D-pad to control the character and the vehicles, and the newer versions of the series, the player has extensive use of a mini-map that comes complete with a GPS, email, and weapon-ordering system.  The story plays out like most other Grand Theft Auto games, with the player doing various missions for crime bosses all while weaving an ever increasing web of deception.  This installment of the series, as the title implies, focuses on the Chinese gangs, which no other GTA game has done before, and a power struggle for control of the gangs after the death of the main character’s father.

Just a typical day in Liberty City. Or Detroit...

One of the most surprising aspects to the game is how emotionally powerful the cut scenes are, even without voice acting.  Previous games in the series are well-known for how good the voice acting is, usually having Hollywood stars voice the main roles in the game, such as Ray Liotta playing the main character in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Chinatown Wars has absolutely no voice acting in it whatsoever, not even lyrics in the music played on the car radios, but the writing is so well done, one hardly notices the lack of speech.  The cut scenes, and the in-game graphics themselves, play out like a comic book, with a cartoony feel to them.  This is a stark contrast to the content in the game.  A good example of this is one mission where a contact cuts out the heart of another character.  While the player is never directly shown the cutting out of the heart, the screams of pain and the sound of flesh being cut open are clearly heard, complete with a hand holding a bleeding, human heart as the next frame of the cut scene.  The typical “mature” GTA content was not held back for this version.

The only negative aspect of the game is the lack of variety in most of the missions, but this can be said of all GTA games.  A majority of the missions have the player go from point A to point B to steal a car, kill somebody, plant some sort of explosive, or a combination of all three.  This is made a bit less annoying by the “reasons” the player is sent to perform the various tasks, all ranging from legitimate excuses to the inane, such as being forced to take out street racers because they are “cheating” by using race cars in the street races.

Overall, the game is very well done, with the cartoony graphics working for the small DS screen.  The controls are tight, and driving is made a bit easier with the inclusion of a “snap-on” feature, which straightens the vehicles to the flow of the road.  The lack of voice acting may throw one off at first, but the quality of the writing more than make up for it.  Although unable to live up to its most previous predecessor, Chinatown Wars is still an amazing game and perfect for anyone looking for a new GTA game, or those older gamers looking for an adult game for the DS.