This grey little sludge of a game has done irreversable harm to Keiji Inafune’s career.

ReCore Heads to the Bargain Bin Ahead of Release

Signing on Keiji Inafune’s Comcept to create an exclusive AAA game must have sounded like such a great idea at the time to Microsoft, seeing as he had just come off of one of the most successful video game Kickstarters ever with Mighty No. 9. Fast Forward three years, and it has become evident that Keiji Inafune has had too many irons in the fire, and as a result all of his projects have suffered. Worst of all, Mighty No. 9 has been roundly condemned as a game which dismally fails at everything it sets out to achieve. When a video game creator goes cap in hand to beseech funding directly from the audience on Kickstarter, there comes with it an unspoken assumption on the part of backers that the creator in question will be very hands on with development and treat it as a passion project – Keiji Inafune has breached this article of faith. Inafune has instead decided take the generosity of fans and use it to facilitate himself operating just as he did when he was working at Capcom, which is to say that he secures funding for a project, sub-contracts that project to the lowest bidder, and then releases whatever they develop regardless of what state it may be in.

It is because of this that Keiji Inafune’s name has gone from being a marketing asset to a huge detriment in just a few short years. People no longer want to pick up untested projects with Inafune’s name attached to them, because he has made it quite clear that he does not actually give a shit about the games he works on. It is because of this that Microsoft no longer has faith in ReCore, which was to be a marquee exclusive release for the Xbox One. Thus, Microsoft is no longer confident enough to sell ReCore for a full $60, instead moving it to the bargain bin pricing of $40.

“We wanted there to be no barriers. We wanted to be able to give you a great triple-A title that gives you $60 of value but if you aren’t sure, not let that be the barrier of a trade-off. That’s why we priced it at $40. We hope that will increase its chances of having success as a new IP.

With new IP like that, launch timing matters a lot. So that’s why you’re seeing us launch it as our first title of the season, getting it out early. The second thing is it doesn’t have an existing base of fans. So we have to build that fan base, earn their trust [and] earn their dollar.”

Aaron Greenberg is so full of shit. Brand new AAA properties on the Xbox One have all launched for $60 up to this point, and watch as every brand new AAA game after ReCore does so too. If Keiji Inafune had not tarnished his personal brand so completely then Microsoft would be selling this game for $60. Moreover, even given Keiji Inafune’s personal disgrace, if Microsoft felt that ReCore stood a good chance of attracting an unambiguously high review aggregate then they would be selling the game for $60 also. Looks like ReCore is shaping up to be another mediocre Inafune game – who could have seen that coming?

Final Fantasy XIV has been going from strength to strength.

Final Fantasy XIV Surpasses Six Million Cumulative Players

When Final Fantasy XIV launched to a critical maligning all those years ago who could have predicted that in 2016 this author would be writing about what a stunning success it has been? Since re-launching as A Realm Reborn, Final Fantasy XIV has gone from strength to strength, rehabilitating the Final Fantasy name and setting Square Enix on a firmer financial footing in the wake of the annus horribilis which led to the sacking of Yoichi Wada. Now Square Enix are announcing the milestone that Final Fantasy XIV has surpassed six million cumulative users. To be clear, this figure does not include free trials – this is six million players who have purchased the game, but it does include lapsed players who own the game but are no longer subscribed.

In light of this milestone, as well as to celebrate the release patch of version 3.35, Square Enix will be offering a full five free days of play worldwide, which is set to begin from midnight on July 25. The patch adds new dungeon content in the form of Deep Dungeon: The Palace of the Dead, which players will traverse to strengthen their equipment:

“Patch 3.35 introduces the Deep Dungeon: The Palace of the Dead, where newcomers and veterans can band together for an unprecedented adventure in FINAL FANTASY® XIV. With parties of up to four, the Palace of the Dead is the first of many planned content updates where players can battle through an array of enemies, avoid traps and tackle bosses to gain valuable experience. The dungeon features randomly generated maps, several dozen floors, and starts every participant at Level 1 with a unique new progression system. Diving deep into the dungeon will see players focusing on strengthening their gear throughout their journey, as they work to unravel the mystery of the Palace of the Dead.”

If one is a lapsed Final Fantasy XIV player who is curious about some of the content that has been added recently, then there is probably no better time to jump back in, as five days of free access seems like it would grant enough time to experience much of it.

Capcom hasn’t learned any kind of lesson from Resident Evil 6.

Capcom Dindu Nuffin Wrong

Capcom is touchy about Resident Evil 6. Even four years on they are still unwilling to admit that it was a bad game, although they are at least willing to acknowledge that the game severely disappointed fans. When asked whether Capcom had something to prove with Resident Evil 7 on account of the extremely negative reception, Capcom’s Katsuhiko Ichii responded that the company has nothing to prove because Capcom has continued to produce good Resident Evil games. That really inspires confidence in the direction of Resident Evil 7!

“We know that Resident Evil 6 was a bit of a let down for core fans, but when you consider the whole universe, we do cater for different tastes.

For the main series it is definitely a good move to go back into survival horror. But perhaps there’s not a lot to prove exactly, because there have been good games, although not necessarily in the genres that fans wanted.”

Capcom has nothing to prove apparently. Never mind that they have not released a decent numbered entry in the series since 2009’s Resident Evil 5, and even that game proved divisive, with broken AI. Never mind too that the last decent spin-offs in the series, Revelations and Revelations 2, were just OK, and certainly nothing special. Then interspersed around these releases have been games like Resident Evil 6, Operation Raccoon City, and Umbrella Corps – each of which is worse than the last. But no, Capcom has nothing to prove!

At any rate, Katsuhiko Ichii has at the very least definitively revealed what is the true essence of the Resident Evil series. One has had his suspicions since Resident Evil 5 jumped head first into online co-op, and after Resident Evil 6 reinvented itself as a bro shooter. Then of course there is Resident Evil 7 and its full-blooded support of VR, but Ichii is able to encapsulate this nicely in words:

“After Resident Evil 6, we asked what is Resident Evil? What is its essence? And what are our fans expecting? Resident Evil VII is our conclusion.”

That is right, the true essence of Resident Evil is to mindlessly follow whatever is the latest trend. Capcom are not making Resident Evil 7 a first person horror game out of a reverence for Resident Evil’s horror roots, they are making it a first person horror game because that is what Pewdiepie plays on Youtube. Similarly, Capcom have not adopted VR out of a genuine belief that it will make their game better, rather they have adopted VR because that is what is popular with the cretins on Neogaf. Resident Evil 7 does not mark Capcom turning over a new leaf – it is merely a sign of business as usual. Capcom has no idea what kind of series Resident Evil is, and so once again they are copying everyone else.

Anyone else notice that the company began to right their ship after Keiji Inafune left the company?

Capcom Series including Onimusha May Be Revived

In late 2013 it was revealed that Capcom almost went broke. They had mere tens of millions of dollars in the bank, and it was only the release and subsequent success of Monster Hunter 4 that staved off complete disaster for the company. Fast forward to 2016, and the company has a very solid two year track record of making good decisions. A change in direction first came with the release of Resident Evil: Revelations 2 – the game was somewhat unoriginal, yet it jettisoned much of the moribund bloat and silliness which had been strangling the series like a cancer. Following that Capcom delighted fans with two high fidelity ports of well-regarded GameCube classics, Resident Evil and Resident Evil 0. The former game sold like absolute hotcakes on PSN, while the latter appears to have replicated that feat, releasing on the 23rd of January of this year and racking up sales of 130,000 on PSN, 40,000 on Xbone, and 10,000 on PC. To top this all off 2015 saw the announcement of a Resident Evil 2 remake, and now it appears that Capcom are of a view that it is time for other cherished Capcom franchises to make a comeback as well – and this could potentially include the Onimusha series.

One mentions Onimusha specifically because Yoshinori Ono was asked specifically about that franchise, and revealed that there had been recent internal discussions about bringing the franchise back – however that is not a done deal. What is certain however, is the fact that Capcom seem committed to bringing back fan favourite franchises, with Ono specifically stating that some of these franchises will come back:

“All I can do for now is reassure fans that conversations are happening at high levels. We [Capcom] realise the need for different series to maybe come back into the forefront and although there’s nothing to talk about right now, I’m sure in the future there will be news on variety of series that will keep the fans happy. [Fan’s] favourites are going to come back.”

The pragmatic conservatism of Capcom circa 2016 should provide a glimmer of hope to anyone who has ever despaired at the out of touch arrogance and incompetence of modern day Square Enix. Prior to 2013 many had given up on Capcom, with Resident Evil 6 serving as something of a nail in their coffin. They had abandoned making the kind of games that their fans enjoyed playing, and instead had increasingly been producing games targeted towards other markets. To this pre-2013 Capcom mindset gamers no longer bought Japanese games, and survival horror was a dead genre – and as such surely the market could be expected to purchase such Westernized bilge as DmC. This wrong-headedness came to a head when the company almost went under in 2013, and to their credit Capcom were self-aware enough at this eleventh hour juncture to step away from the abyss and begin righting their business. Capcom has once again dipped their toe into the production of survival horror, and have found that the audience for these games never actually went away. Now it appears that the Company is looking to replicate the success they had in reviving traditional style Resident Evil with their other franchises. As such HD remakes and sequels for classic Capcom franchises, including Onimusha, are now on the table. Do not be surprised to see a proper sequel to Devil May Cry announced at some point to cleanse the palate from that Ninja Theory abortion.

The lesson of this tale is that Square Enix need to face financial ruin, as it is perhaps the one thing that could potentially save them.

Xbone has reached its Quantum Breaking point!

Xbone Cannot Hold on to Exclusives

For much of the previous console generation the Xbox 360 had the PS3 at a disadvantage when it came to installbase, and even when the PS3 managed to pip the 360 at the post the difference in console sales continued to be somewhat marginal. This directly translated into the Xbox 360 being a formidable platform on which to sell games, which in turn made it far easier to justify making certain software titles exclusive to that platform, since the audience could be relied upon to purchase a substantial volume of content. That obviously is not the case with the Xbox One, as every week it is outsold by the PS4 on an almost 2:1 basis. The PS4 can keep its exclusives, but the Xbox One cannot do the same, as Microsoft tends to over-rely on third party exclusives, and third party companies tend to want to actually sell a few copies.

Early on in the generation PC ports of Xbox “exclusive” games were at least not announced prior to the Xbox One version going on sale, and indeed the PC version would not tend to release until up to a year after the game had made its debut on Xbox One. That is certainly no longer the case, with Remedy announcing ahead of Quantum Break‘s April release that the game will be releasing concurrently on the PC! This port is no mere afterthought, as within a day of announcing its existence Remedy had already provided ‘minimum’, ‘recommended’, and ‘ultra’ requirement guidelines, indicating that the PC port is mature, and has been actively developed alongside its Xbox One counterpart for some time. As a sidenote: one look at the ‘recommended’ settings is enough to make Lusipurr’s famous 32gb of RAM not seem so silly after all. Quantum Break was the one Xbox One exclusive that this author was sad to see stranded on the Xbone, and as such it is the sweetest instance of a game breaking Xbox exclusivity yet! Now, if only one’s computer could run it without going up in smoke!

Still a better story than…

Twilight of the Sods

It is funny to think that when The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess first debuted on the Wii and later the GameCube there was no such thing as Amiibo. No diminutive hunks of plastic to gate off content. No thriving grey market predicated on their scarcity. There was just a game release, and gamers were able to play that release provided they owned a copy along with the requisite console to play it on. How naive we were. What point is there in Nintendo even releasing games if they cannot be used to stimulate sales of cheap plastic Nintendo figurines?

Last month Lusipurr.com brought you tidings of an extremely solid rumour which had its basis in a listing by Amazon France, that suggested Nintendo was planning to lock away an entire in-game dungeon in their upcoming Twilight Princess HD port for the Wii U. This week Nintendo have unambiguously confirmed the rumour true by releasing a trailer to cudgel their would-be consumers into purchasing an assortment of plastic crap. No fewer than four Amiibo will be required if gamers wish to unlock every function that Nintendo has gated away in this port – though to be fair two of these functions are essentially mild cheats.

Owners of the ‘Link’ and ‘Toon Link’ Amiibo will be able to instantly refill their stock of arrows, while owners of the ‘Zelda’ and ‘Sheik’ Amiibo will be able to instantly refill their hearts. Owners of the Ganondorf Amiibo will be able to use it in order to make enemies deal twice the amount of damage. The game already sports a ‘Hero Mode’ where enemies are able to deal twice as much damage to Link, and the effects of the ‘Ganondorf’ Amiibo are able to stack on top of this, so that enemies will deal four times the standard amount of damage. Finally, the ‘Wolf Link’ Amiibo (included with the physical game at launch, but obviously not included with the digital version) will be used to unlock the ‘Cave of Shadows’, a new forty floor dungeon of trials – where each floor is home to unique enemies and environmental obstacles to overcome.

Any return player tackling ‘Hero Mode’ will want to play with the full 4X damage instead of just 2X, obliging them to pick up a Ganondorf figurine. Anyone wishing to tackle the ‘Cave of Shadows’ dungeon [which will probably be most return players] will be obliged to pick purchase a physical version of the game which (at least at launch) comes with the Wolf Link amiibo. But, if the histories of amiibo availability and special ‘launch editions’ are any indication, then the only way that players will be able to guarantee day one access to the Wolf Link Amiibo is to put down a pre-order for the physical edition of the game. That is no doubt what this trailer was designed to communicate to gamers.

Congratulations, Nintendo, your avarice knows no bounds!

Do androids dream of electric lolis?

Anime Spotlight: Dimension W

It is the year 2071, and the discovery of a a fourth dimension has gifted mankind with an unlimited source of clean power. The discovery of this dimension has made New Tesla Energy the world’s biggest corporation through their monopoly on ‘coils’, which are essentially high capacity batteries. New Tesla Energy’s monopoly on coils has basically made them a law unto themselves, much like the Shinra Electric Power Company, and they have effectively made third party coils illegal – these illegal coils are then confiscated by ‘collectors’, who operate in a similar way to bounty hunters. Incredibly, the protagonist of the series,Kyoma, is a man – not a sixteen year old boy, but an actual flesh and blood adult man with a beard and mullet! He is gruff, mature, and is generally just a complete badass. Kyoma hates all coil technology, and lives a completely lo-fi life, to the extent that he drives an exorbitantly expensive gas powered car and uses throwing spikes rather than a coil-powered gun. Fate then conspires to partner Kyoma with with Mira, the robotic creation of the late founder of New Tesla Energy, Shidō Yurizaki. Leading into the start of Dimension W Yurizaki had become a recluse for some two years after New Tesla Energy murdered his wife and child, and shortly before suiciding to evade capture he instructs Mira to follow the source of the illegal coils that have been flooding the market.

One’s initial impressions are that Dimension W is excellent. The conceptual art upon which the world is based is arresting, the animation quality is absolutely gorgeous, and the stylised presentation just exudes an effortless sense of cool. This anime is more serious than most, in the sense that it depicts a reasonably mature sci-fi setting without a lot of comic elements in evidence, but it also does not forget to have fun. This is not a sci-fi world that will bludgeon viewers with endless reams of technobabble in place of world building, but rather it is an action series which has thus far mostly used sci-fi as a backdrop. Dimension W began its run on January 10, and there are currently five episodes available. It is simulcast on Funimation Saturdays at 9:00am Eastern. Highly recommended.

This episode is being referred to as gaming’s ‘Reefer Madness’.

Professional Victims Unit

Several weeks ago Lusipurr.com brought readers the rumour that gamers were set to feature in an upcoming episode of of Law & Order: SVU, and boy did that prediction ever come to pass. The episode attempted to make gamers look bad by basically parroting the criticism that has been leveled at us by our Social Justice naysayers, yet when it came to depicting these claims the SVU writers used no kind of discernment in their portrayal – they simply listened to and believed the Anitas and Briannas of the social media world. These people will tell anybody willing to listen that gamers are trying to chase women out of the industry because they hate them, and that gamers are worse than ISIS – and this is precisely what we got with the most recent episode of SVU, Intimidation Game.

Voltaire once famously stated:

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”

And this is why one simply cannot begrudge this depiction of gamers, even despite all of its intended malice – it is simply too stupid. In the world of SVU female game developers are regularly beaten and groped [referred to as leveling up] at game conventions because male gamers are so in incensed at their mere presence, and said assailants are later able to brag about their endeavours on online forums to the universal acclaim of their peers. In the world of SVU a whitewashed parody of RogueStar, known as Acid Rain, abducts SJW game developer Raina Punjabi [herself an amalgam of Anita and Zoe] in order to teach her a lesson, and goes on to brutally gang rape her with his cronies, which they refer to as reaching level seventeen – a reference to their favourite franchise KOBS. This episode did nothing so much as demonstrate precisely how deranged the views of the Social Justice Tumblr crowd are, and the very icing on the cake of this historically hilarious own-goal came in the final minutes of the episode where a tearful Raina comes to the realisation that she was foolish to try and make it in this man’s world, and unequivocally states that the gamers have won and that she is leaving the industry – *boom-tish*.

The own goals did not finish with the episode itself, as one gamer tweeted the show’s writer, Warren Leight, praising the fictional game Amazon Warriors as an implied insult to Brian Wu’s own game Revolution 60 – Leight mistook this as a genuine compliment and retweeted it, much to the chagrin of the Social Justice mob.

“The Amazonian game already looks better than Revolution 60”

This farcical situation has also finally lead to some prominent game developers throwing caution to the wind by tearing strips from the unprofessional games journalism industry which has been demonising gamers for the better part of six months. Mark Kern, former team lead on World of Warcraft and developer on Starcraft, Warcraft III, and Diablo II, openly called out journalists [and particularly Polygon and Kotaku] on Twitter, stating:

“Just wanted to thank the GAMES journalists who have demonized our hobby and our customers to the mass media. NOT #LawAndOrderSVU @Kotaku

It’s hard enough as devs to make games without your “journalism.” K? Tks. @Polygon @kotaku #LawAndOrderSVU”

He later took to Reddit in order to further clarify:

“I am dismayed that this disagreement among gamers has resulted in a scorched earth policy by a few elements on both sides (and 3rd party trolls) that have made “gaming” a dirty word again…after all the work we’ve done to get past Columbine, Jack Thompson, etc…we really need to find a way to come back to a healthy mutual respect of our differences with an eye towards promoting gaming as the healthy past-time it is.
Thanks for listening and good luck.”

Bioshock‘s Ken Levine then took to Twitter to highlight the absurdity of a show featuring Ice T being used to smear gamers as misogynists:

“Next week on Law and order, they take on violent, misogynistic music industry. Can Detective ICE-T stop the fiends?!”

Finally, one of the writers of Watch_Dogs, Ethan James Petty, took to Twitter in order to affirm his support of gamers, and was promptly harangued by professional attention whore, Brian Wu:

“[Ethan]: I find it *very* clear that GamerGate is not a hate group. That’s a lazy smear tactic and an obvious lie if you look at their diversity.

[Ethan]: @Spacekatgal @ubisoft You are ridiculous.”

Perhaps the funniest thing to emerge from this whole sorry episode is the procession of hypocritical games ‘journalists’ who have been wringing their hands over the fact that gamers have made the industry look so bad. Fuck that. Game ‘journalists’ have had control of this narrative every step of the way, and they decided in their infinite wisdom that the best approach to dealing with gamers was to smear them as raging misogynist nerds. Congratulations, fucktards – this industry is now what you have made of it!

Look into my eyes…

Molyneux Gets Decimated

Peter Molyneux’s Godus is a mess. Molyneux took the money of PC gamers, only to prioritise the mobile version of the game ahead of the PC edition, later releasing a broken build on Early Access which is missing most of its planned features. Earlier in the week both Eurogamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun ran stories exposing the fact that the winner of Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity gamewank has yet to receive his promised rewards, and has not even been contacted by 22 Cans within the last couple of years. He was supposed to serve as the game’s God for a period of time during which he would receive a share of the royalties – something rendered impossible by the game’s current lack of multiplayer. This prompted Molyneux to release a video update where he is seen to essentially wash his hands of Godus. Molyneux and team are moving on to a project tentatively known as The Trail, and are leaving behind a skeleton crew to work on Godus, which is headed up by Konrad, a Godus backer who talked his way onto the team after being so thoroughly dissatisfied with the release of the alpha build.

The release of this video only led to more fallout, which in turn led to Molyneux granting an interview to Rock, Paper, Shotgun – and it is here that something very special happened. Interviewer, John Walker, was prepared for Molyneux’s waffling bullshit, and immediately moved to nail him to the fucking ground, catching him out in lies time and again. One would almost feel sorry for Molyneux if he was not so brazen.

“RPS: Your lead developer on Godus said on your forum that, “To be brutally candid and realistic I simply can’t see us delivering all the features promised on the Kickstarter page. Lots of the multiplayer stuff is looking seriously shaky right now, especially the persistent stuff like Hubworld.”

Peter Molyneux: I was wrong. But it’s not a lie.”

Molyneux is obviously unfamiliar [and a little taken aback] at actually being nailed for his bullshit. His response to this is to time and again make emotional appeals to try and disarm the interviewer by acting the martyr, a tactic that Walker was having none of:

“Peter Molyneux: And then later on I came out and said it would be six months. And I said that again and again. What are you trying to do? You’re trying to prove that I’m a pathological liar, I suppose, aren’t you.

Peter Molyneux: And well done John, well done! And if that’s what you want, you’re going about it completely the right way.”

In the interview Molyneux is regularly hammered for asking Kickstarter for less money than he knew he would require for the project, along with not actually employing someone to manage the development and rollout of backer rewards and other such commitments, such as with the winner of Curiosity:

“RPS: No, but it’s frustrating. Let’s go back to Bryan Henderson. The Eurogamer story revealed that you ignored him for nearly two years – that’s awful. And you’ve apologised, but how can that even have ever been a thing that happened?

RPS: Everyone’s a flawed human being, that’s not my point at all.”

Oh, it was incompetence to blame? Well that is alright then! It is so rare to see someone as blithely irresponsible as Peter Molyneux actually being made to give account through some honest to goodness games journalism. Incidentally, Peter Molyneux has subsequently sworn off of giving interviews after being squashed flatter than a pancake. Now if only someone could put John Walker into contact with Tim ‘free money’ Schafer.

This travesty was eminently avoidable.

Capcom Producer Thanks Fans for Making REmake a Record-Breaking Success

Capcom has long been residing over the bizarrely false narrative that horror-based Resident Evil games can no longer be successful in today’s market. This line of thought appears to have taken hold during the GameCube era when Resident Evil 4 was such a smashing success for the company, yet this reading of the situation is not supported by the actual numbers. Viewed in context on the GameCube, Resident Evil 0 and the Resident Evil remake sold four-hundred thousand and under three-hundred thousand copies fewer than Resident Evil 4 respectively. There is every reason to believe that if these games had been released to the PS2 then they would have performed proportionally well, especially given the performance of Resident Evil‘s re-release on PSN.

This week the Resident Evil remake’s producer, Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, has thanked fans for helping the game set sales records on PSN. The game is PSN’s highest ever selling digital release, and it was the month’s top selling PS3 and PS4 release. For the first time in a long while there is the faintest glimmer of hope that Capcom may see this stunning success and realise that is a genuine appetite for this sort of game, though as Lusipurr.com’s Mel points out this may just convince them that there is an appetite for lazy re-releases.

Resident Evil 4‘s beginning sections represent a very different feeling of tension than its ending.

Last week I discussed and explored some ideas about game endings, some of their controversies and some of what they should try to be. I mentioned how they carry a lot of weight for players and that botching an ending can be a truly disappointing experience for those deeply invested (financially or otherwise). I also mentioned that the ending carries a similar amount of weight to another significant part of the game: the beginning. Game beginnings are among my favorite parts of so many titles. Of all my favorite games that sit in my personal top ten, my favorite part of them is the opening few hours. And since no game is perfect, these games also contain flaws, and most of them tend to be contained near the ending. What goes wrong with games from the beginning to the end I think is something many games struggle to avoid.

The problem is so common because it is tied to the traditional game design template of a steadily increasing challenge. I suppose a game could be made where the challenge is the same throughout, or even gets easier, but the inherent test-like nature of most games requires that the player be pitted against increasingly powerful opposition. The end result usually has an impact on the visual design of the game, as well as the pacing. Many games start in a quiet or serene location and then ramp up and up into more hostile environments often portrayed as colorless and dreary. A very common trope is to end up in some kind of industrial location completely foreign to the rest of the game’s environments. To go back to one of my touchstones, the Resident Evil series has had this problem throughout its entire history.

The early segments of any RE game are often much more atmospheric than the machined, industrial look of the later stages. It seems apparent that when planning out the setting for the game, much more work went into the earlier segments than the later ones. Resident Evil 4 tries to make a big departure from its predecessors by eschewing the (oddly cramped) suburban locales for more natural forested areas. The enemies weren’t shambling zombies, but normal looking villagers. It gave RE4 a distinct look and feel. It all seemed much more old world, the enemies carried literally pitch forks and torches, old bell towers and chicken coups were a common sight. But farther into the game the setting was abandoned for the same old industrial and lab environments, the enemies now all had guns and body armor — it almost became a completely different game toward the end. The pacing went directly out the nearest window as enemies flooded every room and ammo was dumped on the player to accommodate that.

Super Mario RPG‘s first major town. How colorful.

The issue of pacing is a tricky one to make declarations about, however. My favorite games all play with pacing in ways that make different parts of the game more distinct and memorable without alienating those parts from the rest of the game. While I may enjoy the pacing and environment of most game beginnings, I must admit that most games cannot simply maintain the exact same pace throughout the experience. The result is monotonous or, even worse, unrelenting. A sad case in point would be our current playthrough of Vagrant Story, which is ostensibly a dungeon crawler and as such the game does little to vary its content and pace. Every room is an encounter, one that demands full attention and use of the proper tools to handle the threats. The enemies in these rooms respawn upon reentry and the game requires some degree of backtracking. The experience puts the Crawl in Dungeon Crawler, which ultimately just leads to fatigue. Had the game included more in the way of towns or an overworld, the experience would probably have been more palatable. As it is, Vagrant Story is like shlurfing waist deep in mud for the entirety of the experience.

So the pacing should change throughout a game, I think that much I have clearly expressed. But this is something apart from abandoning the atmosphere of the beginning of the game. Peaceful-to-hostile is fine, but slow/calculating-to-guns blazing is problematic in my eyes. The plot might necessitate a confrontation with The Big Bad, but does Mr. Big Bad’s lair necessarily have to be crammed full of more than double the enemies from the rest of the game? I think the real challenge of design is to make the encounter more difficult while preserving the initial concept’s pace. This is apparently a challenge that most game designers are not always up to when they take the easier approach by simply moving all the slider bars to the right. It seems obvious at some point that far more concept art and the initial germ for the game’s creation all revolved around the opening, not the ending, of many high profile titles. It is just a shame that these elements get swallowed up by development costs and time limits that keep the ending of these games from being as smartly designed.

Now it is your turn, lazy eyed reader. Is this something familiar to you or not? Are there more game endings you enjoy than beginnings? Have you been a good boy or girl and kept up with the playthrough of Vagrant Story?! Confess now, my child, and I promise not to tell Fearless Leader of your transgressions.

Mass Effect is a series that demanded a certain pay off from many players.

What is a game but a miserable pile of secrets? It sits waiting for me to untangle its mysteries, solve its problems and find all the quest items. Sometimes a game will offer optional things to find or solve, but always there is a main goal to be achieved. What happens when I do? Depends on the game, I suppose. Sometimes there is nothing left to do. Sometimes I can begin again with all my items in tow to solve the game a second time. But always (ok, usually) there is an ending. Many games treat their endings differently, opting to make them conspicuously less challenging than might be expected or piling on the difficulty in a simple linear manner. Some story heavy games dump a ton of resolution at the end either interactively or in a cutscene. Not all games get it right. So what should a game ending be?

Assuming the majority of games represents the ideal form of a game ending, what a game’s ending should be has changed quite a bit over the generations. In fact many games simply did not end early on. As a child I remember I sat down with my father and we decided to play Balloon Fight and get as far as possible. Eventually we just ended up at the first stage again. Several other games from this time period behaved this way, but some had definable endings. Super Mario Bros., like many others, had a reward screen with some congratulatory text (no credits of course) and an option to play on a harder difficulty mode.

And as games became more narrative focused, as the people working on them began to insist on being credited for their work, games made efforts to reward the player with dazzling cinematics sometimes during a credit roll. Games made many moves during the late ’90s and throughout the 2000s to be more like movies in their presentation, and of course this included their endings. RPGs often had hours of cutscenes, the length of which would be advertised on the box, and probably a good hour of that was reserved for the ending of the game. But there are more to games than their noninteractive moments of congratulations or cinematic reward. Games must have an ending gameplay moment, too.

The final boss is one of the oldest gameplay devices still in common employ today. This encounter is perhaps the true ending of the game, it represents major resolution of any plot and the final challenge of the game. Boss encounters themselves are puzzling things that can be and represent many different things. Traditionally bosses and final bosses represent a test of acquired skill by the player but can also be plot vehicles by subverting that expectation and being an easy encounter. The final encounter in Final Fantasy X is a near defenseless bug creature that cannot be lost to (party members are automatically raised if knocked out) which still conforms to the boss encounter model (it is not a final block puzzle, after all).

The final boss from many Resident Evil games, the Tyrant.

At some point down the line developers began playing with the extra “leg room” for more content in their game by producing multiple endings, often tiered in order of best to worst depending on difficulty to attain. Multiple endings imply that there may not be any one true ending to a given game’s story. The Resident Evil remake on the GameCube featured multiple endings based upon how many teammates the player is able to save by the time the whole place blows up. Interestingly most of these potential endings are invalidated by proceeding games that feature characters that could have perished in some of the conclusions. Likewise, the RE series has featured multiple story angles from different player character perspectives that are also invalidated based on proceeding events. So an ending to a game may not always represent the ending of the story, the one that is considered true for the series. Does this make the other endings represent failure more than a resolution?

More recently Mass Effect 3‘s multiple endings made a big splash on websites as many people voiced their dissatisfaction with everything from the degree to which the story was resolved to how different the three endings were from each other. It brought with it a lot of discussion at the time of what game endings should be and to what degree the players should be able to change a game’s plot. As someone who lost interest in the series after the second entry it was difficult for me to weigh in on the exact matters of the problem but I feel as though many of the best questions raised during the event remain unanswered or at least not widely agreed upon. Bioware eventually stated their willingness to change the game and be receptive to their fans’ demands, and the whole matter highlighted for me how important a game’s ending can be. In Mass Effect‘s case it was also the ending of the trilogy for a series with a heavy story focus and then-innovative connectivity between player choices in previous entries. The ending had to deliver something that epitomized the series in some way and the product left many wanting. Some were satisfied and some where not, though on what criteria I cannot claim to have found a clear answer to.

Game endings, for those of us fortunate enough to see our games through to the end, are clearly expected to be some kind of reward. Some games, those less story focused, can get away with simpler ending scenes but they still can be subject to criticism for a poor final encounter. The most highly regarded games and series have all dropped the ball on their endings at some point or another but they are saved by being made up of so much more than that one moment. Still, the ending is the last thing the player sees and carries a cache possibly only matched by the beginning of the game.

So let me know of any particular game endings that you thought were best or even disappointing. Is there some aspect to those endings you can single out that explains your feelings and is there something you would like to see happen in a game ending. Fill in the blanks in the comments section below, don’t forget we are still hiring and read chapters eleven and twelve for the test on Monday, have a nice weekend class!

The famous Resident Evil mansion. Again.

Happy Meliversary, devoted readers, as on August third of last year I released my first post here on Lcom. And as worthy of celebration as that milestone surely is to the world, I must first divert attention to the latest complaint de jour that has been rushing through the industry enthusiast websites. To be certain, complaints are flung often from the enthusiast press regarding videogames and when these complaints are not declaring stagnation over the constant release of sequels they are moaning about dissatisfaction from too many divergent spinoffs. I can safely say I have done both and sometimes these are well deserved criticisms. But the industry has moved on from churning out sequels to a much more worrisome trend.

While sequels have and continue to flood the market with hopes of brand power selling new products with the use of old art assets and derivative story lines, the latest trend seems to involve the complete repackaging of old games with an higher definition shine and perhaps some new content thrown on top, maybe. The latest news of unexpected, if not a bit unnecessary, remasters comes from the old pro of re-releases, Capcom. In the 90s and into the early 2000s Capcom made themselves no stranger to the concept of re-releasing their games, often as a simple port to another system, with the most famous case being their original Resident Evil title seeing two re-releases in as many years. The Director’s Cut and the Dual Shock Ver. both made minimal changes to the game on the order of something a free firmware update would add today. One added a mode to change up the item placement while advertising the addition of uncensored FMV cutscenes (which turned out to be untrue, to some controversy at the time) and the other re-release saw the addition of analogue support in the advent of Sony’s Dual Shock controller that came with dual analogue control.

From there Capcom would give similar treatment to many of its mainline RE titles and it began to wear a bit thin on the consumerbase until they put forward a true bottom to top remake of the first entry in the series. The Resident Evil remake for the GameCube was not simply a graphical reconstruction of the entire game for the current generation of consoles but a reinvented version of the gameplay as well. New mechanics were added (like the self defense knife), new enemies were added, the story was altered, the puzzles were almost all completely changed or modified in ways that would trick a player familiar with the original. But time would prove that this full fledged remake would not buck the trend of the re-releases Capcom was so fond of. The RE remake (or REmake as it became known) would see a port to the Wii and more recently an HD port for all current and previous generation systems minus Nintendo platforms. And while the Nintendo omission remains sad and a bit baffling, the announcement of this old-style Resident Evil remaster in the wake of the critical dumping ground of Resident Evil 6 is an unsurprising move from Capcom.

The Last of Us will probably become the next generation’s new big franchise. It shouldn’t, though. Leave it alone!

But far be it from Capcom to be the only major industry developer to get busy remastering content for the new consoles. Sony’s own Naughty Dog, creators of the Uncharted series, have announced both a sequel and a remaster for their latest game The Last of Us. Arguments were made, and mine among them, that the The Last of Us offered a complete story that should probably be left alone instead of making a burgeoning epic out of the tale this game originally told. However it would prove merely wishful thinking that a game so expensive to produce would see the intentional dumping of all that hard work over the easy application of it to a direct sequel. The kicker, however, is that this one year old game would also see an HD remaster fittingly titled The Last of Us Remastered for the PS4 and include such banal upgrades as a higher frame rate and full 1080p resolution from 720p. In effect this was simply The Last of Us “Also on PS4 Edition” in an attempt to fill in the software lineup as other developers worked on their games for the new hardware.

And while not a new trend by any stretch, the new hardware is quite obviously the factor involved in all of the HD remasters rolling out the doors. In the face of new hardware and inflated production times while developers become familiar with the systems, these filler titles will likely see a continued presence for the time being. The only difference is that in previous generations these years would be filled with middling launch year titles that would measure up poorly to mid- and late-life releases. But for as poor as some launch titles can be I would probably prefer the new, if ugly, content produced in these years since they can potentially go on to become a newer better series. Re-releasing old games as remasters to me looks like another means of selling back my old library of games to me with minimal effort on the part of the developer. These remasters, or ports as they were commonly called once, go a long way in reminding me that backwards compatibility is well and truly dead. No one would buy The Last of Us Remastered for $50 if their PS4 could play the PS3 version that costs less than $40. And at a time where consumer control only threatens to pass further away, this trend is perhaps the most worrisome regarding the whole situation.

But worry not about sharing your thoughts, year-long readers, because doing so is easy enough in the comments section below! Have you bought a re-release, remaster, or otherwise upgraded port of an older game? If so, have you bought more than one version? Why? What the hell is wrong with you? To tell me what the hell is wrong with you I implore, again, for you to comment below. It is truly the only way I know that you’re reading and that I’m not just talking to myself week after week. I mean, I could just go back to doing that. It’s fine. No, it’s fine! Just– just leave me alone mom, I want to be alone! *sobs*

My favorite controller of all time. Others may be good, but this one damn fine.

This week I would like to take a quick look back at that third wheel of the sixth console generation: the Nintendo GameCube. As Nintendo’s last traditional home console, the GameCube stands in contrast to its successors the Wii and Wii U. Not relying on any particular gimmick to draw in attention or to set it apart, the GameCube nevertheless still had some distinguishing features that shaped its performance throughout its lifespan. Perhaps the most prominent of them was the proprietary mini discs that also required a special laser to read the data stored on them. More noticeable was the GameCube’s controller that featured a layout both reminiscent and new. The general layout of the face buttons, shoulder triggers, and analogue sticks were all quite similar to contemporary designs, but the size and exact positioning eschewed the more traditional diamond layout made popular by the Super Nintendo. The system would also go on to produce the first worthwhile wireless controller, the Wavebird, which untethered gamers from their systems by offering an incredible functional range of operation at the expense of the rumble feature. In terms of hardware, the GameCube stood toe to toe with the Microsoft’s original Xbox and towered over the otherwise dominant PlayStation 2. Indeed, this system came out of a Nintendo that held relatively true to console design fundamentals as opposed to the, to put it unflatteringly, gimmick oriented Nintendo that would produce the DS series of consoles and pioneer the rise of motion controls. And the reasons for this shift in design were thanks in no small part to the change in leadership, from Yamauchi to Iwata in 2002, as well as the general lacking performance of the GameCube in an environment where it struggled to differentiate itself from its competitors in any meaningful way.

To write at length about any console would also be to mention some of its more prominent software as well. I had mentioned a few times in the past that Capcom’s Resident Evil series being fully ported over to the system was one of the bigger software accomplishments of the GameCube. Perhaps that speaks to the general level of accomplishment the system achieved, however those games did prove to make the GameCube the single best machine on which to experience the entire Resident Evil series. The deal for that series would also come around the same time Nintendo was working with then-second-party Silicon Knights as they produced the decidedly mature Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. The release of these games in close proximity would go a small way in shaking up Nintendo’s kid friendly image, though of course it would not sway overall public opinion on the matter. In all likelihood, these were decisions being brought about by a Nintendo that was still questioning some of its practices and examining its position in the industry. The same Nintendo that allowed Majora’s Mask to hit store shelves. Very much not the Nintendo of today, which still rolls in the money it made hand over fist during the height of the Wii’s popularity. Though as the GameCube matured and the change in management took hold, as well as with the launch of the DS and the appointment of Reggie Fils-Aime as NOA president, Nintendo would once again take a step back into the more kid friendly realm, leaving some of the darker exploits of the Nintendo 64 and early GameCube days behind.

Sadly, the GameCube can sometimes be notable for what it did not have, as much as for what it actually offered. The greatest lacking aspect of the console, the singular thing that made me finally stop being a Nintendo-only console owner and purchase a PlayStation 2, was the system’s critical lack of RPGs. Though some noteworthy examples do exist on the system, it was nothing compared to the veritable deluge of RPG content waiting to be played on Sony’s competing console. Back in the days of game rentals, I would always notice enticing RPGs sitting, practically lining, the PlayStation section of the shelves. Not only was the GameCube section much smaller overall, but its games were updated far less. Eventually, despite being a fairly devout fanboy at the time, I broke out of my loyalty and became a two console gamer for the first time. I believe some of my first purchases for the PlayStation 2 included Xenosaga and Final Fantasy X. And yet, for those who might know me well, my favorite RPG does reside on the GameCube. Yes I am giving mention once again to Sega’s Skies of Arcadia Legends. Without getting into the details for why I love it so, I will simply say that this game went a long way in holding me over before I finally felt I needed more out of my RPG experience. A sprinkling of other RPGs did grace the console, such as the first console Fire Emblem title, and a few other offerings I had little interest in. But overall, the GameCube was not a good friend to the avid RPG fan.

Hah, I couldn’t skip an opportunity for a Skies of Arcadia mention in this article!

Finally, I would like to give a mention to one game that still marks the highlight of my GameCube experience. A game made great from equal parts genius on the part of the developer and dedication on the part of the community. Super Smash Bros. Melee, a launch window release title, still stands in my mind as the single best game for the system. It was the greatest reason to get the system at launch and would remain the only reason I would tote the system around to friend’s houses or leave it plugged in at home well after the release of the Wii. The game, a unique mascot fighting game first introduced on the Nintendo 64, is the epitome of the Nintendo design ideal of “easy to pick up, difficult to master”. Unlike other popular fighting games, Melee does not ask the player to memorize unique button inputs for each character as they all share the same move sets. The ring-out style of victory also places great emphasis on the stage being played on, introducing some light platforming elements to the game. However, skill unquestionably separates the good players from the bad, even with the game’s more random elements turned on, like items. A great many techniques were designed into the game that required precise timing and foreknowledge of how they work and when to use them. L-Canceling, Directional Influence, sweetspotting, aerial buffering, these all sound like glitchy exploits dredged up by hardcore players, but they are actually all designed into the game. Which is not to say some exploits were not found, several of which would go a long way in changing the fundamentals of high level tournament play. And that, perhaps, is the GameCube’s legacy. A singular title, still being played to this day at professional tournaments, most recently EVO 2013, that is equally capable of being both a casual party game and among the fastest fighting games ever made. It is a balance in game design that any game making company would do well to strive for.

And so my look back at the purple lunch box is over. I have a sneaking suspicion that most of you readers were GameCube owners, and chances are that you loved the system too. Despite its shortcomings, the system still endears me to it. It is still plugged in at my house! So, what memories, if any, do you guys have? What great games did I miss (I know I missed several) that made the GameCube special? And do not be afraid to speak ill of the system, for there is much ill to speak of. The important thing is that you make your comment!

The Resident Evil remake for the Gamecube looked substantially better than other games on the system.

To challenge a person is to give them a great incentive to rise to the occasion. Throughout the videogame industry this rings true, both when games are played and when they are created. Great things are done when a worthy challenge is put forth. In terms of game development, the industry saw this in its early days up to and including the prominence of the NES, where memory was limited and the ability to convey the simplest of visuals took skill. In its own right, this skill needed to be called upon again at the turn of the fifth generation of consoles when polygonal graphics and three dimensional game worlds entered the fray. New methods needed to be created, not only to allow the player to operate easily within this new world type but also to work around new hurdles like load times and low texture quality. Game development has always involved challenges to the development team, but no more so when those challenges come from severe limitations of the hardware itself. Indeed a great deal across the internet has already been said about the astonishing feats early game music composers pulled off. And to lend further credence to the creative power of limitations, look no further than the genre made popular because of it: survival horror.

To speak of survival horror is, of course, to speak of one of its preeminent entries, the Resident Evil series. First released in 1996 by Capcom and series creator Shinji Mikami, Resident Evil was a game about keeping the player guessing and never letting them get too comfortable. The original games in the series would combine a simple shooting mechanic with a heavy emphasis on puzzle solving and resource management. The story of the games, including the newer entries in the series, is a wacky mess about secret organizations and weaponized viruses. I could write a whole series of articles about that alone, but perhaps I will bore people about it another time. Resident Evil embodies the power of limitations in nearly everything it does. The famous room transitions where a door is shown slowly opening from a first person perspective was designed both to build tension and disguise load times. Though by the time the series hit the Gamecube with Resident Evil 0 and the remake, these door scenes were much less necessary. Still, it was decided to keep them in as its function of delaying seeing whats in that next room was considered valuable. Another famous aspect of most of the older entries, aside from the now particularly butt ugly Resident Evil Code: Veronica, are the pre-rendered backgrounds. For the trade off of a stationary camera, this allowed the rooms and environments of the older entries to contain much higher quality textures than most games of its time. Especially evident in the Gamecube games, this now all but dead technique lent itself well to the series. The stationary camera often gives an unsettled feeling, with a quick switch of camera angles sometimes revealing a new threat or perhaps something that looks like one. The high level of detail was also good for a game that requires examining every room for key items, scarce ammo and healing items, buttons and levers. These design choices, originally crafted by necessity to simply allow Resident Evil to work as a game also lend themselves to the atmosphere and make the series what it is.

Challenge in game development is one thing, and often something that must be revealed, but challenge in gameplay is something designed to be seen and felt. As I mentioned briefly above, the Resident Evil series greatly restricts resources like ammo or healing items. Even the ability to save requires a finite resource, the ink ribbon, first be found and then used at a typewriter. It is perhaps a point of contention, but the default control scheme also places limits and makes the characters generally less mobile and agile than in other games. Despite this, threats can and often should still be avoided to spare scarce ammo for when it is needed. When learning the ropes in the Gamecube remake of the original, I had to quickly realize that not every zombie needed to be shot or killed. While playing I slowly became more accustomed to the so called tank controls and began to appreciate that every new room was a potential threat, though many were often empty. Throughout my first experience with the game I never felt fully prepared and always teetered on the edge of being overwhelmed by the enemy. This is to say nothing of the eerily contrasting puzzles that typically secluded me from the action while I pushed book cases around and thinking that on the other side of that door were a bunch of mutations ready to keep me from using the fruits of my puzzle solving. The challenge presented by the older games in the series is often great, especially for the first time, but I found it only made me work harder to meet it.

Resident Evil 0 managed to improve upon the pre-rendered backgrounds and is one of the best examples of it to date.

As the series moved on, series creator Shinji Mikami voiced tiredness in the formulaic nature of the games that had become evident in what would be the last of the old style games, Resident Evil 0. And so, after much ado, Resident Evil 4 was born. To be brief, this game took the series in a much more action oriented direction in an attempt to breathe new life and bring new attention to the series. And that it did. The masterfully crafted title would be a hit and also Mikami’s last Resident Evil game. From there, with the winds of popularity to its back, the series had a new console generation and much more money to play around with. And from all of this opportunity and all of this freedom came what was at the time the greatest disappointment in the mainline series. Resident Evil 5 took what 4 did and cranked the action all the way up to Boulder-Smash. The already wearisome Quick Time Events, which 4 regrettably popularized, had now become even more commonplace. What pacing 4 had preserved from the older entries to build tension was broken by a constant influx of enemies and the addition of a mandatory AI/Co-Op partner. Unlike Resident Evil 0, which had a swappable AI partner around mostly to help with inventory management and to be used in solving clever two person puzzles, this partners function was to help open those pesky doors only two people can open and to get boosted up to things. If 4 made the series more action oriented, then 5 simply turned it into an action game. Having not played Resident Evil 6 I cannot make much comment aside from it having three characters with disjointed campaigns. Likely because development included three disjointed teams, because coordinating all of them together would have been too difficult. So, following a disappointment, the response to was to throw a bigger development team and even more money at 6. The results should have been obvious.

The newer entries in the series all had great freedom before them to craft huge worlds, fully rendered and explorable. They had access to hardware that let them display many enemies and in good detail. Yet only one of the newer titles showed any discipline in its design or restraint at all and it came from the same man who worked under those old limitations of the past. The man who kept the spirit of those limitations alive despite having the resources not to. Today game development is mostly limited by finance and a person with a clear vision for the game. It is past the days when developers are given no choice but to work within the crippling confines of the hardware, making choices like dropping a sound channel in the music to make room for a sound effect. When given very little, people will try find the very best they can do with what they are given. When given the world, people tend to make a mess.

Deja Vu: Square Enix once again makes some far-off promises.

Square Enix Does It Again!

Square Enix is amazing. What an interesting company. They are certainly one of a kind. What has been one of the primary complaints leveled against Square Enix over the [currently] seven years of [then] Final Fantasy Versus XIII‘s incubation? Might it have had something to do with the game being announced long before it was ready to be announced, only to languish untouched until late 2011? 2013 looks to have seen Square Enix repeat the same old mistakes by announcing a highly anticipated game [Kingdom Hearts III], which they in actual fact do not plan to start developing in any serious capacity until another high profile game [Final Fantasy XV] has been completed. Final Fantasy XV does not seem likely to finish up development until late 2014 at the earliest, and possibly much later.

This week Shinji Hashimoto [a producer on both games] let the cat out of the bag when he stated:

“Both [Kingdom Hearts III and Final Fantasy XV] have Tetsuya Nomura as their director, so we can’t create these two big games at the same time.

A lot of people have wondered for the last couple of years if Square Enix has actually been working on Kingdom Hearts III; that’s why we announced it at E3 this year, but please, we need you all to understand that there’s a lot to do.

Wow. Okay. So, it would appear that Tetsuya Nomura is too busy working on Final Fantasy XV for the Kingdom Hearts III project to begin in earnest until it is finished. Fine. Good. It is preferable if the developer of a large-scale project does not have to divide his attention across multiple fronts, so that is all to the good. But why then was Kingdom Hearts III announced as being in production? Square Enix made that announcement because people had been asking about whether Kingdom Hearts III was in production, and so the company decided that their best course of action was to lie to them about the game being in production despite the fact that it probably will not enter production in any meaningful capacity for another two years. Fantastic! This does not even remotely stand to blow up in Square Enix’s face yet again when gamers start referring to Kingdom Hearts III as vapourware. For all the gamer frustration engendered by Valve’s refusal to announce Half-Life 3, Gaben’s silence has been admirable and much preferable to making a premature announcement which sees the game’s entire fandom embark upon a rollercoaster of frustration and disappointment.

The biggest kick in the balls is that Square Enix refuse to release Type-0, yet you can be certain that we’ll get the freemium game!

Broken Fantasy

Square Enix boss, Yosuke Matsuda, has used the company’s 2013 report to once again lament the performance of Eidos’ multi-million unit selling franchise games Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution, and Sleeping Dogs, while praising the the fantastic performance of the Square Enix Japanese division, because it is not like they have spent the last three years pouring money into a blackhole in order to salvage Final Fantasy XIV [which in all fairness looks to have paid off]:

“In the HD games category, we delivered three major titles in the fiscal year under review, primarily in Europe and North America. These titles— “SLEEPING DOGS,” “Hitman: Absolution,” and “TOMB RAIDER”—failed to reach their respective targets, and resulted in financially unsatisfactory consequences, whereas the HD business in Japan remained strong through sales of the Nintendo 3DS version of “DRAGON QUEST VII: Eden no Senshitachi” (Warriors of Eden) and others.”

Matsuda appears to be sticking to the already much-maligned falsehood that these games failed to meet retail expectations, when Square Enix themselves set the games up to fail by judging them by a metric which was neigh-on impossible to achieve. Matsuda goes on to bewail the fact that disc-based games are essentially killing Square Enix, as promotion, retail-partnerships, and price protection served to make all these games unprofitable – a sentiment which utterly fails to account for the fact that other publishers must also operate within this retail environment, and that both Tomb Raider and Hitman: Absolution were able to dominate their relative launch windows. If these games failed to generate a profit, then it is Square Enix who have done something wrong.

Yosuke Matsuda has a plan to deal with the lack of profitability however, and if one reads between the lines it sounds very much like he wishes to sell Square Enix’s larger games off in a piecemeal fashion:

“How to address the issue is a major task for the executive team. As noted above, the HD games category faces the structural issues of an inflexible earnings model and long-term, large-scale development resulting in a low rate of investment turnover. These two factors are closely interconnected.

Through implementation of such a development process, we will promote approaches to raise investment turnover by accelerating earnings opportunities and reducing financial risks. A lack of earnings opportunities over a long period of time means, essentially, having no contact with customers during the same period. In these days, it is becoming crucial to strengthen customer relations. Re-examining our approach to long-term, large-scale development is also a step toward building a better customer relationship.”

The only message that one is able to take away from Matsuda’s words is that Square Enix plans to find ways to start selling their games before they are even finished. Granted, such an interpretation takes more than a few liberties on the part of this author, yet Matsuda’s choice of wording sounds as if he is planning on releasing AAA Square Enix games in a similar fashion to Tim Schafer’s Steam Early Access release of Broken Game, as essentially both developers are looking to sell a portion of their games before they are actually finished in order to make up for budgetary and revenue shortfalls. At any rate, it certainly seems fair to say that the next great endeavour of Square Enix will be to somehow monetise their HD games before they are even released.

This however is not the beginning and end of Square Enix’s risk mitigation agenda, as the week has seen the unveiling of three new projects – all series which are derived from traditional packaged games, but are now trying to flee that ship. The trademarks of Deus Ex Universe and Hitman Go look to indicate a series transition to MMO and smartphone game respectively. Meanwhile, Square Enix has this week unveiled a new freemium smartphone title by the name of Final Fantasy Agito. If that name sounds familiar, it is only because it was more-or-less the original name of Final Fantasy Type-0. The game itself is to be a direct continuation from Final Fantasy Type-0, and is set to feature microtransactions, a customisable bare-bones protagonist, and player decisions which influence the direction of the story – in essence every me-too bullet-point from the current grab-bag of conventional corporate gaming wisdom.

If Square Enix does not exercise a little more caution in the way they devalue their own properties, then they may eventually find themselves in the unenviable position of Japanese companies like Capcom, who this week revealed that they only have a paltry 152 million dollars left in the bank – that is scarcely enough for one last roll of the dice. This generation has seen Capcom badly botch the Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and Lost Planet franchises, while [seemingly] deliberately killing-off the Mega Man franchise just to spite Keiji Inafune – and their bottom line has suffered because of it. The Resident Evil name alone no longer sells games in the volumes that it once did, and the company, in its cloistered arrogance, may not survive this decline of fortunes. This should serve as an abject lesson to the dinosaurs of the Japanese gaming industry who are currently engaged in debasing their own currency in order to generate a quick buck – once they no-longer have a name to trade on, there is not much else.

Contrary to appearances, one of these screens is not bigger than the other.

Sony Unveils Plans to Revitalise the Vita

It is fair to say that the PS Vita [despite being one of the sexiest pieces of gaming tech ever created] has not managed to catch on in the way that Sony might have hoped for. Part of this may be to do with the price, part of this is almost certainly attributable to the horribly expensive and horrendously requisite Vita memory cards, and a large part of the Vita’s sluggish performance is undeniably the result of the 3DS serving as such a potent competitor. This week Sony has unveiled two potential avenues for the Vita’s expansion into mass market gaming culture, yet they appear to be odd and disappointing by turns.

Sony’s first grab for a larger share of the portable gaming market comes in the antithetical form of a micro-console [named the Playstation Vita TV], which will allow gamers to play [some] Vita games on their televisions for an incredibly cheap asking price. If this were to catch on it would essentially mean that Sony would be supporting two home consoles over the course of the next generation, as opposed to one console and one portable. The feature-set of the Playstation Vita TV is hardly ideal, given that its lower resolution games are bound to look ghastly on HD televisions, and the fact that many Vita games will be incompatible with this new console, owing to the fact that it does not support touch controls. That said, if this is the only way that Sony will be able to keep the Vita alive in the West, then one must admit to a degree of grudging respect for the ingenuity that went into thinking outside of the box in order to better market what was a handheld gaming console. We all know a gamer [or five] who will stubbornly refuse to play anything that is not blown up to a pixilated mess on their 50″ television sets [*cough* Final Fantasy VI Advance *cough*], and so it would appear that this device is for them.

The second new piece of Vita hardware on the horizon is a new lite model of the Vita. The original model of the Vita was not particularly thick to begin with, yet the lite model is set to be twenty percent thinner and fifteen percent lighter. The Vita Lite is also set to tackle the console’s unpalatable pricing by slightly lowering the price of the unit, while also featuring 1GB of internal memory, meaning that new owners need not purchase a memory card in order to play their physical games. This all sounds pretty good thus far, yet unfortunately there is one pretty huge caveat – the console will feature an LCD screen rather than the original model’s lovely OLED screen. The new LCD screen will allow Vita Lite owners to eke an extra hour of battery-life from their purchase, yet the original model’s OLED screen is undoubtedly its strongest feature, and as such the Vita Lite can only be considered a significant downgrade.

One would not begrudge the success of either of these Vita models, yet it should be fervently hoped that neither of them outright replace the original model, as the loss of that beautiful OLED screen would be a truly sad thing indeed.

I do believe I have managed to find a way to make Metal Gear even more elitist.

What ho and hail, Lusiperpendicular humanoids!

A reoccurring theme in my thoughts of late has been the comparability between video games and film, especially in the misty-afterthoughts of E3. Year after year we hear consistent refrains about “cinematic experiences.” Hell, we have even been seeing the steady rise of imported Hollywood talent and techniques in video games, from Michael Biehn playing himself in Blood Dragon to the use of Snyder-esque green screen sets for video game cutscenes. Yet for all that it makes sense to compare video games to a similarly visual medium, I have wondered if we are too hasty in our attempts to emulate film. Perhaps some games should be seen as emulating other mediums: painting, music, or even books. Dust blows off the cogs of my brain. The wheels slowly begin to turn…

In the comments on an earlier post I referenced Hideo Kojima as being a developer whose personality can be clearly felt within his games. Since then, a wealth of information has sprung up around Kojima’s latest project, Metal Gear Solid V. This slew of trailers and interviews got me thinking – had I been too hasty in my dismissal of Kojima’s intentions for the Metal Gear series? The themes of the games, from Metal Gear to The Phantom Pain, are surprisingly consistent. In some ways, we might even suggest that Metal Gear provides Gaming with its first (and I would argue sole) Epic.

Seriously. Consider that most Metal Gear games begin in medias res, a common technique in Epic poems, placing the player right in the middle of the action at the very beginning. Homer’s Iliad opens in the middle of the Trojan War, just as Metal Gear Solid opens amid Snake’s infiltration of Shadow Moses. Taken as a series*, Metal Gear opens with Solid Snake breaking into Outer Heaven, with little to no context of who Snake is (beyond an amalgamation of Snake Plissken and the aforementioned Michael Biehn) or the purpose Outer Heaven serves. These details get fleshed out as the series continues.

What…the…hell…are those people doing in that volcano?

The fleshing out of the details is something else I feel elevates Metal Gear to the status of Epic. Unlike other series, Metal Gear manages to expand on its premises and characters without blowing them up into bloated, arbitrary Resident Evil style monstrosities. This is due, in part, to Metal Gear seemingly always having its eyes on the global, and in a sense epic, stage. Whereas Resident Evil was forced to continually up the stakes in more and more ridiculous methods, Metal Gear evolved in consistent ways that made sense, subtly poking the complexities of their narrative until gamers finally gathered the pieces themselves. In a more concrete example, by the time Metal Gear Solid 4 rolled around, gamers were used to the idea of soldiers with supernatural powers- they had been an integral part since the early days. Resident Evil 5, on the other hand, ends with a fistfight in the middle of a volcano. In a game series that started as a zombie horror game. Because consistency is a four letter word to Capcom.

Metal Gear is further elevated beyond its brethren for its willingness to discuss (at length in many cases) such heavy handed topics as War, Pacifism, Nuclear Proliferation, and Love Blooming on the Battlefield. Kojima’s willingness as a writer to literally stop gameplay to have a discussion on philosophy harkens back to the writings of Tolstoy and Hugo, who were both known to do much the same thing. While other commentators have criticized this, to me it is one of the greatest joys of playing a Metal Gear game. The juxtaposition of the Overman Snake, a hero whose sole purpose is to sow death and destruction, with the obviously personal values Kojima holds is one that keeps me riveted to my seat throughout the games. Other games with seemingly epic storylines such as Resident Evil or Halo fail to even hold a candle to such strength of theme.

FREEBIRD!

The ironic bit of this entire thought exercise is that Kojima himself was explicitly influenced by film. Metal Gear‘s Solid Snake was inspired by Kurt Russel’s Snake Plissken, while Big Boss was inspired by Sean Connery. The films The Great Escape and The Guns of Navarro were also listed as inspirations for the stealth emphasis. Despite this, however, I firmly believe that if we examine the Metal Gear series on its own, we find that Gaming may have its first epic to share with the world.

So what do you think, good Lusireaders? Are the Metal Gear games just a bloated mess of words and cutscenes, or are you as struck as I am by their obvious greatness? Are there any other series that you believe could hold their own in the Epic genre, or is there a game you feel is better compared to an obscure medium rather than to film? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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*Though it should be mentioned that in medias res is not anything with a prequel

Yes, THAT game is getting another sequel.

No, Square Enix did not announce the continuation of Lightning’s saga via the medium of radio drama (yet), but they did announce the next best thing, unveiling the ridiculously named Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. The title looks to be a massive departure from previous entries in the series, with the established battle system being pretty much scrapped in favour of an Action RPG battle system replete with realtime blocking. Despite this, it is said that the game still notionally maintains at least some semblance of an ATB system, though it will feature no menus, as attacks and magic can now be mapped to buttons. In continuing its shift into Action RPG territory, Lightning will be the game’s only playable character, with the supporting cast relegated to the role of NPCs, one presumes. Accompanying this change in battle system is a corresponding change in design philosophy, with Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII moving to adopt an open world as seen in popular RPGs such as Skyrim.

In terms of setting, the game will take place in an all new world known as Navus Partus, which exists many hundreds of years after the locations seen in the previous games. The world consists of four large islands, each one connected by a monorail. All of this is then surrounded by a blue lagoon, which eventually gives way to a sheer descent into stark nothingness, creating the impression that the world is to exist beyond the confines of normal time and space. In fitting with this end-of-the-world setting, the game is also set to feature a doomsday clock which allots players thirteen days (presumably not timed on a 1:1 scale) to save the world as it counts down to the end of humanity. Time can additionally be spent when using special moves and extended by solving storyline events. If a player runs out of time they may find themselves forced to restart their game, making the time mechanic somewhat reminiscent of the system used in Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter.

Despite indication that Square Enix were looking to change-up the formula of their latest offering in the Final Fantasy XIII series, one was truly surprised by the extent of the bold (or reactive) changes made to the formula, and look forward to seeing how it plays out for the existing audience. This move is not without its own inherent risks, as many Final Fantasy XIII fanboys have already displayed their vocal disdain for the less drastic changes made to the series formula with the release of Final Fantasy XIII-2, meaning that Square Enix risk turning away their existing audience while being somewhat unlikely to attract lapsed players of the series. That said, gamers who have stuck with the series up to this point are passing unlikely to quit it now, so it is not unreasonable to expect Final Fantasy XIII-2 levels of performance from the game at retail.

Square Enix Botch the Launch of Final Fantasy: Dimensions

Square Enix’s flash-games could stand to be more attractive.

Much has been made this week of the ridiculous pricing structure that Square Enix have adopted for the iOS release of Final Fantasy: Dimensions, which will run punters upwards of $29 for access to the complete experience. As if this was not a significant enough burden for a cheaply made phone game to carry, the launch of Final Fantasy: Dimensions saw the application made available with a bug which prevents users from paying to access further chapters of the game, forcing many to endure a day or more of waiting while a revision of the software was rushed to Apple’s iOS store-front.

Significantly, this delay constitutes something of a forced cool-down period for early adopters (read: the majority of people who were anticipating the game) when Square Enix was likely relying upon this group’s proclivity toward making impulse purchases in the immediate afterglow of the game’s opening sequence. Allow these people to put down the experience for long enough and they will begin to question whether it is truly worth their thirty dollars to pick it back up again, especially when the game exhibits all the worst aspects of flash-game production values.

While Square Enix should rightly be flogged for launching Final Fantasy: Dimensions at this price-point, and while one sincerely hopes that this hiccup is enough to allow the sheep to see through the wolf’s ploy, one thing must nevertheless be said in Square Enix’s favour on this issue: at least they have had enough confidence in their product to provide a representative sample gratis. Prospective customers are given a warts-and-all slice of the game completely free of charge, and thus consumers cannot complain about being duped into paying top-dollar for a low-quality game – anyone who ponies up the cash for Fianl Fantasy: Dimensions walks into this noose willingly.

Sony Botches the American Launch of PSOne Classics on PSVita

Sony: “We’ll make you work very hard to love us!”

The release of PSOne classics on Sony’s Vita platform always should have been a slam-dunk for the company, and to be fair this is exactly what it was for the European arm of the company which launched with dozens of quality games to amuse and delight their users, yet the American launch did not fare so well. Sony of America in their calculating hubris launched with a mere nine titles, stymieing the availability of PSOne titles in order to artificially bolster their system’s dwindling release schedule on PSN in the coming months. After the vocal user outcry directed toward Sony, the company was forced to make an impromptu update to the available titles on PSN, more than doubling the number of PSOne downloads, yet oddly managing to do so while adding very little of value to users. Case and point, the initial offering saw the release of Arc the Lad, while the update saw the release of Arc the Lad II, which is perhaps not quite the diversity that people were looking for in their demand for a larger selection.

As of writing, there are over one hundred PSOne Classics which are compatible with the PSVita, and which may be transferred to the system by a very round-about method involving the use of the PS3 to transfer a game’s download ‘bubble’ to the PSVita. Understandably, this method involves quite a bit of unnecessary effort on the part of users, which is a completely unacceptable burden to foist upon the system’s early adopters who have paid a high price to support the system as it makes its initial struggles to be brought up to speed. Moreover, even this work-around remains completely unavailable to users who lack a PS3, leaving them SOL, to quote the vernacular. European users have access to over half of their compatible downloads, including heavy-hitters such as: Vagrant Story, Resident Evil 1-3, Metal Gear Solid, and Soul Reaver. Meanwhile the luckless holders of US Vita accounts are left to suffer through a second-string launch catalogue of PSOne ‘Classics’.

We only did as he requested.

Produced 2012.03.18

Amidst reports of news good and bad about DLC and on-disc content, RootBeerKing receives an urgent message: the marching band rehearsal has been moved from Tuesday to Monday, 19 March. Ordered to tell everyone, he complies by using 4Chan and the internet.

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The Lusipurr.com Merchandise store is open! 10% of all money from purchases go to the site. Check it out in the sidebar at right!

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Resident Evil

Vortex: An Afternoon of Resident Evil
Oi, chavs. Welcome to Vortex’s flat! Today, whilst in between cups of English Breakfast tea, I was going to try and play the newest Resident Evil for me Nintendo 3DS. When I got home though, I realized that needed me Nintendo dual “ashtray” stick pro. Why the bloody hell would I need to buy this ashtray. I work a hard days night for the two pound a day that merry ol’ England pays me and what to I have to spend the bloody two quid on? A bloody Nintendo ashtray that requires two double-A batteries. So instead, I went to play Street Fighter IV but, while I was sulking about the ashtray, the 3DS batteries died. So I plugged the bloody thing in and went to me loo.

Whilst I was in me loo, a chav came up in the lift and stole me mobile. I went in pursuit of the lad who stole me mobile but after I took the tube and then the lift up to the London topside I found I had lost the chav in the course of the city riots. So I went and nicked another mobil–and that promptly got nicked by me girlfriend. Sulking once again, I went to pick up me Nintendo 3DS but before I could play it I had to visit me loo again. So I went down the lift and sat me arse right down and tried to turn on the Nintendo 3DS. To my dismay the bloody thing was dead again. Methinks that a foul plot had arisen.

After four hours on the loo I took the lift and found me collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to read. Then I had to go to the loo again. As I went to the loo, I saw the chav that nicked me original mobile, and I went off in pursuit of the same mobile-nicking chav. Then, in the middle of the pursuit, I remembered that we was going to record a podcast today. So I got back home, took me laptop to the loo, and sat down to start recording the podcast. So me, Lusipurr, and that horrid Aussie bloke talked over the finer points of the Cricket whilst that gay Canadeeze and that Halo-loving Mexican were complaining that Cricket wasn’t a sport. I told them to bugger off. Cricket is the sport of gentlemen and all good-natured people of the world. If I were running this site I would make watching the Cricket a mandatory requirement of the horrible people on this staff. That Master Chef, for one, needs to take one up the arse with his talk about Halo and American Football (which is just a bunch of men in skin-tight uniforms smashing their bodies against each other). It seems quite homosexual and a good Brit like meself would never take part in such a rude and base cultural activity. Well, look at the time, chaps! It is time for fish and chips. –Then, after that, another four hours on the loo whilst trying to play Street Fighter IV and Resident Evil. Pip pip, cherrio, good day and remember to get your bumps checked.

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Master Chief

MasterChef: Final Fantasy vs. Halo
In the beginning of the 2000s a revolutionary game was made, one that is better than any other franchise that had come out before it. Right, ladies and gentlemen: Final Fantasy got Hal0wned.

While most other titles and franchises have been all right with being above average at best, Halo developer Bungie decided that they would seek to make a game that would be considered great. Halo was originally planned for the Mac operating system as an RTS game. But Microsoft wisely bought Bungie from under those miscreants’ noses, changing Halo from an RTS to an FPS. With that change, the game became something more than just a simple FPS game for the consoles: it became great.

Halo was unlike any other console shooter of its time. The majority of other shooter games allowed you to carry unrealistically large numbers of weapons. Bungie decided to change this by restricting your super-powered hero to two weapons, adding to the realism. Yet another change was that it did not turn off team-killing within the campaign. If the player accidentally shoots his team mates too much, they will turn against the player and try to kill him. Speaking of the team mates, the AI for Halo was fantastic. While occasionally the team mates would be a detriment they would sometimes actually shoot the bad guys, or even stand on the back of a Warthog.

This brings me to my original statement: Halo is greater than Final Fantasy. Throughout the years we have had many Final Fantasy games (four, I think? They use those Roman Numerals–why not use American numbers?) and none of them were good. From what I remember, the first Final Fantasy game had some blonde-haired dude with a giant sword or something. Halo has a fantastic main character. In Final Fantasy you see the face of all the characters but in Halo it keeps Master Chief’s (not me) face hidden so as to create mystery. The biggest difference that Halo has going for it is that it has multiplayer which Final Fantasy does not. Halo’s multiplayer is amazing even by the standards of 2012 and within that time Final Fantasy has made literally no multiplayer games. I think that if they did make a multiplayer game it would suck anyway.

So folks, those are the reasons why I think that Halo is better than any other game. While listening to the podcast I never understand why Lusipurr and Pierson gush over games like Final Fantasy or even that inferior game TF2. When they are not talking about having erections for Final Fantasy they are talking about their love of Cricket—and that is definitely inferior to real Football. This is why I left the site; the people who work here are idiots that do not know what is good. Good bye and good riddance.

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Dragon Age 2

TheFallenSun: The Deserving Case of Jennifer Hepler
The Male patriarchy of gaming is desperately in need of a shake-up; do not pretend that you are not part of the problem, because until you have participated in a hundred person march of uterus solidarity for International Women’s Day, then you are merely part of the machinery of male entitlement! These past several weeks have seen events so disgusting and misogynistic that for days now I have been openly weeping into my ten gallon hat. I was participating in an Occupy Houston sit-in when I heard the exciting news that Bioware’s Jennifer Hepler had opened a Twitter account, so I hurried home to see this for myself in the hope that I might be able to correspond with this great lady of gaming – but sadly events were already afoot which would see the world of gaming harrowed to its very core.

Jennifer Hepler, being a woman in gaming, is naturally a very important person in the industry, and one that possesses the inherent wisdom and virtue to identify problems in gaming that the rest of us remain ignorant to in our Male entitlement. Hepler is a fantastic role model for female gamers, and if that were not enough she has also penned one of the greatest stories of the 21st century in Dragon Age 2. So when she brings to light flaws in game design that have been long ignored by the industry’s male-limited thought processes, then we ignore her at her own peril.

Hepler is right to point out that the worst aspect of gaming for many young women is the tyranny of being made to do battle when they would prefer to be chatting or pursuing an in-game romance. Jennifer gifted the world of gaming with the peerless insight of women’s intuition when she suggested that games should allow you to skip the gameplay in order to experience the narrative in its pure form without having it interrupted by repetitive shooty bits–an observation self-evident in its truth. Gamers should have been thanking this jewel in the crown of Bioware, yet sadly a knuckle-dragging cabal of uncorrected males replete with inequitable entitlement took it upon themselves to organise an ongoing campaign of sexual terrorism directed at Hepler in response to her good idea. Sadly, this was sufficient to elicit the retreat from the Twittersphere of this cherished figure of gaming.

Not only does this sort of shamefully masculine behaviour hurt the legitimate feelings of brave women like Jennifer Hepler, but it also serves to depict the gaming industry as the unflattering stereotype of being the sole province of basement-dwelling man-babies whose only contact with women is through this shocking digital rape which occurred on Twitter. I trust we are all big enough to admit that Ms. Hepler is entirely in the right, and that her detractors are one hundred percent wrong. The last thing any of us want is for gaming visionaries like Jennifer to be pressured into refraining from making some much needed changes to game design in order to make titles more palatable to the female gamer. Perhaps mankind will one day attain the wisdom to give women like Jennifer the recognition they deserve, until then I shall remain out back grilling Halal steaks on my carbon neutral grill.

Selphie Tilmitt, the main character of Final Fantasy VIII

Produced 2011.10.02

In this week’s episode, Emmori prepares for a game involving thrones, Enrei is humbled by a bundle, Blitzmage announces a free soundtrack, and Lusipurr is finally released! Also: The Final Fantasy VIII playthrough continues through week two, sadly.

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Here’s a link to our Extra Life Donation Page!

HERP A DERP DERP!

Today I’m going to talk to you about the difficulty of games. More specifically I’m going to talk to you about the fairness of difficulty in games, and the point at which we should draw the line between a good challenge and user-friendly game design.

It is not the intention of this editorial to critique and pass judgement on game’s like Devil May Cry 3 or Vagrant Story which make quite legitimate use of difficulty to offer a rewarding challenge, but rather to address games which take a dump on user-friendly game design in order to engender a false sense of difficulty.

None of us should be unfamiliar with excessively difficult games. I would wager that the vast majority of the Lusipurr.com Otaku readership would be intimately familiar with the NES era of gaming; for many of you playing Nintendo’s ugly grey box will have been one of your first formative experiences with gaming, while younger readers have probably at least tried their hand at some NES emulation; the point being readers will be familiar with the difficulty incumbent to poorly designed games. From Contra to Battletoads the NES era was replete with ball-acheingly  difficult games; many of which owed their difficulty to unfair or malicious game design, with a small but significant selection which would require the mongloid intuition of an idiot savant to complete without using cheats. The vast majority of us let this slide however; we were kids after all, and similarly the game industry was in its infancy. Lessons have to be learned before they can be taken on board, and thus the eventual gaming success stories had to stand on the shoulders of the INDUSTRY’S numerous failures.

That was then, and this is now. Circa 2011. We have every right to hold games to a loftier standard given the highly competitive nature of the current gaming climate, so now we must ask ourselves; to what extent are we willing to excuse unfair game design? This question does not lend itself to a straightforward answer.

It must be said that one of my biggest pet peeves are the constraints placed on the gamer’s ability to save their progress. The constraints on the saving of game data were likely necessary at one point, but technology has long since progressed beyond the point where a game’s refusal to allow players to save at will can be justified under most circumstances. Picture if you will any JRPG that you have played this generation which featured save points, now realize that their only functional role in games today is based on the game designer’s hope that at some point you will run into an enemy you cannot defeat and have a chunk of your game progress wiped out by being sent back to the game’s nearest arbitrarily designated save point. Or at least in theory this is how it’s intended to work, though as often as not it is life which intervenes, and RL commitments will at some juncture demand your attention, at which point you can either leave your game on pause for protracted periods of time (not recommended for the power hungry modern leviathans of gaming), or you can elect turn your console off, wiping various amounts of progress for any game arrogant and anachronistic enough to utilize a time greedy save-point design in their game.

DUUUUUURRRRR HERP?

Save points in modern gaming is a pet peeve of mine, yet more offensive by magnitudes is the willfully obtuse placement of save points so as to create an artificial impediment to progression by denying the gamer access to a save point when they need it most. A prime example of this is Final Fantasy III. I have played very little FFIII myself, yet I have heard profligate accounts of the lengthy final dungeon’s only save point being located at its entrance. Even in normal circumstances most would conclude that this is some profoundly mean-spirited arsehole game design, yet add to that the fact that FFIII is often held to be one of the hardest games in the series, and then you just have yourself a bad game.

But of course Final Fantasy III has no monopoly on purposefully belligerent game designs, one recent game which brought me no joy whatsoever was Demon’s Souls. Demon’s Souls was a hard game, and that’s OK. I had heard it was difficult, and I was expecting a game of difficult GAMEPLAY. The gameplay itself is challenging but decidedly fair, the game heightens its difficulty by frequently springing surprises on the player, yet this does not manifest in any unavoidable hazard being dropped into the player’s lap. I have no complaints regarding the gameplay de jour of Demon’s Souls, but rather the sticking point for me was the game design which prevented me from spending any of my souls (EXP) until my progression to some arbitrary point in the game that I never reached. Demon’s Souls is a game which goes out of its way to kill you, and yet its designers were so profoundly bastardly that they deny you character upgrade facilities in your initial starting hub. This is why I put down the game. This is why I’ll not by another. It was supposed to be a sadistic game, sure, but this initial roadblock to my progression was just too much. I can only loose my incredibly hard earned EXP so many times before I feel utterly sick to my stomach, and find myself in a foul mood for some hours. Some people will argue that this design decision adds to the old-school charm of the game, but I contend that it’s bad game design.

So far I have only broached instances which I believe to be relatively clear cut in their awful design, yet one other save system design which I am a trifle uncertain about is the use of a deliberately limiting save system in the survival horror era of the Resident Evil series. One is not able to save their games without first possessing a quantity of ink ribbons for the typewriter (save point), and like all commodities in those games they are a finite resource. This essentially means that gamers are only allowed a finite number of saves, somewhere in the order of between fifteen and twenty-five. This would not be a problem in an ideal world where entire days can be devoted to playing the game and saving at appropriate points, yet once again life is rarely so accommodating as to make way for these demanding fucking games.

I am not able to play Resident Evil games as I would other games, it is not really possible to effectively play the games in order to kill a half hour before having to be somewhere, as your limited amount of progression is probably not worth wasting an ink ribbon. There is a huge disincentive to sit-down and play Resident Evil when one has less than two solid hours (at a minimum) to dedicate towards it, this really makes it vastly more difficult to enjoy the games. Allow me to furnish you with an anecdote: several days ago I was playing Resident Evil (GC) and had progressed a little over my twenty or so minutes of play when Lusipurr told me to hop on Skype. This left me with something of a conundrum; do I go to a save point and waste an ink ribbon on a paltry twenty minutes of playtime, or do I just turn off my console and loose my progress. In the end there was only one choice :(.

HUR HUR DEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRP! 8)

Like I said before however, the Resident Evil save system is a feature That I am slightly ambiguous about. I dislike it wholeheartedly, I always have and I always will, yet how does one rubbish it in a game which is based almost exclusively around the concept of resource management? On the one hand it doesn’t seem unreasonable to treat saving the same as every other resource in the game, on the other hand a lifetime of gaming has taught me that it is never good game design when a particular feature makes you want to play a game less.

Finally, the survival horror genre is apt to demonstrate another area of ambiguity within game design; namely the fairness of enemy and hazard placement. In the majority of game genres one would expect every impediment to gamer progression to be sportingly crafted, if the player is playing the game right then every hazard should be avoidable. Not so the survival horror genre, which requires the implicit threat of the unexpected in order to maintain a frightening atmosphere. When the player is unexpectedly assailed from behind (don’t be gross!) then they receive a shock, when the player wanders through some high grass only to find themselves caught in a bear trap they receive a shock, these occasions are absolutely integral to maintaining the experience, yet each time they feel a little cheap and unpleasant seeing as it wasn’t a deficiency in our technique which led to us taking damage.

To what extent then is it desirable to have the player blindsided by unfair gameplay elements? Too little and you have a game like the superb Resident Evil 4, which categorically failed at being scary. Too much and you are left with a game that you put down in contempt; I was rather enjoying many elements of Alan Wake, yet its occasional random battle mechanic felt cheap, nasty and amateurish. Then of course you have games like Doom 3 which attempted to utilize cheap-scare monster closets to such an extent that they became banal and farcical. When you find yourself starting to enter rooms backwards because of the tangible gameplay advantage it provides, then that is a clear sign that there are far too enemy spawns placed behind you. Ultimately a game which loads up on assailing players with blindsides may well be harrowing, yet it precludes the player ever getting the full measure of enjoyment from the game’s combat system, and all but ensures their low sense of efficacy as gamers when making their way through the game. As for me, I think my sweetspot is somewhere in the vicinity of Silent Hill 2 and 3. Unique events are good, but they are a distraction from core gameplay.

At this point I should like to solicit reckons, as per usual I don’t know quite where to come down on many of these game design elements. Can the challenge of negotiating inconveniently placed save points ever justify the heavy demands it makes on your time and patience? Should resource conservation games compel players to ration their saves also? How frequently is it advisable or desirable to to burden players with unexpected hazards in order to establish and maintain a game’s atmosphere?

NEVER FORGET!

You ain't never had a friend like me!

Produced 2011.01.09

Nate & Biggs return and the podcast is like an out-of-control mine cart ride: it soon goes off the rails and improbably crashes straight into Gilbert Gottfried’s genitals, becoming one of those episodes which Lusipurr hopes he will never have to explain.

When you don't believe demonstrable falsehoods I just get so angry

I can understand why a gamer would hold a certain regard for a game designer who is able to create a consistently high standard product, I really do. I can also understand why a gamer would have a certain amount of affection for any Developer/Publisher who is seen to promote a high standard of software, it is only natural that we should support the people who do the right thing by us, and contribute to the health of the industry. But how far should our loyalty and affection extend? Should we continue to defend their good name when they haven’t made a good game in the last ten years? When a corporate mouthpiece makes a proclamation which on the face of it is a self-evident falsehood, should we become angry and argumentative and then cry like babby when no one else believes them? When corporate management decide to sack all of your favourite designers and appoint experts in the field of homosexualism to ensure that your favourite franchises no longer share even the most superficial similarities to the prior games in the series, are you placated because someone who once produced one of the games is flown out to Canada two or three times in order to ‘oversee’ the project. Well allow me to answer my own line of questioning; this is the overwhelming reality for far too many gormless franchise fans.

Why would anyone continue to support a series that no longer bares any resemblance to the series cannon, while at the same time managing to be completely awful in its own right? The last Bionic Commando game was farmed out to a western studio, the last Dead Rising game was farmed out to a western studio, the next Devil May Cry game is being farmed out to a western studio, and within the last twenty-four hours the rumour mill has been churning with suggestions that Slant Six, the makers of SOCOM, will be developing the next HD Resident Evil game. I think it’s safe to assume at this point that Capcom is in the process of liquidating all domestic development in favour of an international development strategy (please look forward to Mega Man FPS).

This is what happens when Oliver won't answer his phone ...

The reason I mention this is due to the fact that the philosophical and structural changes that have occurred within Capcom over the last few years have rendered it such a manifestly different entity that I cannot comprehend how consumer goodwill toward the Capcom brand circa 2005 can be extended to the Capcom brand circa 2010. There is a disconnect there, though hapless Capcom tragics seem blinded to all but the branding when determining their vocal support. This is why these dreadful people are placated when some random person who worked on one of the previous games is trotted out by Capcom to announce he will be overseeing production of DmC (in this case ‘overseeing’ being a euphemism for ‘ doing fuck all’). Another personal favourite line of fanboy reasoning goes: ‘Capcom can do what they like with their series’, this of course is true, but when read in its correct context it is meant to suggest that whatever Capcom sign off on is cannon because they make the game. Never mind that the creator of Devil May Cry was sacked. Never mind that every significant Capcom director, producer and designer has either been fired or quit over the last five years. Never mind that the people making the decisions about the DMC series’ future direction are first and foremost accountants. No, it is cannon because Capcom have given their say-so, and they make the games …

... This is also what happens when Oliver won't answer his phone

… And speaking about collapsing institutions no longer in the business of making cannon titles, Capcom is as small-fry next to the obtuse and decadent might of Enixsoft. Enixsoft employees lie so frequently that it must surely come as naturally to them at this point as game design by focus group. There is not now, and can never be, a logical basis for taking Enixsoft’s word when a more likely scenario is plausible (hint: the root cause of their every motivation is laziness; mental, physical, financial). Take for instance their missed deadline for Final Fantasy Tactics’ release on iOS devices. Now, Enixsoft swore until they were blue in the face that apparently every single western site was USING THE WRONG RELEASE DATE. I happen to be of the firm belief that parsimony is a virtue, that usually the most intuitive and straightforward explanation is the correct one, and this story reeks of the most feculent, watery bullshit. Assuming that the western media were using the incorrect release date (protip: they weren’t) Enixsoft still had many months to correct this misunderstanding, instead they cobbled together an eleventh hour wildly implausible excuse in a bid to avoid looking like a comically incompetent and dysfunctional corporate backwater (protip: the ruse was unsuccessful). The really surprising observation to come out of this episode however, is the fact that the Enixsoft fanboy plebeians are still trotting out the company line as though it were the very clarion call of truth. Such blind and gormless trust for this most unsound of corporate entities, and brace yourself for blind and witless rage should you point out to them this most manifest truth.

This isn’t so much an isolated incident, as it is a pattern of behaviour for Enixsoft fanboys. Most recently they were clamouring that Final Fantasy Tunnel Run was a very deliberate and inspired design choice (as had been the company line) right up to the point wherein Yasanori Kitase in a rare moment of candour admitted that team Tunnel Run didn’t even have a game design until they were forced to produce a demo, and before that there was the curious case of Yasumi Matsuno’s illness, which caused FFXII to come down with a case of Vann as lead character. And please do not even get me started on Final Fantasy XIV, an entire editorial (nay, an entire series of editorials) could be devoted to that issue and I would still scarcely scratch the surface of that rabbit warren of weasel words, half-truths, flagrant lies and Horse-Birds.

I'm afraid that the diagnosis is terminal

So, what manner of arcane reasoning allows uncritical fanboys to be uncritical fanboys, and not feel the shame and self-loathing that they surely should? This is one of those nebulous questions where even I hesitate to venture an answer for the simple fact that such a state of unreason appears entirely foreign to me … but then I wouldn’t feel right leaving you on such a wishy-washy note, and so must once again look to parsimony to show me the way, and thus; wishful thinking + really low standards = INDUSTRY!!!

But then I most certainly do not hold all the answers on this subject friends, so what is your prognostication for this dire malady? What are some of the more ridiculous corporate statements that you have heard to excuse utter incompetence? What are some of the funnier instances when you have encountered fanboys defending the indefensible?

Speaking of tardiness: Man! How about all those games that got delayed because of Call Of Duty: Modern Warefare 2? A lot of companies expected to avoid this ginormous 800 pound gorilla by pushing back the release dates for their fourth quarter (Q4) “holiday” titles (this period of the year generally seeing the bulk of the “big releases”), and for the most part the did – if they had a game coming out within a week on either side of MW2‘s November 10th release date. Sure that title may have stirred up enough sales its first week out to make Activision’s CEO, Bobby Kotick (the opinion of this writer is that “this man has no dick”), smile like a pig in mud (Educated guess: Kotick himself represents at least one of the characters H, N, or 1 as can be proven here), but there has been a sharp decline in sales for the sequel (how could there not be after week-one sales alone saw the public pick up over 5 million copies of the game) making me wonder if the delays were justified.

This is not to suggest that developers could not have benefitted from their delays by giving their titles the level of spit, polish, and shine they may not have received otherwise, but rather that they did not have much to worry about in the first place. Call Of Duty came with a force heretofore unseen across all forms of entertainment mediums (Activision will not let us believe otherwise), but left only a mass of Q1 2010 games to be released in its wake (which, oddly enough, includes Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake).

It might sound like I am complaining, but I am not (about this, anyway). It is high time that the industry learns that releasing all their big games at once – putting all their proverbial eggs in this holiday basket (an unseasonable analogy given the time of year) does not make a whole lot of sense. Gamers will buy great titles year round, as Capcom has proven the past three to four years alone with their high profile February/March releases (Lost Planet and Resident Evil comes to mind). What I do have a complaint about is that it took single title to get companies to put games out in Q1 and Q2 of a new year to do this. The game industry does not have an Academy that they have to abide by from which to potentially receive awards, and as much as the videogames industry tries to emulate Hollywood, they don’t need to in every regard, and especially not this one.

I hope that after all this, the industry will learn this lesson, that games can come out year-round without a big hit to their sales because, quite honestly, that crap makes me mad as Hell, and I don’t want to take it anymore if I can help it.

Two great titans battle for the final time...

Silent Hill’s characters are much more engaging than Resident Evil’s.  A majority of the Resident Evil characters are some sort of public safety officer, or ex-safety officer, who fights zombies because the zombies attacked Raccoon City.  Any other character in the game is either one of the previous characters’ siblings or some sort of mutated enemy.  All these characters are highly trained in hand-to-hand fighting and weapon-based skills, so if one of the zombies get too close, the player can easily push them away.  The Silent Hill characters are just normal people who were drawn to the town of Silent Hill by some unknown force.  These people are not trained in any sort of fighting or weapon skills, other than clumsily swinging a large axe around.  Another thing that makes these characters so engaging is the fact that all of them have some sort of mental psychosis.  The main character in Silent Hill 2 has a secret so dark that the player is not sure he or she even likes the character after the game is over.  Whereas Resident Evil’s characters are either “good” or “evil,” the characters in Silent Hill ride the line of “grey” between the two.  These character defects are often reflected in the enemies.

Zombies are so overdone; they are just not scary anymore.  Even in the newer games in the Resident Evil series, where the enemies are changed to simply mutated humans, they are still not that scary.  However, in Silent Hill, the enemies are a reflection of the main character’s secrets or neurosis.  The main character of Silent Hill 1 is attempting to find his daughter, so all the enemies look like children or child-like drawings.  Silent Hill 2 involves a man’s dark secret about a woman, so most of the enemies are feminine like in appearance, and even include one famous enemy raping another in an unforgettable scene.  The most interesting monster is in Silent Hill 3, whose female main character encounters a monster from time to time whose only purpose is to turn valves, which represent the female menstrual cycle.  I really do not think anything in Resident Evil can live up to that.

So, there are my two reasons why I feel Silent Hill is a much better survival horror game series than Resident Evil. I would love to hear what our readers have to say, so feel free to defend any point you would like to make, and even rank the games from best to worst.

In fifth place we have the original Resident Evil on the PlayStation.  Who can forget the first time the zombie dog jumps though the window? I was a lot younger when I played this. While time has taken some of the tension and frights away, Resident Evil is still a great example of how to implement horror into a game.

In fourth place is Silent Hill for the PlayStation, a game that played on a different setting then Resident Evil. Silent Hill built up a world of tension and heavy atmosphere with the ever-present fog in the game world. Silent Hill swapped the quick jump-out moments of Resident Evil. Instead it was the game’s ability to build tension and fear that made it such a masterpiece of horror.

In third place is Project Zero for the PlayStation 2. Anyone who has seen Japanese horror films such as The Ring or The Grudge will feel right at home with Project Zero as the game borrows heavily from both films. Giving one nothing more then a broken, old camera to fight legions of ghosts, the story is set in an old house where the player is desperately searching for a missing brother.

In second place: Persona 4 for the PlayStation 2. The setting in this game is very dark and somewhat disturbing: worlds inside a television where one’s inner self can be found. The game once again brings in fog, and one knows that when the fog comes something is going to happen. Considering the game includes Satan as a character, it is clear that something very disturbing and evil is going down.

In first place is Dead Space for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. This is a masterpiece of horror gaming. Never as a gamer have I felt such fear and fright as I did while playing this game.

Scary, horrific aliens: Dead Space has them in droves.

Drawing heavily from Event Horizon, the setting is a huge mining ship where something has gone very wrong. With little chance of escape the player must do what he can to survive the nightmares which infest the ship.

Readers, what are your favourite horror moments?

Players take the role of series regular Chris Redfield, last seen in Code Veronica for the Dreamcast. The story takes place in modern day Africa. It seems to be commonplace that in 2009 games routinely involve terrorists in some way; Resident Evil 5 is no different in this regard. With Umbrella shut down, the viruses they developed have fallen into the wrong hands. Chris is not alone in this tale; early in the game his partner, Sheva Alomar, is introduced. Like Metal Gear Solid 4, Resident Evil 5 ties up almost every loose end of the Resident Evil saga. The game also offers people who are not familiar with the story forty page summary of the whole series.

Resident Evil 5 might as well be called Resident Evil 4 High Definition. The Gameplay remains almost identical in terms of how Chris is controlled. It is sad that this game will never see a Wii release, for anyone who has played the Wii version of Resident Evil 4 will think back to how amazing the Wii remote was. The main addition in terms of gameplay is the two player co-op mode, available in both local split-screen and via network over Xbox Live or PSN. Another new amendment to the gameplay is the item management. No longer will the game pause during that all important first-aid play. This mechanic forces the player to really think about the team work aspect. The ability to use the D-Pad to switch items on the fly is a welcome revision.

The game looks amazing; the high quality textures and the level of detail in the game is astounding. Resident Evil 5 could be one of the best looking games available right now. Problems do exist with moments of interface lag encountered on the Playstation 3 version. Sound editing has set a good standard with music cutting in at the right moments to heighten the tension in the gameplay.

Resident Evil 5 is a good game; any fans of Resident Evil 4 will feel right at home with this, and anyone looking for more of the same quality gameplay should pick this up. Unfortunately, Resident Evil 5 does have a number of flaws which push the game down from great to good. The AI when playing in single-player is shocking, players will often find themselves wanting to turn the game off because of this. The best advice is to use the partner as a mule and to pack her with ammo and items, but never any guns. The other alternative to this is to play the game only in co-op, because this mode is what Resident Evil 5 was made for. The game, like Metal Gear Solid 4, is very cinematic with some of the best-directed scenes seen in video games. Looking back Resident Evil 4 is still the best Resident Evil game. Despite this, fans of the series should have little problem feeling right at home in the latest version.