Marginalia: 6.30.09 – More Cracks at Sony Edition

Gamasutra: This is the way of our industry. Begin rumblings of a possible 2009 release for your massively hyped and anticipated game, and almost immediately after start saying that there might be delays.

Joystiq: No, the lack of LAN support in Starcraft II is not an accident. The end of an era, this is.

Joystiq: Sony is just now getting around to patenting some software emulation for the Playstation 2. If they can emulate blast processing, then surely they can find a way to emulate the Emotion Engine.

Destructoid: Following suit with Duke Nukem Forever and Star Wars: Battlefront III, concept art has been released for the canceled Aliens RPG. Can we call this a trend, yet?

Destructoid: Looking for Rare? He's the wallflower by the punchbowl. Also, he's made of paper maché.

Destructoid: Charge Shot!!! is happy to contribute to publisher consternation. Take that, absurdly inflated retail prices.

1UP: The twenty-first prophet Michael Pachter believes the PS3 will overtake the 360’s global market share by 2015. That’s if we’re not all turned into wooden monkeys first.

GameDaily: Here’s a first: a game is leaked via someone’s wedding announcement. Someone claimed to be a “lead game designer for Fable III” in their NY Times announcement. Way to break the story, Old Gray Lady?

Joystiq: Welcome back to the PS3 Slim Rumor Mill. On today’s episode: Taiwanese manufacturers have received contracts to churn out PS3 Slims. Tune in tomorrow when a fully-formed PS3 Slim will burst forth from Kaz Hirai’s head.

Continue...

This Week on Audiosurf Radio – 6/30 – Negative Nuno Edition

I’m less than pleased with this week’s selections.  You’ll have to read on to find how just how Nuno Ferrao’s music affected me, but you can be safe in the knowledge that it wasn’t for the better.  Thankfully, I was able to take solace in Serberis, who infused his eight-minute techno opus with some Eastern modes to shake up the status quo.

Usually, I devote more time to recommendations than passes, but as I’ve taken to writing more about each song right after I play them, I found I had a lot to say about Mr. Ferrao’s work.  So this week I shook up the formula to provide a more comprehensive opinion on the music at hand.  As a wise man once said, hold on to your butts.

Recommendation

Keep in mind that I rode this song after I rode all of Nuro Ferrao’s music for the first time.  If you’re going to ride any of this week’s songs, make it “Palilalia III.”  The Steep tag makes for a wealth of traffic, which is either a boon or a curse depending on your skill level.  It definitely sounds like industrial music made by a group of Ancient Egyptians.  If Ra were throwing a rave, this would be on his iPod.  The melody makes good use of some Eastern mode I can’t identify, which helps to set this song apart from the months of techno I’ve been riding since this column began.  Serberis mixes up his instrumentation well, keeping everything within the realm of industrial techno without letting it become completely homogenous.  Unfortunately, it’s a little long.  The phrases that feel refreshing each time they appear lose their luster the third time around.  Still, this is better than anything else you’ll ride this week.

Nuno Ferrao

For some, music is something to engage with directly.  It isn’t just in the foreground, it is the foreground.  Chances are if you like going to concerts or relaxing with a glass of scotch and some classic Miles you’re one of these people.  If you’re reading this article because you like playing Audiosurf (and not simply because you like me), you’re one of these people.  However, some music is meant to be in the background – see Nuno Ferrao’s “nunorock3speed110” (great name, by the way).  Its mix of 90s alt rock and electronica never really evolves past the verse/chorus format, which quickly becomes repetitive even in the song’s brief duration.  It sounds odd, but I appreciated the lack of lyrics, as I felt they’d only come off derivative, a channeling of a genre now past its prime.  But without lyrics to move the piece forward, we’re left with a rather stolid oscillation between two modes.  The drums never build.  The traffic never gets much more complex than it is at the start (though it was a bit of a challenge to juggle all the whites it threw at me).  Don’t bother with this one, unless of course you’re looking to score a montage in an indie film.

“nunonewf12” sounds like something straight out of a Top Gun knockoff.  It is nothing if not one man’s attempt to recreate the 80s.  It’s got a really resonant bass line, some lush synthesizers, and a Satriani-style guitar melody. The track doesn’t have much in the way of sweeping curves, corkscrews, or start-and-stops, but it’s pretty damn bumpy at times, which helps to alleviate the occasional “I’m just riding the snare drum” feeling.  And that nagging humdrum-ness pervades the ride.  There seems to be no consideration for dynamics, and it has little in the way of tension or release.  The guitar work is fine but by no means virtuosic.  Then there’s the matter of the bizarre and abrupt key shift and the “Oh shit, G2G guyz bbl” ending.  Not that I think endings are easy.  I complain about them in every genre of music (I’m talking about you Fanny Hensel), but I’ve come to expect something more than just the artist simply peacing at the end.

By the time I first rode “sp1,” I was ready to give Mr. Ferrao a break.  There’s at least a little more variety in this one.  Again, the Garage Band drums make the bulk of the song extremely bumpy.  And it opens with an (perhaps too lengthy) uphill build, which gets somewhat repeated in the second uphill section.  And at least the guitar lick doesn’t sound exactly like the one in “nunonewf12.”  But then I checked the Comments section and couldn’t help laughing.  Steam user hellfaucet subtly digs the mixing with a simple “hint: ProTools,” and Ceb points out ironically that “To Leave a Trace was better.”  I was all set to defend this song, but these guys tore it down before I had a chance.

And is the high-pitched synth droning in “tecnos” supposed to creep me out? Why does the guitar sound like its underwater? Why is the midi kickdrum mixed so damn loud?  Is “tecnos” the name of some miniboss from a long-forgotten SNES RPG?  These were the questions I tried to answer when I gave up paying attention to this boring song.

Author’s Note
All of the songs were ridden twice on the Pro difficulty using the Eraser and Vegas characters.  I apologize for how my thoughts on Mr. Ferrao’s music began as an attempt to justify his mediocrity and then plunged down a rabbit hole of despair and negativity.  If you disagree with me, please feel free to leave your comments below.  I’d love to recant if someone could show me why I should bother.

Continue...

marginalia 6.29.09: everyone’s going nuts about starcraft 2 edition

1UP: A preview of the pre-beta multiplayer build of Starcraft 2.  Could I be any more excited?

Gamasutra:  Brandon Sheffield wants game developers to make time for other games.  How else will they know whose shoulders they're standing on?

Ars Technica:  A mole has shared some "information" regarding price drops for the 360 Elite as well as a price drop/slimline release for the PS3 later this year.  How this source manages to have "insider" info on both Sony and Microsoft is beyond me.

Destructoid: the D-toid people interview Dustin Browder, lead designer on Starcraft 2.

Destructoid: Starcraft 2: now with less LAN party.

Destructoid: Mythic and Bioware may collaborate in the future - promising news, considering they were fused by a sightless and dispassionate god.

Kotaku: Perennial favorite Leigh Alexander writes in defense of the old-fashioned game controller.

Continue...

demo monday: blueberry garden

We like the indie games here at Charge Shot!!!. They’re short, they’re often innovative, they often scratch an itch that $60 explosion-and-boob-fests just can’t. Also, most of them can be had for a song, which fits well into my budget (given that I have far more songs than I have dollars).

Erik Svedäng’s Blueberry Garden won the Best Independent Game award at the Independent Games Festival (IGF) this year, and I wanted to see how it stacked up against other 2009 IGF contestants.

For starters, I don’t feel like this is the sort of game that can really have a demo as such. It’s just a sliver of the game world, which I understand to be one continuous map – it’s a decently well-contained slice, but the demo suffers because it can’t offer the full experience.

That being said, you do have a solid idea of what that full experience will be. You play a sort of bird man thing in people clothes and a rakish hat who is tasked with, I assume, climbing to the top of the map to do something about a faucet which has been left on. I say I assume because, like many old school games of yore, it begins with little fanfare, dropping you in the middle of things and asking you to learn about the game world on your own. It’s a good way to start, I think, and you’ll spend your first chunk of time in Garden just figuring out what everything does. Initially you’ll feel a little lost and aimless, but play around enough and you’ll get it.

Allow me to ruin some of that initial mystery for you by talking about it: you’ll discover pretty early on that there are large objects scattered throughout the game world – apples, pieces of cheese, dice and so forth. Find these objects and stand next to them for long enough, and they’ll begin to reappear at your “home” position and stack up. Climbing them allows you to jump and fly further, discovering new objects and stacking them so you can go higher.

Many of these large objects, however, are placed out of reach or behind hazards. You can surmount these obstacles by finding and eating pieces of fruit, each of which has a different effect on your character. I won’t go into more detail on what fruit does what, mostly for your benefit – again, experimenting is the best way to figure out the game world, and is a key part of the game’s design. Suffice it to say that discovering how to use the fruit to get to new places is made very satisfying by the fact that the game doesn’t always show you the path.

As for music and overall presentation, well, with every indie game I look at, I begin to see more and more of a pattern, a sort of checklist that most acclaimed independent games use. Graphics are hardly ever a selling point, but distinctive art direction is a must. Music should be ambient and pleasant, never bombastic or distracting. The game can’t be long, but it has to be satisfying, and if it has a story to tell it should try to do it in a unique way.

Blueberry Garden can safely check all of those requirements, and it passes the Things You Need in Your Indie Game test with flying colors. None of these factors are to the game’s detriment, but it’s interesting to see such formulas developing even in genre-bending indie games – this formula is especially noticeable when a game tries but falls short, as with And Yet It Moves. Hopefully developers keep pushing the envelope, finding ways to keep the form fresh but still fun.

And that’s all I have to say about the Blueberry Garden demo. Starting this week, I’ve decided to stop giving “buy” or “pass” recommendations, partly because I tend to gravitate toward demos I think I’ll like and I just ending up telling you all to buy everything I play. If you want someone to tell you how to spend your money, go to IGN and look at the games rated 8.0 and above. Here, my goal is to expose myself (and you!) to a variety of new experiences on the cheap, and if I inspire you to download them and try them out yourselves, that’s good enough for me.

Erik Svedäng’s Blueberry Garden is currently available via Steam for $4.99. Played demo for about half an hour.

Continue...

pod shot: grafix

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us on the iTunes store!

This week we talk about the role of graphics in games – when do they enhance the experience, and when are they a hindrance? It’s a pretty good discussion.

What overshadows this is a completely non-game-related talk about Michael Jackson’s untimely death. Aficionados will remember the time I played Resident Evil 5 while listening to the King of Pop’s discography. Bizarre personal life? Sure. Gifted artist? Also, yes.

Music this week is courtesy Kirby’s Adventure from the NES, specifically the Butter Building level. This was my favorite of the Kirby games, perhaps because the first time I played it I was young enough to be challenged by it. If we had a bunch of money though, the music this week would be Billie Jean.

Continue...

Marginalia 6.27.09

Kotaku: THQ is planning on breaking into the ridiculous peripheral market. I hope it's a motion-sensing sledgehammer for Guerrilla.

LA Times: Looks like Warner Bros. will be scooping up Midway. Fingers crossed for a Mortal Kombat vs. Looney Tunes multiplatform release.

1UP: I didn't even know we'd been promised an Aliens RPG and they're already taking it away?

Game Politics: Dennis Kucinich doesn't like the Virtual Army Experience. No word on whether his hot wife has an opinion or not.

Kotaku: PS3 owners can't access Hulu anymore. I think that means that someone, somewhere wants money for something.

Kotaku: Oh hey remember that Mass Effect DLC we were supposed to hear about? Keep waiting for that. Continue...

Go Here, Shoot That: The Thinking Man's Shooter?

A whiff of superiority has forever hung about tactical shooters. The implication in making a thinking man’s shooter is that the others are for idiots; accordingly, games like Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 are slower-paced, more unforgiving and grasp at realism more than their run-and-guns on the lowbrow side of town.

But is that anything gamers are interested in playing? When granddaddy Rainbow Six was released in 1998, its hardcore realism found a surprising amount of traction, but over time, the series softened into its current apogee, Rainbow Six: Vegas, a game that strikes a balance between tactical action and entertainment.

GRAW 2, a Tom Clancy game, dwells in the same mindset. While billing itself a tactical shooter, it depends on the same accessibility and slick production as Vegas. Make no mistake, this isn’t a stern-faced simulator. This war is all rock-and-roll.


The Ghost Recon franchise split from Rainbow Six in 2001. While the Rainbow squad dealt with close-quarters fighting and hostage rescue, the Ghosts took to the great outdoors and went for a heavily-armed hike. Like the Rainbows, the Ghosts softened over time; the sequel was a third-person shooter, and the third game, billed Advanced Warfighter, took the franchise to the current generation – spectacularly. GRAW was a huge success, depicting a war-torn Mexico City with an unprecedented level of detail. GRAW 2 keeps you in Mexico, by and large replicating the experience of its predecessor.

GRAW 2 will punish you for run-and-gun tactics, but is what I’d call tactical action? I’m not sure. Here is the grand total of actions you can assign to your teammates:

Go there.
Come here.
Heal me.
Heal him.
Be quiet.
Shoot him.
Shoot everybody.

Is this what we call tactical? The original Ghost Recon allowed me to position individual squad members, assign fields of fire and sequence an assault with go-codes. GRAW 2 simply gives me three extra guns to roll with. Which, ultimately, I prefer – I mean, there’s a reason the genre moved in this direction. It was frustrating to see assaults foiled by vegetation, or broken AI. After a few disappointments, most players just told their cohorts to follow them and prayed they didn’t get shot in the back.

The AI in GRAW 2 isn’t anything to praise, either. Most of the time, my teammates just complained about not having a good shot on an enemy. I did the vast majority of the killing myself. One obnoxious bug made stuck my medic in a wall for the last segment of a mission – a grueling bridge-crossing where I could have definitely used his skills.

If GRAW 2 isn’t necessarily tactical, it does reward players for fighting and winning the information war. Most missions equip players with a UAV drone, which can be ordered to hover over the battlefield and spot enemy targets. This allowed me to identify and exploit weaknesses – even if my teammates did nothing but bitch once we had the upper hand.

It should be noted, however, that I am no tactical genius, and these “weaknesses” that I “exploited” were pretty clearly built into a disappointingly narrow mission corridor. Some of the battlefields feel like regular corridor-crawls, with obvious barricades to hide behind and rooftops to shoot from. There is, consequently, little variety to engagements.

This would be fatal, were the game not fun as hell. As in all Clancy games, production here is top-notch – Mexico simmers with smoke, heat and unrest, and the hazy lighting effects one-up even the first game. With the exception of your brass-balls commando character, the voice acting isn’t terrible, and the snap, hiss and pop of bullets sound realistic and terrifying.

Let me put it simply: if I couldn’t tell my teammates to form a human pyramid and shoot rockets out of their assholes, I didn’t care. I was too busy saying “ooh” and “aah” and enjoying the current state-of-the-art in tactical shooting. Who cares if it isn’t exactly tactical?

Continue...

Marginalia: 6.26.09

Joystiq: Apparently one of the only things not being blocked by Iran's Internet firewalls is gaming. I expect to start receiving Xbox Live messages from protesters any day now.

Gamasutra: Matt Matthews thinks that Sony should have launched the PS3 with sequels instead of original IP. Considering that Resistance: Fall of Man outsold a long list of sequels in the launch window, I'm not so sure.

Game Politics: According to a class action lawsuit, Final Fantasy XI comes with secret hidden fees. I'll have to go out and kill some giant spiders to raise the extra money.

Destructoid: How can we read this as anything but an apology?

Gamasutra: Someone thinks an Uncharted movie can be anything but Raiders of the Lost Ark.

1UP: Square Enix is teasing us with something. 

GameSetWatch: Is it possible Nintendo’s made it all too accessible?

vg247: More indie devs are speaking out against Microsoft.

Continue...

Dr. Pepper, DLC, and a Bad Taste in My Mouth

If you couldn’t tell from yesterday’s Marginalia, the news of a marketing deal between EA and Dr. Pepper has my feathers ruffled.

Normally, I’m pretty understanding of the advertising industry. I wasn’t bothered by the Dell billboards in Quake Live. I’m a big fan of Mad Men. And I understand that the anemic economy is breeding strange bedfellows, as companies with shrinking budgets band together to share commercial time.

But this isn’t just some head-scratching marketing ploy. It’s part of a larger problem: exclusive downloadable content (hereafter referred to as DLC).

Now, this Dr. Pepper DLC seems kind of silly. According to Dr. Pepper’s Marketing VP Tony Jacobs, "The first-of-its-kind partnership with EA will give Dr Pepper fans an unrivaled experience by adding exclusive value to their games such as new levels and items.” New levels and items? In The Sims 3? So…if I like Dr. Pepper in the real world, I can make my Sims like it, too?

The people at EA really should have read Section 2 of Ian Bogost’s book Persuasive Games. Bogost concedes that a game like The Sims is really the only destination for most product placement, since few games “[depict] the quotidian household tasks that most consumer products facilitate.” But he also notes that “EA cancelled plans for product placement in The Sims 2 after its failed experiments in The Sims Online,” quoting former EA ad sales director Julie Shumaker as saying, “We realized breaking the Sims fantasy in this case would detract from the player’s experience, so we declined.” Well, I guess we know how EA’s changed since Shumaker’s departure a few years ago. Bogost also goes on to argue that product placement like this fails to capitalize on what is unique about games: procedurality. Simply adding soda cans with a Dr. Pepper skin does not demonstrate how tasty or refreshing it might be. But I’ll stop there, lest I recite Bogost to you ad nauseam (do yourself a favor and read his book).

This exclusive DLC nonsense doesn’t stop at EA and soda, however. What about all of these GameStop preorder exclusives? “Get a longer demo if you preorder at GameStop!” “Get a goofy suit for your character if you give us all your money!” “Have a demo key and a multiplayer item if you only shop with us!” Okay, so does any of this break the games in question? No. But I don’t like what this does to games. By partnering with GameStop to withhold content from those who don’t preorder, developers are essentially saying, “What you’re paying $60 for isn’t the full game. Jump through these extra hoops to get the full experience.”

Bullshit. I don’t have to go to a specific movie theater to watch the entirety of Transformers 2. People didn’t get extra pages in Twilight (or whatever the tweens are reading these days) because they ordered it on Amazon. And don’t feed me the “Games are a different medium” line. That works when you’re discussing artistic content. That doesn’t work when you’re talking about screwing over customers.

Because that’s what exclusive DLC does. It’s not the same as offering a free poster when you pick up a DVD. Or entering you in a raffle if you stand in line at midnight for something. DLC walks a fine line as it is. In single-player gaming, I suppose it’s less troublesome. You can elect not to purchase the extra levels in Fallout 3 or the bonus side-quest in Mass Effect. That, to me, is analogous to Director’s Cut DVD editions. But multiplayer content is a little more tenuous because it splits the user base. There’s always been fuss around exclusive Pokémon. And map packs are a bitch, too. When I was regularly playing Halo 2 online, I never purchased new maps. I gave you my fifty bucks, Bungie, because you promised a revolutionary multiplayer experience. Don’t tell me I need to give you more for something you already promised me. Bungie, however, was smart and eventually released these maps for free. They must have realized that fracturing your product is stupid and a slap in the customer’s face.

Thanks to the success of Xbox Live and the ubiquity of online gaming, DLC isn’t going away. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Adding a few more hours to a quality game isn’t wrong. What’s wrong is the advertising that makes a supposedly complete product look hobbled. All of this is, of course, colored by the egregious $60 price point. Still, I’d be a lot happier if I could play the Sims without this song playing in my head the whole time.

Continue...

Without words

I am overcome. I don't know whether to cut my wrists, cry until I laugh or hug my mother and tell her that I love her very, very much and will miss her when g-d punishes us for what we've done.

Big ups/eternal hellfire to Jay Ulwick for passing this our way.

Continue...

margarita 6.25.09

Game Informer:  Now you'll have to buy Dr. Pepper to get exclusive EA content.  I can't even think of something witty to say this is so damn frustrating.  CAN EVERYONE IN ADVERTISING JUST TAKE A CHILL PILL?

1UP: Bethesda is close to having their first set of Fallout 3 DLC ready for the Playstation 3.  You know, the one that came out months ago for the 360 (ed: and was completely effed, right?).

VG247:  Sony's apparently open to allowing non-game apps on the new PSP Go.  If the Go's price point is any indicator, each app will most likely cost $75.

Destructoid: A Double Helix employee called Eurogamer, Kotaku, Joystiq and Gamespot "fags." Charge Shot!!! is officially slighted.

Destructoid: Can't get enough of Bioshock 2 art? Neither can we!

Joystiq: Can you really be more mainstream than Guitar Hero?

Joystiq: Sony openly admits that it is taking advantage of early adopters with the PSP Go!’s $249 price point. Finally, a truthful Sony exec!

Continue...

a gamer’s guide to pc care – laptop edition

I apologize in advance for the length and relative complexity of the directions below – as I’ve said, trying to find laptop drivers can be difficult. Obtuse or not, I hope I help somebody.

Two weeks ago I wrote this thing about keeping your gaming desktop in solid shape without spending any money. Nobody said anything. Which I take to mean nothing went catastrophically wrong with any of your computers! Or maybe something did, and you couldn’t tell me about it because your computer was a smoking pile of metal and silicon. I wouldn’t know.

But, really, who uses desktops anymore? Laptops are where it is at, or so I hear! So here’s the post I promised last week, but not before I hit you with this alarmist disclaimer:

Charge Shot!!! is not responsible for any damage you do to your computer as a result of following the instructions detailed below. We offer no support and no compensation for those who render their PC unusable. We also offer no guarantee that the following directions will work on your PC – this document is intended only as a set of steps which should work on most PCs.

That being said, I am a paid, trained and certified professional, and I definitely know what I’m doing – this is my day job, and I’m giving you the best advice I know how. Relevant parts of this have been copied and pasted from the desktop version of this guide – this is not because I am lazy, or not entirely, but more for your convenience.

The first and easiest thing that any gamer can do for their PC is a driver update – for the uninitiated, a driver is a piece of software which tells Windows how to interface with a certain piece of hardware, in this case your graphics card. All devices in your computer have drivers, from the mouse and keyboard to the monitor down to the processor itself, and newer drivers can fix compatibility issues, unlock new features, and even speed games up. Our first task will be identifying your graphics card – we can’t update the driver unless we know what we’re updating.

To find out what you’ve got running in your laptop (if you don’t already know), the easiest thing to do is download a nice little utility from TechPowerUp! called GPU-Z. Download and run this guy, and it will give you all the info there is to know about the card – the only stuff we’ll need for our purposes right now is the manufacturer, and the information in the “Name” field:

So I’ve got an NVIDIA card, and it’s an 8400M. Graphics cards typically come in series – for example, the 8400, 8600, and 8800 are all part of NVIDIA’s 8-series, the 9400, 9600 and 9800 are all part of the 9-series, and so on. The M often denotes a Mobile card. All the major card manufacturers work in the same way. Most of your graphics cards will either be from NVIDIA, ATI, or Intel, and I’ll tell you how to download and install new software for each of them.

Extra caution for laptop users

Keep in mind that if you have any problems downloading or installing any of the drivers below, you should follow the directions in the installing your laptop maker’s drivers section which follows this one. In fact, I recommend reading it and making sure you can download your laptop maker’s drivers before following further instructions. That way, if anything goes wrong, you’ll at least be able to get your graphics card working again.

Installing your laptop maker’s drivers

This is the unfortunate truth of notebook graphics drivers – some manufacturers have customized their cards, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes not, and other, newer drivers aren’t always going to work.

That’s when you turn to your laptop maker’s drivers – however old they may be, they’re guaranteed to work. First, you need to know who made your laptop, be it Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Toshiba, Sony, or whoever. Next, you’ll need to find the series (i.e., Aspire, Inspiron, Latitude) and the model number, which is typically emblazoned above the keyboard or the LCD panel, or sometimes on the bottom of the laptop somewhere.

Next, go to your manufacturer’s Web site, a mere Google search away, and check their Support page for updated Drivers or Software. Select your model, and look for Graphics or Video drivers. Download the latest available driver which applies to your product and operating system – some laptops offer a choice between Intel or Nvidia or ATI graphics, so choose the right one for you – and follow the updating your drivers directions below to get your laptop working correctly again. These won’t be the latest and greatest, but they’ll definitely work and in some cases will at least be newer than what your computer came with.

NVIDIA cards

The download page for NVIDIA cards is here, and it’s pretty intuitive. First, your product type: most people will have GeForce cards, though the workstation Quadro cards make it into a fair number of business-oriented PCs. Next, pick the product series I mentioned earlier, making sure to pick the “M” version clearly designated as for notebooks, whether it be 8M-series or 9M-series or what have you. Then, select your operating system – the most common will be Windows XP 32-bit and Windows Vista 32-bit, though 64-bit versions of Vista aren’t too exotic. Now, click Search – the correct driver should come up. Check the license agreement box and click Download Now and then wait for the file to download. Once that’s done, skip to the Updating your drivers section to complete the process.

ATI cards

Downloading drivers for some of ATI’s laptop cards can be… frustrating. Here’s what we’re going to do – 9-series, X-series, and X1-series cards are going to use one driver. XP users will want to download this one. Vista and Windows 7 users are, in this case, hosed – the only place you’re going to be able to get drivers is your manufacturer’s Web site, or possibly failing that from Windows Update. Luckily, these are older cards, and laptops using them are more likely to be running XP than Vista.

2000-series, 3000-series and 4000-series have it a bit easier, I think – unless I am mistaken, the same driver package that desktop users download will be the package that you need. The ATI download page, again, is here. Just select your operating system, your card series and the card you’ve got – they’re basically listed in chronological order, from top to bottom. You’ll want to download the Catalyst Software Suite, which includes the updated driver we want and ATI’s control panel, which can be used to tweak a lot of advanced settings. Once the file is downloaded, skip to the Updating your drivers section to finish up. Note: Please let me know, notebook users, if this doesn’t work for you – all evidence suggests it will, but I do not have a modern ATI-equipped laptop on which to test these things.

Intel cards

Owners of Intel’s integrated graphics cards… I weep for you, and as a laptop user, it’s especially unfortunate because you’re almost certainly stuck with that chip until you replace the laptop. Try not to make the same mistake next time, okay? In the meantime, their download center is here, and it’s probably the most arcane of the bunch. GPU-Z should still give you the info you need, though – in the navigation bar on the left-hand side of the screen, hover over Graphics, then Laptop Graphics controllers, and then attempt to find the name which most closely matches the one GPU-Z tells you – the Mobile 965 chipset or whatever.

If you can’t find your exact part listed, click the one that most closely matches what you’ve got and you should be fine. Now, select your operating system, whether that be XP or Vista in their 32 or 64-bit flavors. In the list that appears there should be something that says, approximately, Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator Driver for Windows XP (exe) – make sure that you get the exe version and not the zip version! Click to download, accepting any license agreements. Great, hopefully you’ve made it through Intel’s convoluted joke of a download page, and you’re ready to move on to the Updating your drivers section.

Updating your drivers

Owners of NVIDIA and ATI cards will definitely need to remove the old drivers first to remove the possibility of conflicts between the old and new versions. This is easily accomplished – in Windows XP, go to the Control Panel and select Add or Remove programs. In Windows Vista, go to the Control Panel, select Classic View in the left-hand navigation bar, and then select Programs and Features.

NVIDIA users ought to see an entry titled NVIDIA Drivers which ought to be removed. At this point, if you are given a list of choices, you should bubble in Remove only the following and check NVIDIA Display Driver – the problems which can result from removing anything else are outside the scope of this post. Allow everything to uninstall, and then restart the computer. When it starts back up, don’t be alarmed if your screen doesn’t look right – this will correct itself shortly. Now, find and run that driver file we downloaded from the NVIDIA Web site earlier, accepting all defaults. Once this is done, restart the computer again. Congratulations! You’ve been updated to the latest driver version!

ATI users have it a little easier – in the programs list, there should be an ATI Software Removal Tool, which if removed will take all the drivers and related files with it. Restart the computer, and then run the file we downloaded from the ATI Web site earlier, accepting all defaults. Restart again, and you’ll be updated to the latest version of your graphics driver!

Intel users need to do the same thing, basically – find the entry for the Intel graphics chip in the programs list, remove everything, and restart the computer. Then, run the file you downloaded from the Intel Web site, accepting all defaults, and restart when prompted. Barring any error messages or strange issues, you now have the latest driver version!

Something has gone wrong

Okay, so something isn’t working right. Maybe you got an error message as you attempted to install your driver. Maybe you got your driver installed, but you’re noticing strange behavior or crashes in games. In that case, please scroll back up to the Installing your laptop maker’s drivers section and follow the directions there to get your laptop working correctly again.

We’re done here!

This will get the vast majority of you laptop gamers out there updated with the latest software for your graphics card – you may not see any life-changing performance improvements, but having the latest graphics driver ensures that your hardware is running as well as is possible. Next week, I’ll discuss hardware upgrades you can make to get the most out of your computer. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments section! We’d like these guides to be as useful as possible for all of you, and if they get a strong response we’ll be more inclined to keep them coming. Until next week, happy gaming!

Continue...

Marginizzles 6.24.09

1UP: The president of Gearbox studios is calling out Bungie and Infinity Ward for not exploring new IPs. That's a little bit of the pot calling the kettle black, don't you think, Mr. My-Studio-Released-Six-Brothers-in-Arms-games?

GameDaily: Best Buy's hopping with gleeful abandon onto the used game bandwagon.

Slashdot: Specific details on how Valve plans to support L4D in the coming months. It remains to be seen if any of this community map-making will make it to the Xbox, though.

Game Politics: The Entertainment Merchant's Association wants you to have to activate games and movies at the counter before taking them out of a store. I didn't even know people stole games and movies from stores anymore.

Gamesindustry.biz: Read this interview with Killer 7 dev Suda 51, who thinks he knows how to get Japanese people buying games again.

Eurogamer: Now read this interview with Take-Two's Ben Feder. LOL @ Eurogamer's attempt to frame E3 as a competition. "Well, everyone else is doing it..."

USA Today: id got bought. What.

Kotaku: And EA just mashed Bioware and Mythic together. WHAT.

Destructoid: Matisse meets Fallout 3 meets vomit. Continue...

How To Use Used Games

I love to bitch about the price of games. Andrew loves to bitch about it, too. We all love to cry, moan and rage against the $60 we know we should spend on groceries, overdue bills or something pretty for our ladies, but we spend on games anyway. How dare they charge so much for something that is often so little?

Where there is discontent, there is opportunity – and if you keep tabs on the industry, you’ll know that it’s an opportunity plenty have seized upon. In addition for selling new games at list price, many vendors are now selling used to like-new copies at drastic markdowns. Gamestop, most notably, has made enough of a profit off of used games to draw protest from major publishers. Amazon has made enough of a profit off of used games to put the scare into Gamestop. Now Best Buy is thinking about entering the fray.

There are some incredible deals out there. Hit the jump to see a few.


At Gamestop, the scope of the deals varies. For recent titles, you’ll be better off buying the game new – they have a no-returns, no-responsibility policy regarding used merchandise, and while a Gamestop used game has yet to fail on me, you never know. At the Rehoboth Beach, Del. Gamestop, a used copy of HAWX sells for $54 – might as well have the satisfaction of ripping off the cellophane.

Older games, however, sell at embarrassingly low prices. Though I’m not in love with Grand Theft Auto IV, plenty of curious gamers will find it a steal at $30. Games that were already a steal are even more so – I’ve seen both The Orange Box and Mass Effect in the $10 range.

I recently hopped over to the Rehoboth Gamestop to see if I couldn’t scoop up HAWX on the cheap. $54 was still more than I’m willing to pay for the game, but I spotted another Ubisoft Clancy title on the used rack – Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. One of the first must-have 360 titles, GRAW still looks great today, and for $10, I couldn’t find a convincing reason not to buy it. Better yet, the cashier accidently put GRAW2 in the box. $10, folks. I’ve spent more on a martini.

If you’re willing to wait a week for standard shipping, Amazon is where you’ll find the real bargains. Recently, Amazon subdivided their used games into “Used” and “New.” Under the “New” tab, you can buy games in perfect condition for up to half off. It’s baffling. Recent releases like HAWX go for $26.99 – new. For the miserly, you can buy HAWX for $22, condition “Like New.” The $4 shipping and handling is immaterial – these are simply the best deals in gaming.
Buzzing after reading a snippet of Splinter Cell: Conviction press, I searched for Double Agent, the series’ last installment. When I clicked the “order” button, I had spent a few pennies shy of $12.

When game shopping on a budget, your best asset is an open mind. Remember: games released two or three years ago are as good now as they were then. Flip through old gaming magazines, see what strikes your fancy, and buy it for a song on Amazon.

Continue...

Marginalia: 6.23.09

Joystiq:  Games as Theater?  Games as Art!

Gamasutra:  Alyssa Finley continues to impress.  BioShock 2 is starting to sound like it will be just fine.

GameDaily: PlayStation execs are trying to convince us that people like PlayStation Home.

Gamasutra:  There’s some shifty marketing going on in the world of free-to-play Facebook games.  Is it any surprise that the games are about the Mafia?

1UP:  The guy behind the Tony Hawk Ride peripheral just said he “look[s] at it less as a peripheral, as more of a platform.”  I think he may literally be right.

GameSpot:  Penn and Teller plan on debunking some myths about games.  Like how GTA is worse than polio.

Destructoid: The US Army is using a 360 controller to operate an armored golf cart. Press X to win Afghanistan.

Destructoid: Suda 51 identifies the "middle audience" as crucial to Japanese business. What audience is crucial to Suda 51's business? I would suggest David Lynch fans and the violently schizophrenic.

Continue...

This Week on Audiosurf Radio – 6/23 – Techno the Redeemer Edition

Back from the Editorial Summit, I was full of crazy thoughts for this week’s post.  Like making the – explicit links coming up – Shaq rap required riding or doing a theme week of all Mickey Avalon songs.  Instead I did what I set out to do: round up this week’s rides for you the reading public.

This week we’ve got the triumphant return of trance music.  I’ve been burned in the past, but this week’s gotten me excited.  If all future weeks bring techno this fun, I’d be happy as a half-baked clam.  Carlos Perrota, aka Synthetic Sinergy, brings the Brazilian psychedelic techno.  They’re Speedsound versions, just for clarification.  Unfortunately, it’s not all South American trance.  Ukraine’s Screamcore band To Leave A Trace is all about how loud Oksana Bugaiova can yell.   Please get your earplugs ready and hit the jump.

Recommendations

I reckon they call it Trance because they assume anyone listening is in some sort of alcohol/drug-induced altered state.   I don’t know how anyone could dance to this.  This is not music to grind to.  This is music to compete to (or at the very least make a very huge mistake [circa 1:30] to).  So it’s best to approach “Imagination” as a kind of aural puzzle:  “How can I survive this torrent of colored blocks?”  Just forget surviving.  Focus on enjoying it, and you can play this song.  How might you enjoy this track?  For starters, take some LSD put on some headphones.  There’s enough noise in this one that you don’t want any distractions.  Then use the Vegas character.  Sure, Audiosurf pros may put up high scores with Pointer, but Vegas is where it’s at.  Why?  On numerous phrase-punctuating downbeats, the Vegas character conjured one of its random power-ups.  Each time a tense phrase threatened to overload all of my lanes at once, an authoritative noise would sound, a hill would crest, and I’d receive a Shuffle to clear my board.  The synchronicity felt fated.  Then there was the time I wove through three lanes of traffic to snag a red Paint to save myself from certain doom.  And don’t worry about the running time.  This one shakes things up regularly.  You’ll be too busy holding on for dear life to notice the eight minutes go by.

Okay, so I rambled a bit about “Imagination.”  “Pure Dream” offers a similar experience – I just think it lacks the special kick (or Essence) I found in “Imagination.”  But that doesn’t mean you should avoid this one.  In fact, I think you should definitely give this one a ride.  It still ranks above some of the other techno nonsense I’ve slogged through.  The individual sounds definitely hint at real instruments, with extended runs of synthesized piano.  Something “Pure Dream” does quite well is something Dylan talked about way back when: the tension and release of long-form techno pieces.  He by no means said other genres can’t do it (one of his favorite bands to ride is Tool), but the typical Build-Build-BuildBuildBuilBuiBu-Ahhh of decent trance music is what he’s talking about.  And “Pure Dream” pulls this off in spades.  The traffic becomes less predictable as the percussive ambience rises in pitch until finally the wave crashes and you start climbing again.  Any other week and this one may have been my top pick.

Other selections
I feel bad for “Endless Song for One Day.”  It’s a serviceable track with some dazzling red tunnel curves and some slick Queens of the Stone Age-ish riffs.  But goddamn if this chick’s voice doesn’t make me feel awful inside.  I’m sorry.  Just listen, and if you can stomach it (aka if you can digest nails), maybe you should give this song a chance.  Regardless, I still could’ve done without the sentimental breakdown in the middle.  If you’re going to play thrash guitar and scream at me, you’re not allowed to mellow out in the middle and make me listen to your poetry jam bongo player.  “Fight Your Evil Side” is more of the same.  More adequate music.  More evil Kath Soucie imitations. 

Author’s Note
The Synthetic Sinergy tracks were played on the Pro difficulty at least twice using the Vegas and Eraser characters.  However, I couldn’t get through the To Leave A Trace tracks a second time.  If you think I’m just being lazy, I dare you to try it.  Go ahead.  Make my day.

Continue...

marginalia 6.22.09

Industry Gamers: More backtracking from loose-lipped Microsoft execs.  "We're barely halfway through this generation," he says.  I hope so.  I've still got new 360 games to play.

Joystiq: To back up the above, the ever photogenic Steve Ballmer (right) says that no there is still no new Xbox please quit asking.

Gamasutra: Sony's been showing off their motion control Harry Potter wands to developers.

Eurogamer: Mortal Kombat Nine? Mortal Kombat NINE?

Destructoid: The latest Bioshock 2 viral marketing. Someone got paid to scribble with crayons.

Destructoid: Piss-myself-moment-of-the-day: Shia "The Beef" LaBeouf calling the Wii an "amateur" console.

Destructoid: Mass Effect downloadable content? Does this count as marketing?

Joystiq: The New Xbox Experience is apparently not the last Dashboard improvement we’ll be seeing before console’s end.

Continue...

demo monday: holy invasion of privacy, badman!

On the road again this past weekend, meeting up with my esteemed co-editors in our nation’s capital – you can listen to the ridiculous fruits of this meeting by listening to yesterday’s podcast. In addition to being a damn good time, though, it also robbed me of most of my major gaming platforms. I grabbed the old PSP, downloaded two or three of the most recent demos and hopped a plane, hoping I’d find something worth writing about. I am pretty sure I did. Or did I? Only you, dear reader, can continue on and find out!

Nippon Ichi’s Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is, in as few words as possible, some sort of Bizarro Gauntlet. As in Patapon or Black and White, you are an omniscient presence, peering down into the game world via your screen and being communicated with by a Humble Servant. In some of these “god games,” you’re a benevolent force guiding your followers to victory and prosperity. In Badman, you’re Lord of the Underworld.

Your smart- and foul-mouthed servant, who seems very much to have his own delusions of grandeur, directs you through the basics of the game, and now so will I. The playing field is an underground dungeon, represented by a grid. When you start, most of the squares on this grid are taken up by plain old dirt, and one is taken up by said servant. By expending “dig power” you can clear the dirt from these squares and form a path. Certain clearly-marked squares contain nutrients – breaking these will spawn small slimy creatures. These slimes will spread further nutrients around – the more nutrients in a patch of soil, the stronger the monster that will emerge when it is broken. Some of these stronger monsters eat the slimes to grow stronger and reproduce, so you need to keep a steady supply of them coming even as you produce stronger creatures. The end result of all this is that your dungeon is its own ecosystem, most aspects of which need constant maintenance if your monsters are going to stay strong enough to defeat your enemies.

Of course, since you’re the Lord of the Underworld, your enemies are the heroes, the knights and wizards who descend into your lair to defeat you. Your monsters have to drain the heroes’ hit points – if they reach your evil servant and drag him out of the dungeon, you lose.

Badman’s writing takes full advantage of this role reversal – in one round, a knight comes into the dungeon accompanied by a wizard and his healing magic. Your servant complains that it seems like the heroes are the ones who get all the breaks, but will cede that “that is just how JRPGs are.” Small and clever witticisms put this game’s writing head-and-shoulders above 90% of the big-budget action games on the market today. The hero characters are also humorous caricatures of those you’d find in a standard RPG, though from the demo it’s hard to tell whether you’ll see the same heroes over and over again as you progress, or if Nippon Ichi continues to throw new ones at your for the duration.

Graphics and sound are basic but serviceable – like most Nippon Ichi efforts, this one leans heavily in the direction of the old school. Tiny sprits crawl around your screen while appropriate blips and beeps accompany your every action. I find the retro presentation charming, but if you’re more impressed by bumpmapped textures, lens flare and giant shiny explosions I might have to point you in a different direction. Also, bring your magnifying glass, because this shit is tiny, and distinctions between the different types of soil blocks are subtle enough to be occasionally maddening.

Old school aesthetics also bring old school challenge – I died a few times just trying to complete the demo, and the game’s difficulty ramps up quickly. The full retail game will probably bring all this challenge and more, so don’t give this one to your girlfriend or your little brother unless you want your PSP lobbed across the room.

I always have a little more trouble evaluating a retail title over a $5 downloadable quickie. $5 is what they call “chump change,” and if you don’t happen to like the game after you download it then it’s not as if you’re out much. Get up into the $20 or $30 range, and I become less comfortable telling you how to spend your money. Also, retail games are typically deeper in scope, and the demo doesn’t offer as complete a picture of the game’s potential. All of that being said, I don’t have a lot to complain about here, other than the cumbersome, goofy name which goes way too far out of its way to reference a campy 1960s TV show that has absolutely nothing to do with the game at hand. Nippon Ichi seems to have put together a clean, tidy game with a simple-to-learn-difficult-to-master mechanic that’s part RPG, part RTS, and part SimAnt. If you like any of that stuff and you can get your hands on a PSP, I’d say this one is a pretty firm buy. If you’re on the fence about it, you know, you can always just download the demo yourself and give it a spin.

Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is due for release on the Playstation Portable July 14, 2009 for $29.99. Played single-player demo to completion.

Continue...

pod shot: together at last!

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us on the iTunes store!

This week we are talking about local multiplayer. That’s fine. Of more interest is the fact that the three of us were in the same room for the first time since the foundation of this enterprise. That, my friends, is all you need to know.

Music this week is courtesy the Super Nintendo version of Earthworm Jim, from the New Junk City level.

Continue...

Tango With The God Sniper

Cheer for me: I bought Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 for $9.99 at Gamestop. An hour into the game and I’m already prepared to call it the best squad-based tactical shooter I’ve ever played. When I say ‘squad-based tactical shooter,’ I’m talking about something very specific – something that started in 1998 with three games: Novalogic’s Delta Force, Zombie’s Spec Ops: Rangers Lead The Way, and Red Storm Interactive’s Rainbow Six.

In its current state, the genre is half chess, half shooter, requiring players to take a levelheaded approach to combat. Running-and-gunning in GRAW2 gets you smoked faster than you can say “Checkpoint reached.”

1998, however, presented a mixed bag of varying paths. The genre took one, and even then, GRAW2 bears little to no resemblance to its great-great-grandfather, Rainbow Six. Let’s go back to a time when Will Smith was cool and see how tactical action shooters got their first footholds.


To gauge the FPS climate in 1998, I need only say: Quake 2. A fluid, furious and violent shooter, Quake 2’s engine was doled out to developers as the software lingua franca of the generation (one of them was Valve, who was a year away from releasing a troubled, much-doubted project, Half Life). The prevailing school of thought was that shooters should be shooters, with lots of guns, lots of ‘splosions and gallons of adrenalin.

Zombie’s Spec Ops: Rangers Lead The Way was the first to suggest another way. Harnessing the mighty power of 3DFX, Spec Ops was a third-person action game that plopped two rangers into the middle of a jungle, desert, et al to blow things up – quietly. That was the catch. Too much noise would get you overpowered by a numerically superior enemy. Play this like Quake 2, the game seemed to boast, and your momma will get a visit from the Department of Defense.

In theory. In practice, Spec Ops was as linear and traditional as the rest, offering only minor innovations and saddling the player with the liability of pants-off stupid AI. Apparently, the Army’s best like to plunge off cliffs and shoot at the sky with no apparent agenda. You could offer them a few rudimentary commands, but what was the point?

Delta Force was a more serious game – so serious, in fact, that you took on every mission solo, with nary an English speaker within the timezone. A first-person shooter, Delta Force’s voxel-based (volume-pixel. Get it?) engine made it a system hog, even while it produced middling visuals. It also manifested the problem that would haunt Far Cry years later – the God Sniper, able to pop your dome from an unrenderable distance. And what distances! Can you imagine the fury of a man who’s walked over miles and miles of fuzzy, cookiedough, voxeled-to-shit terrain only to get smoked by a shot he couldn’t have seen coming? This is before the days of quicksave, kids.

Rainbow Six was unforgiving, but in a different way – it asked you to plan your missions before fighting them. Revision: it demanded you orchestrate a flawless takedown of a hostage situation, arms depot or terrorist safehouse. If the timing of your go-codes was off, tough shit – you had blood on your hands, your teammates’ and the hostages’. In retrospect, the mission planner was skull-numbingly byzantine, but at the time, the power it gave the player was incredible. On the occasion that a mission went off flawlessly, the sense of reward was unparalleled. The game was so damned professional – there wasn’t even a gun on the screen. You nodded your set jaw at the monitor and said well done, men. Or at least I did.

Where is the class of 1998 now? The Spec Ops franchise spawned a hilariously bad sequel before promptly, and justly, dying. Delta Force made a clone and called it Delta Force 2, which made a sequel called Delta Force: Land Warrior. Past that, it’s a blur of budget-bin titles. Check out Delta Force: Extreme 2 to see what I’m talking about.

And of course, Rainbow Six went on to become one of gaming’s most successful and venerated franchises. But I’m going to revise what I said earlier – while Rainbow Six is clearly the dominant lineage, it’s the method first pioneered by Spec Ops – small teams, on-the-fly orders – that would become dominant. The pre-mission planning sputtered out with the lackluster PC version of Rainbow Six 3. On the other side of the sea change, the Xbox version eliminated the planning in favor of a few intelligent guns backing you up.

Okay, class dismissed. Go boot up GRAW2 for a good time. For extra credit, find an old copy of Delta Force and see how long you can make it before you get domed by a God Sniper.

Continue...

Bridging the Gap: Achievements and Game Aesthetics

Sure, they can interrupt immersion or drive OCD completionists to insomnia but, like it or not, Achievements are here to stay. 

In an April issue of The Escapist, Destructoid’s Anthony Burch argued for more achievements “that are creative, attainable without much repetition and intrinsically gratifying.”  To paraphrase, the best Achievements often encourage you to approach a game unconventionally, coaxing you into exploring mechanics or areas you might have otherwise neglected.  Unfortunately, this is easier said than done; Achievements regularly require repetitive tactics and boring exploration.  But there is hope, and it comes not from simply choosing better off-beat goals for the players.

Achievements can serve as a framing device for the type of experience the developers intend their game to provide.  Is it a tongue-in-cheek title?  Is it a “serious” experience?  By injecting their Achievement lists with a little personality and/or wit, developers can expand the boundaries of their game world to include that familiar Bloop! noise as well as the requisite “What’d I just unlock?” trip to the dashboard.  I’d like to look at some Achievement implementations that not only provide extra fun for the player but support and enhance their game’s aesthetic.

Braid’s austere achievement list reinforces how Jonathon Blow wants gamers to approach his title.  He wants your full commitment; he doesn’t want you worrying about your gamerscore or your friend Exploring the Wasteland in Fallout 3.  It’s no surprise then that (Speed Run being the only exception) all of Braid’s achievements relate directly to your progress through the game.  Blow wants you to discover how to play the game whilst doing so – so much so that the “Controls” section of the Pause menu makes no mention of the game’s time-bending mechanics.  This makes sense, of course, since each world possesses its own unique time-space rules whose discovery by the player ties in to the game’s thematic concerns – to disclose them in a Pause menu would be, in effect, to spoil the game.  Check out his Official Walkthrough and tell me he doesn’t place immense value on your beating this game on your own terms.  To include more descriptive Achievements would tip Blow’s hand and compromise his vision.

Valve, on the other hand, has no problem fleshing out its Achievement lists.  The Orange Box alone sports a whopping 99 Achievements, which range from the standard “Complete X section of the game” to the tongue-in-cheek Zombie-que (use flares to light 15 Half-Life zombies on fire).  Valve’s success stories all demonstrate this penchant for humor, which has crept into their Achievement lists.  Even the straight-faced Half-Life games get in on the fun with HotPotat0wned and the aforementioned Zombie-que awards.  Then there’s Left 4 Dead.  Look at the names:  Towering Inferno, Zombie Genocidist.  l4D’s Achievements channel the same campy B-movie vibe that pervades the game.

But Valve’s Achievements offer more than humor.  They highlight intrinsic elements of each title’s gameplay.  L4D, a Game of the Year title lauded for its New Millennium take on Gauntlet’s teamwork formula, doles out Achievements for healing or otherwise assisting your teammates.  Team Fortress 2 encourages you to delve into each class with its Head of the Class achievement, as well as rewards you for playing a match with at least seven of your Live friends.  These aren’t Easter Eggs by any means.  But they are indicative of what the developers value about their game – be it teamwork, diversity, etc.

It’s the implementation of Achievements in Mass Effect that impresses me the most.  There’s little irony to be found in the Achievement list.  All of the lingo supports the game’s sci-fi (not SyFy) military vibe.  Many of the plot-related achievements are called Badges or Medals, making you feel like a decorated veteran even when scrolling through your accomplishments in the Xbox HUD.  Also, BioWare poured considerable resources into fleshing out the Mass Effect universe.  To encourage you to come back for more, a good number of the Achievements were made unattainable in only one play-through.  Because Shepard’s skills are specialized, it’s simply impossible to rack up all of the weapon or skill Achievements the first time through (I found myself wielding an untrained assault rifle in hopes of getting Assault Rifle Expert – couldn’t rack up enough kills).  Upon completing the game, I instantly felt the pull to start all over again.  Furthermore, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that many of  Mass Effect’s achievements give you in-game bonuses.  Amassing one million credits not only awards you the Rich Achievement, it grants you access to special weapons and equipment.  BioWare’s integration of gamerscore, aesthetic, and gameplay stands above the rest as an example of superior Achievement design.

Achievements aren’t unique to Xbox Live, though they’ve become representative of the brand in the console wars.  Steam Achievements and PS3 trophies follow the same model, and Blizzard implemented World of Warcraft Achievements last year (they obviously believe that it’s possible for people to get more addicted to something).  For better or worse, they’ve become a mandatory part of game design (thanks to Microsoft’s decree).  More developers should look at Achievements as a form of expression, a post-modern means to expand upon the themes and aesthetic of their titles.  Otherwise, our Gamerscores will remain soulless measures of time spent with controllers in our hands.

Continue...

marginalia 6.18.09

GameDaily: I never thought I'd hear someone get upset about the Crackdown series. But apparently Microsoft has ruffled some feathers.

1UP: The next Madden game is offering a longer demo to gamers who preorder the title. Aren't demos supposed to be free?

GameSetWatch: Remember that indie Dreamcast shmup DUX? Interview get.

DailyTech: Blizzard wants to release StarCraft 2 in 2009, you know, if 2009 happens to be “when it’s ready.”

Destructoid: Take Two is wanting, hoping and praying to sell 5 million copies of Bioshock 2. The rest of us want, hope and pray it's any good.

Destructoid: The latest chapter in the dumbest gaming debate ever. Any more of this and I'm going to demand a Jets v. Sharks-style showdown.

Gamasutra: Research says "prosocial" games promote good behavior. I say: If you think World of Warcraft is making leigons of teens well-adjusted, you're out of your fucking mind.

Joystiq: Do review scores matter for Wii games? World of Goo dev 2D boy thinks so.

Joystiq: Apparently, the awkwardly titled Metroid Other M will be heavier on the story than past installments. Okay, I guess, as long as it’s a good game.

Gamasutra: An interesting interview on The Beatles Rock Band, with particular focus on the creation of the vocal harmony tracks.

Continue...

left 4 dead, a shining example of show don’t tell

Maybe you were expecting a continuation of last Thursday’s post about fine-tuning your computer? Well, remember how long and caveat-filled it was? Compared to desktops, doing a similar post about laptops is like running headlong through a minefield while every bully from your childhood pelts you with pee-filled water balloons. Also your head is on fire but the pee will not put out the fire.

Anyway, it’s coming.

In the meantime, I thought I’d talk about Valve’s Left 4 Dead, a game which has been on the periphery of several of our posts but has been the express focus of none.  After picking up this game several weeks ago, I quickly fell in love with its cooperative nature, its randomly generated enemies and item drops, and the dulcet tones of the Tank music. As I became familiar with its four campaigns, though, I began to notice some of its less obvious qualities, namely that this game had a story to tell.

The game’s developers note in the game’s commentary their decision to excise traditional story-via-cutscene from the game – they were trying to make a game that was infinitely replayable, and they knew that people firing up Blood Harvest for the thirtieth time were not going to stop and smell the cinematic intro. So, with the exception of a short introductory sequence at the very beginning of the game, Valve avoided them entirely, plopping the player down at point A and telling them only to make their way to point B. Oh, yeah, and mind the living dead.

This is certainly not the first game to thrust you into the center of an apocalypse, but unlike the distant death throes of the worlds surrounding the player in Half-Life 2 or Bioshock, Left 4 Dead puts you face-to-face with an apocalypse in progress – the world is in shambles, but just weeks ago it was still the place where you and I live and work. The game is filled with little touches that bring this eerie point home – the unmade bed of a child, the scrawls of graffiti on a safe room wall, the ubiquitous advisory posters warning against infection. These reminders of order and normalcy are far more effective storytelling devices than all the FMV produced by Squaresoft between 1997 and 2001, and stand in stark contrast to the barren landscapes you run and gun your way across.

I hate to admit it, but I’m That Guy – in the middle of a heated multiplayer battle, I’ll be the one who stops to read the diary entries and the conveniently unencrypted Secret Documents on abandoned computers. I made no exception for Left 4 Dead – while my teammates were healing and stocking up on ammo and auto-shotguns, I was standing in the corner reading the writing on the wall. Your band of survivors is not alone in the world – there are others immune to this infection, and they’ve got the same objective: to escape at any cost. Lots of them stop to make their mark, though, mostly via hurried, regretful scrawls to loved ones on the walls of safe rooms. These messages are another blunt reminder of a world turned upside-down – things like the kids are safe or I waited as long as I could are written everywhere, addressed to people who almost certainly didn’t make it. Even more melancholy, you know that anyone surviving in the current climate can’t take the time to mourn.

Take a moment toward the end of the Dead Air campaign as another poignant example – a plane approaches the burned-out husk of the airport you’ve just gunned your way through, but it’s coming in too erratically and too fast. It crashes in a burst of flame and debris, always prompting an unanimous “holy shit!” from your ragtag band of misfits. On the surface, this is Valve giving you an “OMG WTF?!” moment, but think about that plane for a second, and put on your Cape of Deduction. It was in the air. The Infected you’ve fought for the last hour have no interest in anything but your demise. Thus, at takeoff, this airplane was likely full of normal people hoping to escape from the very same apocalypse you’re running from. Of course, things don’t go as planned – first one passenger becomes symptomatic, and the close quarters of coach class ensure that the rest of the passengers follow shortly thereafter. It’s only natural that the plane would crash if it were full of Infected, right? Hold on there, don’t take off your cape just yet! This plane is trying to land in the runway of an airport, you know, where planes are supposed to land, and next time you play Dead Air, take a really good look at that plane as it comes down, taking special note of the lower right wing – its right, not yours. That plane’s landing gear comes down, but as you’ll recall the Infected have little presence of mind. There is something human on that plane, maybe already in the final stages of the disease, and it’s trying to make it home.

Or maybe I’m just reading too much into it – maybe sometimes a fast-paced action game with zombies and guns is just a fast-paced action game with zombies and guns. Still, whether they intended it or not, the guys at Valve might be onto something with Left 4 Dead. Maybe this, a simple game with a one-track mind if ever there was one, is the beginning of a trend toward games that approach storytelling with subtlety, not cutscenes. One of the main differences between movies and games is passivity versus activity – you watch a movie, you play a game. Left 4 Dead doesn’t tell you its story, but it leaves it laying around for gamers to find, and maybe that’s the approach that we need to take.

Continue...