Small Bites Only

I've barely had any time to play games recently, let alone write anything about them, hence this blog's updates have become even sparser than usual. I thought perhaps, just to get myself writing something again, I should put up some impressions of demos I'd played recently. "What?" I hear you say, "You've got a huge (and growing) pile of full retail and Live Arcade games, and you're playing demos of games you probably aren't even going to buy in the foreseeable future?". Well, sort of.

I've upgraded my internet connection, so it's now 4Mbps, and while I'm still capped, I've upgraded my cap to 18GB per month, which is more than I realistically see myself being able to download. So while my connection is still far from first world standards, it's now sufficient to let me download demos without having to agonise over whether they constitute a worthwhile expenditure of my bandwidth.

That's just what gets them onto my Xbox's hard drive. I've been trying a few because I don't actually want to start another game right now that will take me months to get through, I just want to be able to play something for an hour at most, form an opinion and move on, without it making me feel like a quitter when it sits there on my gamercard with only the opening achievements unlocked. Yes, I am aware how ridiculous that sounds.

Anyway, I'm not giving up proper games - in fact, having just finished the season mode of Split/Second, I'm keen to start Halo: Reach, but I'm going to try and put up a few demo impressions just to get myself writing again.

Where Everyone Knows Your Name

Not being a World of Warcraft player, I have not been following the Blizzard RealID controversy very closely, but the furore has been such that it has been impossible to ignore. I read that Blizzard have now backtracked on their stance, but not fully. Anonymity seems to be one of the founding principles of internet interaction, and while it is the root cause of much of the undesirable behaviour on the internet, I can certainly understand why in many cases it needs to stay that way.

I read this comment on Metafilter, linked from Penny Arcade, and I have to say I found it a bit shocking. The assertion that every female player will be harassed and many of them will fear physical confrontation if it is made easier to e-stalk them would seem like scaremongering overreaction if it weren't for the scores of follow-up responses pleading with people not to belittle the problem.

I know WoW has more players than the population of many small countries, and that with such a broad spectrum of humanity online you are bound to get a fair number of maladjusted miscreants, but it is a pretty sad indictment of online game players that harassment and abuse seem almost guaranteed.

As is visible on the right hand side of the blog, I currently use my full real name as my Gamertag on Xbox Live (and Games for Windows Live, as they use the same tag). I set it up at a time where I couldn't be bothered with all the hiding behind aliases that happens on the internet, and I haven't got around to changing it. Every time I play online my name is available to the people I play against, which has never really concerned me before. It no doubt helps that I don't play any MMOs - even if I were to really piss someone off, the transience of the games I play would mean it wouldn't be worth their while to really try and grief me, they'd probably never come across me again. I have had a few insulting messages typed at me in Dawn of War 2, with one person even feeling the need to send a swearword-filled rant to me on Live after a game, but it really didn't bother me. It would probably be different if I knew I was probably going to be sharing the game with that person most of the times I wanted to play.

Trying to bring bit of accountability to people's interactions in a game is certainly a worthwhile goal; unfortunately, Blizzard's attempt with the RealID system does not appear to be a workable way of achieving it.

Merciful Indifference

It seemed a while back like games I was really keen to play were coming out in rapid succession, certainly far quicker than my tardy play-rate would ever let me get through them. However, as of late, since Mass Effect 2 came out (which I bought on release day but haven't been able to play yet), there seems to be nothing on the horizon, or in fact for the rest of the year that I feel the need to buy on launch (okay, I have a pre-order in for Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, but that was placed back in early January).

Final Fantasy XIII? Don't really care

When I took time to consider it, there are actually some really big titles coming out soon, or in the later parts of the year. There's a new Final Fantasy game out now, something which is a huge event in the lives of many gamers. I'm not one of them, however, there are four or five other RPGs I'd want to play first, and even after that I'm not sure I'm that keen on the bizarre Japanese combat scenarios or the fact that the cast seems like it was designed by a cosplay focus group at an Anime convention.

There's also a new Splinter Cell coming out, which many people are pretty excited about, but I probably won't play it because of this bizarre OCD I have which doesn't let me start playing a series with any sort of story on the fifth game when I haven't played the earlier games. I finished the first Splinter Cell, own copies of Pandora Tomorrow (2) and Chaos Theory (3), and could get hold of Double Agent (4) easily enough, but there's no way I'd have time to play through all of them. I'm weird, I know.

Starcraft II? Will probably buy it, but am not really excited

Later in the year, Starcraft 2 will come out, no doubt destroying productivity in South Korea for at least a week. In the Western world, too, there are legions of PC gamers foaming at the mouth at the prospect of their 12 year wait for a sequel to one of the best RTS games ever being nearly at an end. Despite this, I'm not that excited about it. I will probably buy the game, and I'm sure it will be polished and enjoyable as Blizzard games always are, but from what I've seen of it (admittedly not that much, as I haven't been following the betas that closely) it looks like a throwback to the old style of RTS games when the genre has moved on, like Blizzard knew they could not risk alienating the South Korean pro-gamers by messing with the formula. For some, a high-res Starcraft will be all they ever wanted, but I'm also a little concerned that the Blizzard of old is gone, the key staff having moved to different companies over the years as Blizzard became World of Warcraft Inc. It's probably worth remembering that the last RTS Blizzard released was the relatively underwhelming Warcraft III. I have over 800 ranked games of Dawn of War II to my name - I highly doubt I will get anywhere near that on Battle.net.

God of War III? Do want, but not buying a PS3 right now

There are a couple of PS3 games I'm interested in: Heavy Rain, while derided by some as a giant set of quick time events masquerading as a game, sounds like a fascinating new direction for the graphic adventure to me, and is something I'd like to try. God of War III comes out in the next few weeks, too, and there is pretty much no way that it could not be awesome. However, my enthusiasm for these games is damped somewhat by the fact that I don't own a PS3, and I'm not actually in a hurry to buy one so I can have more games I might not get around to playing.

Split/Second? Cars and explosions are some of my favourite things, but not always together

That's not to say that there aren't any Xbox games I'm looking forward to, but none to the extent of counting the days until their release. Black Rock Studio's upcoming racer Split/Second looks very promising, capturing the spirit of the earlier Burnout games, and its blend of breakneck speeds and track-altering pyrotechnics would make it a good foil to the more technical, realistic challenge of Forza 3. Later in the year Halo: Reach is coming out, Bungie's swan-song for the Halo universe. The launch of a new Halo game isn't as big a deal as it was before, I didn't even pick up a copy of ODST, but I am actually more intrigued by something being the last in a series, rather than just another sequel.

I may sound like I'm complaining about the lack of excitement I have over upcoming releases, but that's not the case, I'm actually quite content to be indifferent, as my backlog has built up to the point that I probably don't really need to buy another game for the rest of the year anyway, and a little time to chip away at it will be greatly appreciated.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

While playing Assassin's Creed 2 the other day, I knocked a box of books out of a scholar's hands as I pushed past him, only to be berated by a very familiar voice. An hour or so later, after finding one of the hidden glyphs and unlocking one of Subject 16's data entries, I immediately recognised the voice providing the voiceover.

Cam Clarke (sometimes credited as James Flinders) has to be one of the most prolific voice actors in videogames. IMDB credits him with 196 voice acting roles in cartoons and games, and I'm fairly sure the list isn't complete, either.

If you're somewhere around my age, you would probably first heard his voice in various animated series - he played Max Sterling in Robotech I, Lancer in Robotech III, Leonardo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Die Fledermaus in The Tick, and many, many others, and you've probably heard him enough to allow you to recognise his voice quite easily.

On the games side, He's been in just about every Bioware RPG ever released, along with providing voices for most MMOs on the market. He voiced Liquid Snake in Metal Gear Solid, Hercules in God of War II, Thor in Marvel Ultimate Alliance, but a lot of the time he voices relatively unimportant background characters and NPCs.

The problem is that he has such a distinctive voice, and one that I've heard so many times, that I actually find he breaks the ambience of whatever game he's in a little bit. I actually get pulled out of whatever setting the game is supposed to be in and think "oh, it's Cam Clarke again". It sounds harsh, because I have certainly enjoyed previous things he's done, but I'd actually rather developers of newer games didn't use him.

The Boon and the Bane of Metacritic

I think Metacritic is a fantastic tool (well, Metacritic for games at least, I don't use it for books, movies, music or TV, as I'm less interested in critical opinion of those things, I prefer personal recommendation). Previously, I used to skim over four or five games sites in an attempt to get a broader view of the reception of a game, as different reviewers' tastes can vary. Now, thanks to Metacritic, I pretty much just read Eurogamer, and for an overview of any particular game's score I can have a look on Metacritic, and possibly read a few more reviews if I feel the need.

The problem with Metacritic is that some people take it way too seriously. I'm not sure if the system wars (I hesitate to use the term console wars, because they probably go all the way back to Spectrum vs Amstrad) were always this belligerent, and it's just so much more noticeable due to the internet granting every deranged lunatic a pulpit from which to declare how fiercely invested he is in his gaming platform of choice, but it seems that for many, the enjoyment of gaming is entirely secondary to the quest to prove that any other system, and all the games for it, are rubbish. PS3 owners are required to belittle Gears of War, Xbox owners to dismiss Killzone 2, and PC diehards have to deride anything that is console exclusive.

Metacritic, by reducing the critical reception of every game to a percentile value, allows for the explicit comparison of these games. It's not perfect as it can struggle to equate different sites' reviewing methods (a 6/10 from Eurogamer is probably a better score than a 7.8 from IGN), and it does allow completely different games to be compared on the same scale (For example, are you aware that the Xbox version of Peggle is a much better game than Assassin's Creed?), but the system is about as objective as it could be, and it has become the de facto standard for measuring games.

This causes an issue, especially in the context of the console war, because a bad (or even not stellar) review can damage a games' metascore, especially those with metascores in the 90s, where every less than perfect score drags the metascore lower. I recall the huge uproar when Eurogamer gave Gears of War 8/10, and I recall the comments thread had more than 1200 posts when they dared to give Metal Gear Solid 4 a similarly "low" score. I have seen some ridiculous comments on review threads, such as people saying "well, the game has a metascore of 78 at the moment, so your score of 6/10 is clearly wrong", as if they believe that the metascore should determine reviews, rather than the reviews determining the metascore.

I suppose that vocal idiots are a problem endemic to the internet (warning, link contains bad language), and we shouldn't let this detract from the highly useful information that Metacritic aggregates.

Some useless facts: Grand Theft Auto IV has the highest metascore of any current generation game at 98. At 97, Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii has the highest metascore of a game exclusive to a single console, followed by Uncharted 2 on the PS3 with 96. The highest rated Xbox 360 exclusive is Gears of War with 94.

Games as Art

I just read Eurogamer's review of Fatale: Exploring Salome, Tale of Tales' next "game" after the Red Riding Hood inspired The Path. For the first couple of paragraphs I was wondering what on earth I was reading about, it seemed more like a blog article than a review on a games site, but in the end I think it was probably the best way to try and cover something like that, assuming that Eurogamer should ever be covering this sort of thing. Quite how you can "review" something like that and assign it a score out of 10 is a bit beyond me, though.

It does raise some interesting points about games as art, if you can get through the pretentiousness with some degree of objectivity still intact. However, I've never really wanted to go there, as I don't really care whether games are art or not. I'm the first to admit that I'm a bit of a philistine, I like the idea of art, but it is not something that I'd actively seek out. Art or not, I only care about whether or not I can appreciate or enjoy things. Things have to serve a purpose, be it to look or sound interesting, to provide an enjoyable challenge or even to provoke thought (but by this I mean more than simply going "This is controversial. Discuss"), for me to appreciate them. Art for art's sake is worthless to me.

I made the point in my post about metagaming that it seems quite acceptable to make a game which conveys a message while (or sometimes because of) being a bad game, provided you do not require too much of an investment in time or money from the gamer. Tale of Tales want GBP 7 for Fatale: Exploring Salome, which is probably the right sort of price for this sort of thing. Trying to charge as much as an actual game (although you can get some pretty decent games for that price on XBLA or Steam) for your piece of digital art would come across as entirely unwarranted self-importance, and having it too cheap would limit your returns, as I doubt it is the sort of thing that would get impulse bought by too many people. I suppose your benchmark here is a movie ticket, or perhaps a more accurately a DVD, as you would own a copy of the game, regardless of whether you felt the need to play it more than once.

For the record, this sort of thing doesn't appeal to me at all, I was just so surprised by the review of it that I thought I'd post something about it.