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Recently, your friend and mine Cliff Bleszinski wrote an essay defending microtransactions in general and EA in specific. There are a lot of things to be said about this essay - some of which are said expertly by Jim Sterling here, and some of which touch on concepts discussed by Shamus Young writing a couple of years ago about Bobby Kotick here and here.
Read more...I don’t want a new console generation! I’m not done with this one.
In games where the player character has a specific goal - save the Princess, escape the testing facility, defeat a nemesis - the player is presumed to share this goal. But even if the narrative does a good job lining up player motivations and character goals, there’s still a wrinkle. The character wants to accomplish something, and the player wants to experience accomplishing that thing. This is why we bother playing games at all, rather than just watching the endings on YouTube. If the player had the exact same motivations as the character, they’d cut whatever corners they could to beat the game as quickly as possible.
The humor in this video comes from the tension between Mario’s goals and the player’s goals. Of course Mario would want to just warp straight to the Princess and save her immediately. But for the player that would mean skipping the entire game, which would completely defeat the purpose of playing it in the first place. As long as Mario has that warp whistle in his inventory, there’s dissonance between what the player wants to do and what Mario would want to do.
So what happens when games create that dissonance on purpose?
Read more...Game designers: If your game ever says “Unsaved data will be lost” you are doing it wrong. ESPECIALLY if there is no explicit save system.
Too often lately: Beat awesome game. Feel good about game. Play more. Give up in disgust on poorly-designed trophies. Feel bad about game.
#Enslaved is the dictionary definition of a Bad Good Game. I’m totally in love with it - I just wish it would stop sucking so much.
I just reinstalled #cityofheroes since it’s free to play now. My level-cap main has been offline for sixteen hundred days.
When Crono sleeps in, he’s late for the Millennial Fair. When I sleep in, Crono steals my job. 
GameStop Underling: Huh. That’s interesting.
GameStop Boss: What is?
Underling: These Deus Ex: Human Revolution games Square Enix shipped us include a voucher for a free OnLive copy of the game. I don’t think they mentioned they were gonna do that.
Boss: What? OnLive? But we just bought our own digital delivery game service - Impulse! That makes OnLive our competitor!
Underling: I suppose it does.
Boss: We better open the boxes and remove the vouchers.
Underling: Wait, what?
Read more...Judging videogames by length is like judging meals by weight.
In western RPGs, you kill Satan (malevolent power-hungry beast). In JRPGs, you kill God (incomprehensible timeless superbeing).
Recently we discussed Blizzard’s announcement that they are saddling Diablo III with terrible DRM, which they say isn’t DRM, but which everyone knows is DRM. I mentioned that there was much to be said about the contemporaneous announcements of a real-money auction house and a ban on modding. Well, the time for that is now.
Read more...You may have heard that there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle recently in response to some news about Diablo III. I’ll walk you through it - but first, we need to talk about Ubisoft.
On July 28, Ubisoft reported that they consider their constant connection DRM scheme to be a “success.” This despite the uproar and backlash caused by the scheme, the fact that it was immediately cracked, the clear demonstration of the system’s flaws when denial of service attacks locked out paying customers and left pirates unaffected, and Ubisoft’s eventual scaling back of the DRM to a once-per-run validation. Their reasoning?
Read more...Seems we don’t buy games anymore but passes to theme parks that can close at any time with no warning, whether it be for one day or forever.
I still can’t quite believe that the Robot Unicorn Attack song is not a parody, but a legit Erasure song from 1994.
Iceman says when he was a lad, ARGs were called “scavenger hunts.” Also that the Potato Sack thing is like being in a guild in a metagame.
Part One is here.
Anonymous said…
Post an update….what do you think of the replies you’ve got here?
Okay. You’re on.
Read more...I’d like to see a compelling single-player experience where the player character is a healer.
This has bugged me for a while - why is there no Pokemon MMO? I can’t think of a single franchise more perfectly suited to the format.
Dear Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood: Stop putting big juicy inviting map icons on places the plot won’t let me go yet. Your pal, @doc_prof.