• 15Jun 09

  Video games are RUINING our children

  The ESRB ratings description site says we have Warner Bros. to blame for this:

  The Clique: Diss and Make Up

  Platform:Nintendo DS

  Rating:Everyone 10+

  Content descriptors:Comic Mischief, Suggestive Themes

  Rating summary:This is a social simulation game in which players assume the role of a new student who aims to fit in with groups of girls or cliques at her new high school. Players can gain favor with specific cliques by dressing in a certain manner, gossiping, and running errands for that group. Text-based conversations and gossip can sometimes include suggestive references (e.g., "I saw Meagan Fellers putting makeup on a HICKEY!" and "Someone saw Kara inflating her air bra this morning at the car circle."). Characters occasionally make crude references to "soy snot," "poo," and bad hygiene (e.g., "Cindy Bennett had the dirtiest, smelliest feet today in homeroom" and "Becky's armpits are hairier than Vincent's goatee!").

  1) Are you the new kid in school? Be sure to dress like everyone else, gossip, and be a lackey for more popular kids, or you'll never fit in!

  2) Clearly, Meagan Fellers and Kara are total sluts. Let's ostracize them now.

  3)What are you doing spending your home room examining and smelling Cindy Bennett's feet?

  I don't know what makes me angrier, Warner Bros. exploiting perhaps the ugliest side of teen culture to make a buck, or the fact that there are enough people out there who would play this that they think it's a good investment.It doesn't help that the game is actually targetted toward pre-teens as some sort of twisted wish fulfillment depicting and reinforcing their ideas of how high school is supposed to be. This kind of dreck makes Lord of the Flies seem positively civil by comparison.

  • Posted Jun 15, 2009 9:06 pm PT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 11Jun 09

  Stray thoughts

  I'm pretty sure I'll never use Microsoft's search engine Bing, but I really enjoy the commercials for it.

  I just finished watching the first season of Star Trek on Blu-ray, and Kirk's kind of a ****. When faced with a tough moral decision, the guy just drags his heels until some miracle revelation (you might call it deus ex machina) extracts him from having to make the difficult decisions. Way to lead, Captain.

  On the other hand, as a journalist (that's right, I said it), I love how the series formula plays so heavily into the Enterprise crew's (and by proxy, the audience's) assumptions. Half of my job is thinking, "Well wait, what if this is actually the case instead of that?" So it's nice to see a TV show that actually trains audiences to always be looking for that underlying explanation beyond the obvious.

  I bought a Street Fighter IV Tournament Edition FightStick in anticipation of the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 release, and outfitted it with an octagonal gate and took out two buttons so it feels a little closer to what I'm used to. While I wait for the game's release, I'm putting the stick through its paces playing Street Fighter III: Third Strike from the original Xbox Street Fighter Anniversary Collection (backwards compatible!). The game's got slowdown, but it still plays great and I really wish Capcom would go back to the 2D well one more time.

  Prototype hasn't shipped from GameFly yet, so I likely won't be able to speak with first-hand experience about it on next week's HotSpot. HOWEVER, if you want The Legendary Starfy impressions, then it looks like I'm your Huckleberry.

  Wait, Ghostbusters is $60 on 360 and PS3? Why did I think it was a budget-priced game? Just because it was a Vivendi title based on a 25-year-old movie?

  Indiana Jones and the Staff of Something or Other (It's "Kings," according to the GameSpot database) comes out next week. As a core gamer, I notice that this game is not being advertised in the places I care most about. I have seen TV commercials for the Wii version in the last few days, however. I suspect this game is not meant for me. It makes me miss LucasArts' Last Crusade adventure game, my gateway drug to Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, etc.

  Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again!came out on DSi Ware this week. Here's a ProTip, Nintendo: If you want us to get hyped about something, you have to tell us more than a week in advance. And if you absolutely must go with that one-week lead time for word to get out about your game, don't make that week the same week of E3. Like most gamers, I care about way too many other things that week, none of which require me to part with money for quite some time.

  There's a lull in game releases I'm interested in for a few weeks. I want to try out Prototype because I think the podcast needs a direct comparison of it and Infamous, but after that, I'm sort of ambivalent about new releases until July. I imagine I'll give a time-consuming role-playing game a chance in that span, but should it be Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on the PSP or Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor on the DS?

  I haven't really touched a rhythm game in months, but I'm ridiculously stoked for The Beatles: Rock Band and the Abbey Road downloadable album. Here's hoping it meets a better fate than the full downloadable Who's Next and Nevermind.

  Scribblenauts has made me rethink everything I know about the future of AI and games. Clearly, the abundance of possible outcomes has kept RPG-makers in check for years, allowing gamers only a handful of different branching points in their stories. But if the makers of Scribblenauts are insane enough to make a game with a reasonable facsimile for every tangible noun in the dictionary, why shouldn't we expect more from our interactive storytellers (or glorified dungeon masters, if you prefer the term)? Maybe "procedural" is just a codeword for "lazy."

  The new Transformers game has multiplayer. Was that really necessary? Also, I like developer Luxoflux based solely off their work on the first True Crime game (Streets of LA). and I wonder why their talents (assuming they haven't moved on to other studios in the meantime) are being squandered on an underpromoted movie-based cash-in. If this game is actually worth a damn, Activision should be promoting it a lot harder. We've seen how well straight-up mediocre movie-based games can sell (Iron Man?), so you'd think someone with something worthwhile on their hands would get the word out a little better.

  I never played the original Persona. Does anyone think it will stand up well in remade PSP form later this year?

  I really, really hope the Penguins win Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals against the Red Wings on Friday night. Teamwork is one of the core values of hockey, and Marian Hossa turning down a lucrative contract from the Penguins after making the finals last year (and losing to the Red Wings) only to turn around, stab his teammates in the back and sign with the team that beat them (that'd be the Wings) specifically because he wanted to win a Stanley Cup is the most shamelessly selfish, against-all-the-values-hockey-culture-holds-dear, straight up **** move I've seen since Activision sued Double Fine over Brutal Legend. So for the good of the sport, Hossa MUST NOT WIN THE CUP.

  That is all.

  [UPDATE] The Penguins won the Stanley Cup in a tremendous Game 7 performance, holding on to half of a two-goal lead even after captain Sidney Crosby was knocked out of the game with a knee injury partway through the second period. Thank you, hockey gods, for smiting the heretic.

  • Posted Jun 11, 2009 12:15 am PT
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• 27May 09

  Getting deeper into Infamous

  We probably won't have time for corrections on next week's podcast, so I'd like to get a jump on that by apologizing right now for my comments about Infamous on the May 26 episode. I still stand by them all, but I didn't take enough time before the recording to really get my thoughts in order. As a result, I wound up listing nitpicks and other minor gripes with the game that ultimately hurt my experience, but I neglected to explain the larger issues those problems played into.

  Maybe it would help to explain what my expectations were going in. I knew it was an open-world game with super powers, which instantly gave me a handful of important yardsticks against which to measure Infamous. I loved my time with Spider-Man 2, Crackdown, and Sega's Hulk, even though all those games had serious flaws. So after hearing Tom and Shaun lavish nearly unqualified praise on the game for the better part of a week before I'd picked it up for the first time, I expected something that would potentially redefine the open-world action genre. At the least I wanted it to surpass my previous favorites.

  Unfortunately, the numerous areas where Infamous surpasses its predecessors are not the areas where I thought they needed improvement. What I found most fun about those other super hero open-world games is the sense of power they convey, the ability to swing around New York treating the skyline like a jungle gym, jumping over small buildings, or bowling a van down a crowded street and watching the world explode in its wake. Infamous has correlates for all of these actions, but they are greatly toned down. Getting around the city works well and is relatively easy, but it isn't especially fast for me, or fun.

  And that's a shame, because navigating the world of Infamous is one of the best-executed parts of the game. Climbing buildings isn't as simple as sticking to the surface and running up the wall. You actually have to look for pipes, ledges, ladders, and other handholds in order to scale walls, instead of simply triggering a super power and defying gravity. It's a little like a more interactive and thoughtful version of the climbing in Assassin's Creed.

  But where Assassin's Creed was immersive as perhaps the best animated, most cohesive open-world game I've ever played, Infamous' climbing comes in the middle of a game rife with superficial blemishes. Those nitpicks are many, from enemies that get stuck in animation loops or half-embedded in the environment to that awful will-he-make-it-or-won't-he stuttering fall that happens in so many open-world games when the game can't decide if you'll land on a roof feet first or fingertips first.

  The way the game reacts to my actions is frequently awkward like this, and it pulls me out of the experience every time something reinforces the fact I'm playing a game. Whether it's the inability to climb a chain link fence, the way some enemy machinegun turrets can be disabled and other can't, or by what logic blowing up random cars for a photo shoot is a moral act that cleans up crime from the streets, it all adds up.

  In my favorite open-world games, I have no problem overlooking their faults and getting lost in the game because the moment-to-moment action was so fun. With Infamous, nearly every aspect of the moment-to-moment action has been done better, or at least in a more polished way. There are some great improvements to the open-world formula that will be readily incorporated into future open-world games (in particular, the auto-aim on jumping avoids Tomb Raider-style jumping puzzle frustration), but they aren't improving the things I like best about open-world games.

  As I said on the podcast, this is a very good game, and a worthy purchase at full price for any PS3 owner already interested in the game. I hope I made that clear at least, even if the rest of my comments were less articulate than I'd have liked.

  • Posted May 27, 2009 10:41 pm PT
  • Category: Games
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