The holiday game-storm

It’s September folks, and you know what that means! Unless you have a ton of disposable income, you’re going to have to start picking and choosing which new games you’re going to pick up on release day!

I mourn the long summer months when the big releases dry up. But at least when the odd game is released, either because it’s been pushed back from the previous Christmas season, or a publisher wants to capitalize on the lack of competition, you can generally afford to pick it up right away.

But now comes the deluge. The anticipated releases of this calendar year will increase from a trickle to a flood over the next two months, and I’m already getting anxious about the decisions I’m going to have to make. I’m banking on games that are going to give me a lot of playtime and replay value to get more bang for my buck, e.g., Fallout 3. But then titles like Gears of War 2 leave me salivating. I guess renting is an option for some of these, but good luck finding a Blockbuster that’ll have these titles in at all during the first six months after their release. Besides, a number of them are PC games. What is a poor gamer to do?

My wish-list follows, in order of release date.

• Civilization IV: Colonization – Sept. 22 – PC
• Silent Hill: Homecoming – Sept. 30 – X360
• Sonic Chronicles – Sept. 30 – DS
• Fracture – Oct. 7 – X360
• Dead Space – Oct. 14 – X360
• Fable II – Oct. 21 – X360
• Far Cry 2 – Oct. 21 – X360
• Fallout 3 – Oct. 28 – PC
• Gears of War 2 – Nov. 7 – X360
• Call of Duty: World At War – Nov. 11 – PC
• Left 4 Dead – Nov. 20 – PC
• The Last Remnant – Nov. 20 – X360
• Chrono Trigger DS – Nov. 25 – DS

The games in bold I’ll almost definitely pick up; all others are pending critical response and available funds.

What are you guys stoked about this Christmas season?

Gears of War 2 vs. Resistance 2 on Blend Games

There’s a rather entertaining “debate” going on at Blend Games over whether Gear of War 2 or Resistance 2 will be a better game when they’re eventually released. I put debate in quotes because really it’s just a fanboy flamewar. It is rather entertaining to read, if you enjoy reading unsubstantiated claims by a bunch of idiots. Which I do. There are some rational  people posting in the comments section, but their comments go largely ignored.

I played both original games, offline only. I couldn’t really get into Resistance, so I didn’t finish it. Story was cool, but the controls felt kinda sloppy and the early weapons in the game felt uninspired. Also, I’m sick of gray and brown color palettes. Ugh. I considered buying a PS3 when I first saw Resistance: FoM, but I wasn’t impressed enough with it to drop the $600.

I actually bought a X360 because of Gears. Some of my best gaming moments came from playing it’s co-op mode with a buddy. The story was spotty on the details, and the characters are mostly one-dimensional testosterone junkies. But it PLAYED really well. Plus, it has A CHAINSAW GUN. Awesome.

I didn’t play either of the games online. I don’t own a PS3 and I’m a PC gamer at heart, so paying $50 a year to play games online seems like a rip-off. And 60-player online modes may make you console-exclusive guys go nuts, but that kind of capability has been around in PC games for a while. I’m glad the console guys are getting that kind of experience now, though.

Anyway, only time will tell. In the meantime, go laugh at the flamewar.

The derivative nature of games and art

Sometimes gamers just need someone to give it to us straight. It helps if it comes from a fellow fan, as is the case with Pete Haas’s editorial over at the games section of Cinema Blend, instead of some blowhard like Roger Ebert.

Haas begins by explaining that although RPG’s are his favorite genre, there are some conventions that need addressing. These are the things that pop up in almost every RPG. Everyone knows they’re outdated methods for moving the story along, but everyone just accepts them as a standard of the genre and there’s nothing to be done about them.

In reality, this is something that plagues the electronic entertainment industry as a whole – most everything is derivative, at least to some extent.

The worst offenders, of course, are EA’s annual sports titles, but they’re an easy target. Every Japanese-style RPG is using methods that are over two decades old. Western-style RPGs have their roots in Dungeons & Dragons, a game that’s been around since the birth of Jesus. Now D&D’s new rule-set is pulling in aspects of the MMO’s that it originally inspired. Yeesh.

I’m not saying that being derivative is always a bad thing. The derivative nature of games allows gamers to pick up a brand new title and play it with reasonable ability if you’ve played a game in the same genre before. You may have noticed this puzzles non-gamers. When I first popped Dark Sector in (I only rented it, don’t worry) to play, my girlfriend happened to be sitting in the living room with me. When I started running around and shooting without any prior instruction, she said, “How do you know to do that?”

Also, take a look at Braid. It is an absolutely wonderful and inspired game. The art direction is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The puzzles are great, the story is mature and left open to individual players’ interpretations, etc. But, when you get down into the nitty-gritty, the game mechanics, there are clear roots to the game. The platforming comes straight from Mario, the time shifting mechanic arguably from the recent Prince of Persia games. The key here is he takes those two elements and twists them together into something completely original. Spore, which essentially compiles stripped down versions of 5 different games also comes to mind.

We find that the derivative nature of games extends across most mediums – film, music, painting, architecture, sculpture, etc. When is the last time you heard a rock song on commercial radio that didn’t involve guitars with a lot of distortion and a Intro-Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus construction? Or the last time you saw a movie that wasn’t based on a (graphic) novel or comic book?

We are all building upon the creations of the greats who came before: Garriot and Carmack, Picasso and DaVinci, Hemingway and Dickens, BB King and Van Halen. The way that a medium evolves, though, is to recognize the things that just aren’t working anymore. These RPG conventions no longer capture audiences’ imaginations. There must be better ways to show the story and portray the action in this genre and in all video games. Hybridization/genre-mixing has been a recent popular means of creating fresh experiences for gamers. But soon we’ll all be tired of RPG-FPSes (Fallout 3) and Puzzle-Platformers (Braid) and Puzzle-RPGs (Puzzle Quest).

Makes me wonder what the next big splash is going to be.

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Via Gaming Today via WeGame.com