12.25.13 |
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Yes, it’s arguably a lot of PR boilerplate over at this PlayStation Blog post. But I’m linking to game studio Housemarque’s holiday card because they are behind Resogun, a legitimately great launch PS4 game. These guys are the embodiment of almost everything I wanted from the PS4 on day one; a simple fun showcase for the PS4 graphics with addictive gameplay. It’s perfect for a short break away from my day job. If you do have a PS4 over break and haven’t given Resogun a try, do so. It’s free on PS+ (which you should have for at least 30 days as part of your new console) and even a la carte at $15 it’s well worth its entry price.
12.20.13 |
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I’ve usually come away very impressed with Polygon’s long form writing, and this article by Tracey Lien is a great example. Very solid reporting, smart illustrations, it’s the full package. Best of all, you don’t have to be hard core gamer to appreciate the content. If you’re vaguely interesting in marketing, even basic human psychology, there’s a lot of good stuff here.
12.12.13 |
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There’s been a lot written regarding the PS4 post paunch, but a lot, especially the much hyped (and scored) review over at Polygon was far too premature. We’re just too early to know how these consoles will shake out. But Dan Solberg over at Kill Screen Daily has the right balance. There’s a few soft statements on what clearly stands out (e.g. the PS4’s focus on gaming, sharing, the inconspicuousness of the hardware) and a great analogy: buying a PS4 today is like “sitting in a waiting room”:
To purchase the console at launch is to subscribe to a patient stakeout with the promise of payout sometime down the line. A new Uncharted game has been announced, and both The Witness and the new Infamous game show tremendous potential, but you can’t play them this year. It’s no wonder that devotees are whipped up in a religious fervor about the new “console war” when they’ve chosen sides based mostly on faith.
11.18.13 |
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Kris Naudus, writing for gdgt:
Granted, if Nintendo started making games for mobile it’d still be making games, which isn’t a huge momentous change. But it does mean giving up on their commitment to hardware. And that leads us to the other reason it doesn’t make the switch:
Control.
10.30.13 |
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Game critic Tevis Thompson, writing a very long rant on how broken the state of video game criticism is:
The very outlandishness of my numbers points to how ingrained our pitiful review scale remains. It speaks to how easily we submit to the tyranny of the perceived majority. It’s the same kind of thinking that leads to the many ridiculous sacrosanct positions held by the gaming community. To say you consider Ocarina of Time not a great Zelda or find Half-Life 2 overrated or prefer Metroid to Super Metroid, as I do, demands an explanation. It invites skepticism of not only your opinions but of your very motives. What’s your deal? You’re just trolling for clicks. And why should I listen to you anyway? You didn’t design the game. You don’t represent the average gamer. You’re just some vocal minority.
Overall I can’t say I agree with Tevis. If anything, when I read criticism from Giant Bomb to Polygon and Tom Bissell on Grantland, we’re getting better criticism recently, not worse. You just have to know where to read. It doesn’t help either that Tevis uses inflammatory language frequently (e.g. “thin-skinned boys”, “straight middle class white gamer”).
But there are some good points made, especially with regard to the general uniformity in game scores for select AAA games (including Bioshock Infinite). If you dig gaming, read reviews, and especially if games journalism matters to you, it’s worth your time.
10.18.13 |
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Jason Schreier, writing for Kotaku about the final years at famed gaming studio LucasArts:
“It never felt like people at the top cared about making great games,” said another person connected to LucasArts. “A lot of awesome projects never went anywhere because, ‘it’s not gonna make enough money.’”
Take the case of “Star Wars GTA,” for example. During the early days of the 1313 project, some top staff at LucasArts wanted it to be an open-world, Grand Theft Auto-style Star Wars game set on Coruscant, according to two people familiar with that project. It was a fantasy for many on the team, and the thought is enticing—who wouldn’t want to explore and cause mayhem in a world full of seedy bounty hunters and Star Wars crime families?
Looking at their contemporaries at Rockstar and Ubisoft, LucasArts staffers plotted out how many people it would take to build a game like that—hundreds—and how much money it’d cost—millions. That was too much of a risk for the executives at LucasFilm, sources say.
“Of course there was no appetite to make that kind of investment,” said one person familiar with goings-on at LucasArts. “That idea kinda came and went literally within the span of two months.”
Pretty tragic. At least we have the legacy of some amazing games like the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, and Tie Fighter. In a way, the best of the indie revolution we’re seeing today reminds me a lot about stellar studios like LucasArts. They take often dormant, forgotten genres and reinvent them in a way that makes them critical and fan favorites (e.g. Spelunky, FTL).
10.11.13 |
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Grantland gaming writer Tom Bissell penned a really interesting and memorable Grand Theft Auto V review a few weeks ago. Bissell clearly enjoyed his playthough but had a mixed experience overall. I don’t know if I agree with him based on what I’ve played, but even at an early stage I completely agreed with Bissell on this point:
I understand the basic sense of fatigue with which people are approaching it. Once upon a time, playing a GTA game was like sitting next to your offensive Republican uncle at Christmas dinner. He was definitely a dick but also smart and interesting, and his heart was fundamentally in the right place. These days Uncle GTA is a billionaire with an unchanged shtick, and he seems a hell of a lot more mean-spirited than before.
10.07.13 |
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Having had a few hours to play through the opening third of GTA V, it’s the acting and voices of the three lead protagonists that propel the story forward. That’s exactly why this extended talk with the three game actors really is interesting. Here’s Steven Ogg, a.k.a. Trevor, on his work in GTA:
This was not me sitting in my underwear in a booth watching some character that was like Trevor and saying my lines. No. That was me up there in my motion capture suit with the camera directly in my face and the light in my eyes. It’s a huge thing. It’s not just voice acting. You put three years of your life into something like this and you certainly, if nothing else, want the recognition of what you’ve done—it is an entire performance that has been “captured”—your body, your face, and your voice. It wasn’t just three years of talking into a microphone. It was three years of shooting a movie that was motion captured.
09.27.13 |
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Mark Serrels writing for Kotaku:
And make no mistake, a device like Kinect — the device Microsoft is hellbent on shoehorning into our living space — must be seamless if the Xbox One is to capture the mainstream audience Microsoft is lusting after. In short: I have very little confidence in Kinect’s ability to respond quickly, efficiently or consistently and that’s an issue.
But the major issue is this: if you want to purchase an Xbox One, Kinect is being forced upon you. You are paying extra for a device that, two months from launch, feels like a rough, unfinished product. You don’t have a choice and that’s problematic.
I don’t want Kinect to be dropped; it’s got incredible potential. But from all accounts it seems like Kinect is half baked, tech not taken seriously by most gaming developers. What launch XBox One games are even using a fraction of the Kinect’s potential? Without that extra level of polish it feels rushed, rough and something I don’t want to pay extra for. Another reason my preorder is still for the PS4.
09.20.13 |
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I’ve written here earlier on how amazing the PS3 game The Last of Us is, on both a narrative and cinematic level. So there’s a sense of validation when Art of the Title, which usually focuses on classic film openers, highlights the game’s title sequence. It’s a bit nuts to hear what the creative directors went through to get what’s basically a time lapsed fungal growth captured on film. In the words of title sequence director Kevin Joelson:
So I found some slime mould stuff and some YouTube videos and hacked something together. Within three days we had our foundation…I ended up taking it to my house and growing some there with my wife watching the cameras. We shot everything camera raw so that we had the most to work with. By the end of those two weeks I had a pretty severe cold, I think from all the spores and slime moulds, but it had to get done.