Random update: Monkeying around single player.

All is quiet on the MMO front lately. I’m barely playing WoW at the moment and most of my MMO time (which is not a lot) is reserved for The Secret World. Still love the game but I’m taking my time since I don’t want to run out of content too soon.

Most of my gaming time at this moment is directed at making a dent in my single player game backlog and keeping my schedule clear for Heart of the Swam releasing soon (5 days!).  So here’s what I’ve been up to lately.

• Dark Souls: Finished it yesterday just in time to begin Castlevania: Lords of Shadow-Miror of Fate (long name FTW). Once all is said and done, I clocked around 70 hours over three characters. I found Dark Souls to be more difficult than Demon Souls but also better done. Highly recommend it if you want to challenge yourself for real.
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow-Miror of Fate: I’m a fan of Castlevania… a fanboi even. I nearly have all the games including a few rare ones so a new entry in the series meant an automatic buy. So far it’s been a fun experience despite some reviewers complaints.
• Xenoblade: I was in the mood for an Jrpg and this one came recommended. I have no idea how far in I am at this point but it’s been an enjoyable trip down memory lane.

Read Full Post »

In which video games companies gets sneaky

The other day I stumbled upon this article from the Penny-Arcade Report where the author explained to us what might be looming ahead of us in regards to companies tailoring cash shops to extort ever more money from us. It’s food for thoughts and I highly recommend you go read the article in question. To sum up, it seems some companies are thinking about displaying different prices to the user based on our buying habits.

Easy example, people in North America (more fortunate) pay more for DLC than people in more impoverished countries. By the way that is a real example. Many companies price their games differently based on where you love. Starcraft 2 for example costed around 60$ in the US, was going for less than 20$ in Asia and was even free in Korea. This is nothing new in itself…

What’s new is that there might be changes in price depending not on where you live but also your buying habits. Example, if you buy a lot of Cartel Packs, then the price of the Packs could be raised since EA knows you’ll be buying them anyway.

Some people will say that such a move would drive people away cause we would figure out what was going on and it would create customer backlash…. but companies can be creative when they need to. Let’s say an MMO drop boxes that you can loot but to open them you have to buy keys. Same prices for the keys for everyone so it’s fair right? But what if the rate at which the drop boxes dropped changed based on much keys you have bought in the past?

Instead of changing the price of item what if they made it so the more you spend the more opportunities to spend the game puts in front of you? Way more sneaky but it would have the same effect as rising the prices….

I’m not panicking yet… but it’s definitively something I’ll keep an eye on… food for thoughts…

Read Full Post »

Resident Evil Marathon, final thoughts

Eleven games, around 130 hours and many many dead zombies later, I have completed all the Resident Evil games of the main series plus the Chronicles games (lightgun games). Of course I had a few moments where I was wondering what exactly I was doing but it’s been a fun experience overall and it taught me a lot about running other marathons of the same type (Final Fantasy I’m looking at you).

Overall, RE is a series of surprising quality. Even the title I found to be the worst, RE5, is pretty good when you compare it to other games who came out around the same time as it did. For a series which started out as an homage to B-movie horror, it did an impressive job of creating a memorable story that still continues to this day.

Not only that but it contributed to video games in general by popularizing a new genre of gaming not once but twice. First by making Survival horror games popular and then by making third person shooters a reality. Add on top of this all the other games and series that RE inspired and I think it’s safe to say that Resident Evil ranks up there with Zelda and Mario as far as the impact it had on the video game industry.

But like every big series, RE has it downs and weird experiments and it’s worth talking about them. Many players have been questioning the direction the series is taking lately as well as some thinly veiled attempts at cashing in on the name by Capcom. Some designers who worked on the series have echoed these concerns and have said that by constantly trying to reinvent itself RE might be losing the essence of what made it great.

The series is at its worst when…

When it tries to be a shooter. Simple as that. Sure there’s argument to be made about the games needing more zombies or less monsters or …. but really, when you look at the complaints and the poor reviews it’s always about a part that featured lots of shooting and little survival. RE6 reviled Chris campaign is a shinning example of this as they made it a shooter and everyone hated it.

The series is at its best when…

They stick closer to the survival horror genre. I don’t mean by that old mechanics, fancy door opening sequences and not being able to move and shoot. I mean limited ammo, dangerous enemies and making every fight a decision between killing the zombie and wasting resources or trying to sneak past it. Proof that it works is RE: Revelations where the game stayed closer to the Survival horror genre while staying modern and it was a resounding success

The best and the worst

I won’t surprise you by repeating myself and saying RE5 was the worst game of the series. Too much shooting, not enough surviving.

The best however is a tie between RE2 and Revelations. I suppose I should give the title to RE2 but Revelations really impressed me so I’m putting both of them up there. RE2 had that perfect blend of story and survival horror and Revelations showed us what Survival horror could be like in recent games and proved it wasn’t an antiquated concept.

So I’ll end this with a message to the Capcom staff working on RE7. Guys, please listen to you fans and critics, you proved you cold do a modern survival horror game so please stick to that. Survival horror is not about having the scariest monsters, it’s about having to make hard choices with the limited resources you have. It’s about making a zombie scary because he’ll take seven bullets to take down and you only have six.

Read Full Post »

Resident Evil marathon, Resident Evil 6

Resident Evil 6
System: XBox 360, PS3, PC(March 22, 2013)
Release date: October 2, 2012

And we are coming to the end of the marathon, I’m pretty sure you guys must be sick of it by now but cheer up, we are nearly done with Resident Evil.

So once again I will be disagreeing with the common wisdom. Many reviewers and fans have been very harsh with this but I liked it. A lot in fact. Don’t get me wrong, as far as gameplay goes it’s pretty average but I think they had a solid story going on and one that bodes well for the future of the game.

A tale of four tales

RE6 tale is told through the eyes of 4 different storylines that you will have to complete in order to get the full experience. Some reviewers hated it but I liked it so I won’t comment too much on whether or not that was a good idea, I’ll let everyone judge for themselves.

RE6 tells the story of the C-Virus, another offshot of the original Umbrella research, this time based off the original Progenitor Virus. To make things simple the C-Virus effects depend a lot on how it is spread. It can be a gas which turns people into good ol zombies or it can be injected in which case you turn into a super human freak but seem to retain most of your human intelligence.

Umbrella is no more but evil congressman are using the C-Virus to scare the pants off everyone in order to “wake up” america… a classic scenario if you’re to believe fiction in general. Seems every so often a patriot needs to threaten the world to raise some funding. But as with all evil plans, one of the evil minions is even eviler (is that a word?) and decides to simply try to destroy the planet.

So our intrepid heroes, old ones and new ones, each tackle the new threat and meet each other along the way to share in the good times. In the end the world is saved but not without wiping off two cities and killing millions of people.

So… anything special?

RE6 is fun in itself. It’s feels sorta like RE4 in the sense that at first the story didn’t seem to connect much but the following games built on it. Likewise, I think RE6 setup a lot of elements for future games but what exactly it’s hard to say right now.  More than anything I think the series needs a new good villain but we’ll see if they manage.

The future

I’ll be doing one more post about where I think the series is headed, what worked and what didn’t. I think the series is at a crossroads of sorts and I hope they will take the right path.

Read Full Post »

The tragedy of THQ

THQ was a bit of an odd duck amongst video games makers and publishers. In many ways they felt like an indie game company who made it big. They have numerous succesful titles to their name, games like Company of Heroes, Darksiders, Saints Row, Metro, Dawn of War just to name a few.

More impressive is that they took chances numerous times by experimenting on established video games tropes and came out ahead. Companie of Heroes pretty much showed everyone how squad based RTS could be made,  Dawn of War was a masterful display of how to translate a tabletop game into a video game, Darksiders mixed up Zelda-esque gameplay with Spawn-like comic book characters…. and I could go on like that. THQ was a big studio that still took chances…

… and now it’s going bankrupt and it will be sold piecemeal to various bidders. It’s a sad day when one of the last big studios who still innovated gets shut down.

What happened?

It’s not clear… despite all the articles about this I found the real reason of the bankruptcy is relatively unclear but here’s what I found out.

Since 2010 THQ has been having fiscal difficulties. They still released games and the vast majority of their titles were received favorably and sold excellent numbers when you compare them to similar titles in the industry. I’m not saying that everything was perfect but when you compared THQ to the rest of the publishers like EA and Activision they were doing pretty good with their games which means the problem is not related to the games.

Which leaves one likely explanation which is poor management and that’s where things get real muddy. I won’t speculate much on the exact cause because I could not find any definitive explanation. I found multiple theories though ranging from poor investments, projects costing too much, mishandling of money and outright fraud. I’ll leave it up to you to pick which reason you think is the best one.

Why it’s a tragedy

Beyond the loss of jobs and all the problems that go with that, we’re losing a big studio that was innovating. Worst, we’re sending the message that even if you innovate and make succesful games you can still fail. This worries me greatly because I’m afraid it will only drive companies to make more of the same. I can do without more Call of Duty clones.

I’m going to end this by saying that I hope, pray, that another company will rise to take THQ place and keep taking chances on games and innovating some.

Read Full Post »