Brutal Review Quotes

"There's a word for games like The Order: 1886. Rental." 

- Jeff Gerstmann

"For the start of a new chapter to be so bad at the things Mass Effect has traditionally been so good at raises serious questions about where the series, and perhaps even BioWare, go from here."

- Brad Shoemaker

"Both functionally broken and creatively bankrupt, Aliens: Colonial Marines is an extinction-level disaster." 

- Alex Navarro

"The criticism that he (Kojima) can't write female characters is misleading; on this evidence he can't write men either."

- Edge Magazine

"If all were right with the world, this game would never have been made."

- Game Players

What Lies Ahead

Longtime video game aficionado Alex Navarro (of Giantbomb fame) mentioned in a recent podcast that predicting what things will be like in six months is analogous to throwing darts at a black hole.  So much hinges on controlling the spread of the ongoing pandemic...and, in the North American hemisphere, the results of the US elections this November.  A worldwide economic downturn is completely assured at this point, but whether it will amount to a slight tightening of belts or the systemic collapse of nations has yet to be seen.  I don't envy people whose job it is to market the PS5 and Xbox One X.  Despite all the doom and gloom though, video games have certain advantages over other industries.

Owing to the nature of software development, sale, and distribution, most of the gaming industry can carry on making games even when working remotely.  The problem comes in the form of a scarcity of people who can actually afford to purchase the products they make.  Across the world quite a few households are feeling a financial pinch, but by the same token people are spending less and less money on things that can't be enjoyed at home.  Even so, I have to wonder how many people are currently willing and eager to plunk down over 500 dollars on a new console?  How many have recently bought a PC for their new home office?...or how many have a massive backlog of titles they, only recently, had time to dig into?  It's very hard to answer those questions with any degree of confidence.  Anecdotally, I have a lot of acquaintances who are too distracted by real-world events to pay much attention to entertainment products (video games included).

One thing that is certainly putting a damper on everyone's enthusiasm is the lack of any truly new gaming experiences.  By that I mean shorter loading times and more on-screen detail is great and all, but where is the innovative leap forward?  What we have seen thus far is only small incremental improvements to existing design formulas.  There has yet to be anything that has made me feel like it is an experience that would only be possible on next-generation hardware.  Nevertheless, I'm sure the usual hardcore gaming crowd will scramble to buy both consoles at launch only to complain a few months later about new games being the same as last-generation games just with mild improvements to frame rates and visual fidelity.

Personally, I feel like good art direction matters a lot more than higher polygon counts and unique/interesting gameplay is what really matters above all else.  That might sound overly idealistic, but it can also be good from a business standpoint.  If you don't believe me just compare the success of the original Minecraft to its derivative spinoff, Dungeons.

XB1XvsPS5

If you can comprehend the meaning of the title of this blog post, then you have real talent at deciphering acronym soup.  In truth, I wanted to write about the XBox One X announcement shortly after the presentation concluded.  Unfortunately, the event was a bit lacking in content so I decided to hold off until the PlayStation 5 had made its debut.  Now that both consoles are known entities, I'd like to share my thoughts here.

Aside from the original Xbox (which apart from being a bit bulky was fine), I've always been wary of the hardware used in Microsoft's gaming consoles.  I'm sure just about anyone reading this can recall the red-ring-of-death debacle back in the early days of the Xbox360.  Thankfully, it looks like the designers have taken that costly lesson to heart when it comes to the Xbox One X hardware.  Regrettably, the software side of the console seems kind of lackluster.  Specifically, there hasn't been much shown in terms of gameplay - a fact that has been aggravated by Ubisoft mislabeling one of their videos as such.   There's also a distinct lack of "killer apps," i.e. games that make the console an uniquely desirable purchase.  Perhaps the new Halo will fill that role, but as of right now there really isn't anything to get particularly excited about on Xbox One X.

PS5, on the other hand, has done a much better job of showcasing numerous interesting titles (some of which are exclusive to the platform).  That said, I don't think there was all that much variety with regards to genre.  Aside from the next entry in the long running Grand Turismo series and that basketball game, everything was either a first or third-person action/adventure game.  Well...at least they tossed some original IPs into the mix.  Also, is it just me or were several games that felt like they were aping films a bit too much?  Specifically, "Interstellar", "Edge of Tomorrow", and "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" all seemed to be on display in video game form.

On a final note, I'm curious to see how the Demon's Souls remake/remaster turns out.  It arguably has the best storyline of the entire Souls series.  Too bad that the oppressive gloom and eerie foreboding have been replaced by a more generic fantasy atmosphere.   Hopefully, the team working on it restores the archstone cut from the original...and overhauls some of the boss battles to make them more interesting.  As I recall, fighting dragons in that game was exceptionally tedious.  

 

Wisdom of the Century

Before the turn of the century one of the greatest education games at the time on the PC was SimCity 2000.  The SimCity series has (up until EA acquired the license) been about managing semi-realisitc city planning and infrastructure while simultaneously being fun to play.  That might not sound particularly impressive, but when it comes to games that seek to educate, it's a hard hurtle to clear.  For me, in particular though, there was a life long lesson I took away from the game.  It's something that feels very relevant to what is happening right now in the USA.

There are a lot of factors the player must consider when playing SimCity 2000.  The most obvious ones are sewage and electricity, but there are many others; including air pollution, zoning, road/rail networks and (of course) tax revenue to pay for everything.  What I really want to focus on in this blog post is crime and law enforcement.  More specifically, the last a biggest city I built in SimCity 2000 was a massive urban sprawl that for much of the mid-to-late game was overrun by crime.  I couldn't understand why this was the case.  I had dumped a ridiculous amount of money into building police stations to the point that there was almost one on every city block.  I calculated (based on the total population divided by the number of cops) that on average every one had at least one member of their immediate or extended family in blue uniform.  Yet the crime levels did not subside.  Eventually, I hit on the problem.  My city was lacking in education.  The primary and secondary schools were overcrowded and universities were too few and far between.  After reallocating funds away from law enforcement toward education, I began to notice a significant drop it crime.  In fact it ultimately worked so well I ended up demolition some police stations to make way for more schools.  I also introduced a scholarship fund to smooth the transition away from enforcement to prevention.

In hindsight I guess it all makes sense.  My city had a large underclass of poorly educated individuals who lacked much-needed opportunities to rise up and out of their impoverished circumstances.  This might seem like a problem exclusive to video games with no bearing on the real world.  However, if you look at the police budgets in major cities throughout the USA and compare them to other social support and welfare programs it's basically the exact same issue.  I guess my takeaway here is maybe more government officials (especially those in positions of power) should play SimCity 2000.   

No Time to Think

Despite liking chess, I've never been very good at it.  My inability to play it well stems from how chess is mastered.  You have to see many moves ahead.  For whatever reason I lack that vision.  I do have an active imagination, but it functions organically.  I tend to take each step as it comes rather than having some grand design planned out in my head.  It probably comes down to genetics and brain wiring.  That said, it is an area that I've been trying improve on recently through video games.  While there are a number of games that focus on using that part of the human brain (Battle Chess being one of the most obvious), I've decided to start playing Factorio again.  Unlike my previous outings with that game though, I'm trying a new approach.

Up until now, I've been building manufacturing centers much like one would grow a garden.  I start by planting some basic resource extractors and smelters.  Then I add assemblers, but the belts and claws are only for what is necessary at that particular moment.  When (inevitably) more systems are needed, I place them in a haphazard fashion.  Sometimes they are independent production lines.  Other times they are attached or integrated into existing ones in a convoluted way.  After a while it creates the impression that the whole factory complex is a massively overgrown garden of metal machines.  There's no room for expansion, and more often than not, modifying anything has unforeseen consequences.  So, in my current playthrough I've tried to rectify this issue.  The thing is though...in order to do it, I need time to think.

In default Factorio, the player has a persistent threat they must deal with in the form of pollution hating bugs.  Normally, one might think that the easiest solution is to just keep pollution to a minimum via solar panels and efficient designs .  Unfortunately, that's only part of the equation.  Regardless of the players actions, the hives will spread and the bugs will evolve over time.  Worse still, attacking their nearby bases (in which they launch raids on the player) only serve to aggravate them further.  The end result of this (I find) is unless you are a very expeditious builder, it is easy to be distracted and ultimately overrun by constant swarms of increasingly giant bugs from every direction.  It's not a great situation to be in when you're trying to learn how to be a better planner.

The solution was, for me, to turn on "peaceful mode."  In essence this makes it so the bugs do not spread, and only fight defensively.  Having done that, I can now spend as much time as I need picturing what I want my base to look like hours ahead of actually getting there.  For example in my current peaceful playthrough I have one massive iron plate production line made up of numerous furnaces and mining machines.  If ever there is a shortage down the line it's easy to just add a few more smelters or extractors to up the production to meet demand.  I works great, but it took some time to figure out the distribution system because it not only has to feed the iron to different subsystems (which require their own separate resources), but also have room for later  expansion at various places down the chain.  This is because in Factorio the more advanced the manufacturing process the more resources are needed back down manufacturing line.

I probably will play another game of Factorio with the bug threat reinstated (perhaps when the 1.0 version launches later this year).  For now though, I'm still training my brain to see further ahead.  Right now the process is slow and somewhat agonizing, but the lack of pressure makes it less a case of analysis paralysis and more of a solvable puzzle.  If/when it becomes easy/routine, then it will be time to bring on the outside pressure.