Monday, February 8, 2010

UK PSN – what exclusives are there?

As part of a new series which I’m likely to abandon the moment I become bored with it, I intend to look at the exclusive items on each region of PSN. Meaning you’d need to specifically start an account in that region to enjoy them. Starting an account is easy, and I have four (UK, USA, Japan and Hong Kong). First up the UK, mainly because there’s not much there, so I won’t have to type much!
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The UK PSN sucks. It’s the worst out of all countries, beaten only by places like Germany, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, and then only because these places receive the censored, butchered, edited-down carcasses of what the UK receives. Actually, I’m not even sure South Africa has an official PSN.

I’ve read Americans on forums complain about their PSN, but trust me guys, you at least get a few decent Konami games on your PS1 classics list (like Suikoden and Symphony of the Night), and you always get demos waaaaay before the UK does. I also seem to recall there’s a couple full games you have, which we don’t. PSN has the potential to be an amazing service which syphons money out of my bank account at an incredible rate simply by virtue of its excellent - except that unlike Japan and America’s PSN, the service we have in Europe is an embarrassment.

Furthermore, the UK PSN is stoic in its defiance NOT to show screens of the PS1 games available to buy (unlike Japan and Hong Kong), and it also refuses to tell you how big each file is going to be, until you’ve actually started downloading it. Which is infuriating if only because of how insignificant it would be to implement – why can’t I know that a demo is going to over a gig in size? It’s little more than some numbers typed into the main description. Other countries list the sizes! The menu organisation also sucks.

But, giving credit where it’s due, the UK account does have the following exclusives worth checking out (if these are available on another PSN, such as the US one, my apologies):

1) Dark Mist
A fairly average Smash TV clone with the burley men replaced by an ethereal anime girl. It’s alright, not bad, but not worth £6.25. It was recently reduced to less than a fiver at one point, which is when I bought it. Unfortunately it’s so repetitive I never made it past stage 4 (I think there’s 12 stages).
There’s no saving, so each time you start you need to play the entire game from scratch. Also, the online rankings are no longer working. On stage one I beat both the time and scores needed to tank around 400 out of 1000, and my score never showed up. I’ve read Halverson in PLAY complaining about the US not getting this, but really it’s not worth crying over. It’s also available on the Hong Kong PSN, in English, with the add-on which never saw release in the UK.

2) Bishi Bashi Special – PS1
At £3.49 this is an absolute steal of a bargain. A zany collection of 85 minigames in the Warioware mould, released long before Warioware. One minigame includes a bride throwing her wedding cake at guests. Awesome. A friend with a Japanese PS3 though found it wouldn’t work on his CRT – I’m not sure how it would fare on a US PS3, on either a CRT or HD TV. My guess is it will work fine in HD.

3) Movement series
Two dudes in a minivan tour Europe checking out new bands from Spain, France, England, and so on. The preview looked interesting but each episode is way too big to warrant me downloading it. I wish they’d included just the music videos, by themselves, instead of forcing you to also download the yawnsome interviews. I could do with a collection of music videos on my HDD.
There’s dozens of episodes all over the place and I downloaded a French one because it had a heavy metal band, but most of the file was a subtitled interview. I suppose if you have an amazing net connection it’s worth checking out. You’ll find it hidden under “other media”, or use the search function.

4) Shoot
A collection of short indie films, a couple of minutes long. Alas, the UK’s incomprehensibly stupid filing system means it’s bloody tough to find these. Once you actually reach the Shoot section, you’re presented only with trailers for the films. For a long time I’d assumed the films weren’t on PSN. Some time later I discovered that I needed to click on the Director’s names, each of which have their own sub-directory, and inside of which are about half a dozen files, like making ofs, a director interview, the director's pitch, and a whole bunch of other crap which no-one would ever want. Seriously, who gives a sh*t about some guy's pitch for a film? Just gimme the film already! The films themselves are actually hidden somewhere amongst this lot of irrelevant files.
Because displaying the films prominently as the first item in the Shoot folder, for easy access, is too much to ask, right? Because why would anyone be interested in the actual films when you could instead watch half-a-dozen other videos which are not the films? What a bunch of nobs Sony’s PSN department is. The whole of the UK’s PSN reeks of incompetent management.

Anyway, I didn’t like most of the films, but the following 3 are worth the effort of making a UK account:

1) Bitter
Surreal comedy with a very British sense of humour.

2) 8.3 Minutes
A bit creepy, and a bit gruesome. It reminds me of all those Sega CD FMV games. I can’t say anymore without spoiling it.

3) Prison Food – light-hearted comedy about 2 guys in prison, imagining they’re in a restaurant.

The other stuff includes some daft comedies, and a really awful art-house drama about some dude on a lake.

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And that, gentleman, is the sum of the “good” exclusive content on the UK’s PSN. Well, there’s also a movie trailer section, and some music tracks to download, but it’s all rather lacklustre. If there’s anything else you like which is exclusive, which I didn’t mention, please post in the comments...

Oh, I forgot, there’s also a ton of bloody awful Disney licenses in the PS1 section. Which is a fair trade I guess, because you know, America gets Castlevania and Japan gets Metal Slug, and we get Winny the Pooh and the Little Mermaid. *

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to hunt down the insipid, ineffectual cretin in charge of our PSN, and jam their head into a honey pot.


* I realise it’s the individual publisher’s who are at fault for not putting their games on the UK PSN, but if what I heard six months ago is true, the woman in charge of the UK’s PSN is a European who doesn’t even speak English properly, is forever swanning around getting her hair done and is hopelessly disorganised to the point where it’s impossible to work with her. If Sony Europe had any appreciation of money, they’d get their act together, sack the woman on grounds of failing to perform her duties, hire someone competent who understands their job, start organising additional content and make it easier for European publishers to put stuff up.

But hey, at least we get Pooh Bear, right?
Posted by Sketcz at 5:48 AM 3 comments
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Saturday, February 6, 2010

HG101's Own Game - Shining Force Ripoff


I think that, for the most part, anyone that writes about video games really wants to be a designer at heart. What's the point of criticizing if we ourselves did not have some kind of "ideal" game, that we thought we could do better? It was the reason I got into Computer Science, but by the time I got my degree, it was too late for me fully realize that the Real World application of my coding skills was Big Boring Corporate Crap, seeing as nothing I had learned would be much of use in the video game industry. I only found programming fun when it was put to my own creative designs, but the concept of developing web applications and managing databases makes me want to...well, I can't think of a metaphor that isn't super cliche so I'm not even a particularly good writer. But my education didn't go to waste - at least there's Shining Force Ripoff.

Shining Force Ripoff was my Senior Project, the one time I could do design my own project completely. I loved every minute of it. As the name states, it's a strategy game, with all of the sprites and tiles ripped from Shining Force (and a few from Phantasy Star III, I think.) I didn't know jack shit about graphics programming (and still don't), so it was all done in MFC, which was the only way I knew how to handle bitmaps. So it's all very simple - no music or animation, and all of the action is handled via dialog boxes, which can get very annoying depending on your Windows sound settings. My initial versions were actually a little animated - the characters marched in place, and the water currents ran, although they still just jumped from tile to tile, because I never figured that out - but as it turns out the MFC timer function really sucked, and it kept crashing the whole thing after a few minutes, so I took it out.

Despite its simplicity, even playing it now, there are a lot of things I like about it. I've lost the documentation and source code (they might be in a hard drive in a closet, providing it would even still compile nowadays), but here's what I remember. You have five characters, each with different tasks:

Karloth: The "main" guy, since he's the hero of Shining Force (Max, I think?) and the first character you control. He has all-around average stats. But he also has a skill called "Push Back" which will push an enemy back a single square. If they have their back to impassable terrain (or another unit), you'll deal extra damage instead.

Kyo: The tank. Really high attack, really high defense, really slow (single space movement per turn) and no special powers.

Trodgor: Slightly weaker than Karloth, but has a Counterattack skill which is activated every time he's attacked. The damage of the counterattack is calculated by some percentage of the initial attack - I think it's 50%.

Mai: The healer. Low stats all around. She can heal any of your characters, but since I didn't program in any MP, it drains her health instead, again by a percentage I can't remember. She also cannot move and heal in the same turn, one of those things I couldn't be bothered to implement so it became a feature. To offset the health drainage, every time she attacks, she restores some health, again, a percentage of the damage dealt.

Wiggins: By far the weakest character but with the highest movement range. Every attack will permanently drain some of the enemy's offense and defense. But obviously he'll get killed quickly if you don't use him well. There's also a bug in his movement range - since it's higher than everyone else, and I didn't put in a check to look at impassable terrain, technically he can jump over the river and the mountain. I think I called that another "feature" in the documentation, that he has flying skills or something. From a strategic point of view, it would be a bad thing to do, though.

The active unit is highlighted in red, and their movement range is highlighted in white. You move all five characters, one at a time, and then the enemy moves. (The enemy movements happen almost instantly.) If an active unit is placed next to an enemy, you can left click the enemy to attack. You can also right click on any unit for their stats.

There are seven standard enemy dwarves, and one boss monster, which is much stronger than the rest. The game ends when either all of your units are killed, or all of the enemies are killed. Straightforward enough. The terrain modifies the stats, too - the forests raise defense and the paths lower it, I'm pretty sure. So if you're in a forest and you attack an enemy in the path, you'll make a critical hit, and you'll take less damage on the retaliation hit.

Beyond the bugs/features I mentioned, there are still some stupid usability issues. Like the way to instinctively move Karloth on the first turn will always block Kyo, making him useless for a turn. And others, I'm sure. The AI isn't great. It's simple, like the rest of the game. I think it just scans the tiles for the closest target and makes a beeline for them. If there's an impassable tile, it just moves in another direction. It will always prefer a specific direction - I forget which. I think it turned out well, though. Also, the debug function on the menu totally doesn't work at all.

I designed this all around the time I was playing Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter (still one of the best RPGs on the Playstation 2, and an insane value at Gamestop for $6.) In that game, you only ever had three characters (mostly), but each character had a very specific role in combat. Ryu was the melee fighter, which made him susceptible to damage, but he was also the most powerful. Nina had spells to attack from a distance, but more importantly, traps to set and debilitate enemies. Lin could also attack from a distance, and could push enemies around. You needed to use their skills together for the best effect - like, have Nina cast a paralyze spell behind an enemy, use one of Lin's powers to push them into the trap, then have Ryu run up to smack them a few times before running back, avoiding counterattack. Shining Force Ripoff isn't quite that fleshed out, but you can still see the power of teamwork - for example, using Mai to keep Wiggin's health up, or using Karloth's Push Back to knock enemies in more susceptible terrain.

Like I said, I really like the fundamentals of this! I've been finding myself drawing away from JRPGs in favor of WRPGs nowadays, for any number of reasons, but as much as I'm a fan of just shooting stuff, I REALLY miss the cool turn-based battle systems in the Japanese games. I mean, traditional stuff like Dragon Quest and Etrian Odyssey get passes because they're supposed to be old (or, erm, "classic"), but I much more respect Grandia or Chrono Cross for the ways it played with the standard "line up and take turns whacking each other" formula, which somehow still passes for acceptable game design these days. I want to design something that clever.

The one major, conscious decision I made for this - there are no random number modifiers on anything. If you attack an enemy twice under the same conditions, it will always do the same damage. There is no "agility" or "dexterity", and you cannot miss attacks. I always HATED this, especially in Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre. I hated that too much of my fate was in the hands of a random number generator, and it always felt like a stupid holdover from the days of dice rolling. Consequently, this means I can pretty much never play a board game or a pen and paper RPG without getting really pissed off. It's almost always factor in any video game RPG, but it's usually so minor that it rarely makes THAT much of a deal, but I'd prefer to not have it at all.

You can tell some of the things I was playing with around the time I was developing this. Two of the characters are obviously named after King of Fighters characters, and one was named after Strongbad's doodley dragon from Homestar Runner, a favorite of my friends in college. I think there's a Tactics Ogre reference or two in there, too, try to spot it!

Anyway, since the game was programmed by me as a college student, it's probably buggy, and may very well refuse to work on your computer. Hopefully not. Maybe one day I can dig up Virtual Studio again and design another similar battle system. I really wanted to expand on it - add multiple levels and experience gain, stick a status bar on the side, and stuff - but then the whole Real World Job thing got in the way, as it does for billions of other creative endeavors worldwide. My plans for Pride and Prejudice: The Dating Sim also went down the drain, but maybe someday!
Posted by Discoalucard at 11:24 PM 3 comments
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Kyozou Musume - Shadow of the Colossus Doujinshi


At Comiket 77, Shigatake, the artist behind those silly Habanero-tan comics, published a doujinshi that reimagined all of the lumbering statues from Shadow of the Colossus as cutesy girls. Even though most doujin is scanned within days of the convention, images beyond the official ones have eluded the internet. In the interest of bizarre collectibles, I placed an order with Toranoana, which seems to have been a good call, because the second printing they put up at the end of January recently sold out.

I just got my copies in today. I was originally afraid of scanning it because I though it would break the binding, but the book's pretty small and held together by staples, anyway. But, I don't have a working scanner, unfortunately, and this isn't exactly the sort of thing I'm going to take back to my parents' house, lest they continue to give me the kind of look they did when they saw me playing Twinkle Star Sprites. But I do have a digital camera, so I took pictures of most of the book. They're not perfect quality, obviously, but it's far better than nothing, right? And no offense to Shigatake, of course, but outside of Yahoo Japan auctions, the thing is bloody well sold out on the net, unless there are more printings, which are still damn near impossible (or at least quite expensive, if you go through deputy services like me) for foreigners.

Anyway, this doujin isn't exactly pornographic - some of it is really more for laughes (I hope) - but much of it is...provocative (those bits by the crotches are technically armor plates), so make sure the room is clear of anyone that might judge you. Also, since I don't think the colossi have official names, I just ganked them from a FAQ. There are a couple of other pages with 4-koma comics and two more pages that had small pictures of all of girls/colossi, but I didn't take pics of those.


Colossus 1: The Minotaur



Colossus 2: The Mammoth



Colossus 3: The Knight



Colossus 4: The Horse



Colossus 5: The Vulture



Colossus 6: The Ancient Minotaur



Colossus 7: The Electric Eel



Colossus 8: The Gecko



Colossus 9: The Tortoise



Colossus 10: The Desert Snake



Colossus 11: The Boar



Colossus 12: The Horn-eyed Gorilla



Colossus 13: The Sand Dragon



Colossus 14: The Lion



Colossus 15: The Minotaur Sentry



Colossus 16: The Titan



Agro 1



Agro 2



Guest Drawing - Colossus 9: The Tortoise
Posted by Discoalucard at 6:33 PM 4 comments
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The Wonderful World of Bootleg Merchandise

So some of the folks over at Cheapassgamer discovered this little bit of brilliance:



Yup, a Metroid thong. Click the picture for an Amazon link, too. Hoho! Sure is wacky. Given the way that Hot Topic and the like are whoring out 8-bit nostalgia to an audience that wasn't even really alive to appreciate it unironically, it wouldn't surprise me if these were somehow legitimate. Looking at the piece, though, it clearly isn't, as it seems like the smart folk at Carson's Collectibles went wild on Cafepress and stuck the same picture of Samus on practically every piece imaginable. Here are some of the best!















The best part of all of this was the extreme fervor Mr. Carson had in sticking Samus on stuff the intended audience would absolutely have no interest in. Does anyone under the age of sixty actually use letter openers? Who in their right mind would wear Metroid cufflinks? It's this sort of enthusiastic disregard for copyright infringement that sets this apart from the average Chinatown vendor.
Posted by Discoalucard at 1:31 PM 2 comments
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Friday, February 5, 2010

Bad Puzzle Design 101

For my next series of graphic adventure reviews, I've been playing through The Feeble Files, AdventureSoft's sci-fi followup to Simon the Sorcerer. It's a funny enough game, but the puzzles are really, really, REALLY difficult, and despite the laughter, I'm really not having much fun with it at all.


The main reason I've started covering adventure games on HG101 is because I'm not happy with the way a lot of dedicated fan sites approach criticism. Discarding the fact that some reviewers are waaaay too forgiving when it comes to crappy writing (otherwise how could anyone excuse dreck like Runaway), there comes the puzzle design. Too many adventure game reviews don't talk about this, or talk about it in vague terms, because they don't want to spoil the reader. Nuts to that, what's the point of criticizing a game if you're not going to bother talking about it?

In general, the level of difficulty is always troublesome to talk about. There's a fine line between "difficult but fair" and "difficult because it's badly designed". It's tough to tell the distinction, and much of the time it comes down to personal opinion. But when it comes to action games, for example, you can make objective assessments - for example, poor controls, bad checkpoint placement, and so forth. And if you want to get better, with an action game or an RPG, you can either practice, or fix up your strategy. With an adventure game, you really need to change your mode of thinking - that's not easy for a lot of people and certainly a lot less straightforward! So instead of criticizing puzzle design, a lot of reviewers just sort of give it a hand wave as being too subjective, probably because they don't want to piss off the kind of masochists that actually like this sort of stuff.

But how do you determine the difference between a "bad" puzzle and a "difficult" one? I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. Most difficult puzzles require extreme leaps of logic, but some people tends to like those, for whatever reason. Instead of solely concentrating on that, though, today I want to talk about how puzzles are structured, and what I think are two very good examples of a "good" puzzles and a "bad" puzzle. There are other ways, too, but let's leave that for another post.

First, to get some terminology down. The "main goal" (or "primary goal", I mucked up with the graphing program and I'm too lazy to fix them) is a goal that's clearly defined from the beginning. A "sub goal" is all of the minor goals - the puzzles, in other words - in order to reach the main goal. The sub goals are not always apparent until you explore a bit. We'll be numbering them on the logical order in which you should discover them in order for the gamer to be aware of what they're doing, while the flow chart shows the order in which the final actions are taken.

So, for some examples, let's take a look at two puzzles found in the early chapters of two adventures games: The Secret of Monkey Island, and The Feeble Files.

In The Secret of Monkey Island, there are three trials you need to pass, and you can approach them in any order. One of them is to break into the governor's mansion and steal the idol. So, we have our first main goal!



Simple enough, right? But we can't enter the mansion because of the guard dogs outside. Now we have our first sub goal:



Getting past this isn't too hard. You can find some meat in the kitchen of the bar, and someone mentions about the potency of a certain flower in the forest. Just find the flower, cook it with the meat, and feed it to the dogs. First sub goal down! So now you enter the mansion and get into all kinds of wacky shenanigans, but Guybrush emerges and states, very specifically, that he needs a file. This is the second sub goal:



Solving this is easy. There's a prisoner (Otis) you can talk to, but Guybrush mentions his halitosis and refuses to talk to him. The shopkeeper next door sells mints, which you can give to the prisoner. You can then ask him for a file, and he says, no, but here's this disgusting carrot cake his aunt gave him. Remembering the old cliche of files hidden in cakes (and assuming that Otis is too stupid to realize it - that's why I love this puzzle), you eat the cake, find the file, and can get past the second sub goal, so you can find the idol. Mission completed!

Now, let's talk about The Feeble Files. The first thing you have to do is enter the ministry to talk to your boss. OK!



But! You can't enter because the secretary won't let you. Sub goal the first!



Getting past the secretary isn't as logical as feeding meat to a dog, but she does drop a hint about taking pills for anti-anxiety, which clues you into the drug store outside. You check out there and they mentioned a medication called Charisma X, which you're supposed to use to get past the secretary. Wouldn't you know, they're sold out, and their shipment hasn't come in. You need these pills, and you are left to assume this, because in adventure game logic, anything you can't get is obviously something you need. Here's sub goal #2.



You find their shipment at the dock, which is held up because they need some kind of pass. If you check out the bar, you'll find a trucker with the pass you need, so you need to figure out how to get it from him. And here's the third sub-goal.



This is where it gets a bit stupid and/or sticky. Talk to the trucker and you'll find out he's carrying CDs from the hottest new band. Right next to him, there's a character trying to ban these very same CDs. You can make Feeble sign it, but the petition doesn't have enough signatures to make it worth anything. Now, back at Feeble's office, there's a broken transporter which can enlarge things. (Don't ask why, but this established very early on.) You need to take the protest letter, enlarge it, and submit it to the government - presumably, the size makes it more important, so it won't be ignored. Go back to the bar, talk to the policeman, give him the tip about the trucker and his newly illegal cargo, and he'll get carted off.

Now you have the dock pass, which you can use to deliver the pill shipment to get the pills, which you can swallow to charm your way past the secretary.

But you're not home free! The guard at the elevator refuses to let you pass, since you're not in work attire. This is the fourth sub goal:



You find your uniform easily enough, but you can't just change right into it anyway oh no - for some reason, the game concludes that Feeble can only do it Superman-style, inside of a phone booth. Wouldn't you know, the only two phone booths in the game world are occupied, and, as the game makes you assume, the occupants are talking to each other. One of them, when bothered, will ask Feeble for a drink. You need to get this drink and spike it with some expired medication (whose effects are never given), which causes him to become cross and curse out his girlfriend on the other end, causing them both to hang up. Then, you go to the other phone booth, find it available, change, and then get past the elevator guard to move onto the next chapter.

Let's review and compares these two processes:

Monkey Island:


In Monkey Island, there are only two sub-goals, and the direction is very clear. The solutions are also logical, presuming you talk to everyone, and even a bit funny.

The Feeble Files:


Now look at Feeble. There are five big problems I have with this:

1) Look at the order which the goals are revealed. Assuming you're exploring in this order, you're essentially working backwards - you discover a sub goal, which is solved by solving another sub goal, which is solved by yet another sub goal. Once you solve the last, you have all of the items you need to solve the first. You can technically solve them in any order - you can get the trucker arrested at any time to steal his pass - but you won't know WHY you're doing it, unless you've explicitly followed the above path. Not only is this whole series of puzzles much more complicated, but they're also aggravating, because it's delaying the satisfaction of solving anything. Some games (again, Runaway) try to eliminate this problem by making the sub goals entirely linear, so the character will refuse to take certain actions unless they've cleared certain flags. This is actually worse, in many ways, because the player might have actually discovered what needs to be done, but you need to convince your character first. The solution is just to not design puzzles so stupidly in the first place! And this leads into the next complaint:

(2) Once you THINK you've gotten past this vaguely elaborate set of puzzles (getting past the secretary), it pulls another one out of its ass (the elevator guard), largely out of nowhere, right before your final goal. Talk about dangling a carrot.

(3) In getting to the ministry, you've made the gamer jump through no less than four hoops to get there. I don't like this pacing, at all. Once you've established a major goal, there should maybe only be one or two sub goals to cross before you've stepped the boundary into tedium. If you want more involved puzzles, the best way to approach this is to make the sub goals more rewarding - like main goals - so it feels like the player is progressing and the game just isn't tossing a wrench into the works to make things feel longer.

(4) The actual solutions in Feeble are kind of stupid. Not do much the pills and getting them, but the enlarging of the protest bill only kinda makes sense, and nothing about the phone booth drugging incident really pans out either. They're not TERRIBLE in the grand scheme of things, but taken together, it feels a bit stupid.

(5) This is the FIRST SEGMENT OF THE GAME. Way to start off things with a series of annoyances! I guess it's doing them a favor, because the puzzles later on get much worse - if you can't deal with the opening segment, you're probably just best left not bothering at all.

More to come later, probably.
Posted by Discoalucard at 4:53 PM 7 comments
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Sony’s ‘The Tester’ signifies the end of our humanity


On PSN right now is a preview of Sony’s The Tester series: a repulsive, degenerative cross between Big Brother and (country)’s Got Talent, featuring 11 gamers who really, really want to become games testers. Watching it really, really makes me want to kill myself. (well, not really)
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With Thursday’s update to PSN I had been planning on writing a series on what’s worth getting in each region of the PSN. Plus some photos of cool stuff they’ve removed (Kojima’s Hong Kong tour video is now only available through the search engine, for example).

But instead I’m going to rant about The Tester.

I don’t care what anyone thinks, to me reality TV, especially Big Brother, symbolises the de-evolution of humanity. Five Thousand years of cultural development and refinement, and now we have morons sitting around in sweat pants talking indescribable garbage. Ever seen Mike Judge’s satirical film Idiocracy? It postulates that in 500 years the human species will consist solely of stupid people, where stupidity is rewarded and intelligence criticised – which considering how popular things like Big Brother are, I’d say we’re not far off. We're probably already there.


In case you’ve not seen The Tester on PSN, CLICK HERE.

There are many things wrong with The Tester, here are two:

1) It makes the hobby and everyone interested in it, look stupid. This is not about the “are games art debate”, this about 11 idiots jumping around and putting beer on their cheerios like they’re at some kind of frat party. It doesn’t matter why you personally like games, the image The Tester portrays is one of rank stupidity.

2) Games testing is a sh*t job. I have worked alongside enough ex-testers, spoken to enough people who are testers right now, and have read more than enough blogs and magazine articles to realise that testing is not a cool job. It’s only marginally worse than games journalism: low pay, long hours, awful conditions, run mostly by idiots who invoke Godwin’s law when I try to describe their personalities.

One guy I worked with was once a tester for Rare, and he hated it. He ended up giving up on the industry and, I think, ended up getting some job selling insurance. There was no respect from senior staff and it had an environment of psychological abuse. PLAY magazine had a column by Greg Orlando describing the absolute hell of being a tester (issue 68, Blue Dragon cover). Brandon Justice, in a different issue of PLAY, talked about how badly testers are treated. Look at the anonymous EA and Rockstar blogs which talk about how terrible the conditions, hours and pay are at those companies, especially in testing. I’ve spoken to guys on forums who have ludicrous crunch times, and for 12 hours a day play those insidious Barbie Horse games and other such tween-marketed nonsense. I’ve also read them describing the dark emotional depths they’ve fallen to, living that kind of life in the industry. Destructoid and dozens of other sites have horror stories on being a tester.

Testing is awful.

I find it disturbing that Sony would rope 11 people in, to compete against each other, in an attempt to land a job which is so awful, I’d rather be flipping burgers at MacDonalds. I realise we’re in a global recession and having a job is important, but damn it people, have some self-respect. If Hal Sparks, Brent Gocke, David Jaffe, Katherine de Leon, and the rest of the judgement panel with their sh*t-eating grins, spoke to me like they do to the contestants in the trailer, I’d punch them right in their smug faces.

Katherine de Leon is credited as producer for the abortion that is PlayStation HOME, and yet she has the gall to sit there and pour scorn on a human being to the point that they’re in tears? Who the hell is she to criticise anyone about anything? This isn’t entertainment people, it’s disgusting. I’d find public hangings less offensive than this. At least the dead would have some dignity afterwards.

The worst thing is, this isn’t even for something which I can understand the value of. Like a car, or a house, or loads of money (though the winner does get a small signing bonus), or a respectable job which will pay well and prove satisfying. It’s for the lowest rung on a generally corrupt and unpleasant industry ladder.

If watching the video and reading the hyperlinks doesn’t convince you of the above, well, I frankly don’t have the words that could convince you otherwise. I for one, though, will be boycotting such gaming gangrene.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to hide in a bunker somewhere. Call me when the four horsemen of the apocalypse are finally here.
Posted by Sketcz at 11:16 AM 11 comments
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Thursday, February 4, 2010

So What the Heck is Silver Ghost

In the latest issue of British mag games(tm) (or at least the latest on US store shelves - it's the one with Rare on the cover) has an interview with Hiroyuki Takahashi, one of the head honchos of Team Sonic (later Camelot), the folks behind the Shining Force series. It's a neat read, if mainly because it shows their strained relationship at the time, and how they jumped ship to work mainly on Nintendo properties (what with Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, and Golden Sun.)



Now, most SRPGers view Shining Force as kind of a Fire Emblem-lite - the base mechanics are similar, but it's a bit simplified, and much more player friendly. Yakahashi claims that he hated Fire Emblem and its turn-based style, and instead pointed to a PC88 strategy game called Silver Ghost, by a now defunct Japanese company called Kure Software. I was curious about the connection so I booted up an emulator and gave it a go.



The main reason Takahashi pointed to liking Silver Ghost was due to its real time action and multi-character system. It's very similar to other Japanese action-RPGs of the time, like Ys and Hydlide, where you scamper around and ram into enemies to attack them. Instead of controlling a single character, though, you control an army of about a dozen people. By default, you control the leader, and the rest of your soldiers haphazardly follow you, engaging in combat with anything that comes close to them. You can switch to any other character at any time to take control of them, although your fellow soldiers usually won't bother following anyone beside the leader.



It's a neat little game, but just what, exactly, was the Shining Force connection? Shining Force was still turn-based and Silver Ghost plays nothing like it. I guess maybe the graphics and general style could've inspired it, but Silver Ghost doesn't really look all that much different from any other similar game of the time. Maybe it's just that Silver Ghost convinced him that strategy RPGs didn't necessarily have to be so boring, but he still want back to the genre standards when making his own console game? Shining Force is, as mentioned before, a lot friendlier, allowing you to talk around towns like standard JRPGs, and you control characters directly rather than pointing and clicking with a cursor, so maybe that mentality spilled over.



This brings up another point though. Shining Force III for the Saturn was the last true Shining Force game, because all of its spin-offs were crap lousy action-RPGs (not counting the GBA remake of the first game, or the recent JP-only DS game, which was outsourced to Flight Plan, which basically does nothing but SRPGs.) I always figured Sega took the series in that direction because the original staff was long gone, but as it turned out, the original staff really wasn't all that enamored with turn-based games anyway. So it's more a typical case of Sega being Sega and doing stupid things with their properties then.



Anyway, you can download the disk image and give the game a shot, if you'd like, or check out this Japanese page for some in-depth info on it.
Posted by Discoalucard at 10:59 AM 9 comments
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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Update - 2/3 - Machinarium, Death Gate, Loom, Kid Niki, The Heroic Legend of Arslan


Machinarium was one of 2009's indie darlings, and for good reason - it's a thoroughly gorgeous little point n' click starring a funny little robot with a spinning head. The other adventure game articles include Death Gate, another one of Legend's titles, and one of their better ones, and Loom, one of Lucasarts' earlier games and one of the first (that I recall, anyway) that was criticized for featuring cutscenes over gameplay. On the realm of old Japanese games, we have Kid Niki: Radical Ninja, a brutally difficult side-scroller from Irem and a definite product of 80s marketing, which also had a few Famicom-only sequels, and The Heroic Legend of Arslan, a strategy game adaptation of the early 90s anime OVA for the Mega CD.
Posted by Discoalucard at 8:30 PM 7 comments
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Pitchfork's Final Fantasy X-2 Review


Final Fantasy is one of those topics, like politics and religion, that defies polite conversation, and I don't think there's ever been a message board thread about the series that hasn't devolved into something kind of cyber-fistfight. I've always found it odd that, even after all these years, it's still one of my favorite series (at least, the mainline ones) and, individually my opinions of the entire line range from "really like" to "damn near love".

The exceptions to this is FF2 but it's easy to forgive that for being so old. Final Fantasy X-2 gets no such quarter, because it seems perversely - intentionally, even - engineered to be the most irritating video game of all time. I generally don't have a problem with the Shibuya youth fashion that's overcome the series as of late, but I DO have a problem when you literally infuse it with J-pop. As much as I've tried to deal with it since it was released, the whole thing is something that just never gelled. Maybe the public has been too warped by decades and decades of Macross, but I don't think that kinda stuff flies outside of Japan. (Maybe I've spoken too soon and we'll see Fallout 4 starring Lady Gaga in another ten years.)

So after seeing the series retrospective on the FFXII Collector's DVD, Pitchfork began replaying the entire series and chronicling it on Socks Make People Sexy.net (the articles for FF1-5 show up in slightly modified format on HG101.) They're long, yes, although unlike, say, Tim Rogers, they actually manage to stay on topic most of the time. Three years after FFXII's release, Pitchfork's almost done, and finally put up his review of Final Fantasy X-2, a game which, every time I'd see him , I'd begged and pleased that he cover. Asking for someone to suffer so harshly for the terrifying results to be chronicled on the internet - is that schadenfreude? You, too, can experience his pain for yourself, and why Final Fantasy X-2 is a strong argument for taking up smoking.
Posted by Discoalucard at 7:53 PM 7 comments
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Monday, February 1, 2010

Something's wrong here...


I don't mention Miku and these blog posts are not even related to Project Diva for twice in a row, on top of the fact that I'm now going to say that this Extended Play release on iTunes is totally worth the money:


To begin with, the composer makes Luka sing in a completely fictitious language to Seiken Densetsu/Ar Tonelico-esque music. Not only that, but the composer themselves provides the chorus to some of these songs. The composer can also draw, so this person is pretty talented. So go get it.

Oh, and did I mention that all of these songs on this release can also be heard for free on their piapro account? Yeah, there definitely is something very wrong happening in this world. Or at least with me, anyway.
Posted by dai jou bu at 12:41 AM 2 comments
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