I Ain’t Got Time to Feed

I have a confession to make: I have been on a terrible, absolutely horrific losing streak in S2′s D0TA-inspired Heroes of Newerth lately; it seems every time I sit down to try to get a good game in, I either wind up playing against extremely good people or playing with extremely bad people– or both. The result is me constantly dying, and “feeding” the opposing players money. So I decided to stop playing HoN and start playing some of my favorite realistic shooter, Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I hopped in the server, fixed my equipment to something different from normal (because 200 hours of the same gun gets a bit stale), and immediately started drastically lowering my Kill/Death Ratio. I changed classes, I swapped weapons, I hopped from squad to squad to the other team, and none of it helped; no matter what weapon I used, what team I was on, or what squad could have supported me, I couldn’t seem to keep a positive KDR. So enough of that, nothing is working, let’s play something else: League of Legends, another DoTA-inspired game. The plan is for me and a friend to make new accounts, so we can use our HoN skills to stomp LoL newbies. After 2 games of getting mercilessly destroyed, we decide to put LoL back on the…errr…hard-drive. So where does that leave me? Bored as ever, I scroll through my list of games: Brink, 44 hours and it’s kind of old; Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, already beat the story and played enough of the multiplayer; Team Fortress 2, after 400ish hours, even suicide runs with the grenade-stick aren’t fun. No matter what game I hovered over, I found a reason to be uninterested. After about three or four explorations of this list, a crazy, horrible, confusing idea worked its way into my mind: am I no longer a hardcore, PC Elitist gamer?

It’s a Matter of Principle

One thing that continues to irritate me is the slew of titles being announced for the 3DS: first it was Megaman Legends 3, a game I had long hoped would be coming out on something like PS3; then I heard of Luigi’s Mansion 2, whose predecessor was a cult favorite; and then there are all the remakes, including Starfox 64 and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The remakes and ports and upgrades don’t bother me that much, but it does irritate me that Nintendo has locked franchises I’d love to see more of  behind this $250 wall - a wall that offers very little functionality over its predecessors. Given this continued frustration, I angrily posted about the Luigi’s Mansion 2 announcement on Facebook, at which point a friend asked “Why get upset over this?” While I found my secluded protests rather mild, my reaction was apparently akin to that of the reaction someone has when “Nintendo shot [their] dog and raped its corpse.” Ignoring the issue of severity, I pointed out that I was a bit peeved at the idea of the 3DS, rather than how I couldn’t immediately afford one, which was met with “don’t buy it,” and “wait for the price to go down.” This irks me, because I feel it dodges the principle of the matter, which I find far more important than the implications the policies and prices and products have on my life.

Fantastical Delusions of Relevance

If there’s one thing that irritates me to no end about the gaming industry, its franchises that get stuck in a rut and then try to get out of it by continually releasing products in a brute force attempt to strike gold. For the longest time Sega’s Sonic franchise has held the gold star of continuous irrelevance in the field of utter mediocrity, but, given the latest installments, I think SquareEnix’s Final Fantasy series is becoming a viable contender for the crown.

Dangerously Difficult

One of the hottest topics for “hardcore” gamers is the issue surrounding difficulty in games: many would argue that games these days have become too easy, too straight forward, and too simplistic; the games of yesteryear required more strategy, more skill, and had a greater level of depth. Not only is this technically wrong, but the practical implications are rather backwards as well: to suggest that games haven’t become more complicated and difficult as the medium has progressed over 30 years is nonsensical. While games are less demanding of players right from the start, and usually not as punishing when it comes to failures even late in the game, they often compensate for that fact with subtle aspects that make them difficult in ways we’ve now become accustomed to.

Never Judge a Game by its Cutscene

Just a little under a year ago Roger Ebert posted on his blog that he “…[remained] convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art.” Now what constitutes as art, what is masterfully and poorly constructed, and what is meaningful is all subjective, and open to interpretation, so believing that games aren’t art doesn’t bother me. However, the idea that a work has to be completely and entirely artistic through and through strikes me as a bit odd. Why is it that games can’t be art by association? Games bring together several forms of media, from printed and spoken stories to visual representation to cinematography, and they even add in another aspect of interaction. So, if games are a single entity composed of several parts, can’t a game be considered art, to some degree, if even one aspect of the game is artistic?

Leadership in Virtual Worlds

A while ago I co-authored a more academic paper with a colleague of mine, Ryan D. We wished to conduct an introductory study on how aspects of leadership within games differs between persistent and non-persistent virtual worlds. Eventually I hope to do more with this topic, as I find it pretty interesting. As a note, for this paper I conducted the research on non-persistent virtual worlds, and Ryan conducted the research on persistent virtual worlds.

Dead Space 2: First Impressions

Pre-Post Warning: Plot spoilers ahoy! Nothing super specific, but references to both the ending of Dead Space and Dead Space 2 are made here. This is your only warning!

Over the past two days I’ve tried my hardest to shirk as many non-essential responsibilities as possible so I could obsess over Dead Space 2. I managed to complete the game in just about 15 hours, and it was quite the ride. Between dismembering countless necromorphs, repairing solar arrays, floating around in zero-gravity environments, and fighting Issac’s personal demons, there was more than enough to keep me entertained for the entire experience, and even enough to make me want to go back and do it all again. However, after having finished the game, I can’t help but feel Dead Space 2 is one step backwards and then two steps forwards from its predecessor.