Posts Tagged ‘bioshock’

My Top 5 Most Anticipated Games

Monday, February 16th, 2009

I was inspired by Gamespy’s editor’s lists of top 5 most anticipated.  You can click next on the bottom to see each of the contributor’s lists.  I was surprised how different each of them was until I tried to put together my own list.  There are tons of good games scheduled for this year.  With no further adieu, here is my list:

1) Bioshock 2: Sea of Dreams
2) Diablo III
3) Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
4) Call of Duty:  Modern Warfare 2
5) God of War III

Honorable Mention – Star Wars: The Old Republic

Cautiously Optimistic – Batman:  Arkham Asylum

Everything on my list is currently a day of full price purchase.  Key observation #1, everything on the list is a sequel.  I’m a skeptic at heart and I put a lot more stock in what the developers have proven rather than what they promise.  That said, I am expecting some top quality titles out of the various new IPs this year.  I just don’t know which ones will hit the mark far enough in advance to have high expectations for them now.

Now some further commentary:

Bioshock 2 – I know I’m setting myself up to be disappointed here.  My expectations are sky high for this title.  I can’t tell how many articles I’ve read that point out Ken Levine’s lack of involvement.  I’m not entirely sure how true that is.  The core group in 2K Marin was essentially formed out of key members of the Bioshock team.  The group essentially mentored under Levine.  You don’t think they have conversations about what they are doing and how it fits into the world he created?  Bioshock was one of my favorite titles of all time.  The team wasn’t boxed in by any parameters and were able to create a tight game and compelling narrative.  I expect the next Bioshock to be technically successful but I have real concerns about what the narrative will be.  The biggest concerns I have are polish and story.  I hope they don’t end up having to rush things.

Diablo III - I sunk a ridiculous amount of time into Diablo II.  The combination of RPG and fantasy elements appealed to me from the start.  The first Diablo was ground-breaking in its time.  There has been a groundswell of concern about the art direction on the newest title which I feel is entirely unwarranted.   I don’t want the color pallets for all of my games to be dipped in muck.  The Gears of War’s style color schemes are just too dark and boring.  My biggest concern is around the inclusion of the Paladin class.  There hasn’t been an announcement yet.   I always pick the Paladin.

Star Wars:  The Old Republic – I can’t wait to see what Bioware does with this.  I posted at the time of the EA acquisition that I though this game was the reason for the purchase.  Based on the highly successful KOTOR game, this title.  If anyone can challenge World of Warcraft, it’s the Jedi.

Batman:  Arkham Asylum – What a PR campaign.  The team promoting the new Batman game has the blogs whipped up into a frenzy.  The screenshots look great and all of the blogs are saying positive things.  The commentary and screenshots so far give the impression of a Bioshock-like tone to the game.  We are seeing the first crop of games to be influence by the top quality 2007 titles.  Batman is coming from an unproven studio, but I’m cautiously optimistic based on everything I’ve heard.

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The Right Length For $60 Video Games

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Warren Spector doesn’t think that 100 hour games make a lot of sense, and I agree with him.  Over the last year or so, I’ve thought a lot about the right length for games.  My viewpoint is obviously influenced by my demographics.  For the nearly 30 year old set with family, free time is at a more substantial premium than for high school or college age individuals.  That said, the reality of the gaming market is that the average player age is in their late 20s.  The largest proportion of the market holds full time jobs and has other commitments.  For that reason, as Warren said, very few people will ever finish a long game.  That is a waste of development money.  If you spend 15-20 hours on a game and feel that you’ve gotten your money’s worth, the developer wasted money on the additional content after that.

The real question is where consumer’s feel that they’ve gotten their money’s worth from the developer.  I have an easy answer – 10 hours.  Why?  That was the length of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.  I absolutely felt the game was worth every penny and it was just about the right length.  I should be able to finish a game in under a couple of weeks playing in the evenings.  A game like Bioshock that stretches closer to 20 hours is even more value for the money.  If the game had been a bit shorter, it wouldn’t have substantially impacted my evaluation of it.  Although I will take as much Bioshock as I can get.  Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed both clocked in at the 15-20 hour range.  Both games had substantially more content, but I wasn’t inclined to invest 15-20 more hours with the secondary material.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a game that I am unlikely to ever play through as Warren said.  The 60-70 hours minimum of game time is something I’m unlikely to find time to devote.  There are games like Call of Duty 4 that clock in at a sub-standard but exceptional 6 hours.  When the deep multi-player experience is considered, the game certainly meets the 10 hour threshold.

For my money, a $60 game should have 10-20 hours of great game play, no more and no less.  A developer who wants to make a substantially longer game should consider whether shortening the development cycle and making a better, shorter game is more sensible.

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Bioshock Ushers In A Golden Age of Middle-Ware?

Friday, May 9th, 2008

The recently released issue of Game Developer Magazine (Rock Band Cover) has an entire section dedicated to Game Engine providers. To be fair, game engines have been around and in use for quite some time. For many years it felt as if anyone who was a top quality developer would make their own engines so as not to make any compromises. Second tier operators who weren’t expecting to overwhelm with quality would dive into game engines as a way to reduce production costs. The industry no longer feels that way. The engine developers can tip their hats to Ken Levine and Bioshock for that.

Bioshock proved, largely for the first time, that all-time top rated games could be made on a purchased game engine. Their exceptional use of Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 is a proof of concept for the future. I’m sure Mark Rein and his Epic team are happy to point that out to any potential customer. Mass Effect served as a second confirmation if anyone thought it was a fluke.

Now Epic has literally hundreds of licensed titles in production with their engine at various studios. The company has an interesting duo of a technical genius and a shrewd business man heading up the operation. One developer that I spoke with likened Mark Rein to P.T. Barnum. (In context believe he meant a great salesman rather than a hoax artist. The developer in question’s game was ultimately not very good or very successful.) I’ve yet to meet Mark myself, but I’m looking forward to it. Just reading the blurbs at the beginning of Game Developer Magazine, where the Crytek, Epic, and Valve teams talk about their engines, Mark’s section just blows the others away. Crytek says they have great technology and are working on more. Epic gives the feeling that the engine business is core to the company. Valve so much as says that the engine business isn’t particularly important to them. If I’m a buyer, I go with Epic every time based on these company attitudes. It is no wonder that Epic is probably worth Billions.

There are just no signs of the engine market slowing down. The tools have gotten to the point where it isn’t just graphics, it is an entire suite of tools and code including AI for enemies. It really gives developers so much to work with. It will be interesting to see how the industry develops. Will the Unreal Engine become a standard such that developers learn it like any other application suite and coding language, or is it destined to be replaced by the latest and greatest? At this point, I wouldn’t believe that Epic’s success is fleeting. They seem so much more sophisticated than the competition, which puts them in the perfect place to capitalize on the trend toward game engine use.

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Crysis First Impressions

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
  1. Crysis is a graphical monster with decent gameplay. The first time I ran it, I wasn’t that blown away. After changing all of the setting and exiting the game to go in and play again, it was pretty amazing. Even with my higher end PC specs, there were some settings that it just couldn’t handle.
  2. PC gaming is still touch and go. Even with a high spec PC, there were still some challenges with PC gaming. First, when the game installed, the icon was nowhere to be found except in the Gamespy comrade IM-type program. How annoying. My first time playing the game, I had some gray screens at points and the graphics did go a little squirrelly at one point where all of the images had a black sheen.  PC gaming just never seems to match consoles for convenience.
  3. Crysis cut-scenes can be problematic. When the game itself plays fine at a particular resolution and detail setting, the cut scenes shouldn’t grind you to a halt. I found in some of the cutscenes that the PC couldn’t keep up at my chosen resolution, and the visuals were severely lagging the audio. That is unacceptable. Where was the QC on that?
  4. Crysis AI is pretty lackluster so far. The enemies just don’t act like you think they should. If you are in a building, they might or might not storm the building. If you shoot at them from the top of the stairs, they may just start running up the stairs at you rather than ducking for cover and shooting up at you. I just can’t shake the feeling that the AI doesn’t seem right. Many of the console shooters that I’ve played lately like Bioshock, Uncharted, and COD4 felt better.

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The Ethical Dilemma of Abandonware

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

Publishers hate the word abandonware. To them, it means intellectual property that people have decided to steal. But here is the problem, there are sometimes no good ways to purchase the games and give the appropriate money to the publishers and developers.

The problem was much worse a few years ago. GameTap was a phenomenal idea. It was so clear that if people were willing to pay $40+ for used copies of an old title, they would certainly pay a subscription fee for access to the same titles. GameTap provides an array of mostly catalog titles available for around $60 per year. Even if there are just a couple of old titles that you want to play, the subscription is worth it. Valve’s Steam digital distribution system addresses some of the same market space, but is much more heavily focused on new content. The catalog titles on Steam can often be purchased elsewhere for less.

Digital distribution of catalog titles is not without its costs, however. The main cost is in tech support and making sure that the game runs well on current systems. The original coding team wasn’t planning for Dual or Quad-Core CPUs and certainly wasn’t planning for Windows Vista. Making sure that the game still runs costs money. A company can’t say, “Hey, download our game for $10 but we aren’t sure whether it will work on your machine or not.” This leaves some titles out in the cold. One of which is System Shock 2.

Ever since playing Bioshock, I’ve been trying to tap into Ken Levine’s mind. I read the articles and try to tap into his sources and previous material. System Shock 2 is cited as the key precursor to Bioshock. The problem is that the title is definitively out of print. It isn’t available on GameTap, Steam, or any other legal download service I could find. Current listings for the game on Amazon.com’s Markeplace show it at almost $80. From the auction’s that I’ve seen on eBay, the game goes for north of $50. I want to play the game and pay both Ken and EA, who owns the IP rights to the title, their due. The problem is that I won’t buy the game for the going rate on a used copy. Even if I did buy a used copy, the IP holders wouldn’t get any money from my purchase.

The decision that the consumer is left with for a game like System Shock 2 is download a copy on Bittorrent and play the game for free or pay an outrageous amount to someone for a used copy of the game. The first option is illegal but inexpensive. The second option is overly expensive and legal, but provides no value to the IP holder. Most IP holders lament the profits that companies like Gamestop are making off the “first sale” doctrine. The game player is left in a conundrum of breaking the law to play a game or not playing the game at all. It is too bad that no one has come up with a way to give game players new choices. I have to think that if people are willing to pay more than $50 per copy for System Shock 2, it is probably worth the money to invest in making the title available from a service like Steam. With limited resources at the game companies, I understand that making new games is likely a far more lucrative option. It is too bad that some the classics have to die such a horrible death.

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My Top Ten Games of All Time

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

This post was inspired by Warren Spector’s Wikipedia entry that lists his top 12 games. Here is my top 10 of all time (with one additional current contender). The criteria is the games that have had the most impact on me. I took a shot at putting them in order.

  1. Final Fantasy (I)
  2. Super Mario Brothers (I)
  3. Diablo II
  4. Under a Killing Moon
  5. Quake
  6. Civilization
  7. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
  8. Super Mario 64
  9. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
  10. God of War

Most likely to break into the top 10: Bioshock

Honorable Mention: Gex: Enter The Gecko

1) Final Fantasy - I can remember calling my local EB Games daily to find out if this game was in-stock yet. The expectations that I built up around it were staggering. It is one of the single cases I can point to where the actual game was better than what I built it up to be. This game created much of what became the RPG genre. The idea of traveling off to a vast land and exploring around was just amazing. I stuck with the series through much of the next few installments. Square lost me a bit when they started to move from Lord of the Rings style to quasi-futuristic steam punk.

2) Super Mario Brothers - Not sure what to say here other than that the game was a huge step forward. Mario Brothers became the premier franchise in gaming and with good reason. Anyone who owned an NES back in the day probably put more time into this game than any other. It was so much better than everything else that you found yourself replaying it over and over. Nintendo still releases 2D side-scrolling Mario games more than 20 years later. That’s longevity.

3) Diablo II – The Diablo series clearly set the standard for action/rpg hybrid games. I logged a ridiculous number of hours playing Diablo II online and had an absolute blast. The deceptively straightforward gameplay masked substantial depth. My top wishlist game right now is Diablo III.

4) Under a Killing Moon – This may be a surprising pick to some people, but UAKM and the rest of the Tex Murphy series (The Pandora Directive and Overseer) were definite favorites for me. The combination of a 3D world, actual acting, and witty dialog have influences that are only just being felt now. The games were way ahead of their time, probably too far ahead in some ways. The highly revered summary dialog system from Mass Effect has influences from UAKM. Plus, it was my kind of humor. I can also see some parallels in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. The heavy acting component and sarcastic humor are both reminiscent of UAKM.

5) Quake – My first real experience with online gaming was Quake. I spent lots of time playing it. The game was incredible. Coming on the heels of the ground-braking Doom, Quake was another level entirely. The graphics were amazing for the time. All of today’s online first person shooters can draw a direct lineage back to Quake.

6) Civilization – Scary as it might sound, much of my ability to remember the seven wonders of the world comes directly from too much time playing Civilization. Sid Meier is a genius and the Civilization series demonstrates what games are capable of. The series is both addictive and at least mildly educational. There is a lot to be learned from Civilization about how people can be taught through games. As I learned in Civilization, when a Democracy is at war for too long, the populous will begin to rebel.

7) Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – Symphony of the Night was Castlevania does Action/RPG. As mentioned before, this is my favorite genre. I’ve proceeded to purchase and play all of the subsequent iterations offered for handheld systems. Every 2D Castlevania game since Symphony of the Night has maintained that same great action/rpg balance. My entire reason for purchasing the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS was to play the new Castlevania offering for each system.

8) Super Mario 64 - The game is often lauded in any top list of games. It essentially created the 3D platforming genre. Mario 64 was such a marvelous step forward from prior 2D games. The game was fun and avoided completely confusing players with the new 3rd dimension that they had to worry about.

9) Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - As has been well established by this point in the list, I am a huge fan of Acton/RPG hybrids. In a lot of ways Zelda was groundbreaking in this genre. It wasn’t until the series hit the SNES that I really got into it in a big way. I wouldn’t consider myself a committed fan of the series, since I’ve not really followed every installment. Still, I can appreciate the impact that the series has had on other games and I really liked this particular installment.

10) God of War - The God of War series was a late addition to the list, probably because I’ve just completed Chains of Olympus. In future lists Bioshock will likely replace it (see the next entry). I really enjoy the Kratos character and the finely tuned action/rpg fighting system. The first thing that comes to any God of War player’s mind is “fun”. From the very start, the game is just a lot of fun to play.

Most likely to break into the top: Bioshock - For the moment this is a tentative inclusion. It is the first game that I’ve played which extends the Action/rpg genre to include a first person shooter. It is easily the most intense and immersive game that I’ve ever played. The real test of a game is how its impact is felt and how it holds up over time. I expect that Bioshock will mark a turning point in gaming where the level of sophistication and immersion take a great step forward. Only time will tell.

Honorable Mention: Gex: Enter The Gecko - This pick could probably be construed as the guilty pleasure on the list. In many ways the game’s mechanics were standard character platformer fare. The game’s hook was humor. The thing is, it was my kind of humor. I really got a kick out of the one-liners and levels that lampooned pop culture. I was disappointed to see the series die, but sales were never particularly impressive. Still, I think there is an opportunity for humorous games that isn’t being taken advantage of.

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