Nothing good can come of this, or, Why I don’t play MMO’s

As you boot up an MMORPG for the first time, you are always excited. “What kind of character will I play? What class will I be? If I’m this and my friend is that, we will make a kick ass team! I can’t wait to get to this area! My character is going to be so bad ass!” For me, this feeling of excitement lasts for about 20 levels, if I’m lucky. I’ve played more than my fair share of MMO’s, but I think I’m done for good now. My interest in the genre has severely dropped since I started playing text based MMO’s (I can’t believe that game has a Wikipedia article) when they were called MUD’s. There are some huge flaws in the genre that no one game has been able to resolve. No, not even WoW in its infinite glory has perfected everything.

One of the biggest draws to these games is loot. Everyone wants cool armor. They want to look unique and bad ass. The problem with this is twofold. In most cases, it takes a very long time to get your character to look the least bit cool. Since WoW is the gold standard for MMO’s these days, I’ll use it as a touchstone. In WoW, my none of my characters looked well put together until at least level 30, if not later. The second part of this problem is that gear is also integral to character stats and abilities (in most games), so the coolest looking thing isn’t necessarily the most useful thing. This leads to everyone wearing the same thing because it is statistically the best, thus sucking all of the uniqueness out of your character. It’s not really fun to play a game for days of your life just to know you’ll end up looking like everyone else of your class in the end.

The best solution for this I’ve seen so far is in City of Heroes (or City of Villains). During character creation, you make your dude look as bad ass and unique as you want. Stats are tied to “enhancements” that you drop into individual skills and have no cosmetic effect at all. They still award you for leveling with things like capes. While these have to statistical bonus, you’re a superhero, so obviously you want a cool cape waving in the wind behind you as you jump or fly around the city. With the enormous amount of customization options that you have from the very beginning, you get to feel like a full-fledged super hero from the moment you start, rather than wearing ugly armor for hours of your character’s life.

So you have some cool armor and you’re ready to meet up with some friends in the game to take on a dungeon or instance. But wait, your friends are unemployed and play all day long. They are level 50 and you’re only 35! Tough shit! Have fun collecting pelts while they are taking out a huge instance boss. Level discrepancy is one of the biggest problems I’ve had in most MMO’s. Inevitably, someone has more time than the rest of the group. Either they stay at your level and start an alt (more on alts later) that becomes their main character because it’s a higher level, or they fly ahead on their main character and don’t really care to help you level that much.

Again I have to point to City of Heroes/Villains for a pretty good solution to this issue. They have a sidekick system in place so your high level friend can bump you up to close to their level. It doesn’t give you the new powers or skills you’d have at that level, but your current powers are almost as strong they will be in the future. I haven’t played it (due to high system requirements), but apparently Age of Conan has a similar system in place. Why more MMO’s haven’t adapted this concept is beyond me. These are supposed to be community and friend-centric games, but if your friend is ahead/behind you in leveling, the most interaction you end up having with him/her is exchanging PM’s from entirely different zones.

But, holy shit! Your friend is now 55! Imagine what your character will be like at 55! You’ll have all these skills and those abilities! You’ll be able to fight these mobs and that boss! You can wear this helm and use that axe! Now after thinking about all of that cool stuff, try going back to killing rats so you can use some crappy dagger. Rough, isn’t it? Looking ahead in these games may inspire some to keep going and strive for that level, but for me it just kills the experience. When I start playing an MMO, I try very hard to hold off on it, but my time-to-guide is very low. And once I see what I will be if I spend hours and hours of my life playing, I find it very hard to go back to being low level. Very few of these games let you feel like your character is worthwhile at low levels, prompting you to gaze longingly at the distant future.

There are a few ways to solve this problem that some games have used. The first is to make your character feel powerful, even if it really isn’t, from the very start. Again, I haven’t played it, but Age of Conan seems like it does this. The combat system looks quick and more reliant on your imput. While in WoW you just press one key and attack at a certain interval automatically, in Conan you always have to be on your toes and attack from different directions. The combat is also a great deal more violent and interesting to watch. You actually look like you’re hitting the enemies instead of making a sword swinging motion near them. I hate to keep going back to it, but City of Heroes has accomplished this as well. At level 1 you were still a super hero who could knock enemies back several feet with a single punch.

The other way to solve the former problem ties in with my next problem. Congrats, you’re level 35! Oh wait, you’re halfway to max level. But not really, since the last 35 levels take even longer than the first. Lower the damn level caps in these games. If it didn’t take so long to get to a level you could actually have fun and feel useful; it would be a lot easier to keep playing. All I ever hear about these games is how awesome the “end game” is. They need to make that content easier to get to. If it really is as good as people say it is, let more of the community into the club. I would say far under 50% of WoW players ever get to experience one of these fabled level 70 raids. That kind of stuff sounds fun– it really does– but I don’t want to spend so many hours of my life not having much fun in order to have fun in your game. Mass Effect was rough for 3 or 4 hours and that was nearly too much unfun to justify the great ending. I hit 60 in WoW once. By that point I was far too burnt out on the game to care about the elusive end game. I quit playing a week or two later. Guild Wars gets the win here with its very reasonable level cap of 20. You could do that in a week or two and then get on to the best parts of the game.

You finally did it, level 70! You hit the cap! Oh no! That other class has this really cool skill you’d like to try! And honestly, you’re pretty bored with your current class. Time to start over! Alting derails me in MMO’s more than anything else. Maybe I’m just too damn curious, but when I see a character who looks neat or has a nifty skill, I want to try it. Unfortunately, in almost every game, that means starting back at the beginning. At least in some games (Guild Wars), it won’t take long to get back to the top with my new character. Tabula Rasa (although I haven’t played that one either due to school networking problems) has a cool solution. They have a cloning system in place that lets you clone yourself right before important character progression decisions. Other games give you the ability to respec but that only lets you change your character within the chosen class and usually become cost-prohibitive after a while.

I realize that most of these problems are there to keep you playing longer because, except for Guild Wars and Mythos, you’re paying a monthly fee to play these games. They need to keep you playing as long as possible. The longer it takes you to get to the max level and the more distracted you get by making new characters the better. The only way paying monthly for these is a good deal is if it’s the only game you play and you play a lot. I buy far more games than I should, and it gets expensive, but I like having new and different experiences instead of constantly playing the same one. If I’m going to pay for something monthly, it’s going to be a GameFly account (which I just signed up for) or a GameTap account where I can sample a ton of different content.

I like to be exposed to different game types, genres, mechanics, stories, etc. With an MMO it’s just the same thing day in and day out. Even when I was enjoying playing WoW, afterwards I would feel like I hadn’t really done anything. If there’s no true end to a game, you can’t really accomplish anything. Yes, that is also partially true for something like GTA or Halo multiplayer. They don’t have a true ending, but matches and rounds end. Someone wins and someone loses. In an MMO, I can’t help but feel like everyone loses.

Skipping the nit picky, more personal quips with these games (no more fantasy settings please), I’m at the end of my tirade. All of this being said, every once in a while I get a weird need to play one. This is the part I can’t explain no matter how hard I try. Sometimes I just want to level a character, grind for pelts, get ganked in low level areas and be part of a strange and mostly terrible community. When I get this feeling, I have to close my eyes tightly and repeat over and over, “They just want your money. Nothing good can come of this.” Usually, it works. Or at least it will until the day they fix these problems and suck me back in.

It’s coming. It’s coming. It’s coming.

With the impending arrival of one of the most widely loved and purchased game franchise’s new title, I thought it was time to take a look at Grand Theft Auto IV. I am excited for it, which is really weird. I haven’t played a GTA title for an extended period of time since the GTA III proper. I spent a few minutes with Vice City until I realized that it was the same game with a talking protagonist and then I completely skipped San Andreas for similar reasons. But everything I see and read about GTA IV excites me more and more. It looks like this game will be “next gen” in more ways than one. Which made me wonder, will GTA 4 (I’m just going to use real numbers from here out) show some real maturity or beat it up, throw it in a car and use it to regain some health?

First, let’s take a look at Rockstar’s past with helping mature the industry. The former GTA’s haven’t really done anything for the cause. They’ve been great at propelling the sand box, open world game into the spotlight thus giving us wonderful games like True Crime. While some good things have definitely come out of it (Crackdown), most people just think of GTA as the game where you hop in, toss on some weapons codes and the blow the fucking hell out of everything in sight until the cops stop you.

Recently, Rockstar has had one big up for advancing the medium and one even bigger down. The high point being Bully. I’m yet to play this game as I don’t have a PS2 and haven’t picked up the 360 version yet. This is the game that was mostly famous for letting you (a school age male character) kiss other boys. I think this is an amazing choice and an awesome nod to the gay gaming community. There are very few things for them in games unless you count Mass Effect, but they didn’t even go as far as to include a dude on dude relationship. On the way low other end of the spectrum is Manhunt 2. This has been talked about to death, but it needs another quick word. The original Manhunt was a great suspense/horror game and one of the few that really got into my head and scared me, not with gore but with atmosphere. Manhunt 2 took this idea and made it into a gore fest with a crappy story. You can only justify the kind of game that it was with the right tone and story, it lacked both. The entire debacle with the AO rating knocked Rockstar down a peg, unless you believe in vast conspiracy theories.

With Rockstar already expecting controversy over GTA4, I get a little worried. It seems like they could just be up to their old shock and awe tactics (see: drunk driving), but I think they have more up their sleeves this time around. And if they are just going to shock and awe, I hope they get the jump on Fox News and make fun of them in the game, looking at the GTA 4 site’s conservative talk radio station I’d say there’s a good chance.

The game now has a much less cartoony look overall.  There are still the gag store names and such, but that’s the better end of their joke spectrum.  With a less cartoony look may come a less cartoony story.  This is a game about an immigrant coming to America.  That is an amazing launching point for a game that prides itself on satire.  If done right, the story could have an amazing amount of depth while still being funny and entertaining.

Also, the more real it looks, the more real people may act in the world.  Maybe people won’t just blow shit up constantly.  Scratch that, I’m sure they will, but maybe there will be reason to care about the story or the world.  Reason to investigate it and become part of it.  Better play mechanics can lead to a much more involving game.

I’ve talked about Bioshock’s contribution to gaming maturity a lot, but where it failed is that it’s not a household name.  Everyone knows GTA.  If you mention games they think of Mario, GTA, WoW or Pac Man.  If GTA becomes an example we can point to and say, “That is a great game in every respect” then people will actually understand what is going on.  Other GTA’s are hard to defend, yes it’s harmless silly violence, but that’s a crappy excuse.  If the violence in this one has a real story or message to back it up, then we have a good example on our hands.

It’s April.  It’s almost here.  We will wait and see how the shit hits the fan this time around.  But at least it will have achievements.

Is it a podcast if you don’t use an iPod?

Today we’re going to talk podcasts. As my job is to drive around all day, I have an extensive list of podcasts I listen to that help get me through the day. This is also what inspires some of my ideas for posts and I seem to reference them a good amount. So now I present you a long list of said ‘casts so you too can enjoy them (even though you probably already have heard of most if not all of them).

1UP Yours

My first love. There’s nothing better than having your weekend confirmed with Garnett and the gang. Well, there are better things, but lets allow for some hyperbole. A very simple gaming podcast. Segments on what people are playing, current game news and 1UP community questions. Always entertaining, never let’s me down.

1UP Show

The first video podcast on the list. The best thing about anything on 1UP is the more realistic feeling. This comes across best in the 1UP Show. Not shot on a stage like Gamespot’s On The Spot, the segments about games are shot in more organic settings and are much more like a few friends sitting around and discussing games. Also, best theme song ever.

Retronauts

Yet another 1UP podcast. This one is devoted to the old games we know and love/hate. It’s always nice to learn about games that I may have been too young for or too poor to own the system they existed on. It’s like Gaming History 101.

Giant Bombcast

Formerly the Arrow Pointing Down podcast, this is the baby of exGamespot writers, Jeff Gerstmann and Ryan Davis. Usually starting out with some sort of on air drink tasting and progressing to games and gaming news, it is one of the more unique gaming podcasts around. With the Giant Bomb site is just beginning, I can only imagine what this podcast will become. Always fun to start listening at the beginning, hop on it now.

Diggnation

The video podcast that goes along with Digg.com. Kevin and Alex talk about some of the big stories on Digg that week. Mildly entertaining, not really a must watch every week since I’ve usually seen the stories on Digg before they talk about them. Also, Kevin Rose strikes me as a large douche.

Downloadable Content (The Penny-Arcade Podcast)

While not a weekly podcast, when it sporadicly shows up on the feed, I get pretty excited. This is simply listening to Mike and Jerry as they brainstorm to create a comic. Since it always comes out after the comic does, it is really interesting to listen to the processes of how they came to that specific idea. It’s always fun to have a look behind the scenes, I just wish they put this out more often.

EGM Live*

EGM’s weekly, misleadingly not live podcast. Lots of different segment types and everyone favorite EGM writers, this is another great cast from the 1UP crew. Surprisingly all of these 1UP podcasts feel very different, so there isn’t any reason to fear repetition and bordem.

Filmspotting

This is a very by the numbers movie podcast. Weekly reviews and top 5 lists of different things. I’ve learned about a lot of different directors and films I wouldn’t have never seen because of this cast. Sometimes a bit boring and often has terrible music.

Game Theory

Another podcast about video games! Holy crap! Not much special about this one. They discuss game industry news more so than most other ones and I tend to disagree with them more than I do with other podcasts. Still a pretty good source of news analysis.

GWJ Conference Call

Quickly becoming one of my favorite sites/podcasts, the GWJ conference call is a great game discussion podcast. Like many it has the “So what is everyone here played recently?” section, but unlike many they usually have very unique and interesting questions and segments. Mix that with occasional guests from the industry and you’ve got yourself a nice hour or two of entertainment.

The HotSpot

Honestly, I’m not really sure why I still listen to this. It has totally become the “who is leaving Gamespot this week?” show. I still like the people but there’s definitely something missing without Rich, Jeff, Ryan and Alex. But I have a lot of car time during the week so I need stuff to fill it and this gets the job done.

GFW Radio

Probably the funniest podcast around. I don’t do very much PC gaming at all, which is why it took me a long time to start listening to this one but, goddamn if it isn’t amazing. The chemistry between the cast is the best of any on the list. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, there isn’t a ton of talk about PC gaming. Getting sidetracked is where the best parts of the show come from. That and Shawn Elliot’s raps.

iFanboy

A video podcast about comics. I’m not super into comics so I only tend to watch these if the subject catches my interest. That’s the nice thing about it, you can pick and choose episodes depending on what kind of comics you want to learn about. If you want to get into comics this is a great place to start.

Joystiq Podcast

The game news super site Joystiq’s weekly podcast. The usual game podcast set up but great hosts make it stand out. It can definitely rival GFW Radio for laughs. And like other good podcasts, it feels like a few friends talking about games, which is a plus in my book. Also played with 2/3 of the hosts in COD4 which is pretty sweet.

Smogcast

While it hasn’t had a new episode since January 21st, this is Kevin Smith’s podcast about everything/nothing. You never know what will be talked about during this hour, but you can be sure you’ll laugh. I know a lot of people don’t like Kevin Smith but I can’t seem to get enough. I enjoy listening to the man talk and tell stories. Upside, he’s working on a new movie. Downside, we don’t get many podcasts these days.

Tekzilla

Another video podcast from Revision3, the video podcast kings. Like iFanboy, this is a podcast I only watch if the subject on it grab me. I don’t have a Mac so I have no interest in watching episodes about them. As tech related podcasts go this is a good one and doesn’t make me feel stupid. But it does make me feel poor.

Totally Rad Show

Another one of the first podcasts I got into. This video podcast is full of everything I’d want to know about with segments about games, movies, TV, comics etc. It’s nice that the Jeff, Dan and Alex tend to have different opinions on things, it gets boring when everyone on a show has the same thing to say about everything.

The Triple Feature

Monday nights at 10 EST you can find me in the chat field of The Triple Feature. This is hosted by the creators of three different web comics and is my favorite movie podcast. They use Talkshoe to do it which means you can listen live and chat with them as it’s going on. I recommend showing up some Monday night, it’s a good time.

Major Nelson’s Podcast

Another one that I really only listen to to fill time. Major Nelson is a Microsoft mouth piece and while listening I more often than not find myself sighing. He is pretty annoying, but there can be some good interviews from time to time. His cohost e seems far more human and makes it a bearable experience.

Most accidents happen within 5 miles of the home.

I would really like to know how there was an official Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournament was held down the goddamn street from me and I had no idea.  This is truly upsetting.  I’m not saying I would have won.  Far from it, I’m pretty terrible as it is.  I would have liked to see the game in action though.  The only interesting game related activity, other than Harmonix and 2k Boston (EA Boston?), in my area and I was clueless.  This isn’t even a real post, I just needed to vent a bit.  Post coming soon about GTA4 and what it means for the industry.

About The Future Of Video Games

While checking my mail the other day, I came across this article about the future of video games imaginatively titled, “The Future Of Video Games.” It struck me as weird because it doesn’t immediately dismiss games as kid killers or virtual orgasmic rape simulators. This is a more positive look at where games will be in 10 years. Unfortunately, besides being quite badly written, it is very weird and laughable.

Of course it starts with the obligatory “The Wii came out of no where and destroyed the PS3″ story. We know. It’s been a year. Please move on. While massaging the Wii’s already enormous ego, Mr. Noer drops this wisdom on us, “But the runaway success of the Wii highlights some trends that will be very important over the next decade, as the gaming industry matures and becomes more mainstream.” While I can’t argue that the Wii’s success does highlight the industry becoming more mainstream, I’m pretty sure it hasn’t done anything for maturing it (yet at least). The biggest leaps in maturity came from games like Bioshock (or as he refers to it later on “Bio Shock”). This is a story that isn’t necessarily original, but the way it is given to you could not have been done nearly as effectively in any other medium. Without being in control of the character yourself, the giant twist would not be nearly as meaning full. Having the rug pulled out from under you affects you a lot more when you’re in control of the character instead of just watching him. Enough of my love for Bioshock though, back to some quality sub-mainstream game writing.

I don’t think he has the right idea about what the industry maturing means. To him, I’m pretty sure it’s just older people playing games. While the Wii does do that, that’s not maturing the industry, it’s just an older player base. This would happen with time anyway, since the people in their 20’s and 30’s playing games now will probably be playing them in their 70’s and 80’s barring the immanent end of the world. If he thinks the Wii is leading to actual maturity in the games themselves then his definition for mature games is games that aren’t just violence…which seems really backwards based on the ESRB ratings. Portal has done far more for the maturity of games in 3 hours than the Wii has in over a year.

Like a lot of ideas in this, he hits the right idea but then takes it too far. “You don’t have to read a 30-page manual and memorize 17 button combinations to play ‘Wii Sports.’” I just took a quick look through a few manuals in my game drawer, the only one that’s over 30 pages is The Orange Box and that’s 5 games, so I’m fine with that. People seem to have this weird idea that every game not on the Wii is a huge learning curve and impossible for anyone to understand. While I’ve been doing this for a long time and most controls come as second nature to me, there are plenty of games that anyone can play. Hate to jump back to it again, but Portal is a good example. It’s a very simple mechanic that they teach you slowly and before you know it you are performing some of the most crazy shit I’ve ever seen. And while it may be tough to learn a FPS for the first time, once you know one, you mostly know them all. There are games that take a long time to learn (see Sins Of A Solar Empire) but I would argue that there are far more that are easily picked up and played.

Let’s look at a nice example of causation versus correlation. “Sony’s face-flop with the PS3 proves gamers aren’t obsessed with hyper-realistic graphics to the extent that game designers are.” PS3 didn’t have a tough start because of its high end graphics weren’t grabbing people, it had a rough time because its games weren’t all that good. There was nothing to grab Joe Consumer except the name Playstation. Everyone loves a damn pretty game as long as it’s actually good and worth playing. He seems to understand this but still attributes the fail to this. Color me confused.

“After being widely dismissed as dead (or irrelevant at best) only five years ago, PC role-playing games have made a tremendous comeback.” What? This is in the middle of the MMORPG explosion that soon lead to the cash cow of WoW. All I played back in that time was computer RPG’s. Maybe I was just a weird anomaly but RPG has always been a strong genre on the PC.

From here on out he goes into crazy tailspin of ideas about the future. I’m sorry but WoW guilds are not going to become political forces. I could go through and nit pick each line but that’s too much. People do make connections through online gaming but this isn’t leading toward some sort of weird gamers’ political revolution. We just want to be able to play great games without worrying about them being censored and regulated away from us. I’m not really sure why he thinks this is a real future. All you have to do is go on to Xbox Live and listen in on a Halo match to know that gamers have a long ass way to go before they are anywhere near intelligent enough to mobilize into a political force. The ECA is a great start but your average gamer doesn’t know anything about it. I just hope Fox news never gets a hold of any video of what Xbox Live is like. We can’t defend against that.

I wish this article was how it will really turn out. It sounds like an amazing future where everyone games and understands what games are. Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen that quickly. We are definitely making strides toward this future, but it’s going to take a long time and there are many obstacles in the way. Do your part. Show someone who doesn’t game a game they would like. Bring Rock Band to a party (yes, I know it’s an enormous pain in the ass to move, but if I can do it so can you). Give someone a DS for their birthday. Maybe we can really get to Michael’s wonderful future.

Get your gorge on.

While I’m in the middle of watching Lost, I thought I would toss up a post of this week’s best press release. In the future, we will be given the amazing privilege to play a Major League Eating game. Playing as “the people who built America,” you will be able to chow down on twelve different food groups. Please do yourself a favor and check out the link to the full press release on Kotaku. My only fear is with Mastiff being the sole company with the rights to the MLE, how will we ever get the competition to promote innovation?

In a completely unrelated note, the new Indiana Jones movie has its first trailer out. I’m not going to cast an opinion on it quite yet. But I do have one quick thought. Shia LeBeouf…Please stop. Thank you.

…I hardly know her!

I heard about Poker Smash a few months ago on either 1Up Yours or EGM Live. Poker meets Planet Puzzle League? Sure, sounds weird. Then I proceeded to forget about it until it showed up on XBLA last Wednesday. After an intense Call of Duty 4 session, I grabbed the trial. By the end of my first game, I was hooked.

Over the summer, due to the repeated recommendations of Shane Bettenhausen, I picked up Planet Puzzle League (friend code: 197672773904). I know that this type of puzzle game has existed for a long time (Tetris Attack, Pokemon Puzzle League, Dr. Mario & Puzzle League) but this was my first venture into it. It’s a great, simple puzzle mechanic that allows you to play slow and methodically or fast and furious. Poker Smash takes this and runs with it, replacing the colored blocks with cards from 10 to ace, adding a whole new level of strategy into the game.

Considering there were no puzzle league type games on XBLA, they could have put out a pretty lame version. But they went the extra mile. There are 55 puzzle boards, a bunch of skins and gamerpics you can unlock with in game currency, timed and practice modes etc. They packed a lot of content into a $10 game.

The game is very smooth and pretty. The control scheme is really well done. Somehow they made it more fluid than using the DS stylus. The addition of slow motion and bombs makes the game easier in the sense that you won’t top out often, but it adds a lot more complexity for creating chains. You can watch the top 100 high scores in the games theater, and holy crap. People are amazing at this game. So far I’ve been able to hold my own in multiplayer. I’ve only done 1v1 matches but apparently it goes up to 5 people. This is a great way to waste $10 if you have it. It is a solid puzzle game and one of the best ones on XBLA if you ask me.

Speaking of good ways to waste a little cash, it was just announced that Audio-Surf is coming to Steam on Friday. The $10 game is a dollar off if you preorder it now, which I recommend you do. This game is one of the best ways to experience your music. We’ve all seen the colorful trippy things on 360 or Windows Media Player that pulses to your mp3’s. This blows that shit out of the water. It is a puzzle, racing, rhythm game where you use your own music to create the tracks you drive on. There a coop mode, and many different single player modes. It’s going to use the new Steamworks program so there are achievements in it and it’s all done through Steam. And if that wasn’t enough, it comes with the Orange Box soundtrack! No one can resist “Still Alive.” Go preorder this now, and I will look forward to fighting you via songs we both enjoy. (Steam name is SuicideFLip)

Better than fading away

When I was little, my cousin and I would play the Rush games a ton on the N64. We didn’t play it for the racing as much as we played it for the stunt course. When we got sick of that, we would play the races with the sole purpose of ramming all of the other drivers off the road. I can vividly remember pushing a car into a palm tree and thinking, “Why the hell isn’t there a racing game that encourages all of this?” A few years later, I rented Burnout 2 for my Gamecube and my deep love for the Burnout series began.As soon as I heard the words “open world” mentioned with Burnout Paradise, I exploped with joy. This sounded like the arcade racing game that I had waited my whole life for. I ate up every screenshot and gameplay video I could find. then, the dreaded demo came out. This demo tried as hard as it could to kill all of my excitement for this game. It only had three races. That makes the game world feel very, very empty, despite how large and full it looks. I just had to keep telling myself, “A race at every corner, a race at every corner…” Finally, January 22 came and it was the day of reckoning for Burnout Paradise. While not without its flaws, it is the racing experience I have wanted for a long time.

While a lot of people seem to have a problem with the game dropping you into the world, I love it. There are few games that, at the start, give you a giant world and say, “Go nuts. Have fun.” No sections of the city are arbitrarily closed off. The world you start in is the same as the world you end in. This could be seen as a negative, but I think as you learn all of the streets and short cuts, the world feels like it changes. When you finally start recognizing things it feels different and you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

The races themselves are just what you would expect from Burnout: fast and brutal. I’ve seen the complaint that there is no retry button for when you lose a race. This is only really a problem for me with burning routes. They are specific to each car so they only start in one place. If I lose a road rage, I just find a new road rage near by and I’m rocking out again.

Races aren’t even close to all there is to do in Paradise City. There are gates and billboards that need smashing, jumps that need jumping, secret areas to find and new cars to unlock. As I drove around, a hierarchy of needs developed. At the bottom were the races. They are stationary and clearly marked on the map, they can wait. Next up were the gates, boards and jumps. While still always in the same place, they aren’t on the map. Considering that all together there are over 600 of them, I would hit them when I saw them. Finally, at the top, was chasing down rogue cars. Probably my favorite part of the game was chasing, smashing and stealing a new car.

One of the bigger changes is the revamp of crash mode. I was never a huge fan of crash mode in the old games. It was a cool idea, but I generally got bored with it pretty quickly. In BP, this is replaced with a completely new mode where you run into things as long as you can and keep yourself going with your burnout meter. It’s fun, but also gets pretty old pretty fast. I’ll do it to snag the achievements involved with it, but beyond that, I doubt I’ll play it that much.

The multiplayer, while amazingly set up, is where most of my problems lie. Road rafe and marked man (arguably the best modes) don’t exist in multiplayer. They could show up later as DLC, but that’s fairly bullshit. The co-op challenge side of the multiplayer is a great idea. There are 350 challenges, which is incredibly inflated number since it’s mostly the same thing over and over, but with a different number of players. the worst part, though, is when you’re doing an 8 person challenge and almost everyone has completed the objective. Then some asshole leaves. The game doesn’t give you credit for the same challenge with 7 people. It just drops the challenge. I can’t textually express how annoying this is.

The camera functionality in BP has been a much applauded feature. It’s definitely a cool little gimmick that makes me want to pick up my own. Most people I played with didn’t have it so I only have a few mugshots. I did observe an interesting phenomenon though. A girl with a headset and a camera was playing. The game very quickly turned into “crash into the girl and hope to catch a titty” for most of the other players. This isn’t really all that surprising considering the Xbox Live population.

I’m having a blast working my way through all of Paradise City and I hope more people on my friend list start picking it up. I can see myself popping it in and doing a few races here and there for a long time. If they come out with more multiplayer modes via DLC, it would make it even longer lasting. It’s not for everyone, but it feels like it was made with me in mind. Pick it up, message me and I’ll take you down. Happy crashing everyone.

Aren’t you afraid?

I had always heard of Rez, but never really understood what it was. Screenshots could never quite get the idea across. It just looked like weird graphics and a simple gameplay mechanic. All I knew was that everyone loved the game like it was their own child. People talked about it with the unanimous admiration few games receive, especially years after their release. Finally, this game is getting another chance to shine, this time on XBLA. I went in with high anticipations, but not quite knowing what to expect. And honestly, I don’t think anything could prepare you for the experience that is Rez HD.

At it’s core, it is an on rails shooter, a genre that hasn’t seen much action recently. It seems like it would be pretty boring to not be able to control the movement of your character, but you don’t miss it at all. Fairly skeptical of whether or not I’d enjoy the game, I tried the demo first. Even at the beginning, when I had no idea what I was really supposed to do, I was totally engaged. I wasn’t sure why, but I had to keep playing. Upon completing the demo, I immediately slapped down my 800 MS points to get the full version and continued my journey into the world of Rez.

The game ramps up the difficulty perfectly. Considering there isn’t really anything else like it, the first level starts out nice and easy. You get accustomed to what you’re supposed to do and look for. By the second level, you’re looking for more action and it is delivered to you. This pattern continues right up to the fifth and final level which ends in an epic, mind altering, borderline pretentious boss battle. I’m not really sure what all the text means during this level, but it feels enlightening.

This post has taken me forever to finish. Just talking about the game or watching a video makes me want to play it. I don’t really know what is drawing me back to it constantly. There are only 5 levels but I can’t seem to get enough of them. Usually games that base replay value on beating your high score don’t grab me. Rez, however, has kept me trying to grab the high score on every level. This may or may not have something to do with getting the achievements for the game, but either way, I’m still playing. I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s like no other game around. With music games finally coming into their own, Rez HD fits in perfectly.

Rez HD gets:

54 beats per minute

(I don’t like giving number scores. Enjoy the nonsense scores.)

welcome to the misinformation age

Goddamn it all. This is the kind of video that makes my head want to explode. It’s amazing how fast untrue information can spread. “Full digital nudity” is hardly how I would describe the sex scene in Mass Effect. First off, it’s on YouTube. Doesn’t that say something about how graphic it is? Why don;t games with actual graphic sex scenes ever get mentioned? Oh yeah, because they are shitty and no one buys them so it doesn’t matter.

How do you not market something to kids? There were commercials for Mass Effect on Comedy Central, in the evenings as I can remember. That’s not targeting kids. If kids are watching Comedy Central at night, that’s not Mass Effect’s problem.

How does she talk about the parental controls on the 360 and dismiss them in a single sentence? They are there so you don’t have to “hover over them every second.”

I’m not sure what statistics our friend Cooper here is looking at, but everything I can find is telling me that the average video game player is around 30. So that would be their dads, Cooper. It would be. The women in this game are far from “just a hot body.” This game has some strong female characters. Ashley Williams is one bad ass broad. I’d wager she could snap Cooper in two.

Newscaster lady then proceeds to attack age gates. I’ll admit, they are pretty pointless, but what is the alternative? Some red band movie trailers have more legitimate age gates that actually check you’re information in some data base somewhere (which is kind of creepy). Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to make one let me watch the trailer, and I’m 21. You can easily get some internet filtering software to prevent your kids from looking at things you don’t want them to see. But then they’ll just go to their friends house to see it.

Cooper seems to think that you put in the game and it tells you, “Press A to kill things, press B to fuck and press Y to jump. Press Y and B at the same time to jump and fuck at the same time.” Maybe before you flat out attack something with false claims, you should trying it for at least 10 or 15 minutes. I actually had a hard time forming a relationship in the game. I pissed Ashley off early on and she wasn’t having any of that from there on out.

With a real experience, little boys can’t tell the difference between a video game and real life, or so Cooper tells us. Does that mean they need to kill someone in real life to understand that it’s different that killing an AI controlled program? If so, that is quite possible the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Kids are not that stupid, we don’t give them nearly enough credit.

She says “You have to pick up the box and look at the back for the rating” like that’s different from a DVD. Or like games weigh a ton. Dorky man in the glasses seems to indicate that he has no capacity for thinking, so we can just ignore anything he says. And then again in this lovely round table discussion, they completely ignore the fact that you can block M games on the 360.

Why didn’t it get an AO? There’s nothing graphic! There was more nudity in Titantic, a PG-13 movie, you assholes. And guess what! The games with graphic nudity do get an AO rating. Also, I’m so sick and tired of “What happened to the days of Pong?!” The same thing that happened to the days of zubaz, pet rocks and films starring the Coreys. We moved on to better things.

You can’t download Mass Effect. Also you cannot get it on your damn phone. Thank you Geoff Keighley for trying your best to make these people listen to reason. The sad truth is that they never will. So we will just have to wait for the day that Mark McDonald has often described, when all the old people die off and this isn’t a problem anymore.