The streets are flowing with the blood of the innocents, two sides are fighting to what seems an everlasting war, a war that rages on for only a few years, yet they have the same goal – to entertain. Yeah, to entertain ungrateful people who think there is a war between the casual and hardcore gaming market. There’s a lot of gripe lately on how the casuals (the games and the people) are killing the gaming industry. To tell truth, the hardcore consumers are as much to blame as the casual ones. (continue reading…)

The rise of technology with the industrial revolution came about the assembly line, often used in factories to quickly make, build, and send off the factory’s product; be it cars, electronics, weapons, and even video games. The same and formulaic games often do seem like they just came hot off the assembly line that they get their very own genre beneath what they suppose to be – The WWII shooter, The Hack n Slash, Shovelware, etc. Of course with the Wii being the new fangled device that everyone must have and Nintendo being at the zenith of profits came about the truckload of shovelware. That is, the current trend, and trends come and go so the factories need to replace their rubber stamps to fit the new trend of games they must shovel out.
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After nearly half of century of development and the synergy of growing technology, video games have become a major part of modern society, an interactive form of entertainment. Separating itself from moving pictures, sequential notes, and walls of words; gaming is unique as it combines all three of these mediums, maybe even fourth, the sweaty test of endurance, with the rise of the Wii. But with all these ways one can entertain oneself, what do we call people who read books? Readers? Who enjoy music? Listeners? How about movie goers? Watchers? At least we have a definite term for people who play sports – athletes.

What am I getting at is the term “Gamer”. Does the culture as a whole really accept to call themselves “Gamers” and not “one who plays video games?”. I truly and always have hated the term “gamer” (and don’t bother pointing out that this place use to be called gamerblag). There are many reason why I might hate the term or maybe I just hate the people who use it.
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The shoulder button: one often assumes this is but a trivial part of the gaming experience. After all, the majority of your operations are controlled via the face buttons! This has changed in recent years though. With the rising popularity of the first person shooter, the shoulder buttons have received more and more use. What was once an important button for throwing up your shield in smash brothers or reversing a strike in a wrestling game has taken on a whole new undertaking: shooting stuff. This would be fine and dandy except for one thing: due to the gamers’ love of shooters, the controllers themselves have undergone a radical shift.

Let’s take a look at the Dual-shock 3, shall we? While the dual-shock two had four shoulder buttons that were very operational and easy to command, the dual shock three has two that are operational and two that are complete wastes of space. If you happen to own a Playstation 3, you know exactly which two buttons I am speaking of. The R2 and L2 buttons on the Dualshock 3 are perhaps the worst buttons in the world. No, I’m not using hyperbole, I’m not making stuff up. I literally think you could scavenge the world three times over and not come up with buttons as miserable as the Playstation 3’s R2 and L2 buttons.

What exactly makes these buttons so bad? Well, first, they are triggers. The trigger button trend on consoles started primarily with the N64. The trigger on that system was fine and dandy. It was placed on the very back of your controller and if you needed to shoot something, you knew where it was. It didn’t get in the way, it was just there and ready to help! The Gamecube controller did away with said trigger button, but another system decided to dance with it. The X-Box. As we all know, the X-Box cast aside traditional console controls and decided that they would not have shoulders, but triggers. The popularity of console shooters such as Golden Eye and Perfect Dark helped usher this idea in.
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There's the save point!

Save points have existed for a while in jRPGs, but what is their real purpose? I know it’s something we don’t see nowadays so much but there was a time where save points were existent many video games. Personally I though save points were one of the worst ideas ever, and now that we are able to save anywhere in most games, I’m not sure why some games decide to use them. There is something to be said about the level of suspense and success feeling when you come upon a save point but there’s more wrong with the idea, then there is right with the idea. The pros have already been stated: easier to code, adds some level of suspense, and surprise, but let’s weigh down the cons to it.

• Ruins the surprise of a big event

You know what I mean. You’re fighting your way through a massive dungeon and suddenly you see a savepoint, you know that something funky is about to go down. Either you know that you’re going to be facing some kind of boss, of you’re half way through the dungeon, which can be kind of depressing if the dungeon is fun. Though save points ensure you save before possibly getting your ass kicked, it ruins the surprise.

• Pressured to find a save point when playing for a while

This point is also a no-brainer, you’ve been playing for an hour or so and you’ve gotten far, the first thing you want to do is save your progress. Well what happens if you’re cut low on time? If for some reason you have to go somewhere and you don’t have time to find a save point? What then? Then you have to force yourself to continue playing or start again another time.

• Some save points disable the ability to backtrack

Now I never saw the appeal of doing this. Why would a developer not want you to backtrack to explore the game more? It’s like asking someone into your home then restraining them to the backyard, you have no good reason to do it unless you hate your consumer.

Dynamic saving (saving wherever you like) is the best option, it’s not baby-ing your consumer. It’s giving them the ability to save for themselves, so they can take the responsibility to save wherever needed. If you didn’t save for an hour and then you lose a boss fight, then too bad, it teaches you to save more frequently, and personally I like a game a lot better when I’m given as much freedom as possible.

I am sure everyone has at least played one online multiplayer game, ranging from First Person Shooters to Real-Time Strategy. This is the new form of competition that has arisen within the past decade and a half due to video games and the internet. This new form of competition has come up so strong that there is a whole entire country dedicated to it, though it maybe only one game, it still applies. Then there is of course the tournaments, LAN parties, even conventions that celebrate these competitive games; things like QuakeCON or the World Cyber Games. It has come to the point that this new form of competition should get their own ESPN or something but let’s take it to a smaller scale, that simple internet lobby where some gather to play competitively, lobbies like Battle dot net, Steam, Playstation Network, and even Xbox Live. But I’m not here to talk about the new age of online sports, but rather online sportsmanship – what the hell happened to it?
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I am sure everyone knows what the tutorial level is and I am also sure that some of you readers can agree with me that they are one of the most annoying things about video games today and within the past decade. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, the tutorial level is a level in a game that teaches you the basic mechanics of the game. Why is this so bad that I’m raging about it? It’s the fact every developer out there deems it necessary to have this level mandatory to complete in order to learn how jump and then double-jump. This makes the notion that these developers are targeting their games toward the “casual” crowd, non-gamers, or even your grandmother. Because, hell, everyone is a brand new player into the world of video games but let’s get back on track.

I know neither that all games do not have a tutorial level nor that all games have it mandatory – but I’m not talking about all games. I am talking about the games within this generation and those in last generation where the majority of games had the tutorial level. I am sick of playing a level where it does nothing to teach me, does nothing to advance the story, and most importantly, it does nothing to entertain me. Press A to jump, press square to shoot, swing your controller to awkwardly attack – it’s just plain annoying, especially when the game offers nothing complex to the already copy-and-paste game play of its genre.
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I borrowed a friends Xbox 360 for a weekend, because he suggested I play Fable II. Fair enough, it had interested me. But this isn’t a Fable II review. This is what I discovered on my short journey through the world of the Xbox Live community.

All I had attempted to do, was play some Fable II co-op. I just wanted to go and slay some guards with my fellow heroes of Albion, simple I presumed. Not quite the case. Every time I managed to find a slaying partner, all they were concerned about doing was banging out some more achievements, and they come from the most trivial tasks. I wasn’t interested in killing 5 enemies at once with one magic spell, I wasn’t interested at farting at the same time as him, and I definitely wasn’t interested in the 101 meaningless other bollocks tasks he and the next 6 people I played with proposed that we do for that stupid little popup at the bottom of the screen. (continue reading…)

If you’ve got a Sony Playstation 3, then chances are you’ve snapped up Naughty Dog’s platformer-slash-cover shooter, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. While it didn’t exactly wow over critics with its gameplay mechanics that had obviously been inspired from quite a number of other IPs, it definitely made waves with its stellar presentation, poloygon-crunching graphics and superb voice acting ( which made Nate and his associates quite the memorable crew). Now, we get wind of its sequel, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, via the cover of GameInformer’s upcoming issue.

In their website, GameInformer teases the reveal-all article by letting slip a few details about the sequel: the game will revolve around the exploits of Marco Polo this time around. The game will also feature a new free-climbing mechanic to set itself apart from its predecessor, as well as stealth sections that will probably have Drake sneaking around to avoid enemy encounters.

Stealth gameplay? Free CLIMBING? I’m sorry, Naughty Dog, but since when was blatant imitation and thoughtless copying part of the deal? And in this day and age of dry humor, witty one-liners and shooters that utilize cover effectively? You had a market with Crash Bandicoot, hell, you had a HUGE following, and that series of PlayStation One games have gone on to have legendary gameplay that rivals that of Mario and Sonic. The videogame world considered HIM as a viable rival for those two icons. You’ve got a market for people who want something different, and yet you churn out more of the same. Not just more of the same, but literally regurgitated and recycled material. We don’t blame you for trying something new, but if you just thought for a second about how Free Climbing was done already effectively by Assassin’s Creed and stealth gameplay is but one of gaming’s most tired (and most annoying) cliches, then you’d have thought twice about putting them in as key draws for your game. Your game of mishmash gameplay mechanics from other games that do them better and had done them BEFORE.

I’ve played the first Uncharted and I had fun with it, but even with graphics whore glasses on I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I’ve done it all before. Sure, you’ll say that other games do mimic other games’ key features but at the very least they tried damn well to be original.

Bring back Crash, you immensely unoriginal pollocks.

Why is it that anytime I look to see if a game is good, people always point to numbers? Not even the text of the review or the pros and cons of a game, just a number. How does a number tell me how great a game is or if I’ll like it? How does a number show me if a game is fun? If a number is all that makes a game good, how come I and countless others enjoy games that have a low rating? Is it because I just have a crap taste in games, and so does everyone else that enjoys it, or is it something more?

The answer is simple, numbers are all speculative, they are there to entertain those who do not have the patience to read a review, they are also there, on an unintentional level, so that people who are biased against a game can laugh about it receiving a “low-score”. Let’s say we have a game that scored a theoretical 8.8/10, you are going to find people that even though the theoretical 88% is above average, will say it sucks compared to <insert higher score here from a game probably not even in the same game genre>. Why does that happen? Because people like to be abusive and get under your skin when there is no threat of physical harm because they haven’t invented a device that allows you to punch someone in the face via the internet yet.

If you want to know about a game, read about it, don’t just take a number and say “Oh well it scored a 6/10, it must be horrible”. Read the review, decide if the game you’re looking at appeals to you. Decide if the cons outweigh the pros or if it’s worth your money. Numbers mean nothing without context, and if you really need to compare games, at least compare games that are in the same timeline or genre, because it really does not make sense to compare StarCraft to Halo just because THEY BOTH HAVE NUMBERS ATTACHED TO THEIR REVIEW!