I only seem to be playing half of what I'm paying for.

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with online multiplayer. I do play online on occasion, yet I rarely touch the multiplayer component of most of the games I’ve gotten in this generation.

There. I’ve said it.

If I do go online I often find myself surrounded by idiots. A reason in itself to play in a closed party, but not the reason I don’t often mess with multiplayer. It’s because I find the multiplayer portion of most games to be entirely superfluous to the experience that I like to gain from singleplayer. Fair enough some games are built around their online component. For all my bitching about Call of Duty or Battlefield, the multiplayer portions are pretty damn good and are rightly lauded. I’m just turned off by some of the people who play it. Gears of War is fabulous online, as are Forza, PGR, Tekken and Left4Dead. But sometimes there is a multiplayer component added for seemingly no reason, except that the board of directors wanted it.

For instance, Bioshock.

I know this is just one example, but it’s the one that floats closest to the front of my mind. The first game was a wonderfully self contained experience, with a strong focus on narrative and on how you approach taking down your enemies. In short, my favourite kind of shooter. Best of all it was defiantly singleplayer. Why then, does Bioshock 2 have a multiplayer segment, complete with a half hearted attempt to meld it into the world by way of making it a Plasmid test? I bought Bioshock 2 to take another journey through Rapture. The thought of shooting other people online in that city at the bottom of the sea never once crossed my mind. I had visions of the nuance being sucked out of the game and consequently never went near it. I don’t know anybody who has played Bioshock 2 who has.

The thing is, Digital Extremes, the people behind the Bioshock 2 multiplayer, have pedigree. They had a hand in Unreal Tournament, but I can’t help thinking that their talents couldn’t have been better spent on a project more given to a multiplayer setting. If you’ve played Bioshock 2 multiplayer, I’d like very much to know if it was worth your time.

Thankfully, I’ve just found out that Bioshock Infinite will have no multiplayer. It’s made me quite a happy man. Multiplayer in Bioshock 2 smacked of a decision from the publishers. Props to Ken Levine for resisting any pressure there might have been to include it in Infinite.

In a roundabout way this brings me to my point. Games are expensive. This is something that we all know. They are a considerable investment in both time and money. It is getting better though. I remember back in the deep dark hole in time that was the mid nineties when Sonic 3 came out, it cost something in the region of seventy five pounds in the Kayes catalogue we used to get when I was a kid. That’s an awfully large amount of money now, let alone in 1994. Especially when most of the people who would be playing it would have been around ten, like I was. And it was only half a game. It took the additional purchase of Sonic and Knuckles to play the what was technically the 'whole' of Sonic 3, sort of prescient in a way, what with this generation’s obsession with DLC and all.

Incidentally, Sonic 3's two player match races were fantastic.

Maybe Sega were onto something with this half a game thing though. Like I said, I don’t play multiplayer much. Conversely I work with quite a few people who buy the yearly Call of Duty and never look at the singleplayer. They live for the thrill of multiplayer and if it’s their thing then that’s cool.

 

So how about this? Why don’t publishers release the single and multiplayer portions of a game separately? That way you only pay for the kind of game you like to play. It also removes the major barrier to entry, cost. Think about it, would a game be an impulse buy at forty quid? Probably not, but personally, if I saw a new game out at twenty, I probably would pick it up. And if after playing it, the idea of multiplayer excited me, I could probably be tempted to splash a bit more for the multiplayer component.

Everybody wins. Loners like me don’t have to pay multiplayer portion they’ll never use, and gregarious types can save money by not buying the singleplayer segment of this year’s multiplayer hit, which, if the reviews for Battlefield 3 are to be believed, can be pretty inferior as singleplayer games go anyway.

Ok, maybe one or two publishers would attempt to cash in on this model by making the combined price for both halves greater than if they were just released as a combined whole, but on the flipside it might make them think twice about grafting on an un-needed multiplayer mode if there’s a chance nobody would buy it. 

And I think that could be a win for everyone.

Are we waiting too long for flashy new consoles?

There's a bit been said about this console generation being a bit long, and that it's stifling the industry as a whole.

But you know what? I don't mind. Frankly it's been nice not to have to shell out over three hundred quid on a new bit of all singing all dancing hardware. My 360 is doing very nicely thank-you-very-much. The games are mostly good, and it's pumping out visuals that comparable to a lot of CG animated movies of just a few years ago. If you don't believe me, compare the looks of some of the very latest releases against movies of the same vintage as the first Ice Age film.

Yes this generation is seven years old. That should mean that developers don't have to worry about how they work within the architecture they have (they can already manipulate the hardware to the best of it's capabilities), so they should be able to focus the spared effort on getting really creative. But instead we have some of the major developers and publishers saying they need new hardware to encourage them to take risks.

The indie developers don't seem to be having that problem. If you look at any of the download services, Steam, XBLA, or SEN for instance, there's a plethora of fun and imaginative titles to chose from, yet a lot of what we get from the major Triple A publishers are macho dude-bro sequels. Now I like a good sequel as much as the next gamer, but what I like more is a new IP, and there doesn't seem to be many people out there willing to take that risk anymore.

Thankfully there are is smattering of all new stuff coming through. Even at this late point in the console cycle. Dishonored, Beyond: Two Souls and The Last of Us being shining examples of this. There's even a couple of exciting reboots of established names in the new Tomb Raider and DMC games on the way. And even though they're not entirely new IPs, they're taking risks with our preconceptions of what those two games should be. Reading the previews, it's looking increasingly like those risks have been entirely justified.

Here's a thought.

Technically the last generation is still soldiering on. When the Wii came out, it was derided for using last-gen hardware, and yet, discounting the shovelware, some of the best, most fun and most innovative games of the last few years have been released upon its decidedly low powered circuit boards. Games like Madworld, Smash Bros: Brawl, Mario Galaxy, Zelda: Skyward Sword and No More Heroes showed that you didn't need massive power to make awesome games. Yes, you can say that the Wii remotes add a new dimension to the way the system works, but it's still running on last-gen tech. The Kinect isn't. And it's rubbish. The Wii sets a great example of what can be done with old tech if you stop moaning about how underpowered it is and concentrate on making games that are fun and innovative instead.

We shouldn't need shiny new hardware to encourage developers to be imaginative, it should come naturally. It's just a shame everybody seems to be so risk averse these days.

At the end of The Walking Dead. (Possible Spoilers)

I finished the last episode of The Walking Dead last night. So eager was I to see how it ended, that even after an evening out, I downloaded it as soon as I walked in the front door. It was so good it inspired a rare late night gaming session in me. Then it inspired loss of sleep while I turned the whole thing over in my mind and tried to digest all that happened.

The Walking Dead is fiction of the highest order. Less a game, more a graphic novel whose plot and conversations you direct. Things only went downhill. There was never any reason to feel like a zombie slaying badass, like you do in Left4Dead. The Walking Dead never let you forget that the walkers used to be people, and I felt a pang of guilt with each one I bought down. The situation is never anything but dire in the Walking Dead. The oppressive atmosphere hung over every decision I made. And it was never as simple as good or bad. There was only bad or bad. Terrible or terrible. Every decision I made wound up being tempered by wanting to do right by Clementine.

Never before, have I felt so attached or protective over a videogame character. Clementine is a masterstroke. I saw and did monstrous things over the course of those five episodes. I stole food, murdered a man in anger and willingly dropped another to his death. These were my decisions, none of them were foisted upon me by the game. I ignored the alternatives and Lee and I had to live with the consequences. But seeing the look on Clementine’s face, each time she found out about these things really cut deep. You know what you're doing is wrong. Sometimes the things you do are even necessary, but seeing how Clementine reacts to them is really wrenching.

There was room for compassion in this crazy mixed up world. Lee and Kenny bonded, which is to say, Kenny and I bonded. I liked him, and when the time came, I couldn’t let him do a thing that no man should have to. So I shouldered the guilt and did it for him. We had each other’s backs for the whole game and despite disagreeing with him at some points, we were friends right to the end of the game.

The Walking Dead was an emotional rollercoaster. Actually, no, it wasn’t. There are highs and lows on a rollercoaster. The Walking Dead was an emotional cliff. Forever tumbling downwards, with no let up until the episode ended. There were moments of sudden and explosive violence between other characters that were so shocking that at one point I put the controller down and just said holy shit for five minutes while the scene played out. I wanted justice for what happened and did something pretty awful to make sure I got it.

If you have not played episode five, read no further. There are spoilers ahead.

The fifth episode in particular was one emotional low after another.  Seeing Lee slowly killing himself to get to Clementine was heart rending. Saving her did nothing to stop the sink ever downwards, because I knew what had to come next. If I didn’t have a heart of stone, I would have cried at that moment. Seeing Clementine in that state wasn’t part of the plan. All Lee wanted, all I wanted, was to make sure she was safe.

I worry for her future.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Have you played Curiosity yet?

If you have an Android or iDevice I really must insist that you do. Now that the servers have settled down it’s become something really quite special.

For those of you who don’t know what it is, Curiosity is the first title from 22cans, the studio that Peter Molyneux founded after he left Lionhead. That should tell you something in itself. It is part social experiment in cooperation and compulsion, part experiment in game mechanics. There’s a cube. There’s something inside it. Everyone can see the cube and everyone can chip away at it, but only one person sees what’s inside. And what’s inside is something secret, yet something that is supposed to be incredible. Will the person who gets to the centre of the cube keep it for his or herself, or will they share it with the rest of the world? Will we ever get to the centre of the cube? It’s a massive job. Maybe the experiment is a way to find out how long something will hold the world’s attention before the world gives up. You can keep guessing about what the real experiment is and what’s in the centre. The only man who knows for sure is Peter Molyneux and he’s not telling.

What is certain about Curiosity is that it’s bloody addictive. You can easily sit there tapping away for hours and not notice the time pass. You find yourself making patterns as you painstakingly expose the surface below, trying to piece together the image underneath the layer that may or may not be an image at all, or seeing how quickly you can clear a screen or even just switching off and tapping mindlessly away. Everyone I know who has played it gets something slightly different out of it for themselves. They’ve been drawing pictures, writing messages along the cube’s surfaces and even censoring some of the more lewd ones out there.

During my reverie, I’ve noticed that Curiosity is just about the purest game I have ever played. Look at it like this. Almost every game from the dawn of the electronic age, from Space Invaders to Tetris to Mario 64 right up to Call of Duty essentially boils down to one thing. Making stuff go away. Clicking on things until they disappear. Shoot the aliens or the terrorists, sling Bowser into the lava or clear those blocks. Make the things go away to keep playing.

Curiosity is the ultimate distillation of that line of play. It strips away the distracting graphics, giving you nothing but a cube. It takes away the peril, and gives you peace to work in. It takes away the enemies and gives you surfaces to clear. It takes away the weapons, rather than blowing shit up, you’re left with nothing but your finger to tap cubelets and make them disappear. Rather than move, you spin the cube and zoom in and out. The score becomes coins found under the surface. They’re there to be spent almost exclusively on clearing cubelets from the layer the world is currently working on. You get the feeling that the soothing music is only playing because there’s such a thing as going too far.

What you are left with is the cube, a goal and a simple means to attain said goal. And amazingly, that’s enough. I’m happy to spend time clearing the cube knowing that my chance of seeing inside is miniscule. I’ll do my bit and hope to high heaven that the person who does is the generous type. Perhaps one of the kind of people that share their whole life over the social media.

Here’s hoping.

Maybe that statement says something about me. Maybe it’s what Mr Molyneux wants all along. Maybe the cube is intended as a mirror from which we learn something about ourselves. Maybe I’m just talking pretentious rubbish. There has been a lot of reaction to Curiosity, and amongst all the variation, quite a significant number of articles contain a phrase along the lines of, “you must play this.”

And doesn’t that make you a little bit curious?

Please don't remake Final Fantasy VII! You might ruin it.

Love Final Fantasy VII? If you’re a gamer of a certain age then of course you do. You probably want to see it remade as well right? Well it’d be nice, but it wouldn’t be FFVII if it was.

I finished FFVII for about the fifth time a few months ago and came out of it with the absolute conviction that it is perfect exactly as it is. For all its cube shaped hands, its midi music and curious little translation gaffes, I couldn’t see it being any better if it was remade.

Would seeing it with flashy HD graphics actually make the same impact as it did all those years ago when Cloud stepped off the train and blew up the reactor with a foul mouthed dude called Barrett? Probably not. If it was released like that today, it would just be an antique with some admittedly really nice graphics.

Besides, can anybody remember when a remake of anything was actually better than the original? Something that stood on its own merit, bringing new ideas and a competent reimagining in its own right. Something that made you look at the original in a new way and made you appreciate it slightly more for what it was, when what the original did was so far ahead of its time that it warranted a fresh attempt with technology that could keep up.  How about if we narrow that down to just games? Sure, it might run in 1080p and have smoother textures, but was the game actually better than the original? I can think of one. Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and that was mainly down to the huge step up in power between the PS1 and the Gamecube. Okay, the step between a PS1 and a PS3 is as wide as the English channel, but Final Fantasy doesn’t need first person aiming and lip syncing to make it any better.

Take a look at today’s remakes. Is Shadow of the Colossus HD actually any better than the PS2 version? No, but it looks how your rose tinted spectacles make you remember it. How about the impact it made? Again, back when it was released, Colossus made a huge splash. It didn’t sell well, and shame on you if you didn’t buy it first time round, but the sense of scale and desolation of it just blew people away at the time. Fast forward to today, and nobody really bats an eyelid at any of that. It’s been seen before. The same goes for most remakes of last gen games. A lick of HD paint doesn’t cover up the fact that they are effectively still exactly the same game as what they were when they were first released.

Final Fantasy VII is its own thing. Everything about it adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. Change any part and it wouldn’t be FFVII anymore. Could you imagine what would happen if Square tried bringing it up to date? Would you like to see the battle system changed? What about the overall look? What if they decided certain parts of the game didn’t need to be there and cut them? What if hardware limitations meant that they had to run it through an FFXIII style tunnel? Worse still, what if they replaced FFVII Cloud, who may not have been the perkiest of guys but was at least relatable, with the silent, sullen non character he became in Advent Children and Kingdom Hearts?

The final nail in the coffin would be voice acting. Square voice acting ranges from mostly excellent (Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy X) to godawful (Vanille and Hope in Final Fantasy XIII). I have a genuine fear that any voices added to FFVII would degenerate into the anime clichés that plagued the voice work of FFXIII. Yuffie would clearly be voiced in the same terribly annoying style of FFXIII’s Vanille. This logic states that as the sorta-kinda comic relief, Barret, like FFXIII’s Sazh will inadvertently receive an amazing actor and become the one redeeming feature of the whole sorry affair. FFVII is gaming’s Metropolis. It’s silent and the silence is integral to the experience. You read the script and this wonderful thing known as imagination lets you hear the characters, despite the lack of voice. Nobody would dare desecrate a work like Metropolis, why do the same to Final Fantasy VII?

These things happen when something is remade and the people making it decide to bring it into line with what they think modern audiences expect. We only have to look at the movie world to see this. Whilst there are undoubtedly some good movie remakes out there, there is a whole litany of poor ones. From pointless exercises like the Italian Job, Get Carter, Poseidon, and any American version of a J-horror flick to just plain bad ones like The Pink Panther, and Clash of the Titans. And Hollywood just keeps going with them. Look at the forthcoming remakes of Robocop and Starship Troopers. Remakes show laziness and a dearth of creative imagination at the studio that is making them. Two accusations I’d rather not see levelled at Square-Enix, one of my favourite developers.

Besides, modern audiences are the people who buy the yearly Call of Battlefield and hurl abuse at each other over multiplayer through teh interwebz. Do you really want FFVII to be remade to satisfy the tastes of that lot? I didn’t think you would. Luckily it was recently documented by IGN that Square CEO Yoichi Wada has said that there won’t be a remake until they make a game that “exceeds the quality” of FFVII.

Good luck there guys.

Final Fantasy is Oldskool. It should remain that way. And if someone who comes to it today can’t appreciate the merits of it just because it’s old, well screw them. It’s their loss. One day, they’ll see the light.

Is Sega living too deeply in it's past?

I spotted an intriguing thing the other day. Virtua Fighter 2 running on the 360.

Cool.

Sega is releasing a collection of model2 arcade remasters onto the XBLA and SEN, and it’s a nice touch. I never did get to play Fighting Vipers the first time around. Maybe while they’re at it we’ll get versions of Sega Rally and Sega Touring Car too. Maybe even Manx TT. The thing is, that might be cool and all, and we all know that Sega’s business model at the moment is based around a few strong franchises and a digitally distributed back catalogue, but I can’t help thinking that Sega are going about this in entirely the wrong way.

Sega have a rich history to mine, and since I never had a Saturn it is nice to see some of the stuff I never got to play as a kid coming back. I downloaded Nights into Dreams on release day, and for a game released way back in the mid nineties it’s way better and much more unique than it has any right to be. But here’s a thought, instead of just re-releasing old games from beloved franchises, why can’t those same franchises be resurrected and given new games? Sure it’s a risk, but if it’s done right there’s a chance of a big reward. Sega already have form with this with Sonic Generations.

Generations was applauded as one of the best Sonic games in years. And rightly so. Personally I played it to the (literal) death of my old white Xbox, but the sections I played most were the classic Sonic levels. Sega had finally nailed Sonic in 3D, but at the same time they reminded us about what was so awesome about Sonic in 2D in the first place. So how about Sonic 5, made with the Generations engine, in 2.5D?

Part of what made Generations work with modern 3D Sonic was the occasional shift to 2D. Why not flip it round and have the action of Sonic 5 mostly in 2D but with the camera panning mid level to really show off a setpiece or two. So when something happens like the orca chase, riding rockets, swinging on the vines or hitting the tunnels of springboards in the two Sonic Adventures, we get a camera pan and have Sonic move into the screen for a few glorious, level defining seconds. It might just work. It’s just a shame Sega have said we’ll never see chubby classic Sonic again.

And that makes me sad.

What cheers me up is the thought of other classic franchises treated the same way. How about a new Ristar for instance? It’s still got a gameplay element that’s pretty much unique among platformers, and all those exotic planets would look great run through the 2D half of the Sonic Generations engine.  As a boxed game it would be a lost cause, but as a digital release it could stand a chance.

But why stop there? Why not commission Platinum games to make a new Streets of Rage, or better yet, Shinobi? Why not bring back Toejam and Earl? A new F355 challenge? I’d certainly play that. Brand new Jet Set Radio, Nights, Outrun? Crazy Taxi set in London with sooped up drop-top black cabs and monumentally mouthy cabbies? How about grabbing Playground games (a group of veterans fresh from Forza Horizon who come from several famed racing studios including Bizarre Creations) and setting them to work on a new MSR? Sega do own the IP after all. Could Harmonix make a new Space Channel 5 based on the tech powering Dance Central? You’re damn right they can. Could you imagine how beautiful Ecco the dolphin would be on a current gen machine? Why not team up with EA and Critereon and bring back Road Rash? A new Skies of Arkadia perhaps? I’m stretching it here, but Thunder Blade deserves a comeback, and who wouldn’t play a modern day Quackshot? Think Duck Tales (remember that?) crossed with Uncharted, but with a lower body count and coloured plungers as ammo. Would you like to see Donald Duck battle through Pirate Pete’s sinking ship to rescue Huey, Dewey and Lewie as it pitches and rolls on a dynamic ocean? I’d pay to see that. Yes it’s Disney, but so what?

And then the holy Sega grail. Panzer Dragoon. New Panzer Dragoon shooters would be great, but what we really want is a conversion of Panzer Dragoon Saga. Yes, I know I’ve just ranted about re releasing old games, but Saga is Special. The original source code is lost, so the game is supposed to be un-remake-able. But that might not be the case anymore! Bluepoint games used a reverse engineered game disc as their source for God of War HD. The logic being that the code was in release condition and as free of bugs as possible. If they can do that with a recent PS2 game then maybe it might not be totally impossible that the same could be done with a release copy of Saga?

Just saying. And it would be pretty cool if they could.

Sega can trade off their past easily. They have a raft of great IPs that they can revisit at any time. I’d just like to see a bit of the old Sega imagination, fun and daring in that strategy. Bring back old names by all means, but it would be nice to see those old names given great new games.

And for the love of Christ, would someone please put Yu Suzuki to work finishing Shenmue?

The firstest post

Amongst other things, I’m a gamer. I’m also edging inexorably towards thirty, which unfortunately, makes me something of a grownup gamer, and while that’s not exactly unusual it sometimes feels like it. It also means I’m sometimes given to venting opinions and the odd rant.

Sometimes they’re even valid. And if they’re not then at least they might be entertaining. So I’ve decided to put them here for posterity. They’ll likely be pretty much all gaming related, but I’m a man of many tastes, so I’m making no excuses if I go off topic on occasion.

So it’ll be gaming current affairs, rants, the odd paean to the past and hastily formed opinions. Updates as often as I can.

Enjoy.