Gamebreaking

help my friend mike sacco!!!

natellite — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 15:35:48 -0500

hey guys, my friend Mike Sacco - who you may have heard lost his job earlier this month for some stuff he wrote about Borderlands on twitter - is looking to get a psychiatric assessment for his depression and anxiety issues.

as a freelance game journalist and writer who recently lost a good portion of his income, he obviously doesn’t have health insurance, and i know better than just about anyone how scary and hard it can be to take care of yourself and your mental health when you’re not making any goddamn money.

i would really appreciate it if you’d take a look at the WePay link at the top and consider donating - or, at the very least, reblogging the post. mike is one of my very dearest friends, i love him more than i can express, and i want to help him in any way i can.

thanks :3

"'Guild Wars 2' writer disappointed in game's players heavily favoring Human race"

natellite — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 18:07:51 -0400

"'Guild Wars 2' writer disappointed in game's players heavily favoring Human race":

From Polygon.com, a really interesting infograph about the breakdown of GW2 races and classes. Perhaps not surprisingly, humans are overwhelmingly popular. It’s too bad - the writing in GW2 is universally solid, but some of the content in the Sylvari zones particularly has floored me. I hope more people get to see it.

yo it's time for a greenlight post

natellite — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 22:10:02 -0400

rabbivole:

if yall aren’t looking at steam greenlight you should be. it’s a fun way to see the absolute worst of what indie gaming has to offer AND support some rad games that should be on steam

i thought i would collect some of the things i think people should go check out!!!!

Read More

I agree with everything jason says as a rule, but he’s especially correct here.

Obsidian missed Fallout: New Vegas Metacritic bonus by one point

natellite — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 03:15:23 -0400

rabbivole:

ahahahahahha holy shit bethesda

Unfortunately for Obsidian, Fallout: New Vegas currently has a Metacritic average of 84, a single point below the average that would’ve earned the company royalties on its product. “[Fallout: New Vegas] was a straight payment, no royalties, only a bonus if we got an 85+ on Metacritic, which we didn’t,” Obsidian creative director and co-owner Chris Avellone told one Twitter user.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/15/obsidian-missed-fallout-new-vegas-metacritic-bonus-by-one-point/

From what I’ve been led to understand, this is pretty much an industry standard practice, and it’s PRETTY DISGUSTING. As if mainstream games journalism wasn’t already in bed with publishers, devs have to enter what basically amounts to a devil’s threesome with the publishers and the reviewers in order to have any hope of getting paid, you know, a living wage.

Burn metacritic to the ground, basically.

Tomb Raider, Rape Culture, and a Concise Illustration of Exactly What is Wrong With the Game Industry

natellite — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 02:23:00 -0400

I’m still collecting my thoughts from the Big Three’s press conferences, so thanks for bearing with me through my horrifically busy schedule this past week. I want to take a short break from the madness of E3 to talk about something only tangentially related: Tomb Raider.

Now, listen - I’m not going to stand up and issue forth an indictment of this almost two-decade-old franchise on the basis of the extreme sexualization of the character that has existed from day one. That’s obvious to anyone with two working eyes, and I don’t think there’s anything left to be said about it. We all know Old Lara Croft with her comically short shorts and her excessively large polygonal breasts. We went through the phase where she was lauded as a Strong Woman despite being little more than a pin-up for horny male teens. Those days are behind us.

…mostly.

Because today, we have Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider. (And from now on, we’re just going to call it Tomb Raider, because calling it The New Tomb Raider or Tomb Raider (2012) is clunky as hell.)

The above (and similar pictures) was the first I saw of the new Tomb Raider a couple of years ago, and even just with that limited context, I was pretty ecstatic. New Lara looked dirty. She looked as though she’d been crawling through filthy tunnels looking for some ancient relic or other. She looked tough, and perhaps most encouragingly, she looked sensible. The modelers had seen fit to reduce her cup size by a factor of 10 or so. She looked like something approaching a real person! In some pictures they released, she was shown to be wearing actual pants!

And then the other shoe dropped. Crystal Dynamics released a gameplay trailer during E3 2011. It’s short, you can watch the whole thing, but the really egregious stuff doesn’t start until roughly the 4-minute mark. And by the really egregious stuff, I mean Lara’s incidental voice acting.

Seriously, listen to it. It’s the most uncomfortable thing I’ve heard in a while, even in retrospect. Lara is put through a series of puzzles, she has to dodge falling rocks, she has to fend off attackers, all while experiencing what is apparently an earth-shattering orgasm.

But hey, I thought to myself, maybe it won’t suck. Surely some of the feedback from that trailer will make its way through whatever road to the developer, who might realize the degree to which it sounds like Lara is moaning erotically while going through what is essentially a series of torture chambers.

Needless to say, then, I was interested to see what Crystal Dynamics would bring to the table this year.

What they brought to the table was not good. In fact it was by pretty much all accounts even worse than last year. Lara now cannot move more than a few feet without panting. Every time she lands on her feet, she releases an orgasmic squeal. I’m pretty sure that the VA directions for this trailer were just the second two-thirds of Deepthroat. And this is all while she’s enduring physical pain and trials the likes of which haven’t been seen outside of a Vin Diesel movie. I was, in a word, done. Nice try, boys! Next time try not to give your players an erection.

And then things got even worse.

Because yesterday, Crystal Dynamics gave Kotaku an interview. Check this out:

“When people play Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character,” Rosenberg told me at E3 last week when I asked if it was difficult to develop for a female protagonist.

“They’re more like ‘I want to protect her.’ There’s this sort of dynamic of ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.’”

Excuse me?

Maybe people would project themselves more onto Lara Croft if she was at all a relatable, real character instead of a blowup doll with sidearms. Maybe gamers of both genders wouldn’t have a problem connecting with Lara Croft if, up to this point she was an actual human being.

And hang on just a second, protect her? That completely defeats the purpose of making Lara the POV character. That isn’t how this shit works. You want to protect Emma in Metal Gear Solid 2. You want to protect Yorda in ICO. I’m not supposed to want to protect the character through whose eyes I’m seeing the world, I’m supposed to want to BE HER.

I can’t remember the last time a developer said of a male protagonist, “You will want to protect him.” Did you want to protect Nathan Drake or Ezio Auditore? Did you want to protect Gordon Freeman or Adam Jensen or any other of the thousand male protagonists that have come and gone over the years?

Of course not.

So why do they want us to protect Lara, instead of being Lara?

“The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear,” he said. “She literally goes from zero to hero… we’re sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again.”

In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft will suffer. Her best friend will be kidnapped. She’ll get taken prisoner by island scavengers. And then, Rosenberg says, those scavengers will try to rape her.

“She is literally turned into a cornered animal,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a huge step in her evolution: she’s forced to either fight back or die.”

Excuse me?

This is why men shouldn’t be allowed to develop female characters. Because when the men get their hands into the project and realize that they need Lara Croft to go through some Real Problems, the first thing they turn to is physical torture and rape. Perhaps it’s because they don’t think they’ll be able to write a relatable woman. Perhaps they’re just lazy. Perhaps they don’t see what exactly they’re doing that’s so awful, here. But it happened in Dragon Age: Origins. It happened in Heavy Rain. And it’s happening again.

I can’t believe that in this, The Year Two Thousand And Twelve, I’m having to write this. But developers? Writers? Men who are trying to create compelling female characters?

Please stop using sexual assault in place of actual character development.

Crystal Dynamics, please. You can still save this game. You can make Lara Croft a real character instead of a torture victim. You can make her a complete badass, give her her own agency, and let her defend herself instead of making us want to save her from being raped like some kind of adolescent white-knight fantasy. You can, in short, take Lara Croft out of the fridge.

But if this is the direction in which they’re taking the game, well… I’m just going to start yearning for the halcyon days of 1996.

Just read your EA conference impressions. Just wanted to say that Crysis 1 was most definately a sandbox game. It was all about having these huge environments, willed with destructible objects, and how you could use the nanosuit to approach a situation from any angle and handle it however you wanted. It's sandbox in that you can use whatever playstyle or strategy you want at any time and just explore this huge island. Not so sure about Crysis 2 or 3 since I haven't played them. But Crysis was.

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 04:36:11 -0400

Thanks for writing!!!

I played Crysis 1 and I didn’t have that same experience - I honestly found it pretty linear. But hearing you talk about it, I want to go back and take another look, because I feel like I must have been missing something.

Ubisoft @ E3 2012: Awkward, Tasteless, and Dumb.

natellite — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 03:17:30 -0400

or, What the Fuck Did I Just Take

Wow.

I just got done watching Gamespot’s replay of the Ubisoft press conference from yesterday - my work schedule is necessitating a more leisurely pace for these recaps. And… I don’t know, you guys. Someone really needs to check in on Yves Guillemot, make sure he’s okay. This shit is getting weird. And I don’t mean Satoru Iwata holding a banana weird. I mean, like, salvia weird.

So chronologically speaking I guess we need to talk about Flo Rida and Just Dance 4. I guess. I have the same problem with these dance games as I do with Military FPSes - I can’t tell the difference between Dance Central and Just Dance. I don’t think there is a difference, and much like how Guitar Hero tried valiantly to jump onto the Rock Bandwagon (see what I did there?), the difference at the end of the day is probably going to be more about tracklists than anything else. I think a lot of people have the Kinect now, and a lot of people have the Wii, so that’s pretty much your choice made for you. Let’s move on.

Far Cry 3

And suddenly, everything went completely off the rails. The Far Cry 3 gameplay demo started out with the main character (you) awkwardly fondling a topless native woman’s breasts. The native lady (who I’m pretty sure was voiced by Zoe Saldana, or someone who was trying really hard to sound like Zoe Saldana) tells you something about your destiny or something, then you get up to find that the entire village is watching you have weird sex with this woman. And then it turns into Avatar - the music swells, you pledge to lead these poor, backward islanders against the menace of Someone Bad, then you dive into the ocean.

And this is where shit gets really weird. Because suddenly you’re having LSD flashbacks, you’re being taunted via televisions by your Heath-Ledger-As-Joker arch-nemesis (who we see turning into different characters - into you, for instance, or into strippers), you drop into a deep pool of water and see entire rainbows of televisions. They hit the “insanity” thing pretty hard - so I guess we’re being led to believe that you’re an unreliable narrator and something, something. Listen. Who gives a shit. We’re missing the obvious stuff.

Why the fuck were you having sex with the villager?

Why was the entire village watching you?

Did we really need a scene of an enemy soldier beating a tied-up woman in the first two minutes of the game?

It isn’t just gratuitous, it’s completely tasteless. I don’t know if it was meant to establish the surreality of the setting or if it was there just to titillate people (my money is on the latter) but it tainted the entire presentation for me. Far Cry used to be a halfway-decent open world shooter with some really nice environmental effects.

When did it turn into this?

Splinter Cell: Blacklist

A lot of people I’ve spoken with since this game was introduced aren’t super happy about it, and I can understand why. The trailer was chock-full of Sam Fisher killing a lot of keffiyeh-clad Iraqis, and if you read my article about Medal of Honor from yesterday, you might think that I would be eager to lump Splinter Cell in with the other gross, vaguely neo-imperialist oorah titles. And you wouldn’t be wrong. Well, not entirely, anyway.

I guess the difference is that I like the Splinter Cell games. For one, they’ve never taken themselves quite as seriously as their FPS counterparts. I liken them more to Metal Gear than Medal of Honor - there are secret plans, shadowy organizations full of ridiculous ninjas, apocalyptic superweapons, and the like. And while the trailer was pretty troubling from my particular standpoint of wanting to avoid as much jingoistic propaganda in my games as possible, it probably isn’t going to be representative of the game at large. At least, I hope not.

Avengers: Battle for Earth

Embarrassingly low-res, awful CG, and we didn’t even get to see the main cast of the Avengers doing anything except watch Wolverine and Spidey beat the crap out of some B-list villains. This would have been a bad trailer in 2002. Next!

ZombiU

I’m going to talk at length about ZombiU in the next couple of days - I think it’s important to put the game in the context of the WiiU, so I’ll write more about it when I write about Nintendo’s offering this year. All I’ll say now is that I really liked the trailer and I can’t wait to see more.

Assassin’s Creed 3

Before I write something inflammatory, I want to be clear here. I’m a huge fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Assassin’s Creed 2 was without a doubt one of my favorite games of 2009. Brotherhood was fantastic. I’m eight hours deep into Revelations right now and enjoying the hell out of it. The Assassin’s Creed games manage to keep the core gameplay of the series solid while constantly introducing new and interesting concepts and mechanics. My feelings for the franchise transcend “affection” and tend more toward the “fangirl” area.

So let me tell you, then, why I’m not excited about Assassin’s Creed 3.

I’ll admit that I had my hopes up for a more baroque setting in AC3. I wanted revolutionary Paris. Maybe industrial revolution-era London. I’ve spent probably hours thinking about how cool an Eastern setting would be for an AC game. Maybe something in China or Japan or India. Something new. Something exciting.

So yeah, I was a little bit crestfallen when I heard we were going to 1770s America. My beautiful architecture, replaced by trees. My bustling cities full of life, replaced by snowdrifts and wild animals. The disappointment of it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Take, too, the character of Connor. I like that he’s apparently Native American. I like that his facial animations and combat animations have been improved - if nothing else, the game looks incredible. I don’t like how his voice actor has been stumbling over his lines in the material that we’ve seen. I don’t like how the character seems to be a return to the Blank Slate Assassin in the vein of Altair from AC1 - especially not after Ezio (so full of life! so full of personality!) just took us through a whole trilogy of gross sobbing and incoherent emotional noises.

It’s intractable, at the end of the day - I’m still going to buy it. I’m going to play it, and I’m going to enjoy it, because I like the parkour and the combat and I really like the look of the naval sections. But I can’t help but feel like something is missing.

Shootmania

Yes, it’s actually called that.

This was the most embarrassing part of the whole thing. Toby Turner starts gushing obnoxiously about esports and then suddenly there’s a battle of the sexes thing going on and frankly the game was so uninteresting, the announcing was so painful to listen to, and the memory of Toby’s voice grating in my ears was so soul-crushing that I zoned out and thought about pancakes for like 20 minutes. I remember feeling shame. That’s about it.

Watch_Dogs

And then, suddenly, blessedly, riding from out of the mist, came Watch_Dogs. I still don’t really know how to describe it - it’s almost a modern cyberpunk setting, a strange amalgam of Deus Ex and Grand Theft Auto, coupled with the absolute most gorgeous visuals I’ve seen so far at E3. The gameplay trailer we got was agonizingly short and left me hungry. And the reveal at the end suggests that we’re looking at either co-op multiplayer or a full-fledged MMO environment? Holy shit. Sign me up. I wish I had more to say about it. Please watch that video, it was amazing.

Finally, I want to say something. I’ve seen a lot of people giving Aisha Tyler shit for not being the World’s Best E3 Press Conference Host, and all of the obvious stuff aside (would you be saying this shit about her if she weren’t a black woman? nope), fuck that. Aisha Tyler was great. She was obviously working with a pretty bad script and literally the world’s worst co-host in Toby Turner, but she was one of the only people on stage so far this year that didn’t make me feel the most severe douche-chills. She was funny when the script allowed her to be, she ad-libbed her way out of some painful moments, and she was one of the only people who seemed genuine. Aisha Tyler was great. Haters to the left.

I really don’t know what to say about Ubisoft this year. Aside from Watch_Dogs, I didn’t come away super-impressed by anything, and the trailer for Far Cry left a profoundly bad taste in my mouth (seriously, WHAT WAS THAT). Hopefully what we saw from the Big Three will make up for it.

GameSpy: SimCity Disappointment: You Won't Be Able to Save, Destroy, and Reload Your City

natellite — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 05:09:41 -0400

GameSpy: SimCity Disappointment: You Won't Be Able to Save, Destroy, and Reload Your City:

Oh, dear.

As anyone who’s played one knows, one of the simplest pleasures of any SimCity game, dating back to the 1989 original, is the consequence-free “What if?” scenario. The kind where you obliterate your city by triggering an apocalyptic wave of fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, and monster attacks, then time-warp it back to pristine condition by loading a saved game. When I asked Lead Producer Kip Katsaelis if the 2013 SimCity would allow that same pleasure in its Glass Box-powered cities, the answer was a simple, disappointing “No.”

The perils of always-online gameplay, I guess. This is probably one of those things that we’ll look back on in ten years and laugh about, like the transition from cartridges to discs. But this, coupled with Blizzard’s recent Battle.net woes that prevented people from playing the single-player version of the game that they already owned, would appear to make a pretty compelling case for leaving offline play untouched.

What do you think?

EA: Medal of Honor, Battlefield, and the White Power Fantasy

natellite — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 01:15:00 -0400

So you guys saw these games during the EA press conference, right? If not, go check it out. I’ll wait.

Welcome back.

A brief word on BF3 before I get into the real meaty stuff. And please understand that when I ask this, I’m not trying to be a smartass:

What is the difference between all of these games?

Full disclosure: These military FPSes really aren’t my thing. I have about 30 hours clocked in Bad Company 2, and about the same in the first Modern Warfare game. It isn’t that they aren’t fun - they are, up to a point! - it’s more than there isn’t anything new anymore. And the same looks largely true of Battlefield 3. I honestly couldn’t tell you what distinguishes the Battlefield franchise from the Modern Warfare line from the Bad Company games.

If anyone wants to give me a rundown, my askbox is open. Mostly I feel like I’m obligated to mention Battlefield only as a contrast to the horror that was Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

Military FPSes have been toeing the line between “uncomfortable” and “tasteless” for a couple of generations now, and I guess Danger Close decided that ambiguity is for sissies, because Medal of Honor: Warfighter is sprinting past that line and not looking back.

“Every single mission in this game has a dotted line to an actual event or a real-world hotspot,” said Greg Goodrich, Executive Producer. The days of “Somewhere in the Middle East” are over, it would seem. And they waste no time showing us exactly how Real this Shit is going to Get by dropping is right into the middle of Somalia.

Yes, that Somalia. Fifth-poorest-country-in-the-world Somalia.

I understand that Somali piracy was a hot news topic a couple of years ago but I really don’t think Greg Goodrich understands what he’s doing when he makes a game wherein a bunch of American black-ops troops parachuting into fucking Somalia and riddling the local (poor, black, desperate) population with holes. At least, I hope he doesn’t understand. I would rather think him ignorant than monstrous. Is there anything more tasteless than making a game out of things that people are, at this very second, dying for?

The problem with games like this is that the very premise is flawed - and yet, here in America, it’s one that we take for granted. Without exception, these games have us, the player, serving as the arm of American (or British, or French, or Canadian, or German) military might, taking out some tinpot dictator or terrorist cell. Every single one of these games is a Tom Clancy book come to life - which is fine when you want something that captures the attention, but extremely worrying when it comes to the lessons that these games are teaching us.

It isn’t even about imperialism. It’s about taking imperialism for granted. It isn’t that being the arm of Western power isn’t ultimately a satisfying game experience. It’s just that for once - just once - I’d like these games to have a shred of self-awareness. I’d like for these games to present a more complicated and nuanced scenario than “white savior rescues entire world from brown terrorist menace.” Just once, I’d like to be given a choice.