Gibs: Phones, MMOs and the Future

Welcome back!

Posts here have been few and far between, but of course real life must come first in anything which isn’t a real job, and this definitely isn’t a real job, as much as I’d like to get paid to chat about games all day it’s a saturated field to say the least.

So what is/are ‘Gibs’? Apart from being the chunky bits one will experience when shoving a rocket in somebody’s face in a classic arena based shooter, it’s also a banner under which smaller discussion pieces will appear that aren’t impossibly over-wordy enough to be worth their own entry.

Windows Phone 7

I like mobile technology, let’s be honest here. Bizarrely however, I really do not care at all for ‘apps’, that is, games and feature programs that pull attention away from the core functions of the device itself. If you want to impress me personally, make your core feature set absolutely incredible, I want the best contacts hub, calendar, messaging system, photo viewer, whatever. I am immune to being impressed by something that your company did not do themselves when it comes to mobile devices, I don’t care if Skype or someone made the best IM app in the universe, and it’s on your platform, you should have made a better one in the first place.

 “I WANT ACTIVESYNC, NOT ANOTHER FART APP”

So it might become obvious at this point that I’m not an iPhone user. Not a slight against the device itself, although I will complain endlessly about each ‘new’ feature they claim (3G, Hardware Rendering, GPS, front facing camera etc. etc.) will revolutionize the industry once it’s placed in an iPhone, five years after it’s been in lowest end Nokia. I’m not blaming Apple themselves for the deluge of crap that their app store hosts, that’s pretty much the user base demanding them, but Apple really isn’t helping by encouraging it.

Anyway, Windows Phone 7. It focuses on apps, on looks and on not confusing users with behind the scenes options. So why am I looking forward to it? Quite frankly, I can only ask, have you seen the functionality and fluidity of the UI? Microsoft seemed to have just dusted off the old DreamStealer and made exactly the phone I wanted in every way shape and form. Whereas Apple and Google seem to try and make things more analogue, Apple especially making a lot of official applications wood-panelled, and taking the compass from a 16th century galleon, Microsoft suddenly realized ‘Oh yeah, this is a computer!’ and made an interface that just gets the information across and gives the user free reign to use it how they wish with little to no eye-candy and a few swipes and taps. The whole UI is very ‘active’ the concept of Live Tiles and so forth are extremely appealing.

So with that said, it may not be as deep as Windows Mobile, but Windows Phone does what it’s supposed to do in the most functional way possible. Be a phone, be a PDA. So with little less than a month to go until launch, how about advertising it somewhere in the high street!

“Like this one, or not, apparently.”

Eve

I started playing an MMO recently. That may be something of an empty statement nowadays, especially considering most gamers have at least one MMO on the go at any given time, and a startling number have several, however in all my years of gaming I’ve only ever paid for one MMO prior to this. Given that I’m an FPS nut, take a wild guess on what that was, but don’t be too disheartened if you can’t guess, it’s very likely that you missed it entirely given it’s flash in the pan nature.

“Neon purple not strictly being the best camouflage ever.”

PlanetSide, a complete anomaly in the MMO space from its inception in 2003 to pretty much this day (in an ‘on life support’ kind of way) over seven years later. What made PlanetSide different? It was an MMOFPS. Whereas the Battlefield series in various guises has been famous for its heated 32 vs. 32 maps, PlanetSide used the leverage of an MMO subscription fee to bring that number to 100 vs. 100 or more on maps bigger than any featured in a multiplayer shooter before or since. Not only was the scale unprecedented, but the shooting didn’t suffer as a result, no click to move, this was undiluted FPS action on a huge scale, with vehicles and probably the only game I’ve played to date where human players across a whole server banded together to perform a common goal because it was the right thing to do. Although it was nothing like being in an actual army, the camaraderie was real, and as Rock, Paper, Shotgun puts it, “I WAS THERE, MAN” syndrome was rampant.

Maybe more about PlanetSide again some time, as I segue into the second title I’ve somehow decided to turn my wallet inside out for every month, Eve Online. To the uninformed, Eve can most easily be described as a combination of window management and clicking on things in those windows, but that really doesn’t make it sound fun or exciting. Which it is. Maybe. Eve is another anomaly in the MMO world, so maybe I just like games that don’t involve swords, sorcery, hotbars and mana. Eve is a game of exploration, combat and horrible, soul-crushing loss, dependant on the situation, and if somebody decided to be an ass.

The Future

So in regards to this blog? I don’t know to be honest. I initially started it years ago, revamped it in the last few months and then never found time to update it. It was supposed to be updated often with thoughts on the industry and so forth, maybe another short novel like ‘Let’s Talk About’, despite its considerable controversy (can it be controversial if nobody reads it?) in terms of how much skill certain genres of games take. Anyways, watch this space, or don’t, and maybe there will be more in the future, with more time to update, who knows.

Thoughts on PDLC (Paid DownLoadable Content)

So with the release of the Modern Warfare 2 ‘Stimulus Pack’ today I thought I’d share my opinion on the whole debacle. There are actually two main arguments here, so let’s break ‘em down.

• People in general who think that 1200 MS Points ($15/£9.99/etc.) is too much for three new maps, and two polished up old ones.
• PC owners who feel entitled to the map pack for free.

To immediately place myself on one side of the fence, I agree with the first point. £10 is too much for five new maps for an admittedly multiplayer-focused game. To be fair, Modern Warfare 2 also has single-player and co-op modes, the main story and ‘Spec Ops’  respectively, but let’s be honest here, how many of you ran screaming from those into multiplayer as soon as you were done? Heck, I know people who didn’t touch either and only played multiplayer, so that speaks volumes about how much people care about multi.

“You want to play Single-Player? Let’s get out of here!” 

The official reason for the pricing was twofold, one, Activision sets the price, and two, five maps adds hundreds of hours of content given that you’ll be playing them a LOT.

To be fair, I can agree with one of those reasons.

Look at something like Unreal Tournament, every update ever for UT (regardless of version) has been free, however each update has added in maybe a few maps and a new mode, but hundreds of hours of play, due to each existing mode being playable on every map, and MW2 will follow in that respect. You may only have five new maps, but you’ll be able to play Domination, Demolition, Capture the Flag, Free-For-All, and so forth on each one of those maps. A good analogy would be paying £10 for five boxes you can put anything in, rather than getting five boxes you can only put one thing in for free.

 
“It’s like this, only it makes more sense”

I don’t agree with the price, but I do agree with the reasoning behind it. One out of two isn't bad, but let’s hope Activision have a good hard think about their side of the equation, the money.

So, to move on the the second bullet point, if I don’t think the pack should cost as much, it should be free, right? Most forum users would have you believe that would be the case, however years of experience have taught me otherwise.

See, in the ‘olden’ days, us PC owners had to do the whole expansion pack thing. For roughly the price of the game we bought the year or so prior, we got a bit more ‘game’, so to speak. A few more units, maps, and missions for our RTS, a few more levels, guns and multiplayer modes for our FPS, and so on. A few games still do this, although the most prominent are those in the RTS genre. The point where people began thinking that every update for every PC game was free seems to have been lost in the mists of time, however, so I’m really not qualified to take a stab at guessing it. Instead, I’m going to attempt to list off two games who actually went down the old-school route on PC of offering minor updates for free, then busting out the more fun stuff in an expansion pack.

“You want the whole story? HERE’S your whole story!”

StarCraft is definitely a bad example, since Blizzard have a habit of supporting their games until the sun burns out and the skies turn to ash. However, Total Annihilation, a fellow RTS released around the same time, is a great example. Cavedog, the developer of TA, made an interesting move by releasing single units for the game (players could add a unit into the game by simply pasting a file into the units directory) for free. Users rejoiced, “Something for nothing?” they cried, “Excellent!”. These units however, came after a total of 79 units and 125 missions were added by full-price retail expansions. How many free units did we receive? Six. This was not an uncommon occurrence however.

If you want a better example, how about The Sims? Just counting the original game, there were seven expansions. Each subsequent title has received a similar deluge of expansion packs, each debuting at a price not too dissimilar to the original game itself. EA, whilst not having the best reputation amongst gamers, did do its part in terms of free items, releasing several around the time of each expansion pack, or thereabouts, with The Sims 3 doing the best job on the free stuff side, by regularly popping free items up on the Sims Store, a microtransaction-based virtual item shop. However, whilst each expansion pack added a new game mechanic, more items, locations and most importantly, hideously upholstered furniture, it cost money, a fair amount of it.

 “Don’t worry, nobody will notice!”

So what’s really going on here? Are PC gamers just complaining for the sake of it? Many console fans will agree, however I personally believe that people have just forgotten that once upon a time, PDLC was common, it just came in a box, and it had ‘Expansion Pack’ written on it. Now it comes in chunks, over the internet, and is priced accordingly. Adapt or perish.

Five Word Reviews!

Mass Effect 2: Nuclear missile launcher, in space!

Bioshock 2: Drill, drill, Objectivism, drill, drill.

Assassin’s Creed II: Stabbing, religious philosophy, urban renovation?

Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!

Just Cause 2: Backflip into car, from helicopter.

That’s it for this week!

Let’s Talk About: Fighting Games

So, ‘Let’s Talk About’. In posts marked with the ‘LTA’ acronym I’ll try to impart my opinion of how a genre works and plays from my point of view, not subjectively and certainly not backed up with any real facts, of course.

If I wanted to quantify success in something like a First Person Shooter, I'd say it was around 50% skill, 30% luck, 10% weapon choice and 10% memory. Essentially, luck is around half as important as skill in most FPS games, largely due to bullet spread, muzzle climb, recoil and all those other things, not to mention being in the right place at the right time, either spawning in the right place, or merely travelling there. Fighting games however are a significantly different case, in my opinion of course. I’m certainly not a newcomer to the fighting genre, however I will say now that I’m certainly not overly competitive, and my friends generally prefer games focusing on teamwork and co-operation, rather than one-on-one beat downs. So, in short, while I can take on the CPU, I certainly won’t be winning EVO anytime soon.

Essentially, I’m not writing this article from experience with one game, or even one generation of game, so I hope that some thought will be provoked as a result. I own a number of fighting games spanning the PS1, PS2, Dreamcast, and even the PC, not counting of course the many more I have played over the years.

Returning to my pervious statement about quantification of success, I would say the arguably a fighting game can be measured at around 70% skill, 20% memory and 10% tier lists. Now, whilst fighting game fans may argue that ‘tiers’ do not factor in to a skilled player’s victory, largely existing to guide newcomers into avoiding ‘bad’ starter characters, tiers also provide a record of overall victories in tournaments. To the uninitiated, a tier list, as you may have worked out, provides a list of characters, grouped top to bottom in overall usefulness, victories in tournaments, etc. Arguably, calling it a list of ‘best to worst’ is grossly oversimplifying the process, that is more or less its purpose. Suffice to say that often in fighting games, a battle can be won on the character select screen.

Now, as to discussion of the percentages. I have completely discounted luck as a discerning factor of success from fighting games. Although this may seem an odd move, luck is completely discounted at high level fighter play. Each player know exactly what they’re doing, their abilities, where each move will be directed, where it will land, and so on. A good example of this would be the classic ‘staring match’ in old samurai legends, where each warrior could stand stock still, sword sheathed for days at a time, each acutely aware of both their and their opponents strengths and weaknesses until one admitted defeat, without a single blow being made. Somewhat of an extension of the fight being over before it started as I mentioned earlier. Although I will admit that some characters in games have ‘random’ moves, Marvel Vs. Capcom games notably, it is more akin to the ‘spray and pray’ of the FPS, discounting skill rather than relying on luck (this is a bit of a difficult one to explain right).

Insofar as how one fighting game community feels about luck, one needs look no further than Nintendo’s premier fighting franchise, Smash Bros. Be it Melee, Brawl or even the original N64, the law laid down by the big name in Smash, the Smash Boards Forum is that the game must be tweaked to remove any elements of chance or luck. Items turned off, the more ‘annoying’ environmental stages removed and even more technically minded members diving in to the game’s code in an attempt to remove Brawl’s ‘tripping’ element, wherein a running character can randomly fall over. The problem here is that even some senior members admit that they are attempting to set out a list of guidelines that railroad a non-competitive game into some sort of attempt at a true fighter. So what happens when a game is designed to be played in a competitive environment from the start?

Well, you get your Street Fighters, Guilty Gears and King of Fighters, for a start. All of the prior mentioned games are big on the fighting game scene, and players will journey from all corners of the globe, much like the characters in the games themselves, to prove that they’re the best of the best. To a high tier fighting game player, every move needs to be memorized, every frame analyzed and every character strategized. For these reasons, it is often said that fighting games are the hardest type of games to ‘break into’, as the difference between high and low, and even high and mid level players can beggar belief. Often when I see someone eyeing a copy of Street Fighter IV, BlazBlue or King of Fighters XII, I wonder how long it will be before that game is played online, and then unceremoniously dumped back in the ‘used game’ section, due to frustration. Fighting games are heavily based around the so-called ‘meta-game’, picking characters that perform specifically better against others, exploiting the odd glitch here and there, literally playing by using knowledge of the game’s internal mechanics, rather than using knowledge gleaned through playing the game.

Although no game, video or otherwise is free from meta-gaming, fighting gamers do take it somewhat more seriously. Hit-boxes, attack frames, priority moves, all familiar terms to the veterans, but to a newcomer? How are they supposed to know that one character’s beam can shoot through another's? Trial and error, play, play and more play. This, finally, is where the skill percentage analogy begins to make sense. In a FPS for example, it doesn’t matter how bad you are skill wise, by relying on luck, weapon choice and memory, you can oust a much more skilled player, maybe you’ll only kill them once or twice, but compare this to a fighter, and you can see where the problem is. As I explained, a FPS can be broken down 50/50, 50% skill, 50% other factors. However, a fighting game, no matter how good your knowledge of the game, no matter how high on the tier list your character, a player with more skill, be it due to meta-gaming, hard practice or simply through natural talent will always beat you over and over again, due to this 70/30 split.

This is largely a case of having knowledge but not knowing what to do with it. Professional players will only learn as much as they have to, focusing on a tight set of factors and then improving themselves through constant practice. On the other hand, there will always be the players who prefer to point out that one character can punch 0.003 seconds faster than any other, and is therefore better for tournament play. In this sense, a line can be drawn between high level and pro players. High level players will endlessly spout about the meta-game, and will usually win against most others, but upon encountering a truly skilled player, such as the famous Daigo Umehara they will always fall flat.

In a sense, what I’m trying to say is that there’s only one way to be good at fighting games. Play often. Play at home, play online, if they still exist in your country, play in an arcade, play against skilled people, play against unskilled people. It honestly doesn’t matter as practice does, in this case at least, make perfect. If you’re planning on playing a fighter, don’t go online and look up arbitrary lists, pick a character you like and get better with them.

Yes you can learn every single fact about every character, a counter for every move, and you can sit down, reams of A4 paper around you, and proceed to get beaten by someone who never stopped playing the game to post in a forum, be interviewed by likeminded individuals, or advertised themselves as the ‘best player ever’. Often, those with the least personal fanfare and the most drive and determination will be your most dangerous opponents, and that’s why fighting games require probably the most genuine skill of any genre out there.