My gaming Witchlist

The last couple of days I’ve gained a new interest for The Witcher, and as such started eyeing up it’s sequel as well. It also caused me huge grief as certain parts causes huge (and I mean HUGE) memory leaks that would cause my PC to crash, until I figured out a way to handle it somewhat well. And keep this in mind when I still completely recommend it for play. Now, as the sequel is coming up and I’ve kept myself somewhat ‘clean’, and also the fact it doesn’t seem to be much info available, I decided to sketch up my own ‘witchlist’ (see what I did there?) for the game. Three points I’d really see improved/added, and three things to keep.

Three things to improve/set on fire:

1. Useful extra weapons

The entire thing with a Witcher is that they’re masters of swords. They have different stances for fighting utilizing this, and a huge part of the character improvement section is making your sword combos bigger and more lethal. And you don’t only use swords, but also signs, which is the games very limited combat magic. But why then, does the game include weapons that you can’t use with above said styles and moves?

I do realise that of course not everyone can wield a witcher-worthy weapon, but I think it’s bad when the extra slots on your character becomes glorified holding spots for something sellworthy. The most useful extra weapon? A torch. Yes, that’s right, a wooden stick is your best alternative weapon. And it’s only useful because you set it on fire. And don’t fight with it.

2. More realistic character interactions

So I’m all for characters in a game looking more lively. A normal person shuffles about a bit when talking, being nervous, wanting to punch you in the face, that sort of thing. From what I know however, unless there is something really amazing happening, people don’t tend to focus much on things by their sides, or say, in the sky.

I can understand if a giant, pink hippopotamus in a ballerina skirt dropping haiku’s like raplyrics flew by, that’d definitely make you look away from a conversation. Just randomly looking away mid-conversation? Is he insinuating he wants a massage? Does he think you should take a shower? Maybe he saw a squirrel? Who knows.

3. Less strict enviroments

This is a technical limitation, and I understand that. I really do. The game is already big, it’s pushing…some kind of graphical limit, and why the hell would you render all that wheat anyway when you could spend it on oversized lady-goodies instead? I’ll tell you why.

If I have walk three times the distance just to get around a completely normal field of wheat fenced off by a wooden fence, or spend five minutes trying to navigate around a swamp bush that’s just a bit too big, I will set it on fire and burn it to the ground. Geralt, the main protagonist, has a sword. He’s got a fire spell. He’s got a damn wooden stick, so he clearly doesn’t have problem with maimed trees. Unless he wants to get it on with a dryad. In that case, he supplies the stick anyway.

Three things to keep/I’d want to see in bigger quantity:

1. Reasonable breast-sizes

I’ve talked about this before, and I will re-iterate. I love the lady humps, the mammaries, the funbags. And yes, before anyone says anything, there are plenty of the well-endowed medieval ladies we’ve all come to know and…drool over. But by all that is holy, this game has girls with reasonable breast sizes, and one of them is even a main character!

What this means is that the game is actually stepping away from the common ‘sexification’ of women (and then complete knocks that achievement out of the ballpark with the sex cards) and brings some diversity. We all do love the plump ladies, but give the slender ones some loving as well. Which appropriately enough, is something you can totally do in this game. Hayooo!

2. Gold mattering even late in the game

A classic RPG tendency is that as your power grows, so does your treasury, and at some point gold seizes to be important and more ‘that number that decreases slightly whenever you buy something’. In the Witcher however, they make it count. I was smugly making my way to Act 2 of the game with 3000 gold pieces and felt pretty damn good about myself. What then? Oh, I had to pay someone 200 involving a quest that is absolutely necessary. You started a new chapter, and due to the way the game is built, you gain knowledge of plants and monsters via books. How much are they you say? Anywhere between 100-600. And at this point there’s you need a minimum of 3 to even do any quests.

The kicker? The chest armor from the blacksmith costing a total of 5000. But it’s only chest armor you say? This is a game where there’s maybe 3 armor upgrades in the entire game, and that’s one of them. All of a sudden I found myself scrambling like a madman.

3. A non-clunky journal

A lot of games has the tendency to dump story and exposition in some kind of information center, like a journal, and if you don’t take time reading all of it, consider yourself blind.

The Witcher walks the balance between being relevant, useful and short to the point, while still having a good story focus. Putting the quest log in here together with the rest instead of keeping it separated is actually genial, as it minimizes the moving from window to window, and opens up the ability to casually read a quest to then be able to click and read up on the character the quest is about. It also does the really important thing of not having the game completely punching you in the face for not studying it for hours and hours.

I do hope they remake it a little bit, just with small touches and niches. For example, it would be nice to have a cross reference section where say, if I’m looking up an alchemy recipe, it’ll suggest me what kind of ingredients I’ll need for a specific potion, and point out what monsters I can slay or flowers to pick, without having to jump between three tabs to do so.

Let’s face it, any game where a big part of the gameplay is drudging through page after page of text just isn’t that great, and if I wanted that, I could’ve picked up a book. It does store all your sex cards though, so it could be like a book where randomly every 56th page there’s a picture of a pinup-girl that drops out. Although that’d make me tempted to just shake the whole thing to get all the pictures straight away, and that wouldn’t be very fun, now would it?

For those of you who don’t know what the sex cards I’m referring to are I’d direct you to The Witcher wikipedia sex card list. As you can see there’s quite a big list of…wow, there was a lot more of than than I thoug…I don’t have some of these. That means I’d have to do another playthrough and…be right back.

Capitalism, ho! – Recettear

I have a list. A list that is huge. Gigantic. Titanic (no, not the ship). On it is every game that I would like to be able to get around playing, and it’s topped by a lot of ‘Triple A’ titles, games that got the million dollar budgets, with production values equal to it and that’s suppose to sell and sell. Somewhere on this list is games that I’d like to play because of nostalgic value, titles I’ve played it when I was a kid, but that I’d like to go back to just to see it with a new set of ‘adult eyes’, in hopes of grasping it better. And then there’s the games that caught my eye, raised my eyebrows and had me going ‘I have no idea what this is…but I have to try it’. Let’s talk about one of those.

Two points needs to be raised straight away about this game. First of all, it’s as cute as a batch of candy-coated puppies dipped in sugar swimming in a pool of candy floss. It’s also more japanese than a samurai eating sushi and washing it down with some sake. If you can’t cope with either of these, this game is going to be a challenge for you.

The game itself is a small 15 euro deal that you can easily get off Steam, and that tends to fall victim for sales every now and then. When starting, you wake up as the young woman Recette and is forced by the fairy called Tear to work as an itemshop owner. Why? Apparently your dad left after him a huge debt when he decided to ditch the shop and become an adventurer. It’s great that the game instantly establishes that the last person that did this thought it was lame and decided to go do something else. Way to sell yourself there, game.

The entire deal of the game is therefore to make money, and every aspect of it also centers around money. It does do a good job of pacing itself and keeping new, interesting thing coming. You do start out with the very basic concept of being able to sell an item, but by the 4th or 5th hour there’s at least three different variables of the selling and buying scenario. Oh, and you can totally customize your shop with random wallpapers and such. Sounds standard? It is, until you realise how furiously devilish that is.

See, the thing is that every two weeks or so, you need to pay a set amount, and while money is easy to make, run yourself dry, and you’re more or less screwed. It makes the balance between those buying those black walls filled with skulls and incantations of doom and death and actually paying off your debt all the more trickier. That kind of wallpaper may or may not exist within the game.

‘But Viking’ you say, ‘I’ve heard of elements of dungeon crawling in order to collect loot in this game, so even if I end up spending all my money on furniture that still isn’t better than anything I could get from IKEA, I should be safe anyway no?’.

To that I answer that you’re but a young, naive and foolish girl, and before you start to think I’ve questioned your manly macho stature, I’m talking about in-game. Or well, let’s say that anyway.

While these elements does exist in this game, and are quite abundant, you aren’t a fighter and therefore have to rely on hired help. As you progress you unlock certain characters, but so far I’ve managed to get myself a warrior type, a rogue and a caster…wait, I thought I did Dragon Age 2 last week? On that note, innovation isn’t the strongest card this game has to play, but everything is functional enough, it’s light-hearted, and it works. That’s not to say some design decisions isn’t horribly flawed. For example, the dungeons are broken up into level ranges of a couple of levels for each block. Now, if you manage to select the wrong block, you’ll be instantly teleported in there. Is there a way to leave instantly? Sure. Will you be penalized for it? Hell yeah.

The reason for that is that a game day is split into 4 chunks. Doing a thing such as organising a sale takes 1 round, same with shopping and so forth, while dungeon crawling takes 2. Therefore, select the wrong dungeon and leave it, and you’ve wasted half a day, plus the money spent to hire the hero. When you’re a silly person like me, this happens a lot, which is why you also learn very quickly to save before you do anything. Anything at all.

The game itself does have some quirky and hilarious moments however. You can sell everything from cherries, apples and bread to broadswords made of iron and ancient artifacts and pocket lint, and everything has a modifier. If you’ve played any sort of RPG at some point you’ve probably encountered Mighty Ogreslaying Sword of Firey Death +1, or Helmet-that-obviously-isn’t-really-just-a-cooking-pot +3. Have you ever looted or encountered a savage beast that wielded and ultimately dropped an Apple +2 or Candy Bar +1? Just think about it! You can assume that the above mentioned sword would bring more firey death to ogres than it’s normal standard counterpart, but the apple? Is it…applier? A brighter red? It’s these kind of things that makes you ponder the very essence of what actually makes an apple and end up spending way too much time on it, just to come up with the quasi-meta-theory that you probably need to get the hell outside a bit more.

In the end of the day though, is the game worth it? After about 5 hours of gameplay the game itself was still throwing me new things to learn, and while the core concept in itself might be able to become a bit stale or repetitive, the game is a good batch of fun, especially considering the price. I don’t regret my purchase at all, if nothing else because you can’t call yourself a gamer until you’ve sold an Egg Toast +3 to someone for an insane amount of gold.

Here’s me hoping that I can do a couple more of these in the future to bring forth some more unknown games that might be worth your money and time. Oh, and my essay on the fundamentals of egg toast should be on it’s way. Watch this space. Also, Flickr.

Hills and valleys – The Dragon Age 2 Demo

Dragon Age 2, the hotly anticipated sequel to the ‘Back-to-the-roots’ RPG Dragon Age now has a demo available from your favorite download outlets. I figured I’d have a poke around with it and see what has changed, see if it’s all hills and valleys, or a bloody mess. Turns out it’s a bit of both.

Before we really get down to business, I come from the perspective of someone that hasn’t finished Dragon Age. However, I did get to see the merits of the game, as well as some of it’s flaws (and yes, I am gearing up again to make a full playthrough, so you can put away your torches and pitchforks), and kinda liked it. The story was great, the characters was cool and I got a great feeling from it. The combat on the other hand was one sided and balls hard until my party snagged a healer, after which I almost wondered if someone had screwed down the difficulty.

Combat is still, in core, the same. You can control anyone in the party, pause and so forth. However, like every other part of the game, it’s been slightly ‘Mass Effected’. It’s now a more close, personal deal. Wielding a sword and shield and bashing it straight in an ugly persons face feels very satisfying, and it’s still bloody as hell. They do seem to have turned down how long the blood effects actually stay, but you’ll still get more than your fill of cinematics where your characters looks like they had the most vicious combination of a nose bleed and a sneeze attack ever.

The dialogue mechanics is also almost a carbon copy of Mass Effect’s, now with a little nice spinwheel with all the options. It’s very blatant that the development saw how well Mass Effect 2 did, and decided to try to capture a bit of the magic. I can’t really comment on things such as inventory management and character customization as this wasn’t available, but at least the previous item system could use a polish up, so let’s hope. Also, maybe it’s just my impression, but just as you’re now a lot closer to your character than before, everything in the game including UI, text of the item and quests and such is way bigger, almost like it’s all crawled closer to you for a snuggle.

Speaking of things that has changed, Flemeth is back, once again helping you to start out. However, she’s got a makeover too. While still styling herself as the Witch of the Wilds, she now looks like a diabolical-mastermind-nemesis. Also, she together with your mom is the reason why old people in this game scare me. Just look at her! She’s an old hag (the game actually states this, I’m not being a douche here), and sure enough, she’s got grey hair and looks old. But look at that body! Look at those breasts! Trying to avoid the impending ‘your mom’ gags here, but she suffers the same fate of having a body way too firm and sexualised for her age. Bioware, you scare me at times. And not in the ways you intended.

What’s amusing however, is your sister. The intro of the demo is basically a silver-tongued dwarf telling a story of your heroic beginnings, and then having to tell them again after he’s caught up on, shall we say, glossing up the story a bit? Your sister in this first version of the story gains…okay, let’s be straight here. The females in this game has boobs. Okay? And not just boobs, but BOOBS. The standard size overall seems to be at least a D. And yes, that goes for your mom too. Interpret that however you want.

Now where was I…oh yes, in the more glossed up version, your sister has bigger breasts. In the re-told story, she’s then graced with smaller (but still large, do not mistake me) set on her. The game is still beating you over the head with it however. The fact that they’re big. Not the boobs. You perv.

Now really, I don’t mind. I’m the first to raise my hand and say I love me some bodacious knockers. I like the hills and valleys of the female form, the funbags, the…right, let’s get away from the topic. Hills and valleys. Right. The terrain around you in the beginning of the demo also leaves a lot to be desired, most being such a mix of grey and brown at times to be point where I thought Steam had pulled the rug under my feet and swapped it out with a military shooter. It’s still however very pleasant and frantic to play, the story and voiceacting feels fairly spot on as we’ve come to expect from Bioware. Towards the end of the demo we get to board a ship and meet a new compan…

…you gotta be…gotta stay focused…Isabela. That’s her name. Yes! In the advertisement for some reason they turned her white. Apparently that makes her look better or something (not really). At this point you’ll end up getting to play around a bit with the revamped and cleaned up talent trees and try out some more of the fancy moves.  I chose to have my sister specialize in a firestorm move (if you manage to even make that sexual somehow, I salute you), and fire and flares started popping up everywhere. It felt very hectic, chaotic and also fluid, at times to the point where  it almost was too uncontrolled. However, I never found myself wanting to pause because I really, really liked it.

This can however be combated by setting up strategies just as before. However, I preferred to plow through it with all the planning of a fridge full of lemons and a chaos worthy of a group of 100 middleschoolers all trying to access the one swimming pool in a 50 km radius on a hot summer day. I think I made a collective of tactical-minded RPG fanatics cry somewhere.

In the end of the day, the demo convinced me. My main complaint with Dragon Age was always the combat, and they made it seem more accessible, frantic and fluid while still keeping the great story, characters and boobage. I mean lineage. I do think that, despite it being blatant that they’ve stolen ideas from Mass Effect, it’s all for the breast…best of the game, and will end up in a more enjoyable experience. I sure am looking forward to trying out this experience, and see more of what this game has to offer in terms of boobs…story. Goddamnit Bioware!

As you might see I’ve decided to set up a Flickr instead of bothering trying to create my own gallery. There’s a couple of more pictures available from the demo there, and there’ll be more going up. Since they’re actually taken by myself, should you want to use or repost them, I’d be happy if you just poked me about it beforehand. That way, I know someone actually appreciates them. Or ran short of personal-time material.

The future is touchy stuff

During the last couple of months I haven’t really posted much. It mainly boils down to me being a ‘lazy perfectionist’, and I ended up being caught into a loop of that, every time I wanted to write, I got stuck on doing totally unnecessary things. I wanted to create a gallery for one post, but ended up getting caught in layouts, got frustrated and left it at that.

So, what managed to finally break this circle? What madness has be unleashed for me to take up writing again? I’ll tell you. It’s…the future. Of touchy stuff.

I’m the first one to admit that I’m a major Sony fanboy. Growing up I was a Nintendo gamer, but every since I managed to score myself the original Playstation (a console which I still got at home), they’ve been a housegod of mine. As such, when I heard about the latest Playstation Meeting, and the fact that they’d put it up in parts on youtube I just had to check it out.

The meeting itself was an odd mix of complete awesome stuff and very corporate things. Having ‘visions’ and a few core things they wanted to improve on or attain is very ‘adult’, but I really like it. It’s always cool to see what a company as a whole strive for or want to achieve, especially if they put it in some corporate funformat. Watching this made wonder if I racked up adult points for watching a corporate event, nerdpoints for the awesome gaming stuff, or both. Somehow I’m fine with being a corporate nerd. But, what did they introduce? What’s their new ‘killer app’?

Meet the NGP, or the PSP 2 if you want. What’s great right off the bat with this one is that it shows Sony has been listening to customer feedback in regards to the previous model, with the console now carrying dual analog sticks. The monitor is reported to be a 5 inch touchscreen, but the main kicker is that there’s another equally big touchscreen attached to the back.

My first reaction to this wasn’t overly great. I could see how it might be really uncomfortable, if you have the tendency to have a sweaty grip you’ll probably easily end up sweating up the screen (which just isn’t fresh amirite?) and so forth. However, seeing this in demonstration, and thinking further on what sort of gameplay this could bring, my frown turned into a grin.

Now, the problems? Looking over the form factor, there’s no apparent slot for UMD’s, neither did they mention anything in relation to this. They did say that it’d be able to handle the previously downloaded titles for PSP, which surely makes the two people out there that actually bought a PSP Go really happy. However, looking at Sony’s previous history (my PS1 games library wonder why you never return their calls, PS3) in regards to backwards compatibility, I’d surely plan on keeping my PSP around. Time will tell.

The second is prizing. Since Sony is the prime techno juggernaught the issue about prize quickly comes. At the moment there is no set price, but many are ballparking that with all the fancyness going on, you can expect prices in the range of 300-400 euros. As they’ve also stated that the NGP will use mobile technology and networking, it sounds almost damn sure that you’d need access to a mobile network, that is, a contract and a monthly fee on top of the price of the unit. Think current Iphones. Ouch.

Now, when looking over this a realisation hit me. If you’ve looked at this traditionally, you’d generally expect that a handheld device is of lower cost, because it’s smaller, and handheld, and…stuff? Right? Now, I know the consoles has been up for pricecuts, but both of the upcoming handhelds suffer this prizing compared to their stationary options. The current prices on a Wii is around 150-200 euros depending on what package you pick, and the baseprize for a Nintendo 3DS is hoovering around 250 at the moment. On the Sony side, you can easily pick up a 320g Ps3 bundle for around 280 euros, with the NGP most likely being 50-100 euros more than that.

Funnily enough, I’m getting this feeling that both the 3DS and the NGP is the next ‘hardware step’. Instead of a Wii 2 or a PS4, we get this, which together with Move (and in Microsofts Kinect) will hold off the inevitable arms-race and release of new consoles for a while more. The impression they gave in the meeting was that it would co-exist together, the stationary PS3 and portable NGP, and bring you a full gaming experience. One of the things they said was ‘You’re playing a game at home, having a good time. Then you need to leave? Imagine being able to bring the game with you, and continue playing? That’s what we want to do’. That sounds awesomely cool, very weird and slightly implausible. However, the NGP is supposed to be close to the PS3 in terms of graphics and such. Not necessarily raw power however, but still. It’ll be interesting to see.

What else? They mentioned that PSN and the PS Store in one way or another will be available to the Android market sometime during this calendar year, and this is where the penny drops. It’s made very clear that small, bitesized indie-games will be made available at a tiny price to the public through these kind of devices as well. Sounds familiar? That’s right, Sony is taking the war to Apple’s turf as well.

It’s very blatant they avoided doing what Nokia tried with engage, to pack everything into one with the N-Gage, but instead crafting a ‘Sony Experience’. When you’re at home? Play your PS3 and watch your Sony TV. Need to leave? Sure, you have your trusty NGP for your gaming needs. Want to make a phone call? Get your android device out, and should you want to play a fast, small game, you don’t need to swap. Did your NGP go out of battery during your trip? There’s still the android.

So, can they pull it off? It’s hard to say at this point, as it all depends on the delivery, prices and the service. This is also where I think Apple and Sony are polar opposites. While the Itunes Store is very nice and easily manageable, Itunes have always felt kinda…clunky to me. In that, the PS3 itself is nice and easy to navigate and sort, but the PS Store is…okay. I for one will be playing the ‘hybrid mode’, wielding an Ipod and Iphone for my music and phone-based needs, and the PS3 and NGP purely for gaming.

Am I getting an NGP? Hell yes. If not for the fact that it looks sleek, awesome and just all around like an upgrade to the PSP, I really want to see where they take dual touch screens. So far, out of Microsoft and Sony’s initiatives to incorporate motion controls into mainstream games, Sony has just done better, which is why I’m also at least somewhat hopeful it wont just be limited to ‘gimicky-as-fuck’ games. Crossing sweaty nerdfingers.

Despite being a fanboy, I also want to say that I still do love Nintendo and has seriously been pondering picking up a Wii at some point. If nothing else, I can do like everyone else and let it be a great dustcollector…right?

Creativity, a lost art?

Prepare to face my mighty army in glorious combat! …what do you mean ‘the color of that shield looks a bit weird?’ It’s a dwarf’s shield, what would you expect! He probably spilled beer all over it! Okay, can we just move on? Thanks. Now…no, I’m pretty sure if you had one of them slamming you in the face, you wouldn’t really stop to consider what color-tone it is, you’d think about the fact that your head is soon going to be in a world of pain, and…just roll the dice please.

A very recent decision led me pondering further into the meaning of creativity. See, for years I have on and off been thinking about starting to paint Warhammer figurines as a hobby. All the times before however I’ve stopped myself as this is something that requires money, knowledge and time. Now is an ideal time as I have a steady job, longer weekends and an awesome fiancee who has offered herself to teach me (whilst also painting her own figurines).

When we where ordering the necessary things available she was looking at other figurines to paint. None of these really appealed to me, and I started to question why. They where the typical things you would expect to find in fantasy, nothing different from the dwarves I had decided earlier on to paint. And that’s when it struck me.

The reason why I first knew about Warhammer and why it ultimately felt so compelling was simply because it’s part of a game. Now, I guess the mystery of ‘what came first, painting the Warhammer figurines or playing with them’ is something that will ultimately go unsolved, but doesn’t this speak for something?

Recently an esteemed movie critic called Roger Ebert claimed that video games can never be art, or at least not without a significant amount of time (the claim was that no currently living gamer would see this happen), and yet had many steps to evolve. Many people took this to heart and rapidly rallied to defend gaming as a cultural form of art, to be praised in the same way that movies, books or paintings are, almost with a frantic zeal. I wasn’t one of them.

I am the first to call myself a gamer and be proud of it, but I do think that what people might need to start consider is what all these medium has in common: creativity. Now, you can say that creativity plays into a lot of things that aren’t necessarily branded art. Fixing that leak in the bathroom water pipes using only some chewing gum and a collection of old newspapers sure is creative, but it’s not art. If you look up the definition of art, the most blunt one is from wikipedia, stating that ‘Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions’. Now, instantly you will say that games does this, right? So therefore they are art, right?

What I would say is that if anything, games is a construct of things that we have previously mentioned. Although all of this can exist to a lesser or greater degree, a game usually has the reading experience of a book, the sound experience of music and the visual experience of a movie, whilst also having a level of interaction none of the other mediums come close to, and bringing creativity no matter when.

To explain this, things can very bluntly be created into two phases, creation and use. A book, record, movie or piece of art involves a lot of creativity for the creator, but only a limited amount of creativity for the user, whilst games tends to push you into thinking and be creative when experiencing them. Furthermore, I cannot think of any other medium that has brought so much inspiration and creativity to things that are absolutely unrelated to the medium itself. I mean, how many books has inspired a soft drink? Or how many movies has inspired someone to knit a really bad-ass cap? There also exists plenty of evidence of people that has made music videos using in-game visuals, sounds and lyrics based around the actual game. This is only the beginning, and more and more different things are coming. Most of these things might be scoffed at simply because it has something to do with a game, something viewed as ‘childs play’ and therefore not ready to play with the big boys.

This can easily be tied back into the figurines I mentioned as the start, as I am pretty sure that simply the fact that someone being told these are primarily used for a game rather than their artsy value (although this can be contested) instantly devalues them simply due to these ties. It leads to the question however, with society the way it is, with all the stress, focus on being efficient and multitasking, surely these figurines, and gaming, would excel? Compared to other normally painted figurines the Warhammer ones can not only fill one but two roles, both being a simple visual boost to your surroundings, and being used for entertainment. Games would top books, movies and music in the sense that it can provide all of these three to an extent, within a package.

Just as a red mage however, maybe the problem that Mr Ebert tries to aim for is simply that in doing this, it becomes a Jack of all trades, but master in none and as such can’t possibly yet reach the highest quality level of work that currently exists. And it’s a valid point, because surely a medium that managed to at least keep itself on par with the greatest musicians, writers, artists and storytellers in history, all at the same time, would make the world implode.

I think however that what I will take away as a gamer and carry on high is the fact that gaming will hopefully go down into history as the medium that sparked the most random, fun and interesting outbursts of creativity.

Because, let’s face it, a cake shaped as a giant red blob-like monster used as a mount for goblins is just pretty fucking sweet.

I really hope that people likes the new look and feel, made by my wonderful fiancee that I cannot thank enough for it. Also, I decided to go with dwarves because even if you overlook the totally epic beards, the awesome weapons and their general state of drunkeness, they have pirates. FECKIN’ DRUNKEN DWARVEN PIRATES! If that’s not awesome then what is?!

We’re going digital baby! – Part 1 – Distribution

As the general shopping window now has been, or is, depending on if you got gift cards, need to return stuff or are just enjoying the sales, the thought came into mind to talk about shopping. I’m sure there’s a female-directed sexist joke in here somewhere too, but let’s leave that out for now.

So, what’s one of the most important things with games? I mean, besides marketing, PR, boasting and actually making a damn decent game? And yes, if you answered ‘the boxart’ here, I’m going to go ahead and call you wrong. The distribution of course! This is something that has long presented (see what I did there?) an issue for me, because I am a collector. I like to have those big rows of games stacked in my shelves. This however used to be a problem back in the day when the games, for some reason, felt the need to have the size of a small encyclopedia and take up an unreasonable amount of space. Due to the technology of innovation (or innovation of technology?) we got the slim DVD-esque cases that made it even more possible for me to collect more and more whilst needing less space.

As we evolved as a sentient race and achieved great advances, we happened to stumble over the Internet. It was after all found and has always existed, not created, everyone knows this. This created a shift in how we enjoyed games and gave the option to be able to play together with people we’ve never seen, in countries we’ve never been to and talking in a language we probably didn’t know existed (and allowed us to make up one too).

This also seems to have shifted how we interact with each others as gamers. Instead of getting together as two friends or a couple of buddies, it’s faster and requires less planning to simply hook up via the internet, and the ‘getting together’ aspect feels somewhat abandoned or at least outsourced to plastic-instrument flailing rhythm games. It somewhat touched upon a person such as me too, a collector that much appreciates showing his collection every now and then. No longer are there people sitting in my couch that I can foolishly insert into my powerfantasy of thinking they are ever so slightly impressed by the amount of space occupied by these plastic boxes.

Along came a spider, or Steam as some prefer to call it, starting as a simple service that branched out into distribution, and is probably to this date one of the most well-known and functioning digital distribution (from here refered to as DD)…thingies we have. So what’s so good about it? And why exactly does a person like -me- like it?

Steam and DD in general has both its pro’s and con’s. That a product is available everywhere via DD is swiftly limited to the fact that the concept of ‘everywhere’ equals ‘places with internet’. When you have it on a disk it’s in theory available to you at all time, but if the service that you were issued the game from should shut down, what do you do if you ever need it again?

Services like this does also neatly allow you to buy games as gifts to another person, provided they’re using the service in question. Maybe it takes away a little bit of the ‘fun’ of unwrapping presents, but well…if gifted games came wrapped it would most likely just ending up giving you viruses instead of enjoyment, in an eerie similarity to your nearest street-corner ‘lady’.

There’s also the spin on it that DD is more eco-friendly. It doesn’t require plastic boxes or to be shipped anywhere. In a crazy world where the government actually cared about gaming other than putting sometimes crude age-restrictions on games, would they think about offering tax-reliefs, help or just a pat on the back for releasing a game as DD, from the eco point of view? The whole thing can also be friendly to small companies with lower budgets, still being able to release their titles which helps in this crazy economy-tight times.

Gameshops are being refered to as ‘brick and mortar’ stores due to the above mentioned boxes, and some people think it will eventually go out of business. Indications are already there that it’s slowly happening. A big chunk of the recent layoffs from EA for example was apparently people handling distribution sides and contacts with major stores and so forth. Companies are already catching on to this trend, which also ties in with another ‘new’ trend called DLC (which I will talk about in the next part), and who can blame them?

Going back to the collector-part of all of this, we can once again look at Steam. They have a simple neat list of the current games (and related achievements) easy accessible to everyone. Again the holy might of the Internet has changed how we interact as gamers, even the slightly silly ones like me. Is DD ultimately a good thing? I’d like to think so. If nothing else because I live in a shoebox they’ve mistakenly labeled as apartment.

Check back next wee…uhm…time (I will try to be a bit more consistent, honest!) this is updated for part 2 of We’re going digital baby! that’ll be all about DLC.

I’m aware that I’m playing up Steam’s importance in all of this but…have you seen their holiday sales?! If you haven’t, don’t. It’s a trap.

Apologies if the formatting is wonky as fuck in this, as it’s written from a netbook. I would here attach a picture of what a wonky fuck is, but apparently it’s all Paris Hilton, so I’ll save you the pain.

Ah, the delays…

Just a quick post if anyone should happen to be reading this at the moment. My excuses for being so random with posts at the moment. I blame a combination of work, a cold, the new LFG tool in WoW and Dragon Age: Origins.

I’ve just managed to grab myself Dreamweaver, so I’m going to be playing around with that and hopefully construct my own website that’s a bit more dynamic and suits the ideas I have for this. I can’t promise anything however since I’ve never used it before, so cross fingers!

New post will hopefully come up shortly.

Ride the sack-rocket

Right, let’s see what we have…just a little more to the right…yes, yes! And up, through…in there. Grab on to this. Then…yes, just like that. Now try the…no, the other one! C’mon, we’re almost there, we…I know you like to slap me, but can we focus? Good…yes…yes…YES! That was great! Another one?

Thanks to my wonderful girlfriend there’s now a PS3 in the house, and as such we’re both completely open to new gaming experiences. While swinging by the game store I was looking for something that could we could play together and would enjoy. After ignoring a good chunk of the current content due to being FPS’es (I’d rather play darts using baked potatoes as dart arrows and a squirrel on acid as target than play a console shooter), I was running short of ideas, and as such, picked up Little Big Planet.

I’d heard plenty of praise at this point already, and with a decent price tag I figured we could give it a try. Good reviews had been scattered around it like rice at a wedding couple, so despite the pondering over exactly how fun a shiny colorful platformer could be, I ended up getting it.

And let me tell you, the game is fucking sweet!

When we picked it up and starting playing it was all very simple. Our characters, both simple sackboys (as seen above, and yes, it’s not separated but actually spelt sackboy, Sony trademarked and all!) simply emerged out from a glowing hole, and as we walked along we where gently instructed on how to play the game, controls and whatnot. The elements kept snapping into place one by one as we learned how to customize our characters, collect items and use the environment around us. Before you knew it we where swinging along on swings made out of sponges and just marveled at the small things like the fact that you can drag, pull and even slap each other, something that my girlfriend took big joy in every time I was being silly holding her down.

After spending about an hour or so the statement ‘This is such a kids game’ was flung out from my second half. As I turned around and, raising an eyebrow and asking ‘You’re not having fun then?’ all I got as a reply was ‘Shut up and keep playing’. And looking over it cynically, it’s very true. Little Big Planet is about as cute as kittens dipped in honey, rolled in sugar and used to decorate a cake made of candy-floss and lollipops. And yet, so very, very compelling. And why?

After a while the thought struck me. The game handles multi-player so very well, as it’s pretty much integrated and built around being multiple people, although it can be played in single player. Handling this kind of gaming isn’t really anything new, but this is the way-more-compelling sort of multiplayer that, rather than you sitting alone in front of some squad based, 256 shooter with bazookas shooting 4 flavors of laser, you sit next to a friend or significant other and giggle cheerfully as you grab onto something and your friend then grabs onto your leg and ride along in order to keep together.

I would seriously recommend getting someone over next to you to play this with. Get your girl/boyfriend, mom, dog or any other man-person that you have a somewhat established relation with, and play this. Get another manly man and you can play this game using the excuse that you can slap each other in it, and it should be macho and fine.

So why haven’t more games done this? It probably has to do with the fact that it’s a somewhat restricted format. Most games tends to try to pick you out as the sole courageous hero in the adventure, and while there generally are secondary characters, none of them are as awesome as you.

Resident Evil 5 was one of the more recent games that toyed with his and actually ended up giving a better game for it, although perhaps this had more to do with the fact that playing as co-op made for easier inventory management rather than a very much better game. There was also jokes tossed around about the fact that they added a ‘colored’ playable character simply to avert the claims of racism (which was pretty silly to begin with) rather than being an actual planned part of the game. And of course, everyone knows boobs sell, amirite?

How long the sugar-coated appealing cuteness of Sackboy and the other sackboy-ians (and…sackgirl-ians?) will last is hard to say. I’m getting the feeling that if you do plow through this you might just end up with a stomach-ache due to just being so damn sweet, but I’m guessing it’s one of those games you’ll play bit parts at a time unless you get really hooked to it. Either that or you’re already busy making level after level after level of your own, sharing with the community.

Just try to be original about it and don’t make too many rip-offs of already existing game levels in other games, will you? Although, if you can make the entire first PS Metal Gear Solid, I beg you, let me know.

Oh, and Brutal Legend is cool too.

Female, oh why…

Right, let’s start out with a pretty face, tight body, oh and yeah, we have to show the stomach, a cleaveage so big it’s a contender for ‘Things you can see on Earth from outer space’ alongside the Great Wall of China, and a skirt that ends slightly below the underwear so that if you jump, bend over, sneeze, walk, move, cough or even think about anything other than standing perfectly still will sho..what? Oh, just working on our next female character.

Now, first of all, before anyone calls me out on this, yes, I do like scantily clad females. This isn’t something I’d deny at all. Can we just chill it out a bit with them?

This is actually a sort of two-part irk coming from me. Rather than to start somewhere I figured I’ll just mix them together and say that the next time I see a scantily clad woman acting tough, I’m turning this screen right off. And instantly you turn around and say ‘Why? Aren’t women allowed to be tough, macho and independent just like men?’ and no, tough women are perfectly fine. To be frank, I like them with a temper, some fire and some passion. Going around calling people ‘bitch’ and cursing all the time however, isn’t very tough.

And yet again you turn around (suddenly I get the feeling I’ve picked a subject that’s easy to nay-say against and open to counter-points) and ask me ‘Wait a minute, what about grunted, macho, muscular men grunting insults every two seconds while slaying his foes?’ and I’d casually reply ‘Why, that sounds like a mix between a generic shooter and the recent 50 Cent game, the last one of which I definitely didn’t play’. Now where was I? Oh right, female characters.

To keep spinning this plate I’m going out on a limb and say that Red Alert 3 actually had some strong, female characters. I’ll give you a moment to try to explain to your downstairs neighbour that the reason there’s a hole in the ceiling is that your jaw dropped at such a velocity and hit the floor.

Because yes, frankly one or two of these girls had an interesting character beyond the fact of how little of her skin was covered, and I’d like to see this ‘basic’ personality fleshed out a bit more.

The character in question I’m talking about is Lt. Eva McKenna, the woman laying down in this picture (please disregard the status of her in this visual as this isn’t how she’s presented in the game at all. She pretty much always sits up), a female figure that’s actually interesting as opposed to many others.

See, the main problem with most other female characters is that they have three personas. Queue ‘Too sexy girl’, who’s wearing way too little (and is usually found around water for whatever unrelated reason), the entire character screaming ‘I want you!’, hoping to inspire a crave for her in direct proportion to how empty the company hopes your wallet will be. Next we have the opposite-but-yet-kinda similar attractive woman who’s just totally bad-ass, is a bitch to everyone she meets and use curse-words more than I use punctuation, because apparently this is how a straight-forward, independent woman is. And of course, the stereo-typed air-headed princess or such like who cannot do anything by themselves and just has to be rescued.

It does become slightly interesting when they decide to mix certain qualities such as the air-headed helpless type with the strong, successful woman, and we get characters like Ayumi from X-Blades. I swear, this is one of the more ‘cleaner’ pictures I could find.

In this case it’s so sadly blatant what the developers where going for here.

By now you’re probably wondering if I’ve lost my focus due to all the lightly dressed women, but alas, I’m just about to reach to a conclusion. Now, why I brought up the character of Eva McKenna is simply because she’s an appealing character. She’s straightforward and just plain nice, very often praising your progress in an openly flirtatious way. It’s very obvious to anyway seeing it (if even I could notice, anyone should be able to), but it’s not over the top, just charming. Later on this is a tad bit spoilt in a scene which I wont reveal, but it kinda gets me thinking.

Can’t we have this sort of character packed into a plate armor, swinging a huge two-handed sword in some universe, killing of everything in sight and being generally bad-ass, and after she’s finished, wink at you and give you a smile. And not just any smile, but one of those smiles with the whole face, that makes you warm inside, not because it feels like someone just raised a tent in your pants, but because it makes you feel slightly fuzzy on the inside.

I know this kind of character sorta exists, but it’s usually hid behind the fact that they’re a bit of a doofus, nerdy or a 12-year-old anime character that even just feeling slightly fuzzy inside about makes you feel kinda doubtful of just a few too many things you don’t really want to doubt. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, but I just haven’t found it.

And why do I get so worked up about women, when there’s so much more stereotyped manly characters? Wouldn’t I think that’s wrong too? I’d kinda do, but somehow the macho masculine characters feels okay. My reply in the end would however be that so few games have female characters, at least as leads, so doing them in a shitty way really doesn’t help at all. A few stereotyped macho men in games is fine, because there’s just so many of them that at this point, one more doesn’t make a difference.

This isn’t necessarily why I don’t play female characters when I have the option to choose. I just really think that the excuse ‘I want something pretty to look at when I play’ and making that having to be a woman is a tad bit sad as it really does imply the character might just cause sudden blood flow to the nether regions. Maybe people with the disposition that playing a male character is okay is more comfortable with their sexuality or something. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go brush my long, blonde and flowing hair.

+Innovation -Sequel “Good Game”

In-no-va-tion

1. something new or different introduced: numerous innovations in the high-school curriculum.
2. the act of innovating; introduction of new things or methods

The textbook defenition of innovation. What does this mean to a gamer? The promises of a good game, something that the fans can rally around when proclaiming that the thing they wait for oh so much will descend from the heavens and be better than anything else. And isn’t this what innovation has become, the short-cut to an awesome game? ‘As long as we can think up something that no one else has done, it will be a killer hit?’

Whatever it may be a shooter where you end of wielding a weird alien blade together with your pistol or a life-simulator where you go from cell to sentient being, all leading up to a space-esque crescendo where only the sky is the limit, innovation is being pushed.

From the above I’ve also outlined what I would say is the two kinds of innovation in gaming: the ‘Let’s add something to an existing established thing in order to totally change it’ and the ‘Create something totally new that no one has ever done before’ concepts. And where I can say I haven’t tried Dark Sector as I was too busy lookin at the FPS with bullet time, upgradeable weapons, incredibly silly superpowers, stealth gameplay or destructable buildings, I did have a crack at Spore. And boy, was it a let down.

And why? Whilst it was quite innovative the way you could play all the way from a tiny fish-cell, being tossed out of the sea and staple on a ridicolous amount of legs and eyes and go from there, it wasn’t very fun. The 3 mini-games that I could sail through without problems trying to eat a giant and scaringly alive lobster to then end up in an open ended segment that felt more boring than Saturnus on a sunday afternoon just wasn’t that great. I’ll however stop myself before this turns into a rant-fest about the game, but the point is, the innovation didn’t count for anything.

Recently I purchased Torchlight, a game from Runic Games and apparently from parts of the people that made Diablo II. At the cheap price tag of 16 € on Steam and the whisperings on the wind that it might actually be slightly good, I decided to give an early birthday present to myself. Booting up the game gave me this cartoony wibe, and whilst I grinned ill at the fact that there’s no character customisation options whatsoever besides name and if your pet will be a cat or a dog, I decided to go with a brutish destroyer and give it a go.

Being ushered into the game, going through the town and entering the mine that’s the start of a continous dungeon, my mind kept screaming ‘This is from Diablo II, this from Diablo I, this from Diablo III’ and so forth. These thoughts where however quickly hushed when I started pondering where the last 3 hours had gone and why I was almost late for the bus, and quitely asked myself if a shower really was that necessary, or I could squeeze an extra 10 minutes of gaming instead.

Playing it more and more the only real tangiable new thing I’ve seen is that there’s a pet (did I mention you can feed fish to it to make it become other monsters such as a walking treasure chest?) that fights with you, acts as a second inventory and runs back at your command to sell crap. Oh, and there’s fishing too. Although that isn’t really very new. Just smelly. Yet I’ve already sunk a couple of more hours into this and can see myself playing it even more.

So why do I like it? The game play is just the same old and in my opinion completely awesome gameplay of Diablo, and this is where the kicker comes in. The gameplay, whilst being a bit more cartoony and fish-stenchy, is nothing new and yet what lifts the game and makes it just that kind of fucking awesome.

The golden fi…erh, games, is probably the one that combines innovation with awesome gameplay, or at least where the innovation ends up becoming awesome gameplay, and in this case I’m casually glancing at the original Max Payne. In my own experience there wasn’t any shooter at that time that handled bullet time this well if at all, and the freshness of it ended up in awesome gameplay. You can obviously counter-argue it wasn’t really that fun, but if you want to say that your point is that flinging yourself in slow-motion gunning down badies with a grief strucken and bad-ass cop that looks like he could use a diet of yoghurt and steady fibers isn’t fun, then you really need to have a long hard look at yourself in the mirror and try to figure out what’s wrong with you.

So, I would say to stop staring yourself blind just for something new and and inventive, and enjoy a solid game with awesome gameplay, even if it might not give you the bragging right to play the latest FPS where you’re armed with an arsenal entirely made out of fish.

Although, if you do find a game like that, send me a mail. Killing zombies with a lobster-launcher sounds fairly amusing.