Tomb Dater: Quick Death

Like the timed press of a yellow face button when being forced off a cliff, my shared marital adventures with the Tomb Raider reboot was saved, and seemingly at the last possible second. After last week's post, it really looked as if the universe had righted itself and that all video game playing in my home was again squarely in my hands. But behold my bemusement when she suggested that we turn on the Wonder Machine and get back to the faux-Lost episode that Sorority Croft has found herself in. I suppose that makes the title of this particular post a bit on the misleading side.

But it's not. We need to take a quick second to talk about that Thing That Everyone Hates (today's, anyway), and by that, I mean quick time events, or QTEs. Now, I'm sure that you, the God of War/ Shenmue/ any-other-action-game player that you happen to be, are quite familiar with the concept of the dreaded QTE. Something happens onscreen, usually of the more "cinematic" variety, and a button prompt breaks any sort of fourth wall the game may have built to explicitly tell you that you should press this button to get that result. Think about when your bald, screaming Greek butcher hops to a cyclops' shoulders. If you're not mashing that O button, well, that singular eyeball isn't going to tear itself out now, will it?

The QTE has had quite the bell curve of popularity and acceptance since its widespread gaming infection in the late 1990s (yes, they've been around in one form or another since much earlier). It became the de facto way of "playing" a cut scene not too long ago, which caused many players and games writers to kind of throw up their hands. Other criticisms leveled against them are that they crash the momentum of action sequences, making a breakneck pace grind to a halt while you look at your controller in bafflement. Personally, I find them obtrusive and irritating, especially in games like Tomb Raider where they pop up out of seemingly nowhere and lead the game to a failure state.

This has become a shared problem, which is why I'm bringing this up. The wife, she hates them with an almost impressive passion. She walks through a jungle and a wolf pins her down. She guides Lara over a bridge, and a thug pushes her over. For someone that hasn't been playing games and isn't used to seeing these things, it's a bullshit bait and switch. I've already espoused the problems with the uninitiated learning the combat mechanics. Couple that with the a looming threat of death if you don't hit a button, or sequence of them at the right time and things can be pretty aggravating.

When they first showed up in the game (which I can't even properly recall since it's been so long since we started it), I caught myself mumbling aloud, "they're still doing these?" It was legitimate surprise. I really thought the mounting distaste for these things would remind developers that games don't need these anymore. Sure, they were fine for a moment, but that moment passed. Yes, that's just my opinion getting the better of me, but poop on a game that requires me to hit the shoulder buttons and a direction to jump off a flying bat (or whatever) when I was just doing back-flipping slices with my giant chain swords a second ago. Most of the time, this stuff just doesn't make any sense. Then again, Kingdom Hearts sill exists in the state that it's in, so I guess I'll never get what I want.

Ok, I know that I've been ragging on TR in all of these pieces so far, and that may not seem fair for a game that, really, I dig with a shovel. I'd like to remind you again that these have simply been my observations of having played portions of it with my wife, the ungamer. Sooner or later, some gushing will happen, I'm sure of it.

Your homework for the day is Gamasutra's feature article on the ethics of free-to-play games. It's a thinker. Also somewhat timely since my earlier piece on the recently-released Tekken Revolution.

Tomb Dater: The Handover

On Thursday, we hit the proverbial wall.

Earlier that morning, a message was sent to my main squeeze while we were at work. It simply read "Tomb Raider tonight." It was not a question, but it wasn't me being forceful, either, just my very direct way of gauging here interest at this point since we'd barely even brought the game up in conversation in roughly a week. She was agreeable to some pre-weekend jungle adventuring, but that alone didn't answer the question.

The telltale sign was when we actually played it. She was content to pass the controller to me to kick things off, which included about ten or fifteen minutes of tooling around so we could become readjusted to the control scheme. I screwed around in the village section for a little bit trying to figure what to do next, and after a brief cut scene that rewarded us with a climbing ax, we raided our first tomb, and were greeted with the first of the game's fun little physics puzzles. Nature, the cruel minx that it is, decided it was time for me to take a quick break, so I relinquished the controller to my lady and promptly hit the can.

When I returned a few minutes later, I was a little saddened by the controller falling back into my lap right away. I played a little while longer, mostly just messing around in the environment before moving Lara further into the story and on toward a bad guy-infested radio compound. After a few fights with the island-dwellers that stood guard there, I tried to hand the reigns back over. "No. I don't like the fighting," she said. And with that, it was clear that The Great Experiment was failing.

So what happened here? My first reaction is that, well, she's not a gamer, and my earlier thoughts about neophyte players having a hard time navigating the complex controls of a 3D action game were right on the money. While I'm sure she'd be better with some practice (she even joked about it a few minutes after turning down another turn), the barrier for entry was found to be a little too high, and she had become discouraged. Part of that may be due to a person's individual personality, I guess, but it's not unreasonable to surmise that the older people get, the less likely they are to put forth that much effort into something that they do with their personal time unless they're immediately good at it. I probably wouldn't want to spend an entire day playing hockey if I was just taught to skate and shoot the puck that morning.

Should I blame Crystal Dynamics, or one of the console manufacturers (we were playing it on 360, incidentally) for this? I'm going to say no, but with some reservations. Tomb Raider is a very well known property, and every entertainment industry from comics to television to film try to use reboots of franchises as assured ways of attracting people unfamiliar with their larger concepts. While I don't necessarily find the game hard (especially, again, because we're playing on the lowest difficulty setting), if Tomb Raider's primary motivation was to attract new people into the larger realm of video games, it could have been much simpler. But it isn't. If anything, this TR is meant to cater to both a casual and hardcore crowd, at least I thought it would. Apparently, this casual crowd is bowing out early.

Of course, the possibility exists that she just doesn't like playing the game, which is pretty feasible. I'm going to politely suggest again that we give it another shot sometime this week, but Lara and me are walking that tightrope.

Your homework --which will be from now through the next 12 months-- is to download and listen to Retronauts Vol. III Ep. I, which is now loose upon the internet. I hope you contributed to its Kickstarter campaign, but even if you didn't, you're still able to reap the benefit.

Fury!

Do you want to know what I thought of Project X Zone? In all honesty, you probably don't. Regardless, GamesRadar has run my review of it, and the unwashed masses are particularly unhappy with what I've written if the comments are a fine sampling of our collective reasoning. My favorites are the ones that think that I don't exist. I guess, for all you know, I might not. Go ahead and collect the pieces of your blown mind. There's some on that chair across from you.

I don't really think I need to defend what I've written. Honestly, what's the point? I found it to be a shallow strategy game that looked pretty when it counted. If that's your thing, well, it's your cash, friend. I do like the fact that people are a little huffy about me wrecking PXZ's Metacritic curve, though. The internet gets pissed about anything, and I am the high priest of ruining your day because of it.

Except when they don't, and by that I mean today's homework: This spectacular write up of Christy Marx. You may not have heard of her, but she had a hand in shaping your childhood one way or another. Polygon has done a darn good job with their feature articles since they launched, most of them being insightful developer interviews or deep dives into the process of games that work and the evolution of projects that may never be released. Like anything you find on the internet, it isn't all riveting stuff. The ones that work, though, really work. Good on them for building such a back catalog of great content so soon into the site's life.

I actually took a pass on weekend work this week, but more will come soon, hopefully. Some Tomb Raider was played last night, and we'll get back to talking about it tomorrow or Monday.

Work

Last week I made reference to my weekend freelance work. It turned out to be two things:

A: Project X Zone review for the 3DS, which will go up on the wide internets sometime later this week

B: Not weekend work at all, because it didn't show up to my castle until about 10:30 yesterday morning.

Truth B turned out to be a real bummer, actually. I had plenty of fun this weekend not playing the game and doing other things, but it would have been a nearly equally fun weekend of sitting on my couch, or in a coffee shop, or (likely) in a bar with my portable gaming device. As it stands, I had no choice but to stay up awfully late last night, and probably again tonight, so I can bum rush through it. I have confidence in my feeling toward the game at this point, but my editor was cool with the fact that it didn't show up until yesterday, making my Tuesday afternoon deadline unreasonable. He's a cool guy.

So that's that.

Revolution, Televised

So it seems as if Tomb Dater has stalled for the time being. I'm really not surprised or even disappointed, but I'm still giving my wife a deadline: if there's no jungle hunting cuddle time within the next week, the rights to Lara Croft's origin story fall squarely in my hands.

This morning, I finally got those hands on some beta time with Final Fantasy XIV. I didn't do much other than run around a desert city and talk to NPCs, but what I saw sure looked pretty. And seriously, desert cities in my Final Fantasies have thus far proven to be a recipe for my own personal enjoyment, so at least there's that. Sadly, I have some weekend freelance work lined up so that odds of me getting any more QT with it are looking mighty slim. Oh well, all that kicking and screaming for nothing, I suppose.

So let's talk briefly about Tekken Revolution. Call it a small review of a game that you may be enticed to play until you actually play it.

That is, of course, unless you're a Tekken savant. Revolution is a free-to-play (f2p) fighter exclusively for the PS3. Personally, I'm not a f2p hater; I've logged plenty of hours over the last decade into strange and borderline creepy Korean MMORPGs, and have forked over plenty of work hours in a previous life to whatever Kongregate had broadcasted on its front page that week. The times I've actually dropped money into these games for extra items or whatever have been remarkably scarce considering the chunks of my life that have been broken away in tribute to them. But that's where TR differs from the Runes of Magic and Cityvilles of the world: Like any other fighting game, your enjoyment is based on skill. If you're not good at this game, you're getting your ass handed back to you with a side order of shit talk coleslaw. As a f2p time investment, it makes it kind of hard to recommend.

Think about other f2p games out there. Most of them are are hedging their bets against you by basing all of their potential monetary gains on your patience. Don't want to wait for that Brony village to complete construction in 6 hours? Need some extra inventory space so you can throw down on a looting raid in Angmar? Think you could use some extra leveling because you're on your lunch break? Pay up, son. Under this train of thought, though, one could logically (though probably not enjoyably) stick it out and game the system. You honestly don't need that town built faster or that huge super sword to get a fire affinity, you just need a little bit if willpower to not spend the cash. You'll be fine if you just wander off and do something else.

Tekken, though, is a fairly complex 3D fighting game. The move sets available for each of the characters (8 at the onset, 4 more unlockables. A generous number, really) are sprawling, not to mention the time needed to adjust to the series trademark goofball physics where if you hit the ground ass over feet, you can still continue being pummeled. It takes serious work to become half decent at any fighting game, and that much more if you're unaccustomed to the likes of Tekken (or its rivals Virtua Fighter and, to a lesser extent, Dead or Alive).

In the state that it's in now, Revolution affords the green recruit few opportunities to put in that kind of effort. The game is built specifically for the online competitive ranked and unranked matches, with a modest single player "Arcade" mode. Play an online game and you eat one of your online "coins," which replace themselves every 30 minutes one at a time to a total of 5. Tekken matches, especially those unbalanced in the way of skill from one player to the next, can be over in roughly 30 seconds, though. Meaning that unless you're running into some decent fights, odds are high that you'll burn through your 2.5 hour allotment of online coins in about 10 minutes. Extra "Premium" coins can be bought with real world dough.

There's a way to extend it, but again, only if you've got your black belt in the ways of the Iron Fist. The way the game tries to throw you a bone is in Premium tickets, which each new player is given at the start of their struggles with TR. Burn through your coins and you can choose to use a Premium ticket, which will be replaced if you win an online match. These tickets are also doled out to you at intervals, like winning every ten online matches. This makes them ultimately precious and precarious. You're gambling extra time with the game based on your skill with it. Am I good enough to use this ticket in the hopes that I win and get it back? If you wind up liking what you're playing, it's a serious threat to consider.

Of course, if you like fighting games, and especially if you're an old-timey Tekken player, you will like what you're playing. While lacking some of the depth of the more feature rich and roster heavy recent releases like Tag Tournament 2 or even 2009's Tekken 6, each character is fully realized and balanced. They look great and move well, and the environments are sparse, though varied enough that fights will wind up tactically different depending on if they take place in enclosed or wide open spaces. If anything, it plays like something of a gimped 6 with the move sets and physics of Tag 2, and for the price of admission, it's a pretty nice deal.

But you're still stuck with a high barrier of entry, and no real way to practice. This is a real problem. While a single-player Arcade mode exists, it's full of AI opponents so stupid that they regularly run into your attacks, and it can be finished within 5 minutes. This would be fine, but the player is limited to a coin entry for playing it, and coins for this mode replenish once every hour, which means that after you expire your coin supply --a maximum of 2 for Arcade mode-- you must wait an hour before your next speedy turn through it, which limits any kind of offline training you may want to participate in. While waiting for an online opponent to sync up during a ranked match you're given a brief training mode to pass the time and to bone up on your moves, but this might last you 20 seconds or 5 minutes depending on how the online matchmaking is feeling at the moment (and how many players are online, of course), and this is still at the mercy of using an online coin to play, so it's an unreliable method for learning. A rudimentary offline training mode is in the works as an update at some point, but for now, you're stuck with either getting better on the fly against other opponents. It's basically like being in an arcade with a pocket full of quarters.

Part of me thinks there should be some charm in that, but really, I just feel lucky that I've played a lot of Tekken on and off over the years so I can hang with the online competition. A very basic character growth system exists to potentially alleviate this for beginner players by boosting a few stats, but in practice it only serves to widen the gulf between them and the old hands.

So what you're getting is a free Tekken with a high cost. Sure, it's still Tekken; a very good, fairly pretty, absolutely zany fighting game that you better hope that you're good at right away. Otherwise, cross your fingers that something good's on TV. You'll have some time to think about how much you suck.

Jibber Jabber

Before we begin, your homework for today is to read Jeremy Parish's account on why the seminal Atari 2600 failed miserably in Japan. A lot of evidence near the end is sort of anecdotal, but it's no less compelling to read because, really, after the hard numbers, a lot of what he says is as good an excuse as any.

Now, here's an image that should look familiar. That's part of the problem, but we'll get back to that:

Yesterday morning, I received a PS3 message from one Square Enix telling me how lucky I am that I can download and play the newest beta for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Mildly interested, I clicked on the attachment which led to a PlayStation Store page that auto-filled a code to download the application to launch the game. After an alarmingly short download (because I had forgotten that the first thing you grab for an MMO is the client launching software, not the "game" itself). It was the usual stuff after opening: make a new Square-Enix ID (because my old one wasn't good enough or something), read some terms of service, agree that I live in the United States. So far so good. At this point, I had to enter a beta key code for the game to begin downloading the actual client. A little confused because I was under the impression that Square had kind of already done that for me with the email, I attempted to reread the message that I had originally received to see if there was another code inside. No dice, though, because the download application I was forced to use blocked the PS3's XMB, so I couldn't read any email. So there I sat, exhaling in frustration, staring at something I had to close just so I could go back and read something else just so I could start it all over again. I shrug my shoulders. In true Square-Enix fashion, things are finally unnecessarily difficult.

While I concede that it was my own fault for not reading the entirety of PS3 message, let's just say that this wasn't my only problem. For the sake of brevity, I'll just briefly list them:

1. I had to recreate yet another SE account and password
2. The One-Time password stymied anything I wanted to do, mostly because I wasn't sure what it was and was even less convinced SE did either judging by the instructions on their site
3. The roughly 5G download of the client was proceeding last night at an alarming slow rate; think .47 MB/s at its peak
4. I don't have the time or patience for that shit, so I typically set it up before I go to bed to let stuff that size download. Not this time, because the client download wouldn't auto-shut off the system after it was finished and installed
5. Early this morning I decided to try it again, and it downloaded at a much more manageable 1.49 MB/s speed, which only took roughly an hour to complete.
6. But that didn't matter, because I was given an error and couldn't log in to play. Why?
7. Because all of the servers have been down for maintanance since early yesterday evening

People, from what I understand, have been playing this beta since before the weekend started, and I was a little confused why I was just getting a code for it now a few days after this phase its testing had already begun, but I don't really care that much about that. What I care about is a company that's had its head in its ass for years now, and my experiences over the last 24 hours are simply indicative of Square-Enix as a developer and publisher.

Really, I thought I'd hit my breaking point with all of the fallout of Final Fantasy XIII -- a mess of a game that was a product of a development cycle that resulted in twice the amount of work necessary that ultimately, by many accounts, was just pasted together with spit and bubble gum just to get it out of the door. The good of the game was far outweighed by the bad, and judging by what we can surmise of the company and their absurd sales expectations over the years, we can safely say the same thing of the hands that built it. So full of hubris, they announced in 2006 that FFXIII would be the nucleus around which spinoff games would come: VersusXIII for the PS3, a PSP/ Mobile game called Agito XIII, and a DS release that never materialized outside of conference jibber jabber. Only one of these had actually appeared in real life, Agito, and under a changed name to separate it from the now reviled XIII universe. Oh, and only in Japan. Sequels to XIII have and will be released in the near future, XIII-2, being a mediocre game intended to "solve" some of the problems of its predecessor. Clearly, these are people that put the cart in front of the horse.

People, this cycle of idiocy is just about to begin anew. While I'll give them credit for having their best E3 showing in maybe a decade, everything said about what they presented has been par for the Nomura-caddied course. Yes, its swell that there's going to be a new Kingdom Hearts game, but for all intents and purposes, the company needed to put a bullet in that franchise years ago. The original plan of mashing up the combined Final Fantasy franchises with various Disney properties is long since dead creatively, and the obvious use of idiotic and barely playable portable spinoffs over the years (which many rightly speculate were used to fund a KHIII to begin with) has diluted its fan base. Plus, from what we already know of development --which isn't much, of course-- the game won't arrive for another few years. And by "few," I really mean "several." Don't get your hopes up that this game will be released any time soon and will clean up the dump truck of a mess that previous KHs have made.

Final Fantasy XV, though, is beginning to give the impression that it will once again set itself up for failure. Given that it's the renamed VersusXIII, one would assume that after a nearly 10 year production cycle that was birthed from the prospect of another game doing well that the company has learned from its mistakes. Total baloney. Divisive character/systems designer Tetsuya Nomura has already stated that XV is planned to have multiple releases surrounding it, so they're right back to thinking that not only will this game sell like gangbusters, but that people will like it well enough to shell out for other games in its capsule-franchise. That's awfully familiar. On top of that, there's still no guarantee that we're going to see it in the immediate future. In an interview with Nomura conducted by Famitsu (via Polygon) this very morning includes a few choice nuggets: First, he states that about two years after the original announcement of VersusXIII that it was suggested that they move the game to an official core entry into the franchise and divorce it from its attached predecessor. This should surprise no one since we only saw very brief, random showings of the game at conferences, but not since this decision was made (in 200-fucking-8). If the game hadn't become vaporware at the point, the only logical conclusion is that it became FFXV. The other thing to mention in the interview is a real doozy, though. Observe:

Nomura and his team also found themselves hitting a wall graphically with the PS3 and 360. "With current-gen systems, we couldn't fully express what we wanted to do in this project," he said. "There were more and more things that we would've had to change the form of. However, the assumption was that we'd go ahead with a current-gen release, so went through a trial-and-error process to do as much as we could. So we built an alpha version about a year ago, and the company response was 'If you remained bound to the current generation, will it will be the product you envisioned?' They suggested shifting fully to next-gen, and that was the spark that led to the move."

An alpha build of the game was made only a year ago. For a game announced in 2006. If this isn't a sign that this company's not flailing around shitting money into a sewer I'm not sure what is.

I'm really too old to be angry about this stuff. After observing the last console cycle and how the games-making business has shifted so wildly, I really can't be. Still Square-Enix, a once and future juggernaut of development and publishing has turned into a fascinating case study for arrogance, poor leadership, and listless development. I really hope to god I'm proven wrong and that Final Fantasy XV can be favorably compared to sliced bread. History, though, seems against it.

Smash

After watching Man of Steel over the weekend, I walked out of the theater pretty conflicted. There was lots to like and lots to hate. I don't think I'm alone if the Internet has anything to say about it. And the Internet, as it does, has an awful lot to say.

That's the thing, though. I've read a fair share of reviews and reactions to the movie today (writer Mark Waid's was pretty compelling) and everyone seems to agree with me on sort of a macro-scale: it was an ok movie, but it sure wasn't a masterpiece. But everyone has slightly different reasoning. While I know that people have differing opinions, and that everyone views everything from their own lens or whatever, but with film reviews there seems to be a sort of group think that floats in our shared Jungian consciousness. This movie was good and here's why. This movie is bad, here are specific examples. MoS director Zack Snyder felt the sting of the latter with his last couple of movies for sure. The going consensus is that Sucker Punch was the worst kind of male power fantasy masquerading as the opposite and that his adaptation of Watchmen was so slavish to its source material that it lost the point. With MoS, though, it's all over the map. Some people thought the fights were great representations of super-beings kicking the snot out of each other, plenty thought they were long and tedious. Many found the Cosnter/ Lane flashbacks poignant, many more thought they dragged the pace to a halt. Tons, and I mean tons of people found the mass destruction at the end of the film to be a over-the-top, and...well, most seem to agree on that. There is sentiment that this movie is pretty good, but not really that great. Nobody can agree on why.

Is it Snyder? Is the guy cursed? I think I might be starting to agree, but I don't want to be that much of a jerk to a man that figured out how to adapt 300. But we can't blame him solely, and there is plenty of finger pointing going at both script writers Goyer and Nolan today, but that just exacerbates the problem, and that problem is that this movie has problems, but articulating those problems has turned into a problem.

At least we can all agree that obliterating entire cities is a really big problem. Let's all remember this a few years from now when the sequel comes out.