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.

Fine, Let's Talk About E3 Press Events

So how about those press conferences yesterday, huh? Seems as though Microsoft brought a bunch of games and Sony came packing with Everything Everyone Wanted to Hear Ever. I've always thought that Jack Tretton was a class act, to be honest, but I can't shake the image out of my head that he was watching the Microsoft press event yesterday, checklist in hand, chuckling to himself how much he can make the XBONE look like it was made by crowds of dickheads. In fact, I'm surprised that, in his glee last evening, he didn't let the term slip out. That would have made for a bonafide E3 surprise.

Outside of that, though, I've never heard so many people SO PSYCHED to pay $400 for anything in my entire life. Still, the PlayStation 4 looks to begin with an impressive good will lead over the XBONE. This is swell. I keep telling myself, though, that the PS3 staggered punch drunk off of the assembly line looking like the most expensive unnecessary hobbyist machinery this side of the 3DO and it, somehow, clawed it's way back to being competitive. Microsoft has just shown how dumb they are at this E3, but that doesn't mean that they can't wise up sooner rather than later. For now, a PS4 is in my future and a XBONE still looks like an expensive cable box. A year from now, who knows?

In other news, Square Enix is consistently cagey, but Final Fantasy Versus XIII is now (to the surprise of nobody) Final Fantasy XV. Sony has proven that some people can learn from their mistakes, but E3 hasn't been clear this year if that record can go two-for-two. Since no release date has been posted for the next "officially" numbered entry in the series, I'm not holding my breath. After all, VXIII has only been in development for close to ten years.

Image also from Kotaku, mostly because I was just reading the article about 5 minutes ago

Wait, E3 is Today?

Today, the E3 mothership will descend upon the west coast mecca of clean living we call LA. Potentially, this is the most interesting one in many years, too. Why is that? Hey, there are two new consoles coming out in the next few months (we hope), so we are guaranteed at least a handful of game announcements, and game announcements are fun. Most of them we see coming a mile off; everyone knows that the Xbox One and PS4 will have a Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed game this year. But the potential for there to be surprises during press conferences compared to the last several years of samey stuff is pretty high because of the new machines, so that should make it worth it to at least follow Sony and Microsoft's press events all the way through.

That's not what I'm getting at, though. This year's E3 has an odd feeling of foreboding importance. It has something to prove as an event now that we're seven years removed from the last round of new hardware, and the industry is a completely different place. Mobile and PC gaming has a much stronger foothold now than anyone thought they would back then, and I have a feeling that if the trade show doesn't make a serious splash this year (and, by extension, the new consoles when they come out) then we'll probably see it limp toward an inevitable, unceremonious death sooner rather than later. The last two or three years of the show have been a little on the rough side already, and many games media folks were wondering about its continued relevancy going forward. I'm one of them. I suppose I'd miss it if it didn't exist, but the survival-of-the-fittest nature of technology isn't as sentimental as I am.

After a weekend away, the continued adventures of Tomb Dater will return. Your homework today is to check out USGamer when it finally launches (the new home for games writing hepcats like Jeremy Parish and Frank Cifaldi EDIT: Nope, Cifaldi doesn't work there, sadly), as well as to lose your cool anonymously on message boards when Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony do things that you don't like at the LA Convention Center.

Tomb Dater: Part Two

Last night, there was a hint of dismissal in the air. After a few harrowing attempts to shoot wolves with arrows, the proverbial towel was nearly thrown in. Let me set up the situation for you: after escaping the cave and acquiring a wooden longbow conveniently left on a hanging dead body, post-graduate Lara runs into her dick cheese archeologist counterpart (whose name escapes me. Let's just call him DCA). After being impaled from falling on a spike and sprung from an errant bear trap, our heroine cools her heels at a camp fire for a second and is completely fine to follow DCA up a hill to a large door; he's got a gun, she's packing the heat of wooden arrows and a pick axe.

On the way up this hill, the player is given their first taste of a real combat scenario: wolves spring forth from the brush and it's up to the player to fend them off with the bow. Two arrows should do it as far as wolf persecution goes, but an experimental player will find that the bow does more damage the longer it is drawn before being loosed, so one can be enough with a clean enough shot. For a person still new to 3D gaming, this was a major chore. Getting used to the fact that both thumbs should be on the analog sticks at almost all times was hard enough, but dual-sticks plus dual-triggers for combat was almost enough for her to throw her hands up, especially when we found that the wolves were respawning enemies if you were to wander too far back to the campfire. I would have been delighted by this, actually; an early place for me to grind out a skill level with never-ending bad guys and an equally abundant supply of weapons. But this was our time, not just mine, and after she handed me the controller when finally opening the door, she was fine giving me a much longer turn after the lupine beat down.

In fairness, I actually found this to be a pretty lousy set up to learn the combat mechanics. Yes, Lara is given the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of bow shooting with an early run in with a dear, but the confrontation with the wolves shortly thereafter has two key problems: first, the wolves will appear in the same spot every time, but blend very well into the natural surrounding of the brush within the hill. For a non-gamer unused to surveying areas like this, it was easy to be overwhelmed when they pop in and out of small shrubbery, especially when getting the hang on of adjusting the camera while aiming the bow. Luckily, only one of the wolves does fatal damage to you (triggering yet another putrid quick time event, which we'll get back to), so on the Easy combat setting Lara can take quite a bit of punishment, but I could hear audible frustration from my lady as she fumbled around the environment while trying to aim and fire at enemies that went in and out of vision.

The second problem is actually minor, but I think worth pointing out. Had this been nearly every other third-person action game, there would have been a melee option. Points for Tomb Raider for making ranged combat more of viable option (and realistic. No matter what shape LC might be in, the odds of her winning hand-to-hand in a room full of attackers is slim for anyone), but in terms of new players in a game like this, fighting up close is a better way to ease in the neophyte; you walk up to the bad guy and hit a button, then something happens. For a person still getting used to working in combinations of buttons, it was nearly the breaking point.

But things turned around. After making our way though another cave and into the ruins of what seemed like a small village, she was far more interested in her surroundings, leading me to believe that the carrot at the end of the stick is in exploration and not moment-to-moment combat. Trying to figure out minor puzzles and locations of hidden items sparked quite a bit more interaction between the two of us rather than expressions of dissatisfaction with mechanics from her, and this is what I was hoping for all along. I don't exactly think we're over the thumb dexterity hump quite yet, but watching Lara saunter into a dilapidated hut while the camera was spinning wildly in search of a key item or the next destination made me pretty happy that the controller was in my wife's hands and not mine.

Tomb Dater: Part One

My wife rarely plays games. While there were some brief drunken hijinks that occurred just after our Wii purchase, they're starting to feel like a thousand years ago now that the world sits on the eve of an E3 that will really show the mettle of Sony and Microsoft's new hardware (we hope). The Tomb Raider reboot, though, had my lady's interest curiously piqued. I am not a traditional TR fan. For as good as the games may have been at one point, I've always had a hard time being pandered to as a male with an anatomically impossible main character. I'm not going to launch into a tirade or prove how enlightened I am as a male gamer, but I can honestly say that Lara Croft never really did it for me. My main squeeze, though, saw things a little differently. A tomboy, my wife seems to have looked at TR's main character as a respectable tough chick, one that the video game industry just didn't have enough of. This isn't an uncommon response to the Croft character, it seems, and from what I know of my wife's taste in action, tough chicks are the only chicks that matter. I can get behind that.

So a pact was struck that we will play the game together. It took a little time to get started; having really no interest in purchasing the game we decided to rent it over a weekend and blast our way through it just after launch. Since it's the beginning of June, you can rightly assume that it didn't happen that way. Long story short, though, we finally happened on a copy the other night and began playing it, incrementally, as a two parts of a romantic whole. One of them gets bored very easily. Over the next several days (weeks?), you will be the happy recipient of its documentation.

We decided to start the game with the combat set to the Easy setting, which is something I rarely do as a seasoned player, but it made perfect sense for our overall enjoyment. She, after all, sort of sees the game as something of an interactive movie from what I can surmise (which, so far, it is), so the thought of further frustrating herself with difficult battles was off the table from jump street. I am totally behind this. As a non-gamer, I want her to have a good time and, hopefully, find the experience enjoyable enough to play something else with me in the future or to ultimately seek out games that will interest her down the road. Realistically, my hopes aren't exactly sky high for that outcome, but I at least want the two of us to go through this game front to back together, and if less challenging enemy throwdowns are part of that, then that's A-ok.

Besides, I knew for a fact that this wouldn't be the real challenge for her anyway. After about the first ten minutes following the intro cut scene, it hit her in the face like brick wall: the player controls the camera, and the game expects it of them constantly. While, to be fair, the first 30-45 minutes involve Lara haplessly wandering through a cave in a straight line, the few puzzles found inside of it make it necessary to adjust the camera to see the full extent of the environment, something that you and me may be keenly aware of after years of dual-analog controller handling, but frustrating for her to wrap her head around. "This must be irritating for you," was a phrase she would occasionally repeat when stumped about our next course of action. I'm not going to lie, it did a little, but I'm sympathetic. I'm aware that I've been at this a long time, and I just try to imagine my mother, or an uncle, or anybody else that isn't conditioned to knowing the right stick will swing their perspective around as they see fit and get it. I'm pretty sure that this will still be our biggest hurdle going forward, but I'm optimistic that if she gives it some time, eventually it will just click. She's a smart lady.

I've often thought about this scenario over the past few years. Not necessarily with my wife, but with anyone not programmed with the knowledge of how to necessarily move your hands on a controller with 15 buttons and two analog sticks in concert with what's happening in front of you. Like, say, if you transported Gunpei Yokoi from 1975 forty years in to the future and told him to play Uncharted. I doubt he'd be able to hang, and he was a certifiable genius, so I wouldn't expect people today unaccustomed to several years of this kind of gaming to be able to jump right in, either. Often, my wife would tell me that current-, and even recent-past gen controllers simply had too many buttons. It intimidated her, and rightly so. This is why Nintendo made a gold mine off of Wii Sports; they simplified the control so that everyone could play. I can't help but agree with the fact that overcoming the Fear of Many Buttons is is a large barrier of entry for modern game consoles, and I'm very happy with my lady's mustering of courage so that she may overcome this obstacle to play as, from what we can tell early, a tough chick. A hell of a start, I'd say.