Unfettered Blather

February has traditionally been the month I buy the most games. Usually because this is when the post-holiday slump hits retailers the hardest. There just isn’t much out there that I don’t own that is at a price I’ll buy this year. In the interest of trying out titles I missed last year though, I did find a good deal on an old franchise I’ve kept my eye on. This has been a solid month for me in terms of games at least. We are going to change the format to where Buddy and I keep our lists completely separate until the end of the year. It has been too much trouble trying to synch lists.
- Jason O

GAME OF THE MONTH Midnight Club: Los Angeles
Despite some glaring flaws this is still a good racer that continues following the new direction the series set with Midnight Club 3. I was hoping for more and a lot of my fears about the new game were confirmed, but it’s still a decent racer which is something oddly absent in the current generation. As much as I want to give Buddy’s top pick game of the month I remain sufficiently dubious of the quality of the C&C franchise on the 360 to give it the top spot.
- Jason O

BEST OF THE MONTH (Buddy Pine)
	#1 Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (X360) Tiberium Wars is the game Red Alert 3 should have taken ques from in terms of balance. It doesn’t feel as innovative but who cares about innovation if it fails. It’s far more playable and you aren’t punished for making small mistakes. A game you can fire up and actually win while burning some time playing with toy robots and crushing infantry with tank treads. Replay value rules this title.
	#2 Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 (X360) It’s not often I can use the term “love/hate relationship” but here it actually applies. Red Alert 3 is confused and unforgiving. I feel like being rewarded for playing at least with the experience, but RA3 makes you feel like the game actually has something against you. Yes I actually get a vibe of resentment for trying to play against it or for not doing things it’s way. RA3 is a title I still can’t hate but the more I try to play it the more I do. I supposed if I wasn’t so in love with the franchise I might have been more forgiving, as it stands I am considering placing this title in my “worst of 2009 list” already merely out of sheer contempt for EA’s handling of it.

BEST SO FAR - Buddy Pine

1. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
2. Quake 4
3. Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
4. Call of Duty 3
5. Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3

BEST OF THE MONTH (Jason O)
	#1 Midnight Club: Los Angeles (X360) When it comes to Midnight Club I’m fairly gun shy. While Midnight Club 3 was one of the best racers I played from the last generation, it’s predecessor was one of the worst. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is like Midnight Club 3, except less of everything. Only one city, fewer cars, less customization, and less variety. While the game is absolutely gorgeous it is obvious that most of the effort went into making the game look good. Unfortunately, they did add a few new features. Pink slip races without a retry option is one of the most infuriating and is instantly “not fun” simply because a race can be lost by one simple mistake at the end. There is nothing quite as frustrating as skunking the competition the entire race in your car that you’ve lovingly built up to suddenly lose it because of one mistake at the finish line. Overall it’s a good game but a better looking and shallower sequel.
	#2 Speed Racer (Wii) As a movie, Speed Racer was a visual assault but an oddly good time. Would it surprise you to find out the game is the exact same way? A fairly decent racing game that actually does a good job with the Wii controls, this game actually incorproates the ridiculously cheesy but fun “Car-Fu” from the movie into the races. You can jump right in and figure out the basics quickly, but they were kind enough to provide in depth tutorials so that you could maximize the experience. One of those rare games that actually toes the line of easy to learn but difficult to master. An under-appreciated gem that is fun for the whole family. I can’t believe I actually said that!
	#3 Bioshock (X360) Maybe this game is just overhyped, I’m not seeing what is so great about it. I think it’s trying to be scary, but it’s not really. It is creepy, but almost in an annoying way. Creepy like that guy at work who hangs around the receptionist’s desk just a little too much and not creepy like finding out your next door neighbor got arrested as a serial killer. The game is “neat” enough and I appreciate the simple controls that allow you to switch between powers and weapons with no fuss. Unfortunately, the game is just not very compelling and I find myself having a hard time getting into it. Granted, I’m not that far into the game, but I purchased it at the beginning of the month and have spent more time with games purchased well after it. I’m just not having fun, in fact I’m a little bored. I keep plodding along and nothing interesting seems to be happening.

BEST SO FAR - Jason O

1. Burnout Paradise
2. Midnight Club: Los Angeles
3. Puzzle Quest
4. Call of Duty: World at War
5. Speed Racer
6. Bioshock
7. Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grade?
8. Doritos: Dash of Destruction
9. Corvette
10. Super Trucks Racing

WORST SO FAR

1. Drome Racers

REPURCHASES
As usual, post holiday remorse kicked in. Fortunately, just one title this year.

• Soldier of Fortune: Payback (X360 - Jason O)
  This is not a great game, in fact it could easily be classified as bad. I think the reviews have been overly harsh on it but I’m not entirely sure why. I will say that no other game has given me so many options for loadouts before and that is what I missed. There is something grand about choosing which weapon and how it is configured for every mission. Do I want a grenade launcher or would I benefit from the extra stability of a forward grip? Do I need a reflex sight for close combat or a rifle scope for distant targets? Do I want a submachinegun for backup? A shotgun? I’m still mystified why better shooters don’t give players these kinds of options. The top “real world” military shooters should be allowing players to do this!

Rejoice comrades! Chairman Nintendo is here to bring true equality to gamers in the glorious players paradise!

My brother-in-law Nathan is an avid player of Tetris Party on the Nintendo Wii, every chance he gets he positions himself on the couch, tosses a pillow under his feet on the ottoman and fires the game up for a bit of online world play. He is a strong player with an average score of between 6000 and 7000 points. I say “average” because this is the realm in which his score fluctuates.

Accusations that Nintendo likes arbitrary equalization of the scoring system and slanted game mechanics is nothing new. Penny Arcade has broached the subject and I have experienced some of the same issues present in Mario Party.

Tetris Party’s online component randomly pits you against players in a head-to-head challenge where clearing blocks or combinations will reward the opponent with a corresponding number of blocks under their workable blocks.

The major issue is the sliding scale by which Nintendo rewards and more importantly, punishes players for a loss.

The scale functions as such: As a new player you receive points for each victory, if you lose then a certain number are subtracted from your overall score. New players (those with lower scores) will receive larger amounts of points for each victory and a small portion subtracted. As you progress up the ladder the scale tips from rewarding victory to punishing failure. The amount of points earned per victory diminishes and the points subtracted increase exponentially.

I watched as my brother-in-law approached the 7000 point mark, a single win granted him 15 points towards his score, but the corresponding loss that followed saw 65 points taken away. If you lose to a player of lower ranking, their victory is given a much higher value than yours while your loss hits your points to a much greater extent. The scales problem is the tipping point, if you are a few hundred points higher than the shift point, your punishment becomes exponentially greater automatically.

Nathan waged a series of battles with the same player. They were pretty much on an equal footing, both winning and loosing an equal number of matches. By the end of their run they both had lost nearly 1000 points. They were essentially, BOTH loosing even though they were engaging in an equal exchange of blows. Eventually they both quit out of the matches because neither wanted to be punished.

What game translates four losses as twenty-fourth place?

The games does not provide players with the same pieces but generates random shapes, it is entirely possible to lose by a string of pieces that leave you with limited options. This “random” element throws a wrench in to the game’s overall mechanics. I’ve seen players lose simple because they were given pieces with no good corresponding place to drop them while your opponent blitzes you with combos.

One might say” thats up the skill of the player to determine, its a puzzle”, if this is your view then I’m sorry to say you either aren’t a player or you haven’t examined the dynamic well enough.

A simple crunch of the numbers outlines the flaw. A single loss must be countermanded by four or even five victories as you reach a higher level. That single loss punishes the player while those below your level are given more points and less punishment to bring them up to a higher level faster. While it is true that you need to win a proportionally larger number of games to attain a score, the balance favors lesser players and assaults ranking ones. The ratios are be designed to keep everyone within a specific score range.

In later stages, four losses need to be offset with as many as twenty-six victories, and this will only bring you back to your previous score. Whats worse, how you attain victory does not seem to be a factor, are you given extra points for beating players in a shorter period of time? Perhaps for stringing combinations or performing certain moves in succession? Not at all.

Good players need to be proportionally rewarded, not exponentially punished for their success. Being forced to win constantly to maintain your basic standing is not amusing or frankly, fair. This is little better than some strange form of socialism where you are unable to adequately gauge the rank and quality of a player unless they ace the game and maintain a near perfect record of victories. how is this different than games like Gran Turismo where you need to hit the perfect button combination every time within a fraction of a second to achieve a basic goal? Here the dynamic is skewed further because of the introduction of the random elements.

There are always players who can do this, but the disparity means that equal rank players will not be readily apparent because one has to ask, how many victories does this player have? The system dictates those with more victories are equalized and totaled in with players that have more losses than they do.

This reduces the overall quality of the title experience. If you don’t care about anything but dropping blocks, thats fine, go play Bejewled or Bubble Breaker. Once you introduce a scoring system your game mechanic has to function within that set of parameters in order to make sense of it all. If you don’t then frankly you are proving to me that you don’t really care all that much about your product or engaging the minds of people who play with some form of strategy and goals. This can be the difference between a great game and one that feels mediocre and sloppy.

Japanese games are notorious for punishing players instead of rewarding them, but Nintendo seems to have more than a few games designed where everyone is intentionally kept equal and unless they overcome the game itself, are not allowed to shine or stand-out. This is the worst kind of “everyone is special” crap that ruins games for those with anything more than a casual interest in them. Nobody likes to be kicked in the beanbag, but Nintendo’s only justification for this seems to be that you deserve it because you dared to display you are more talented than the other players.

Good game design does not force artificial punishment on players by exerting a “fairness doctrine”. Games are meant to be unfair but it has to prove this inequality by allowing people to succeed by allowing their talents to challenge each other without standing in their way.

I typically don’t review games because there are plenty of sites out there already dedicated to that purpose. I simply do not possess a great enough sense of self importance to think that my opinion ultimately matters for much. I do like to talk about games though, and I particularly like to talk about the games industry and game design. Occasionally a game has a design that intrigues me enough that it becomes worth talking about. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is one of those games.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a quick history of my experiences with the Midnight Club franchise. My first encounter was actually with Midnight Club 2 on the X-Box. I didn’t care much for the game. The idea of open world racing where you could determine how you finish a race sounds good on paper but doesn’t work so well in execution. The AI has an obvious advantage here as it doesn’t get lost, doesn’t make wrong turns, and never has to look at the mini-map while flying through city streets at 150mph. The game had another problem which is that the player is always driving the worst car. You get new cars by beating drivers with a better car and the entire game played out this way. After beating the first city and moving on to find the game was just going to repeat this cycle ad nauseam I decided I had enough.

After such a poor experience I took a pass on Midnight Club 3 until they released the “DUB edition” as a Platinum hits title and I had read enough reviews to convince me it was worth $20. Well, the game was fantastic. They still had the open world races and unordered races that made the previous game so frustrating, but they were a minority now. Motorcycles were a fun if somewhat useless addition. Different car classes had special abilities that added to the gameplay. Also, races attempted balance so that you were usually racing similar cars. I’m not totally ok with that as I think it’s acceptable to have a superior car but it was better than always racing at a disadvantage. The game was focused on fun and player choice. Of the last generation, there is no other racing game I had so much fun with.

So now we have Midnight Club: Los Angeles and the entire franchise has taken a giant step backwards for the sake of graphical fidelity. Not that the game is bad, there is just less of everything. We’re down to one city, which is more detailed than the 4 cities in the last game but I can’t say there are more roads. Just more detail. There are fewer cars and they all have fewer customization options. You still have special abilities but now they are all powered up the same way (Driving “clean”) and you select your ability instead of it being according to car type. That feels like a copout, since the different special abilities were one way that help differentiate the different car classes. Also, I can’t say that the cars feel all that different. I feel like there should be a big difference between how a 2006 Lancer Evolution accelerates, handles, and performs versus a 2008 Charger SRT. Yeah, the Lancer corners better, somewhat, but I don’t feel like they’re two distinct automobiles. In the previous game there was a world of difference between cars like that.

Not that everything is less. The in car view is nice, but largely worthless since looking around in the real world and in game is still completely different. Chances are good you’ll be playing this game just like the last one, in third person so you can actually see what is going on around you. Also, they included pink slip races and wagers.

Now, I want to talk about this in-depth because with a game so focused on “fun” instead of “realism” this seems like a really odd choice. The entire point of Midnight Club is that you have these cars, you see, and you’re encouraged to love them. You put serious game money into them, modify them, tune them, make them look the way you want them to look. Every car you have can be changed to reflect your own personal statement about yourself. Also, performance parts aren’t cheap, but you can effectively use the same car for a good chunk of the game by upgrading it and keeping it competitive for as long as possible. You get to know that car very well. So imagine this car you’ve spent a lot of time with, tweaked, customized, and won many a hard race, and then lose that car in a split second because you missed a turn, had a head-on collision, or any number of things that commonly go wrong in a race. Watch as your AI opponent gleefully speeds to the finish marker that you can visibly see as you’re at a dead stop. Your car is now gone. There are no retries in pink slip races. Also, you can’t simply turn the game off. They subtract your car from your garage at the beginning of the race and re-add it if you win.

This is one of those ideas that sounds good in theory but works out really crappy in reality. How many times are game developers going to try this before they realize that people don’t like it? Kind of like Steel Battalion erasing your save game if you die or the Fable II development when they realized in playtesting that people were loading old save files rather than living with a disfigured character. These are GAMES that people play for FUN. While I think there is some value to having consequence in a game, the consequence should not be so harsh as to discourage playing. I know the first time I lost a pink slip race I shut the game down for the rest of the day. It was devastating. I almost took it back. I’m glad I didn’t, but I have resorted to gaming the game in order to not suffer the consequences because some of those races are necessary to advance the game. So now I keep a back-up on a memory card. I hate that I had to resort to that and I consider it cheating, but I’m not about to lose another car like that.

If they wanted to do this, then they should at least have a retry. If you just got yourself into a race you can’t win, then you’re not going to win and you’ll lose the car. I’m sanguine about that. That happens and there should be a penalty, even a harsh one, for trying to reach too high too early. However, at least with a retry I don’t suffer a harsh penalty for a stupid split second mistake that costs me the race. These races take a game that is a shallower prettier sequel to a still pretty fun game and make it maddeningly frustrating.

Overall, I think the game is good minus a few really bad points. I hope they’ll release some cars in the future as downloadable content. That’s wishful thinking though. Out of the box, it is inferior in almost every way, except visuals, to its predecessor. That’s surprising, but also exactly what I had predicted with this generation. All this additional horsepower and all we get are better looking games? Midnight Club: Los Angeles is a tale of wasted potential. A game that could be great and settles for “good enough”. There is a reason I picked this up at a bargain, even though it still sells full price. “Good enough” is not going to get $60 out of me.

I’m sure somewhere, someone is universally offended at the concepts present in Unreal Tournament III. Rehash is probably good way to describe it if you’re one of those types that has to render things down to a single term, I prefer to say “rehash, but…”

UT3 is a culmination title which features every multiplayer cliches and catchphrase. Nothing about the game hasn’t been done before. UT3 is a game designed around the core principle that high-speed multiplayer is king and packs the roster with muscle-laden hulks snarling out dares that death holds no sway over their prowess with a weapon that could lay waste to a small continent in a single shot. We are treated to sexy (but oddly enough, fully armored) women, the typical black guy with facial tattoos, revenge against aliens and a main character that is Marcus from Gears of War (seriously, compare them folks, its the same dude.)

Single player missions in story mode is at best a thinly veiled selection of missions based entirely on multiplayer concepts including point defense, capture the flag and capturing power generators. The formula is jumbled with a few added features including weapons and abilities that form some pretty clever ways to allow two players to mutually support each other in assault and defense.

UT3 seems lazy in single player mainly because all of the cutscenes and story while generic (revenge on aliens that destroyed your homeworld) is complete window dressing. The levels are simply multiplayer maps with a collection of bots and generic multiplayer goals attached to them. Everything is carefully detailed and even capture the flag has some protracted (if somewhat cute) explanation as to why they are called flags and why they happen to look like them as well.

Everything in UT3 is so deadly serious that it has a certain level of kitsch attached to it. There is simply no way you can’t smile at the sheer determination and grizzle, the washed out colors, the growls and one-liners. I’m sure people think the female swaggers and the chiseled jawlines are absurd, but I see UT3 as a homage to a style, much like the film “300″, it’s all about the niche inside the genre.

As lazy as it feels, you simply cannot fault UT3 for what it is. Is it unoriginal? Sure it is, has it been done before? Many times, but everything in UT3 has this strange polish to it. It has some control issues, mainly it feels like the player is skating on butter. Starting a strafing attack usually leads to your character staying in motion for a split second even though you’ve tried to change directions. Strafing in a circular pattern seems to be a favored method of the developers.

UT3’s shortcomings are based in the view of the developers that multiplayer is the real reason to buy this title. I can understand this to an extent, Unreal and Quake were for a time, the masters of genre and recapturing the past success seemed like a solid idea. Gears of War was no doubt seen as their single-player experience so UT3 was left with an identity crisis. A game somewhat abandoned in creativity where the developers tried to offer the solitary player some measure of an experience while still being obsessed with online gameplay

As a multiplayer experience, UT3 feels old and dated. Capture the flag? Come on guys, the generator defense missions and the cooperative gameplay elements add an extra dimension but UT3 feels like a title that should have been made to the 1999 title, not a genre that has had ten years of evolution behind it. Still I can’t help but praise UT3 for some of the small details but it all feels like a massive case of afterthought, adding a story that the creators tried to shoehorn in to their title without doing anything but the most basic elements to develop it. The frustration is present in the fact that they really seemed to work at this, but it doesn’t matter because there seems to be a fear that the single player might somehow detract from the multiplayer obsession.

UT3 deserved something linear, its own mythos and thats where the final nail in it’s coffin comes in to play. Multiplayer is generic, you cannot have a generic level meant to drive a specific story. The explanations of why this deathmatch particular or capture the flag has significance is hollow, it’s bullshit from people trying hard, really hard to hide the fact they had no interest in offering anyone but the online crowd an experience.

The final summation of UT3 is a question:

“How does it feel to play a game that the developers don’t care about you playing?”

I might have been mad at being treated like the bastard step-child, I thought the obsession with multiplayer only titles died out, apparently some folks haven’t gotten the memo. Still UT3 is just good enough at what it does to quell the annoying focus and let me have fun. I want to steal me a Necris walker!

Welcome, welcome to Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deeply insightful to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

My wife has never been an avid gamer. Over the years she has had games purchased on her behalf or participated in games with me if she’s interested. Honestly, she’d rather play Bejeweled or Tetris for the most part, but every now and again we find some common ground. There always seems to be a lot of angst from other gamers to get their wives or girlfriends into gaming. I think that’s silly, my wife doesn’t try to get me interested in scrapbooking or crocheting. I have, as an enthusiast, always been welcoming when she has wanted to try something.

I’d like to point out that there are no surefire “gateway” games. I hear a lot of talk about getting girlfriends hooked on the Sims, Rock Band, or other “girl gamer” games. I think that is the first problem. There are no “girl gamer” games. The way I’ve been able to get my wife to play games with me is largely driven by two things:

1. Our desire to spend time together
2. Her interest in a particular game

My wife has played Burnout 3, Pac-Man, Bejeweled, and most recently Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader. Her tastes are eclectic, but that’s ok with me. If she has interests that diverse, how am I going to pin her down to a specific “type” of game to play? Also, do I really want her to become a gamer or do I want her to understand my hobby? Actually, the real answer is I just don’t want her to be jealous of my hobby. Having mutual interests is important in a relationship, but I think that more gamers could stand to diversify themselves. There are plenty of things couples can do and trying to get your signficant other to become a gamer seems self-serving. I honestly wouldn’t think twice about scrapbooking. I have neither the patience, skill, or inclination to learn. What I do focus on is making sure I spend time with my wife and still game. If that means I can’t rush off to play my new game as soon as the kids are in bed then I’m sanguine. The important thing is to keep an open mind, because I never know which game she’ll want to try next.

Other participants!
Gaming with my wife, You could be doubling alone, Next Gen Killed Our Gaming Relationship, Forced Perspective, From Gaming Geek to Heroes Freak, My Lady and Gaming, Gaming with your significant other, Gaming Together, Maybe?, Girl Gamers = Hawt, Gaming with my significant other, Move Over Hott Boy, I Want to Play, ‘Til Mongoose Mowdown Do Us Part