Assorted gaming rants
Maybe you'll want to skip this if you're not into computer games.
After quite some time without doing more than playing for an hour or so on my DS the PSN outage got me into HD gaming again. I guess its the old : as soon as you can't have it, you want it again; thing.
DS vs. PS3 for RPG s
I got to love my DS especially for the sheer number of 2d and retro style RPGs it has and some of the more innovative games. When I got my PS3 I had sen trailers of Final Fantasy 13 and White Knight Chronicle and saw the number of PS2 RPGs and figured the PS3 was a safe bet for me. But it never really felt like its catering to my audience. I still love it, I use it to play video files and Bluerays and I have a handfull of games but most of the games are pretty on the outside and all the same underneath. The DS is quite the opposite. It has much more affordable games and just so many more that are intruguing to me - and well .. if I didn't like the game as much as I thought that isn't as hard to swallow with a 20$ game as with a 70$ game. Especially if the is alway one more you'd like to try.
After a while I seem to start missing the graphics, though. Enough to give FF13 a try. Enough to See the announcement of a Wizardry Game for PSN and get all excited.
Final Fantasy 13
ok, so I finally caved in and got it. I waned to skip this iteration after all the bad press it got but it wasn't so expensive and I figured even a bad Final Fantasy Title should still be some fun. It is. Its also very much irritating at places. I'm about 20 hours in now, I guess that might be about 1/3rd of the game. What do I think about it?
Its beautiful. I mean that. I occasionally forget to follow the story during cutscenes and just stare. Even in game I sometimes just look around and stare. The ingame menus have a SF feel and your characters profile page has a closeup of them turning towards you and smiling. In terms of design and art and resolution this game is all I wanted as a child and then some. The story breaks into a few major topics: the world is great. Its much more interesting than the world of FF 12 ever was . much more like some of the old titles with the extra mile in back stories, locations and everything. I like the overall story too - as far as I got to know it so far. I'm not sure if its the translation or if some of the scenes were simply rendered before someone thought up the final story arch, but some parts of the story make next to no sense. Like those games when you take a movie scene and try to come up with a script to match it without knowing whats going on. I wouldn't want to cut a beautiful and expensive scene from a game just because it is no longer necessary to the narrative, either but well ..
The characters are a matter personal taste I guess. No real all time favorites for me. Not as bad as some reviews make them out to be.
The game as a game is where it falls short.
Through the first hour of playing I found myself wondering why they didn't just leave all the RPG parts (whats left of them, shops, skilling up characters and fighting) out in favor of a Heavy Rain/God of War quicktime event for the boss battles and just leave it at that. Granted, the fights do get more complex and more complicated later on. But SE stripped almost everything game and RPG like from the game. Its a bit like a movie/visual novel that you can only continue to view by braving hundrets of battles. The last art I played yesterday follows the charcters rescuing the remaining 2 heros out of a giant spaceship and I really found myself wondering if this is still supposed to be fun, or work. Especially since there is nothing to do but fight. Noone to talk to, nothing to explore, no sidequests, just cutscene, battle, battle, battle rinse repeat.
I still want to know what happens next :) But its more the appeal a film or book has...
Wizardy
When I saw the announcement for a Wizardry game for PSN I was instantly won over. I have happy memories of the wizardry series. I even got one of the PS1 japanese games (and found it charming but stopped playing after a while). It sounds to good to be true - a retro RPG from a series I love with pretty japanese character art and HD graphics? Count me in. While the "Welcome back" games from Sony don't do much for me (yes, I played the demo for Little big Planed and liked it, but I really can't see myself spending much time with a platformer - and some shooters and racing games - come on, do I look like a teenage boy to you?) I sat here biting my nails over the PSN coming back up so I have a chance to get the game - and the release date isn't even officially announced.
In the meantime I did what every obsessive gamer would do and looked up news and screenshots. The one that made me rethink the day one purchase is this one. Its a bit hard to read, but below the character stats it say "Use a Groth Fruit (Playstation Network)". Maybe I'm being a bit crass again, but I've spent too much time on facebook to think games that make you pay for character advancement are fun. I wouldn't be so irritated if this were a casual game - if you want to spend mony to get a new car for mario cart or something like this - go for it. But I've played some older Wizardry games and they're hard. Really hard. At the same time some of those hard and evil moments are those I remember most fondly - getting wiped out by a few rats in the beginning of Wizardry 6 - spending several days plannning and rolling the perfect party in wizardry 7. I played with my brother back then and we woud play the first dungeon several times until we knew what party of characters really worked for us. Deciding which charcter would get get the best weapon wasn't easy. This wasn't Diablo where the only choice you make is your start character and which magical items to throw away and wich to keep. Giving you paid help makes it feel cheap somehow.
Imagine making a hard day trip on foot. the sun is shining and you're having fun and you get exhausted and all your muscles ache but it feels like its worth it. Now imagine the same trip while a bus stops by every 15 minutes to ask you if you really don't want a ride? its only 2 dollars after all? Hard to stay as excited about the labour you make.
some thoughts on game making
Right now I'm not trying to make any games. To be honest I'm happy if I find the time to play them. Still, some thoughts just sort of pop up.
maybe I'm on the wrong track since I'm not really playing online games .. and this might work better with less crowded online worlds .. but wouldn't it be a good idea to make every player a quest giver? When you make your own charater you could just add one or two questions - like a favorite food or something like that and determine an appropriate quest from the combination of race, class gender and favorite items. In game, other players could trigger this quest like a normal one and get the quest reward from the system. Voila - a lot more variety in quest givers and not all of them would be the same.
another tought I had is a bit more difficult to explain .. I thought about al this time travel games right now, and how I like to be able to break from the main storyline and do something else (sub quests, gain new classes and stuff like that) and I thought - how about making a game that is pretty straight forward (brave the tower, kill the bag guy style). When you just start the main storyline you're a normal man/boy fighter class nothing special. But you would have another game mode that essentially is your history as a character. This would be sort of sandbox style. Doing things in your history would change your protagonist and sometime the world for your main storyline. Simple example. If you pick up a magical sword in your characters history, in the main storyline the character starts with a magical sword, he found in his childhood .. and so on. The two gaming mode could even have a different graphical style (the history part would work well in cute or retro graphics I think) and you could have a narrative in the main storyline that doesn't always suffer from that RPG problem of : "Come quickly, the dragon is about to destroy the town." "I'm coming, after I shop around some more and searched the whole town for missing chests .. if it gets burned down maybe I won't be able to get them later, right? And I need to gain a level anyway."
ok, I'm sure I forgot some thing I wanted to talk about, but i guess its more than anyone in their right mind would like to read already, so I#ll leave it at that
After quite some time without doing more than playing for an hour or so on my DS the PSN outage got me into HD gaming again. I guess its the old : as soon as you can't have it, you want it again; thing.
DS vs. PS3 for RPG s
I got to love my DS especially for the sheer number of 2d and retro style RPGs it has and some of the more innovative games. When I got my PS3 I had sen trailers of Final Fantasy 13 and White Knight Chronicle and saw the number of PS2 RPGs and figured the PS3 was a safe bet for me. But it never really felt like its catering to my audience. I still love it, I use it to play video files and Bluerays and I have a handfull of games but most of the games are pretty on the outside and all the same underneath. The DS is quite the opposite. It has much more affordable games and just so many more that are intruguing to me - and well .. if I didn't like the game as much as I thought that isn't as hard to swallow with a 20$ game as with a 70$ game. Especially if the is alway one more you'd like to try.
After a while I seem to start missing the graphics, though. Enough to give FF13 a try. Enough to See the announcement of a Wizardry Game for PSN and get all excited.
Final Fantasy 13
ok, so I finally caved in and got it. I waned to skip this iteration after all the bad press it got but it wasn't so expensive and I figured even a bad Final Fantasy Title should still be some fun. It is. Its also very much irritating at places. I'm about 20 hours in now, I guess that might be about 1/3rd of the game. What do I think about it?
Its beautiful. I mean that. I occasionally forget to follow the story during cutscenes and just stare. Even in game I sometimes just look around and stare. The ingame menus have a SF feel and your characters profile page has a closeup of them turning towards you and smiling. In terms of design and art and resolution this game is all I wanted as a child and then some. The story breaks into a few major topics: the world is great. Its much more interesting than the world of FF 12 ever was . much more like some of the old titles with the extra mile in back stories, locations and everything. I like the overall story too - as far as I got to know it so far. I'm not sure if its the translation or if some of the scenes were simply rendered before someone thought up the final story arch, but some parts of the story make next to no sense. Like those games when you take a movie scene and try to come up with a script to match it without knowing whats going on. I wouldn't want to cut a beautiful and expensive scene from a game just because it is no longer necessary to the narrative, either but well ..
The characters are a matter personal taste I guess. No real all time favorites for me. Not as bad as some reviews make them out to be.
The game as a game is where it falls short.
Through the first hour of playing I found myself wondering why they didn't just leave all the RPG parts (whats left of them, shops, skilling up characters and fighting) out in favor of a Heavy Rain/God of War quicktime event for the boss battles and just leave it at that. Granted, the fights do get more complex and more complicated later on. But SE stripped almost everything game and RPG like from the game. Its a bit like a movie/visual novel that you can only continue to view by braving hundrets of battles. The last art I played yesterday follows the charcters rescuing the remaining 2 heros out of a giant spaceship and I really found myself wondering if this is still supposed to be fun, or work. Especially since there is nothing to do but fight. Noone to talk to, nothing to explore, no sidequests, just cutscene, battle, battle, battle rinse repeat.
I still want to know what happens next :) But its more the appeal a film or book has...
Wizardy
When I saw the announcement for a Wizardry game for PSN I was instantly won over. I have happy memories of the wizardry series. I even got one of the PS1 japanese games (and found it charming but stopped playing after a while). It sounds to good to be true - a retro RPG from a series I love with pretty japanese character art and HD graphics? Count me in. While the "Welcome back" games from Sony don't do much for me (yes, I played the demo for Little big Planed and liked it, but I really can't see myself spending much time with a platformer - and some shooters and racing games - come on, do I look like a teenage boy to you?) I sat here biting my nails over the PSN coming back up so I have a chance to get the game - and the release date isn't even officially announced.
In the meantime I did what every obsessive gamer would do and looked up news and screenshots. The one that made me rethink the day one purchase is this one. Its a bit hard to read, but below the character stats it say "Use a Groth Fruit (Playstation Network)". Maybe I'm being a bit crass again, but I've spent too much time on facebook to think games that make you pay for character advancement are fun. I wouldn't be so irritated if this were a casual game - if you want to spend mony to get a new car for mario cart or something like this - go for it. But I've played some older Wizardry games and they're hard. Really hard. At the same time some of those hard and evil moments are those I remember most fondly - getting wiped out by a few rats in the beginning of Wizardry 6 - spending several days plannning and rolling the perfect party in wizardry 7. I played with my brother back then and we woud play the first dungeon several times until we knew what party of characters really worked for us. Deciding which charcter would get get the best weapon wasn't easy. This wasn't Diablo where the only choice you make is your start character and which magical items to throw away and wich to keep. Giving you paid help makes it feel cheap somehow.
Imagine making a hard day trip on foot. the sun is shining and you're having fun and you get exhausted and all your muscles ache but it feels like its worth it. Now imagine the same trip while a bus stops by every 15 minutes to ask you if you really don't want a ride? its only 2 dollars after all? Hard to stay as excited about the labour you make.
some thoughts on game making
Right now I'm not trying to make any games. To be honest I'm happy if I find the time to play them. Still, some thoughts just sort of pop up.
maybe I'm on the wrong track since I'm not really playing online games .. and this might work better with less crowded online worlds .. but wouldn't it be a good idea to make every player a quest giver? When you make your own charater you could just add one or two questions - like a favorite food or something like that and determine an appropriate quest from the combination of race, class gender and favorite items. In game, other players could trigger this quest like a normal one and get the quest reward from the system. Voila - a lot more variety in quest givers and not all of them would be the same.
another tought I had is a bit more difficult to explain .. I thought about al this time travel games right now, and how I like to be able to break from the main storyline and do something else (sub quests, gain new classes and stuff like that) and I thought - how about making a game that is pretty straight forward (brave the tower, kill the bag guy style). When you just start the main storyline you're a normal man/boy fighter class nothing special. But you would have another game mode that essentially is your history as a character. This would be sort of sandbox style. Doing things in your history would change your protagonist and sometime the world for your main storyline. Simple example. If you pick up a magical sword in your characters history, in the main storyline the character starts with a magical sword, he found in his childhood .. and so on. The two gaming mode could even have a different graphical style (the history part would work well in cute or retro graphics I think) and you could have a narrative in the main storyline that doesn't always suffer from that RPG problem of : "Come quickly, the dragon is about to destroy the town." "I'm coming, after I shop around some more and searched the whole town for missing chests .. if it gets burned down maybe I won't be able to get them later, right? And I need to gain a level anyway."
ok, I'm sure I forgot some thing I wanted to talk about, but i guess its more than anyone in their right mind would like to read already, so I#ll leave it at that