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Expansion Packs, Add-ons, Sequels, and Other Crap the World Doesn’t Need

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I love the Sims. I am hopelessly addicted to the nutty little people that live in their own world on my computer. I am so hooked to this virtual crank that each time EA kicks out another goofy expansion pack for it, I bite and grab myself a few new locales or items for my little demented Sims to play with. The Sims is a completely genius game while at the same time, a totally evil one. It is a game that is groundbreaking in a multitude of ways, but for me, one specific trait stands out: The Sims franchise, for better or worse, made expansion packs and add-ons a norm of gaming. Sure, there were games before that did it and had success but no game boasts the breadth of expansion-y goodness that the Sims has on the market.

Enough of the Sims, I am here today to talk about expansion packs. Everyone these days has an expansion for something. →  Get lame or get out.

Retrospectives – Metroid Prime

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I don’t know about you guys, but with all these Metroid videos popping up all over the place, coupled with the release of three Metroid titles in a three week span (Metroid, Super Metroid on the VC, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption on the Wii), I have developed full-blown Metroid-fever. GameTrailers has an awesome video retrospective on the entire Metroid series, while Nintendo has been so kind as to relay eight preview videos for the soon-to-be Wii masterpiece, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, right to our very own Wiis.

But then I became a little sad. Corruption is going to end the Prime trilogy as we know it. What happens next, no one knows. Would the series return to 2D adventure like SNES’s opus, Super Metroid? Would it continue the First-Person-Adventure legacy? That’s for Nintendo and Retro Studios to decide. My job now is to tell you how awesome Metroid Prime is.

Surprisingly, many of you have never actually played Metroid Prime before, all because it wasn’t like Super Metroid. →  Who is that standing behind you?

Dreamcast Mania!: What did we miss? – Capcom VS SNK 2: Millionaire Fighting 2001

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What happened – I don’t actually remember if there were even rumors of Capcom VS SNK 2 coming to American Dreamcasts, but considering we got the first game, it seems likely that there were. CVS2 would hit the Dreamcast, but only in Japan. In my experience it was one of the most widely imported titles in the West, to the point where some DC groups talk about it like it was a regular release.

The Game – If there is one thing Capcom’s massive library of fighters has taught us, it is that they never did get it right the first time. The first iteration always comes with its share of problems, while the final revision is often tweaked and polished to perfection. It happened with Street Fighter 2 and 3, it happened with Darkstalkers, and it happened with Capcom VS SNK.

A 100 pound woman and 400 pound man both make identical jumps simultaneously. Who lands first?

The original CVS was novel enough to make it popular, but it was unable to realize the full potential of this concept. →  Article Kombat

A death in the family – Sega leaves the hardware business and I rediscover video games

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More fun than games?

Towards the end of highschool I stopped gaming. For the first time, I had a girlfriend, was preparing to go to college, and had a wicked meth habit. Beyond these time wasting activities, something about video games seemed to have changed. Though I had been a Sega faithful since the Master System, my highschool days marked the first console generation I spent in bed with a Sega competitor. I loved the PS1, but it didn’t carry me through to the PS2 by any means.

I don’t even remember the launch of the Dreamcast. Murmurs of Sega’s new system made their way through school but I knew it was destined to failure and didn’t have the time to care. Freshman and sophomore years of college were spent playing Diablo 2 with roommates, hanging out, surfing the web and strung out on heroin. Diablo was more an addiction than a game and I don’t really consider it to be more than a diversion. →  It was the best of games, it was the worst of games

Requiem for a Dreamcast

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I used to think I was pretty clever when I told folks that “Nintendo made me a gamer. Ocarina of Time made me hardcore”. I kept thinking this for quite some time, but eventually realized that pre-OOT, I wasn’t really a “gamer”, just a kid whose game experience consisted of little more than a string of Nintendo consoles, a few hours on the Genesis, and a dusty old 486 PC. This was a time when fresh games came to my house twice a year if I was lucky.

After Zelda I truly became a “gamer”, though now I think it had less to with that game in particular and more to do with the fact that around that time I was introduced to a modern day computer, Next Generation Magazine, and a Sony Playstation. I learned of an industry that was much bigger than what Nintendo on its own could show me, and I began to appreciate the things that made a game good. →  Postsona 3 FES

Pieces of a Perfect Game: Koei’s arduous slip into mediocrity

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Good strategy games can be hard to come by on consoles. The only company that reliably produces games in the genre is Koei, and, as I’ve noted before, their recent track record is not so good.

Koei is now widely known for their willingness to recycle old work in the form of Dynasty Warriors – to put it more nicely, they haven’t fixed anything that isn’t broken in a while. Their lesser-known, but longer-running, Romance of the Three Kingdoms series is now on its eleventh iteration. I haven’t gotten the latest one yet, because by now I’ve figured it out (took me long enough): Koei has a secret recipe for the ultimate officer-based strategy game, but they insist on releasing it a piece at a time.

You don’t even have to look within the series itself. Genghis Khan 2, for example, was an entertaining little test of a familial system, in which you would marry your daughters off to the most loyal (and coincidentally ugliest) generals, and raise your sons to be good rulers (or kill them off if they sucked). →  All I want for Christmas is my PSP.

Game genres and classifications

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Recently I’ve been enjoying Gungrave Overdose, which you might remember as being reviewed as a solid little action game with a ridiculous 15 dollar retail price. With a solid combat system and great presentation, you could do a lot worse in the genre.

The question is, what genre am I talking about? The obvious answer is that this is an “action game”. But even though you shoot many enemies, this isn’t Gears of War or Rainbow Six. Gungrave is all about racking up multiple kills in a row with successive attacks, and using your limited arsenal to create combos. Playing it as a simple run-and-gun makes it a far more mindless experience than it actually is. So to be more specific, I would classify this as a “Devil May Cry”- like, something that most reviews agree with. But in my travels, I have even seen the game described in the same sentence as Tomb Raider.

What the hell? Tomb Raider is a platform-heavy adventure game. →  Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 5: Golden Post

On licensed games

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Licensed games are probably the last thing an avid gamer would be worried about. Aside from the occasional gem, they are quite often the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of quality. I still worry about them however, and there are plenty of reasons to do so. Let’s take a look at why.

The most important thing to understand about the modern licensed game is that it has changed greatly since the old days. Time was when video games were just another niche to exploit. They were never a primary source of profit, and so they never got a lot of money or attention. If they could whip up something playable and use marketing strength to sell enough copies, then that was good enough. Thus you had just about every movie or cartoon character finding their way into some sort of platformer or shooter. Swamp Thing, Total Recall, X-men, Aladdin. Robocop and Terminator. Robocop versus Terminator. Even food mascots got their game on. →  [post launches in virtual reality],[put on your VR headset now],[left click on your mouse to open the remainder of this post in your web browser on your digital computing device]

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 7.27.07

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Microsoft sort of wants you to buy an HD DVD add on
$20 off is not a good deal for something that costs $200, but that’s the amazing deal Microsoft is giving us on their 360 HD DVD add on. The move feels like a last ditch effort to make it appear that they still have a chance at beating the Blu Ray format. What is it with these companies that are desperate but not willing to allow this desperation to save me a lot of money? The PS3 should cost $300 and the 360 HD DVD doohickey should retail for $19.95.

Then there’s the prevalence of bundle deals. In addition to the twenty big ones you’d save buying the HD DVD drive, you’d also get five free movies. Choose from classics like Seabiscuit, Chronicles of Riddick, and Tomb Raider. Or, buy old movies like Blazing Saddles and enjoy the pain of watching lower quality film in high def. I’d prefer to save more money on the initial purchase instead. →  You had me at read more.

Everything I know about RPGs I learned from Fallout

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These days, the few western RPGs that exist that are not MMO’s are trying to conquer a unique challenge: How do you create a living, breathing world for the player to engage in? We’ve got the graphics, the items, and years of combat engines to take inspiration from. But we’ve played in static worlds before, where quests and NPC’s never change, and your options to mold the world are limited. We want games where the roles we play actually mean something, to ourselves and those we interact with.

It isn’t an easy task. You need the right size world, and the right contents in said world. You need smart NPC’s that go about their daily lives, and a ton of dialogue options to give players the illusion they are talking to a genuine person. Many games have experimented with these features, but I don’t think there are any that get them all down perfectly, or even close to perfectly. Oblivion, one of the poster children of fine Roleplaying, has characters who don’t open doors to enter buildings, and a handful of voiceactors each doing lines for dozens of townsfolk. →  Lords of the Read 2