Love the Capcom

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This is a transcript of a presentation I gave at the Women’s Institute last week.

In the ongoing, victimless, and utterly pointless console wars Capcom is America. It’s selling arms to everyone. Ammunition for all the fanboys to use on each other. Sure the Wii can’t do Dead Rising but then Zack and Wiki just wouldn’t work on the Xbox 360. HD is the only way to play Resident Evil 5 but then is there any greater pleasure than being able to carry around the entire original Resident Evil around on the DS? Science says no. So as the fanboys shoot each other down in flames Capcom continues to produce a stream of the greatest games that ever existed. So here are the reasons why I love Capcom.

Sure, we may all have our Capcom favourites. A Street Fighter fan here. A Resident Evil fan there but it’s only when we step back and take a look at the full spectrum one realises the full extent of Capcom’s awesomeness. →  Words are the towns and cities of letters.

Review – King of Fighters XII

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The King of Fighters XII has been out for close to four months. I have had it since day one. I apologize for the delay, but I finally came to terms with why it took me so long. KOF XII is not a good game, and my old review tried to hide it by going over every detail and feature while ignoring the big picture. And the big picture is not pretty.

Here’s the problem – SNK had a vision, one that involved taking this franchise in a slightly new direction. Tag battles, quicker combat, and a new story and new characters were all in the cards. It may not be what everyone wanted, but it was a good excuse to keep the series going well after it probably should have died. For whatever reason, they shitcanned this new formula after just two games. My only guess (and really, this is a guess) is that they had nowhere else to go. →  Rule of Read

Review – Shadow Hearts

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Continuing my trend of catching up on PS2 RPGs, I picked up the Shadow Hearts series a few months ago. Since a recent spate of games (including Demon’s Souls, which seems to be a videolamer favorite) has kept me busy, I’m just now making my way through the series. The PS2 may have an impressive spread of RPGs – as I’ve discovered, still playing games I had barely heard about – but Shadow Hearts really stands apart, despite being an early game on the system that hasn’t really aged well.

By far the most impressive part of Shadow Hearts is the atmosphere. Set a little over a year before World War I and taking place in both East Asia and Western Europe, SH manages to portray a surprisingly realistic world, given its focus on demons both internal and external. Some of my favorite parts of the game involve direct interaction with Japan’s army – though a little research indicates the writers confused pre-WWI events with pre-WWII events. →  Tony Hawk’s Pro Reader 3

Games With No Reviews I Agree With

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I realize Metacritic is more than a little unpopular, but despite all of the problems produced by its aggregate scores it still functions well as a convenient index of professional reviews, which is my reason for referencing it in this post.

Gears of War 2 — I came late to the party on the Gears of War franchise, but it still had a fairly active and large fanbase that kept the hype alive and is also what eventually convinced me to play it. When I finally started playing my expectations were set especially high, and thus I was especially shocked when I discovered exactly how much I disliked everything about it. This game was such an unenjoyable experience for me that I went on to write a review of my own.

Every single one of the ninety reviews listed on Metacritic is outstandingly positive.

Chrono Trigger — There are a lot of things about games that I like just because I like them. →  There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is games.

Review – The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

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The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, was not simply good relative to other licensed games. It is one of the best games in its genre, both upon release and to this very day. People with no interest in the genre have picked it up and had a blast. Shooter fans were stunned that something that looked so derivative on the surface could be so engaging. While it might not have been quite the miracle that Goldeneye was, it was still a blessing, and hopes were high that developer Starbreeze Studios could take their formula and strike gold again with The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.

Let this be another lesson on the importance of execution when it comes to making a good game. All of the elements that made Butcher Bay a classic are back, but arranged so that they have hardly any potency. It ends up playing more like a straight shooter, which is not only boring at this point, but completely betrays the character and setting. →  Hot Shots Post 3

Review – League of Legends

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League of Legends, the stand alone Defense Of The Ancients clone released by Riot Games, bills itself as better than DOTA. The good news: it lives up to its billing. Without a doubt, LoL is a superior product to DOTA. This should not be surprising. Being able to draw from established source material, recruit one of the recent caretakers of the map (Pendragon) and build a real, non-volunteer design team, made the first part of Riot Games’ job easy. But credit should be given where credit is due: these ingredients do not automatically make a good game, but Riot has ensured that they have taken the best of DOTA and added much more.

As one would expect, there is much to love about LoL. The evolution of the DOTA concept can be extended to two distinct aspects: the community interface, and the game itself. The community interface is something sorely needed, as any moron can tell you. Because the internet is full of morons, it becomes the task of the developer to reward good behavior and punish bad to attempt to make the online experience as pleasant as possible. →  You’re tearing me apart lamers!

iPhone to utterly destroy Nintendo and Sony

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While searching the web for cats that look like Wilford Brimley, I stumbled upon an article on John Carmack’s view of the iPhone. He thinks it will pose a significant threat to handheld gaming devices. I think this is stupid. There are always the traditional reasons the iPhone won’t steal much thunder from handhelds: the battery life isn’t long enough and the lack of any actual tacticle buttons is a turn off for many and hampers control, but I am more fond of an analogy.

Proponents of the iPhone argue that developer freedom over content and cost will separate the platform from competitors. Let’s try this same argument to explain the death of game consoles:

Man of the Future: Did you hear about this new platform that nearly everyone in the country owns?
Hearer of Good News: What, a DS?
Man of the Future: No, it’s called a computer and it’s totally going to shake up the market!
Hearer of Good News: How so? →  Europa Universalis IV: Articles of War

“Screw you America” – Nintendo

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Why doesn’t Nintendo release every game they create in every market? The traditional glib answer is some variant of “Nintendo is a business and not a charity.” This may be true, but some companies have found a way to both make money and pay tribute to their medium. For example, HBO is known for keeping shows afloat despite poor ratings. These “prestige shows” are too good to simply cancel and for the sake of television as an art, HBO keeps them on the air.

Nintendo has made billions of dollars selling video games and has some of the most dedicated fans in the industry; it seems like they should not only be a producer of games but also part of the video game vanguard by protecting and honoring interactive entertainment. Unfortunately, Nintendo and Nintendo of America more specifically simply do not agree with this philosophy. They are clearly a corporation looking out for number one and nothing else.

The following is a list of the more recent titles Nintendo of America has deemed unworthy of release in the United States. →  Disaster Readport

Review – Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon

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After a few minutes of playing Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon I realized that this was a game that I’ve always wanted to play but never knew existed until recently. I was quite late to the party since the game came out in the early 90s, back when point and click adventures were cool and “interactive movie” sounded like something futuristic and not something cheesy. It was also a time when technology didn’t quite know what to do with itself; for some reason Access Software couldn’t quite figure out how to use a keyboard and mouse to make someone move around a 2.5D world in a way that makes sense, and there are specific instances where the smooth gameplay suddenly breaks into jagged fragments.

Nonetheless, it’s fascinating to be able to load Tex Murphey in DOSBOX and travel back in time to the past’s virtual imagining of the future. I wish I had played this when it was first released, but not everything about the game has aged poorly. →  Is that an article in your pants, or are you just happy to read me?

Numbers Are Fun – Back by Popular Demand

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After a long hiatus I have once again been induced to write an update on the financial state of the video game industry. My plan is to divide this write up into two main “chapters.” This first one will cover the “hard” numbers: hardware unit sales and earnings reports. The second will cover the “soft” topic of average player profiles, including online connectivity, hours per day, tie ratio, etc. This section promises to be densely packed with numbers, but it should not require an MBA or a degree in statistics (at least it shouldn’t, since I have neither). Please note, I will cover software sales with the “soft” numbers, since it is not easy (possible?) to get reliable software numbers.

Most people who follow games closely, whether or not they specifically check sales numbers, probably have a rough idea of how each of the three consoles has sold so far this generation, but putting some actual numbers next to these impressions should be helpful. →  Xenosaga 2: Jenseits von Gut und Pöst