Ninety Nine Mistakes

I played the demo for Ninety Nine Nights (hereafter known as N3) while visiting Japan last March. In that insulated setting, the game experience was excellent. The game's rich graphics and wonderful designs drew me in and I'm always a sucker for short bursts of Dynasty Warriors-Style Combat.

The game, however did not live up to its potential. While this is unfortunate, I don't think N3 was a lost cause and so I've thrown together a few key changes could have saved it from the Bargain Bin.

1. Fix the damn save system. The game has like six playable characters, and their progress is saved in individual save files, accidentally overwrite one and poof! Everything you did with that character is gone. This is an obtuse system that should be a distant memory, not an unfortunate reality.

2. Make the boss fights more interesting and more frequent. One of the ways N3 separates itself from Dynasty Warriors is though the use of boss battles. DW simply puts you though a series of battles against similarly powered heroes, whereas N3 actually had the occasional large, challenging-looking boss. I say "challenging-looking" because generally speaking, the object is to find the boss's blind spot and go to town for what feels like forever until the fucker finally goes down.
This doesn't work.
You can't spit without hitting a game that has done decent boss fights, boss fights with some sort of hook that makes it more then just a repetitious chore. It doesn't take that much work and it really adds so much more to your game.

3. Save Points must be included. Yes, this is different from complaining about the overall save system. If your game has forty-five minute missions, particularly when you often have a big ass boss at the end of them who are capable of killing you in one or two hits, then you must allow for some sort mid-mission saving. Otherwise, instead of providing challenge, you provide frustration.

4. What's with the Cursed Items? N3 has equipment that actually drops your stats. Equipment that you have to manually equip having read in advance that they are indeed cursed. Hell, even the font color is is different as to eliminate any need for you to have to actually read the negative numbers. They serve zero purpose, lose them.

5. Give me some extras. You are allowed and encouraged to replay missions in N3 in order to get experience and drops. Thats fine, in fact, that's a great idea. But there needs to be more incentive to replay like that. The game's one hidden character has but two missions, both of which are reused missions from other characters, which this game does a lot of, and that's fine. But you could easily have used the other non player characters in the game as additional unlockables. The assets are already there and there's almost no work involved in shifting a mission's point of view to them. It's an exceptionally cheap and easy way to make more content and heavily increases replayability.

I don't think a game like this will ever be a top selling game, but if they are smart about it, a well crafted one can defiantly be profitable.

The American Famitsu

Japanese gaming journalism is... strange. The number one gaming magazine in Japan is Famitsu, a 400+ page beast of a mag that comes out weekly over there. It's huge, it's colorful, it's vibrant and well, it's also essentially all about delivering an oral massage to popular games. This was a column that an insider submitted to next-gen.biz that got rejected on the grounds that it was too slanderous:

Contrary to what hordes of western gamers believe, people don't "pay" Famitsu for a specific review score. I know this because I have dinner with Famitsu guys once a week.

It's more like, a company pays Famitsu "protection money" -- in other words, they pay them to review their games, period. Famitsu -- and most of Japanese journalism, in fact -- is basically just vanity PR. And proud of it!

The editors of Famitsu are, to a certain extent, deeply entrenched in the most fascinating role-playing games of their lives. Sure, it's a love of games that gets them to apply for the job. However, once "in", they must play the "role" of a person who is batshit nuts in love with the very idea of videogames. The guys at Famitsu, however, are usually such resiliently affable personalities that they can do this job and still provide hilarious conversation at dinners where they are not even drunk (yet).

That, and let's face it -- games like Sonic have creepily devoted fans who are even more devoted than, say, James. In other words, they are blinded by their love for Sonic. Or Final Fantasy, or Kingdom Hearts. The chief purpose of the "MOST WANTED" poll in each week's issue can be assumed, then, to be to gauge what games the readers do not want to receive a low score. The readers who vote in that poll are the people who buy the magazine, read it cover to cover, and chatter endlessly on 2ch about it.

When Famitsu rates a game high, they do it out of respect for the readers -- avid players of Kingdom Hearts as most of them are. Avid players of Kingdom Hearts don't want to be told what Famitsu really thinks of their fucking piece of shit hobby. So Famitsu awards the "courtesy score" -- which used to be all nines and a ten, and is now all tens and a nine. When Famitsu KNOWS a game is going to sell 2 million copies in a week regardless of what they say, this is what they do.

You can try to refute the above paragraph. However, you will not be successful!

Famitsu is still very careful about perfect scores. No matter what, readers will bawl when a perfect score is given. They will be either overjoyed or deeply angry. Final Fantasy XII's perfect score, to look at 2ch, was "the biggest debacle in the history of the magazine". No. FFXII was a game that made giant, drastic, sweeping attempts to change a genre. Famitsu made a conscious decision to give it a perfect score, despite the game not being perfect. They wanted to send a message -- a gentle one -- "Please make an honest attempt to like this game better than those other games." It's very noble of them.

Yet Famitsu makes more money off the back cover advertisement than off all the newsstand sales combined (they offer no subscription service). What Famitsu is -- and you wouldn't know this unless you've held a heavy issue in your hand on a tired Friday morning -- is straightforward (if not entirely honest) PR in a pretty, meaty, high-quality bundle. It's an advertisement feast. If the western concepts of "journalistic integrity" are distorted and twisted within its pages, they're done so very lovingly. Because, you see, that degree of over-thinking really doesn't exist here. You can cry "viral!!!!!!!!!!!!" and "TEH PAID!!!!!!!!!!" all you want at Famitsu's features and articles. However, you can't change that it's a hell of a thing to look at on the train on Friday morning, or at lunch on Friday afternoon; it provides stimulating topics of conversation (for geekos) over Friday dinner.

The people who read Famitsu are not brainwashed by the contents of the magazine. They take it in, shrug some of it off, and form their own opinions on the fly. Whether they're enlightened about the finer points of its making or not, they are always suspicious of the fact that they can think for themselves. It's a free country, and a free world, et cetera.

In the US, gaming journalism has been struggling for respectability, trying their hardest to be taken seriously by the rest of the country. They do everything they can do not be seen as biased, they try to be objective and sometimes even antagonistic in their reviews and interviews.

There is, however, an exception

Play Magazine

Yesterday evening I forgot my PSP at the office and had finished earlier that morning, the book that I had brought along to read (Timothy Zahn's Star Wars: Allegiance), so i swung into the magazine store and saw a copy of the latest Issue of Play. I haven't read Play in a long time (at least a year) so i figured why not? Then I started flipping though. The first thing that caught my eye was the glut of below-average games getting high marks... and for very odd reasons. Like Star Wars: Lethal Alliance (61 metascore) got a 7.5, citing "a female lead" as the first entry in the "pros" section. Even the interviews... hell, especially the interviews were heavily layered in PR-style fluff. The questions were always phrased like "This game is absolutely amazing, how did you cram this much Amazing onto a single disk?" It almost felt like i was reading an infomercial. I felt embarrassed for the interviewer. But then it clicked.

They were trying to pull a Famitsu.

It was very much like that wonderful moment when you realize that the shitty movie you are watching is actually going for pure camp; and so you begin to have fun with it. Suddenly i felt free to enjoy the bright, colorful pages filled with ridiculous hype and overblown scores unhindered by the limitations of "journalistic integrity." I must confess, once I released Play from such conventions, I had the first American gaming mag experience that brought back fond memories of Famitsu.

Crackdown notes

Realtime Worlds has constructed the greatest "Pick up and Play" game that I've ever dealt with. It's a game that you can just pop into for 5 minutes, get a satisfying experience from, quit, and still have the feeling that you accomplished something in it.

That however, is the challenge. In a manner I've only seen previously in World of Warcraft's quests, it's incredibly easy to be seduced by the "just one more" mentality in Crackdown. You always want to just kill one more group of thugs, just grab one more agility orb (which are collected to make you faster and jump higher... and there are 500 of them to find).

PS: I saw this over at GAF and needed to share:

Speaking of fun, I spent a surprisingly long time chilling out on a highway sign watching the completely batshit insane traffic blaze down the highway behind Crazy Volk Steroid Chick's Lair. I didn't have to shoot out anyone's tires or anything. They barrel through that slight curve so fast that there's an insane (and awesomely handled by the AI) wreck every few minutes. Check out it when you get a moment.

I can't wait to try that

Cleaning up the Streets!

So like so many others, my local store had copies of Crackdown yesterday, a full day ahead of the scheduled release date, and complete with a nice "Do not sell before February 20th" sticker on the top. The sticker is sort of amusing. I've never seen anything like it and it was 'inside" the packaging, which made me think that it was almost intended for the buyer to see.

It almost feels like MS was trying to do one of the following:

A: experiment with the idea of advance shipping and just didn't expect such rampant street date breaking.

B: knew it would be broken, but wanted to see what sort of hype that would generate. After all, people love to think they are getting away with something! perhaps this was an experiment in a new type of Viral Marketing.

I'm not sure, but I was certainly happy to have a copy in hand yesterday. So far i'm having a blast with it. Crackdown really is just a pure sandbox game. No real plot to speak of, no narrative, just you, a big city, and criminals who need to be taken out.

More impressions later...

To Wii or Not to Wii

I wanted to buy a Wii, but now i'm not so sure. My reasoning is pretty simple:

There are no games coming out.

I looked at the release list and all they offer currently for me are Wii Sports, which comes with the damn thing, and Zelda, which i could buy right now for Gamecube. Past that there's almost nothing going on until Christmas, unless you are interested in PSP(wtf?) ports with tacked-on Wiimote functionality.

Sometimes I don't understand Nintendo. They have a legendary amount of hype surrounding their console currently and to capitalize on this, they are releasing what? Wii Play? perhaps they were hoping that 3rd parties would come along and pick up the slack, but that has simply not happened yet. I envision playing though Zelda (or getting bored of it) in a few weeks and then occasionally taking out to show Wii Sports to guests like once a month until Metroid Prime comes out in like eight months.

Podcasts x2

Been gradually adding more podcasts to my weekly audio buffet, These past two weeks I've discovered 1Up's new WoW podcast, Legendary Thread, featuring some personalties already familiar to me from other 1Up productions, such as Luke Smith and Jeff Green.

The best thing about it is that apart from Luke, the hosts are all casual players that people would have a better chance of relating to. Having a hardcore like Luke there helps move the topics along and add some variety. On one hand you get Luke passive aggressively whining about his Shaman while taking manic pot shots at classes perceived as being overpowered, and then at the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Jeff telling us about playing the game with his daughter. The show does a good job of capturing the variety of players that WoW attracts

In addition, I've been checking out the Played Podcast, staring, among others, Chris Remo from Shacknews (Whose job I was actually one of the finalists for getting). The Played group has good chemistry and tend to keep the discussions fresh and interesting, even when they are about games i've read and heard about a million times. I reccomend them if you are looking for something a little different then the usual fanboy baiting verbal flamefests that, despite how entertaining I may find them, many other shows tend to become(1Up yours, I'm talking to you).

Bill Harris on Sony

Bill Harris, formerly of Gonegold.com is one of my favorite gaming bloggers, combining intelligent discussion with quality laughs and very very astute observations. Here's a bit of one of his more recent rants on the fall of Sony.

Do you remember when you were in college and your best friend decided to throw a party? Even better, he somehow got the best-looking girl in school to show up. When you saw her walk in, you had one thought: this is going to be the best party ever.

There was only one problem: the best-looking girl in school. Yes, she was totally hot, but all she did was talk about how hot she was, and how we were all lucky that she showed up, and how every single girl at that party looked like ass compared to her. She was so loud and so obnoxious that you went into the backyard just to get away from her.

Later that night, though, you came back inside the house and saw her again. This time, though, she was sitting against a wall. Passed out. With vomit all over the front of her smoking hot halter top. And as you took a picture of her with your cellphone, you had one thought: this is the best party ever.

That smoking hot girl, my friends, is Sony.

I've said this before, but I don't have an anti-Sony bias. I've been extremely pro-Sony at various times in the last ten years. But I do have an anti-dickhead bias.

You can find the rest of his thoughts on Sony's recent moves here.