Well here’s a bittersweet little pill for all you gamers out there: after just one game, the fantasy RPG Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, upstart gaming company 38 Studios has shut its doors, firing almost 400 employees after defaulting on loan payments to the state of Rhode Island. Now I’m sure some of you are wondering what part of that is sweet for me. Well, the studio was founded by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, so on one level: fuck you Red Sox Nation! But beyond that slight schadenfreude, this is actually a pretty bummer event.
The blockbuster gaming market is so, so hard (read: impossible, apparently) to break into these days, and a lot of developers are avoiding the nightmarish battle altogether by doing small, downloadable titles. But Curt Schilling, a longtime table game enthusiast with a passion for gaming and high fantasy, had commendably lofty aspirations for his (comparatively) little company. And Amalur was a damn fine game, with some great combat mechanics and an RA Salvatore created world that had some real potential down the line. Guess we won’t ever see those Amalur sequels, even though screenshots from an Amalur set MMO were leaked by the company yesterday, perhaps trying to put off their demise. Didn’t work. So fine Treyarch/Infinity Ward/EA/Bethesda/Capcom. Enjoy all of the monies.
I would ask if you all remember Weed Demon, the Wavves branded game that VICE recently put out featuring baddies designed by Мишка, but because the game tweets out high scores I know that a bunch of you are still playing it. Well, it seems that you all aren’t the only people still loving this Paperboy-gone-druggie adventure.
Wavves was just nominated for an O Music Award for Best Artist/Digital Entrepreneur for Weed Demon. The O Music Awards are MTV’s award show dedicated to the intersect between entertainment and the internet, and it’s now entering its third year. The O Music Awards are totally fan decided, so it’s up to you to go on over here and vote for Wavves/Weed Demon between now and June 27th, when the winners will be announced. While you’re waiting, feel free to play Weed Demon.
Appearances can be deceptive. Take Dragon’s Dogma, for instance. On the surface, it seems like an ill-informed attempt at a Western RPG designed in the East. Look a little deeper, however, and you’ll find that it brings some well-disguised originality and highlights the failings of our most recent, beloved RPG experiences. It’s fair to say that Dragon’s Dogma is a game made from, often opposing, and dramatically different design mentalities. From Japan, it brings strong combat, precise controls and tight structure. From the West, it brings epic scale, ham-fisted olde English and more Tolkienesque fantasy tropes than I care to remember. It is a game built on familiar foundations; all castles, titular beasts and sorcerers. Naturally, all the standard fantasy RPG elements are firmly in place; questing is open and broad in its nature, dungeons are there to be pillaged and explored. The names and faces may have changed, but you’ve definitely been here before.
Despite the gravitas that posturing dreamers like myself may attach to it, Dragon’s Dogma is a game and not a statement. It is a developer attempting to give its audience what they seem to want and, for the most part, it succeeds. First and foremost, it succeeds by addressing one of the largest problems plaguing most contemporary RPGs. I love Skyrim, I truly do, but its combat, and that of most of its peers, is 90% garbage. Capcom brings its long and illustrious history of pulverizing and decapitating to the table and tackles this issue head-on. Combat is all at once, deep varied and accessible. Simple combos and signature moves are all at your disposal and brighten the screen with typical Capcom flourish and physicality. It’s not exactly Devil May Cry, but you’ll certainly get a faint whiff of Dante’ with some of the more agile character classes.
Depending on your chosen class, of which there are several, you can employ a mix of skills and strengths. Agile hunters, stalwart knights, battle mages: the list goes on. Remember: you’ve been here before. However, Dragon’s Dogma excels by making it so that you should never be punished for your choice of hero. It’s happened to me time and time again: where I’ve felt punished for not picking a diverse enough character, setting myself up for a fall with particular enemy types. With its pawn system, Dragon’s Dogma offers you a team of companions, allowing you to select appropriate roles for supporting you and filling the gaps in your own hero’s personal skillset.
Pawns form a substantial part of the game as both an online and offline experience. Pawns can be traded online, hired out to build their own experience and recruited from all over the world. Not only does this show Capcom’s understanding of a positive shift in RPG standards post-Demon’s Souls, but it also allows for a more involving and tailored experience. The beauty of this system can be seen when you are able to hire a top-tier pawn to assist you with a particularly challenging area that would normally be above your ability. As the player, you are in a unique position where you can chose to plough your accumulated experience points into either the development of your own character, or for hiring out some high-level cronies to do the dirty work for you. It’s a genuinely refreshing change.
Dragon’s Dogma also boasts a pleasingly robust sense of physicality, and through this it brings a surprisingly unique quality to contemporary RPGs. No matter how grand the experience or the breadth of the world that has been so lovingly built, many RPGs fall down in that they fail to offer truly personalized experiences. Whilst most offer the choice of a variety of character classes and an option of moral dilemmas, few really deliver personalization through the way that individual missions and scenarios play out. What Dragon’s Dogma offers is dynamic, frantic battles and a system open enough to bestow upon you the ability to tell some truly heroic battle stories. Take the time my party and I encountered a giant in the depths of a murky dungeon.
My noble hero, Misty, grappled the beast, clambering up its back, thrusting his blade into its ugly, misshapen head. The beast seemed not to falter as it attempted to swat Misty as if he were little more than an annoyance. Then, as luck would have it, the beast lost its footing, Misty capitalised and used the beast’s weight to his advantage. The mighty foe stumbled over the edge, plummeting towards certain doom. Noble Misty rode the impending corpse all the way to the bottom of the well and used it to break his fall. The beast was dead and Misty was a true hero. It’s this sense of weight and physicality that makes every battle an absolute joy. Goblins and Harpies are dispatched quickly in the game’s earlier stages, but they are all just appetizers for the game’s main course.
Boss battles and larger enemy encounters display Capcom’s sense of the epic: a skill sharpened on their experience with both Monster Hunter and Lost Planet. Larger foes can be climbed upon and watching your character swing from a Griffon’s frantically bustling feathers as it takes flight is a sight to behold. Taking down such an enemy mid-air, or clambering atop a Cyclops to stab at its eye is undeniably satisfying. This gives Dragon’s Dogma a valuable sense of involvement and allows you to attempt just about any battle without having to resort to a war of attrition with bows, arrows and a tonne of health potions.
Whilst it may lack the sheen and presentation values of its contemporaries, Dragon’s Dogma retains a unique personality whilst reminding us of the importance of solid gameplay foundations. It certainly doesn’t cut corners on its scale and length either. From its undeniably camp J-Rock theme tune, to its blend of different design philosophies, Dragon’s Dogma is a distinctly varied experience. I like to imagine it as the older guy lifting weights at the gym. Sure, he may not be as tanned and as well-sculpted as his younger peers, but you know that his insulation layer obscures genuine strength and that you would really never want to fuck with him. If he speaks anything like the inhabitants of Dragon’s Dogma though, I will seriously consider trying.
Though the newest dose just dropped, starting back in the beginning of 2011 the writer of VGJunk started a series of posts devoted to imagining an alternate world where licensed game don’t suck. Actually there are a couple of licensed games that are good. Goldeneye. T2: Judgment Day. Chronicles of Riddick (actually much better than the movie in a weird twist). Blade Runner. But for the most part you get dung like E.T. for Atari or that Superman game on N64 (I have to assume the developers of that were purely trolling).
But what if all the cool movies a game studio wouldn’t touch with a ten-pixel pole somehow poofed into existence? Well, then we’d have something like the awesomeness you see above you. People have been making fake game screens for a while now, and as independent game development/modding gets easier and easier, I sometimes wonder when some of these might actually get made. I vote for Videodrome first pleez. Check out a bunch more here, here, and here.
Audio homages to video games are nothing new. Especially with electronic music, the shared DNA with the plasticine gaming world has been a constant presence, whether through aesthetic similarity or legitimate interaction (I’m thinking Rez). Even in other genres, most notably rap, recognizable bleeps and bloops from gaming scores have made their way into beats, and recently drops like a John Tobias “Toasty!” or LoZ chest-opening jingle have found their way into songs from SpaceGhostPurrp and Rustie.
But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen something quite like the 49 track collection Blam Lord’s Quest that Aural Sects just dropped. Blam Lord’s Quest brings together a roster of participants to rival that of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, mainly of the Witch House persuasion, to record covers and tributes to some of gaming’s greatest sounds and songs. Artists like I††, Ceremonial Dagger, the Bloglin’s own Nattymari and Sortahuman, BLOWN, Fr<>ze and more take on Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy, NBA Jam!, Secret of Mana… the list goes on and on! Best of all: it’s a free download.
Everybody knows that Street Fighter is the coolest, right? Damn straight. Queens-based animator Jonathan Monaghan is no stranger to this knowledge either: as shown in his animated short Sacrifice of the Mushroom Kings. Jonathan re-purposes Street Fighter IV character models and Super Mario iconography to produce some haunting and bewitching results.
At the moment, it seems that only a few clips exist online, but I just couldn’t resist sharing this any longer. I always knew M. Bison had big plans for all that Shadaloo money: no amount of Hadoukens can stop an army of 80 ft. golden calves.
I wonder how much Xanax has been consumed at Blizzard Entertainment HQ this week, as the Sauron eye of internet rage lands with fury on them for bungling the 12 years in the making launch of Diablo III. It really seems insane that you could fuck something like that up. Especially if you’re Blizzard, you really have nothing but the luxury of time. People were willing to wait outrageous, absurd amounts of time. The game was announced in 2008, but everyone knew Blizzard had been chugging away on it since like 2002. No secrets there, considering the gangbusters success of DII and LoD.
They must have known that there servers would crash, right? – Sidenote: let’s just take a moment to remember Hellgate: London for a second. Yikes. – That’s the real problem I can’t get over. If you’re so adamant about making your game online only, then you must (MUST!) know that your servers can handle it. Now the phrase “Error 37″ will be forever a blight on Blizzard’s record. At least they can rest knowing they weren’t the only ones to shit the bed immensely. As gaming was a business with no precedent, its business history is, in a word, laughable. Despite how it may seem now, gaming companies pretty much did everything they could to sabotage themselves, especially in older generations. Here are the High Five.
Knowing now how well this console ended up doing, it’s easy to remember how utterly disastrous its coming out party at E3 was. That video above is one of the most-cringe worthy things you will probably ever see, like a stand-up comic completely bombing, except this stand-up has hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. I bet you Kaz Hirai still has nightmares about this all the time. Hell, I feel like I have nightmares about it sometimes.
First of all: the console cost $599. Just the console! What in the fuck were they thinking?! Who wants to spend over $700, factoring in a game or two and maybe an extra controller, on a new gaming console. Who can? Especially when your launch titles are Riiiidge Racer and a Dynasty Warriors clone (ugh) with “realistic historical battles” that feature giant mutant crabs. Hirai sums it up best himself: “whoops.”
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4. Nokia N-Gage - Location: Gamestops in Late 2003
Just look at that piece of shit right there. The N-Gage really illustrates how deeply some companies misunderstood gaming and especially game consumers, especially ones trying to break into the market defined by Nintendo, Sony, Atari (their story, by the way, is also loaded with idiocy. Fun fact: they had the original rights to distribute the Famicom AKA the Nintendo NES in North America and lost it over a petty dispute. LMAO). I’m not sure who exactly the target audience was supposed to be for the N-Gage, but it ended up being no one.
I’m going to hazard a guess that this is probably the lowest selling item on this entire list. What makes that even more embarrassing is the outrageously inflated sales numbers Nokia released after the launch, hoping to bolster sales, only to be forced to go back and reduce them by an entire order of magnitude. What they originally claimed to be 400,000 sales in the first two weeks ended up being just over 5,000. For reference, Hilary Duff released an album that same month that sold 2.5 Million copies. Nice.
Duke Nukem Forever is a cautionary tale for the concept of vaporware. The sales numbers on this thing actually aren’t that disastrous, but the bloody massacre left in thousands of gamers’ nostalgia centers and the complete ruination of a treasured franchise is more than enough reason to warrant it a spot on this most auspicious of lists.
It’s hard to say how much of this is Gearbox’s fault, especially considering that they’re not bad developers. I suspect they tried to work with too much of the skeleton left over from 15 years of development instead of scrapping everything and doing it all themselves (which makes them lazy bastards btw) ending up with a game that took all of the worst parts from a whole lineage of gaming generations. Ya blew it!
So this is definitely the most purely dumb mistake on the list. When you really start to think about the ways that Sega sabotaged the launch of a perfectly good console, one that should have been able to compete with the Sony Playstation, and effectively sent their hardware division into a tailspin they would never recover from, the wrong turns are really staggering. The core issue though was their unabashed fear of Sony, a paranoia that allowed Sony to win without really doing anything. With rumors that the PS was going to be much more powerful than the Saturn (which ended up not being true), Sega decided to move up the launch of the console by 4 months, making a surprise announcement at E3 that the console was available that day.
The problem – and here’s where you facepalm – is that they didn’t tell anyone except for 4 small retailers. Not even – wait for it – the 3rd party developers. HOW DO YOU DO THAT?! Not only did it leave the Saturn with almost no launch titles, it severely damaged Sega’s reputation and relationships with hallmark developers. Later that day, Sony announced the price point for the PS would be $100 lower than Sega’s, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Just try to imagine flipping through your favorite gaming magazine and coming across this ad – arguably the worst ad of all time. No game title. No information about a game at all recently. Just two aggressive sentences that immediately ended the career of a gaming great. Suck it down. Whoever’s idea it was, the point is that John Romero signed off on this ad for Daikatana, the big tentpole title of his company Ion Storm. People were not pleased.
It’s weird to think about how different the gaming landscape could be had they just done an ad featuring a screenshot and a smiling Romero instead. Setting aside the question of whether his quieter, nerdier partner at id Software, John Carmack, was entirely responsible for that companies success, the fact is that between 1982 and 1997, when this ad came out, Romero was involved in a whopping 85 games including Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D. Since then, he has been involved in 10, including an N-Gage port of Red Faction. Bitch.
Happy belated 4/20 motherfuckers! I meant that with love. Sorry, I’m really high. That’s not true actually I can’t smoke weed anymore it makes me think the government is watching me. Which they are. In honor of everyone’s favorite green plant, Vice and Wavves threw together this sweet lil’ video game called Weed Demon. It’s like Paperboy but instead of throwing the last vestiges of a dying business onto people’s doorsteps in a pantomime of a more innocent America, you’re dealing drugs.
Much more emblematic of our time, dont’cha think? Play as Nathan or Stephen as you bike (or skate) through the ‘burbs, the city and more, all the while avoiding various beasties designed by – yup - Мишка in collaboration with our friend Dennis Chow AKA GlamNation! Does this mean we can put video game studio on our resumes/business cards now? I submit that it most definitely does. So light one up and get your jollies with Weed Demon!
Though this is an argument best had over delivery pizza from Dominos (plus cheesy bread, natch) and a two liter of the Dew, I’ll take the long roiling argument onto the stage of the world wide web: which N64 FPS is better? Is it the groundbreaking licensed title GoldenEye, it of the millions of hours of multiplayer and utter seizure of the gaming zeitgeist? Or is it the equally loved (if not as widely) vehicle for original character Joanna Dark?
Damn you Rare and your proficiency with FPS’! How dare you make us choose! In the most basic sense, Perfect Dark is a more “advanced” game, as it was made by the same company after GoldenEye (some say it originally started as a sequel to that game and eventually morphed into its own beast. Seems plausible enough but who knows). It had greys and V’s (you know they stole the Skedar from V. C’mon) and the suitcase gun, multiplayer bots (big deal seriously), and of course Joanna herself.
I’ve always been a fan of female avatars in games (I play Chun-Li and my RPG characters tend to skew girl) but I know that’s not the case for everyone. On the other hand, GoldenEye had more iconic moments like diving off the dam, playing Golden Gun in Facility or Stack, slapping mofos to death, endearingly awful animation, and getting to play as James fucking Bond. Both classics, but you know how this works. The Choice is yours…
Being a game steeped in perspective puzzles, hidden codes, Escher-like architecture and a distinct lack of anything resembling sign-posting: Fez is not short on a challenge or two. However, after exploring its shifting dimensions and succumbing to its intoxicating charms I have found that the most difficult challenge it poses is in asking you to define your experience. It’s difficult to be concise about a game that is so sprawling and labyrinthine. Watch me as I fail. Fez’s gameplay takes its core mechanics from much-lauded Nintendo classics and the golden age of home console gaming at large. Zelda style exploration is bolstered by simplistic platforming as you begin your 2-D quest from your humble floating island abode.
Within minutes of play you are introduced to the third dimension, and this is where the game truly begins. The world of Fez is a series of disconnected, floating platforms and structures. These islands, whilst appearing to be standalone 2-D plains are actually each one side on an imaginary cube. As you plough ahead with the simplistic platforming, you are able to rotate the level in 90 degree increments, allowing you to shift the perspective to bridge gaps, reveal doorways and join platforms. As you delve deeper into Fez’s myriad dimensions, all sorts of other migraine-inducing techniques play into the ‘shifting’ mechanic. Raising water levels, rotating individual parts of scenery with levers and invisible platforms all add to the seemingly overwhelming series of hurdles.
Stylistically and functionally, Fez is the most self-aware and reflexive game I have ever played. It revels in its influences and makes a point of crowbarring the 2-D platformers of our youth into the 3-D age. Whether or not the game as a whole is an allegory for modern game design trends and a true representative for a new wave of intelligent and thought-provoking, independent games is irrelevant: the fact that I can at least attempt to wax lyrical about the ‘meaning’ behind it all is progress enough. To cite examples that prove its ingenuity and depth would be to deny you some of its most stellar moments. However, what I can say is that certain aspects invoked the same sense of wonder as when I had to swap the controller port over to defeat Psycho Mantis. Did I mention how self-reflexive this game is?
For all its postmodern posturing and mind-altering perspective shifting, I’d be doing Fez a disservice if I didn’t confess that its true strength lies elsewhere. Its labyrinthine, dream-like and fractured structure offers a sense of genuine adventure and exploration: the likes of which I haven’t experienced through games for years. This mentality of following the rabbit hole deeper and deeper is an unchecked and unfiltered joy. You simply allow yourself to follow each whim and quickly learn that imposing any sort of regimented structure upon yourself is pointless. Doors are set to tempt and confuse you, tricking you into following paths that exist only in your imagination. It may be hours before you take stock of just how far you’ve traveled and realize how futile it would be to try to find your way back. And you needn’t worry: that’s what warp gates are for. This is the beauty of Fez. You can spend hours going nowhere but be rewarded simply for the act of ‘going’. To fall back on a cliché, it’s more about the journey than the destination. Breaking the game down into one or two-hour sessions is probably essential, should you want to avoid a Pi-aping power drill to the temple scene. Luckily, most sessions will bear some sort of fruit, whether it be discovering a new area, treasure or something totally unexpected altogether.
The game purposefully denies you any sort of clear, definable objectives beyond collecting cubes and whilst particular areas are unlocked by reaching certain amounts, you are given near total free reign from the beginning. As you progress, the game’s subtly-blended environmental puzzles help you adopt the mentality that every piece of scenery has a reason for being there; whether it be part of some as-yet-undiscovered puzzle or contributing to a larger narrative mystery to be unveiled later. What this lack of direction offers is the chance to genuinely explore and embark upon the kind of adventure that made journeys through Hyrule such a pure experience. If you can, I urge you to play it without checking an online guide every time you get stuck. Imagine you are sat in front of your SNES, high-speed internet and super hardcore pornography are but a distant dream, so you must solve the puzzles by talking to friends and bringing in fresh perspectives.
After all of that rambling, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Fez was some sort of unplayable, art-school nightmare, but the essence of Fez is in its perfect marriage between removing/breaking frontiers and in its sincerity and dedication to what makes games so enjoyable in the first place. As a whole, the game is beautifully contradictory; it is fractured, yet complete. It is confusing yet simple. It is avant-garde, yet one of the purest and most grounded gaming experiences I have ever had. In short, Fez is truly unique, personal, memorable and ingenious. As a life-long gamer, reaching the age at which he begins to ponder upon such things, it is exactly the kind of game that I would kill to have made. Not to taste its success, not even to claim that I was smart enough to design it, but simply because I wish that I could pen a love letter to the medium that was at least half as sincere as Fez is. Fez is available now on XBOX Live Arcade.
