Terminated

While it not presently possible to access this post, as wordpress should redirect you to the new site, if you’ve somehow reached here, it means that wordpress has stopped doing so (probably because I stopped giving them dollar bills), and you should therefore quit here forever and wander over to the new Ghostrazor site.

Downtime…Really this time

The DNS transfers are now actually in place and happening (I think), and as such Ghostrazor may be in flux for the next 72 hours.

Conveniently, I’m also flying back to Toronto tomorrow morning at 8 am, provided the massive snowstorm does not prevent me from touching down.  I’ll try to make the transistion as seamless as possible, but expect issues to occur.

Kindle eBook reader not available in Canada

Yeah, this is off topic, but I when I’m not doing the video game thing, I’m reading books.  I read a LOT of books.

And I would really, really like an e-paper based eBook reader.  So today Amazon launched their new eBook reader, the Kindle.  It’s ugly as fuck, but they have some sweet wireless setup going on.  Unlike basically every other reader out there, the Kindle has a free, EV-DO based wireless network that allows you to browse, buy, and download eBooks from Amazon’s ever increasing collection (they plan to eventually make every book they carry available).  You can also grab newspaper, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.

Great, sign me up.  Take my $400 dollars, I don’t care that your device is hideous, it looks marvelous.  Wait a second, as per usual, Canada gets the raw end of the stick.  Despite the fact that Sprint and Bell Mobility have agreements with each other, Amazon’s Whispernet does not work outside of the 50 US States.

Ever wonder why Canada is a haven for piracy?  Maybe it’s because companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, and Apple – the premiere offerers of digital content – don’t fucking offer their services in Canada.  Remember prohibition?  If there’s a demand for something, it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal, people will obtain it.  And unlike prohibition, under which criminal organizations were still charging money for booze, digital content is free to steal.

I don’t know whether the issues are legal or economic, but once there’s a culture of theft that’s been established for a long time, it’s very difficult to legitimately offer content and expect the people you’ve been shirking in the past to expect to pay for your shit.

Gamerpoints vs Achievements

I’m going to have to throw this one over to my fellow Canuck, Nerfgun.  As previously mentioned, I’m quite the dainty trollop when it comes to achievements.  There’s something quite sadly affirmating about having the game pat you on the head and give you an A+ sticker.  Must be a Gen Y thing.

I hadn’t really given much consideration to the fact that Gamerscore and Achievements are not one and the same.  In theory the point value attached to a given achievement should indicate the relatively level of difficulty for earning that achievement.  However, at the end of the day, it would appear there is no actual policy regarding how difficult something should be for a given number of points.

 And really, that’s impossible to dictate globally, because there are some games that are just easy.  A raw gamerscore doesn’t really tell you anything about the skill of a player, it just theoretically tells you how much time they spend playing Xbox 360 games.  I’m not even sure that’s true, actually – Gabe and I have nearly the same Gamerscore, and I hear he plays video games like it’s his job.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted

I finished playing Assassin’s Creed last night at about 4 am, and I feel decidedly lukewarm about the whole thing.

Marketing

I’ve been waiting for this game for what seems like forever. From the first moment I saw the game, I thought to myself that this was going to be a game that was truely groundbreaking. Taking the lessons Ubisoft learned with Splinter Cell and spinning them off into some wild combination of Hitman and Prince of Persia. You know the feeling you get when you see a commercial for a comedy, and it’s really funny, but when you go to watch the movie, you find out that every single funny moment in the movie was in the commercial, thus making the movie not only rarely good to begin with, but now even those moments are ruined for you?

Ubisoft could have done that, but they didn’t. Superb marketing, Grape job. Big A+ Sticker

Parkour

The whole Parkour thing is awesome. The sandbox thing was very appropriate for this game and the sheer ability to climb up nearly everything was done in an exemplary fashion. Unlike say, Spiderman, who can climb up pretty much any surface, Altair needs handholds – but can make handholds out of pretty much anything. What this means is that when he’s climbing, he’s climbing the way a real human climbs. The walls aren’t just a big sheet of chain-link fence that game be translated across. I can’t imagine how much time they must of spent on this, but it’s really, really awesome, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to deal with stealth games that don’t allow you to do this ever again. The freerunning is also awesome, and it’s a lot of fun to try to lose guards chasing you by doing your thing. The weird part about this is that it doesn’t seem to just be your thing… guards in full armor are almost as manuverable as you are. This kind of takes the wind out of my sails as a bad-ass assassin, but cool nonetheless. The major complaint I would have with the freerunning is the controls. When you’re trying to jump towards a pole, if the direction you’re aiming with an analog stick is more than about 5 degrees off, Altair decides that what you really wanted to do was jump four stories down to the ground. The section of the game in the docks is especially annoying due to this problem, as instead of nearly killing yourself from a four storey drop, you land in the water 2 feet below you and drown. What kind of asshole can scale massive buildings, is a Parkour master, and can’t fucking swim?

Social Stealth

I was really excited about this idea. The idea that you’re hidden when you’re doing things that are socially acceptable is really neat, I just would have liked to see it explored more. There are exactly four ways to hide from the guards – You can hide in these weird little huts that are on the roof and stand out like an eyesore (how do the guards not poke their head in?). You can hide in a pile of hay. You can sit down on a bench and blend in with other people, or you can fall in with some wander scholars. Now, I would note that only two of the above are actually social stealth conditions. The other two are real, I’m hiding somewhere you can’t see me conditions. Scholars appear so rarely and benches hard to pick out that I almost always ended up in a pile of hay or the hut anyway. To make any significant distance (because the cities are massive, you have to freerun like a mofo. While people comment about this, it doesn’t seem to actually bother anyone – other than the guards I inevitably end up throwing off the roof. You’re either sword out in the streets, or just walking along doing nothing in particular. I suppose when Ubisoft said they were doing this big social stealth thing I expected it to be a little more elaborate.

Fighting and AI

Some of the reviews for this game make complaints about the AI. If that’s your opinion… wow, you’re retarded. In my view, the AI is very REALISTIC, which is kind of the whole point of AI in the first place. Yeah, the guards on the roofs don’t immediately kill you for being on the roof. You know those ladders that are everywhere, that would indicate to me that theoretically citizens can get up here too. Ever been in a building at night when you’re not supposed to be there? Does the security guard draw and open fire the second he sees you?

Let’s look at some examples of good AI. Contrary to what you might think, climbing up the side of a building onto a rooftop rarely buys you an escape right away from the guards. Because they follow you up the side of the building. If it’s too hard for them, they’ve usually found another route anyway, so you’re still not out of the woods. If you get somewhere they really can’t get to, they start throwing rocks at you to knock you down.

The fighting system is awesome. Unlike many games which are a huge festival of hack and slash, Altair fights the way a skilled swordsman should fight when outnumbered. Likewise the enemies don’t swing at you all at once, but look for opportunities to break your guard. The sheer number of animations (all of which are beautiful) are astounding.

Now the problem with this is that it’s way, way too easy. Altair can take a ridiculous number of hits, while each soldier, even the ones who are generally on a similar level to Altair are getting their throats slashed and stomachs impaled. In an earlier preview of the game it was indicated that Altair was not supposed to be a tank who could take lots of damage. These fights are in fact easy enough that it’s generally simpler to kill all the guards after you instead of run and hide from them.

This is a bad design decision. The two main pillars for this game are social stealth and freerunning. The latter is usually a means to break the line of sight with your persuers so you can do the former. Allowing Altair to get into massive brawls in which he sweeps the floor is completely at odds with this model.

Story

I’m not even going to discuss it, other than to say it’s terrific, one of the most intricate and crafted plots seen in a video game yet. My only real gripe is that Altair starts the game as an arrogant jerk, and as he progresses becomes more and more wise and lucid… by killing people?  Nevertheless, they’ve got some cool order-vs-chaos-nothing-is-black-or-white stuff going on, so points for that.

Overall Gameplay

Okay, I’ve sung my praises. I had to make myself finish this game, and I largely did so because Penny-Arcade told me I had to. This game had so much potential, and the things they did right were really innovative and well polished. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is just paste around these mechanics. Here is an outline of how the entire game will go:

1. Get mission from boss, go to appropriate city
2. Find Assassin’s Bureau, go talk to dude in there.
3. Spend the next 45 minutes climbing up to the top of the 12 or so towers in area, some of which seem to be replicas of each other
4. Spend the next 45 minutes doing exciting investigation activities such as “Sitting on a bench and targeting that guy”, “Walking behind someone and pushing a button”, or the classic favorite “Finding 20 flags in 3 minutes”. What is up with that, why do these assassin’s keep losing their flags all over hell’s half acre and requiring that they be cleaned up in less than 3 minutes?
5. Find every single citizen being mugged and save them. They will utter one of 3 or 4 lines of dialog. There are somewhere between 6 and 15 of these guys in every mission.
6. Go back to the Assassin’s Bureau, get authorization to kill
7. Wander over to your target, listen to him talk for a while, use ’social stealth’ (read: scholars) to get near him and shove a knife in his back
8. Run away, or just kill every guard you see

The information you obtain in the investigations is rarely useful, and extremely tedious. You’ll be bored of doing it before the end of the first mission. Tidbits like “Hey, there’s some scholars nearby that you can probably use to get close” are really inane. What’s really disappointing though is that there’s very little differentiation between the scenarios for killing the target. One has to make the comparison to Hitman at this point. In Hitman, every single kill is a unique experience, the whole level exists to provide many different ways to execute the hit, some of which are better than others. In Assassin’s Creed, you basically just have to run up and kill the guy (since you’re going to alert the guards anyway), and the ’stealthy’ solution is almost always hiding with some scholars to get close and then kill him, and otherwise involves jumping down off a wall behind the guy.

Overall I’m disappointed with the title. Ubisoft clearly made some very costly investments into getting the engine for the fighting and parkour down well. This game was not really a safe bet, they’re doing some new and unique things here. I feel bad that they did take a unique take at the stealth action genre but completely fouled up the execution on the gameplay part of things. And really the crux of it is that it’s a game, and the gameplay should be more important than anything else. Everything but the gameplay experience is absolutely top knotch in Assassin’s Creed, and perhaps for the second one they can take the engine they’ve built and build an assassination experience that is not a tedious chore. Major points for unique ways of killing or approaching each individual target.

Slowy Joey

Apparently it takes a long time to switch domain registrars.

Due to shinannigans, Ghostrazor.com will not be unpacking until Wednesday this week, and it will probably do weird things at that point in time for a couple of days.  I’ll be updating the wordpress.com version and the new version at it’s new home in tandem so hopefully no downtime will actually occur.  Maybe.

No Xbox Originals Achievements Either

I’m going to get one last one in before the DNS throws up.

Major Nelson reports that Xbox Originals aren’t going to have achievements either.  So essentially buying the game digitally will be like having a buggy version of the disc version of the game with no achievements and random crashing when you chose menu options that you shouldn’t have chosen because you’re a stupid fuck who’s not psychic (apparently). 

“These are the original games that were created before Xbox 360. In order to preserve the integrity of the original gaming experience they provide, they will have the features available at the time of their initial release”

That’s some marketing bullshit that means “We don’t want to go into the source code and modify the game because it costs more to do that, so you’re going to get a sloughed out half-experience instead”.  Achievement points cannot possibly destroy the integrity of the original gaming experience.  This is one of the only modifications you could make that would be a no risk gain.  I don’t even see a scenario around this product anymore. 

There’s an opportunity to leverage the existing platform of awesomeness and bring it up to a new level.  Developers in general are happy to release their game on more platforms if the cost is low to them.  I would expect most would be more than happy to spend a month reworking their code to operate in this environment and add achievement points to their games.  It gives people a really good reason to replay those games they once loved and to buy them through this channel instead of getting them for ten bucks used at the local GameStop.  You guys do know that you don’t get paid when people buy used games, yeah?

By feeding your customers the raw scraps from the table in an attempt to make a quick cash grab you’re hurting your brand.  Xbox Live has become a touchstone and a symbol of multiplayer gaming.  Watering down that symbol with buggy content, or rechurn of games at a lower quality than their original incarnation burns your brand.  This will result in less money long term.  Do it right, or don’t do it at all.

Downtime

My blog is currently hosted with WordPress.com

While it provides some nice features, it also puts in a lot of restrictions.  I can no longer tolerate these restrictions, and as such I’ll be rolling my own WordPress offsite.  The practical upshot of this is Ghostrazor may be unavailable between now and Sunday.

When I’m back, I’ll put up a post on an exclusive Will Wright lecture.

Xbox Originals

*sigh*

 Guys, what are you doing?

Look, I’m a PM, I understand that things get cut and you don’t always get to produce what you’d ideally like to produce.  That’s the reality of the situation.  I’m okay with the producer’s logo being a little choppy on the way in.  But if you’re essentially licensing out back catalog IP, is it really that much work to disable menu options that will cause the game to crash?  What if Word shipped with a big red toggle button on the ribbon that said “More Magic” on it. 

Do you really want to field all those calls with the answer that the player is just ’supposed to know’ not to push those buttons.  That’s not a good experience story.  In fact, it’s such a fucking terrible experience that it may threaten the viability of the platform.  I already have way, way too many awesome games coming out right now, I can wait until the mid-winter slump for my third copy of Psychonauts.  Go fix it. 

Even More Digital Delivery

Steam, I still love you, but we’re moving into an open relationship.

After replacing the misbehaving video card in my frankenstein-esque laptop (Replaced the keyboard 3 times, case fan twice, hard drive, batteries, and now the graphics card), I decided to celebrate with a purchase from the bargain bin (Evil Genius, which then proceeded to eat my weekend. I’m a sucker for a short fat guy with a monocle). Having firmly planted myself on the side of the people who make the things I love, I absolutely cannot stand going to GameStop/EB Games/The Den of Despair. If I’m forced to due to exclusive packages, etc., I will always buy games new, even if they cost more, so as to support the publisher and developer. Gamestop’s draconian policies around pre-ordering and the fact that their business model of making massive profits on the secondary market at the expense of the people who actually are responsible for the content they sell makes digital delivery all the more appealing. Unfortunately these same retailers have a lot of power to essentially extort publishers by threatening not to stock their games, or to carry less copies when the publishers try to work around them via the digital route. One gets the impression that there’s a lot of cloak and dagger going on between publishers and retailers.

At any rate, I’ve already purchased every game Steam offers I have any interest in with a metacritic rating above 70. This has led me to Warcry. The deal is similar to Steam, only instead of a client, you download the game installer manually (and unless you have a download manager, potentially multiple times, as browsers don’t like massive file downloads via http). The good side of things is that once you install the game and validate your account with the installation, you’re done, the game acts just like the retail copy does, and no further DRM is in place.

In other news, Microsoft has announced that it’s going to add a new digital delivery service to compliment Xbox Live Arcade. The service entitled “Xbox Originals” will allow players to download through Xbox Live games for the classic Xbox including Psychonauts, Crimson Skies, Fable, and the original Halo (Maybe not as good as Nintendo’s back catalog, but I’ll take it). The service will kick off December 4th.

Looks like I’ll be buying my third copy of Psychonauts. Tim Schaefer must be making matresses out of my money.