Firefox Add-on ScribeFire – Screaming Buskids

I’ve installed a Firefox add-on that lets you blog from anywhere without having to go through a tedious login, so maybe I’ll start updating again!

But I doubt I’ll keep the old format, it was getting to be a hassle to cut an paste every time. I think I’ll just play it by ear for the most part.

Today’s mini review:

Screaming kids on the bus!

Verdict – 0/10 – They both look like chubby little boys, but one is a chubby little girl (or a boy named Melissa)! Who can control them? Certainly not their father.

Videogame Reviews

It’s so meta right now.

Videogame reviews are a joke. Ha ha ha. Being a person with a passion for the games industry, it’s difficult to watch as year after year no advances are made in the videogame review formula. Some surface issues include:

• A review is not a list of features.
• A review is not a synopsis of the storyline.
• A review cannot be boiled down to “buy it” or “don’t buy it.”
• Reviews don’t have to be written so that a 10 year old can understand it, especially if it’s for a Mature rated game.
• Reviews for ‘Mature’ rates games should not be listed on the same review areas right next to the ‘Kids’ titles. No wonder there’s been such a problem with keeping minors form purchasing violent games (the film industry is actually much worse with this, but video games get the blame.)
• Reviews should not be ranked out of 10 if reviewers give bad games 5’s, good games 7’s, groundbreaking games 9.8’s, and unplayable pieces of garbage (literally so buggy that they should not have been released as a consumer product) 3 to 5. It’s okay to be a little harsher! Or just keep doing what you’re doing and subtract 5 from every score and call it out of 5.

This is all fairly basic things that other media have long taken into account, and have been mentioned in other deconstructions of the videogame review. A review is a critical look at the content, the message, and yes, the style, the features, and the plot, but this means looking beyond “the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, but the graphics are so good you won’t care!” Why doesn’t the plot make sense? In this case the reviewer has only done half the work, offering no examples and assuming that everyone prefers pretty graphics to content. This also occurs in movie reviews, but this is usually the lower end of the spectrum (tellingly, the movie reviews written by videogame review sources.) Of course it’s a fine line between spoiling something and offering a critical view, but I’m sure the writers out there can manage.

(edit: The opposite of this is equally irritating, where a reviewer is so blasé and “unbiased” about the game they’re reviewing that they make observations like “If you liked the game before this one in the series, you may find that you like this one too” or “If you like games in this style, you may like this game.” Thanks a lot. That really told me a lot about the game. )

There’s a few other problems that bother me even more, and they aren’t the same as the surface issues listed above. These are deeper issues to do with the writing itself. They’re not as easy to fix, because not everyone may benefit from their implementation, only those concerned with how videogames are affecting culture, society, children, adults, thought patterns, learning potential, the past and the future will benefit. Which is to say, everyone.

• Games aren’t deconstructed to find what core skills and specific knowledge they teach. Even if game developers aren’t trying to teach something (they should be), people will always be taking something away from the game, no matter how trivial it seems. I would like to see more exploration on what games are teaching. I think it would allow parents to make more informed choices about games to let their kids play. It would also point out stagnation in the industry, and allow developers reason to explore new vistas beyond a very western “good vs evil; let’s have a war.” I think we’ve learned all we need to there.
• Themes aren’t often expressed in video game reviews. This is very important in books, movies, comics, and many other mediums, but I don’t remember ever seeing an exploration on the themes presented in “Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal.” In the same way you probably won’t see anyone spending time analyzing “Not Another Teen Movie” maybe some video games don’t deserve this treatment, but I think more than only the most artistic games deserve some analysis. Sure we could all write about “Shadow of the Colossus” forever, but why not write about the themes of abandonment, paternity, and friendship presented in “StarFox 64?”
• Games are open to interpretation. Tying in to the last note, games can mean what you believe them to mean, as long as you can back yourself up within reason. Fans spend years debating the meaning of every chapter of the “Metal Gear Solid” saga, but in my memory this is about the only game dissected in this way. Is it because it’s one of a very few post-modern games? That certainly makes it more ambiguous and easy to speculate about. Maybe Sonic the Hedgehog is a metaphor for progress: we CAN return order and stability to the world, we CAN stop pollution and damage to the environment, but the solution is to plow forward at breakneck speed until a final solution becomes clear! Anyone who says that games are too shallow to be interpreted in this way, I’ll poke your eye out. Even A. A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” is open to interpretation, and that’s “kid stuff,” right?
• Perhaps most importantly, reviewers need to start asking “What does this game do for videogames?” I think it may be important to begin shunning games that are derivative, play on shock factor, or aren’t socially responsible. But that’s just me. In any case, videogames need to be analyzed in a way that can determine if they validate videogames as a medium. Again, personally I don’t think videogames need validation, but the rest of the world’s not there yet. This is common in other fields of art, like Music or Visual Art, some works are credited with moving their art forwards, attaining new heights and subsequently inspiring others.
• Games reviewers need to spend more time researching WHO made each game, who directed it, who are the lead artists, who wrote the score, etc. Beyond a very select few “videogame celebrities” known only to those very close to the industry, people outside have very little to go on when purchasing a new game. Unlike comics, novels, movies, art, music, every other medium of art imaginable, videogames exist in a vacuum. Despite the huge amount of people who contribute to each title, none of them are given credit, except in the (often skip-able) credit sequence. Attaching a name to a media allows consumers to make a more educated choice, as with movies. If you liked “The Departed” you might like “Raging Bull”, because Scorsese directed them both. This sort of referal system doesn’t exist in the video game industry. I think it’s important to a medium’s image, as well as relatability.

I don’t think arguments like “No one wants this, because there’s no demand” don’t stand. People never know what they want until it’s put in front of them. Gamers are getting older, and whether they’re going to keep playing or not depends heavily on the content being presented. If the reviews, and the content of the games themselves can’t mature with the population then people can’t be blamed for losing interest. Some would argue that it’s only natural that people lose interest in video games as they get older; games are for kids, and are just a meaningless pastime, vapid entertainment. Sadly, I’d agree for the most part. Maybe people need a new way to think about video games. A heavyhanded analysis of “Super Paper Mario” might allow someone who was previously uninterested to enjoy it on a deeper level than they initially thought possible, but this isn’t only the reviewer’s task. Games themselves need to become more than just entertainment if they want to stay relevant.

CONCEPT: 3/5 – Current reviews at least allow some exploration into what a game is about, which is better than nothing.

INNOVATION: 1/5 – I have to admit, I’ve stopped reading reviews altogether because they don’t hold the information that I am interested in. I couldn’t care less about level 3’s killer boss fight. Let me find that on my own. Tell me what the game’s ABOUT.

SATISFACTION: 1/5 – Not a whole lot of satisfaction going on here, hence the spiel.

EXECUTION: 2/5 – Well, they put words into lines called sentences that convey some information.

FUN FACTOR: 1/5 – So un-fun that I stopped reading them entirely.

OVERALL: 2/10 – Urgh. I’m not blaming any one person or publication for what I perceive as these problems, but I think we can work together to give videogames the intellectual respect they need.

Massive Impromptu Gears of War Party

Many people were chainsawed

I present to you exhibit A. 8 Friends. 3 Xb0×360s. 3 TVs. 1 Livingroom.

The Sunday before I started University, January the 7th, my roommates decided it would be a good idea to play some Gears of War. Fine, that’s a good idea, it’s a great game. You can play online with your friends, and you can play 2 people on the same console while online with up to 8 people. So we started out with one console, two players.

One of our associates, who also owns a 360, decided to bring his over as well, we could hook them both up to the router, and play 4 people at our house, and two other people at home on their own 360s made 6 players. Fun!

This process was then duplicated by another friend who happened to phone and wanted in. We had the TVs, the network cables, and the moxie to rearrange the furniture to make it happen. Now we had 6 players in our living room!

Soon more friends arrived and left, a huge box of chips arrived, and a flat of cola materialized. Suddenly we weren’t a bunch of nerds playing a video game. Suddenly we were a party of nerds playing a video game together.

Although we had to trade controllers a lot because we had more people than seats, it was a blast to run across an alien planet with 4 team mates with an assault rifle that was also part power tool and chainsaw the opposing team in half if they came around a corner too quickly. A testosterone fueled bloodbath.

I’d like to draw your attention to the final picture of the photoset, this one here, because you can’t quite appreciate the horrors that occasionally enter into my life without seeing them for yourself. (zoom in on the picture with the little magnifying glass, it’s kinda longish)

CONCEPT: 5/5 – Hey, I’m always into video game themed events. If you’re throwing a Legend of Zelda wedding don’t let me know, ’cause I’ll crash it. Super Smash Bros. bar mitzvah? Mario Party birthday?

INNOVATION: 2/5 – Nerds have been hooking together pieces of machinery since the dark ages. (insert joke about 1960s here)

SATISFACTION: 5/5 – There’s nothing like hopping around a corner, having someone lumber at you revving their chainsaw, and blowing their legs off with a well placed shotgun blast at the last possible second. Space Marines that looks like 800lbs gorillas, and monsters that look like 800lbs monster gorillas in space boots tearing each other apart.

EXECUTION: 4/5 – Well done considering how spontaneous the whole thing was, but with only one HDTV, some people were forced to suffer unnecessarily.

FUN FACTOR: 5/5 – It put a nice cap on the winter break, and set a standard for future dorkery.

OVERALL: 9/10 – Fun times with friends, no matter the condition or situation or social implications is always a good thing. Without exception. I can’t really think of any possible situations in which any of those things would take precedence over fun times with friends.

EB Games ‘pre-orders’

Sarcasm?

Does this make sense to any of you? You go into an EB Games location, looking for a specific game. The staff there tells you that it’s not out yet, but it’s due to be very rare (you know this is true) and that if you want to secure your ownership you should pre-order the game. Pre-ordering allows you to put down a maximum of the games entire price or a minimum of $5. Naturally, you pay $5 because what sort of a sucker would give away money that could be earning interest in your bank account to a corporation for the promise of a product “when it ships”?

You wait however long, occasionally this can be up to a year, but usually only several months (hah), and one day you get a phone call from your friends at EB.

“Hi, this is EB Games, I’m calling to let you know that your pre-order for Game X is in stock, and can be picked up anytime during normal business hours. I must also remind you that if you do not pick up the game within 48 hours of this phone call, the game will be sold on the shelf with the other games. We will, however, transfer your credit to any other purchase in the store.”

I can’t begin to describe the ways this in no way constitutes a preorder. How does waiting for a game for months turn into a 48 hour window of opportunity to claim your prize? Why does having the initiative to create a demand for a product go punished? You’ve already outlined for us that the game is going to be nearly impossible to find, which is why we’ve pre-ordered it, and now you’re going to just sell it to anyone? Fie on you, EB Games, fie and fie.

Between waiting upwards of 20 minutes with just two people ahead in line, trying to upsell everything in the store, and having staff disappear for lengths of time, or simply duck behind the counter and pretend to be busy it’s a wonder anyone goes to EB.

If they weren’t the only place offering pre-orders, I’d never go there.

CONCEPT: 4/5 – The concept is noble enough, I give you money down, and you promise to give me what I want when it’s available so I don’t have to search for it like the fucking Master Sword.

INNOVATION: 3/5 – Their strategy of apparently trying as hard as they can to infuriate customers is a new one for me.

SATISFACTION: 2/5 – I’m only giving this a 2 and not lower because I’ve always managed to make it to the EB in time. I can’t imagine what I’d do if I was out of town.

EXECUTION: 0/5 – Poor! This is consumer service? I’ve had hobos treat me with more respect. I’ve had more enjoyable circumstances climbing over barbed wire fences!

FUN FACTOR: 1/5 – Good strategy; make me dread buying what you sell. If grocery stores treated me like this I’d starve.

OVERALL: 1/10 – One more reason not to play video games: EB Games.

Weekend Warzone #5 – The Good things about Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, The Bad things about Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, Stalker

The Good things about Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz

Super Monkey Ball for Nintendo Wii is a fun game! There’s 50 multiplayer games, and a lot of them are well thought out, and fun to play with other people. The single player game is classic Monkey Ball (with a new jump move), with about 100 levels. The levels themselves are detailed, with more scenery than previous games. The themes of each world seem more cohesive than in previous outings as well; jungle, snowy, desert, etc, as compared to washing machine, whale, and clock, in other Monkey Balls.

The multiplayer lets up to 4 people go head to head in fun, easy to pick up games that have extremely intuitive controls, like Disk Golf, Monkey Target, and an asteroid shooting game that makes excellent use of the Wii-remote. There’s no need to play hours and hours of single player to get to the good stuff either, all the games are ready to play out of the box! Neat!

CONCEPT: 3/5 – As good an idea to a popular franchise could be, I suppose. The multiplayer is inspired.

INNOVATION: 4/5 – Creative use of the Wii-remote increases the fun of gameplay dramatically.

SATISFACTION: 5/5 – Worth every penny.

EXECUTION: 3/5 – The front end is a little hard to navigate, butthe presentation is extremely cute with lots of bright colours, and catchy music.

FUN FACTOR: 5/5 – The most fun I’ve had with the Wii so far.

OVERALL: 8/10 – Go out and grab some Monkey Ball.

The Bad things about Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz

From the get go, thing are confusing. To navigate the main menu, the user is required to twist the controller to scroll through a ring of options. Why not just point and click? Sometimes making things the same works well if the concept works before.

Some of the multiplayer games are impossible to play. The controls are not explained well enough, and strange pre-game screens seem to obfuscate the control AND the point of the game simultaneously. One particular example I find inexcusable; for games that use the remote as a pointer, the “How to Play!’ graphic shows someone sliding their controller around in a square with arrows radiating out of it to denote that you can move the remote in any direction. This is not actually how you play the game, the remote remains stationary, and you point it at the screen, turning it slightly to move the onscreen cursor.

There’s an issue of balance as well. Some of the games take place over multiple rounds. If you select bowling, be prepared to play a full 10 frames. Amongst 4 people, this can take up to an hour to complete. Yet other games, like Paper Sumo Fighter, are over within 5 seconds. Both are worth the same amount of points in a tournament, however. Huh? Numerous times the timed games seem twice as long as they should be. If the game stops being fun or becomes tiring after 30 seconds, it’s a minute long. If it’s fun for about 2 minutes, it lasts for 4. Other games require everyone to take turns (for no real reason, the screen could have been split) and takes a good amount of time transitioning between the players, eating up even more time.

Then there’s the fact that the menu system has no on screen instructions on how to go backwards through the menu to the title screen, and that I had to look up how to PAUSE in the INSTRUCTION MANUAL.

CONCEPT: 2/5 – A lot of poorly thought out features and time balancing issues make it a hard sell as a party game, unless you already know what all the games are.

INNOVATION: 2/5 – Inventing new ways to frustrate users, thanks SEGA! Good in smaller doses, clearly.

SATISFACTION: 2/5 – I’m heavily dissatisfied with the features mentioned above.

EXECUTION: 3/5 – They did a good job of making some features absolutely confusing.

FUN FACTOR: 1/5 – Being frustrated is never fun, neither is not being able to quit a game that’s not fun because you don’t know how.

OVERALL: 2/10 – Boo to these features!

Stalker

Stalker is a sort of sci-fi concept based on a Russian novel, Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It was made into a movie by Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. The entire concept is being made into a videogame, titled S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl. Whew.

I have the movie on my floor, and I’m reading the book in PFD form, which can be found over here. Don’t worry, it’s legal. I can’t find time to watch the movie though, it’s fairly long, as Russian movies tend to be. I expect it to move exquisitly slowly. I may have a heavy dinner and some wine, and sit down to watch it in my house coat and slippers in the dark when I have nothing to do the next day.

Anyway, the whole concept is this (and it varies with each telling), objects impact the earth or the Chernobyl nuclear station is rebuilt and detonates again. The objects or the explosion create a Zone. The Zone is an area where the natural laws of the world are not always in effect. They are extremely dangerous for completely unknown reasons. There are artifacts in the Zone from another world, all of extremely greate value to both science, and private collectors. This created a breed of people who call themselves Stalkers. They illegaly enter the Zone and steal any artifacts from the other side they can and sell them to the highest bidder. In the book, a team of three enters the Zone legally, searching for a “full empty” and the movie is even more abstract, The Writer and The Philosopher enter the Zone with a Stalker to find the Room, where wishes can be fulfilled, to find enlightenment and inspiration.

CONCEPT: 5/5 – One of the greatest works of Sci-fi ever, apparently. Still need to finish one of it’s forms though. The game’s been delayed since 2003.

INNOVATION: 4/5 – Prety high concept, especially back in the day (1972).

SATISFACTION: 4/5 – What I’ve read so far is really good.

EXECUTION: 4/5 – Well written, well directed, although the game remains to be seen.

FUN FACTOR: 3/5 – Fun for nerds, and maybe other people too!

OVERALL: 8/10 – A classic.

Verdict – Stalker! As fun as they can be, Monkeys inside Balls just don’t stand up next to masterworks of writing and cinema.

Strange Computer Issues

Not sure how it happened, but it can’t be fixed by mortal hands

Maybe you’ve turned on your computer, and all the desktop icons are reset. Now this happens every time you use the computer. Welcome to the wacky world of computer problems. Things that don’t really break your computer, but minor inconveniences that hinder your enjoyment. Worse are the sort that start seemingly for no reason when they used to work perfectly. Some of the ones I’ve experienced include:

• Being informed, twice, on every bootup, that Windows cannot ‘find the installer for volume’.
• Speakers that make a high pitched whine whenever the hard drive is read unless they’re playing any sound file. Even a silent sound file.
• Windows tries to install exactly 2 updates every time the computer is shut down. They never complete, and the computer shuts down after about 2 minutes.
• DVDs don’t always read the first time they’re put in the DVD drive.
• New versions of video card driver do not allow the user to actually open the video settings controll panel, and cannot be uninstalled completely.
• Hard drives suddenly become several megabytes smaller than they used to be with no explaination.
• Post your own crappy problems that don’t make any sense that no one seems to be able to fix!

These sort of problems are the thing that make my mom and dad stop using computers. Don’t we live in an age where computers should be beyond the point of being ‘touchy’ and needing to be coaxed with some useless ritual to work properly? “It usually works best if I put a pot on to boil before I use the internet; the pages load faster, and the computer doesn’t beep as much.”

CONCEPT: 2/5 – If I wanted a box that I didn’t know the state of the contents of, I’d just get a much cheaper box and a cat.

INNOVATION: 1/5 – Mistakes have been made since time began, and people still don’t know how some of them happen.

SATISFACTION: 1/5 – One of the least satisfying parts of computing.

EXECUTION: 4/5 – They always manage to do it, no matter how new the software, or how powerful the hardware.

FUN FACTOR: 1/5 – When parents yell my name because the computer-box is acting up, it sends chills up my spine. When it’s not their fault, it’s even more frustrating.

OVERALL: 2/10 – We should be beyond the point where consumer products can easily be so corrupted to the point where they don’t function, or need to be jerry rigged.

Heroes 5th Episode – “Hiros”

Heroes airs Mondays on NBC at 9

I was afraid I was going to have to give up on this show, and maybe I will after all, but the fifth episode was (finally) a satisfying watch.

Every previous episode was dragged down by molasseses pacing, unsympathetic characters, wooden acting, and virtually none of the titular subject; heroes. Hell, it took like two episodes to see anything out of the ordinary happen, and then the next episode the characters all deny that anything took place. The audience is left betrayed as the character who can fly denies his ability to his brother, the girl who can heal very quickly denies saving a man from a burning train, and the man who can travel through time has his power treated as an idle daydream. PHOOEY.

This episode laid it all out though. Hiro, the Japanese time traveler, appears from the future to let the dopey young doctor character, Peter, know where to go to get the plot rolling. Peter’s brother, Nathan, actually uses his power of flight to escape from men from an unknown organization trying to steal his brain. The psychic druggie paints the future, and finally shows someone who knows what his pictures mean. Without revealing too much, it was much more exciting, and actually had people doing things in it! Plots progressed! People talked to each other about meaningful things instead of hiding them! It’s a goddamn miracle.

I really want this show to be good. I want to watch a show on prime time that deals with nerdy questions I’ve been wondering about my whole life, like “if I could fly, what would I do?” (the answer is: run for office in New York) One of the things that still bothers me about the show is that all the people who aren’t completely evil, or at least manipulative jerks, are complete idiots. Yes, all the people with moral fiber are depicted as naive, plodding, emotional wrecks with no direction. Who gave these people powers?

All in all, an exciting FIFTH episode. What took so long? I hope I don’t drag on watching this show longer than I need to. I refuse to accept it because “I enjoy the concept.”

CONCEPT: 4/5 – I enjoy the concept.

INNOVATION: 3/5 – Superheroes are nothing new, but a prime time TV show with Heroes treated with respect? Well, it’s not that creative, but it’s been a long time coming.

SATISFACTION: 4/5 – This episode was particularly satisfying, lots of action and some actual foreshadowing that didn’t make me go AW, COME ON.

EXECUTION: 3/5 -Even the cinematography seemed a bit better this go around, and the special effects aren’t bad. But I expect better from a high profile show. Maybe it’s not high profile yet. All I can hope for is better effects than Buffy I suppose.

FUN FACTOR: 4/5 – Fwoosh! Zooo! I’m a Superhero!

OVERALL: 8/10 – Not disappointing like I was made to believe I would always be with this show.