It’s hard to compare the video game industry today with the video game industry of ten or twenty years ago, But being the stubborn individual I am, I feel the need to. Current generation consoles, with their online connectivity and impressive graphics power are leaps and bounds more advanced than the Sega Channel or Mario Paint, but what about certain genres that never quite made the jump to next generation?
If you haven’t gotten word yet, let me break it for you here. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, aka Modern Warfare 2, aka MW2, formerly known as Prince, has leaked the new kill streak reward list. After 25 kills you are rewarded with a tactical nuke. That is a nuclear device designed to detonate and killing at least the bad guys on the map and declare your team the winner.
On this game alone people can get pissed about the fear of perverts with cheap Night Vision Goggles. They can get pissed about the possibility that you can kill some civilians. People can take up arms over the fact that the PC version won’t have dedicated servers. They can cancel their pre-orders over the lack of private chat online. But everyone is A-Fucking-O.K. with awarding someone who virtually kills 25 people by giving them a tactical NUCLEAR weapon. Where are the demonstrations? The liberals, the bleeding hearts? Kojima? SNAKE!?
I figure in this day and age of ultra sensitivity about everything a hot topic the use of nuclear weapons would raise a little controversy. Especially if you mix two hot topics like video games and nuclear weapons there would be a few angry letters. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for the lack of coverage demonizing the industry and hobby we all love so dear but please tell me. Am I missing something here? Should someone be angry? North Korea maybe? This feels like a trap to me, maybe it’s revenge for the dedicated server fiasco? I don’t know anymore, you tell me.
It’s the question I’ve been asking myself for a while now… Has the Game of the Year award become as worthless as the Nobel Peace Prize? It is a bold question, but one that is worth exploring.
If you have been living in a cave or just don’t run with circles of people that discuss these things here it is for you. President Barack Hussein Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. If you catch the video on YouTube you can hear the shock and awe reactions from the Nobel Press at 0:18. These are some serious reporters you hear shitting themselves. If you listen to the Nobel Committee spokesperson (and understand Norwegian) he states Obama wins because of his efforts to curb nuclear proliferation. If that’s the case where is the prize for Hideo Kojima and his work on the Metal Gear series? By the time the Nobel nominations had closed Kojima had accomplished more in this area than Obama.
Coincidentally, as the weather gets colder in the Northeast, AAA games begin to surface. While this is a great excuse to stay inside, it can’t happen without the money to buy the games. While looking through my game collection, I noticed that I hadn’t played most of the games in at least 4 months or more. If I did play one of the games, it was merely to kill some time over summer vacation. After looking at both Best Buy and GameStop’s trade in values respectively, I learned that I could easily get over $160 for all of my games. By now most of you how we here at Loot Ninja feel about GameStop. To end up trading my games in with them was a huge surprise to me. Find out why below.
Earlier this year I was thoroughly engrossed in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Horrible voice acting and cliché characters aside, it was a great game. In the game, you have both save spheres and HP/MP recovery spheres, but you never have them combined into one graphic, they’re always separate. Right before the first boss in the game, I stumbled upon an odd occurrence: there was a save sphere right around the corner from a recovery sphere, with a single enemy between them. This boggled me. Why would they even bother putting them that close to each other and not combining them into the same graphic, or at least just place the graphics right next to each other? In this case, you would recover your health and most likely have to fight through one more battle, possibly losing some HP and MP, then you could save and head down to the boss. What’s the point? The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that pre-defined save points seem to be an outdated mechanic.
Everyone likes choice in everyday life, right? Do you want ketchup, mustard or both on your cheeseburger? Do you want fries with that? Should I mow the grass today or wash the car? PC or Mac? Mario or Sonic? The list of choices goes on and on – and we like it that way. Its only natural, in the evolution of the gaming industry, to give the gamer progressively more and more choices when it comes to their character and the path that character takes in a game. Eventually, you get to the point where the character’s actions and moral decisions can have repercussions – for good or bad – at later points in the story. Lately it seems so much emphasis has been placed on giving the player these choices that games that tend to stick to more traditional means of storytelling are criticized.
I love adventure games, almost as much as Scuba loves ZJ’s, if it is possible to love something that much. The first time one of my friends came over to my house and had a copy of Maniac Mansion, my obsession began. LucasArts brought such classics as Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, and Day of the Tentacle to my computer screen, while Sierra occupied days of my life with Kings Quest, Police Quest, and Rise of the Dragon. Many consider Myst as one of the last hoo-rah’s of the Adventure gaming fad.
Well now it’s back baby! With two of the best, The Secret of Monkey Island and Beneath a Steel Sky just to kick it off. Telltale kept the heart beating strong with Sam & Max and Strong Bad episodic adventures but the true resurrection has begun…. on the iPhone.
Every time I see a classic title available for download on a console, I let loose a sad little sigh. I already paid for this game, why do I need to pay for it again? It’s because Backwards Compatibility is slowly dying a painful and expensive death. The powers that be have chosen to reduce support for backwards compatibility in favor of digital distribution.
Cleaning out your gaming cabinet one day you find Metal Gear Solid 2. If your PS2 was taken by the electronic gods a while ago, you turn to your PS3. If it’s not a launch PS3 you are done for, the game will not work. Why? It worked on the PS2, it’s the same product line from the same company, but you get no love there.
Your options are limited to either get some antique hardware running or lay out some cash to download the title, if it’s even offered to download of course. If you remember you hated the game and that’s why it’s buried in the back of the cabinet, there is no chance you can return it once you downloaded, or even sell it used for a few bucks. The man got your nuts in a sack and just stomped on it twice. Was it worth it? I get fed up every time I see a game I already have, not working in my current console. On PC it’s not an issue because you can play around with the settings until it works. Consoles aren’t that flexible.
Take a look in every corner of your gaming room, and I am sure you will find a pile of plastic gaming peripherals in one of them. Everyone has it, whether it’s secretly tucked at the bottom of a coat closet, or in a far away crevice of your living room (guilty here). The gaming industry has been transforming into a world where you need a specific peripheral for everything you play.
Over the course of gaming consoles history, the evolution of the “gold standard for controllers” has been a long fought battle. The original Nintendo set the bar with its simple directional pad plus A and B buttons, that would only be outdone by itself two generations later with the analog stick featured on the N64. After that, PlayStation and Xbox fanboys clashed as to which controller was king. However, throughout the course of gaming history, we as gamers only needed to choose between which system had the best controller and that was that. From there, we were free to play any game for that system, and we were content.
Everyone who games has their own reasons for picking up the controller (or mouse), whether it is to escape, because we refuse to read, to hit the pause button, or maybe to compete. Last week, Matt wrote his reason to game, to be someone else. This week, I share with you why I game. I game to experience things. Not just stand in someone else’s shoes, but to experience events, places, emotions that are not available to me in my normal course of life. Experience can be a dose of reality in the form of sports games, flight simulators, or economic and world simulators like SimCity. Experience can also be something of the imagination, fantasy or science fiction worlds, which gaming provides an abundance of.
Coming Soon!
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