Pee-Ess-Pee

I got a PSP recently, and I just finished FF VII: Crisis Core today (great game, a lot of its features and aesthetic were carried on to FF XIII, but even Sephiroth is more likable than everyone from the latter). I’ve been playing a lot of Dissida 012, too, which is also great and probably the only fighting game I’ve ever loved. Mainly because it’s pretty much 100% an RPG.

        The third game I own, which I bought in order to snag a $50 discount on the cost of the PSP, is Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce. Let me tell you about this game. It’s going to be a lot less funny to read about, but I’m going to write it anyway so I never forget.

        When you select “new game” from the main menu, you’re given the choice between three dynasties. There’s a green guy (benevolent), a blue guy (likes talent?) and a red guy (noble, possibly evil). The nice guy sounded like an ok dude, so I picked him.

        Then I had to select from one of ten other guys. Wait, what? There’s a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make any sense until you start playing the game, so you just pick a guy that looks cool. I picked a guy with a big sword and maybe a spear hidden somewhere. Apparently, his name is Mu Chao.

        For choosing the green guy, I got to watch a little cinematic about how he wants to help people and some warriors united under his banner. Then the narrator tells you “they gathered together and rose up like a dragon.”

        Ten seconds later, they start glowing, turn into a dragon, and fly away.

        A clear sign that this game is going to be well worth the negative ten bucks I paid for it. The ancient Chinese art of “turning oneself and companions into a dragon.” A lost art, obviously.

        Some general tells you to go check the notice board, so you do, and there’s a mission to go beat up some bandits. Great, tutorial mission!

        Or not, because the game doesn’t tell you the controls. In fact, it doesn’t tell you anything. You just press buttons and people die. You get points the more people you slaughter, and at the end of a mission, your points are converted into something else and you get experience points. I levelled up, and either because of that or from the mission, I gained proficiency points in a few weapons and ability points (defense, attack, life, etc.) and I still don’t know what any of that means.

        Will I play this game for more than an hour? Who knows! As long as it’s easy and silly, it could be worth firing it up every once in a while.

Critical misunderstanding of video games

Speaking of the creator of AVALANCHE, he’s got a long (but very interesting) article about the consumption-based nature of the gaming industry and the problems it’s causing. It’s called Of Games and Swine, for some reason, and I do recommend you read it. The crux of the issue is that not only are most gamers critically unaware of the medium (like the kind of people who only watch summer blockbuster films), nearly all the critics are, as well. I think this sentence about sums up the problem:

Our standards for professional videogame reviewers in this industry end right after “do you really like playing videogames and do you know how to write?”

        Either most people don’t look at games as something with the same critical depth (not a great term, but hopefully you get the idea) as other mediums, or the people who do understand these things aren’t sharing their knowledge with enough people. It’s pretty easy to learn how to critically analyze a film or a book, but that’s not the case with games. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to analyze. The people who understand these things are going to have to explain it to the rest of us, so we can all get past the basic, literal understanding of the games we’re playing.

        For the most part, any time someone tries to critically analyze a game, they limit themselves to tools available from other mediums. It’s easy to analyze the music in a game, or its art, or its writing. But few people seem to understand how to analyze the gameplay, or the level design. Or they just aren’t doing it in public. I’ll admit that there are probably plenty of games designed simply based on how player feedback - “oh, they tend to run out of ammo here, we’ll have to add a supply station” - but that doesn’t mean every game is designed without any deeper meaning.

        One final note on this, Clint Hocking (known for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Far Cry 2, and being a super smart guy) is one of those people with the knowledge to critically analyze a game. I actually don’t know where I read or heard this, but it’s probably somewhere on his blog… Anyway, he mentioned somewhere an encounter he’d put in one of the Splinter Cell games where the enemy soldier begged for his life and mentioned his family. From what I understand, you can either kill enemies or simply knock them out, and the idea was to make the enemy more than just a tough, anonymous grunt. Then he said “if one single person even understood the reason I put that there, I’d be happy.” Out of hundreds of thousands of people who likely played the game, he figures not a single one will understand what he was getting at.

        Turns out that a number of people did get it, and have spoken about it in various places, but I can’t decide which is more tragic: the fact that we don’t truly understand the games we play, or the fact that the brilliant minds behind them don’t take the time to share their knowledge. If they would collaborate, create a place to share knowledge and spread the kind of critical understanding that allows them to make great games… If such a thing were to happen, I’d say it would only take ten years to establish the kind of widespread critical understanding found in other mediums.

It’s Sunday, and I have Some Things for you! First, some good news: PSN is back up in the US and Canada, coming with a firmware update that does nothing but inform you that you should change your password.

        Next up is FromWhereToWhere, a firefox extension that “threads” your history, showing you how you got to a specific page. As in, if you were on your dashboard and click on the link for the extension, then go to wikipedia, then go through a bunch of articles, it would show each of the steps along the way. I used to use TreeStyleTabs in a similar way, but this is far more useful. I highly recommend it. If you’re worried about security, they say it just uses firefox’s existing history tracking. Theoretically, you should be able to use it on older history as soon as you install it.

        On a much more niche note is AVALANCHE, a fan-made brawler based on Final Fantasy VII and starring Tifa for no real reason. This game actually introduced me to OCRemix, as it uses music from the stellar FF VII remix album, Voices of the Lifestream. It’s a decent game, and if you actually want to try it out, there’s a recent beta available on the creator’s website. You may also want to download the font changing mod here.

        Back to general interests, I’d like you to watch the Extra Credits video from last week, Gamifying Education. If there are any teachers you particularly like, you should share it with them. If there are any teachers you dislike, you should definitely share it with them! I doubt one video on the internet is enough to reform the education system. However, it’s more than enough to help individual teachers, and that’s better than no progress at all.

        Also on The Escapist is an older Extra Considerations article about console gaming. Extra Considerations has Yahtzee, the writer(?) behind Extra Credits, and another smart guy called Movie Bob discussing various topics in gaming. Guest writers come in sometimes, too. Anyway, this particular article is all about how little innovation there is in the industry, and how the Wii came and went without many games actually using its controller for anything interesting. Also, how video games shouldn’t be limited by what the player can physically do in real life. Could you play Final Fantasy VII with Kinect? Of course not, because you can’t jump fifty feet in the air or use a sword as tall as your body.

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        Wrapping things up, I’ve got an anime recommendation: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, aka Madoka Magica. I don’t want to say a lot about it, because it’s best left as a surprise, but check it out and don’t be fooled by the cute and cuddly exterior. It’s not on crunchyroll, sadly, so you’ll have to find it yourself. This tiny paragraph doesn’t do it justice, but I liked it a lot and I think it’s worth your time.

Bad Writing Showcase 1

I’m calling this Bad Writing Showcase 1 because I can’t think of a better name, even though I hope there won’t be a Bad Writing Showcase 2. Still, I could screw up another post, and I could also showcase writing that isn’t mine. Bad Writing Showcase 1 just gives a better sense of closure than “Bad Writing Showcase.”

        Moving on. Below is a post I wrote a little over a week ago, which I never published because I felt pretty bad about it. I spent a lot of time writing it and trying to make it good, but as it is now, it can’t be what I want it to be. I’d have to do a complete re-write of it (my old Persona post is in a similar situation) and I just don’t really feel like doing that. When I say it isn’t good, what I really mean is that it isn’t good by my standards - I know I can write better than this. I’ve made these same mistakes before, and learned how to fix them. In fact, it’s eerily similar to the MacBeth essay I wrote. I’ve also made the same mistakes a ton of times in other blog posts, but it’s getting to the point where I need to do better.

        Much like my MacBeth essay, if it’s taken paragraph by paragraph, the writing is pretty solid. But much like my MacBeth essay, it was written without a thesis or an outline. It’s just a bunch of slightly related thoughts strung together, with a sloppy introduction and conclusion that try desperately to make some cohesive point out of all the individual paragraphs. It’s ok to sit down and throw out a big rant, because I can post whatever I want and who cares if anyone likes it or thinks it’s good? But I kind of want to take things I’ve written and say “hey, look at this, it’s really damn good and incredibly smart.” Also I fantasize about being paid to write smart things for video game blogs but that’s a risky proposition. So, in short, if I wanted to do those things, I would need to apply all my knowledge about writing to at least a few posts.

        That means taking the time to plan out my thoughts in advance, starting with a clear thesis and making sure everything I write serves to support it, and revising to fix the messy spots. I’ve been working on that for a while, and I’ve got a couple sheets of paper covered in notes for when I sit down to write one of these wonderful posts. It’s getting to the point where the individual paragraphs I had planned are becoming essays in their own right. I need to get other things straightened out first before I can start writing seriously, though.

        Anyway. I’m not going to go through this and point out everything that’s wrong with it, because I wrote it and I don’t want to tear my own work apart. Plus I don’t want to be tempted to improve it. I may start over at some point, but for now, it’s testament to the day I realized I can’t expect perfection to simply flow out of my fingertips. If you’re really bored, check out older posts and see how I couldn’t find a way to write a solid conclusion because they suffered the same problems.

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Gaming and the mainstream

Inspired by a MovieBob episode I overheard my brother watching, in which he has the following to say about film critics and the general population:

It’s often said that the problem with film critics is that we’re out of touch with normal people, because we see hundreds of films a year and thus get tired of formula quicker, and bored more easily, than people who only see a dozen or less. As such, we tend to overpraise certain films for things like narrative abstractions, explicit sexuality, taboo subject matter, or creative violence, because we’re just desperate for anything that surprises us - and conversely that we’re overly dismissive of otherwise solid films because they aren’t different enough to keep us awake.

        He mentions gaming, as well, to say that if every gamer were like Yahtzee or the Extra Credits crew, we wouldn’t get things like Halo: Reach (as he called it, just Halo 3 with a jetpack added). I don’t think that’s anywhere near as interesting as a subject, though - it’s just simple economics, and it applies to games, movies, books, television… If it sells, you make it, even if it’s derivative/unoriginal/starting to get stale after eleven iterations/not even that good/etc.

        Gaming is in a worse position than other mediums, because it doesn’t have the long history of great examples that break the mold that other mediums have, and it’s still a commercial industry at its core. Most games today are made as merely average commodities, as opposed to the exceptional (Portal 2) or the intellectual (), and that’s just how the industry is right now. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with making your game based on mechanics or “fun,” but it’s not really enriching anyone’s life if you have nothing interesting to say beyond “look how realistic our explosions are!” If you don’t have any issues with that, by all means, make what sells.

        But what I’m really here to talk about is the gaming public (your parents, perhaps your children, your co-workers who don’t know what a ‘source engine’ is) and the way they’re different from gamers. It’s not just the gaming media that have completely different ideas and expectations about games from everyone else - the gaming media is for gamers, by gamers, and we share their ideas and expectations. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they share ours. But to be accepted as a medium and an art form, games are going to have to deal with the radical differences in its audience. Things are better than they used to be - smartphones and the Wii have brought gaming to the general public, but compared to books and film, it’s still a niche.

        People like your parents and your “non-gamer” co-workers and friends probably play as many video games per year as I watch movies: a handful at best. “Gamers” either play or keep up with more games per year than so-called “non-gamers” have played in their entire lives. We may scoff at minigame collections for the Wii, or cry that “Angry Birds is just a reskinned version of a flash game I played years ago,” but for the average person, these are totally new to them. We may have played similar games in the past, perhaps even better games, to the ones “non-gamers” buy in droves. But there are only a few million “gamers.” Meanwhile, there are billions of “non-gamers.” Very few developers can afford to cater to the gamers now, because the audience isn’t big enough to sustain the costs of development for modern systems. Of the few million gamers out there, how many only buy strategy games? How many only buy shooters? Each genre has its own niche audience among the greater gamer population, while “non-gamers” don’t even know what those terms mean - they just buy the fun games.

        Hollywood makes films for people who only watch a few movies per year, and film critics complain about it. But film is accepted as a medium because the average person still watches some movies, and they’ve probably even watched a few really good ones. The absolute gems of film are just as accessible to them as the summer action films - all they have to do is buy a ticket (or DVD) and sit down to watch. Video games still aren’t accepted as a medium because they’re foreign and strange to most people, who only play those few accessible titles. The difference is that games made for people who have been gaming for years are NOT as accessible as Wii Sports Resort, and the average person can’t get over that hurdle. My dad will occasionally take our Wii and Wii Sports Resort with him when he goes out, and play it with people who have never even seen it before. Could you do the same with Starcraft 2 or The Witcher? Of course not, because they rely on you knowing a lot of other things that you’ve learned from previous games.

        (Side note: among the people who play games on their computers at all, I would guess that the proportion of “gamers” to “non-gamers” is far more skewed than that for dedicated gaming consoles and handhelds, making core games and complication the rule rather than the exception)

        MovieBob said that film critics are “out of touch” with normal people, but he went on to justify that in the context of a film critic. To him, being out of touch and having higher standards for films is no problem, because it leads to a greater appreciation of the medium that “normal people” don’t get when they only watch movies like Transformers 2. But that justification only works if you care about film as a medium, and aren’t one of the people who just want to see something fun or interesting. Hopefully something fun and interesting that blows up. The average person will still see the film critic as out of touch, because to them, Transformers 2 was still fun to watch, and the film critic is just too jaded to enjoy it.

        So what happens to video games? A medium built on us, the gamers, all of us out of touch with what normal people can handle? If you tell someone who hasn’t been gaming for years to “press the L3 button” on a PlayStation controller, they’ll just glare at you. Using a piece of plastic that has four directional buttons, four face buttons, four shoulder triggers, two analog sticks (which press down to provide two more buttons) and now three “control” buttons (start, select, and the PS/X button in the middle of 360 and PS3 controllers) is not a skill most people have. Swinging your arm to swing a sword is much easier to understand, with the next best thing being a button that says “kick” used to make your character kick. Why is it any wonder that normal people like my father can play games on the Wii or in an arcade (granted, not very common these days, but they can handle it), yet he can’t figure out how to watch a movie on my PS3… or how to turn it off afterwards?

        And now, I realize the solution is incredibly simple. Just wait. In another decade or two, everyone will have grown up playing video games. Problem solved. When most people were illiterate, books didn’t have much widespread acceptance as a medium. “Moving pictures” were probably incredibly frightening to people who didn’t grow up with them. Now that video games are in the hands of an audience at least ten times the size of what it used to be, it’s only a matter of time. Yes, video games are complicated. Yes, most people don’t understand them. But that’s changing, as more and more games fall somewhere between “dead simple” and “requires fifteen different buttons to play.” Before long, there will be plenty of games for people of every skill level, and then the medium will be accepted by the general public.

Video Games Live Ottawa

On friday I had the wonderful pleasure of experiencing Video Games Live - basically, music from video games performed by an orchestra (with choir). First of all, holy crap, the music was good on its own. When you knew the piece, that was just a bonus. Second of all, it was a pretty sweet event all told, music aside - they had booths from Microsoft and Sony, demo hardware, a Guitar Hero tournament, a costume contest… It’s pretty much the closest thing to a gaming convention Ottawa will ever have. I highly recommend you see them if they’re playing in your area.

        Let’s move on to the summary of all the fun I had (that you didn’t :( ), shall we? I don’t know about you, but that sounds great to me! From what I understand, here’s what Video Games Live does: play shows anywhere there’s an orchestra willing to play the music, with video accompaniment of cutscenes and gameplay from the games. They travel around and play with local orchestras, playing an assortment of the 80 or so songs the creator has arranged for the project. They try to play different songs everywhere they go, so it’s worth going more than once. They take suggestions on songs, too, so if I got to choose I’d love to see Assault of the Silver Dragons from FF IX, or Eternity ~ Memory of Lightwaves ~ from FF X-2, or even Destati from Kingdom Hearts. I would have been the happiest boy in the world if either of those were played.

        Well, life is full of minor disappointments. They played lots of other great stuff, though! In no particular order, they played a medley of retro games (Joust, Centipede, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, etc.), the opening sequence for Assassin’s Creed 2 (literally, they played the video behind, and did the music as it played), a similar video-and-music arrangement for God of War 3 (not sure if the video is from the game or not, as I haven’t played it, but it showed stuff from all three games so the song may have been a mix as well), an arrangement of songs from the Halo series, a medley of vanilla Megaman songs (from Megaman to Megaman 10, but no Megaman X or any of that stuff), an arrangement of character themes for Street Figher 2 (if Guile’s Theme is in SF 2, they played it) a piano medley of Final Fantasy songs (this made me so happy, I knew every song XD), a piano medley of Mario songs (half of which was played while blindfolded, and received the night’s first standing ovation), and maybe a few others I’m forgetting… There’s more, but the others bear special mention, so I’ll get to that.

        They picked two people out of the crowd to compete for a high score in Frogger, while the orchestra played the background music. The ultimate winner was a man lovingly nicknamed “Jesus” by the crowd. Jesus only hopped on the lady frog once. What a great monogamous example for us all.

        After the intermission, the winner of the Guitar Hero tournament was brought on stage to play a song alongside the orchestra (on Guitar Hero, obviously) - if he could score 175,000 points on Hard, playing Jump by Van Halen, he’d win some stuff. His response: “I want to play it on expert!” He got 200,000 points in the end. Pretty cool.

        They also played Baba Yetu (the song from Civilazation IV that won a Grammy, the first for any video game), accompanied by the original singer for the song, because apparently he’s from Toronto. Pretty sweet.

        The vocalist for all the songs was Laura “FluteLink” Intravia, who (I think) was recruited by the group after they saw a skit she’d performed and uploaded to youtube. She did the skit live, with a plush Navi over her shoulder, which was cool.

        Now I’ll give you three guesses what the finale was. Here’s a couple of hints: the title ends with the word “angel”, it had to be played by an orchestra and a choir, and it’s more than ten years old.

        If you called it before the end of that sentence, congrats. If you didn’t, you need to brush up on your gaming history and dust off a copy of Final Fantasy VII - the finale was One Winged Angel, and it was great. Lots of people did their best to sing along, mostly poorly, because who remembers all the lyrics anyway? You know, except the Sephiroth part. While it was an obvious choice for the finale, that certainly doesn’t make it a bad choice, because it was a totally fitting finish.

        Everyone stood and cheered, and a chant for one more song rose up around the room. It continued for a minute or two, and died down a little when it started to seem like we weren’t going to get it. Then it got a bit stronger, and finally they came back for an arrangement of music from Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Everyone pulled out their backlit screen of choice (DS, cell phone, PSP) and waved them around. Probably looked really, really awesome from down on the stage. One guy was waving a laptop. A couple of the guys we’d met up with while we were there waved the copies of Chrono Cross they’d bought just before coming to the show. Lucky bastards got them for twenty bucks…

        All jealousy aside! After that song was done, everyone stood again and clapped and clapped until they said “if you guys keep standing, we’ll just have to keep playing!” Spoiler: we stood. For our second encore, we got a rendition of Still Alive, with lyrics up on the big screen for the two people who didn’t know them already. Everyone sang along, and it was great.

        Everything about it was great.

Morality of used games

A couple of weeks ago, I set off from my house with a backpack full of games I knew I’d never play again. My brother had agreed with all of my choices, and we’d had them sitting in a box, waiting to be disposed of in any way possible, for a long time. This was stuff like Ape Escape Pumped & Primed, Pokemon Battle Revolution, games we either picked up in a bargain bin or as a well-intentioned gift. Maybe a few that seemed like a good idea at the time (Star Wars Force Unleashed, Ridge Racer 7). We’d tried selling them to our friends, through a yard sale, and we just couldn’t find anybody willing to give us any decent price for them.

        So I took them to the one place I knew would be forced to take even the worst game off of my hands: GameStop. I looked at the pile of games, and I said to my brother: “I almost feel bad for making them take these games. I’d refuse, if I were them.” I apologized when I went in, and the guy (the manager, I think) laughed. I unpacked all the games, he rang them in, and the total came up to around $90. If you buy a used game when you trade something in, they give you an extra 50% credit. New total: $134. The catch: I had to use all the credit right away.

        So I bought Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood used, which was 100% worth it. Then I bought Final Fantasy Tactics A2, also used. With $70 left, I couldn’t think of anything to get, and ended up getting Dead Space and Dead Space 2 - both used. I didn’t really want Dead Space 2, given that I haven’t played the first, so I asked my brother and we agreed to return it in exchange for a Portal 2 pre-order.

        This was definitely a great deal for me - I got rid of a box full of junk, and scored four games in exchange. But does that make it right? I got, literally, dollars and cents for most of the games. I got Arc the Lad: End of Darkness for $10 in a bargain bin, and they gave me $0.37 for it. That Ape Escape game got me $0.45. Pokemon Battle Revolution was worth about twenty bucks, and Yoshi’s Island 2 was worth $15. All of the games I sold them will be sold for a much higher price, the profits going solely to GameStop. The three games I bought used didn’t contribute anything to the developers beyond what they got from the first sale. Some people like to make the argument that “used game sales drive new game purchases” - yet GameStop gave me $45 just for buying one single used game from them. I could have just bought a $10 used game from a bargain bin, and gotten that bonus credit. There are no restrictions on it, except with pre-orders I think. You think they’d be doing that if it didn’t make them a profit?

        So, in short, I may be a bad (or at least selfish) person. I made a profit for a large corporation, and I contributed nothing to the people who genuinely deserve the money for the games.

        edit: I traded in exactly 30 games, if I counted the receipt properly - so an average of $3 each

Ramblings about video games

Before it stops being topical, I’m going to post a couple of Ars Technica articles rather than make one of the posts I have floating around in the back of my head. I’m not sure how much I want to say about this, because it’s all information I’ve cultivated from intelligent people writing blog posts I couldn’t hope to source now. At any rate, here’s the first link:

• How Publishers Punish Us For Buying New Games

        Or, in plain English, more properly called “Self-Entitled Whining, Lack of Industry Knowledge, and Free Bonus Stuff Isn’t Good Enough For Me.” I’m going to look at his points in order, because the fact is, these things don’t happen just to piss you off and keep you from playing the game you bought. Not only that, but none of these things even have anything to do with “new” games! Buying a game used doesn’t solve any of these issues, except perhaps that you don’t get the free DLC codes that the previous owner probably used.

        Or worse, you DO get the codes, and they’ve already been used. Jerks.

I don’t want to install the game, or an update.

        A) Installing a game is one thing developers use to make the game perform better. You know how load times are practically a thing of the past? That’s because we don’t have to load every new area off of the disk when you move across some arbitrary boundary point. A lot of games will make installs optional on PS3, which is nice, but it’s probably easier for them to force you to do it. Go make lunch or something.

        B) The code sent to the manufacturer who makes the physical discs you buy (or to the publisher who controls the digital platform you’re downloading on) is likely months old, in order to give enough time for the discs to be made (or the content to be reviewed by Sony/Microsoft/Steam). Is the development team supposed to twiddle their thumbs until release, or start working on DLC expansions (or the sequel)? Not only that, but patches cost a lot of time and money to push through Sony/Microsoft on consoles. That’s why they don’t release patches to fix every little problem, because it’s just not worth it. For example, a problem people had with Costume Quest was fixed if you bought the DLC for it, because it just wasn’t worth the money to patch it.

        So there’s two things at work here: it’s more economical, and that’s important when you’re spending millions of dollars on developing a game. And the second thing is that you get a better product after the patch, and the game can be released six months sooner, so why complain about it? Unless you have a dial-up connection, it’s going to take you two minutes to get the patch. Go to the bathroom while you wait.

I don’t want to input a stack of codes.

        Gosh, getting free stuff is just awful. It’s hard to say for sure if the content you’re getting would have been on the disc if it weren’t DLC, because that really depends on the individual game. Aside from that, I guess this is the only one that’s relevant to buying new vs used. The goal is to reward people who buy new, and/or punish those who buy used, and packing in DLC is a perfectly fine way to do that. Assuming the content really isn’t on the disc, you are getting free stuff. Now, if these codes were abolished, one of two things would happen: the game a few months later to add some DLC, or you’d have to fork over five bucks for it the day of launch. DLC codes don’t seem so bad now, do they?

I don’t want to watch an unskippable trailer for your next game.

        I don’t know about this. Does this actually happen? I’ve never experienced it. This is a good point, I guess. Why anyone would do it is beyond me, so I’m glad I haven’t played a game that does this.

I don’t want to make a new account for your online service.

        There aren’t that many services to sign up for anymore. You’ve got an EA account for BioWare and (Dark)Spore and Dead Space, and you’ve got a Uplay account for Ubisoft, and maybe on PC you have an old GameSpy account… I’m sure I’m missing some, but for the most part these kinds of accounts are from publishers or something and not game-specific. Most of them come with free stuff, too, so why not use them? Having an EA account lets you get free Dragon Age stuff, having a Uplay account lets you get free Assassin’s Creed stuff and upload your save data to their servers. It’s really not that bad, and it’s great for them because they can track your stuff more accurately, pimp their brand a bit, and if they’re doing it right give you some sort of reward for using the service. Alternatively, if it’s to sign into their servers or whatever, that kind of sucks. But it’s not different from making an account for an MMO.

        The one legitimate argument against this is when the Terms of Service basically say that you don’t own your game, as has happened with Dragon Age II (turns out that was an error, allegedly) and Dragon Age: Origins (server problem) recently.

Boy that was way too much. Well, onto the next link!

• Truth of game length in the modern gaming industry

This is a long one, but it can be basically summed up by two graphs later in the article:

• Average completion rate of game campaigns

• Average time spent playing games

        Mass Effect 2 is a kind of oddity among the group, considering it’s very story driven and a lot of players were probably coming in from the first game. Red Dead Redemption, Super Meat Boy, and Shank, all of which were very well reviewed, have abysmal completion rates. Essentially, most of the people who played those games probably didn’t see the last half of the games. If you’d released the game with half as much content, 30% of the people (a very vocal minority) would have complained, while everyone else would have finished it and been perfectly satisfied.

        I don’t know what the solution to all of this is. I know I don’t finish the vast majority of the games I buy. Yet I do like to have more content in the good ones. I really don’t mind the multiple almost-endings in Persona 4, because any extra time spent with that game was just great. On the other hand, I feel kind of cheated that I spent so much time on Final Fantasy XIII, considering I didn’t enjoy it that much and just felt obligated to finish it.

        What would be really interesting is if some data like this was available for older games. I’d love to see how many people made it through older, 40+ hour RPGs (western and eastern) and how many managed to finish shorter titles. We know players don’t see most of the content in a  game, yet demand that it exists, but we don’t know how things used to be either. Could be that just as many games were going unfinished.

        I don’t think we’ll ever see 100% completion rates, no matter how perfect the fit between length and quality becomes. But then a class average of 70% is considered phenomenal in a large first year university class (more people take the course than there are people who care about doing well), and considering the even larger sample of people who play a given game, you could probably expect something a bit lower on any game longer than two hours.

        ok that’s enough I’m going to go have lunch now, too bad I don’t have a game to install