When Gears of War came out in 2006, critics praised it as a fine video game but found the plot rather shallow. This is from a Gamespot review: “The lack of exposition feels like a missed opportunity to make the characters and the setting even more compelling.”

Playing it back then, I had the same inkling. I loved the cover mechanic and the branching paths within the level, but I felt that ultimately the game was an excuse to blow stuff up. Then I read the Tom Bissell piece on Cliff Bleszinski in the New Yorker. It’s not a perfect article. He tries to delve into a game that isn’t deep and stretch out its meaning over 5,000 or so words.

This could be a dangerous thing like a grown man jumping head first into a kiddie pool, but Bissell manages to dig through Bleszinski’s past and finds that Gears of War’s autobiographical quality makes it deeper than it appears to be.

More on Bleszinski and Gears of War 2 on the jump

I got an interesting text messages the other day from my cousin. Out of the blue, he asks: “How’s the online community for COD5?”

Because of what I do, I was assuming two things: A) He was thinking about buying Call of Duty: World at War and B) More importantly, community was an important factor for a game like this. It’s an interesting concept — community.

Go back 10 years ago and community wasn’t in the top 10 of factors you consider before buying a game. There would be graphics, sounds, gameplay and maybe story but community? Ha, fat chance.

Now, it’s creeped up in the top 5 and could be No. 1 as user-generated content becomes more of a factor in video games. In the future, it won’t be how good the graphics are or what the sound is like; instead, people will be wondering how intense the community support will be.

With user-generated content, the people who play have never been as important. Take a look, for example, at Guitar Hero World Tour. Here’s a game that offers custom music from its players. Certainly, it sounds like a good idea, but if you actually, go through GH Tunes, you’ll find that a lot of the stuff isn’t very good and the stuff that does get the most acclaim are either copyright violations or riffs off old 8-bit games like Mega Man.
More on the jump

My review on Far Cry 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour hit the InterTubes today and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Congo.

If you hadn’t heard, the place is going to hell in a handbasket, and it looks like things aren’t going to get better any time soon. With this conflict going on, I can’t help but think ofFar Cry 2 and how it has an uncomfortable prescience.

It takes place in a nameless African country, where two factions are brutally killing each other out of spite. One side is called the Alliance for Popular Resistance and the other is named the United Front for Liberation and Labour. Playing the game, you naturally want to see one side as good and the other as evil. But smartly, Ubisoft doesn’t paint them that way.

Working for both groups, players will see that there isn’t a good side or bad side but two muddled evils that strike at each other out of jealousy or strategy. When the Alliance for Popular Resistance has something like say medicine, the other group, the United Front for Liberation and Labour, doesn’t like it and asks you to destroy it.

If one group posses clean water, the other group wants you to destroy the pipeline that carries it. All of this grinds down an increasingly despondent civilian population. Playing the game is a worthwhile experience just for the fact that it actually points to something real and says “Hey, you should pay attention to this.”

More Post-Game Thoughts on the jump

Post-Game Thoughts is a new featurette where I discuss some ideas that couldn’t make it to my reviews. Most of this is odd marginalia that I write down while I play. Last week, I took a look at Fable 2.

I never really considered the politics behind Fable 2 until I was talking with the Casual Games Maven the other day. I was discussing bigamy in the game and how funny the dog was when she asked me: “Can you have more than one dog?”

I told her no.

“But you can have more than one wife?” she asked. I confirmed that but added that you could be a woman with multiple husbands. “Sexist” she said and that fact made me realize the quirky politics behind the game. This is an RPG where players can be unfaithful to their wives but they stay in a monogamous relationship with their dog.

Albion is also a place that allows gay marriage when the state I live in (California) has unfortunately banned it. When you dig deeper in the game, the world of Fable 2 is actually more progressive than San Francisco. There are quests that let you find a date for a gay man (You get purity points for that one.). Players get an achievement for orgies. The hero gets more purity points for lower prices at his shops so that more people can afford his goods. This is only game I know where family planning and safe sex can actually benefit you.

If you were to play Fable 2 as a conservative, you would undoubtedly be evil. The game undoubtedly leans left. As a business owner if you believe in a free market and raise prices at a stall, you’ll get corruption points. If you want to help a certain “church” reform the Las Vegas-like town of Bloodstone, you find that the organization is corrupt. If you believe in the policies of self-interest, then you may end up aging an innocent woman later in the game.

But through it all, politics doesn’t get in the way of enjoying the game. Playing off those conceptions, the more liberal achievements and quests actually make the Fable 2 funnier and fresher. It’s an attempt at politically charged humor that sort of works.

I am, as I’m sure you’re sick of hearing, in the process of moving.

While I was going through a stack of old games I stuffed in a box without paying a whole lot of attention to what they were I ran across a copy of the Gamecube port of Crazy Taxi. I had also, through a stroke of luck, found an old Gamecube controller recently and I hooked up my Wii a couple days ago for a review (Spoiler: I’ve been simming a city.) so I decided to take it for a spin.

That was an hour and a half ago. I just pried myself away to do something productive and still the drums of Change the World pound in my ears, beckoning me to pick up the controller again. I can say without a moment of doubt that Crazy Taxi is the most fun game I’ve ever played.

It’s by no means the best game of all time. There are games with better stories, better graphics, better writing, better production values, more depth…basically there’s a game out there that’s better in every category except soundtrack. And yet despite that I’ve never had more fun playing a game than I do while driving the wrong way on the freeway in that one level. It’s not The Godfather or Casablanca, it’s Airplane.

So it got me wondering. What’s the most fun you’ve ever had playing a game? What game, to this very day, puts a smile on your face every time you pick it up? It doesn’t have to be the best game, it doesn’t even have to be good, it just has to be fun.

I’ve always been a fan of The Behemoth. The indie developer found underground and a good amount of mainstream success with Alien Hominid. The side-scroller had a Metal Slug quality about it. It was hard as hell but it had personality.

In that same vein, the same team released Castle Crashers. I just beat it the other night and thought it was good game. It brought me back to the days of Golden Axe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the arcade. The game played to my nostalgia, but at the same time, I appreciated all the hand-drawn graphics and indie nature of it.

I’ve always been a fan of The Behemoth. Hey, they’re from my hometown. Looks like I’ll have a lot to write about tonight.

What’s that? You don’t follow the comments on these posts? Well what’s wrong with you? We have, by a wide margin, the best commenters out of the whole stable of BANG-EB blogs. We make the Raiders blog’s commenters look like YouTube. We make Tony’s commenters look like IMDb.

Well, you’re forgiven this time, and to show that there are no hard feelings (and because we’re in the midst of the video game news dead period) here’s the transcript of a discussion I had with a commenter about MMOs, sparked by the announcement that Final Fantasy XI will no longer feature 24 hour boss battles:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the more interesting things to come out of the Wall Street Journal interview with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata (other than the mention of the cheap Wii Motion Plus price) is the impression that the well has run dry on Wii ideas.

If you read his answers, it sounds as if Nintendo is going back to the drawing board and furiously working on new ideas to keep pace. Obviously, its E3 media briefing was a underwhelming. There wasn’t anything that wowed the audience. And other than Wii Speak and Wii Motion Plus, there doesn’t seem to be anything else to point to in the future.

So does this mean after these final two peripherals come out, players will have to endure a Wii drought. If Nintendo needed its third-party developers to come in to save the day, it looks like now would be the best time. It’s the only way for the company to avoid the long drought between major titles that had plagued its previous two consoles.

Having used its big guns so early in the cycle, Nintendo did create a good base, but I wonder if it’s strong enough to hold and keep players loyal while the Nintendo EAD recharges its creative juices.

Or perhaps, Iwata, Shigeru Miyamoto and company have something bigger up their sleeves. At the end of the Wall Street Journal interview, Iwata did end with a hopeful sign for the Nintendo faithful. There is a next next-gen system in the works.

But being Nintendo, nothing is ever clear. Here’s what Iwata said:

The hardware team started work on the next thing as soon as they were done with their previous project, but what they think up doesn’t necessarily become a product. We only turn something into a product after it’s been thoroughly vetted inside the company. We’re not at a point where we can give specifics, but of course we’re working on it.

From the financial reports, it sounds as if Square-Enix isn’t doing too well. The developer and publisher reported profits falling by 20 percent in 2007, according to “Gamasutra.

In response, the head honcho Yoichi Wada said the staff should focus more on mainstream games or layoffs will promptly follow, according to Kotaku. This either means we’ll get more Final Fantasy followed by more Final Fantasy followed by even more Final Fantasy ad infinitum or Square-Enix could bring back some old properties like *ahem* Bushido Blade. (I cringe at seeing another Bouncer.)

Find out why Bushido Blade is overdue for a next-gen sequel on the jump

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Electronic Arts hates me.

I was excited about Spore. I love Will Wright’s work and it’s basically a combination of all my favorite past Maxis games. EA, apparently getting word of this, began a quest to harsh my buzz. First they tried to sell me an expansion before the game is even released, and now they’ve unveiled a DRM scheme for the PC port of Mass Effect and Spore that seems ridiculously ill-advised.

Here’s the quick version: As with most games, Spore will require online validation when you install it. You’ll be required to input a CD key or something. That part is fine, that’s normal. The new twist is that it will require an automatic re-validation every ten days after that or it will unceremoniously stop working. Don’t get online for 11 days and the program, which you paid for and already validated once, is as good as dead.

This doesn’t immediately affect me. I’ll pay for the game and I’m perpetually connected to the Internet, if I wasn’t told I wouldn’t even notice. The problem is that the esteemed Mr. Wright’s last game had very broad appeal. It was played by millions of people who don’t see the need for DSL or cable and who aren’t tech-savvy enough to immediately understand what DRM is and why they can’t play their game. If Spore attracts a similar audience it will make these casual gamers angry and generate boatloads of bad PR. Or alternately, what if the game goes the route of certain other Maxis projects?

Plus, eventually, what if I get the urge to fire it up again in ten years? I occasionally do that with old strategy games I remember fondly, will I be completely unable to with Spore?

The worst part of it all is that it probably won’t put too big a dent in piracy. Software pirates are a dedicated lot, they’re going to break this just like they’ve broken the schemes it replaces. So in the end it’s just inconveniencing paying customers.

(From ShackNews)