Game PTSD

Wow, I’m full of tiny, irrelevant posts today.  Everyone loves top ten lists, so here’s one of the most irritating old school Nintendo games.  I’m absurdly proud of the fact that I’ve actually beaten 3 of them honestly (Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, and Contra) .

Ironically, many of these games have actually spawned sequels that are even harder than the originals - Contra and Ghosts n’ Goblins, I’m looking at you.  I would go so far as to speculate that the incredible difficulty was actually the main thing people remembered about these titles and so impelled designers to retain it.

I’ll conclude by noting that I think Battletoads may in fact be impossible.  Literally.  I cannot conceive of a human being who can beat this game without emulation, Game Genie-ing, or otherwise cheating.  The vehicle levels themselves were enough to make me hurl my controller across the room in rage.

Eternal Darkness Returns?

The underrated Eternal Darkness looks like it will be making an reappearance at some point in the near future.  The game didn’t sell well, but not because it wasn’t good.  Hopefully this will vindicate the designers.

Two GTA-Related Links

Some guy with far too much time on his hands has apparently matched up photos of New York with screenshots of Liberty City.  Behold the power of unemployment.

Also, some dating advice that applies to the real world.

GTA IV’s Blueprint for Cross-Platform Titles

Destructoid points to a Eurogamer analysis that somehow determines that GTA IV runs at roughly 33 FPS on the XBox 360 and 28 FPS on the PS3. Like Destructoid, I don’t see this making much, if any, appreciable difference to the experience. Despite this difference, as well as the PS3’s slightly worse resolution, most people who have played both versions seem to think that the PS3 looks slightly better than the 360 version due to some extra filtering that’s done on the PS3 version. My guess is that this extra filtering can be done on the PS3 because of it’s extra CPU power. With this new information, though, the strategy for successfully creating apparent visual parity between the 360 and PS3 versions of the game becomes apparent:

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GTA IV Over-Infatuation

What am I missing about this game?

I still have a ways to go with it, but I am over 10 hours in and I’m actually completely baffled that this game is still sitting atop Gamerankings.com as the best game of all time (actually the best 2 games of all time, since there’s a 360 and PS3 version).  This could still change, of course, but with over 30 reviews now in for the game, it will definitely be retaining a spot in the top 10 if not the top 5.  Typically, the course for these heavily hyped games is to get some really high early scores, and then later reviews tend to “backlash” against those scores to bring it down into a somewhat more “reasonable” range.

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Whoa, Numbers

Interesting analysis from the not-defunct Eat Sleep Game on what the NPD figures miss regarding PC gaming sales.  This kind of analysis is often missing from actual professional media outlets in the industry, so I’m glad someone is stepping up to the plate.

Review Completists

I don’t have that much to add, but here’s an interesting Multiplayer Blog post on whether or not reviewers need to finish a game like GTA IV before reviewing it.  I lean towards no, but that’s something that I think is fairly specific to massive, sprawling sandbox games like GTA rather than a general rule.

How To Draw Geometric Shapes

Via PtB, this site takes aim at one of my least-favorite game-related memorabilia, How to Draw guides.  As the site notes, these books seem targeted to irritate you while teaching you nothing about how to draw: they usually feature 3-5 drawings for each character, in which the artist makes a bunch of geometric shapes, then draws the full character with few, if any, intervening steps.  Although I understand the shapes conceptually, I have yet to see an artist actually use them when drawing something.  I suspect the time would be much better spent showing someone how to make guidelines or something to keep everything proportional, then just doing everything slowly and in small sections. 

Needless to say, I doubt you’ll be able to draw Link after reading this book.  But you will have some unattractive pictures of Zelda characters.

Weekly Column 5/9/08

Today’s column looks at why GTA IV had minimal impact on the release of Iron Man.  Enjoy!

The ESA Blues

The dustup over the ESA is something that confuses me a lot.  I can understand that Activision or LucasArts might not like the current direction of the organization, but it seems pretty clear to me that it’s the only organization positioned to effectively represent the video game industry’s political interests.  And those interests are important: the constant pressure retailers and publishers are under with respect to content or customers is something that is both recurrent and deeply problematic.  I don’t see politicians deciding to let Rockstar have a free pass any time soon.

And that’s why this is so troubling.  I can understand disliking the way the ESA or its new leader have pursued their agenda; but leaving the organization is much better used as leverage to effect some change, not something to actually do.  Really withdrawing eliminates your leverage and leaves you (and the rest of the industry) highly vulnerable.  What gives?