No choices! & Sony leaks (part XXVII)

Letter 1:



Hi SuperViv!


One of this days somebody will create the definitive action-strategy hybrid (which is not Raven Squad). But even then, I can't guarantee that I'll play it! :D


I admire the Command & Conquer series because they kept having FMV sequences even after they were officially declared to be uncool. And with great actors! If your game has Michael Ironside or Tim Curry, for me it's automatically promoted to "worth playing", even if it only had a loading screen. Maybe someday I will play them all, if we get another "definitive" compilation, or when a less lazy reissue of C&C: The First Decade includes a more user-friendly instalation process (when you install it you have to enter seven CD keys!)

My brother is a die-hard strategy gamer (he loves the Civilization and Alpha Centauri games, and is now playing the heck out of Hearts of Iron III), but he usually skips RTS games altogether, unless they are in space! I guess he just wants to have (virtual) power in his hands, but he doesn't care much about explosions and stuff. Though it's always interesting to have nukes in a game, and he says the nuclear bombs from Rise of Nations are very cool.

Now here's a GTA IV tip for you: If you want to date that lawchick, just keep looking for dates on the internet after the game requests you to date some dude for a mission.

I think the good/evil "decisions" in GTA IV are a joke. You are forced to act evil all the time! There was one mission in which I didn't want to shoot some unarmed guy on behalf of a paranoid scumbag I didn't even like, and the game didn't acknowledge my attempt to walk away from the murder. Some other times, I was given the chance to spare one guy or the other. But I wanted to kill both!

That's an interesting link! The matter of "moral choices" is a hot topic right now, but it's not very well done in games. It hasn't moved forward since Jedi Knight: you got "dark" powers and a bad ending. And that's it. Not really challenging, is it? So we are now offered lots of meaningless choices (if any) which don't change anything other than adding a +1 to the evil counter. You become too evil and a bad ending is silently triggered. Morality in games hasn't gone very far, don't you think?

Later,

- Danda

Letter 2: (replying to my buddy JR, who just sent me this)



Hi JR!


The house that Sony built is certainly leaky! So now everybody knows that they do have the technology to emulate the PS2 on the PS3 (of course they do! They had it two years ago after all). To tell you the truth, I think it's great that they start selling PS2 games on the PSN store, because I don't own one single PS2 game. You know, I almost bought a re-issue of ICO in Dublin in 2005, but it was too expensive!


Of course, if they can do that, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't play the game if you already own it. You know, like with Xbox games. If you have, say, Conker: Live & Reloaded, you can play it on your Xbox 360 because it's on their retrocompatibility list. I completely assume Sony will do the same, right? I hope their customers won't accept less than that.


Oh, but there's actually more interesting information in that document, even if it's not highlighted as "the more interesting bits":



Alpha Protocol:

You know, I already preordered this for PC on Steam... but at some point I considered playing it on PS3. It's being developed by Obsidian, the company founded by members of the original Fallout game. According to Sony, it feels "barely RPG", and it's too challenging at first (it reminds me of how I got owned time after time by the rats on the first Fallout screen! You don't want to know how I fared against the radscorpions that attacked the first town...). Sony's product evaluator produced a great quote: "Mass Effect felt more RPG". Of course, many people feel Mass Effect can't be considered an RPG at all.

Planet 51:

For me this is specially interesting. Pyro Studios, from the Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines series, is behind this. Sony is worried because movie tie-ins traditionally underperform. Well, they underperform because they are crap. But I think this case is different: Pyro Studios hasn't been hired to create "the game from the movie". Actually, the game developers from Pyro Studios are directing the movie. Yeah, you read that right.

Yakuza:

Japanese imports? Yes! (And I don't even understand Japanese!)

Game + movie bundles:

Of course! Why didn't they even thought of it before? I even bought the Collector's Edition of Stranglehold just to get Hard Boiled in HD. And in Germany, you can buy Ghostbusters with the movie.

Of course, "the movie" means "the movie in HD". Some UK stores offered Wanted: The Videogame for the PS3... with the DVD! Why?! I already have a PS3 and I want the Blu-ray!

It's funny how the big secret from the document (the potential PS3 price cut) was already leaked weeks ago!

I know you're very busy, but I hope you have time to reply!

Hope to hear from you soon!

- Danda

Real-time strategy vs. turn-based strategy

Hey Danda!

I'm not entirely surprised that you don't like strategy games if your only real contact with them was Stalin vs Martians! Although that viral campaign looks like fun... A dancing Stalin? Why not!

Seriously, though, I realize that strategy games aren't for everybody. I played Command & Conquer mostly for the video sequences when it came out in the mid-90s. (A lot is possible with animated cut-scenes these days, of course, but videos of real people do have their own appeal.) I also vividly remember playing Command & Conquer against my brother via null modem (who does that anymore?) and also losing constantly. But I still liked the game.

Meanwhile (with age?) I prefer turn-based strategy games over real-time strategy games, though, as they're generally a lot less hectic. Games like Civilization III and, before that, Colonization, or even X-Com: UFO Defense and SimCity have captured my attention for many more hours than real-time strategy games have. Of course, it might also be that it's because Civilization, Colonization and SimCity were less about war and more about nation-building.

At any rate, as you know, I'm now quite taken with GTA IV now, even though I didn't yet get to the part where it's possible to date that "lawchick". There's still a lot to explore in the game, and the in-game Internet is one of those things. By the way, it's a shame you can't choose to play the game as a woman, although I do admit that in this particular game, the story so far wouldn't really work if you could. (I recently read an interesting article about the "issue" of having to play male characters as a female gamer: Writer Ann Aguirre talks games | GameCritics.com.)

I was surprised to find out yesterday that I could make a "good" or an "evil" decision in GTA IV, and I wonder what the effect on the story will be in the future. However, shortly after that morally sound decision I made, I had to execute someone, and I don't think there was away around it, which makes the importance of the earlier decision doubtful.

Anyway, I'm curious to see what happens next, and I'm just glad that the people I accidentally hit with my car in wild chases through Liberty City don't weigh negatively on my karma!

Speaking of moral decisions in video games, there's another interesting article (Decisions, Decisions | GameCritics.com) about that on the same site as the other article, which agrees with you in the assessment that the moral choice system in BioShock was lame. (That's what you think, too, isn't it?) In retrospect, I have to admit that I was never tempted to replay BioShock as "evil", harvesting all the Little Sisters. From what I understand, the only difference would be that I'd get to see a different ending. That's not enough payoff for a casual core gamer!

Game on,
- Viv