A brief aside

I just want to take a minute to quote this comment from RPS:

Jim Sterling really ought to be stood down from his job at Destructoid – he’s totally hateful and mysoginistic, as a recent public Twitter spat between him and Auntie Pixelante’s partner has proved. I won’t be reading Destructoid until they eject the idiotic, infantile shithead from their payroll.

That's what I think, too. I stopped reading Destructoid altogether because that professional troll annoyed me so much. That's the reason I haven't written any "Jimbecility" posts tracking his insane foulmouthing for months.

Speaking of losing readers by the hundreds, did you know you can keep reading Kotaku without the annoying new layout if you type "UK" or "CA" in front of the url? Just try it:

http://uk.kotaku.com/

http://ca.kotaku.com/

Luckily we don't have to worry about anything like that because we don't have any readers.

APB sucks... so you know what comes next

I was really hoping for APB to be great, but then I tried the open beta-thing "Keys to the City" event... and what I found was truly horrible. Awful driving, bad shooting, boring missions, long loading times... I didn't want to write specifically about it here because I couldn't even keep playing for long and you know, it was just a beta, though it didn't seem too likely that they could fix all the major problems in time for the real release.

So it's not a surprise that the game tanked, so now the developer is firing everybody. It's sad, but as I usually say, if you make really bad games you'll go under.

After getting this bad news for Real Time Worlds, a former employee has written about it from an insider perspective in the comments section of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It looks calm and impartial enough, unlike the comment from a former Obsidian employee who crapped on the game as soon as he found the first bad review for it.

Well, I'm not against snitching, but please let a game live or die on its own terms, and then tell us. Don't land the killing blow on it... What if you are wrong? And in the case of that Obsidian guy, he certainly was.

So here's the comment in its entirety. Why not?

What a fucking mess. I’m ex-RTW.

An outcome like this wasn’t desired by anyone at RTW, but game development is a weird business. A game can play poorly right up until only a few months before release, for a variety of reasons – Crackdown was awful right up until a month or two before it came out (some would say awful afterwards, too, but I’m trying to make a point :). Knowing this, it can blind you to a game’s imperfections – or lead you to think it’s going to come right by release. You end up in this situation where you’re heads down working your ass off, not well able to critically assess your own product. APB itself only really came together technically relatively late in its development cycle (and it still obviously has problems), leaving too little time for content production and polish, and lacking any real quality in some of its core mechanics (shooting / driving). It’s not that the team was unaware of these huge issues, but a million little things conspire to prevent you from being able to do anything about them. It can seem difficult to comprehend, it certainly was for me before entering the industry – ‘How did those idiots get X wrong in game Y?’. No team sets out to ship something anything less than perfection, but projects can evolve in ways that no one seems to be in total control of. All that said, it was pretty clear to me that the game was going to get a kicking at review – the gap between expectation and the reality was huge. I wasn’t on the APB team, so I played it infrequently, during internal test days etc. I was genuinely shocked when I played the release candidate – I couldn’t believe Dave J would be willing to release this. All the issues that had driven me nuts about it were still there – the driving was poor (server-authoritative with no apparent client prediction, ergo horrendously lag intolerant), combat impact-less, and I found the performance of the game sub-par on what was a high-spec dev machine.

But the real killer, IMO, is the business model. This was out of the team’s hands. The game has issues, but I think if you separate the business model from the game itself, it holds up at least a little better. A large scale team based shooter, in big urban environments, with unprecedented customisation and some really cool, original features. The problem was that management looked at the revenue they wanted to generate and priced accordingly, failing to realise (or care) that there are literally a dozen top quality, subscription free team based shooters. Many of which, now, have progression and persistence of some sort – for free. The game would have been immeasurably better received it had simply been a boxed product, with paid-for in-game items, IMO. This may not have been possible, given what was spent on the game and the running costs, but the market is tough. You can’t simply charge what you feel like earning and hope the paying public will agree with your judgement of value. Many of us within RTW were extremely nervous at APB’s prospects long before launch, and with good reason, as it turns out.

They also failed spectacularly to manage expectations. When Dave J spoke out saying there would ‘not be a standard subscription model’, he unwittingly set expectations at ‘free to play’. When it’s announced that we’re essentially pay-per-hour, we get absolutely killed in the press, somewhat understandably. The game also announced far too early (though it kept being delayed), and had little to show but customisation for what seemed like years, largely because internally we (correctly) judged it to be the stand out part of the game. But we should have kept our powder dry. Our PR felt tired and dragged on and on, rather than building a short, sharp crescendo of excitement pre-release. We also went to beta far too early, wiser heads were ignored when it was pointed out that any kind of beta, even very early beta, might as well be public as far as generating word of mouth. The real purpose of beta is publicity, not bug fixing. We never took that lesson on board. We also made the error of not releasing fixes externally to many of the issues early beta testers were picking up, keeping the fixes on internal builds, I presume to lessen the load on QA. This simply meant that to early beta testers, it looked as though we were never bothering to fix the issues they found, when in fact, they were being fixed, simply being deployed back into beta very infrequently. This lesson was eventually learnt, but only after we’d pissed off a large number of early-adopters.

The sheer time spent and money it took to make APB is really a product of fairly directionless creative leadership. Certainly Dave J has great, strong, ambitious ideas for his games. But he’s a big believer in letting the details emerge along the way, rather than being planned out beyond even a rudimentary form. For most of the lifetime of APB, he was also CEO of the whole company, as well as Creative Director. His full attention was not there until it late in the day. This has ramifications for how long his projects run – many years, on average – and the associated cost. This, in turn, means that the business model options were constrained, conspiring to place APB in a really difficult position, commercially. Ultimately, it’s this pairing of a subscription model cost with free to play game play that really did for the game. And many of us saw it coming a mile off. I must admit I’m dismayed about the scale of the failure, however. Many of us thought APB might do OK at retail and sell a few hundred thousand, though struggle on ongoing revenue, and gradually carve a niche. But it absolutely tanked at retail I believe (though I’m not privvy to figures) I think due to the critical mauling it received. It never made the top 20 of the all format UK chart. It’s scraping along the bottom of the PC-only chart, a situation I’m assuming is replicated in its major markets. And being at the bottom of the PC-only chart is not where you want to be as a AAA budget game. God knows what the budget was, but when you account for the 150-odd staff and all the launch hardware and support, it was in the tens of millions of dollars.

MyWorld is an innocent bystander caught up in the demise of APB. Which is a real shame, because it is genuinely ground breaking, though not aimed at the traditional gamer audience. It was going great guns over the last year or so, coming on leaps and bounds, impressing everyone who saw it. MyWorld might as well have been a different company – there was very little staff overlap on the two projects, they worked under entirely different production methodologies, and because we were not the next in line for release we received very little attention from the execs (which was a good thing, to be honest). We knew that time was limited, and tried to encourage management to go the ‘google-style beta route – release a limited, but polished core feature set early, and iterate. What happens to it from here on out is not clear, but without the people who wrote it, the code isn’t worth a damn, so I can’t see the project being picked up. Management tried to get a publisher onboard to fund continued development, but the time scales involved meant that was always unlikely, despite some considerable interest from potential partners. God knows what will happen to it now the team are gone. Probably nothing. Years of my life were poured into that project, but it was a blast to make, and at least it was made public so I can point and say, “I helped make that”.

RTW tried something bold, and fucked it up. It tried to make what amounted to two MMOs at once, as well as self-publish. I have to hand it to Dave J. He’s ballsy. But in the end, we couldn’t do it, and I think the whole company will go under sooner rather than later. It’s a shame, too, as Dundee can’t absorb the level of game dev redundancies that are about to hit, which means the Dundee scene gets that little bit smaller. But that’s the price of failure, and we certainly failed. No excuses, really. We were well funded, hired some great engineers, designers and artists, and great QA guys. Ultimately, the senior management team must take responsibility. I think they had far too much focus on the company’s ‘strategic direction’ and not enough on day-to-day execution, which was where it really matters. And I think a huge part of the blame lies with Dave J, though I can’t emphasize enough how nice a man he is personally; ultimately APB has torpedoed the company, and it failed largely under his creative leadership. It has other issues (technical, for instance), but the design and the business plan are largely down to him and the board, and they are what have failed so irrevocably for the rest of us.

ExRTW

Lost Planet 2 sucks?

Lost Planet 2 is a multiplayer co-op experience, disguised as a regular game. But even if you play it with other people, it's still mediocre. That's the word on the street. And a few reviewers are also aware of that. Other reviews just hop on the "big game, big scores!" chain that allows bad stuff like Rebellion's latest Aliens vs Predator to be considered a 70% or even 85% game by some people (even when those reviews still use expressions like "dated" or even "mediocre").

And I believe it! I couldn't even finish the Lost Planet 2 demo, because it was just... tough on me. Just consider this:

-No real story. It really feels like a regular multiplayer-only game.
-Brain-dead squad AI. If you aren't playing with friends, you are still supposed to do the work of four players, but the bots filling the other positions won't do anything.
-Unfair one-hit kills. Like, prepare to die. A lot.
-Awkward, slow controls.
-Infuriating design choices. You can't even pause the game, even during the single-player campaign. Wait, WHAT?! Also, just plain bad execution. Brad Shoemaker's review makes it quite clear:

At one point in the back end of the campaign, I was playing an online-enabled game, on the off chance that someone might randomly jump into the action. My Internet connection dropped out for a second and disconnected me from Xbox Live, at which point the game abruptly cut to a black screen with a "Disconnected from host" error message. In a single-player game. That set me back at least 30 minutes of progress and incidentally made me never, ever want to play Lost Planet 2's campaign again.

That is not admissible in 2010.

UPDATE: Destructoid is even more unmerciful, describing the game as "downright frustrating" and "a shell of a potentially great game, brought down by bizarre, dated and counterintuitive design decisions". Jun Takeuchi offered a good co-op experience with Resident Evil 5 (though many gamers who loved RE4 found it lacking) mostly by not changing anything, but in this case, he took what was good of the first Lost Planet and he has turned it into a pathetic mess.

Pest Patrol - Shellshock 2: Blood Trails

So I had a weekend to spare and I decided to play this fine mess of a game. I had bought Shellshock 2: Blood Trails dirt-cheap, and I wanted to be sure that it was as bad as they say.

Well, it's not as bad, but almost. I get that old feeling you get from some cheap games, when you feel "oh, this would be a decent game... five years ago". So this is not exactly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, but "it used to be fun when we didn't know better" material.

This is also one of those "in name only" sequels, like Far Cry 2. The original title was a third-person shooter made by the Killzone developers which tried hard to be disturbing by showing the toughness of the Vietnam war (even if many think they failed). Rebellion, your go-to guys for cheap shooters (ask Sega or Bethesda), said to Eidos, "OK, we'll do a sequel", they started developing a Vietnam-themed FPS, and then they filled it... with zombies.

So this is just an excuse to create a Resident Evil rip-off. Of course, they don't come even close to the great original, but still, the best part in Shellshock 2 is the part when you are in a mansion (in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle?!) and the realization sinks in... "This is just like the first Resident Evil game!". And later I saw a hooded guy with machetes, and you remember the scary chainsaw guys from the recent RE games. The game is then not a complete waste, just as the mediocre Wii reality-based FPS Red Steel, which included a truly great level in which you had to fight your way through an insane amusement park-like maze where weird stuff happened. It was worth to play that game just to experience that.

Apart from that, there's not much to recommend. Lots of scripted scares that aren't scary anymore after the third repeat. A worthless, cliched story. The old-fashioned "all the people you meet die almost immediately", which seems a left-over from the old "we don't know how to program decent squad AI" times.

Still, the mansion level is fun to play, if you don't mind suffering horrible graphics with too few character models and ugly textures. You don't have much ammo and you suddenly realize that those slow (but deadly) zombies won't go down unless you shoot them in the right place (not just the head: you can stop them blowing off one of their legs with a well-placed shotgun blast). That is a good "survival horror" feeling, but sadly it doesn't last too long because of the repetition and overall lack of quality. So I guess the game is acceptable, but not much more, if you are a horror fan and you are not sick of zombie games yet.

Don't be fooled, though. It still is a bad game.

We said it was going to suck

And we were right.


Rebellion, you suck.

UPDATE: 1Up.com, GameRevolution, Gamespy and the no-nonsense guys at GiantBomb agree: this game blows chunks. And all the fans scream "Noooo! You are lying! You are wrong! Aliens vs Predator is awesome!"

Grow up, kids. Listen to the voice of reason.

We must get better!

According to the reviews, Painkiller: Resurrection really sucks. And not in the "this kind of game gets old really fast" way like Dreamkiller, but in the "this game isn't even finished!" way.

Today, a major update has been released on Steam. It's good to know that the developers haven't just let the game die already, but is it even fixable? The list of changes is presented in a way that makes clear that the developers know how badly the game sucks:

-New AI System blending the direct approach used now and a sophisticated way-point system. In most areas, Monsters can not only chase you through complex architecture, you`ll also see them taking different ways in order to outrun you, and sometimes even retreat and trying to get into your back. (They basically admit that the enemies are dumb idiots that charge against you following a straight line and then get stuck in any object they find.)
-Better Char models / animations: Our 3D Artist gave another shots at the new monsters and improved some of them. (This sounds like "We are so sorry he didn't know what he was doing, but he'll do better next time, we promise!" Any other company would just fire the guy.)
-In-game MP hosting reactivated (dedicated server not needed anymore) (So they realized NOBODY would set up a dedicated server for this!)
-Competitive MP crash-fixed and tweaked (Dropped weapons look, jumping walls, etc.) (Bug fixes! Great!)
-Co-op for up to 8 (if you like madness, even 16) players (although 2-4 is the best number to try) and with up to 50 monsters at once to fight them as team (Co-op! Yay!)
-New maps and some new surprises in the levels themselves are on their way too. (The game is better now, we promise!)

So here you are. I don't know if I'm going to try the game now, but it's good to know that at least they are trying.

Back from the cold (for a day!)

Hi SuperViv!

Here I am, trapped in a remote (and rainy!) part of Spain with no internet connection (I had to do a long walk to find a place to type this) and with no games at all. I had my laptop with me for a few days, but then I sent it away to see if I can get it fixed before I return to Germany on January.

But before I keep going, I'll reply to your posts. I know you are a staunch supporter of the Gothic games. So I bought them (twice, actually: in English and in Spanish), but I still haven't had the time to play them. I got them from one of your fellow German translators at the office, who was nice enough to give me a CD with the latest patch for Gothic 3.

Mass Effect is a great game, but it was tough on my crappy laptop, so I could only play for a few hours. I've seen some Alpha Protocol videos and it looks like they rip off that dialogue style and the action-RPG approach. Now the game has been delayed and I wonder if it was a good idea to pre-purchase it on Steam. But I still trust it to be good. I trust Obsidian, even if they took a lot of heat because their KOTOR II was released unfinished. They have a lot of history, and some really talented people worked on this game. That was a misstep, but their other games are very, very good.

But you know how this goes. You make a bad game, you are in trouble. And in these times, you make a really bad game, you are finished. You release an unplayable game like Lair, and you are whistlying your way to bankruptcy. You ship a really promising but obviously previous-gen game like Haze, you are done (Free Radical was absorbed by Crytek). You ship blander-than-bland dreck like Terminator: Salvation, you go under (that's too bad, because Grin had actually really talented people...). And now we have a new (deserving, I think) victim: Pandemic Studios. The creators of the awfully bland, unplayable (in a Just Cause way) Mercenaries 2 just released their final game, The Saboteur, which predictably is... not very good. At least it looks like it's just a mediocre GTA clone, not a complete mess like their previous game. And I love any game that has some naked chicks just for the sake of it, like The Godfather 2 or Conan, but I will wait until I can get it for 10€ or less.

And this leads to one of my own pet peeves... What's the matter with Rebellion? They keep pumping out very bad games, and they never stop. Yes, they had a hit with the first Aliens vs Predator, but after that, their FPS pedigree is dubious at best. Dredd vs Death was loathsome, and their recent Shellshock 2, which I would like to mention some day in one of my "pest patrol" articles along with other disasters like Damnation and Velvet Assassin, was one of the worst games released last year (only utter crap like LSL Box Office Bust was worse). Their latest "jewel" is Rogue Warrior, a should-be-released-as-budget title which is definitely bad. What is going on here? Why are they still releasing games?

I still can't believe SEGA cancelled the Obsidian-made Aliens RPG at the same time they announced a new, obviously quick'n'cheap Rebellion Aliens vs Predator title. A lot of nostalgic fans are drooling over the low-framerate teasers, but the fact is they look cheap and shoddy. For me, SEGA made the videogame equivalent to Fox shutting down a Ridley Scott or James Cameron Alien movie while greenlighting a new Paul W.S. Anderson AvP sequel.

Oh... I've spent too much time on this, and I couldn't say anything about my "survival gaming" practices. Maybe some other day! (Hopefully...)

See you soon,
- Danda

I don't want to join that club

Hi SuperViv,

I'm really sorry that I can't say anything about Rise of Nations. I never play any strategy games whatsoever. They are just not made with me. Maybe it has to do with the fact that my brother is the king of strategy games at home, and I just don't want to compete with him.

And I guess I'm really unlucky, because the last "strategy" game that I tried to play was the abysmal Stalin vs Martians, easily one of the worst games ever made. I think they were going for the high camp seen in some of the Command & Conquer games, but obviously they didn't even try. The final result is something like a fan-created, horrible Cannon Fodder-like arcade game. You just move your units around, trying to shoot martians with a non-existing interface (just point and click, no statistics whatsoever) and dying arbitrarily. Oh, and you are forced to listen to god-awful techno tunes.

I bought this game because the viral campaign for it was so insane I thought maybe it would be fun. But it wasn't. This game was so bad that it was pulled from Steam after a few months. Or maybe it was because some of the martians in the game were ripped off straight from Toy Story, Pikmin and Doom. Look it up, it's true! Sadly, this is not a case of "it's so bad, it's awesome". This is just soul-crushingly bad.

Now, to GTA IV... Well, I played that game on my PS3, and of course taking your friends out is a chore, but... you know, the game doesn't exactly force you to do it. You know, it's a bit like real life: you neglect your friends, you lose them, and that's it (hey, that's what I usually do in real life!). Just consider this option an "extra" advantage, in a purely pragmatic way. You know, the conversations and stuff get old quickly, but it's still good to date that "Lawchick" you meet on the internet ocasionally to get your "Lose police heat" free card.

I also have the PC version. I bought it on Steam as it was part of a "all GTA" package, but I never even installed it. The Rockstar Social Club and Windows Live membership requirement is one of the most stupid ideas ever. I've been a PC gamer all my life, but I've jumped ship and become a console gamer because I just hate those intrusive "activate the game on the internet" schemes. They are really stupid, and only punish those who buy the game (you won't find any of this crap in the pirated versions!). The same happened to me when I bought the House M.D. DVDs and I had to suffer through that annoying (and unskippable) "Piracy is a crime" video in every single disc. But I already bought the DVDs and I'm not a criminal! Hello?

I have many of the Unreal Tournament games. I even played intensively the first one (offline!), but a couple of weeks ago I tried playingg UT 2004. It didn't help that I never played when it was first released, so I lasted ten minutes before I uninstalled it. I have UT III, so what's the point?

Speaking of the Unreal engine, I'm currently playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, and in my opinion it is very good, but not amazing. And it's ugly as sin. It's really sad that this game is regarded as A+ material; it indicates that video game design has been slowly declining into mediocrity. For me, this game can be accurately described as Metal Gear Solid with Batman.

Hear from you later!

- Danda