Never say this is the last game

Did you love the Monkey Island games? Well, then you'll love Deathspank. This is the first game from Ron Gilbert in a very long time, and it's good.

It's nice to see Gilbert creating cool games again. The Monkey Island games became crappy and too cartoony after he left! To his credit, he has created something new and exciting. Other designers are happy to make the same game over and over again, with Hideo Kojima being the worst offender, or even Hironobu Sakaguchi, who made his long, prosperous career possible after he went all out to create a "Final Fantasy" which was supposed to be Square's last game. So what's he doing now, after leaving Square-Enix? The Last Story, which will probably be his "last game", again. You have to be kidding me!

Do you know who has been actually frank about creating the same game over and over again until we can't take it anymore? Yes, you guessed it right... Well, the guy responsible for creating Kevin Butler and the ad which kind of proved that Killzone 2 had amazing graphics after all has been hired by Activision. So I guess Activision wants to look less evil now, and this is probably the right person to whitewash Robert Kotick's wrongdoings. I can't imagine what he will do, but I'm sure it will work, because he's clever and we gamers have really short memories.

Jimbecility - A bullet in the head

I shouldn't care about idiots making the world a worse place. After all, I didn't write any blog post about George W. Bush in eight years. But after he single-handedly started a wave of critical hate against a truly great game, and then he kept kicking it at any possible chance until that was it, I've decided that I've had enough with this twat who fancies himself a video games professional writer.

I didn't even want to acknowledge his existence ever again, but his latest act of stupidity is too amazing to let it just slip away. As part of a commentary about the difference between video game violence and real violence, he says: "to illustrate my point, I want to show you a bit of footage that it's a bit disturbing, so I want to warn you now." and then he shows the footage.

This guy is never one to be taken too seriously, because his rants are always so over the top that you don't really know if he is serious or not. So, what is he going to show us, a clip of the death of Bambi's mother?

Well, most of Sterling's followers are teenagers who don't know better, so they don't immediately identify the 23-year-old footage of the Bud Dwyer suicide. So a lot of young readers are expecting some of the patented tongue-in-cheek antics to be expected from him, they keep watching, and they are unexpectedly "rewarded" with a close up of a man shooting a gun into his own face.

Can an immature blogger sink any lower to prove an obvious, sophomoric point? The poor wretch goes on to say something equivalent to "See? Real violence is not disturbing at all. His head didn't blow up or anything like in video games". No, but I got to see a stream of blood gushing down a recently dead dude's face, and now I have to try to sleep after seeing that.

And to cap it all off, this pathetic, unineuronal excuse for a video games journalist thinks it's a good idea to end his simplistic rant taking a plastic gun out of an envelope and placing it in his mouth. Oh, how funny! I'm going to die laughing. And after 150 comments, none of his faithful readers seems offended or anything. Oh, the internets.

Killed by bad reviews

Sega has confirmed that there will be no sequel for Alpha Protocol, crushed by slow sales and middling reviews. Because yes, reviews actually have a strong influence on sales.

I didn't want this to happen. The game is very good, but for some reason American reviewers really hated it, specially a short-sighted idiot from Destructoid with a taste for self-promotion (with features like "Jimpressions", "the Jimquisition", and probably something called "Jimbecility" in the near future) who was so off-the-mark as Tom Chick was when he "reviewed" Deus Ex ten years ago in a perfect storm of cluelessness. According to Chick, Deux Ex was a "cliché-riddled game" with "an uninteresting story", "generic soundtrack" (wait, what?!), and "isn't all bad, though; I'd say it's only 90% bad". Amazing words for what is now considered one of the best games in history (or even the best, period).

Now Alpha Protocol is getting the bad rap, even if a lot of people is really enjoying the game. This reminds me of what's been happening to M. Night Shyamalan for the last few years. All of his new movies have been torn to pieces by critics, and the last one is no exception. The Last Airbender has at this point a pitiful 8% at Rotten Tomatoes, which means 92% of the American critics hated it.

But the thing is, a lot of people went to see The Last Airbender. After earning $40 million during its first weekend, it's not a disaster. So Shyamalan's planned trilogy could very well happen, if word of mouth is good and people keep going to watch it.

It didn't go that way for Alpha Protocol. European reviews were usually kinder, and I was even considering to buy the PS3 version (I originally bought it for PC) to support Obsidian's effort. But now it's too late. I guess a future for RPGs with lots of choices is now crushed, as it was for Deus Ex, one of the few games with real significant choices. In the amazing coverage by RPS celebrating Ten Years of Deus Ex, some people express their disappointment because nobody followed the trail opened by it: "I just assumed that games were going to be like that in the future."

Alpha Protocol is truly one of the few games in which the player can actually shape the story in visibly different, complex ways, even changing your allies and foes and getting to fight different people as a consequence. Despite its few weaknesses (the actually decent combat system is hated by many), expect in a few years some articles wondering why this great game failed.

Sony, you won't get my money this time

You've probably heard about Playstation Plus. For 50€/50$ a year, you get very big demos (or "full game trials", but they are still demos, right?) and lots of games:

As a member you can expect to get your hands on at least four games a month at no extra charge. Each month there will be a selection of one PSN game, two minis and one PS one classics available on PlayStation Store for you to download. You also get premium avatars and dynamic themes each month, many of which are exclusive to members.

Whaaat??? I'm sold! No, but wait, because there's a catch... You only have access to all those games as long as you subscribe. The day you stop paying the service, you lose them all (except for special offers like the downloadable version of Little Big Planet)

So your they are not really "free" games, and you are paying to keep them for a limited time. They don't use that word, but you will be renting those games. (So, if during your Playstation Plus subscription there's a special offer to buy them cheap, can you still buy them or you are stuck with this rental?) That is one of the things I hate about this current generation of digital downloads: you don't want to think about it too much, but you know that sooner or later the service will be discontinued and you won't be able to download the stuff you paid good money for anymore. So my beautiful list of games from Steam will be gone, just like that... But at least you accept that as something that will happen in the distant future. In this case, "your" games are like hostages being held by Sony, and if you ever get tired of this service, Sony will say to you "if you ever want to see your loved games alive, you have to pay the ransom!". Are you prepared to give up all the games you've collected during your time as a Playstation Plus subscriber?

I was prepared to be a day-one customer because I thought I would keep all those games. But now I'm not going to join in, even if they promise me a downloadable version of Uncharted 2 with a personalized welcome message from Nolan North... unless they change their mind so I get to keep the games. Maybe if we all rejected this system, Sony would get the message. Otherwise, they will understand that most customers see this rental as an acceptable service, and others will copy it in the same way many publishers are already copying EA's nasty Project $10, including (naturally!) giants like the evil Ubisoft, THQ, and even Sony itself!

Playstation Plus is not that great. The only "big thing" about it would be cross-game chat, and that's not even a launch-day feature (I'm sure they will offer it in the future, though). So my advice is, buy the games you want from the Playstation Store, and forget about paying to have a taste of games you'll still have to buy. Otherwise, you'll be helping to move the games industry in the wrong direction.

Splinter Cell - Destruction

Splinter Cell: Conviction feels wrong. It's one of those games that (if you care about Splinter Cell, anyway) makes you think "this is not going the way it should", like Deus Ex: Invisible War, which wasn't a bad game, but it also deviated too much from what a Deus Ex game should be.

Conviction is a mess in many ways. First, Sam Fisher doesn't feel like the same character. He's old and battered, as he should be, but now he looks ape-like, and his eyes have pretty much disappeared. Even if the graphics are really detailed, he looks less human than ever. He's now an unstoppable killing machine.

The story is as subtle as a jackhammer. Somebody killed his daughter, so he wants revenge. This is the excuse to present him as somebody who doesn't care about anything, and who just kills everyone in his path with no remorse, unlike all the previous games which were about surgical strikes and careful stealth. Very early in the story (like, in the second level or so) you discover that she's not dead after all (spoiler!!), but does that change anything? No, not really: Fisher continues on a rampage, and the game keeps beating you on the head with images and dialogues about your daughter, over and over, after we just don't care because we know that she's still alive, though Fisher doesn't seem to care about anything else, even about Irving Lambert. Oh, the game tells you with a throwaway line that you killed your best friend (a very optional choice from the previous game) but Fisher never shows any pain or guilt about that whatsoever. So no "Oh, I thought my daughter was dead, so I didn't mind killing my best friend. I'm an idiot!". There's a scene that tries to suggest that by projecting words like "guilt", "lies" and such on the walls in giant letters (again, sublety!), but when Fisher finally catches up to what was obvious for the player a few hours earlier, he doesn't show regret, but anger. At this point, I guess we are supposed to feel sorry for Fisher, but he just looks stupid. Yes, the game is full of bad writing, and that's just a sample of it.

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SC: Conviction also seems to believe, like Batman: Arkham Asylum, that showing a lot of people dying is cool. The "climax" of the story takes you through a virtual tour of empty, boring White House hallways and rooms with lots of dead people around you. Family entertainment! (Modern Warfare 2 did something similar with the Washington setting in smaller doses, and it worked considerably better). Also, there's a lot of torture (inflicted by the protagonist!) that seems ripped straight from THQ's The Punisher.

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So there's a lot of bad shooting? What else? Well, everything is streamlined for the dumb, assuming players will be overwhelmed unless the game holds your hand all the time (the stylish messages telling you what to do and where to go get old very soon). You don't even have to hit a crouch button: if there's a big pipe in your way or you have to enter an air duct, Fisher ducks automatically. Also, you are really fast, and you can climb a very tall building in 30 seconds. Altair and Ezio never were so quick. It feels almost like a parody.

Still, the game still forces you to be more or less stealthy, not only in those annoying "if an alarm sounds, you are instantly dead" stages but also during the rest of the game, because if the enemies discover you, it's pretty much impossible to line up a shot with a keyboard and mouse. I didn't have any trouble at all playing the unfairly maligned Alpha Protocol, but shooting in the PC version of Splinter Cell: Conviction is just a pain. And that is too bad, as Sam Fisher is no longer a spy: he's now a soldier. We even get a contrived Modern Warfare-like flashback to the first Iraq war which soon becomes a below-average cover shooter that feels jarringly out of place and stupid (you are wounded and can't take too many hits, so why don't you just stay of the road to avoid the enemy soldiers? But there's an invisible wall...). This is not Splinter Cell! What is this, Soldier of Fortune Payback?

Ubisoft seems to be doing everything wrong lately. Now I see it's not by chance that the Splinter Cell series director called it quits a few weeks ago. And just now, the guy behind the Assassin's Creed series has also left the building after completing the new, unnecessary "Assassin's Creed 2.5" sequel. Ubisoft Montreal, one of the best game studios in the world, seems to be in trouble. And we all just believed the rumours when somebody said that Michel Ancel had left Ubisoft too. Hmm... Something has changed. Ubisoft is no longer a company where creativity is respected and high quality is always to be expected. I hate what they are becoming now.

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One more thing: I finished the game in one day. But, unlike all the previous Splinter Cell games, I don't think I will be playing this one ever again.

Scary new games

There are lots of new games at this time of the year. It's E3 again! Well, Los Angeles is too far and I couldn't afford the journey anyway. I could afford a trip to this year's Gamescom in Cologne, but it's still too early to know if I will be able to go. Well, what about all the new games? There are just too many, so let me talk about just a few of them.

The Guitar Hero games were getting stale, so Neversoft's main competitor Harmonix has decided to present the new, innovative Rock Band 3. Now there's a keyboard, and there will even be MIDI guitars and the possibility to connect your real MIDI instruments (like my really nice Roland drum set) to the game. The good thing about this is probably that these games are slowly leading advanced players to real musicianship, as the advanced difficulty is almost like playing a real instrument. The bad thing is that, well, you are still playing along other people's music. What I like about playing (about real playing, not the make-believe variety that these games brought to the table) is that you can change the solos, improvise, try a new rhythm to make things more interesting. Because I'm a musician myself, I feel there's still a limit to what these games can offer me. I don't want to play along a song: I'd rather just play a song, because I can, because I have the chops for it.

Let me give you an example: it's cool to follow Pink Floyd's "Another Brick on the Wall", but what happens if you just want to jam for a while and just keep playing? Here's a video of my old band doing just that. But with Rock Band you just mimic the song, and that's the end of it. Will Rock Band titles give you that opportunity in the future? That would be really cool. But would regular players even want that? I'm not the best person to answer that.

Super Scribblenauts promises adjectives that offer a lot more options than before. But are these new options any fun? Because the problem with the first game was not the lack of options, but their faulty implementation. Guys, we don't want more options, we want better options. This time you are not fooling anyone with the "hey, you can do anything!" hype. Just give us a good game, OK?

Homefront is... well, just a stupid far right wet dream turned into a videogame. Inspired by one of the most absurdly paranoid movies ever, Red Dawn. It's usually easy to present the Russians as the bad guys, but in this case the developers try to sell the idea of a Communist invasion making it look as real as possible, if real means "Korea is just like Nazi Germany". You know, Modern Warfare 2 wasn't just a good example of great storytelling, but at least they bothered to create an acceptable -even if flawed- excuse for the main conflict (you know, that level). Now it's just "Koreans are crazy and want to kill us all!"). I'm curious about the game, but I can tell you now that I'm not going to pay a cent to fuel paranoid fantasies, even if it turns out to be really good.

There are just too many new games to comment about all of them, so I just won't. Oh, but there's another thing... Today Super Mario Galaxy 2 has been released in Europe. You should definitely check out that game. It's awesome.

Alpha Protocol's rift - A mystery

A few days after Alpha Protocol's release, a lot of us are still shocked about all the bad reviews it got in the good old USA, which forced people like me or these other Spanish guys to hastily defend the game even before we were done with it. The game has been received warmly elsewhere and players all over the world love it, as I showed at the end of my full review, so why all that hate?


Vlad Andrici tries to study this phenomenon in this article, trying to check all the facts and find an explanation, but it still doesn't make any sense. What is going on? Now, I hate to turn too paranoid, but I've come to think that there are some reasons that don't have anything to do with the quality of the game. First, as Andrice points out,


I've noticed for a long time that many magazines/review sites tend to overlook some pretty noticeable problems that certain games coming from big-ass publishers and developers have, while the "not so hyped" games tend to be hammered for the same issues.


That is so true! If a GTA or a Metal Gear Solid game is released, it automatically gets top marks. Yes, it's a completely populist attitude but it's not going to go away soon (most players actually go crazy if they don't get those unrealistic reviews, anyway). But some game must be seen in a negative light so it doesn't look like reviewers love just everything. And it looks like it's Alpha Protocol's turn.


Also, I hate to turn to ideological explanations, which always look crazy no matter how you present them, but I'm really starting to think that American reviewers are not OK with having a company called "Halbach" (a dead ringer for Halliburton) as the bad guys in Alpha Protocol's story, while the head of the effing islamic terrorists is depicted as a man of his word. Blasphemy!

But I don't know what to think. Thankfully, this game was released a bit earlier in Europe, so when bad reviews started to drip from the US, a lot of people already knew that the game was much better than what they were being told. And you can influence someone to not buy a game, as in this case, but it's different if you are already playing the game... and enjoying it.

I hope this whole thing is not disastrous for Obsidian. As far as I'm concerned, they have delivered the goods with their latest game. If my review didn't convince you yet, I'm telling you again: Alpha Protocol has great writing, and decent gameplay, so if you love RPGs, you should definitely try it.

And speaking of good writing, I really enjoyed this in-depth article by Chris Breault about how important writing is, and about the way careless scripting can ruin the whole experience, using Splinter Cell: Conviction as an example of how bad a game can be because of that. You should read it!

BONUS: Someone sent me this article which says that core gamers are male and casual gamers are female. Well, SuperViv, JR and I are both things at once, and we are not hermaphrodites! Or, at least, I wasn't the last time I checked. Let me have a look again...