Resident Evil 4, Microtransactions, and Paying for Cheat Codes

Fair warning, this post is not on-brand, I'm working through my feelings on a video game so just bear with me.

Anyway. Resident Evil 4 Remake! Played it. Finished it, on standard difficulty, once. Great game. I've been playing Resident Evil games since the series began and haven't missed a mainline game yet (if you don't count Code: Veronica), and this one is up to standards.

Normally after beating a Resident Evil game I would, per tradition, unlock the Rocket Launcher with infinite ammo and go on a vengeful spree through the game, destroying my fear of the various monstrous enemies by blowing them into pixelated chunks. Capcom has, as of last week, decided to make that a question of moral difficulty so now I'm blogging instead.

Background: the infinite Rocket Launcher typically unlocks after beating the game with a sufficiently high rank, usually S, which used to mean doing a speed run. Resident Evil 2 Remake tweaked that a bit by requiring a speed run on Hardcore difficulty, and then Resident Evil 3 Remake and Resident Evil 8 introduced bonus stores where you could unlock and purchase the weapon after doing some challenges. 

So far, so good, except RE2Remake also provided an option to just buy the infinite Rocket Launcher for five bucks. This flew under the radar because the option took about a year to come out and by that point no one really noticed.

Fast forward to now, and RE4Remake, which has more weapon upgrades but has added microtransactions to the mix, in the form of "exclusive tickets" you can buy for $3 a pop in real money. These let you unlock high-end weapon upgrades that you'd otherwise have to do multiple playthroughs of the game to earn.

Is the infinite Rocket Launcher locked behind this? Oddly enough, no, you can't use a ticket to get that, probably because it would break the game's hardest difficulty in half. But, you can get a Handcannon (Magnum) with infinite ammo using the tickets, which has kind of the same effect. And that's something you can't do by just grinding out in-game money, at least if you want to go for the trophy tied to beating the hardest difficulty with infinite ammo on your side.

In short (too late), Capcom is charging three bucks for what used to be a cheat code.

Is this a good thing? No. I miss cheat codes. Bring them back.

Is this evil then? Also no, at least not in comparison to some of the truly predatory microtransactions out there. At most I think you can spend $10-$25 on these tickets. And the game is single-player so it's not a thing where you're paying to beat other people.

Am I going to buy these things?

...Maybe?

I confess, I prefer to cheat my way through games whenever possible. I am time-limited for gaming, but I do like to see as much of the games I like as I can, and I like unlocking the trophies. So if $3 saves me a couple of hours of grinding I consider that worth it. (And this is why I need to avoid anything with pay to win mechanics.)

With that said: Capcom's been getting more and more willing to load up microtransactions in their big franchises, and this is the first time where they've done it in a way that the game may have suffered for it. The weapon unlocks in RE4Remake are weird and grindy in a way that's not been the case in most any previous game. They aren't quite at the point where I think open greed influenced the game design... but they're close.

There's been some muted backlash over the tickets already, but not a lot. As I said, these aren't egregious next to stuff like Diablo: Immortal. But if Capcom decides to keep pushing their luck on this sort of thing going forward, it could get ugly.

Probably right in time to screw up a Resident Evil 6 remake, if one happens. Wouldn't that be funny.

-Dave

Street Fighter V Hurts My Hands

I picked up Street Fighter V on a whim. Everything I'd heard about it said "Dave, don't pick up this game, it's not for filthy casuals". But it was in a Redbox and I thought, why not? So I grabbed the game and played it for a bit over three nights. Then I returned the Redbox and bought the digital copy. With the season pass.

MUAHAHAHA! ALL ACCORDING TO PLAN!

Part of it is the fault of the Super Best Friends. They got me hyped for fighting games. It's like MMORPGs where you have to learn a different language to understand them. Footsies! Frame data! It's all beyond me but it's interesting.

The game itself is, charitably, a train wreck. The art style is okay, sometimes good, sometimes not good at all. The menu is shit. The story mode (prequel mode?) is shit, and the real story mode won't be out until June? July? Maybe August at this rate. Survival is a special hell for obsessives. I'd have returned the game on the first day if the actual fights weren't so good.

The fights are not just good. The fights are fantastic. It's Street Fighter! The fights have always been fantastic. It is the fighting game that all other fighters bow to, now and forever. I wish it didn't take five minutes to find each new fight. I guess it's to save gamers from getting arthritis in the first month of the game's release.

Oh God, the loading times. The network search times. It's still better than Mortal Kombat, where fights just lost connection or lagged for no damn reason. But them I stomp Ryu underneath Laura's electrified heel and all is good again.

But Survival. Survival is breaking me. Survival will give me the arthritis.

30 rounds, 50 rounds, 100 rounds, all in a row but the only ones that matter are the last three fights, the toughest fights. Lose here and you lose everything. No experience, no fight money, no matter how many rounds (25 rounds, 27 rounds, 29 rounds) you cleared, even if you just flat out dropped your network connection and the game shit out all your progress for no fucking reason.

But I have to remind myself what this game is. Because I have never seen a game so dedicated to the idea that people will be playing it for years. The trophies are all geared to that timetable, to months of play. The DLC (for the first year!) is spread out over six months. Everything points to a Killer Instinct style experience of frequent updates on and on, forever and ever, amen.

I'll be dropping Street Fighter V tomorrow for Dark Souls III. And then I'll pick it back up. And then I'll drop it for Persona 5. And I'll pick it back up after that, over and over, until my PlayStation finally dies.

Or my hands do. Cripes. Where's the ice?

Fallout 4 Just Won My Heart

I've been playing Fallout 4 intermittently (read: at night, after bedtime, if the house is clean) since it came out. Up until tonight my verdict was "not bad, better than Fallout 3", which I never really got into. V.A.T.S. combat is fun until it goes on too long, the world is a hoot, Dogmeat sank into the ground like fucking Artax a few times but I'm sure there's a patch coming.

But then tonight happened.

I'm looking for a detective. I find the building he's been stashed in, and I go through killing miscellaneous assholes. And I keep going. And keep going. A bit too long, honestly, but point is I find the guy and I get back out. I manage to talk down the kidnappers (after failing the first Charisma check - thanks quicksave), and we get out, away, Scott free into the night...

except Swan spawns.

This is Swan.

What the hell is Swan? I have no idea. It had nothing to do with the mission or anything else that was happening. I just know it came out of nowhere in the dead of night and started clubbing me to death.

Was I prepared for that? Hell no. I'd just been through an entire dungeon! No Stimpaks for me! No power armor! And I'm still early in the game without much to my name except a Cryolator my pal Dogmeat busted out of a safe for me. Good dog!

So I throw the Cryolator on, start running, and fire. First time I've used the gun. It lets out a puff of what I assume is cold air and causes... let's say 2% damage to the Swan. Laughable damage, I've given him an ice cream headache. Damn it Dogmeat!

Whatever, I don't have better guns. I just run around and keep firing and try to dodge the Swan's hits, which I fail at.

Screenshots stolen from Google results for "Fallout 4 Swan".

I don't have health items so I just scarf radioactive meat as fast as I can. Fuck the rads. I try V.A.T.S. but there's hardly any point, it doesn't make a difference to the damage I'm causing. I'm near death but, somehow, he is too. At least he's around 30% health. I jump into my menu for more instafood and see I've got a drug called Jet. Slows time down for 10 seconds. I jack myself up, unpause, and start firing the Cryolator as fast as I can as the bludgeon comes for my head in super slow motion...

And the Swan dies. At the literal last second the Swan keels over. I get a fancy gun and some other gear I can't even process, I'm so high on adrenaline.

I find the detective smoking in an alley, somehow restrain myself from grabbing him and shaking him screaming "Where were you?!", finish the rescue mission, and call it a night. No way I'm topping that.

Bloodborne was the last game that gave me a rush like this fight. It was totally unexpected, brutal, but it was fair and it was winnable and I won, damn it. If Fallout 4 keeps delivering moments like this I'm in 'til the end.

Roll on into the wasteland! Bring on the next super mutant! Oh God it's got a nuke wait

Celebrating Konami?! FemSnake For The Win

Back when Assassin's Creed: Unity was coming out I wrote a backhanded defense of the developers for not putting playable female characters in the multiplayer mode. My point was that, because of the way the game was designed, it would be a hell of a lot harder to implement a playable female character than it was in the old AC games that did have them.

Well, time has passed and Hideo Kojima sure showed me. Brianna Wu has a great write-up, but the TL;DR is that you can play as FemSnake in Metal Gear Solid 5.

FemSnake Blonde.

From the aforementioned write-up:

"She’s a prisoner you rescue on a mission, but you do get to play almost every mission as her. She can be your protagonist, and is included in many of the cutscenes. She runs Mother Base. She commands the game’s soldiers. She is fully voiced, and her acting is even more menacing than Kiefer Sutherland’s."

This is basically what I said Ubisoft would have to do to put a playable female character in Unity, and I stand by my assertion that it's a hell of a lot of work. (Kojima even has an advantage in that Big Boss/Kiefer Sutherland is practically mute throughout the whole game. Less voice acting!) But I also said it was totally doable, and Metal Gear Solid V has gone and proved it. They've also allowed you to play as different races by the same method, male and female. Hats off to Kojima and, yes, Konami for doing the right thing.

I should note that there are a few hoops you have to jump through to do this, namely actually finding a female character and extracting her to add to your Mother Base combat unit. At around the halfway point in the game I've found six female characters out of almost 600 soldiers, so yeah, this is difficult. (Extracting a female prisoner is actually worth a Playstation trophy, but I'm 99% sure I've run across at least one female soldier as well.) Also my FemSnake, a.k.a. Laughing Wallaby, sounds like a total psychopath when she pets D. Dog, but that's not that much different from Boss I guess.

You can also customize D. Dog. I've made him as Corgi as possible.

(Tangent: why the hell can't I put Quiet in something modest? You released female DLC costumes that are only usable by 1/100 of your soldiers and don't go on Quiet. Come on Konami.)

As for Ubisoft... well, Unity was a glitchy disaster at launch so, yes, their resource and time problems were real. Poor bastard developers. Happily Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, just out, is by all accounts a superior game and features a choice of male or female protagonist, so they've put one in the "win" column. Here's hoping they keep it up.

"Damn it D. Dog."

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Puppy

"Kept you waiting, huh?"

I've been playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain lately. I expect I'm going to keep playing Metal Gear Solid V for quite some time. It's a very large open-world game, which is a game type I've only gone gaga for once (and that was Assassin's Creed 2). I got into Far Cry 3 for a bit too, but petered out sometime near the halfway mark once things got a little... repetitive (climb tower, clear out bases, skin something, repeat). It's a problem that's kept me from enjoying any Grand Theft Auto game, the rest of the Assassin's Creed series, and MMOs in general (once I got the Warcraft monkey off my back.)

I'm still in the early game, so this might change, but Metal Gear Solid V has a couple features that raise it over most open world games for me. First, you can go back and play through earlier missions to clear side objectives you're pretty much guaranteed to miss the first time through. Second, the missions are discrete little games within the game, which means I can drop in to do one without getting lost wandering the Afghani wasteland for hours looking for plants. (Or I can do that too.) Third, the game adapts to your play strategy, so if you get comfortable headshotting guards, they'll start wearing helmets to force you to change up your style. Fourth, there is a crazy amount of different ways to do each mission, from pure stealth to crazy gun nut to full-scale army invasion to cardboard box surfing.

That all adds up to a game I'm unlikely to get bored of anytime soon, because I'll be playing it in short sips and I'm not likely to keep doing the same thing over and over again. That's important for something that'll probably take me sixty hours to finish.

Fourth, there is a puppy. This is his heartwarming story.

* * *

Kazuhira "Kaz" Miller: Boss, this is the Fulton extraction system. You can use it to recruit soldiers and... did you just drug a dog and tie it to the balloon?

K: Boss? You just brought a wild dog onto our top-secret military base. Care to explain that?

Big Boss: PUPPY!!1!

K: Boss, it's been living in an Afghani war zone-

B: Hello puppy! Hello!

K: Boss, can I please-

B: Who's a good puppy? You are! You are!

K: Boss I'm not kidding, that thing probably has rabies-

B: *squeals* Aww, puppy kisses!

Revolver Ocelot: Er, Boss?

B: IT'S THE CIIIRCLE OF LIIIFE

K: Sigh... Ocelot, get the dog a room and its shots.

B: Wait, what? You can't hold my puppy! You shock people's testicles for kicks!

B: YOU BETTER NOT HURT MY DOG YOU CRAZY TORTURING COWBOY BASTARD!!

K: Great, good, we're done. Can we get back to DID YOU JUST TIE A GODDAMN BEAR TO THE BALLOON

Going Up Against Anaïs Nin

Okay, I'm punching way above my weight class here, but I'm annoyed and I'm not at work and the Muse has gotten Inspiration out of hammer space and clobbered me in the head with it,

From the anime Vividred Operation? Sourced here.

so I'm just going to go ahead and do this.

Joe Kawano posted this quote (abridged) on Twitter. It's not his fault I'm pissed off but shout out to him and transmedia.

The quote is from Anaïs Nin, and it's this:

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Okay. No.

First of all, under no circumstances should you listen to anyone who tells you that you shouldn't fucking write. Believe me, if they are correct, it will not take you long to discover it all by yourself. No one else needs to communicate that information to you! At least on the basis of quality. Go ahead and keep telling the trolls to shut the fuck up and why.

Second, according to Wikipedia Anaïs Nin herself began writing by selling erotica to some guy for a dollar a page as a half-joke, half-desperate-need-for-rent. Which is an avenue I'm exploring myself and I don't see any shame in it. But in total awareness that I'm yelling at a dead woman whose body of work is vastly superior to my own: pot and the fucking kettle!

But what I'm really steamed about is the idea that you need to write in the throws of passion, or some strong emotion, to be doing it properly. Uh uh. I've done it before, and while I've produced some prime words that way it feels like sticking a fucking knife through my heart and leaving it there. And then picking up another knife.

I'd like to point out that Diane Keaton's character was wildly successful for years before she got her heart broken. Sourced here.

Also, those prime words? None of them have been published, either because I don't want to expose certain parts of my soul, or because I ended up with a high-quality scene disconnected from any other narrative. Could I build a story around a scene of passion? Absolutely. But there's a hell of a lot of bloodless, tiring word-churning involved I haven't done yet.

Look, if you're doing something creative for awhile without spectacular, immediate success, you're going to wonder if you should keep doing it. Here's the test. Take stock of your work and ask if you're doing it to meet a requirement, or meet a need.

I'll give you an example. In college I took computer programming classes because I wanted a job I could make good money at while I wrote. (Whether this was a good strategy I leave to posterity to decide.) Happily I got really into programming and thought "Hey! Maybe I can make video games! I love playing video games and I love writing, so making them myself should be ideal!"

So I read a book on graphics programming and learned the skills. And then I read another one. And another one. I spent hundreds of dollars on stupidly expensive programming books, trying to catch the right inspiration to make that killer game I wanted to make. But after years of this, I realized that I never went very far beyond doing the exercises in those books. I wasn't making anything I wanted to make, I was just doing wrote exercises over and over again. I was meeting the requirement these books set for me, then tossing them aside and moving on to the next book. I don't buy game programming books anymore.

With writing I don't have this problem. I can't meet a word count target to save my life, but I've got scads of notes and ideas and scraps and scenes and entire fucking novels in my trunk. A lot of this shit might never get published, and I may never do well enough writing to pay my bills or make a full-time career out of it. But I can't stop. I tried! And all I did was waste money on game programming books. I write to meet a need I have to express myself.

In short, if writing or painting or music or programming meets an inner desire, if it fulfills you, go to it as hard as you can. But if you're only doing it to meet an external demand, well, maybe try something else for awhile. The worst that happens is you come back to what you were doing in the first place, with a few new experiences to play with.

Now, I will encourage you to let emotion take you while you're writing. If you're pissed off, or crying, or laughing while you write a scene, that's a very good thing! But it's not a guarantor of quality (you still gotta polish that nacre into a pearl, fella), and it sure as hell isn't the litmus test for whether your writing is worthwhile. And now I feel obligated to purchase something by Anaïs Nin, so if anyone cares to make a suggestion, I'm all ears. Er, eyes.

*opens Amazon*

Wow, her stuff is not Kindle-friendly, is it...

Artificial Scarcity (or: Damn You Konami)

I didn't want to buy a PlayStation 4 today. Yet as I type this, my new PlayStation 4 is downloading a game demo called P.T. that, as of tomorrow, will no longer exist.

I blame Konami. Also publishers' failure to come to grips with an increasingly post-scarcity world for intellectual property. But mostly Konami.

Back up a bit. When I was a young lad I came across a book by David Peters (who is Peter David's secret identity) called Psi-Man: Main Street D.O.A. It was book three in a series starring a telekinetic Aikido-master Quaker and his telepathic German Shepard. It was, frankly, awesome: funny, action-packed, sexy, and skewering the living hell out of Walt Disney.

When I got older I looked around for the rest of the series, but it was out of print when I found it and things hadn't improved. I ended up asking Peter David himself if it would ever come out as an eBook, and he explained that 1. it was a work-for-hire series he had no control over (that something like Psi-Man was work for hire is still bizarre to me) and 2. that it was out of print for a reason and unlikely to be revived again. I still haven't read the complete series.

Some years later, I got heavily into Warhammer 40,000 and Black Library, and found out that a limited edition book called Xenology existed which detailed the biology of a bunch of their alien critters, including a mysterious ratlike race called the Hrud. I like Skaven (their swords and sorcery mysterious ratlike race) and hunted for a copy. Sadly the book was out of print and could only be had for heavily inflated prices from eBay resellers (now Amazon - currently starting at $92).

I'll admit it, I sinned. I located a PDF of the book online, struggled through five pages, and then gave up and deleted it. (Pirates are not known for quality. I'm lucky I didn't get a virus.) I've kept an eye out, but despite the publisher's print on demand experiments the book is still not available, and I still haven't read it.

Flash forward. Some time ago video game publisher Konami released a game demo called P.T., or Playable Teaser. It turned out to be the announcement for a revival of the classic horror franchise Silent Hill, now Silent Hills, created by the legendary Hideo Kojima in cooperation with the brilliant Guillermo del Toro and starring white-hot actor Norman Reedus. And fans squeed with delight.

Then last week, after a strange and half-public breakup between Konami and Kojima, del Toro confirmed that the game was no longer happening, at least with Kojima. Then Norman Reedus tweeted that it was flat-out canceled. And this past weekend, Konami announced the demo was going to be pulled from the PlayStation store entirely, never to return.

I'd been looking forward to playing Silent Hills when it came out. It was one game that sold me on the PlayStation 4 over the XBox One. (Persona 5 was the real seller. The Last of Us and Bloodborne haven't hurt either.) But I wasn't planning to go out and buy the console for another year, when more of the games were out and I had time to actually play them.

But... hell, I was weak. And I couldn't let the chance to play P.T. go by. It was already a unique and masterful piece of marketing and horror game design, and by the end of the week it'll be a video game legend.

The thing is, there's no real reason this should happen. Yes, the game P.T. is trying to sell no longer exists, but the demo alone was a critical hit and as far as I know, it costs Konami nothing to keep it on the store. But for whatever reasons the game is being consigned to the dustbin. Within a decade it'll be gone forever, beyond recovery.

Similarly, we've entered an age of ready access to digital books, where there are no physical reasons for anything to go out of print. You don't get charged to maintain a book on Amazon, even if it doesn't sell. But scads of back catalog material will never be uploaded, never be made available again.

Sometimes there are good reasons for this: it costs money to make a decent quality eBook and publishers have limited resources. And sometimes there are bad reasons for this, such as when game companies use copyright law to prevent fans from even doing the minimal updates needed to keep abandoned games playable

But either way it's a shame, and it feels so unnecessary to lose works of art this way. We've got enough to worry about with file format lock out, hardware obsolescence, and the damn DCMA without self-inflicting more wounds to society's collective store of knowledge.

Now if you'll excuse me, P.T. has finished downloading and I need to go scare myself shitless before Solid Snake breaks into my house and wipes the hard drive.

Update: I played P.T. For like five minutes. That's when I got too scared playing it alone in the dark to continue. Seriously, if you have or can get a PlayStation 4, download this demo. If you have a PSN account but no PS4, order the demo and hope you can redownload it later. If you're out of luck entirely, pray for a fan port.

Hardcore Risette Fan

I've been playing Persona 4 Golden since late last year. Exquisite Japanese role-playing game. It combines some light dungeon crawling with social/dating sim elements and wraps them in an insanely tight but intuitive time-management system that guarantees you'll have to finish the game twice to have a hope of seeing everything. (It's also an anime available on Hulu Plus if you want to watch a good high school supernatural murder mystery.)

Part of playing a video game these days is achievements, or "Trophies" if you're on a PlayStation device. (It's going to be achievements for me - XBox 360 OG here.) Persona 4 Golden has them, and supposedly one of the hardest to get is called "Hardcore Risette Fan". I got it last night without hardly trying. Here's how I did it.

The point of the trophy is that one of your party members, Rise, will say little random quotes as you fight monsters or run through dungeons. You need to hear 250 distinct quotes to get the achievement. That doesn't start until about halfway through the game so don't worry about it at all early on.

Once Rise turns up, do the following:

-Balance your party. Divide it into two teams and swap between them to keep your levels even. This also ensures you're going to hear more character-specific lines because you'll be playing with everyone you can.

-Make friends with the Fox. You need to spend a lot of time in the dungeons to get this achievement, and ranking up the Fox's social link will let you get the cheap healing you need to do it. Also make sure you keep enough dungeon-exiting items around so that you don't have to leave early. The Traesto spell is huge if you can get it and keep it.

-Go through the Void dungeon before you rank up Rise's social link too much. Some of her lines stop happening once your social link rises above 2 or 3. You should be able to get a good chunk of them in the Void. Speaking of, let the Void boss rebuild his little pixel bot when you're fighting him to get a bonus quote.

-Fight a lot of different enemies, don't just run past them (unless you get super bored like I did in the last dungeon). You want to fight enemies with different strengths and weaknesses, especially elemental ones. Also make sure you have all your party members hitting weaknesses when they can, one monster at a time if possible. And make sure you fight the little hand monsters when you see them.

-Fight the bonus bosses and do all the quests. It helps cut down on the tedium of grinding enemies if you have a larger goal.

-Don't heal after a fight if one or more characters is low on hit points. Rise will warn you about it and that counts as a line.

-If you find an enemy with Debilitate, let everyone in your party get hit with it, then start scanning enemies and backing out until Rise has identified everything that's just gone horribly wrong for you. 3 things per party member.

-When you're fighting Ring Head (you'll know him when you see him), let him screw around with the environment for awhile halfway through the fight. When you're fighting the culprit, let him use Heat Riser early in the fight. I got the achievement fighting the culprit so you don't need to get every special boss quote.

I got the achievement on my first playthrough, so don't listen to anyone who says you need to go through the game twice or wait for the second run. And the only farming I did was hitting all the quests and the bonus bosses, and doing the Debilitate trick once. (Not even on everyone in my party!)

And this is what I've been doing instead of fucking writing. (Well, that and raising a tiny human and miscellaneous other family-related things.) How were your holidays?

Playstation TV Review

Yes, wildly off-topic again. If anyone's interested, I've got a short story I'm working on with (what I think is) a really neat emotion-based magic system to it, and I may have cracked the code on my long-suffering "Anita Blake becomes human again and goes on a rampage" book. Which is good for everyone, because the original thought train has expanded into an urban fantasy epic I'm going to write one day, I swear.

But for now. Playstation TV.

Background: I started a diet plan a few months ago that was designed to work on a modified swear jar system, where I'd reward myself for good behavior (eating meals from home, eating fruit and vegetables) and punish myself for bad behavior (take-out dinners and drinking soda). The reward cash would go toward a Playstation Vita, because I wanted to play Persona 4 after watching the anime and I'm scared to go into the closet and look for my old Playstation 2. (Also, Persona 4 Golden, the Vita one, has new content I wanted to see that's not in the anime.) Punishment deductions went to my wife for whatever she wanted.

The end result was that my wife got a ton of cash and I didn't lose any weight. Poor diet design, plus the motivation fizzled after I did the math on how long I needed to keep up the diet to get the Vita, which with mandatory accessories and the game runs about $260. Then I heard Liam talking about the Playstation TV on the Super Best Friendcast, and how it's the perfect device to play Vita RPGs on if you're on a budget.

And it is. It really is!

The cost of the system plus the game is $99, and a bundle with a game download (the LEGO Movie game), a Dualshock 3 controller, and an 8 GB memory card is $139. (This is a deal even without the game - Playstation controllers and memory cards are notoriously expensive.) With Persona 4 added in that's about $160 for me, which coincidentally I'd actually managed to save up through the diet system by the time I found out the Playstation TV existed. So I declared the diet on hiatus and picked up the system.

Rear-view of the device. Don't put it on your TV, the cables will drag it down.

The Playstation TV is about the size of a Raspberry Pi, or a larger cellphone. Really tiny. I can hold it in the palm of my hand. The guts are the guts of a Playstation Vita, minus the touchscreen or any screen at all. It plugs into the TV via HDMI and has an Ethernet port plus wireless capabilities. The controller plugs in via USB, but only to charge and do the initial sync-up with the system. You can plug in up to four controllers, though I'm not sure how many of the games will support multiplayer.

Initial set up is fairly easy. You will need a Playstation Network account to get full feature access, and the website's a bit of a pain to deal with. (You also can't register the hardware yet for some reason.) But if you just want to get started playing a game all you have to do is insert the game chip, turn the system on, answer a few questions and you're good to go. Or you can download the day one update, which will add most of the system's features to your front page.

What the hell am I looking at?

The menu system is not pure crap, but it's pretty bad. There's no rhyme or reason to the way things are laid out, and games (you know, the things you'll actually want to play) are all hidden off the front page by default. And there's no intuitive way to rearrange things unless you go online and read the manual. There's also a news feed you can't get rid of, apparently, whether you want it or not.

Go away!

Actually gaming is much better. The Dualshock 3 is a solid controller (my toddler is already a big fan), and Persona 4 Golden (above) looks great on a big screen. There's a compatibility list for the Playstation TV that covers the games you can play on it, and you will want to give it a look. If you like role-playing games, then you're pretty much set - the Playstation TV supports most of the Vita RPGs. If you sign up for Playstation Plus, you also get access to a few free games, which right now means Spelunky (technically a PS4 game, but it at least installs), Pix the Cat and Rainbow Moon. A new set of games turns up monthly (I think The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is out next month), and you keep everything as long as your Plus subscription is current. I signed up for a 14 day demo and I'll probably get a full membership.

As a media center, you've got much better options. Even the 3DS has better app support than the Playstation TV right now, although Sony swears the apps are coming. I still have my 360 plugged in for Netflix and the like, so this really doesn't bother me.

Overall, for what I want it to do the Playstation TV is a great little bargain. It's not for people who want next-gen graphics or lots of streaming apps, but if you just want to play some Vita games without shelling out for a Vita, I'd say go for it.

*sees Disgaea 4 on the compatibility list*

*runs off whooping*

In Reluctant Defense of Ubisoft (Actually, Fuck Ubisoft)

Update 3 August 2020: this year a lot of stories of horrible abuses at Ubisoft have come to light: Jim Sterling's covered them at length here and here. I'm leaving this post up because I do think the coders at Ubisoft caught a level of shit they didn't deserve, but I also gave Ubisoft some credit for trying and, well, they didn't deserve it. At all. So fuck Ubisoft.

I really don't want to write this blog post.

I don't like Ubisoft all that much. uPlay annoys me. The last Assassin's Creed game I played was III, and I didn't finish it. Didn't finish Far Cry 3, either, though that was solely because my wife and I spawned a tiny Overlord and I dawdled on side quests. I'm not likely to play anything they put out in the next few years unless they make a massive push on the 3DS.

And Ubisoft fucked up. No question there. But my day job is developing software and, God help me, I'm sympathetic by nature to a coder on a deadline getting yelled at for leaving out That One Feature. So brace yourselves, here we go...

In case you're not familiar, it came out during E3 that Ubisoft had left playable women out of the multiplayer modes for both of their upcoming big franchise games, Assassin's Creed and Far Cry. They wanted to include women in the games - Scout's honor! - but didn't have the resources to pull it off in time. This excuse has understandably pissed a lot of people off, much moreso with Assassin's Creed because the last few games have included multiplayer modes that did have multiple female characters.

And I get it, and I'd jump on the bandwagon except I see a lot of people saying that the developers are being "lazy", or that they just don't care about female gamers. Which is not, I think, the reason to be pissed off.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 is apparently a reason to be pissed off.

 Let's be clear right off the bat: both multiplayer features at issue here are cooperative, meaning they're part of the single player experience. (Assassin's Creed's earlier, female-friendly multiplayer deathmatches got dropped entirely.) A friend, or three, can jump into your game, or you can jump into their game, and help out with single player missions that tie directly into the main storyline of the game. And all the avatars involved are, at this moment, male, and Ubisoft is being raked over the coals for not letting players play a female.

I'm seeing a lot of angry comments in the form of "This is bullshit, it's super easy to turn a male model into a female model, Ubisoft are fucking liars." And that would be true if all the new model had to do was run around killing people. But in a properly implemented coop game that's not the case anymore, because Bioshock Infinite is a thing that happened.

You can't top this!

Your buddy has to support you, has to be able to team-kill with you, has to hand off items and witty repartee as you mow down the enemy A.I.s. If Plot happens, your buddy is no longer allowed to vanish, they have to contribute to the Plot, have to have lines, make a meaningful impact on events, or at least not fuck up verisimilitude by disappearing into the Aether.

And if you want your buddy to be male or female, that really does double the workload. You have to hire an extra voice actor, you have to write and record new dialogue, you have to animate new body language, new facial expressions. And all of that shit has to be added to the test cases, along with what happens if maybe you have two different buddies at different times who want to play different genders. How many ways, at how many different points, can that completely break the million-dollar title that's due out in a few months? Because they add up.

Oh God, take off the turban! Take off the turban!

"Bioware does this all the time", you say. Yes, they do, with blank-slate characters that represent the player and her choices. They don't do it with characters that have distinct personalities that make their own impact on the plot. Ask Bioware if you can pick the genders of every member of your supporting cast as well, and see how long it takes them to descend into apoplexy.

I am ready to be corrected on this point, but I cannot think of a game that implements a plot-relevant gender-swappable coop character with a distinct personality. The closest I can come to what people are demanding is Gears of War 3, and that isn't close at all - you could only choose a female character when the plot made them available, and if everyone wanted to play a woman, tough shit. Or there's the latest Resident Evil games, where you choose between a well-developed male or female character, but your buddy had to be the other gender and nobody got to customize anything.

Not an option, sadly.

And yes, I'm crediting Ubisoft that they're implementing cooperative gameplay that's closely tied into the story. That's because these are next-generation games adding cooperative gameplay to game storylines that are traditionally strongly character-focused: no blank slates. If Ubisoft is just doing another implementation of the Amazing Disappearing Coop Buddy who fucks off whenever anything storyline relevant happens, then the resource excuse really does not hold up at all.

See, I'm not trying to exonerate Ubisoft as a company here, because if they delayed the game or management had made gender diversity a priority from day one they could have gotten this done. I just don't like seeing people blaming the dev team for this fuckup. They're coders and artists under the deadline gun for a multimillion dollar title running on a brand new engine on brand new hardware and working in an industry where employees are routinely getting laid off en masse. For Assassin's Creed, you just have to look at the Clone Quadruplet Assassins they did put in to see that something went badly wrong during development that limited them to one playable character model for the entire game. And on top of all that, every interview I've seen with the developers suggests that they loved the idea and they're genuinely disappointed they couldn't get the job done.

Which is another thing: Ubisoft hasn't been great at having female protagonists, but they've been pretty consistent in including strong female characters in their games. Compared to Call of Duty's complete lack of women, or characters like Quiet and whoever the hell this Zelda villain is, Assassin's Creed has been downright progressive for years. So I'm a bit disappointed that Ubisoft's catching more hell for trying to do the right thing and failing than companies that didn't bother to try and address the issue at all.

You know what you did, Team Ninja.

With all that said... I'm not going to say lay off Ubisoft. At a minimum they've mis-prioritized a feature gamers obviously wanted (and not just female gamers, I like playing as a woman sometimes myself), shitcanned it rather than delay the game just long enough to get it right, and committed a massive P.R. fuckup all around. Even if they're telling the absolute truth, it's moronic to say that you were five minutes away from putting in a feature and just didn't quite make it. Jim Sterling skewers them heavily here, to the point where I can't believe Ubisoft is lying about what happened - they'd have been far better off just saying nothing at all.

So please, scream and yell and tweet and write letters demanding playable women, because it's a thing that should happen and if it's not in the next Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games then Ubisoft deserves everything it has coming.

Just give the devs in the trenches a bit of a break, mmkay? Or at least the benefit of the doubt.

Why The World Needs Nintendo To Survive

If you're a regular reader of this blog then thank you! Also this post is wildly off-topic but hey, still writing.

Video game blogs and journalists have been making a lot of hay over Nintendo's awful sales figures over the past year. The Wii U is not selling and crazy good sales of the 3DS aren't enough to pick up the slack. The venerable company's war chest, once flush with Wii cash, has been badly hit and the sharks smell blood in the water. People are talking about Nintendo reorganizing, maybe following Sega's lead and becoming a company that just makes games for more successful platforms.

To which I say, fuck off! If you think Nintendo should become some hired gun developer for Apple or the XBone then you're failing to understand Nintendo or the games industry at all.

Listen: Nintendo is not a floundering console maker. It is, and always has been, the driving force of innovation in the console industry. Losing Nintendo would be the greatest blow video games could suffer, and would doom gamers to a dark age we haven't seen since the collapse of Atari.

I know that look. Don't go. The crazy man has wisdom to share...

Think back on the recent history of consoles developed by other companies. The XBox, the XBox 360 and the XBox One. The Playstation 2, 3 and 4.

They're not really all that innovative, are they? (The naming systems certainly aren't.) I mean yes, better graphics, okay, but we're practically at photorealism now and it's not resulting in better games. Call of Duty Battlefield Madden Halo NBA Killzone Jam 2014 is going to come out and you'll be able to see the vascular systems of the plants you're running past while lobbing yet another grenade at that spawn camper who won't leave you alone. But that's a gameplay experience we've had for over a decade and nothing much is changing, even though a new game keeps coming out in all these series once, twice, or three times a year.

And the consoles themselves, from a pure gaming perspective, are pretty well locked down. You have a controller you hold in both hands. There is a D-pad, four buttons, two analog joysticks, shoulder buttons, and a Start and Select button. That's been true for three hardware generations now.

Meanwhile Nintendo went out and made the Wii, and people laughed at them until they played the thing and realized how much fun waving a little stick with buttons on could be. Sure the graphics weren't next-gen, but Nintendo put out games that did things that you could not do on any other console. Microsoft's Kinect is, I'm sorry to say, a solid idea that's been implemented as a bad joke twice now, and I'm not sure anybody ever bothered doing anything significant with the Playstation Move. The Wii became a must-have console because it was a new experience, it was enjoyable for hard-core gamers and casual gamers alike, and the developers focused on making the games fun.

Fast-forward, and people are laughing at the Wii U, admittedly with better cause. The graphics are now two generations behind the curve, the new gamepad hasn't caught on in the popular imagination, and Nintendo's not doing itself any favors by putting its third party developers through hell, and releasing the kickass games it's known for a year after the console came out. At this point the Wii U may be a legitimate, unrecoverable flop.

But, look, it's still an innovative flop. The idea of being able to tap a button on your controller, move the game on your television to a screen on the controller, and keep playing while your spouse watches Downton Abbey is a pretty damn good one. So good, in fact, that Sony outright stole it for the Playstation Vita.

And it's not like Nintendo completely punted on this generation. The 3DS, Nintendo's handheld, was the top-selling console last year, has a killer game library, and beats the pants off the competition for price.

I've heard certain people poo-poo the 3DS, saying that the mobile phone/tablet market has made it obsolete. These people are on crack. Taking a look at my iPad, I've got Plants vs Zombies 2, fifty versions of Angry Birds, Candy Crush, and some ports from the fucking Nintendo DS, the last-gen handheld. The rest of the games on the app store are... well, not worthless, but you absolutely get what you pay for, and sometimes not even that. Don't get me started on the grand mal fuckup that is Final Fantasy VI.

Phones and tablets are fine for casual games, but they don't offer anything beyond that except maybe the occasional port from last-gen or earlier Nintendo consoles. (And yeah, it's generally Nintendo, and yeah, that's not an accident.) And frankly, touch screen controls are shit if you want to do any sort of active gaming, up to and including just moving someone around a screen in real time.

And the 3DS... let me offer an anecdote. It spoils the beginning of Bravely Default, so skip this paragraph if you're concerned. I turned the game, the hot new Square Enix RPG, on, and was told to show it an AR card. That stands for Augmented Reality. I didn't have the card, so I put the console on a flat surface as told and waited. The screen used the built-in camera to show me my kitchen. A jewel appeared and floated up, out of sight. I picked up the 3DS and moved it around until I could see the crystal in my screen again - keep in mind the damn thing appears to be floating in my kitchen. Then there's a flash and this girl, this 3D girl, is standing in my fucking kitchen. She walks around, bemoaning the end of the world and begging me for help, until the floor of my kitchen cracks open and she falls in, screaming. At which point the actual game starts, because that's just the first three minutes!

Every phone and tablet has the potential to do this and not one game has tried it. I can't stress enough that the 3DS blew my mind without breaking a sweat by using the available tech to do something completely insane. Apple and Google aren't even close.

And for innovation that's true all around. Sony hardware can push pixels like nobody's business, but they rely on third-party game developers to take advantage of that and they sure as hell don't like to experiment with the controls too much. Microsoft tries to innovate and spits out things like the Kinect and Windows 8 - kudos for trying, but the shit doesn't work. Apple was innovative with Steve Jobs at the helm, but now he's gone and they seem stuck iterating minor improvements to the hardware and software they have - much like Google, unless Glass takes a massive leap forward. All the smartphone players are locked into form factors that are suboptimal for gaming - at the very least you need a standardized controller if you want developers to get serious, and nobody is biting.

Nintendo's the only company that can regularly produce innovative gaming products, because they're the only game company in the mix. Making a game console does not make you a game company, and Sony, Microsoft, Google and Apple all make their main profits elsewhere. Nintendo, on the other hand, just makes games and hardware to play games on, and they have perfected this over decades of excellence.

Nintendo's problems now come from a lot of things. The graphics curve is a biggie, because it's not profitable for third-party developers to backport their games to two-generation-old hardware. That means the Wii U is missing out on a lot of popular games. And then there's Nintendo's self-inflicted wounds from their release schedule, their failure to cope with networked, social multiplayer effectively, and some frankly horrendous marketing in the past few years. (Do you know what a 2DS is? Have you seen one? And are you even aware the Wii U isn't just an upgraded Wii?)

What is not fucking them up is innovation, and that's why Nintendo can't dare go the way of Sega. Nintendo makes excellent games because they know their own hardware and they know exactly how to get the most fun out of it. Trying to port even the classic Mario games to every goofy-ass mobile and console platform that comes out would dilute the quality of the games to the point where it's hardly worth the effort. Can you imagine playing Mario with a touchscreen? And God help us if Nintendo were to try licensing out their intellectual property again.

Please, no.

And beyond Nintendo's fate as a company, their contributions to the gaming industry in general are legendary, essential, and continue to this day. We can't afford to lose them because they are, so often, at the forefront of the best gaming can be. Without them, it won't be long before we fall into a stagnant pool of rich multimedia set top devices that offer subscription services to football league and military simulator channels, accompanied by high pixel density tablets that, very occasionally, play puzzle games.

God help us all.

Blatant Nintendo Advertising

This is the Nintendo 3DS. I got one (the XL version) from my wife for Christmas. It is the single greatest device a new parent gamer can own. Let me tell you why.

The 3DS is small, but not too small, and the XL version is a solid size without being too large. You can carry them both in your pocket easily, and you can hold one up and play it well enough even if you have, say, an infant sleeping on your chest.

The 3DS flips closed, which makes it durable. Cracking the screen is a mean feat. Odds are good your infant will not sneeze, spit or vomit on your 3DS screen, and he can gum it with relative impunity.

The 3DS is one of the cheapest game systems on the market, even the high end versions. The games are all cheaper than console games, by at least $20. Even game downloads can be had cheaply if you catch the right sale.

The 3DS was built from the ground up to deal with interruptions. For any game, you can flip the 3DS closed and it will pause. Flip it open and you can start playing again - easy as that. If you don't get back to it for a few days, the battery will probably still be fine. Standby mode is awesome and needs to be a thing on every system possible.

The 3DS has a switch to turn the 3D effect off. If you like 3D, more power to you.

The 3DS has a ton of games in all genres. If you don't like them, it also plays all the old DS games. If you don't like those, you can download classic Nintendo games. You will not lack for games to play.

So needless to say, I'm enamored with my new game system. Having a handheld lets me take advantage of Ben's naps to game without booting my wife off the television when she's trying to wind down after a work night. And the games are pretty sweet. Here's what I've played so far:

Super Mario 3D Land: I'm not sure I really have to explain why a main Mario game is awesome, but imagine Super Mario 64, updated and improved in every way, and set up for classic Mario levels, and you'll get a pretty good idea why I'm already in World 7 on this one.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds: The classic A Link to the Past on the Super Nintendo was one of my favorite Zelda games. This one has all the same charm and gameplay, and adds in challenging  puzzles and dungeons for a completely new experience. I'm already in the "Dark" world, and I can't even describe the twists they've put in there without spoiling things.

Shin Megami Tensei: I honestly downloaded this because A. it's supposedly one of the best RPGs on the 3DS, and B. it was $20 off the list price (and still is until tomorrow), even compared to Amazon. Hard to pass that sort of deal up. I've been too busy with Mario and Zelda to get very far into it, but it's looking good so far. Update: Oh my God this really is Atlus hard!

Bravely Default (demo): I'm not sure how to Brave or Default yet, but Square put a hell of a lot of effort into the demo, making an entirely separate quest line from the main game that gives you some advantages when it comes out. I'll be exploring this demo in more depth over the next couple of weeks to decide if I'll play the actual game.

Fire Emblem: Awakening (demo): This actually seems like a pretty sweet strategy game, based on the demo. The controls and actions aren't overcomplicated, but the relationship function between your units promises loads of complicated strategy trickery. On my list to pick up later.

Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies: Pretty sweet game, with a strong sense of humor and an interesting (if completely unrealistic) legal mechanic. I'll be picking this up when I have a free slot.








That's the good stuff. There are a few other demos I've tried, but they haven't been great:

Super Mario Dream Team (demo): I immediately glom onto Mario RPGs, and never finish them. The demo for this one demonstrated funky controls involving controlling Mario and Luigi at the same time, so no thanks. I might try out the Paper Mario game later if the price is right.

Resident Evil Revelations (demo): I tried the demo for this on the XBox 360 and the 3DS, and gave it a pass both times. The weird squid monster enemies (no zombies!) and tacked on gimmicks threw me off. I watched a video playthrough of the game and I'm satisfied with that.

Project X Zone (demo): The total opposite of Fire Emblem. It should be crazy awesome and full of Capcom characters I love, but the actual gameplay in the demo makes no sense and doesn't interest me and the Capcom characters I either don't recognize or don't care about, except Ken and Ryu. Kind of disappointing. Also why is the demo limited to only five plays?

2 Fast 4 Gnomez (demo): A running game. Go right, collect socks. I could download 50 versions of this same game on my phone. No thanks.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate (demo): Apparently an attempt to make a 2D Castlevania game with the 3D engine, characters, and requirement to hit enemies way too many times to kill them. I outright hated playing this well before I found out a Belmont can take fall damage so no, I won't be picking this up.






And there are other games I'd like to play, but I'm determined to keep myself in check until I've finished the ones I have. Which includes a playthrough of the Final Fantasy IV remake for the DS.

So if I say on this blog this year that I don't have time to write? Blatant lies.

*runs off to scribble down notes on a little girl's spooky best friend*

*and play Zelda*

Ten Ways To Look At Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite is a great game. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees with that assessment. Ken Levine's tale of Booker DeWitt, the down on his luck Pinkerton detective and Elizabeth, the girl who can give him his life back had been winning awards left and right even before it came out, and now looks likely to take home Game of the Year more than a few times.

But if you had to sum up Bioshock Infinite in a sentence, what would you say, exactly? That's not an easy question for a game with a story this complex.

Here are ten possibilities. Note that from here on the SPOILER WARNING is very much in effect, because I'll be flat out summarizing the game's ending.