My First Homecoming

Like an ever-increasing number of lucky Playstation 3 owners, I received a code to participate in the Home beta over the weekend. After years of promises and half-glimpses, I would finally have a chance to experience Sony’s much-touted interactive online experience. What awaited me inside their online realm was in a word, sparse.

Overall, the beta offers little to see or do at this point, which is kind of despairing when you considering how long this thing has been in development. The amount of clothing and furniture with which to custom your individual avatar is limited to only a handful of items. Still, I went ahead with gusto, creating the fattest, tallest character possible and then decking him out with red track pants, a black tank top, aviators, a brown hat and black dress shoes.

My online personage thus made, I ventured out into Sony’s brave new online frontier. There are only a few locations available for exploration at this early stage, so I had to content myself with wandering the large plaza area. It serves as a hub, connecting you to the other spaces, like the bowling alley, mall and movie theater. It all looked pleasant enough and, to my infinite surprise, my fellow inhabits displayed equally sunny demeanors. After experiencing the unvarnished brutality to logic that was “World of Warcraft’s” old Looking For Group channel, I expected a little more in the way of fanboy bashing and argument mongering.

Before you can visit any new location, they must be downloaded to the hard drive and even after that there is still a cumbersome loading screen to contend with. While it was neat to see all the people milling about, interacting become a trying process. As most PS3 users lack a headset, communication was limited to typing in each letter manually using the controller. This process continually frustrated my attempts to insert my biting, sarcastic barbs into conversations, due to the lateness with which said jabs would arrive. Also, once I had more than 15 people on my screen, the lag kicked in, though in all honesty it could have been a lot worse. However, my Internet set up is not ideal due to my living in South Korea and my router’s config screen being completely in Korean. On the plus side, there is any number of amusing dances that your avatar is capable of executing. On the downside, after 15 minutes boredom set in. I don’t think I’ll be using it again until the next update.

Generally, the mood seemed subdued, which reflects my overall takeaway from the experience. I know it’s too early to judge, but things like a beta are supposed to get consumers excited about the product. Instead, I’m borderline worried. The fusion of Second Life and gaming that Sony seeks to capture seems headed toward a muted middle ground. The bottom line for me is that I want to be able to find my friends online and play games with them, and I want to do it quickly. What Sony fails to realize, I think, is that this is all that most people want. All the extra bells and whistles, achievements and statistics and customization, are always great, as long as they don’t interfere directly with the primary goal: playing games online with your friends.

By creating entire worlds where a few icons can suffice, Sony surely will create a new experience. However, all the features that Home offers are already available on the Xbox 360 or in PC gaming, just without the veneer of explorable 3D worlds. My experience with Home so far suggests that this gloss could end up as a distraction, not an enhancement, to the gaming experience.

Additional Comment: I’m about 17 hours in to “Valkyria Chronicles” and I’m totally digging it. If you are in anyway remotely interested in strategy, fantasy or gorgeous animations, then buy this game.

The “Best” Holiday Season Ever?

This fall has brought an impressive rooster of games along with the usual cries of “best holiday video game season everz!” How patriotic of the industry, to soldier on while the rest of the economy is in the toilet properly. While I can’t corroborate these wild claims, I can admit that I don’t think there’s ever been so many games out at one period that I have oh-so-desperately wanted to play. Sadly, while my passion for electronic entertainment knows no bounds, my free time has a painfully finite limit. Compounding my misfortune is that unlike all you lucky people stateside I can’t simply take a trip down to the local Wal-Mart when I feel a jonesin’. Instead, I have to get all games shipped through Hong Kong, a process that usually takes around 2-3 weeks.

Item# 1: Congratulations, Your King of the Dorks

After months of waiting, the latest “World of Warcraft” expansion has become old news . Some French guy got level 80 in roughly the space of a day and a super clan downed all the raid bosses in a couple. Yawn. I’ve played my fair share of WoW and the only feeling a remember from any marathon sessions was an overwhelming sense of shame. I can’t imagine how these guys feel, must be awful.

Item #2: Certain Doom

Damn, somebody else is reporting on stuff going down in Korea. They’ve totally beat me at my own game. The gist is that Korean company NCsoft, responsible for both “Lineage” games, has garnered an overwhelming response in the beta test for their next MMO among the home crowd. While the article tells you that Lineage has always been popular among Koreans, I can personally attest that images of the game plaster the signs for most PC rooms in Korea. Oh wait, you don’t know about PC rooms? Perhaps you should read this.

I can tell you without exaggeration that I talk to my students about video games every day. I shall have to inquire about this “Aion” game and see how it holds up to the impeccable standards of my 1st grade “Starcraft” pros. Honestly, I hope NCsoft isn’t targeting the 8-12 demographic ’cause those kids are absolutely hooked into “Maple Story.” There’s even novel-sized comic books based on the game that most kids (boys and girls) carry around. I should know, I’ve confiscated enough of them from overzealous fans during my classes.

On a side note, what started as a joke quickly spread like wildfire through the halls of my English language academy and I suddenly found myself scheduled for a “Starcraft” showdown with several of my third grade students on Sunday afternoon. Such a match-up can only result in my utter defeat. My sole hope is to convert the best players to my cause where some team play can overcompensate for my lack of skills. Seriously, there is a TV channel devoted 24-7 to this game; I’m going down.

Item #3 : Getting Steamed

In an effort to engage in some joint transatlantic RTS action on the cheap, myself and a few friends purchased copies of “Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, Gold Edition” from Valve’s proprietary service, Steam. After playing the tutorial, I was quite excited to try it out against my human foes. However, when I attempted to log in to the online matchmaking service, I received an error that I was quite accustomed to though still surprised to get, “CD Authentication failed.” You see, this was something that happened to me often when I was attempting to crack a game, but never when I had ACTUALLY PURCHASED IT, YOU A**HOLES! Lo and behold, my friends encountered the exact same error.

A little digging revealed the fact that while developer Relic can make a decent RTS, they apparently fail at something even people who make crappy games get right. Often, the game’s installation will write the CD key into Windows registry wrong, even if you enter it correctly during the install. Worse, this has been happening since the first Dawn of War game and has continued into every single expansion. Worst, even manually changing the key in the Windows registry doesn’t fix the problem. It could be a problem with your router. Or maybe they misprinted the !#$!% CD key inside the manual. Then again, it’s possible they gave you one that was 20 digits instead of 16. At the very least, you can call customer service for three weeks until they fix it on their end. Idiots.

So, now it’s just me, hordes of customer service personnel and a host of possible solutions. I just can’t wait until I spend hours and hours working toward a fix that I shouldn’t have to make in the first place. Oh, hey did you know the highly anticipated sequel “Dawn of War II” is coming out? Yeah, don’t buy it, I heard it’s going to suck.

Item #4: The Rock Never Dies

“Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” continue to be popular. Honestly, I stopped paying attention after number three, but I guess their is still rock music out there to be reduced to a sequence of colored dots. At this point, I shudder to think the depths those song lists must be plumbing.

Further Side Note:

Man, Steven Seagal is perhaps one of the worse action movie heros of all time. It’s not even the hopelessly B-listness of the films but more his completely and totally bland delivery. He beats Keanu Reeves in that department hands down. His I-just-kicked-your-ass, movie-ending line to this cinematic gem? “Nobody beats me in my kitchen!” I missed the first part of the movie, so I can only guess Segal’s hobby is … cooking? Damn man, hardcore … hardcore.

Ahem, I apologize for the drastically negative tone of this post. Maybe if certain parties could program their games correctly I could have enjoyed Mr. Segal’s action-packed POS or WoW’s social life crippling success.

Column: A Review Manifesto

The great wide world of the Internet holds a pure deluge of information and articles and links. And while it’s always good to read the opinions of people who are paid to give you an opinion, I’m also thankful for the Net’s more plebeian voices. Of particular interest are those contained in the comments section following most articles. While most of the time said activity gives me only humor, it also occasions a more introspective thought.

I was a bit skeptical when I found out that the damn good “Call of Duty 4″ would be getting a quickly produced sequel, “Call of Duty 5: World at War,” made by the less-than-stellar Treyarch. The fact that they decided to return to a World War II setting only reinforced this notion, despite the clever manipulated titled. Seriously, why not just call it “Call of Duty 5: Nazis, Just One More Time and Then We Are Done, Promise.” But lo and behold, this article appears, bestowing upon CoD5 a perfect score. My issue is not that Treyarch has managed to produce a superior game (though I remain skeptical until further evidence presents itself). Rather the problem and contradictions implied by the “perfect” 10/10 score, something pointed out by a brave soul in the torrent of comments.

The central fallacy of a flawless score is that it suggests there is no way the product can be improved upon. Most, I think, would agree that “Call of Duty 4″ had everything you could ask for in a shooter. Ah, but was it perfect? Where there not occasionally things that irked, annoyed or frustrated you? That didn’t stop it from being highly enjoyable and an accomplishment in it’s on right. Giving a game a near-perfect 9/10 seems to be saying that if maybe there was just one more gun or one more level or one more gimmick then it would be vaulted to that most coveted of levels. People wonder why games aren’t taken more seriously and I think the anachronistic review system employed by most publications shares some of the blame.

There are some parts of the gaming community who would like to see the industry move past pure entertainment and into art, similar to the way movies and music have one foot in each door. By using such a reductive formula for criticism, the room for growth and expression is inherently stymied. While movie critics may employ a numerical scale, you would be hard-pressed to find a movie critic who would tell you that directors should stop making movies because the perfect one has been made already.

The scale is even furthered narrowed by the fact that since a 10/10 represents such a high threshold of excellence, most publication shun it entirely in order to show their “independence.” So, in the end, you’ve got an 8, which represents “pretty good,” and a 9, which signifies “pretty awesome.” Thus, a full 20 percent is in common use throughout much of the games industry. This practice hurts developers, journalists and consumers alike by sustaining a system riddled with hypocrisy.

This is just a small bit of what can be a much larger argument. The scale also threatens journalistic integrity by creating a glut of games that fall in the 8-10 because a 7 is feared to be a mark of total shit. That’s what a zero is for. Theoretically, a 7 is still above average, and there is nothing wrong with an average game if it’s something dig. If a game has a couple of things you enjoy in its mix, say turn-based strategy, zombies and medieval settings, but only garners mediocre reviews, it’s actually entirely possible that you still might like it.

I believe that a grading system (a la 1up.com) is a better way to rate games. By using pluses and minuses, it offers broader range of opinion while still saving room at either end of the spectrum. If it’s a damn good game that is completely fun and enjoyable slap an A on that sucker and that is simply all you are saying. Barring that, the only recourse I can see is Metacritic. where at least you can get a compilation of reviews instead of being subject to those wild editorial swings between 8 and 9.

In the end, no rating system can be perfect (just ask the ESRB, har har). It’s up to the consumers to take the time to actually read reviews and form opinions for themselves, rather than relying on numerical snap judgments. This also means the professionals on the other side should focus on writing copy that’s compelling enough to merit deeper reading and advance the gaming industry forward.