Tag: Xbox 360

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Ben Kuchera interviewing the “doctors” at Bioware for the PA Report:

“I just finished an end to end playthrough, for me the ending was the most satisfying of any game I’ve ever played… the decisions you make in this game are epic,” Dr. Muzyka promised. “The team has been planning for this for years, since the beginning of the Mass Effect franchise. Largely the same team, most of the same leads have worked on this for years and years. They’ve thought about [the ending] for years and years. It’s not something they’ve had to solve in a week or a month even, but over the course of five or ten years.”

The time investment in playing the game series hasn’t been as long for me as some as I did not run through the first game until around the launch of the second (after a couple of false starts), but I understand this feeling from the other side. I have been waiting a long time for this story to conclude and I’m happy to read that many of the people making it have been on the same team for even longer.

I asked about the popular fan rumor of a Mass Effect MMO. “Now that we’ve learned MMOs are really easy to make, and simple to run after the fact, we’re on it!”

“When you deliver a game, and you deliver it for a player, you have to capture what they think is the possibility space. You need to let them do everything they think they should do, and you can’t block them from doing anything they think they should be able to do. You have to nail all the features and content that should be in that possibility space.“ He paused for a moment.

“Mass Effect is a big possibility space.”

As interesting as a Mass Effect-based MMO might be, I’m not so sure I want to see it happen. It’s a fascinating universe that I would very much like to continue playing in, but a huge part of the appeal of the series has been the huge amount of player agency afforded by the narrative. Granted, it’s still within the rails of a branching story, but actions that you take as Shepard create pretty big swings in the events that play out, moreso as you get closer to the conclusion.

Part of the structure of an MMO is necessarily that player actions can’t create large changes in the universe (unless you do some sharding of the experiences maybe). Without that kind of agency I’m not sure such a game would really be a Mass Effect.

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Patrick Klepek for Giant Bomb:

Quarrel is a word game (imagine a mix of Risk and Boggle) with a massive problem: an inconsistent, utterly mystifying word filter.

Try typing in “help,” “start,” “hung,” or a variety of so-far unpublished words during an online game on Xbox Live Arcade and prepare to be told, without explanation, the word can’t be used.

You can see why this might be a problem for a word game.

I haven’t had the chance to play Quarrel online yet, but the fact that there’s a word filter at all on a game like Quarrel that depends on playing words in order to win is ridiculous, let alone the fact that the words that are being caught are seemingly completely innocuous.

I also have the Scrabble implementation that is part of Hasbro Family Game Night and have played it a couple of times, but I can’t recall running into a word filter this strict before.

“Microsoft clearly has reasons for censoring the words they do but we haven’t discussed that with them,” said Taylor. “What we’re focused on at the moment is working with Microsoft to provide a suitable solution.”

The “suitable solution” will come in the form of a patch in the near future. Taylor did not have a timetable for this patch, nor would he elaborate on the details of any proposed solution.

“Suffice to say that it will fix the current word filter issue,” he said.

The only acceptable fix in this case would be to remove the word filter entirely so long as the parental controls on the 360 are set to permit non-family friendly content.

I’m not quite sure what the concern is here. Quarrel is rated E, but every game that has an online component has to carry an ESRB notice that states “Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB.” There is a reason for this in that a rating system—however it reviews the content of a game—cannot actively anticipate all actions of a human player.

As an example of how misplaced this word filter is in a game of this type, I can attempt to play the word “start” in a game, and when that fails and I lose the battle (really, you should check out Quarrel, warts and all), I can let fly with an unrestricted string of profanities over the voice chat and there is nothing to stop me.

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Allers

By now a good amount has been written about this “event” by various people.

It boils down to:

  • BioWare/EA releases the Mass Effect 3 voice cast trailer, which includes a bunch of people we expected and one person we didn’t.
  • Said person is Jessica Chobot, who also happens to be a member of the games press who did a preview of Mass Effect 3.
  • Cue crazy conversation tearing up the internets about (choose your topic): pandering to lonely male gamers, publicity stunt casting, conflict of interest, whether previews in game coverage are actual journalism, etc.

So far, the best opinions on this I have read are Susan Arendt’s rundown of the possible reasons for doing so:

I get all that. I don’t like it, but I get it. This is a business, after all, and EA is very, very good at gaming the system to get more of your munney. Which is why I just plain don’t understand the Chobot thing. What does including her hope to achieve? Let’s go through the options.

and Bill Abner’s thoughts on the journalistic integrity of this move or lack thereof:

It’s good to know that Maxim has finally infiltrated the game press and BioWare continues to fuel the repressed sexual angst of both teenagers and lonely adults.  Never fear, now you’ll get a chance to nail a virtual Jessica Chobot! Maybe she’ll even do a Fem-Shep scene! Dream come true, indeed. All of this is so slimy, so juvenile, and so…profitable.

Truth is, I don’t care if Jessica Chobot is in Mass Effect 3 or not. I mean look, if I don’t care that Martin Sheen is in it I really don’t care that someone who licks PSPs makes a cameo.

G4 should care, though.

They should care a lot.

Look. I had been wishing that people would at least give Chobot a break on this. As far as I can tell and understand, she’s actually someone she plays and enjoys playing games and has been a big fan of the Mass Effect series.

If you were provided this opportunity to voice a character in purportedly the last game for a while in one of our favorite series, I’m sure you would jump at the chance (and if not I would hope you would defer so I could do it instead).

BUT—

Then I read this interview puff piece on G4 regarding the casting announcement.

Let me provide you with some choice quotes:

“It’s a dream come true. I’m excited, stoked and honored. I’m seriously in 7th heaven,” Chobot said. “It’s cool just because it’s in a video game, but it’s also for one of my favorite companies of all time, Bioware, and in one of the most epic series of all time, Mass Effect 3.”

This is great. It’s about the kind of quote that I would provide were I in that position. BS detector not engaged yet; condition green.

Chobot says the sight of herself as a virtual character was a bit of a shock at first.  “You’re just not used to seeing yourself like that,” she explained, “I have huge chipmunk cheeks. I hope I don’t look like a chipmunk in real life…and the butt and boobs are impressive. I wish I had boobs like that, and the butt is quite large. I hope my butt is not that big, but I’m happy that everything looks very firm in the game.”

YELLOW ALERT.

This is a grade A humblebrag. It also happens to draw attention to the reason lots of people have been ragging on her for being in the game that I was hoping was just mistaken: “They made me look pretty in the game (except for the big butt) but I’m really not all that pretty” says the former model who had a picture taken suggestively licking a PSP.

But let us go on.

“Last I heard, I am one of the ‘romanceable’ characters in the game,” Chobot said. “I think you can bring me on the Normandy, I think you have the option of kicking me off too. I’m not sure if that’s before or after you romance me, so we might have a Jersey Shore moment. I think you can romance me with a man or a woman. We’ll see when the game comes out,” Chobot added.

When asked whether she planned to “romance” herself, Chobot said, “Oh, I’m gonna give it to me so hard.”

*klaxons blaring*

*exasperated sigh*

I could facepalm on this twenty times and it wouldn’t be enough. It is pandering, juvenile, and embarrassing all at once. I’m not often embarrassed by what happens in the games industry, but this “interview” by a “journalistic outlet” is just plain awful and I’m frightened to think that not only did someone write it, but I have no reason to believe that this is anything other than thinly veiled PR for G4 and someone thought it was a good thing to post to the internet.

As cool and respectful to women as Bioware has been with Mass Effect (female main character option with complete voiceover, strong female character in ME2’s Liara, range of love interests in ME2 for those playing as a female lead), they have done just as much that’s lame (female love interests that all have daddy issues and insecurity, Jack’s “clothes”, Miranda’s gratuitous ass cleavage), so this unfortunately doesn’t really surprise me.

I was hoping to be able to get past this and maybe be pleasantly surprised in a casting choice that strangely made sense in the end, but this promotion in the form of “reporting” just brings into relief the fact that it’s a mark of the immaturity that still plagues the game industry and the media that covers it.

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Nathan Brown for Edge:

“We heard the same justifications for passing on it over and over again ad nauseam. One signal came through clearer than any other among the general noise of reasons why Quarrel wasn’t for them, and that was this: ‘Gamers don’t buy word games’.”

It’s a claim Anderson naturally disputes, and with Quarrel launching today on Xbox Live Arcade, he calls on gamers to buy a copy – “Or four, it’s only 400 MSP” – and to “tell everyone you can about the game. Discovery remains the single biggest challenge facing original games these days by far.”

I plan on proving them wrong later this afternoon (and I already have it on iOS). Join me.

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Quarrel comes out on Xbox Live Arcade today for the measly sum of five whole dollars and it’s pretty safe to say that if you don’t buy it you don’t like words.

It is a great iOS game that inexplicably lacks multiplayer, which is something that they thankfully decided to remedy for the Live Arcade incarnation.

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Tom Bissell for Grantland with a fascinating behind-the-scenes on how Madden is made every year:

Every year for the past three years, key members of Madden NFL’s development team have traveled to the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton, Calif., to meet with John Madden himself at his production company’s office building. There, Coach Madden and the dev team discuss identifiable trends that have emerged in professional football over the past year and spitball ideas about how these trends might be implemented in gameplay. Coach Madden is also briefed on the creative direction and “feature set” of next year’s game. Once that’s done, Coach (as he’s called) and the dev team watch a fully catered afternoon’s worth of professional football games in a large studio space that Coach built after retiring from broadcasting a few years ago.

I—like, I am sure, many others—did not have any idea that Madden was as intricately involved in the development of each game as portrayed in this article.

It’s a great read on how EA Tiburon works to create a fresh take year after year, and some thoughts on the future of the king of sports video games.

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Tom Chick’s quick review of the Genki Bowl VII DLC for Saints Row: The Third has prompted me to write some thoughts I was saving for tomorrow.

He says:

The Genki Bowl DLC is weird for weird’s sake, and frankly, it’s not even that weird. A giant ball of rampaging pink yarn is just an immutable Katamari. The new pink catwomen homies are no stranger than the costumes you’ve probably been wearing all along. A pink convertible with mounted flamethrowers sure would be cool in a game without VTOL cycles, TRON tanks, and a moon buggy.

I want so much to disagree with this, but I have to say that I’m unfortunately disappointed with this first DLC pack in much the same way.

The Third was a great ride and definitely worth my money, and to support Volition for making it I dropped the money on the season pass for the DLC sight-unseen. But Genki Bowl VII is missing almost everything that I liked about the base game itself.

It’s a series of derivative diversions that aren’t as fun as the material that they are supposed to push to the next level of crazy.

Apocalypse Genki is a harder and more confusingly-laid-out version of Super Ethical Reality Climax. Super Ethical PR Opportunity is an Escort mission, just not as difficult or novel. Sexy Kitten Yarngasm is the Tank Mayhem diversion but without a cannon and with hangups on the world geometry. And Sad Panda Skyblazing—though a unique diversion that’s like nothing else in the game—is an exercise in frustration that’s over as soon as you figure it out.

The bonuses for completing these things aren’t even very interesting, especially if you are playing with a character that’s already reached the endgame. There’s little enjoyment to be had in running them co-op (though it does decrease the difficulty a bit). And there’s a moment in the closing cut scene where it’s blatantly obvious that they didn’t record lines with The Third‘s uniformly excellent voice talent.

I had high hopes for the DLC based on my experience with the base game—but it was such an over-the-top piece of performance art that perhaps anything they do at this point is going to fall short.

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I bought the Season Pass for it as soon as it was in my hands, but the first DLC for Saints Row is released next week:

It is known by many names: “The greatest specatacle in sports,” “The most dangerous game,” and “Holy [redacted] I can’t [redacted] believe I [redacted] [redacted].” It is the one, the only, Genkibowl VII!!

As a special surprise, the Professor has allowed his very own Genki Girls to theme the new games after themselves. Sail through the skies with Sad Panda Skyblazing. Fight through dark, shark-infested jungles in Angry Tiger’s Apocalypse Genki. And crush your way to victory in Sexy Kitten Yarngasm. But don’t forget to help Professor Genki maintain his excitement before any public appearances in Super Ethical PR Opportunity.

I am hoping this is exactly the kind of insanity that I think it is going to be.

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I have had a great deal of fun with co-op games in the past few years, with highlights being the Covert Ops stuff in Call of Duty, the Gears of War series in campaign, and most recently with Saints Row: The Third.

When it comes down to it, I find that I would rather play a game that way than just about any other, so my lazyweb request for today:

Recommend to me an Xbox 360 game that has an amazing co-op experience.

Guidelines:

  • Not a Gears, Halo, or CoD title.
  • Not being a first-person shooter makes it better in my eyes but not required.
  • Has to be for Xbox 360.
  • Can’t be 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (already covered and because it’s too awesome for mortal man).

Comment!

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That’s right; I backlogged a game! In between Gears 3 and MW3 and everything.

This is going to be brief, as there’s not a lot to be said that hasn’t been already. The tl;dr version is that if you find a cheap copy of this and you like Mass Effect 2-style RPG action titles but aren’t picky about a riveting story, you should give this some time.

Things I liked:

  • Neat ideas like putting conversation options on a timer to force you to choose
  • Consistent attitude-based conversation options were easy to understand
  • Conversation and mission choices actually had a noticeable effect on the game later
  • Espionage is a great idea for an RPG setting
  • First story twist was delivered early enough that I didn’t see it coming

Things I didn’t so much like:

  • Bad script, disjointed story, good voice talent, but bad voice direction = meh overall story impact
  • Every character is a striking archetype; there are few surprises
  • The main character is barely likable
  • Final story twists come all at once and make the endgame a total disaster
  • Suffers from typical Obsidian half-doneness

Things I hated:

  • Game design lets you make decisions that you might not want without any kind of warning because of bad level design
  • I don’t think I ever saw a character smile, except maybe that one time
  • Combat is uninspiring (even broken a lot of the time) and pistol proficiency is an “I win” button for boss fights
  • It’s an RPG with boss fights
  • Helicopters

Alpha Protocol is an espionage-based RPG, which was enough to get my attention when it was in development (I think this is a logical RPG setting). However, it hit some pretty rough reviews when it was released, so I tabled the idea and certainly wasn’t going to drop $60 on it. I had the opportunity to snag a copy for about $12, and I’m pretty happy I did.

The game does a very few things right but mostly throws out a few promising ideas that don’t seem to have been given enough time to bake. At first I found the game to be really exciting and novel, but as it wore on I realized that it was falling back on old ideas and in the end wasn’t particularly engaging. The characters were memorable enough and the stable of voice actors was pretty great—it’s too bad that the words they said weren’t as memorable, nor was the voice direction solid. A lot of the story came across as flat.

The largest sin that it committed in my eyes was that it tried to take the story threads and characters from the first three missions and then weave them together in the final mission as some kind of cohesive story. It didn’t work and just served to cheapen the impact of the choices that were made earlier. It felt like the writers ran out of ideas and had to stretch beyond their abilities.

That said, I did manage to enjoy it pretty well in spots and put in a couple of pretty long play sessions with it, so something was going right. At less than $20, it’s a decent buy if you like action RPGs. Just don’t expect anything revolutionary. I think it would have been a decent franchise to revisit in a sequel with some additional polish, but as it didn’t sell very well that’s not likely to happen.

It gets a “hm, this was interesting yet flawed” from me. Honorable mention goes to Nolan North’s turn as Steven Heck, which was one of the better parts of the game.