Van Hemlock.com

Van Hemlock News for July 25th 2010

2010-07-26T22:58:52Z

Van Hemlock News for 25th July 2010

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Limbo

2010-07-23T12:00:48Z

In general I’m in favour of achievements in games. The 360 implementation is good with them feeding into gamerscore, the PS3 version is perhaps more interesting with it feeding into gamer levels and steam has… Well to be brutally honest I’ve never got an achievement in a Steam game.

What I don’t get are the game specific achievements. I’ve been playing Mirror’s Edge on the iPad and it has badges that are just for that game. They unlock wallpapers, which almost makes them useful but when they are just a measure of how well you’re doing in an individual game then they’re not really much more than something like leaderboards. They lose that something that pulls a platform together.

This week on Xbox Live Arcade they released a game called Limbo. It’s a gorgeous black and white indie puzzle game that is well worth a look. Being on Xbox there is a requirement for it though: It has to have achievements.

Xbox live arcade games must have 200points of achievements and since this is a linear puzzle game this does sort of limit your options. “Hurt the spider’s legs with a trap” is fine, but it does sort of tell you how to solve one of the puzzles. It also leads to a bad place which is to have the game throw achievements at you for completing each part of the game. Back when the 360 launched there was a King Kong game to tie in to the film and since the whole concept was new they didn’t really know what to do with them. In this case they dished out all 1000 points for various stages of completion and the game got a reputation for being an easy 1000 points. Which it was. This kind of scheme just doesn’t work; it does bring anything to your game and instead just says that you need to have them in your game and you have no idea how to add them.

Back to Limbo. There isn’t much in the way of self expression in this game as you’re just following a path. There isn’t much you can do that isn’t on that path, that isn’t a puzzle you have to beat, so I can imagine that the conversation as to how those 200 points were to be was quite interesting.

There are two achievements for completing the game. “Where Credit is due” is another usually lazy choice, which is to watch the credits until the end. Since you can only see these by completing the game this is actually the more usual “has won” achievement, but with an added complication of not skipping the credits at the end. They allocated a whole 100 points to this, which is half of their allocation. I think this says a lot about what they were thinking when they were brainstorming what to do.

The next is called “No Point in Dying”, which is 10 points and you get for completing the game in one sitting only having died a maximum of five times. Pretty standard stuff, they can get away with the one sitting part because the game is only a couple of hours long.

There’s only so much you can do with completing the game though, and there are still 90 points to dish out. What they seem to have done is make 10 achievements (two are 5 points) and added hidden objects to collect throughout the world. There would be no reason to collect these normally, they have no effect in the game so their reward is purely gamerscore.

I’ve chatted offline about how a game like Small Worlds (funnily enough) doesn’t need achievements, and in fact would change the entire tone of the game and I suspect the Limbo devs had the same conversations. Achievements must never exist just because they’re there. They’re rewards for doing things and incentive to try things. Complete the game, have a cookie. In the case of Limbo they’re an incentive to explore a bit more than you would with the game designed as it is. They don’t harm the narrative as you don’t know what’s going on anyway and so exploration is effectively what you’re doing anyway. Small Worlds is all about exploration, in fact that’s all there is and so rewarding that just falls into the % completion school of bad achievements.

They could be hidden in hard to reach areas. Again that changes the tone of the game and gives it a new goal. They’ll become the reason to play, the point of the game and the actual point will be missed.

I’m determined to come up with a workable achievement scheme for Small Worlds that’ll actually add to the game as it’ll annoy my Brother in a most delightful way. I’m impressed with how Limbo achieves this, but I’m unsure if I’m closer because of it.

Van Hemlock Episode 112

2010-07-23T08:59:52Z

This week we've been playing Left 4 Dead 2. Will Tim like it with his new found affection for console shooters? Or will the zombie horde defeat us?

You can follow us on Twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute, and that's where you'll find @vanhemlock's friday question.

You can find our site at VanHemlock.com, where we have many interesting posts and an equally interesting forum. You can also add Tim as a friend on Xbox live as Van Hemlock, or Jon as Senyek on xbox, PS3, Steam or Raptr.

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Van Hemlock News for 18th July

2010-07-19T09:22:27Z

Van Hemlock News for 18th July 2010

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PlayStation Plus?

2010-07-18T10:55:02Z

This weekend I ordered PlayStation+, the subscription service from Sony that's like Xbox live, but not quite. Why did I do it? Automatic updates mainly. My biggest complaint about the PS3 is that whenever I want a quick game there will have just been a patch to the OS, or I'll have not played a game like Little Big Planet in a while and it'll download and install excruciatingly slowly while not allowing me to do anything else on my PS3. For me automatic downloads are worth the cost.

Saturday night I buy the thing and set the download of Wipeout HD going as it's bundled in and I never actually grabbed it before. It downloads really slowly of course so off goes the PS3 and I go to bed hopeful that in the morning it will have switched on overnight and downloaded the game.

Cut to Sunday and Wipeout is downloaded. And patching 120mb because of course Sony don't update their master game images with patches. PlayStation+ didn't patch it, which seems like a no-brainer for them decision wise but since I hadn't actually started it maybe it wasn't installed properly or something.

What did get me was that it decided to download two demos over night but didn't manage to finish either. The first was ModNation Racers. Um, I own that game guys. It's on my profile, there is no way that pushing that to me is a good idea, you could have at least looked for save games first.

The second demo? Heavy Rain. I own that game too so the same complaints stand. The really big one though is that I also have the demo already downloaded. It was trying to push me content I already had!

So now I can't trust that they aren't going to keep pushing me content I already have and crush my Internet download limits each month and so automatic downloads gets switched off. There are no controls to say what should or shouldn't be downloaded. Brilliant.

I want to be positive about Sony, I really do. They encourage creativity while Microsoft crush it. It's just that everything that they do is half cocked. Every idea they implement is only half thought out, and then left broken. Trophies get put in, but they don't automatically upload to the servers, you have to do it manually if you want anybody else to see what you've done. Home sits there as a center for abuse and cybering while its potential is untapped. Every time it's the same, they don't improve things they just implement something and move on. Hey, that sounds like CCP.

I wonder how many people with 5gb download caps will buy this thinking it's a good source of getting a game a month and all those annoying patches stream overnight instead of getting in the way when they want to watch a blu-ray. They're screwed.

Sony, don't download content I already have please. Of course that'll never happen.

Van Hemlock Episode 111

2010-07-16T10:07:15Z

This week we've been playing games again, and so we'll tell you all about it.

You can follow us on Twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute, and that's where you'll find @vanhemlock's friday question.

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Casual is as Casual does

2010-07-15T11:00:07Z

I am a gamer. I will play any game that I find fun, and will not play any game that I don’t find fun. I suspect you are the same.

There’s something that annoys me though, and it is casual games. You know the ones, Farmville and the like and things on the Wii. Games that are beneath us and we shouldn’t even grace with the title “game”. They’re toys not games.

This is of course utter bollocks, and that’s what annoys me. A game is a game and just because somebody doesn’t like it doesn’t mean that it isn’t. You can keep adding all the qualifiers to what a game is that you want in order to discount them, but in doing so you start classifying things that are obviously games as something else.

Farmville is the perfect example. You gather crops and build things in order to make your score go up a little bit more. You send out helpful messages that other players can profit from and over time you build up a network of friends who are all working together towards the goal of improving that score.

The complaints are obvious. You’re just chasing a score, where’s the game in that? How do you win? You have to be able to win in order to be a game. Of course gaming started this way, the only goal of Asteroids or Pac Man is to get the highest score possible.

But in Farmville you can’t fail! You can’t die, you can only quit. True, but your crops can wither and die, just because it only sets you back a short while doesn’t mean that isn’t a way to fail, it’s just one that you can always recover from. It’s much like shoving another 10p into an arcade cabinet to keep on playing in fact, but just without all the RMT trading real cash for lives that we had to put up with back in the day.

I will admit to having a slight bias here as my brother made Small Worlds, a small flash game that had all these things said about it and more. All you do in the game is move your character around a landscape exploring, and as you do your world zooms out until you have the whole map onscreen at once. You can’t win beyond having made it through all the maps, you can’t die and there’s not even a score. And yet it’s still a game, it makes you think and that’s the point.

You could add more game-like bits to it if you wanted. A percentage complete number, leader boards for completion times, achievements or hidden collectables but all of those things take away from the whole point of the game. By adding more you end up with less, and miss the point. Be honest, we’ve all played games that have done that. Alan Wake, I’m looking at you with those pointless collectable flasks that didn’t need to be in there.

Does the length of a game matter? Is a five minute blast that you’ll never want to play again mean any less than a hundred hour epic? I don’t think it does beyond value for money as you wouldn’t want to pay £50 for a five minute game, but it doesn’t matter as much for 100 hours. iPhone games are designed to be played in short burst when you have a free moment and something like Doodle Jump isn’t any less fun because of it, it’s just designed to be played differently. This doesn’t make it any less of a game either.

The game that really gets me though is Mario Galaxy. It’s considered a casual game by many despite being a really hardcore platformer. Is it because it’s on the Wii? Is it because it’s accessible? Is it because it’s cute looking? I have no idea, but if you think that’s not a hardcore game I don’t think you’ve played it enough.

When it comes down to it I think there are a couple of simple rules of thumb for writing a game off as casual. The first is having a light graphical style like Mario Galaxy. That’s the kiss of death despite there being a long legacy of hardcore games from back in the time before realistic and gritty graphics were even possible.

The second, and bigger one, is killing. I think if you don’t have any killing or, to a lesser extent, conflict in your game you’re going to get written off very fast. Farmville doesn’t really have any conflict (except against time for crops), Small Worlds doesn’t have any conflict except against the world as you jump your way through it. Asteroids has conflict against, well, asteroids and that that means you need to use a lot more skill as the difficulty ramps up. This is important as the need for skill obviously gives games a more of a long term life than they might have otherwise, but it’s not required. Is skill really what defines a game? I don’t think so because if it is then where do you set the level? If you can cut the first five minutes out of another game that ramps up its difficulty so you only have insanely easy bits then it’s still a game despite loosing the need for skill. A game of solitaire is still a game despite the flat difficulty curve and inability to lose.

Ultimately I think this trying to dismiss games because they’re too simple, short or cute is damaging. We’re all gamers and we’re far too prone to drawing up dividing lines between ourselves as it is. Darkfall players have been actively encouraged to hate World of Warcraft players, non-MMO players think MMO players are weird and waste their time, PC gamers think console gamers are dumbing down the industry, and console gamers think PC gamers are masochists. When it comes down to it whether we’re playing Farmville, Doodle Jump, Final Fantasy or Darkfall we’re all scratching the same itch because we love to play games. Criticising somebody for scratching that itch using Facebook, a DS, the Wii or a mobile phone is at best misguided and at worse elitist. Nobody has the right to tell anybody what they do or don’t enjoy, and for all we know somebody who discovers gaming through Facebook and Farmville may discover that they didn’t know that itch needed scratching and discover a whole new world of games in front of them. Who knows, they may even find that what they really want is some proper interaction and conflict between players and end up in Darkfall, just as I’m sure that some of those WoW tourists that people go on so much about would find if they were encouraged to try the game, just as I’m sure many Darkfall players also play WoW quietly on the side.

Just remember that no matter what you enjoy the important thing is that you enjoy it, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

Can we really take 10 years of these consoles?

2010-07-14T10:27:03Z

All of the games companies keep saying seemingly dumb things. Microsoft and Sony harp on about motion control being the future, everybody except Microsoft harp on about 3D being the future and Microsoft and Sony say that they’re going to keep the current generation of console going for years to come. We know these are dumb, right? So why do they say them?

I have a certain distrust of these 10 year lifecycle statements as popular consoles seem to have a 10 year lifecycle. The PS1 and PS2 both did, but that didn’t stop their replacements being released 5 years into their life. The fact that they are still releasing PS2 games says wonders for the success of that platform, a success that wasn’t totally wiped out by the release of the PS3. In fact for several years the PS2 outsold the PS3 and gave Sony some much needed market share and revenue as the PS3 established itself.

Now everybody is talking about addons to the existing hardware as a way of extending the life of the consoles and they need it. Coincidentally five years into this generation the market isn’t looking healthy. Of course some of this is from the fact that the global economy sort of imploded, but part of it has to be because there isn’t a coincidence that we’ve gone five years between hardware before. That wasn’t an arbitrary number just pulled from the air; these companies knew that they needed new hardware ahead of their rivals and just at the point where their current hardware started to decline. It could be said that Sony misjudged this with the PS3 by releasing a few years early, but it didn’t harm them in the long term and probably actually did them some good.

The whole 10 year lifecycle cannot mean that the hardware isn’t going to be replaced. You just can’t sell a 10 year old console against a PC that is 10 years ahead of it with a straight face, and something like OnLive would be very attractive if the current generation of consoles looked so crappy in comparison with it. Add to that the fact that this generation of consoles can barely manage HD properly, with a very large majority of games this generation not even managing 720p graphics properly let alone 1080p and the future looks doubtful for the 10 year claims.

Of course Sony and Microsoft say motion control will extend this generation. At the same time they announce a range of games that is extremely biased towards the casual players, in fact those players who are getting towards having a Wii for around 5 years maybe? Those people whose CRT TVs need replacing with an HD one and realise that maybe they could do with an HD console as well? There are two options for “core” games for these new controllers. The first is that they’ll come and they know we’ll just buy them if they’re good. This seems plausible to me, we’ll take care of ourselves by building hype and discovering we want it in our own time. We’re year 2-3 buyers in that case, we’re the long tail they need. The other alternative is that there just isn’t a core market because they don’t care about one. They don’t need to care about one. Core gamers are covered by something else.

Is it 3d? 3D has a massive advantage in that if it takes off then it makes our entire back catalogue of games look old. In fact look like they’re from the last generation. This must be a major boon for the publishers and gives the hardware a whole new lifecycle starting from scratch. Of course it doesn’t address the two main problems: aging graphical abilities straining even harder because of 3D and the fact that nobody has a 3D TV. I’m sure 3D TVs will be mainstream one day, but it’ll not be Christmas this year. Or next year. Or the year after. Only when every TV is also 3D in the same way that every TV is now HD will it get the penetration, and the adoption of HD proves this. There are still large numbers of people using an SD CRT who have no desire to upgrade unless their TV breaks and they need a new one. I have several 360/PS3 owning friends who are in this camp, they just don’t want to spend that money on a new TV when it can be spend on better things.

3D won’t extend the lifecycle for at least 3 years, probably longer.

So what about the threats to the lifecycle from other factors?

Apple is a massive threat, each year they release something more powerful and better for games. It’ll not be that many more years until the iPad is as powerful as a 360, certainly within its 10 year lifecycle. Luckily Apple have a terrible reputation for staying on focus with gaming.

OnLive is a massive threat. Hassle free gaming with state of the art PC graphics? Very tempting.

The PC is an even larger threat. PCs are getting more and more stable hardware wise as time goes on and the number of boxes designed to plug into a TV is getting larger too. I can see Steam having an alternate fullscreen TV interface before the consoles see out this lifecycle, and those games will blow the consoles away.

Brand apathy is the biggest threat. When it comes down to it only a couple of games have actually looked better on the PS3 and yet, partially due to the Slim, the console is seen as more powerful than the 360. Sure there may be more power in there, but get away from the Uncharteds of this world and we’re still not seeing it. The slim was a masterstroke by Sony, it reset the expectation timeline for Sony with the customers. All of a sudden this console is now nearly a year old instead of nearly five in the minds of the average buyer who doesn’t already have one. The 360 was looking very long in the tooth until they released their new smaller console. Don’t underestimate the need for people to have the next, big thing and discard something totally serviceable in favour of a new shiny because it’s new. A 10 year old console is still a 10 year old console, even if the games are looking better than ever.

It’s impossible to escape from the conclusion that this whole 10 year lifecycle doesn’t work economically for the hardware. Software yes, people will buy games but after a while everybody who wants one will have a console and those who still might want one (people are still growing up don’t forget) will be able to get really good 2^nd hand deals. High hardware sales aren’t sustainable even if Kinect/Move shift units to the Wii crowd for the next few years. Soon the smaller percentage of people who want to upgrade their Wii will have done so.

The conclusion is inescapable. At the E3 after next Microsoft will announce a new console. Sony have a couple of extra years of sales in them, but both are peaking over the next year going by sales. No amount of motion control will pick up the entire Wii market; there are too many dusty Wiis that haven’t been touched since the Christmas they were brought for that to happen. 3D is too far away to extend a 10 year lifecycle and is much better used for the next generation of hardware.

The thing is that now, more so than at any time in the past, making an upgraded console is easier to design. Up the processor speeds and core count, up the amount of memory and up the power of the GPU. You don’t need any quantum leaps in graphical power such as back when adding texture mapping or HD was big, it’s all a programmable pipeline that the developers can do with what they want. They’ll do the heavy lifting with more complicated scenes, more effects and more shiny and it’ll all work with our current TVs. It’s almost a no-brainer, especially as you can keep backwards compatibility that way if you don’t change your architecture just as PCs have kept their backwards compatibility in fact.

Van Hemlock News for 12th July 2010

2010-07-13T23:54:04Z

A short Van Hemlock News for 12th July 2010 because Blizzard insist on doing interesting things after we decide to take a week off from the news.

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Van Hemlock Episode 110

2010-07-08T21:52:15Z

This week we've mostly been playing the free trial of Darkfall and are reviewing it after playing for a few hours. No, I don't see how this can go wrong at all, why do you ask?

You can follow us on Twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute, and that's where you'll find @vanhemlock's friday question.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it's published each week.

Direct MP3 Download.