I decided to catch up with Dota 2 during the Bali Major this year. It has been five years since I’ve watched Dota. (It’s been even longer since I played it.) I’ve really been enjoying Dota again. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed.
First, the game has totally changed. I guess it’s normal that an ongoing game changes but the amount of changes that has happened in Dota is staggering.
The biggest change are changes to the map. The lanes are huge now. In the past, the lanes were narrow and they were confined. The trees are much more sparse especially in the jungles.
Another big change is that there is a warp that goes from the off-lane jungle to the safe-lane jungle. I’m trying to understand how the pros are utilizing this warp. It seems like it is used after killing Roshan.
Roshan is another change that has been made. Roshan used to be located in the river but now there are two spots where Roshan spawns in the safe-lanes. I’m still not sure if he spawns in both or if it’s only in one. I’m not an expert and I have done zero research into these changes.
There are also some objective “fountains” located throughout the map. It takes a moment for the hero to do the objective and they get something from the objective. I am not 100% sure how these work.
Gems have also changed a bit. They seem to spawn in the river as they always have but there are some other spawn points.
The last change that I can think of, remember this is coming from a self-proclaimed amateur who has been away from things for some time; there are some new heroes.
It is cool to see new heroes. One of them rolls up into a ball and it’s a swashbuckler. There is a lizard that grabs a hero and slams them into the ground like Hulk did to Loki. There are others but I haven’t gotten a good idea of what powers they have because as I have only been watching streams for about a week.
I’ve been really digging the teams and the casters for the Bali Major. Dota has gone through some tectonic shifts in the last few years not only because of the version upgrades but the community has changed as well.
I feel like the community is strong. Is it as strong as it once was? I don’t think so but I still think that Dota has a strong community and the game is well made enough to withstand the test of time.
The town hall style meeting didn’t only deal with Battlefield 2042 but none of the rest of the news was leaked to my knowledge. The executives didn’t just point out the issues with the game but they also spent time talking about where the game is going and the future of the series. It seems like they still do believe in this iteration of the game and the franchise as a whole which is heartening.
The meat of the leaks all came from the mouth of Laura Miele, EA’s Chief Studios Officer. She pointed out that EA and many instances of hits and misses (we are looking at you Andromeda). She pointed at the launch of Battlefield 2042 as one of the things they can chalk up to a miss.
The Frostbite engine seems to be something that is on the chopping block for the studio as they start moving some development back over to Unreal. Frostbite was the engine that was poised to take EA into the future. It was also one of the reasons they touted for buying DICE. The problem is that Frostbite is an older engine that is notoriously difficult to work with especially for facial reactions that are so important in action games. It works great if you are making games that have gorgeous environments where you are shooting people that are covered nearly head to toe in gear but not so much when you want to see subtle changes in expression.
The Future of Gaming Might Be Going Back to Unreal
Miele commented that the studio basically needed to go back and update the existing Frostbite engine so, according to her, it was like building an engine from the ground up.
Another reason for the subpar launch was the global pandemic which hit during the halfway point in the project. We can all understand why this caused such havoc for the development of the game. Nobody would hold EA to the flame because a global pandemic caused issues for a multinational corporation that needs to share large assets across the world and managing teams across time zones and local laws. There was a lot that went into making this game during that time and we all feel for the team and the hard work that went into making the game that they did. But, players don’t need to forgive management for digging their heels in and deciding not to delay the game, which leads nicely into the final point.
The game had an unprecedented number of bugs. Miele stated that the team got a lot of feedback about bugs and other areas of the game that weren’t up to DICE standards according to players but it seems like they focused on the positive feedback from players who told them “Battlefield is back.” The game ended up releasing with a Day 0 and Day 1 patch but the experience was still too buggy to be considered a 1.0 game.
The final reason she gave for Battlefield 2042’s rocky launch was Halo Infinite. She compared the much anticipated free-to-play shooter to Battlefield 2042 saying, “[Battlefield 2042] was not favorable because Halo Infinite was a very polished title whereas Battlefield 2042 contained bugs and wasn’t as polished.”
Bout to Drop on Some Battlefield Players
I feel like this is a quote that is going to follow her around for a while but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true…mostly. Halo Infinite also had a lot of bugs holding it back but overall it did feel more polished than Battlefield 2042 because of the historic number of bugs in a Battlefield game.
It is totally understandable that a game of this size and scale would have issues being developed in the middle of a pandemic. What is unforgivable is the studio’s decision to hold to their launch date. The executive team at EA could have taken these factors under consideration and delayed the launch of their game. They could have fixed the unprecedented number of bugs. They could have also given their game a little bit of breathing room from the launch of Halo Infinite.
I was really excited for Battlefield 2042 because I haven’t played a Battlefield game since Battlefield 4. When I played the game on my aging PC during the beta tests, not only the bugs but the technical requirements left me struggling with the game even on the lowest settings. I could have played the game on my last generation consoles but that would have been a stunted experience because of the limited player counts.
I did end up playing the game on my PC after the launch for a few hours because I had access because of the 10 hour free trial on Game Pass. While it did play better than during the launch, there were tons of bugs and performance issues that might have been happening because of my PC or because the game itself was buggy so it just turned into a bad experience overall and it soured me on the game. I would like to go back to it at some point in time but being unable to get my hands on a new console or a new GPU at this time also keeps me from going back to check things out.
I hope that EA learns from this experience. I hope that investors learn that bad decisions can be made by teams and executives alike and I think the worst decisions made for Battlefield 2042 were made by the people who sit a long table and not by those who sit in front of computer screens.
Most people who follow games know that Microsoft, the recent apex predator of games, has been on a buying spree. They have been bolstering their portfolio to flesh out what they have to offer for their Game Pass service. In the beginning they started small but in recent months the purchases have been getting bigger and bigger. When it was announced that they had purchased Activision Blizzard to the tune of about $70 billion it gave me pause.
That’s a lot of big names
I love my Xbox and I am a devout Game Pass subscriber but the purchase announced in January made me wonder about the future of the industry. Microsoft just purchased “the” largest or one of the three largest video game publishers in the world. It is akin to Apple purchasing AMD or Intel. It is a huge purchase that has ramifications across the gaming spectrum.
After I heard the news, I wondered if the console wars had effectively been turned into a battle of East vs. West. Microsoft is working hard to gobble up all of the western developers in the Americas and Europe. Sony and Nintendo are left in Japan trying to hobble to keep up. I’m sure that Nintendo, as always, will be able to sit in their corner and bring in a tidy profit for their shareholders but Sony, who has been the king for so long, has been lagging behind recently. Their subscription service, while amazing in this author’s opinion, just can’t hold a candle to Xbox’s Game Pass.
It was announced this week that Sony had acquired Bungie but Bungie would continue to make games for all platforms. There are rumors that Sony has some other acquisitions that it wants to proceed with in the coming months. If this is true, can Sony keep up with Microsoft. Who knows?
It’s a start
I think the first thing Sony needs to do is get as many people as possible moved over to their PlayStation Now service. Microsoft did this by combining their Xbox Live service and their Game Pass service into a combo and then throwing the Xbox Live service out the window. PlayStation needs to look into doing the same thing with their services.
I pay for both PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now. I picked up PlayStation Now a few years ago on sale at a criminally low price so I am set up with that service for the next few years. I think for PlayStation 5 customers they need to get them started on a combined service as soon as possible. The fact is that people don’t want to be double billed by a company for something that they could provide for one price. And Microsoft proved that it doesn’t even matter if that price is high than they were originally paying, as long as the value is there.
Sony has been making some small acquisitions but overall Sony, not PlayStation, as a company just can’t compete because it’s business isn’t as healthy as Microsoft’s overall. Many of the various departments within Sony are not holding up against competitors which means that the PlayStation division doesn’t have as much money to throw at growing their business.
How will Sony keep up with Microsoft?
I believe that Japanese companies will band together to support Sony as a way to fend off Microsoft’s encroachment into their territory. Microsoft has always had a hell of a time getting the Xbox to make any headway in Japan and even with Game Pass, Japanese gamers haven’t gotten on board with the insane value that Game Pass provides. (Japanese Netflix also lags behind America because that isn’t how Japan watches TV usually.)
The Bungie acquisition looks good on paper to shareholder but overall it doesn’t give me hope that Sony is taking these moves by Microsoft as seriously as they need to be. I want to see a strong video game industry and moving towards services instead of boxes is where the industry is heading without question. We need Sony to step it up and become the HBO Max of video game services to Microsoft’s Netflix to keep this whole thing interesting. Right now Sony is looking more like Crackle. If that reference is still applicable in this day and age.
The news was posted to Twitter by 343’s head of design Jerry Hook. He announced there would be other changes to the store besides price reductions, like “providing stronger values in our bundles, starting to put individual items outside of bundles, and more.”
We’ve been monitoring the discussions on the Shop, bundles, and pricing closely since launch. Using data and community feedback, we’re going to begin rolling out changes to how we package and price items in @Halo Infinite – and it all starts next week.
I was excited to see that they will be splitting items from the bundles so each item can be purchased individually. I think this is a great addition because I bought the cat bundle a few weeks ago and I wasn’t happy with the armor coloring that came with it. I mainly wanted the cat ears but the gun charms were also good too. It’s good that they are going to give the player more ways to purchase stuff in the store.
Hook added, “We will be trying new things throughout the rest of the season so that we can continue to learn and improve for the future.”
It is heartening that the team at 343 are using this first season as a sort of beta period. It’s good that they are throwing somethings at the wall to see what sticks. It is a difficult balance for any team because the community wants everything for free but the dev team and their publisher want to try and make some money off of the whole endeavor.
Later in the replies to the tweet, a user mentioned that 343 wouldn’t need to lower prices if there were a free way to earn the currency used in the in-game store. Hook replied that the studio should be looking into doing both.
I have never felt that in-game cosmetics needed to be cheaper because they just aren’t that important to me. I have always played service based games with the idea that I am never going to have everything.
I was recently in the Halo Discord and this debate was raging. There were people speaking to both sides of the issue but it’s always hard to debate against the idea that everything should be free all the time.
I hope that 343 is able to keep tweaking things to keep people interested in their game. I have been having an awesome time with the game. Like most people, I have some issues but overall I have been having a lot of fun playing Halo again.
Amy Hennig and Jade Raymond are two of the biggest names in modern storytelling. They have been behind some of the biggest original IPs to come out of video games in the last 20 years. So, when they have a talk, you listen.
Hennig says, rightly so, that there is no one-size-fits-all philosophy for storytelling in games. She spend a lot of this interview reinforcing that idea. She brings up games like Journey, Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus as stories that tell a structured story but have a lot of freedom for the player to move around and make their own stories in the quiet moments of the game. These kinds of game also leave the player open for interpretation – the story isn’t being spoon fed to the player. She followed this with a good metaphor that I agree with completely.
One form of interactivity is interpretation. I find poems and lyrics more interactive than a non-fiction book, because I’m actively engaged in interpreting that experience through the collision of metaphor and information. Games are like that. If you lead the player, even at the level of a linear-authored story that allows room for interpretation, it’s already more interactive in some way. The more austere a story is, like Journey, it leaves even more room for a player. But it doesn’t mean that anywhere else on that spectrum of authorship is right or wrong. It’s just a different genre.
I couldn’t agree with this more. I like reading non-fiction stories but there is something about non-fiction that has always felt less interactive than fiction or poetry for me. Hennig makes a great point that in non-fiction the story is told as fact and it happened to that person. The facts are presented and evidence is presented on why the events happened. In poetry and fiction, the same is true but there is imagination that comes in to fill in parts of the narrative. The reader tends to fill in the blanks with their own imagination.
They both agree that genre plays a big part in the storytelling of a game. Uncharted is a pulpy action game so it makes sense that Drake would be a gun slinging bad-boy, much like Indiana Jones. Games like Uncharted, Journey, and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order all work because the developers know their genre and keep to it.
The two of them agree that leaving room for interpretation is important as well as a well-crafted story. Raymond mentions that different players want different things. Later Hennig says, “We hear that anecdotally a lot. It’s like what we said – different tastes for different players. Not everybody likes the same movies.” Some want hugely open stories that they can help create themselves and other players don’t – they may feel paralyzed by the openness. They both agree that it’s a fine-line and they are continually trying to find the best way to do it.
I love when creative people have the confidence to say, “Hey, maybe what I made isn’t for you. I’m sorry but I’m also not going to change it to fit your tastes.” Video games have especially become susceptible to this because everything is focus grouped to death which waters down the original artistic intent (see Hideo Kojima for an example where this hasn’t happened).
Hennig brings up the role cinematics play in games and how they should be a treat for the player. Sometimes cinematics are used as a way to show off the graphical power of a game because the gameplay moments don’t look as interesting.
I get just as annoyed as anyone by cinematics if they’re bad. I’m tapping the button trying to get past it too. But if it’s a well-told story and I’m invested in the characters and why they’re doing what they’re doing, I feel like it’s a reward for the work I did to get to that cinematic.
In games like Uncharted or The Last of Us, I’ve always felt rewarded by the cinematics especially after a tricky firefight or something that I’ve beat my head against for a few tries. Once I’ve conquered that part, a well done cinematic experience gives me time to relax and reflect about the story after doing something difficult in game.
One of the best parts of gaming is the water-cooler experience. When you are playing the same game as someone else, unlike a movie or book, a lot of times you are talking about events that happened to your character because of a hundred if-than statements have coalesced and something happens to you that didn’t happen to your friend. In this moment, you are participating in the story. You are changing it and giving it ownership. This is an important part of storytelling that they recognize.
Later in the conversation they talk about the dissonance between the stories told in the cutscenes, where a lot of character building is done, and the action between those cutscenes – usually shooting stuff. This is a problem with Uncharted and Tomb Raider, which they mention in the article. Raymond mentions how hard it is to tackle this issue, “That’s always the dichotomy that I feel like would be easy to fix. But no one’s ever done it very well.” It takes the player out of the story when a good person turns into a killing machine all for the sake of making a standard action game with gun combat. It’s good to know that two of the best storytellers in games are thinking about how to correct this issue.
The interviewer brings up The Last of Us as an example where the killing matches the tone of the game. He says it feels like “every single fight is a life and death struggle. It matches.” Hennig agrees and bring it back to what they said about genre and how genre is important in these decisions. She points out that there isn’t really a good answer right now but it’s something that they, as creators, are aware of and want to try and improve upon. I’m glad to hear that there are creators that aren’t satisfied with the status-quo. It’s good to know that they want to get to the point where we can enjoy a game like Tomb Raider or Uncharted and not feel like a mass murderer after the credits roll.
Raymond has an interesting anecdote about her time working on The Sims. She mentions that when she was at EA working on that game, the team did a lot of research into how players where playing the game and why they were making those choices. She mentions that some people were playing the game to “role-play American life and American values.” I find this interesting but it makes sense to me. America is definitely the dominant culture in games and I haven’t thought much about how that is seen by non-American players. Of course, I know that there is a lot of discussion about the need for more variety in the stories told in gaming. I love watching foreign TV and films because it gives me a glimpse into being a part of a different culture. It is important to see media from one’s own culture but it is also important to feel like an outsider sometimes as well.
At the end of the article, the talk moves to the Star Wars projects. Hennig does most of the talking during this part and Raymond is quiet throughout. Hennig talks about enjoying the constraints of working in another person’s playground. The universe of Star Wars is huge but there is a lot of room to move around. She is a huge fan of Star Wars and she seems excited to make something unique within that world. She mentions that writing on a blank slate can be paralyzing at times and that writing a story within the Star Wars framework is exciting. She pushes back on the idea that working with Disney, the Star Wars people, and EA is like having too many people in the kitchen. It seems like she enjoys that kind of collaboration and we can see that with her new role in Hollywood she moved even farther toward that kind of work.
I found this interview very interesting as a writer and as a person interested in storytelling in general. I have always loved video games and have always believed myself to be more interested in the stories of the games than the actual gameplay. It’s great to hear two of the principal creative minds in the industry talk about what they do and how much hope they have for the genre going forward.
I’m not really sure how to respond to this article about GameStop employees having Thanksgiving off. GameStop is just follow the lead of retailers like Target and Wal-Mart but they are in a very different position than those other retailers. I think it is a smart thing to do but it’s a complicated decision for all involved.
Come back tomorrow
GameStop has been at the precipice of bankruptcy for a few years now. It seems like a month doesn’t go by without some news snippet about them shutting down stores or laying off workers. For GameStop, the business, it is not good news that they will have to delay their door-buster sales for a day.
Talk about super spreaders
When I think about the workers, it’s a different story. With the threat of Covid 19, many workers are worried about their safety and the safety of their family members. So, taking one of the busiest days of the year off is a responsible thing to do for the health of employees and customers alike.
I’m sure there are a lot of GameStop employees who love the idea of spending time with their family on Thanksgiving or even just having a day off to play games. But, unlike salaried employees, GameStop employees at stores don’t get paid holidays. For these people, who are living paycheck to paycheck, they are losing a day of work. Worse yet they are losing a day where they would have been paid time-and-a-half. That is a significant loss to their paychecks.
It is a complicated issue and there are a lot of reason why closing the stores outweigh the reasons for keeping them open. At least we know there will be more people online to play games with on Thanksgiving, unless some asshats plan a DDoS attack on that day.
For those of us who have never been fans of the cross-media bar, it seems we will have to continue to live with it for the time being. I do like that they have split the games and media into two different realms. I always thought the apps area on the PS4 wasn’t very well planned out and slow.
Cards are the new hottness
The biggest feature that they talked about were the cards. The cards look really helpful. I love the idea of including time to completion on different activities in game. These companies are compiling infinite amounts of data on how we as players play, I am happy that they are now turning that data into something that is useful to us.
The potential of including guides from developers is huge. I’m not sure if this is something developers will need to put together themselves or if they could just use the information from the community. I’m sure that would take the pressure off of the developers and allow the community to make their own guides. People could up-vote the most helpful guides and those would be the featured guides. I’m sure there is potential for penises which may be the reason for making this a walled garden. I worry that if it’s just left up to the developers to implement these guides that the feature will be a wasteland before too long.
The sharing functionality hasn’t changed that much at first glance. I’m sure that I will use it about as much as I use it now.
I am glad that they are including voice support in the UX with a microphone in the controller. I use voice support on my phone and it has become invaluable so I can see how it could increase my use of the message system in the PlayStation community.
PlayStation will include the ability to pin media to corners of the players screen so they can watch their friends streams. The Xbox One included the One Guide which allowed players to view Netflix or other apps in a small window on one end of the screen.
White is not the new black
Sony has revealed the last piece of the puzzle and I think convinced a lot of people to make a PlayStation purchase. The new UX has plenty of other secrets for us but we’ll probably have to wait for November 12th when the PlayStation 5 debuts.
It is sad that I find a person taking responsibility for making a mistake newsworthy but the fact is that in our increasingly selfish society it is newsworthy.
Pokeprincxss, who has rebranded to Digitalprincxss, has changed her handle, taken down merchandise that infringes upon Nintendo intellectual property, started paying back the money she has already made off her merch, and taken responsibility for having made a mistake.
We live in a society where businesses and people don’t take responsibility for anything they have done; whether it is pumping prescription drugs into every small town across the country, poisoning the water of a whole city, or having a hit and run with a small child. It’s not a new thing that people don’t want to take responsibility for that which may get them into trouble but we also don’t see very many people or businesses taking responsibility for their actions.
Nintendo issued her a cease and desist order and I’m sure she has been able to work with them to figure out the best way to correct this mistake. It is the use of the word mistake that makes me so proud that she has done this.
Speaking with Kotaku, she adds “I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to play the victim in the situation, and only hope to be somebody people can learn from and not make the same mistakes I did.”
I’m sure she has been financially hurt by this but it may also bring more people to her TikTok and OnlyFans pages. I hope Digitalprincxss is able to turn this into something good for herself because in my opinion she needs to be praised.
I’m a little late to the Parsec party it seems. I just heard about this service recently and I tried it out this weekend and I’m impressed with what I saw. By all accounts, it seems like they have done the impossible and brought latency down to an almost imperceptible number for both users and game creators. Parsec might be the key to making cloud gaming mainstream.
One night while on a hacker forum, Parsec’s founder learned about a new way of bringing down latency by using only the GPU. They set out to try it themselves. In the beginning, the latency was still not good enough for twitch shooters and fighting games but as they continued to work on it and were able to get the latency down to under 10/ms. Of course, once we start adding in networks, home routers, and so many other kinds of things that number doesn’t stay that low but it seems that Parsec is the real deal and they have made something that works right now. Video game developers started taking notice of Parsec because of what they have been able to produce.
Cloud gaming is here to stay. It seems like every company is stepping into the ring to show off a bit of what they have in store. Google’s Stadia didn’t start well but cloud gaming isn’t something that we need right now, it’s something we’ll need in a few years and companies need to be getting it right for when that happens.
Amazon Luna is poised to launch soon and I’m sure that they are watching this very closely since Parsec is using Amazon Web Services to host their technology. Microsoft has X-Cloud and PlayStation has their PlayStation Now (Gaikai) service. Each of those companies may be wondering if Parsec can make the same magic happen using Microsoft Azure. Both of those services are using Azure for their cloud based services.
Parsec has split their business two ways that may be very beneficial. First, they are going after the content producers like Ubisoft to show off how those companies can’t live without Parsec. Game makers can add Parsec’s SDK to their games. Second, they are also going after the users, people playing at home with their friends, right now with their app. Video game players can use that app to play in a lag-free environment with friends or even with matched players.
The app gives players a way to play co-op games with very low latency. One person starts a game as a host and then someone joins that game. I tried the service out and here is what I have to report.
I tried running Burnout Paradise from my friend’s computer. I live in Japan and he lives in Omaha, Nebraska. The video had a lot of artifacting, the audio levels were going in and out at a specific interval of every second or so, and the gameplay was perceptively lagged. I ended up quitting pretty quickly after having gotten it booted up because it wasn’t a great experience.
The next game that I tried was King of Fighters. This time I started it up and let my friend share with me. We were both able to get things running and he said that the game did not look bad on his end. The lag was a lot better for that game.
I will say that I have a 2GB connection and he has a 500mb connection. There was also an ocean of distance between us and have the distance across the United States. But, after factoring all of that nonsense in I still think that Parsec has done something amazing for streaming. I will do some more testing this week and I’ll either update this article or write another one with my thoughts on the service.
The name Parsec is being spoken with near-godlike reverence when it comes to playing games online. That means whenever one of these companies ends up swooping up Parsec, that company is going to be purchasing some very good word-of-mouth from users but also names like Ubisoft, Samsung, and HP who have also used their technology. I’m excited to see how fast cloud gaming can become and it looks like Parsec might be one of the companies who brings us to the finish line.
SNK announced that it would be adding to it’s stable of NeoGeo Pocket Color games on the Switch. At the end of April they made SNK Gals’ Fighters the first game in their new line of emulated NeoGeo Pocket Color games for the Nintendo Switch. The new product line is called NEOGEO POCKET COLOR SELECTION.
SNK announced that two new games would be coming this summer. King of Fighters R-2 and Samurai Showdown 2 will be added to NEOGEO POCKET COLOR SELECTION.
Samurai Showdown 2 was already given away to some people who purchased the new retail Samurai Showdown game for the Switch. This summer everyone will have the opportunity to get their hands on that game.
Some players will remember King of Fighters R-2 for it’s connection with the Dreamcast. The NeoGeo Pocket Color could be linked with the Dreamcast using a special cable for use in King of Fighters ’99 Dream Match for the Dreamcast. A novelty for the time and a peculiarity even now.
SNK Gals’ Fighters was released on the Nintendo eShop for $7.99 so we can expect similar prices for the KoF R2 and Samurai Showdown 2.
The games will also feature local co-op play in both docked and undocked modes.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons has taken over my life. Like many people, it could not have come at more perfect time. I have not been trying to game the systems, like so many people who have been writing articles online. I have just been taking it at my own pace.
Enjoy!
マイペース (My pace) This is a Japanese gairaigo. Gairaigo are loan words from other languages so of which may or may not be grammatically correct or recognizable in that language. An American would never say, “I did it my pace.” But, in Japanes this is something that people say on a daily basis. I guess the English dictionary form of this isn’t too far off. We would probably say, “taking/doing something at one’s own pace.” I’m playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons at my own pace.
I bring all of this up because I have been playing Animal Crossing in Japanese.
I first started playing it in Japanese with Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3DS. I got that game as a going away present from my supervisor when I left the JET Program, a program for English teachers in Japan.
It’s been seven years!
Most schools will spend hundreds of dollars on a bouquet of flowers and some other knick-knack that is related to Japanese culture. Most of it ends up in a garbage pile or stuffed into some box in so many mothers’ basements around the world.
This illustrates the unique relationship I had with my supervisor. He was one of my best friends. We kept in contact with each other, until he died suddenly the year after I returned from Japan.
I spent three years back in American and it took three years and a terrible earthquake in Kumamoto for me to realize that I felt more at home in Japan than in America. (Having an asshole as president helped me make the final decision.)
Kumamoto Castle After the Earthquake
During those three years I played a lot of Animal Crossing: New Leaf and I felt my Japanese improve, or at least it didn’t dwindle away like so many other people who shared my experience.
I came back to Japan and I have been very happy ever since. I’ve gotten married, had a baby, and started working more on my website and my writing.
Last month Animal Crossing: New Horizons debuted on the Nintendo Switch. I pulled out my 3DS, after mixing up the release dates, and started playing New Leaf after a long absense. At that time, I realized that I had played New Leaf off-and-on for seven years.
When I finally was able to access Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I started my town. I purchased the game on the American store because Japanese games are more expensive than games in America. (We are overdue to increase the price of games but I’ll take advantage of the cheaper price while I can.)
I started the game in English with every intention of making a Japanese island as well.
I put in 10 hours or so in English then went to start an island in Japanese. I switched my system language, I booted up the game, and I realized that my Japanese account would only be joining the island I already made in English.
I have seen a lot of articles written about how Nintendo chose to handle the issue of multiple accounts on a single Switch. I don’t like it anymore than anybody else but this is how it was on 3DS and it doesn’t really surprise me that they handled it the same way. (It’s just one more bullet-point on the list of things Nintendo doesn’t get about modern gaming.)
Once I realized that my island would be named in English, the main account on this game would be named in English, and who knows what else that might affect down the road, I decided to start over.
Baby it’s cold outside.
I immediately cleared my save data and started all over again. I named my island in Japanese, I named my character in Japanese (with a small mistake that I’ll have to live with), and I feel some much better now that everything is back to the way it should be – for me.
I feel much more comfortable playing Animal Crossing in Japanese. I learn bugs, fish, and dinosaur names and information in Japanese. The Japanese used in game is a good mix of language used so children can understand, more advanced language for adults, and dialects used in different parts of Japan that aren’t so thick that they are unintelligible.
I understand almost everything in Japanese but I am learning everyday as well. In this way, Animal Crossing isn’t just a game about daily life. It is so much more.
It is a learning tool for the culture than I have chosen over my own. It helps me feel more at home in a place where I feel out of place sometimes. It is a safe and comfortable place to hide away at this scary time in world history.
Study with My Pace!
I hope other people use Animal Crossing in this same way. I’m an evangelist for playing it my pace. Don’t let this game become another game that you try to squeeze everything out of and put the game case on the pile of game you’ve “conquered.” Use it as a way to explore a new world in a new language. Take it at your own “my pace.”
I don’t love Bunny Day but I couldn’t disagree more with the opinions in this Kotaku article. This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this kind of thinking but it bristles me when I do see it. People who agree with these kind of thinking have missed the point of Animal Crossing.
The author of the article touches upon many things that I’ve heard about Animal Crossing for years. I don’t agree with most of the opinions espoused therein. I do agree with a couple of them. I agree that Zipper is creepy but he is creepy in a very cute, Nintendo way; like Tingle. I also agree that the Bunny Day items suck but I understand that is subjective.
I think the biggest issue I have is with how people who have this mindset are playing Animal Crossing. (I know that we should never be critical of other peoples play styles when it comes to games but, like griefing, there are some play styles that should be criticized.)
Animal Crossing isn’t meant to be played 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until everything is done in the game. (I think this is why Nintendo has always been against achievements in their games. They affect the way that people play games.) Many people in the games industry and many avid gamers have a hard time not playing games until completion and then moving on to the next game. For most games this is a solid way of playing things; beeline through the story and move on to the next thing.
Animal Crossing is different. It is a daily experience and it’s meant to be played at a leisurely pace for about an hour or so per day or a few hours per week.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been out for just over two weeks and the author of the Kotaku article complained,
I was so happy for new fish to show up in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I was tired of catching the same things every time I played. But right as the game cycled out some old fish and added some new fish to catch, Bunny Day happened. And now all I catch is eggs. I hate the eggs.
It’s true that the player will catch many of the same fish but those fish are meant to be sold to give the player money to buy things from the store or the ATM. I’m still finding new things everyday that I play and I have put in a lot of hours into this game. So, it seems to me that people who play in a completionist fashion might be putting too much time into this one game. Do something else for a while.
The article’s first point that there are too many eggs might be true but they can be sold just like the fish mentioned above. Everything is meant to be collected and sold in this game. New Horizons hammers this point home by adding daily furniture items that can be sold at Nook’s Cranny for double their normal price. I never used to sell furniture but I find myself selling it now to supplement my ever growing loan.
I agree that the Bunny Day furniture is terrible. The aesthetics are not something that appeal to me but I’m sure, for some people, the same might be true for Christmas and still some others may love these pastel colored egg themed furniture items.
I look at the Bunny Day furniture as just items on a checklist and most of Animal Crossing is a game of checking items off a list. So, in that case, I enjoy just checking the items off my list and shoving them in my storage. The items could also be sold to fund better housing or items to put in one’s house.
I agree with the last point that Bunny Day isn’t optional and it might be good to give the player the choice to opt-out but that isn’t the game that Nintendo made.
My recommendation to people who have issues with AC would be to not play it so much – or take a break. This is true of everything in life. Instead of voraciously playing the game for hours and hours everyday to be able to place the box on a pile of completed games, come back to it in a week once this event is over.
Relaaaaaaxxxx!
Animal Crossing is a game that should be enjoyed in small bursts daily or even weekly for years on end. I’ve been playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf for seven years. I go through fits and starts with that game and seasons that I’ve missed out on I’ve come back to in the next year – that is the game that Nintendo made.
The most telling statement that the author is playing this game too much is when they wrote,
My biggest problem with Bunny Day is that I’m forced to celebrate it.
Nobody is forcing you to do anything!
I’m all for giving players more options but I’m more for artistic expression. Some people may have wanted Moby Dick to die but that isn’ t the book that Melville wrote.
The Game Nintendo Made
Nintendo has chosen to make a game that teaches players that life is about enjoying our surroundings. They want their players to learn that putting in work will reap rewards. They even used the now jobless Resetti to teach the player that cheating the system by moving the clock forwards and backwards, in an effort to get everything and toss the game on a pile, ruins the artistic intent of the game. It cheats the player out of learning the lesson that the artists at Nintendo are trying to teach us.
It’s okay to miss some things. They might come back later. They might not. And, that is okay. Put the game down. Go do something else. Everything doesn’t need to be obtainable and checked off a list right this instant. Everything doesn’t need to be done in a way that satisfies everybody. It just needs to be fun and it should teach us something and Animal Crossing succeeds in doing just that.
I guess I would just like to remind these players that there isn’t a tiny bow that needs to be placed on this game before adding it to a stack of “finished” games. That is what Nintendo is trying to teach us through their art. That is the the game they made.
I spent a portion of my night going down a Wikipedia hole. I started by looking into Woah Dave! I really enjoyed that game. I got it in a Humble Bundle of Wii U and 3DS games. I then checked on the developer of that game Choice Provisions (formerly known as Gaijin Games). I learned that they are the people behind the Bit.Trip series which made a lot of sense. I also saw that one of their first games was an iPhone/iPad game that was also ported to Wii Ware called Lilt Line.
I don’t have an iPhone or an iPad and, as we all know, Nintendo has shuttered the Wii Shop forever. This put me in a bad position because I would like to play this game but there is nothing that I could play it on. Who knows if it is even still compatible with modern Apple devices?
The game is a very straight-forward arcade game. The player tilts their phone or Wii-mote with the on-screen line. The line will travel through zones where the player is tasked with pushing a button in time with an excellent soundtrack done by 16bit. All of this seemed like a really fun way to spend a few hours and throw down a few bucks to support the developer of this game.
At first, I started to research if this could be played on the Dolphin emulator. It looks like it can be done. I could go out and buy an iPhone or an iPad to play this game but that isn’t really financially feasible. So, I’m stuck between a rock and hard place…for pirates.
I did find a Let’s Play on YouTube and decided that that was probably the easiest way to see what this game is all about. I lucked out with this Let’s Play too because the person does no commentary over the video which means that I am able to get a good idea what the soundtrack, the thing I was most interested in, is all about.
I really liked this track.
But, some of the other tracks were really well done as well. This one has some real insanity to it that I really enjoyed.
I guess I was satisfied this time after finding this Let’s Play but I decided to write this blog because it is one more instance of the need for game preservation. I am a staunch defender of the people out there who are doing the work to make sure these small titles are preserved for people to find years from now. I hope that people find this blog and hopefully remember this game or hear about it for the first time and do some digging themselves.
I got my first look at Quantic Dream’s new noir cyberpunk game Detroit: Become Human at this year’s E3. The first thing that caught my eye, like all Quantic Dream games, was how gorgeous everything in the game looks. But, more so than any other game by this studio, Detroit: Become Human has a story that is full tilt centered at me as a player. While I’m not sure if this game is full-on cyberpunk, the game looks like it takes place in a hyper-connected future Detroit that will most likely be run by the same mega-corporation who creates these androids.
I have played every Quantic Dream game and, while each one is sublime in the visuals department, they usually all have some kind of issue with plot or playability. I enjoyed Heavy Rain but, while the story had a good noir style feel to it, it felt like more than any other Quantic Dream game that it needed to be played multiple times to get the most out of the story and I wasn’t interested in playing it again after my first time. Beyond: Two Souls had some really tense moments but I thought the overall plot of the game was stupid. It always seemed like Beyond was a game that, when the studio heard the original pitch, the team members should have pipped up and asked a lot more questions about how the mechanics of soul and human are going to keep the player interested for 20-some hours.
The story of each game has interesting moments but David Cage, the lead writer on all of these games, probably wants to be a movie director and he doesn’t realize that keeping an audience’s attention for 20 plus hours is much more difficult than doing so for two hours. Hideo Kojima, another game producer who wants more than anything to be in Hollywood, at least has been working in the medium long enough to understand that longer games and franchises need to be paced in a very different way than movies.
As for now, we know that the game will feature multiple playable characters so the two characters that we know of right now, Kara and Connor, might die during a playthrough and that might be the end of their part in the story. The developers have talked about how the game will not have a “game over” screen.
Kara is a newly created android who escaped the production line and is trying to figure out her place in the world. The world of Detroit is a magnification of what it is like today; a city that has largely died because of it’s reliance on the very machines that it once created. Androids do everything in this new world and humans and androids alike are trying to figure out how we fit into this new world.
Connor, on the other side of the fight, is an android working to try and recapture those androids who have gone rouge. We see in the E3 demo that Connor tells the fugitive android that it is their job to serve. I am sure that Kara and Connor will meet at some point during the game or at least in some timeline.
The stories of robots/androids and their creators have captivated audiences for decades. It is a real issue that people need to start thinking about but I am worried about Mr. Cage’s ability to address this topic in this very fractured storytelling method that he has been curating over the last two decades in France.
I am excited to play Detroit: Become Human but I have also been excited about each and every one of Quantic Dream’s games. Much like, Peter Molyneux, I think David Cage tends to over-sell what he can actually accomplish.
I’ve been making my way through old Famitsu magazines that I’ve bought and I’m going to start translating some of the articles here.
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There hasn’t been a “Double Platinum Prize” since 2011. At this year’s PlayStation Awards the gorgeous “Double Platinum Prize” and “Platinum Prize” will be awarded. Let’s see what kind of event took place.
November 30 – Shinagawa, Tokyo – At this year’s PlayStation Awards, many video game creators and people involved with the video game industry came together for this event. The PlayStation debuted in 1994 and since the following year there has been a PlayStation Awards ceremony in Japan. This is the 23rd year for this show. It’s been established that at the end of the year there will be an awards show. As always, Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan Asia wants to recognize the biggest hits for PlayStation in the region but also show off the fantastic line-up of PlayStation 4 games. The 2011 “Quadruple Platinum Prize” for Monster Hunter Portable 3rd which has become the “Double Platinum Prize” has finally returned to the stage. This year 24 games have been awarded 34 different prizes.
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The Double Platinum Prize (over 2 million sold) winner was Minecraft. Paddy Burns CEO of 4J Studios and Noma Yutaka senior producer at Microsoft Japan were on hand to accept.
The Platinum Prize (over 1 million sold) winners were Grand Theft Auto V, Final Fantasy XV, and Dragon Quest XI: Echos of an Elusive Age. Rockstar games general manager of Rockstar international Neil Stephen showed up for GTAV. Director of Square-Enix Tabata Hajime and producer at Square-Enix Hashimoto Shinji accepted for Final Fantasy XV. Game designer and scenario writer Hori Yuji, Square-Enix director Uchigawa Takeshi, and Square-Enix producer Okamoto Hokuto received the award for Dragon Quest XI.
The Gold Prize (over 500 thousand sold) winners were Uncharted Collection, Rainbow Six: Siege, FIFA 17, Battlefield 1, Call of Duty: Infinite Warefare, Yakuza 6, Resident Evil 7, Nioh, Nier:Automata, Horizon Zero Dawn, and FIFA 18
The PlayStation Network Awards (which are the top three sellers between Oct. 1, 2016 and Sept. 30, 2017) winners were Phantasy Star Online 2, Rainbow Six: Siege, and FIFA 17.
The PlayStation VR prize (top three sellers between the same dates above) were Resident Evil 7, Farpoint, and Summer Lesson: Allison Snow.
The Indie(s) and Developer prize (top three sellers between the same dates above) Fushigi no Gensokyo TOD Reloaded, 3on3 FreeStyle, and UNDERTALE.
The Users’ Choice prizes went to Battlefield 1, Final Fantasy XV, Resident Evil 7, Nioh, Nier:Automata, Horizon Zero Dawn, Persona 5, Ys 8: Lacrimosa of DANA, Dragon Quest XI, and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
I have been playing a lot of mobile games recently. I live in Japan and I have an hour commute to and from work everyday. I have been trying to put that time to use by delving into the mobile game scene. I’ve never really been a person who plays a lot of phone games. I love mobile games, don’t get me wrong. I have have a Game Boy since the original debuted and I have had a Nintendo portable in my bag ever since that time but, when phones started to flex their own mobile game muscles, I never really bought in. At first it was the cost associated with playing sub-par arcade ports. I didn’t have an iPhone when that marketplace took off so I missed out on a lot of the games that game out during that heyday. I have since gone back to play quite a few of them but since then free-to-play mobile games have taken over the zeitgeist and I have played quite a few of those offerings and found them to be infuriatingly similar.
My first foray into modern mobile games was the Jurassic Park builder. I kept with that one for a few months. I then moved to Pocket Planes. When I was living in Kumamoto, I remember staying in Japan one Christmas with my friend Andrew. We went out drinking nearly every night and we woke up and played Pocket Planes until the sun went down and that was basically it. I have played others. I played the Simpson’s one for a bit. I played a Final Fantasy one recently. Most recently, I played a Crazy Taxi game for a few months. Now, I am done. I would rather spend my time reading news or playing other games that have an end goal or a reason to play besides just clicking.
I haven’t given up on mobile games. I just don’t want anything to do with free-to-play stuff most of the time; especially clickers.
I speak Japanese so I’ve been trying to find games in the Japanese store to play while learning some new words. The Japanese store isn’t much better than the American app store, most of the games are terrible. Recently I’ve been playing a battle royale game called Knives Out in the West, in Japan it’s called Koyakodou. It isn’t bad. A lot of the boys at my school play it which is the reason why I downloaded it and gave it a try. After tens of hours I decided that it isn’t any better than Player Unknown: Battlegrounds on mobile and neither of those games are as good Fortnite on mobile.
One game I did find and really enjoyed recently is a game called Odin Crown. Odin Crown is a simple MOBA. MOBAs are still a new thing for the Japanese audience which is why I gravitated towards this game. I’ve been playing a lot of Arena of Valor, which is a traditional MOBA. (It is fantastic!) Odin Crown set up the rules of playing MOBAs for a Japanese audience. I enjoyed going through their tutorial and found it easy to understand. The tutorial was presented in a single player environment which helped the player adapt to the concepts of playing a MOBA. Once I played through the tutorial, I started playing online nearly everyday on the train to school.
The art style of Odin Crown was cute and it had the free-to-play elements that make those games addictive but it had the MOBA that actually challenged the player to fight strategically and work as a team with the other players on their team.
The problem that I found, and I find this a lot with Japanese Mobile games, is that the services will shut down quicker than a Japanese cicada’s life-span. Odin Crown released earlier this year and it was shut down by July. It was available for less than six months. Now, I’m sure that this decision was made because it didn’t have the player base to support it’s continued development but that doesn’t take away the feeling that I got burned. I didn’t spend any money on the game but I did invest time in it. Time that I enjoyed.
There are tons of games out there, in Japan and all over the world, that have healthy lifespans but most of those games are trash. When a game like Odin Crown, that tries something new while also implementing the current free-to-play model and tries to bring the gospel of MOBAs to Japan, comes out and it fails, it sucks that there is nothing that I could have done to make it last. It was never localized into English so the player market was already small. It was trying to bring something new to an audience that should be all in but it didn’t quite capture the attention of that market.
I guess it’s just kind of lonely being one of the few people who played and enjoyed this game. It’s lonely being one of the only Westerners who enjoyed it as well. It’s demoralizing to think that I will need to wade back into the void to try and find another diamond in the rough.
There has been a couple of games that have been released recently that have taken the mantle of being unrealistic sports games.
These aren’t sports simulators, they are games that use a sport that is familiar to most people and make a new kind of game that does something unique while still having a basis in the original source material.
The first title that comes to mind is Golf Story for the Switch. Golf Story is a role-playing adventure game that uses some elements of golf in its adventure game gameplay. The character hits a ball at elements or holes of the world map to complete objectives and open up more of the world. This isn’t too far from traditional RPG story-telling progression.
The next title that comes to mind is Adult Swim’s Pool Panic that was announced this past week at GDC. Pool Panic is touted as “The world’s least realistic pool simulator game” by its developers. The game has the player using pool elements to complete single player or multiplayer levels. The game looks like a puzzle game with pool elements. I think Pool Panic looks amazing and I can’t wait to play the hell out of it. Adult Swim humor with a fun pool style game.
I’m sure there are others that I could add to this article but I can’t think of any at the moment.
I would like to see more developers utilize sports in a non-traditional way like these two games above. In the same way that Zach Gage, turned the solitaire rules and chess rules on their heads and made some interesting variations on those games.
It seems like Switch is a hotbed for indie game development. It might have something to due with the fact that sales are strong and the business model of the eShop isn’t based on free games, unlike the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. I hope that these games do well for themselves and it encouages developers to do some more exploration in the area.
Allegra Frank wrote a Polygon piece about Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s latest attempt to make “trance vibration” a thing. He originally tried to bring the device to the masses with Rez’s original release on the PS2 but that didn’t fare well.
Lumines Remastered was featured at the Nintendo Nindies, their indie games booth at this year’s GDC.
The game Is the same great game that we played on the PSP and, for some of us, bought again on the Xbox 360 marketplace while that was still in it’s infancy. Even though we’ve purchased this game twice, the Switch version might be the most exciting version because of the console’s ability to do HD rumble with the Joy-Cons. Mizuguchi tasked Resonair, the developer, to use the console’s HD rumble to add “trance vibration” to their port of the game so the player can feel the game while playing it.
The player feels the game by strapping two Joy-Cons to their legs while controlling the game with another set. I hope that in the final version of the game the player will be able to strap their Joy-Cons to their legs like they want but play with a Pro Controller instead of having to buy another set of more expensive Joy-Cons.
It was Frank’s description of using the controllers that really put me over the top when it came to my desire to play this game.
It’s like going to a well-lit club where you’re the only one there, and yeah, you’re playing a video game, and that’s kind of weird, but for some reason nothing about this is pitiful — it’s a supremely chill-ass solo hang.
Nintendo definitely threw some weight behind it’s console this week with their Nindies presentation. Lumines is a game that, even though I’ve purchased it twice, I am very much looking forward to buying a third time.
For years, Telltale Games has been doing god’s work by making fun and engaging episodic stories for video game consoles, computers, cell phones, and any thing else that could run their proprietary engine. At times it seemed as though Telltale games were being ported to nearly as many devices as Doom. It says a lot that a proprietary engine would end up being malleable enough to make so many leaps to so many different consoles and across generations. But, that same engine has become a liability for the company as we saw recently when Telltale laid off a quarter of its workforce.
I have been playing Telltale games since the Sam & Max games were announced. Telltale Games preached to the masses that they were going to bring about the long desired model of episodic gaming and many were excited about the prospect of a video game that could be played like TV is consumed; in small compact bites. Episodic gaming is an idea that had been a glint in the eyes of the video game industry for years but had never really been done in a way that worked (see Half-Life and SiN Episodes).
Sam & Max finally made that dream come true for one developer. Telltale become the one company that you could count on to actually finish their episodic stories and, for those of us who had been burnt by other developers on our episodic dreams, it was a welcome form of storytelling.
Back to the Future was the first Telltale game that I played to completion near to its actual release. (I am not a person who plays games day-and-date.) I enjoyed the game immensely but I did see some issues with the engine during my play though on the PS3 at the time. While BttF had some issues, it didn’t stop me from seeing the good points of the episodic way of storytelling in games.
Back to the Future and Jurassic Park were two games that showed us how dated the Telltale engine had become and these games came out before Telltale’s massively popular The Walking Dead was berthed into the gaming conscience.
The Walking Dead came out at a perfect time for Telltale. The comic and the TV series had both become cultural touchstones and the game’s focus on player choice and accessibility made the game easy for almost any fan of the series to get into.
It was around this time that Telltale had become the darling of licensed video games within the industry. They obtained licenses for many beloved franchises; they were chosen as “the” studio to put out a cheap, assessable games for nearly any premier property. It’s almost as if Telltale games had taken over for the cheap licensed game…game of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. But, many reviewers and fans alike had started to see the cracks in the engine.
Patrick Klepek, for me one of the ultimate Telltale reviewers, has bemoaned the Telltale engine for quite a while now while still enjoying parts of nearly all of their games. He wrote an article on Waypoint back in April concerning the issues he saw with the engine while he was playing through Guardians of the Galaxy.
Telltale’s history of hobbled tech goes back a ways, too. A source told me that even as the company was riding the success of The Walking Dead, their engine didn’t have a physics system. (Telltale has their own proprietary technology, it doesn’t use Unity, Unreal, or something else off the shelf.) If a designer came up with a scene requiring a ball to roll across the floor, or a book to fall off a shelf, it had to done by hand, an enormous time and resource commitment.
It’s my understanding that little has changed since, but Telltale didn’t respond to my request for comment.
Patrick was one of the early reviewers of The Walking Dead that was excited for the series and the innovative style of storytelling that Telltale was implementing with The Walking Dead series and how it has changed the way their games tell a story.
Additionally, the company says the restructuring will be used as a way to shift the technology it uses for its own internal projects, saying that it aims to move over “to more proven technologies that will fast-track innovation in its core products.”
It is good that the company is moving on to new and “more proven technologies” but it is always sad when so many people lose their jobs. If Telltale had implemented these changes earlier could they have saved some of these jobs? Will these changes make for better more easily produced games? Who knows.
I’m glad Telltale Games is finally moving on from their old engine which provided some pretty good licensed titles and even some interesting original content. Hopefully they can get back to putting out quality stories without the technology getting in the way.
You can watch my play through of The Walking Dead: Season One Episode Three and Four here:
Waypoint had an interview with Lorne Lanning late last year. I read the interview at the time but after reading it again the things that Lorne said really resonated with me. His talk about us being the powerless in a society where corporations and greed are the most virtuous qualities for people. It’s good to see that some game creators are thinking about non-traditional heroes; the Everyman.
I liked Abe’s Odyssey when I was young. I’m not going to lie and say that I ever beat it. It was a difficult game and my OCD to complete everything in a game was really challenged by that game because I always wanted to collect all the Mukodons.
It’s nice to see a game producer call out games like Call of Duty and other war games where the main objective is to just murder people without much thought in the world. Of course those games have a story mode and sometimes that story mode challenges us to think but at the end of the day those games are really selling war which America doesn’t really need any help selling.
I feel compelled to give the Abe’s Odyssey franchise another go. It would be a shame to only listen to the message of the game and not experience it myself.
