So before I get into the meat of this blog I have a question for you all. You know that Fireflies song that is playing nonstop on the radio these days? Does anyone have any idea what that song is talking about? I mean what is a fox trot or a sock hop? And why would it be weird to hate goodbyes and what exactly do all the fireflies represent? There seems do be some meaning behind this song but what it is escapes me. Or maybe the writer was just really high when writing it and it is just a bunch of gibberish. Anyways, any thoughts?

So I decided to go with Uncharted 2 for my holiday purchase. I also bought Star Wars The Force Unleashed Ultimate Sith Edition as a birthday present for a friend of mine. He doesn't actually have a PS3 or X360 so he played it at my house. He beat it in two sittings. I wrote about it last year so I wont go into too much depth. We played the Hoth level which was boring and short, but we haven't played The Jedi Temple or Tatooine. As for the main game, it seems identical to a year ago. Playing on any difficulty above easy still makes playing the game a chore. On easy the enemies do so little damage that you can play around with your force powers and have fun with the sandbox like levels. On normal or higher you are stuck using only a couple of the most effective moves, and taking the time to grab and throw things usually just leads to death. Oh and the Star Destroyer part still sucks. On the other hand, the game still looks incredible with some beautiful art direction. After I see the final two levels I'll assign a score, but right now I plan on giving it a 7.5.

I also played some more Resistance 2. I really want to finish the game. I have to note again that Insomniac's R&C games look infinitely better than its Resistance games. Hopefully the third game will be much improved.

Finally, I started Uncharted 2. I am maybe two or three levels in. So far one aspect has really impressed me and that is the camera. Simply put, the camera is the best I have ever seen in a game. It always points you in the right direction, and often does so while giving you a cinematic angle of the action. Also, some of the graphics are just outstanding. The snow is the best I have seen in a game, and the variety of animations Nate has truly could only fit on a Blu Ray. It really feels that almost every moment of this game is a set piece. There are no repetitious scenes or environments as we saw in the first game. Also, enemies take far less damage and do far less damage. But there are many more of them per area now. What this means is that the game feels more realistic and rewarding. When you are constantly taking out soldiers you feel that you are moving forward. Also, there have only been a couple of scenes that have had me taking on wave after wave of enemies, and the waves of enemies actually made sense in the context of the story. Simply put, Naughty Dog has taken a the same mechanics as the first game and simply put them to use in better situations. I also haven't experienced the issues people have had with Nate taking cover in the wrong place. The game has so far controlled perfectly and I have yet to die because of control or camera issues.

While the game is great, I kind of feel that it isn't as good as people are making it out to be. Yes it's a highly polished and mechanically and structurally flawless but I don't really feel like it deserves to be rated quite as highly as it is. But I'm going to play through the whole game before I make any final judgement. One final thing, I like how Uncharted 2 has all single player trophies. I think it is unfair to players without PSN/XBL to allow games to have MP achievements/trophies. If you are going to put a reward system in a game then you should make it so that all players can get the rewards. Also, I hate the "get 20 kills with X Gun" trophies. Trophies should make me do something special, not just reward me for using a gun multiple times. Actually Uncharted 2 has these trophies for the single player game and I don't appreciate it. Even less, though, do I appreciate the trophies for collecting random objects. In some games these collectibles actually give me something in game and in Uncharted this is somewhat true, but honestly I don't really want to spend hours searching the world corner to corner for some tiny sparkling light. Hopefully Uncharted 3 will have gotten rid of treasure collecting.

Later folks.

So when most people spend all night partying and drinking the party usually involves more than two guys sitting in a room and the drinks are usually a bit stronger than IBC Rootbear. For my buddy Andrej and me though, a party involves a 65" 1080p TV, a dozen different consoles and a couple hundred games. Our day long gaming marathon started at 2:00 PM and ended at 4:00 AM. That's a lot of gaming huh? So what did we play?

Well we started off with the reason for my visit. I needed help in the first Oddworld game. I was stuck on the fourth screen. Yea I know, I suck. Or so I thought. As soon as Andrej started the game up he started doing a bunch of moves that I didn't know existed. He used a mind control move to take control of an enemy, he asked friendlies to follow him, he in essence did a whole bunch of stuff that the game never told me existed. It was an eerie foreshadowing of a game that would come half a day later on our odyssey, but I simply was shocked that moves that were required for the player to progress in the game were not ever mentioned until after they were needed. How did the game expect me to know what I had to do? Oh well. We got through the first ten or fifteen screens and then decided to move on.

Next we checked out the PSN to see the new releases on the store this week. We decided nothing was worth downloading, so we took a look at a demo he had previously downloaded- Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. We could only play a couple of the 30+ games on the collection so we just went through the list and watched the trailers for each of the games. Neither of us ever owned a Genesis so a lot of the games were new to us. There were a lot of cool Genesis games huh? I kind of want to buy this collection, but I already own most of the games on my PSP Genesis Collection. Still these collections are seriously good values. There are nearly a dozen RPG's in this collection, most of which are over sixty hours long. That's a lot of gaming! Still, I don't really enjoy old school RPG's so I don't know how much I would get out of them.

After spending a good hour looking through the games I said we should try out one of the new games he had bought earlier in the day, but he wanted to play them on his own, so we got up and looked through his collection. About five minutes in my eyes settled on a game that sent shivers running down my spine. I felt a tingle in the back of my neck that only shows itself in the face of the worst of games. My stomach immediately started roiling, my cheeks were burning. It was a sensation I last got when trying to play Sonic the Hedgehog for 360. What was this game? Yes it was my lowest rated game ever, RLH. This travesty of a game is simply one of the worst games ever made. It turns out Andrej had picked it up for $2 and never played it. I told him we had to play it just to see how bad it was. Now I should mention that Andrej has very, very, low standards when it comes to gaming. He'll like pretty much anything so I was interested to see if he could actually find enjoyment in RLH. For the uninitiated, RLH is one of Interplay's last published games. It tells a rather cliché story of a astronaut far in the future who returns to his ship only to find that it has been overrun with monsters. Of course his fiancé is stuck on board and it is up to him to rescue her. Unlike Dead Space or other good versions of this story there is nothing interesting about the characters or world of RLH.

We started off with the tutorial, and we almost never made it out. Andrej and I agreed it was the most boring, dull, long winded, and flat out worst tutorial in a game ever. It took well over half an hour to finish, during which you mostly ran around the ship to talk to people. The dialogue is horrible in this game, the acting is worse, and the character animation borders on non-existent. By the time you reach the twentieth utterly dull long winded conversation about things you don't care about you'll be begging the tutorial to end. You are constantly nagged by a girl that you need to get to the bridge as fast as possible, and in all honesty we would have warped to the bridge if at all possible. Instead half of the elevators on the ship are broken and you are sent in circles trying to find a way to finish this snooze fest and start the actual game. Eventually you reach the combat tutorial and things get really bad. Combat in this game is horrendous. It's not that it doesn't work, it's just that it is just plain boring. You hold down right trigger to lock onto an enemy and press A repeatedly to fire. When the enemy is dead just depress the right trigger again to lock onto your next target and press A some more. I compare the combat to Diablo in that it mostly involves just clicking one button over and over until everything on screen is dead. The difference here is that the enemies require no strategy to beat and you have no spells or skills to spice up combat. And of course you aren't receiving loot or experience with each kill, so there is really no reason to fight these enemies. There is nothing to work towards. No rewards that we found. You just press A over and over, room after room until you come to a door that you need a key for. Then you walk up to everything in the room and press A until something gives you a key.

If the gameplay wasn't bad enough, once you get into the actual meat of the game you'll quickly realize that the graphics, audio, and menu all suffer from atrocious design. The graphics are so dark that we could barely see a thing that was happening in the game. We turned off the lights in the room and set the brightness in the game on max and still we could barely make out doors and enemies in the almost pitch black ship. Secondly, the audio mixing is simply, well, broken. Voices are almost inaudible, while ambient noises like the buzzing of the ship are set so high that you can barely hear the music or combat sounds over it. Then some sounds, like the opening and closing of hanger doors are so loud that our speakers nearly blew out, and remember we couldn't even hear the voiceover. Finally the menus are incredibly confusing. We are both game designers and life long gamers and these menus had us flabbergasted. Nothing was labeled well. You had to press a half dozen buttons to do something that could have been done in a single press, it simply was terrible.

So after playing this game for several hours, our dinner arrived. It was a classic Israeli meal- falafels. We ate and talked and then I mentioned I had never played Mario Galaxy. Andrej insisted that I try it but first we went downstairs to pick up some drinks - IBC Rootbear, Organgina and pomegranate juice. Yea we are hardcore. Then we started up the Wii and popped in Mario. Wow, what an amazing game. I had only used a Wii a couple times before in my life, but it only took me a couple minutes before I was playing like a pro. The game was just pure fun. The controls were flawless, the music and audio was perfectly sampled, the graphics were stunning for a Wii game. Truly a top notch effort all around. I said I wished that Nintendo put out more games of this quality. Andrej said that there were a lot of great games for Wii. I asked him to prove it. He listed a couple games like No More Heroes, Madworld, World of Goo, and Zack and Wicki. I told him that those games were fine but they were all really arthouse games that I wasn't sure I would enjoy enough to make the system a worthwhile purchase. So he said Nintendo made a lot of good games. Again, I asked him to prove it. He listed Metroid Prime 3, Zelda, and Mario Kart. I asked him to name a game made in the past couple of years and he couldn't. So I decided to not buy a Wii.

I played for an hour or two and then Andrej said I had to try a game that he loved back on the PS1. The game was Heart of Darkness. Wow. Just wow. What an experience. The story makes little sense. The characters are all very Jim Henson-esque is design, and the story seems ripped out of one of the director's classic movies. You are a boy who must save his dog from an evil land of darkness. The game is a puzzle platformer. It's actually very similar to Oddworld. The mood is outstanding. The game just has this great mix of dark elements and sugary sweet parts that could only be found in a 90's game. It just has a feel and style unlike anything released today. It's an indie style missing in today's gaming landscape, where the game was built to be the best game it could be, not a game that fits well into a marketing scheme.

Heart of Darkness is hard. In fact we often were stuck on puzzles for well over an hour. And unfortunately the answer to the puzzle invariably was something that should have been obvious... if we had known we could do it. Yes, like its Oddworld brother, Heart of Darkness suffers from the problem that the game never gives you even a hint that you have an ability and certainly never tells you how to use it. I felt so mixed playing this game. I loved the mood. I loved the graphics, audio, and story. I loved the animation, I loved the puzzles, the controls, almost everything, but then we would get to parts where the game just didn't give us enough info to progress. The game would give these cryptic hints that more often than not actually got us more stumped than we were before. For example, in one area we had to shoot several plants to get past a screen. First off the game had never told us we could shoot. We didn't have a gun, and for a large portion of the game we couldn't shoot anything. But then out of the blue we could. Then there were these plants that before had been dealt with in a certain way. We obviously assumed on entering the room that we had to use the same skills to defeat the plants that we had in the past. The game's hint also seemed to say that we were on the right track. Nowhere did it mention that these plants could be stunned if shot. In most games when a new element of gameplay is introduced it is explained in a small tutorial or other sequence that lets the player know he has new abilities that can be used in a certain way. This game had none of that. Anyways, at around 4:00 we reached the end of the first disc and decided to call it a day.

I grabbed my bottle (or Orangina) and stumbled out to a cab and slurred something about my address. Who knew you could have so much fun with Rootbear and video games.

I'm sitting at school right now waiting for a lecture with David Hellman to start. David is the guy who did the art for Braid. He's supposed to be pretty cool. I can't wait to meet him. I can't imagine what would have happened if Downloadable games had never taken on.

Recently there were some blogs written saying that download-only games are essentially the devil. According to these people, owning a physical copy of a game is imperative to their enjoyment of the game. Personally, I strongly disagree. These comments are made by people who obviously know nothing about game development. I find it humorous that the same people who complain about downloadable games also complain about how much the industry is becoming like the rest of the entertainment industry- basically a couple big companies run by suits who don't know or care a thing about the content they produce. What these people don't understand is that the very reason the industry is headed this way is because of the retail market. In the 90's more and more games were being pushed on store shelves. Retailers started restricting shelf space for the smaller companies, and removing games from shelves if they weren't a huge hit after the first couple of weeks. Of course, these smaller companies couldn't afford huge marketing campaigns, and most of their sales traditionally came after the first month, as more and more people recommended the games to their friends. Because of the limited retail space, though, these games were usually gone from store shelves by the time that occurred. So dozens of companies either went under or were forced to join forces with bigger publishers. The retail market basically destroyed the cottage industry of gaming.

As time went on the price of designing a game rose. The companies that could afford to put a game on shelves in the late 90's saw their profits plummet in the new generation. Today, independent development is all but gone. Making a retail release costs tens of millions of dollars, and a single failure usually leads to the company going bankrupt. The retail market has become cut throat. Publishers worried about their bottom line force developers to release games before they are ready, and it is becoming more and more difficult to squash bugs in games that contain millions of lines of code.

In the past five years, though, hope has come back to the independent companies. Downloadable games can circumvent the traditional retail market. Downloadable games have a potentially infinite shelf life. They don't have to compete with big budget games for shelf space and they don't have to have multi-million dollar marketing campaigns. Downloadable games have lead to a resurgence of grass roots development and have seen the creation of numerous high quality innovative titles.

I understand the concern that having games be download-only will eventually lead to higher prices and less competition, but the exact opposite is actually true. The production budget of a game is usually around $30 million for a AAA title. Then you have $5 million for packaging and $10 million for marketing. If your game is downloadable you don't have to have the $5 million packaging cost, and you can afford a lower marketing budget because your game wont be jostling for space in a store with countless other games. In a downloadable world, all games have equal shelf space. So prices for games can drop, maybe even back down to $50. In addition we will see more titles, and more risky and innovative titles. Remember that right now it is important for publishers to see most of their profits in the first couple of months or else used game sales will start eating into their bottom line. Without used game sales publishers can take bigger risks knowing that they will be able to recuperate their costs for a much longer period of time.

Also, smaller publishers, who before couldn't make a mark in the highly competitive retail market will now have a higher chance of making a profit. This will lead to more publishers, more developers, and more and better games. Downloadable content really is in the best interest of every designer, and every consumer who wants more and more innovative products without seeing the prices of games rise next generation to $70 or more.

I wish that we could have the best of both worlds, and get all the good games for a low price and still get a disc to go with it, but those times are gone. For the industry to move forward, and for companies to make a profit, we are going to see download-only consoles next generation. And I have a feeling it will be good for everyone.