Someone Actually read this blog!

An article I wrote on in game XMB on the Playstation 3 was posted onto the News for gamers website and garnered enough interest, or should I say controversy, that it became highlighted on the top story section. You can see it on the right in the above picture.

It gathered about 110 comments, some of them calling me gay and/or retarded. This doesn't bother me that much what did irk ever so slightly was to be dismissed as stupid and then the poster going on to agree with the article in their comment, which suggests to me that they didn't actually read the entire article. Never mind, my 15 seconds of fame came and went, how will I go on without your attention?

Thanks to Kalistyles who I presume read the post and got it linked to at n4g. I appreciate it.

What defines a next generation game?

I am writing this in reaction to reading a review of a Devil may cry 4 which labelled it last generation.

Sounds like a simple question doesn't it? However, every person you talk to seems to have a preconception of what next generation actually means. Some feel that next generation games should be in some way enhanced than any previous game they have played and every game should be better than the last generation of games. Some feel that next generation games should have better graphics and that is it. Some feel that next generation games are Massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and that simple single player or deathmatch style games are last generation. Then there are those PC gamers who feel that next generation as defined by new consoles is an artificality that is only adhered to by the delusional.

Who is right? Is anyone right or more importantly is anyone wrong?

How do we define the next generation games which some feel we are playing just now on the playstation 3,  pc, xbox 360 and wii. The most basic definition of next generation is any game running on next generation hardware.

So is this definition a good one? The playstation 3 and Xbox 360 applied resolution standards primarily taken from hi definition television with their much touted 720p and 1080p resolutions. The PC had been gaming in these resolutions on monitors for years prior, one strike against any next generation there then. Technically though for consoles it was the next generation, a new hardware generation from the three big console manufacturers, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

From this standpoint it is a new hardware generation, next generation hardware, but does this result in next generation games? This new generation of hardware means better graphics, more polygons hurled around at better frame rates by more and more processing cores. This jump in graphics alone can make a huge difference to games. For example higher resolution, does make a huge difference to games, try playing Burnout paradise on a high definition television and then play Burnout 3 takedown on the same television and see if you can make out the cars in front of you on the road with the same ease that much improved resolution gives you. The very fact that you can see a car in the distance as opposed to some speckled pixels means your performance will be enhanced and your game experience improved. The games then have better graphics, but are they next generation because of this?

Some people I have spoken to claim that it is features in games that make them next generation rather than the hardware. This doesn't need to be huge, simple things like for example in Ninja Gaiden sigma on the PS3 if you leave a room in which you are battling with a group of about five ninjas they don't follow you through the open door. It's gone that room no longer exists in cyberspace, forgotten by the game in favour of the room you are now in, it spoils the illusion. If the game was next generation as some put it then those ninjas would simply follow you through the door and fight with you. Does this stop Ninja Gaiden from being a good game? Not at all, though some would say it was last generation because of flaws like this, are they right?

Is it innovative features that make a game next generation? Things that have been slowly creeping into games over the years as each game is developed and the people that play them grow up and become game developers themselves. Today the gaming industry is in a position that it has never been in before. The twenty and thirty something people who I presume are in the majority in software development have all grown up playing games, a subtle difference to the last few generations who have been the people who really pioneered gaming, by inventing it in the first place. Today we have people who grew up with gaming and have their own ideas about what was wrong with it in the past and new ideas for the future. 

What has been the evolution in games over the past decade? The changes and innovations are too numerous to mention, I will try and list a few. Predominantly 2D games became 3d thanks to the PC and the power of the Playstation 1. Stories have came to the forefront, the majority of games now have strong story elements and strive to be cinematic to greater or lesser success. The consequences of in game death have changed, to avoid the frustrations of the past, gone are the days of old where you had three lives and then you had to start from the beginning of the game again. Most shooters have lost the health pickups and percentage health in favour of a shield level dropping or the screen going red as in Halo, Call of duty and many others. It was not that long ago in the days of the megadrive that saving your game on consoles was almost unheard of. The PC first person shooter now has mouse and keyboard as the only really considered option, I may be wrong but I think Doom or Wolfenstein started this trend, that wasn't that long ago, or am I just getting old? Turn based strategy became real time strategy with Westwood's Dune II. Like it or not changes are coming in the shape of casual games, games aimed at women, and the explosion of music games like Singstar, guitar hero etc. Where is the evolution of these games going? Real Guitar hero which actually teaches you a real instrument is already on the horizon.

The influence of the internet and the connectivity it offers have brought multiplayer games through similar much faster paced evolutions in the past years. Who knows where World of warcraft, Second life etc will take us. The Halo's and Call of duties have huge followings for their multiplayer deathmatch. Warcraft has broken 10 million users. Is a next generation game one which demands co-operation or conflict with real human beings and relegates a.i.'s to storekeepers?

In summary, it is my opinion that games evolve constantly, the next generation of games moves forward with every new game that changes things. The game that is successful and every game that come after in the same genre is influenced by is the real marker that ushers in a next generation. Hardware generations are irrelevant to these software generation, each change depends on human ingenuity and creativity.

This makes it much harder to track or to label the generation of game that we are in. Therefore, does it matter we are always in the moment next generation and last generation are places we can never visit like tomorrow or yesterday, we live in today.

Calling a game last generation as an insult is meaningless in my view, call it derivative, call it unoriginal, however, calling it last generation means nothing to me.

Why PS3 users screaming for in game XMB may be a bad idea!

Since the Playstation 3 was first launched people have been complaining they can't do the same things as you can on the xbox 360 with regards to online friends list, cross game communication and chat and the ability to play your own music in games. As time has went on the call has changed from we want to be able to chat to friends online, or we want to play our own music in game, to we want in game XMB.

Now why is this a bad thing to ask for? In game XMB isn't want we need you see and asking for it may harm the playstation 3 in the long run. Lets look at the Xbox 360 here and identify exactly what it does. You would be forgiven for thinking that the Xbox 360 has in game dashboard, it doesn't. When you press the centre Xbox button a little half screen menu pops up, on this menu is your gamertag, it shows you your gamerscore, and online status, which when pressed allows you to change personal info, below this the ability to send messages, see your friend list, and players met. Below that the voice chat and messenger section which allows voice and text chat with people on your friends list. Below this personal setting which allows tweaks to online status themes controller settings etc. Finally there is the music controller which allows access to music stored on the hard drive. Now these options are very powerful, and they allow great functionality, like the ability to chat to a friend while they play another game, and then when you are ready to jump into a multiplayer game together all without ever losing the voice chat. It's quite good and you can see that the playstation 3 suffers from the lack of it.

Now to the point, this menu, shall we call it the minidash, isn't the xbox 360 dashboard, i can't browse the marketplace, see the inside xbox news pages, see my demo and xbox live arcade game collection, browse my achievements list, look at pictures. watch video stored on the hard drive, or change some of the more important settings on the system blade. To put it bluntly the xbox360 has a dashboard with everything and a minidash with just the features you are likely to need while playing a game.

If we ask Sony blindly for in game XMB we run the risk of creating a rod for our own back, we might end up getting what we ask for, the ability to get to the XMB in it's entirety from within a game. The system overheads that this might entail for 512mb of ram might not be to our advantage in the long run.

We need to be specific, we need to say we want messaging and friends list access in game, we want to have voice chat in game and the ability to play music in game. Those really are the only options we need. On the Playstation  3 when you press the playstation button on the controller in game a menu much like the xbox's pops up,  it has options to shut down controller and the system at present, all that is needed is for this to be expanded slightly.

Please see that asking for full in game XMB access is only going to hurt the playstation 3 in the long run.

Kane and Lynch Dead Men Review

Gritty, cold, harsh, bad, hard men doing bad things to each other and anyone unfortunate enough to get in their way! What a load of overblown nonsense! This game was portrayed before release as a game with a wonderful deep story line, something that would inject progress into a tired genre.

Who cares if you are doing the same old shooter if the story line is involving. Movies have been doing it since the dawn of time haven't they, same old genres played out with only the novelty of the plot to distinguish one thriller from the sea of other thrillers out there.

Well does Kane and Lynch have a better story than say gears of war, a game it shares most of its game mechanics with? Oh, darn, that was that point squashed, yes it does have a much better story than gears of war. What it doesn't have is a better premise!

Gears of war had a neat setting. creatures from under the ground that have lived for years underneath the humans on the planet suddenly decide they want the surface as well. War is unleashed and all hell breaks loose, the problem with gears was that the motivation for each level was never very clear. You were sent to recover the tunnel mapping thing, you get it and it doesn't do as intended, then inexplicably you go to your old house and find the data there all ready for you. You then go and trigger off the big bomb and what? Is the war over I don't know but the game is. See what i am getting at neat premise poorly scripted flow of the story.

So what is the setting for Kane and Lynch? It's the world of career criminals, dodgy deals and double crossing. Kane has worked with a group called the seven in the past and things must have went wrong. Kane ends up in prison and as the game starts he is busted out with the aid of lynch another con and the sevens army of thugs. After the first level is over you meet the seven and are told that Kane stabbed them in the back and vanished with all the money for the job. They understandably are angry and want the money back and Kane dead.

They have his wife and Daughter and will kill her if they don't get what is theirs. Lynch is assigned to escort Kane to get the money and make sure he doesn't just do a runner. Without spoiling too much The duo rob banks, kidnap a yakuza bosses daughter and end up fighting in the middle of a government coup. All in the aid of getting Kane's daughter and wife to safety. Suffice to say everything that can go wrong does. There are two endings to the game, a downbeat downright depressing one and a slightly happier though still dark and depressing one.

One thing that i kept getting irked at with Kane and lynch, and much talked about in previews, was that Lynch is touted as a medicated psychopath, what does that mean really? Everyone in the game, apart from Jenny (The daughter) and Kane's wife are complete career criminal sociopaths. What is Lynch's difference other than really bad hair? No he is on "medication" and every so often he is meant to wig out and go nuts. The only evidence I saw of this is when robbing the bank he starts shooting up the hostages for no real reason other than he is tense. So there you go, to make the game sound edgy and appealing they saw fit to tout the "medicated psychopath" role. Didn't actually do much else with it though, I kept expecting Lynch to do some double crossing or really get you into trouble as a result of his "illness" he doesn't, he is just there to wisecrack, the comedy sidekick to Lynch's deadpan straight-man, who seems infinitely more chilling and psychopathic than Lynch.

So is the story a step forward for action games. No I don't think so, while it has slightly more holding the collection of levels together than say doom, it is still a pretty linear shooter. The story is good, if  a little overzealous in its eagerness to be edgy. There are no new game mechanics that are plot related here, other than the fact that you can end the game one mission earlier than it should after a moral choice. Therein lies the difficulty for developers when creating games that truly give you a choice.  If you create a game where you branch the story you risk players never seeing a percentage of the game. Say for example you create ten levels and depending on player choice you only play through five or six when playing through, can you guarantee that the player will return and choose the other choice and play the other levels. You run the risk of someone thinking well that was short and hating the game. Alternatively you can go the open world route and allow players to tackle missions as they choose. This however leads to the main plot still being a series of missions and a few side missions. More importantly however the levels all share the same world and the levels are reduced to a task within it. Which can be a problem as evidenced by Assassins Creed, and the repetitiveness of some side missions. My point, if there ever was one is that gamers complain about linear games, when actually non-linear games have their own problems, there is room for creativity here but I don't think Kane and Lynch shows it.

Enough about the story then, how does it play? Well yes thank you, once you get used to the controls and the aiming system it plays very well. I found it hard to hit anything at first, which, yes, could just be my general blindness, then i found out that crouching and standing still when shooting actually sends your bullets to the cross-hair, if you stand and run while shooting then it's hard to hit the side of a bus. This isn't the first game to use this mechanic, i remember Graw 2 using this idea, though I think it's a little more exaggerated here than that game. The game employs a Gears of War style third person view and utilises a similar cover system, which is mostly essential for progressing through the game, sure you can lurch around in the open firing while running if you are a game god and make progress, but for most mere mortals we will be content with taking cover behind the appropriately placed walls, cars etc. and taking pot shots at the enemies.

The enemy a.i. is pretty standard, it won't win any awards for it's creativity and style, but it is functional and doesn't provide much opportunity for us to point and laugh at it's stupidity. What does need addressing is the squad a.i. especially on hard, I have talked to other players and they never seemed to have this problem, on questioning further they played on easy or medium difficulty. On the hardest setting "edgily" named morphine, your squad's main function seems to be to run blindly at the enemy you point them to and get killed. Which means you have to save them, as its game over, and back to the last checkpoint if one of them dies. You spend a few minutes trying to save them and gettting killed yourself, before you realise that in harder open areas it's easier to just point them to stand at a nearby safe spot and make them wait then go shoot everything yourself and come back for them. I never played on easy or medium, so I don't know if they were more use on those difficulty levels. As for my experience with the game they were nothing but a nuisance I could have done without. Though to be fair, Dom in gears of war was guilty of the same thing, I don't remember him as being as much of a pest though.

The levels themselves are well designed, with plenty of environmental detail and for the most part reasonably real world design, the streets look like they are streets, the bank might be similar to a real bank somewhere in the world. There is variety with the well designed club level, also since crysis the obligatory jungle level. The revolution in Havana makes a change of pace with more military type hardware making it's presence felt.

The game uses a checkpoint system to save progress, and there is a good spacing of these that avoids the "big gap between hard areas" syndrome of some games, which can be a real game breaker when you have to repeat two or three huge skirmishes to get back to where you died just to die again. The game uses a system based on adrenaline injections to the heart when you are shot down, there is the now almost standard reddening of the screen until you die and then you fall and have about twenty seconds for someone to revive you. They do this by sticking a long needle through your body into your heart and giving you a shot of adrenaline. Again, "wow you're so edgy", is this actually an accepted medical practice, no i don't think so, but sticking on the pads of an automatic external defibrillator, doesn't have that same edgyness. It's time this particular urban myth got edited out of movies, injecting adrenaline into your heart isn't a good idea kids, it might work, but they don't do that in hospital. Once this is done you get back up and carry on, the problem is that you can only have it done once before you overdose and die. The only point where I found this system really annoying was in the last level where you have to fight alongside your daughter who doesn't respond to your squad orders and tends to run about in the open firing ineffectually and dying regularly, the problem is  you can only revive her once. With yourself and the other adults if enough time passes, say five minutes you can be revived again. She is too fragile, logic applied to an illogical process only draws attention to how illogical it actually is.

The graphics are serviceable the engine seems similar to the one used in the Hitman games, the havok physics engine is employed. Characters are detailed, environments and lighting adequate, though that is the word I would use for the whole game graphically, adequate. Don't take that as criticism, just know that while the game looks good it really didn't move me to express any love for it's visual look, again the "edgy" factor comes in again with everyone being scarred menacing types. They went for bleak and harsh and they got there. For me they succeeded too well.

Sound is serviceable with all the usual bangs and crashes, music, where it is employed is mostly mood setting and works well. There is a soundtrack CD included with the version I bought, though it has never been popped from the case and probably never will, but that is just me. You may like the music and this feature will have been a great addition, for me it wasn't a draw. 

I played the xbox 360 version, so there should be some mention of the achievements. I played through the single player game on hard. and finished it, also going back and doing the second last level again so I could choose for the alternative ending. I got 310 points. Now this isn't a criticism of Kane and Lynch, more of developers in general. I feel that a game should do a sixty forty split when it comes to achievements, give 600 points for the single player and 400 for the multiplayer. My gripe is that if you struggle through on the hardest difficulty setting you should be rewarded with more than half the achievement points available. I personally don't like it when you see a larger number of the points going to one million head-shots in death match type achievements. Some may like that idea, I don't.

Special mention must be made to the co-op game. This almost wasn't played for this review, as it isn't over xbox live and I don't like split screen gaming, however, a friend was over the other night and we fired it up. It made a big difference to the gameplay in that it was much easier and fun, something which most co-op modes add, what did change was that sometimes during the single player game Kane and Lynch split up, and in the co-op game you have different things to do, another example of someone potentially missing nice game features. When Kane goes down into the bank vault Lynch gets to go on  a rampage with the hostages and the cops, what impressed me the most at this point was that playing a Lynch exposed you to his psychotic episodes, which as aforementioned seemed to be attention grabbing rather and gameplay orientated. When lynch has an episode the view wobbles as if you are affected by tear gas and you start seeing things differently, i.e. everyone is a cop about to shoot at you, so you don't know who is an innocent hostage or armed policeman, which means that yes you do have to go nuts and kill all the hostages. Suddenly the forced and overblown story element made some sense to the gameplay. I may have to take back some of what I said earlier about the game. Pity they never found a way to integrate this into the normal single player story.

I haven't said anything about the multiplayer game here, simply because I haven't got around to playing it yet. Will do soon, and add on my thoughts to this review.

In summary a good game not a brilliant one, very playable, I am glad I bought it, and I can't say that for some of my other recent purchases.

Scoring

Graphics 6

Gameplay 8

Story 8

Level Design 8

A.i. 4

Total 34 out of 50

Score = 68%

Does sony bury their head in the sand regarding inflation of PSN user numbers?

If you take the time to read some forum posts, most people have multiple accounts on psn for downloading from each territories store. This is done because, while some demo's are released in all areas at the same time, most are just released in one or two specific regions at a time.

For example Ninja Gaiden sigma came to the USA store two months before the European. Ratchet and Clank and Uncharted similarly so, though the delay may have been less. To get round this, fevered gamers not prepared to wait are making more than one playstation network account in the required territory. This seems to only require a valid post code for the region to work. So far so good, no harm done.

Indeed, there is never any real harm done here, but is it a sales pitch? Are Sony counting each account as a separate person in their numbers for amount of users on psn. If so we can probably half the number of users for a more accurate statistic of total conscious human users on the psn.

It does seems that Sony are actually trying to foster this practice so that they can claim a larger amount of users than there are to use as a bargaining chip then they talk about xbox live. We have x million users in our first year, xbox live had x million less in it's first year etc. How do Sony seemingly unwittingly foster this, they release demos in differing territories and then wait weeks before releasing them to the others, why?

The only reason can be localisation, now i understand that for Europe this can be a headache, surely a multinational with the resources of Sony can help the game developers of their biggest franchises to do this quicker so that demo's can be released simultaneously in each store. 

From my own point of view there is no excuse for delaying from the Us to the Uk, we both speak the same language after all. Hell give the rest of europe the choice to download the english only version early if they want most Europeans can speak english better than I can as their second language.

Sony have the power to see where a playstation is in the world when it's online, they can close the loophole that allows you to make multiple accounts. If they actually didn't want you to be able to do it then you can be certain it would be harder to do.

So there is my point, maybe at the start it was just something they never thought of, and then they saw it. Picture the scene, two guys deep in Sony HQ staring at their server's screens.

Admin: "Look, that guy from Europe just made a usa account?"

Boss: "What did he do that for, never knew you could!"

Admin: "He's getting that demo for ninja gaiden from the store."

Boss: "Send in the lawyers!"

Admin: "Hang on the demo is free."

Boss: "Oh, ok, hang on a second, so he now has two accounts?"

Admin: "Yes, two accounts, one person."

Boss: "That means we can say that the number of users on psn is higher than it is

Admin: "I suppose so, look, when I search there are hundreds of people doing it, also for the Japanese territories too."

Boss: "Tell no one, i have to go and revise the demo release schedules, ha ha ha."

There they have it, a loophole generated by their users that they can legitimately use as a claim for user number figures and have deniability when someone calls them on it.