By Kieron Gillen on October 27th, 2008 at 1:21 am.
Well, Monday morning, but I’ve been off at the London MCM expo doing my thang (And hello to any readers who said hi). Anyway, even if it’s Monday morning when you read this, it’s still a good time to sit back and take in a carefully prepared list of pieces which caught my eye this week which I tried desperately hard not to include any links to top disco classics.
- Comic Godhead Al Ewing has been crashing at my house this weekend, and he mentioned that he actually blogged on games for a year. Somehow I didn’t know this. Useless. Anyway, with a mass of stuff already written, let’s start you here – his review of 1985 classic Gauntlet: “Red Elf Shot The Food”. Frankly, I have never seen such bravery.
- Kyle Orland writing his Press Pass gathers opinions from journos on the effect of Hype on coverage. I was asked about my take on this, but never responded as I am crazy busy. Useless old me.
- Bill Harris over at his Dubious Quality has been having a bad time – and, as such, writes effectively about the consolatory nature of games. No puns intended. This is one of my pet themes – not consolation per se, but the utilitarian function of games. It’s also something Jim touched on heavily in his book – namely, games as an antidote to bordeom.
- Not games, but Paul Boutin writes for Wired on why Blogs are obsolete in 2008. Worth thinking about if you care about Web culture, even if you disagree with him on a fundamental level (Which I do).
- Comrade Edwards goes off on one over Far Cry 2. We’ll be doing our verdict this week, which proves to be an interesting one.
- Paul Barnett has started doing a daily video diary. This one namechecks John Walker and World of Goo. Woo!
- And while we’re on Warhammer, Ex-Mythic MMO-sage Lun (Not Lud, Kieron, you nub – Ed) (Actually, it’s Lum. I was up all night. What’s your excuse, Ed – Kieron) the Mad talks about five things he loves about Warhammer and five things he doesn’t like. I don’t like how my subscription has just died. Man!
- Leigh Alexander picks up from where I left off and thinks about the responsibility of journalists and whether she’d have grabbed exactly the same quote.
- BOOGIE WONDERLANNNNND!
Failed.
I’m looking forward to the FC2 verdict. I feel this game may become another Bioshock.
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Jog does a write-up on the Prince of Persia graphic novel. I am pleased to see he can produce insights from the source material that is the original game itself too.
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Should there be a link in paragraph 3?
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I’d have quite liked to have posted something in-depth about how I completely and fundamentally disagree with Paul Boutin’s article on blogging, but was placated by Kyle Orland’s excellent and insightful piece on hype and now I just don’t have the ire necessary to put any effort into ranting. Shame.
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I have to ask, why the hell isn’t anyone reviewing King’s Bounty? Does it have AIDS or something? It makes me so sad. SO. SAD.
Hell, even you guys promised one. But there’s still nothing. :(
This game needs all the love it can get.
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You call this the Sunday Papers?
Nah, kidding, I can go to bed now. This means reading material for tomorrow! Yay!
I couldn’t resist reading one, so I can report that the re-Retro article is rather humorous.
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I want WAR to be successful purely due to Paul. I was a bit fed up with the genre but his enthusiasm sold me on it.
I’ve not subbed, but I’m going to keep my eye on the patches in case the RvR and later tiers pick up.
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If there’s any justice in the world, he’ll be sacked for that Far Cry 2 review.
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*eagerly awaits RPS verdict on Far Cry 2.
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DANCE! BOOGY WOOGIE DANCE!!!
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I second the call for a King’s Bounty review and state my opinion that: if your blog isn’t the best at what it does and you don’t have fun writing it, there’s not much reason to keep it open. A small readership is no reason to shut down an excellent niche blog, though. Boutin seems only to be saying that blog-entrepreneurs are a dying breed. If he’s right, I sure wouldn’t miss them.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhdQyuN9ktE
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Paul Boutin is so fundamentally wrong it’s hard to rant about it. It’s like bashing a Flat Earther.
The argument that you shouldn’t blog because trolls will say nasty things to you was hilarious. If that is your reason for not blogging, it’s also your reason for not making games, writing books, or doing anything else that the public can consume. Cripes that is weak.
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He was trying to say the trolls are the *only* ones who’ll probably ever read what you’ve written.
I for one would not shed a tear for the passing of the amateur blog. If I’m going to spend time reading a long post I will read one by someone who has some authority in the area.
You wouldn’t stand around at Speaker’s Corner looking for political advice.
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The thing isn’t that blogging is outdated, but rather, it finds itself in a position where it’s struggling against similar easy-to-use social networks, such as those Boutin mentions. But I don’t think it is as dismal as he portrays it, as each of these systems has its own pluses and minuses. Comparing them is about as useful as engaging in platform wars: one thing is better at something than the next, but will always have its own advantages.
Also, that one of them has a wider audience than the other doesn’t really say much about them. Blogging has its hecklers as much as YouTube has its doe eyed, slurring cutegurrrl17s.
In essence, the ability for less tech savvy people to instantly post text, images, or videos on the internet will always be the backbone of such mediums. It’s how people use them that gives them an edge. Yes, a single blogger can’t really compete against a game portal that churns out dozens of posts per day – but, why would it have to? It’s like saying indie developers should quit it because that’s not where the money is.
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Kieron, put up some DeVotchKa clips next Sunday Papers, yes?
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Article collision: The Gauntlet article has a really funny concept but dilutes it with its length, and the Wired article suggests dumping blogs for twitter because of the brevity.
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Looking forward to the Far Cry 2 verdict; I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit.
nabeel
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I have mixed feelings about the death-of-blog piece, though I’d certainly be interested in reading a longer-form rebuttal, if anyone writes one.
Also looking forward to FC2 thoughts from the hivemind. When I play the game, I feel it tapping that MMO/OCD part of my brain, and I can’t decide whether that’s a strength or not.
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I’m with Shon on that blogging article. I suppose I should have known the rest of it would be wrongheaded dross the minute he used the word “blogosphere” without irony.
The idea that facebook and twitter are a threat to blogs for producing written material is just ridiculous. I’m pretty sure decent blogs aren’t comprised entirely of lists of people who have no interest in talking to each other joining banal fad groups and uploading yet another picture of their cleavage.
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That Far Cry 2 review seems kind of hysterical.
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Lame. Why don’t you just suck a wiimote?
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Ha! A review of Gauntlet? I think not. Everyone knows that in Gauntlet, there was only one character of each class that could be played. There was no Red Elf, nor Yellow Elf, nor even a Green Elf. There was Elf, and he was alone.
No, it was not until Gauntlet II that each of the four places at the game were color coded, and where you could play whichever class you desired. You could have four Elves, or none.
It saddens me to my very soul that anyone who called himself an old school gamer could conflate the original Gauntlet with its later version! For shame!
Contemplate this upon the Tree of Woe.
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I’ll leave my FC2 comments until RPS gives their review of it, but I agree with qrter that the cited Far Cry 2 review made me feel a bit disgusted by its over-saccharinated tone.
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As people nowadays expect a review a few days after release, there is no middle ground to retreat to – especially high production value games just leave you visually stunned to a degree where it leaves you unable to see through the presentation.
I remember watching the third Star Wars movie, or the newest Batman movie, coming out of the theatre and not being able to really say how I liked it, because these films were expertly produced to a degree where my brain had been kept from working out the content. Only after repeated viewing I could say that I did not love the third Star Wars movie (of course it still is a well-produced movie) and that while I really liked the Batman movie, it was just a really good action movie and the story was nothing special.
I don’t expect much objectivity from a game review. Of course there’s the general game mechanics, there’s the graphics and the sound, and the system requirements and coding, which can all be categorized easily. But the question whether a game really grips you is somewhat hard to objectify, especially some week after you started it. I’m not surprised that reviews mostly border on the extreme, that’s the normal reaction after a week.
That’s why I like the general timing of the verdicts, they could even come later. Although RPS is sometimes up to speed, I read this blog because it regularly digs deep and produces interesting perspectives. Ok, there are also the trailer threads, but they are spam threads, really.
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Why would RPS spend its valuable time doing a verdict on something as forgettable as Far Cry 2, whilst ignoring gorgeous PC curios like Kings Bounty and Hinterland?
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The above poster is absolutely right about FC2 tapping into the MMO/massively addictive sector of your brain. For me, despite its flaws, that is it’s strength: giving you this sandbox playground to explore and unlock things in. It’s just a REAL pity that it’s only a ”good” game when it had the potential to be game of the year.
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I don’t think you could say that we’ve ignored Kings Bounty, with multiple posts on it. Hinterland coverage is on its way when I have time – we’re not exactly idle at the moment, and Hinterland is something I’ve had to put aside to review RA3, GTA4, Dead Space, and make time to play Far Cry 2, and Fallout when it turns up. The same is true for the rest of the team.
We’re doing a verdict on FC2 because we all have something to say about it: which is the point of the site. Obvs.
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Boutin’s right for his point. Blogging is considerably more mature now than it was. The idea of “starting a blog and achieving fame and fortune” is a lot harder today than five years ago, and, to be honest, to get the “mindshare” he’s talking about, you really needed to start your blogging sometime around when Lum the Mad started his (Lud the Mad? Is that some sort of MMO-playing technology hater?), and that was a long time ago.
Today, if you want a Blog to reach a wide audience, you need to find and exploit a niche, and to do that, there are a lot of pros out there.
But the same problem exists with Twitter, Flickr or whatever. Once a social system gets established, it becomes a lot harder to work up the hierarchy. So most people end up on the lower tiers, the fringes of the little internet society, along with the deadbeats and outcasts (aka trolls).
Ms. Alexander could have said the same thing about political news or sports coverage today. The tension is the same, but, contrary to what EA seems to suggest, both sides play the narrative game. The source wants to present a narrative (‘spin’) and the press wants to find one that sells (‘yellow’).
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I guess what I’m asking, Jim, is since RPS verdicts can be charitably described as ‘sporadic’, what’s the mechanism for choosing what game gets the verdict treatment?
Far Cry 2 just seems a teensy bit ‘meh’ when held for brutal judgment against what I imagined were the criteria.
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True, I’d like to see something about Hinterland.
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And, (curse the lack of an edit function), while I totally understand you guys have to do all the big names, don’t we already get enough coverage of those? I mean, is there anything left to say about all those games you named, Jim? Or are they for your real job?
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The irony that Paul Boutin posted this rant on a blog.
And his argument is so flawed it hurts my eyes.
9/10 for stupidity.
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I was “singing” the synthline to boogie wonderland in the shower this morning. Excellent choice of music. Isn’t verdine white such a cad? He looks like he’s on coke durnig every gig.
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It’s rating 88/100 on Metacritic, making it the highest rating major PC title of the year. I think it’s worthy of discussion.
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Formal request: More disco links on RPS, please.
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@drewski:
I can go to any lowest common denominator gaming site to read about Far Cry 2, though. There are many major PC titles that have passed by RPS unverdicted too.
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Re: Boogie Wonderland. The video came on the wall display in the pub I was in on Saturday night, and we were overcome with the sheer joy of it all to such a degree we were singing and dancing to it at our table all the next day. POP MUSIC.
(Best of all, I love videos before they invented modern choreography. HUMAN)
Re: What we cover in verdicts. Things which three of the four of us have played significantly is a normally the main thing that leads to a verdict, assuming it gets past our getting organised thing.
Cataclysm: To be fair, he posted it on a major international magazine’s blog. Which is kind of his point. And claiming “Blogging is just a tech” as last time a similar discussion came up is the sort of pedantry which deliberately misses the point of what was being discussed. Of course, I still totally disagree with ‘im.
KG
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Ah, so it’s really just blind chance, that enough of you had played it to proffer some kind of opinion on us?
I SEE.
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Guys, give RPS crew a break, I don’t think you understand how extremely busy is a videogame journalist at this moment (and I don’t want to imagine the kind of schedule Kieron has being a freelance journalist and having to write a comic on a monthly basis). I´m really surprised you find time to write something at all, it´s great and inspiring seeing such a commitment.
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Don’t forget that they also have to fight crime at night. No wait, I mean alcohol.
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All I can say is in the last 5 minutes Kieron went from saying Skaven 221 times to 780…
Is that a new record and what was the discussion that made it possible? :D
ps – good work, it really should be called “monday morning reading while ignoring all the so called important things that need to be fxed”
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Not really blind chance: we try to get everyone to play particular titles, but it’s not always possible – I didn’t play WAR, for example. We will all have played FC2, and that makes a Verdict worth doing.
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Al Ewing writes uncannily like Jonathan Nash, only he has a working, regularly updated website, these two facts combine to make exceptionally good news.
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I quite like the idea of an RPS verdict ‘on us’. RPS verdict: RPS commenters.
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FOUR THUMBS AS DOWN AS THEY COULD POSSIBLY BE, then, I guess.
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“Pretty, but too much DRM.”
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Having now read more of Ewing’s material, it seem’s the Gauntlet retrospective might have been one off, in term of comedy genius stakes :(
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Jochen: I never fight Alcohol.
KG
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Meat Circus you’re being crap again.
Oh and about Hype: it’s not just low end journalism that does it; the Economist plays the bait and switch with it’s front page lead every issue.
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@Radiant:
New Scientist is a shitter for it too, ‘WHY WE’LL BE DEAD TOMORROW’, and the article reveals a new style of string theory which hypothesises an alternate dimension each day where we all die or something equally rubbish.
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Dear RPS, I have no idea on how to run a website about games or indeed how to write correctly in southern queen like English. I do however have a degree in a real science (chemistry) so that makes me better than you or indeed anybody else. So please give me a job so that I can alleviate your burden of having not enough time in the day to play computer games and write about the things you love most, instead of for example testing the highly entertaining sealing characteristics of polytetrafluoroethene based gaskets under EN13555 standards and then having to write reports of said sealing characteristics in as boring as possible third person passive.
I need a new job… does RPS need a research chemist with an overly large head? I have experience in creating car polish and anti graffiti cleaners also….
I am a chemist I can make things go bang…
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More splodes are always need, surely?
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*I seem to have blown the end off of ‘needed’ :S
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“Lud” the Mad? FOR SHAME.
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Looking forward to the Farcry 2 verdict. Initially I was down on the game, but the more I’ve played the more I’ve come to embrace the challenge to it, and in a lot of ways understand where Tim is coming from in his review. If you’re on of the many complaining about the respawning checkpoints, you need to think beyond the road when it comes to getting from A to B. You’re a hostile in a warzone…travelling on a road in broad daylight is always going to be a recipe for disaster. Start thinking like that and the game becomes that much more pleasurable.
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@mrrobsa
I don’t think I’ve ever read the New Scientist.
Or indeed looked at the cover. ;)
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@Kadayi
That’s what I thought reading a lot of the complaints on FC2: “The checkpoints! They have guards!”
Maybe some dyed in the wool FPS players are too used to straight lining a game; COD4′ing themselves from A-B in the shortest line possible.
With the shift in gameplay that FC2 presents it’s hard to understand that you really don’t have to go through any checkpoints if you don’t want to.
I don’t know, I just think some people [the ever present horde of you people that love to moan if the porridge is too lumpy] just want to grind to the end of the game to get to the next.
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Only because you lose when you do…
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Let’s Groove > Boogie Wonderland
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_XOY7lsBVpo
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Abyss: Gillen has a degree (at what level I do not know) in Biology, so consider yourself redundant.
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Re: Boogie Wonderland. I only could think of one thing when watching that video – it’s a singing Klingon with an afro!
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@Zuffox: Of course, as Physicists and Chemists know, Biology isn’t a Real Science, as Abyss specified.
Of course, as a Physicist, I should note that Chemistry isn’t a Real Science either.
*ducks*
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@Sam:
We all know what’s needed…. SCIENCE WARS!!
It’d be chuffing brilliant! Chemists vs Physicists vs Biologists TO THE DEATH.
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@Radiant
I’d say the flaw to the game is that it doesn’t actually encourage you think differently about your play style, in the way that say Portal does, but instead leaves you to figure out why your butting heads all the time, or end up on forums/websites bitching about ‘respawning Checkpoints’ and ‘they need to patch it’. I watched the 1UP show last night and although all of the reviewers on it were super enthusiastic about it as a game, it was abundantly clear that one of them at least hadn’t made the necessary leap of imagination required to get past the whole Cars/Roads/Checkpoints conundrum.
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Sam: we physicists win :)
Oh, crap, I do maths as well don’t I? I agree, a fight to the bitter, messy end is needed.
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Absolutely.
My personal view of it is that it sits in between two camps. It’s flaw being it’s not RPG enough for the explorers ["no XP? no leveling? no inventory?"] and it’s not signposted enough for straight forward shooters.
It’s not really a flaw in the game dynamics more a flaw in the games perception.
It reminds me a lot of Project IGI.
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But your right it does need a Cpt. Price to show you the ropes in game.
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Although Farcry 2 is building on the bones of STALKER & Boiling point and GTA to an extent; it’s going to be very hard to go back to the linear shooter for a lot of people after they’ve played it I feel. It’s definitely going to shift the FPS paradigm in terms of mainstream player expectation (someone had to say it, so it might as well be me), which kind of makes me fearful for titles like HL2:EP3, but at the same time makes me excited for future releases that evolve the concept further.
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Sam and Down Rodeo: look here :D
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New Scientist is a shitter for it too, ‘WHY WE’LL BE DEAD TOMORROW’, and the article reveals a new style of string theory which hypothesises an alternate dimension each day where we all die or something equally rubbish.
The only time you can be sure that the end of the world will be tomorrow is when the New Scientist doesn’t appear at all, because all the staff are out snorting cocaine off a prostitute’s buttock.
I don’t know, I just think some people … just want to grind to the end of the game to get to the next.
Judging by what I’ve seen and heard from many people, this is depressingly true. Although it seems to me that they’re often the most easily pleased players as well – give them shiny graphics and they’ll grind through it and move on to the next one for another £40. I’ve even seen this done with Guitar Hero – people sitting there mechanically pressing the buttons on easy mode until they’ve passed all the songs once, then ditching it forever. Totally missing the point, but there you go.
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The thing is, biologists get laid.
KG
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Growing your own doesn’t count.
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Theoretical Physicists unfortunately don’t get laid. They just meet very charismatic, athletic and attractive multi-ethnic women with engineering expertise. Then, NOTHING HAPPENS.
The bloody anti-shag field is down now. They should be gagging for it.
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