Sundays are for downloading Indie Strategy Games, sipping tea and compiling an enormous list of the fun and fascinating reading from across the week, while trying my jolly hardest to not link to some fine 80s indie miserablism which I found myself listening to this morning…
- RPS and assorted friends-of-RPS have been nominated for the GMAs. That is, the Games Media Awards 2009. I’ll hand you over to the justly nominated for specialist online writer, Simon Parkin to talk about it. While still clearly enormously silly, it’s… well, I was going to say “getting more credible”, but it’s still very silly. Just not as silly as before. We’re in the blog category, as opposed to last year, when we were in the website category. VG247 is in both, somehow. And Nowgamer -as much a website as Eurogamer or C&VG is – is in blogs. It’s gloriously mental. At least it’s a good excuse for a piss up, eh?
- Actually, while on the subject of Si-Si The Parkster, here’s his interview with Ex-Goldeneyer Martin Hollis about what he’s up to now and how he got there. Hollis is one of my favourite developers, because – er – he’s lovely. Sometimes it really is that easy. Great stuff.
- Over at Edge Chris Dahlen wonders whether we’ll ever play videogames on an interplanetary scale. He talks to NASA about it. Conclusion: Urban Dead’s more likely than Left 4 Dead 2. And not because Martians are big for the L4D2 boycott.
- Robin Clarkes’ had a busy few weeks, y’know. Retrospective on the ever-awesome Deluxe Paint. Arguing why APB MUST succeed. And most relevantly to RPS, a hefty over-view of the history of the Shareware game.
- Valve are studying sign-language for a deaf-Half-life character. Interesting.
- Talking about Devs I Like, I liked to Randy Smith’s new Iphone game earlier this week.Now he writes about the experience over at Edge. Er… making the game. Not me blogging about him.
- I haven’t gone through all of it yet, but the New York Time’s enormous piece on Rock Band Beatles and the whole rhythm-action-toy-game-thing is seriously hefty. Double-multiplier points for its title: While My Guitar Gently Bleeps.
- The web’s finest home of AARs, The Blue Casket, starts another one. It’s Peggle Noir. Yes.
- Popmatters’ Jack Patrick Rodgers on Final Fantasy VIII. Heartfelt and clever, but more than a little disingenuous when it claims that FFVIII was reviewed badly. FFVIII almost drowning in in reviewer semen was actually the moment my dislike of Final Fantasy hardened into an actual grudge. Those unskippable guardian forces are literally unforgivable.
- Lou Castle, now of Instant Action, thinks the industry is on a “Bad Spiral”. Specifically, spending all the effort to please whining sods like us lot.
- We haven’t done an interview DoubleBear on ZRPG because we thought it was probably too early. RETICULE THINKS US COWARDLY KNAVES!
- Very Cute. Bobsy obsesses over the Cricket and Spelunky simultaneously.
- Couple of pieces from Resolution. Firstly, Fraser McMillian on loneliness in Indie Games. Not in, “you have to be lonely to play them”. And the final part of that games-and-militarism series I’ve talked about before.
- Paul Wedgwood starts a dev-diary on the forthcoming Brink over at the Bethblog.
- Videogame advertising used to be amazing. You seen the Club Centipede advert for the Atari?
- Actually, before I go onto the less-game-related stories, just something I’ve been thinking about. The Sunday Papers seems to have been ballooning in recent times. Which is great, but I can’t but help feel by having so much stuff here, a lot of it’s going to be overlooked. I’m thinking of actually spinning more stuff into actual RPS posts, leaving a body of work for here, but moving stuff which perhaps needs more concentrated debate to their own story. I mean, to choose one from the last few weeks, the Abandonware Interview was probably a post in of itself. I mention this to feel people out. Of course, it wouldn’t even be an issue if we were the 20-posts-a-day style blog like Kotaku or whatever. It’s just that with our relatively low turn-over, it may appear a little odd. Or maybe not.
- I liked this fake NYT story about Peter Parker writing about his mutant room-mate.
- Lady Gaga: Puppet Of The Illuminati. One for the Deus Ex 3 writers to consider integrating, methinks.
- Jim loved this hefty conversation between Francois Roche, Geoff Manaugh and Warren Ellis over at Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today.
- You’ll have seen the Billion Dollar Gram. But in case you haven’t…
- The Smiths – What Difference Does It Make?
Failed.
Related Stories:
I get loads of low budget titles used. Often stuff i would never ever try at the prices the portals like steam and gamersgate want. Hell, often times i’ve been able to register the key with a service. Be it steam, blizzard or the multiplayer servers.
As a karmic retribution of sorts i found that the new copy of age of mythology doesn’t support multiplayer because the publisher (ubisoft) put a generic key on every box. Blah!
So yes, when the retail and digital price is high, i know there is no activation issues and the key is likely okay (when the game is practically new) i’ll snap it up 2nd hand.
So i’m the guilty party you are talking about. I never actually trade in though.
Great links, thanks! Will need to slowly read through them :P
Thanks for replying Robin. I would be tempted to agree that 1993 is probably the most appropriate year for which to claim the start of the “DOS gaming era”. VGA became widely used, Soundblasters became a standard, as did the “joystick/MIDI” ports, and – of course – Doom came out. Perhaps also we could say that Shareware grew up: it didn’t mean half-baked graphics or gameplay any more. Titles like Doom or In Pursuit Of Greed (remember that?) could stand up to “commercial” releases of the time, quite easily.
But yes, about 1998-1999 this all gave way to Windows and 3D acelleration. Hence my comment.
Otherwise, though, it was a superb article and – having grown up, and enjoyed many games in that era – I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I need to add that 2 years ago i got a mint condition copy of system shock 2 for £3. A game which otherwise exists only in myth. If system shock 2 was actually available anywhere legally digitally i’d buy it again of course. So i guess what i’m trying to say is, get that shit on gog, steam and gamersgate.
KG: I expect a huge entry soon, then!
I loved reading the article on Lady Gaga. If there’s any celebrity that’s batshit insane, she’s it.
Plus they wouldn’t have to do much to make her look like a mechanically-modded character for a cameo in DX3.
Wasn’t DirectX originally owned by someone else and then later bought out by MSoft after they realised its value to their OS?
I dunno, where I lived in the UK there were a lot of used PC games for dirt cheap. I picked up Max Payne for 1 pound, and JK: Dark Forces II for 1 pound as well.
I don’t have much trouble finding PC Games…Aside from Fallout 3, which I havn’t been able to find anywhere, neither in the UK or in Holland …so I had to torrent it.
Here in holland, in one store in the Hague they sell their old (pre-2000!) stock for good prices. I picked up X-Wing Alliance and X-Wing vs. TIE-Fighter for 15 euros each, in the original cardboard boxes with all the original manuals and everything! They also have stuff like Wing Commander, and I think I even saw the original Tomb Raider in there.
I’ve only got one store nearby (australia) that sells second hand PC games.
They’ve had barely any stock rotation in 3 years, and 90% of what they have can be had for half price as a budget re-release. But its good if you’re a sucker for original box’s and such.
Actually, it makes Gordon an utter bastard, since we’re pretty sure he can hear if the gamer can hear. Faker!
I don’t mind it ballooning, as it is my favorite part of RPS. I probably look forward more to this than any other post. Great stuff as always.
Break off and expand as much as you like– the more RPS to read, the better! I read almost every story you blog about during the week, but it is hard to get through the entire Sunday Papers, so I tend to cherry-pick. Would help if you directed more attention toward the “important” ones.
“At the same time, one of the best-selling games of recent times was 80 hour gameplay/$100 million production GTA4, which probably made half a billion dollars by now.”
Not to mention that ‘80 hours of gameplay’ is a pretty liquid number, not to mention different to different people. Some would say the goddamn Mario 1/2/3 series of games is 80+ hours, because it often took that to master it. I’ve put 80+ into Fallout 3 and Mass Effect, but I’m willing to bet you could power through it in 6-8 hours.
I think what people DO want is QUALITY gameplay that lends itself to replayability. I don’t need a game that takes 90 hours to beat. I need (want) a game that I WILL spend 90 hours playing.
Queue the value of TF2 vs. Call of Duty 4 (for me.) I disliked the multiplayer (I had a series of screenshots showing me dying four deaths in a row to the same strafing run on my spawn), and I absolutely HATED the walk to ‘x’ and enemies stop clown-car-exiting the 10×12 room singleplayer. So to me, it’s about a game that brings me back.
I still have a few tabs open from last weeks sunday paper that I didn’t finish reading(but will). I like not having the sunday papers spread out across the week but it does suck that usually only one thing will ever really get discussed in the comments (DRM, it’s always DRM) and the things that either seemed to raise some interesting points or effected me have very little discussion. I don’t think the photoessay of trailer trash would get it’s own newspost though.
(and again, I wouldn’t want it to. I feel like shit if I try to keep up with too much so this is the only game blog I read because it doesn’t keep up with every little thing that comes out of the industry like I’m training to be a gaming historian. I wouldn’t want to have 10 news posts every day. I already have that problem when I don’t check for a few days.)
@Freudian Trip
For future use:
http://savygamer.co.uk/2009/04/hmv-do-not-get-pc-gamers.html
To be honest, the main reason I hoped the interview would be a post and not a Sunday Paper was because the posts come up on the ‘Revisit an old story’ panel. I often find myself picking through odds and ends because of that panel. The Sunday Papers are a little more transitory, while the posts seem to be blessed with a kind of permanence.
It’s not too late, Keiron ! IT’S NEVER TOO LATE !
By the way, that’s how we spell your name here in Bangkok. Not a typo, no sir.
Ahh… Final Fantasy 8, the game that killed off my *very* brief affair with JRPGs (which started with FF7). I really can’t see how anyone can call the writing, the love story or the coming of age stuff as profound…
But what made me really actively dislike it was all the glaring plot holes. Mind you it was almost 9 years since I played it, and maybe I missed something, but this is what I remember. (Obvously, *SPOILERS*)
- Protagonists supposed to be a world elite military force, but act like whiny spoiled arguing 13 year olds, with discipline that wouldn’t be acceptable in junior scouts.
- They can “draw” power from enemies by hopping forward one step and frowning at them. How does this drawing ability work metaphysically? Why can’t anyone else do this? Is no-one freaked out by these kids who draw life force remotely from everyone like vampires? Never explained, never mentioned again and taken for granted after the initial tutorial battle.
- Everyone suffers from collective amnesia, just so they can go “Oh so we all knew each other as kids, even the evil sorceress queen we have been fighting! How profound!” Why did they all get amnesia all at once?
- There is a mythological country, which turns out to be slightly more technologically advanced than other countries and takes up half the area of the planet, yet they remain a myth and have no contact with anyone else. Why? How? (a power shield that protects against being detected by everyone and everything apparently).
- Protagonists all dream about 3 soldiers in enemy army. Then you meet them in the game on the other continent where they have become the rulers and everyone goes “Yay! The people we dreamed about! Cool!” Why did they dream about them? What was the point?
- A flying fortress. Who built it like that? Why? If you can make it levitate, why not put some bloody cannons on it?
… to me it felt like the writers just sat down with some nifty concept arts and a checklist of the “musts have things” in a Final Fantasy title – “a strange flying vehicle, going into space and under the sea at some point, mecha enemies, emo kids with self-esteem and other emotional issues relevant to 13-year olds, a big disaster wiping out someones home town at some point, etc” and then wrote a thin story around it.
One of the three soldiers (was his name Laguna?) where in early press releases described as an investigative journalist, and was hinted at being an occasional transvestite, possibly a bisexual, and mystically linked to the hero somehow, but the ear-piercing shriek of puritan outrage from fans seemed to have made the developers scrap a large part of that plot, which may be why the subplot of the three soldiers you dream of are so pointless.
I also didn’t like how the girls who, even though one of them is a senior instructor at a military academy, immediately lets the boys, especially Squall, take charge. They are passive, shy and chaste, so they are good girls. Independent women are evil tyrants who dress in clothes that show their boobs. I got this vibe of, if not mysogany then at least fear of adult sexuality.
“…but the ear-piercing shriek of puritan outrage from fans…”
JRPG fanboys/fangirls are the reason the genre is so stagnant.
Look at FFXII, a game that actually tried to push the genre forward, and is reviled by said genre’s fans for “not being a real RPG.” Hell, the only reason the obligatory bishonen exists, is because they realized they could hope to sell a single copy to their fans without one. Early versions of the story centered completely around Basch. They threw Vaan in, and pushed him out of the way as soon as possible, to make room for the *actual* main characters.
As for the amnesia in FF8, the guardian forces slowly cause you to lose your memories. It’s never implied that they lost them all at once.
>As for the amnesia in FF8, the guardian forces slowly cause you to lose your memories. It’s never implied that they lost them all at once.
Ahh, I see. So I did miss something. Thanks.
So, is one of you going to be doing a Wot I Think on AI Wars? Tom Chick’s description of it as Sins meets Tower Defence sounds very enticing, but, well, Tom has strange taste in games. And it sounds like the demo doesn’t really give you much of a feel for how the gameplay develops.
Lou Castle is, quite frankly, smoking crack if he’s going to spin shitty console games sales as being due to games getting sold “5-6 times”. Even GameStop, whose core business plan revolves around used sales, still sees three times as many new games sell as used games. Let’s run a few numbers.
Let’s say that a retailer, on a US$60 copy of Halo 3, earns about $12. That’s actually more than they usually get, but it’ll make the math easier. Let’s also say that this retailer buys used copies of Halo 3 for US$14, and sells them for $50. That’s actually less than they usually offer to buy it for, but again, easy math is good.
Like GameStop, this retailer makes about half of their gross profit on used games. So for every $36 they make on used game sales (one copy of Halo 3), they will also make $36 on new game sales (three copies of Halo 3). As a check, let’s figure up the total profit for the retailer under this scenario: US$72 total on 3 $60 new games and one $50 game adds up to a gross profit margin of 31.5%, which is actually a little higher (but then, I made the math easy) than the actual gross margin GameStop enjoys of 27% or so. All those old sports games from 3 years ago and lackluster shooters nobody cares about anymore actually bring the profit down a bit.
This isn’t about retailers sucking up 2.5 million of the 3 million potential sales on a title by cutting the developer out of 80% of their profit. We’re talking about the retailer pocketing US$72 rather than $48 of the $230 that has been spent in toto on four pieces of software, and developer revenues dropping by 25%. It’s still a significant chunk, but I’ve got got a saying I like to use to describe the book business: a new bookstore can stock the 30,000 best selling books on the market. A used bookstore can stock the 30,000 best books of which the public would rather have two dollars than own.
If the games industry really wants to make up that “extra” 10% of the gross the retailer is taking (and that is keeping it afloat), maybe it should stop making games people are going to want to trade for $14 after a couple weeks.