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Tag: destructoid

March 20, 2010

Just In Case You Needed Realistic Force Feedback

by Frank — Categories: Gaming — Tags: , , — Leave a comment

This one comes courtesy of Gizmodo via Destructoid, where apparently one hardcore God of War III player was so into the game he managed to literally break two fingers. Matthew Razak of DToid opines:

“I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes trying to visualize how this even happened, but cannot think of a way where I would be holding a controller while playing a game and still be able to roll over my hand with my knee. I can only conclude that this man plays videogames in a very awkward position and must be some sort of contortionist. However he did it it doesn’t look like he’ll be beating the game any time soon.”

Ouch. You and me both, Matthew. You and me both. Well, like I always say, let’s look on the bright side – considering that Kratos decapitates, impales, and rips things into halves on his way to fulfilling his revenge, the guy should be real lucky that his intense playing only landed him two broken fingers.

Don’t try this at home, kids.

February 19, 2010

The Need For Artsy-Fartsy Gameplay

by Frank — Categories: Gaming — Tags: , — Leave a comment

Over at Destructoid, Jim Sterling’s created a bit of a stir with his two articles regarding the “artsy” nature of games – one in which he decries the pretentiousness of indie “art” games for eschewing gameplay, and one in which he has to clarify what he was trying to say. The camp of opposition to Jim’s little article seems to fall within two main bodies of people – one which thinks Jim is bashing artistic value in games and the other which thinks Jim hates different things than the norm, a sort of gaming racism, if you will.

Sometimes I feel for Jim, because unlike someone as optimistic and annoyingly sunny as me, Jim receives plenty of negative impressions in his reviews and his notions. When they come out, they come out in a way that is inevitably insulting to some portion of the gaming populace. It leads to a lot of need to clarify and repeat. Definitely not fun all the time. In my own way, I think I’d like to help by providing my own impressions of what he thought.

Really, I think the main point that’s being put across is not that art games suck, or that indie games suck, but that a game being “artsy” and only “artsy” as a selling point of success sucks. We all know that games themselves are an amalgamation of parts, and the presentation, of which art is a part, is only one portion of making a successful game. I love games that make me think, present me a theme, show me something that is controversial and out there. In fact they’re a welcome alternative to the mainstream stuff I sometimes play when I don’t need a brain to play. But as much as we need “art” in games sometimes, we also need the accompanying gameplay and sensible logic to go with it. This is pretty much, I think, the crux of Jim’s argument.

If people thought that gameplay was the only thing that could make a successful game, we wouldn’t see half of the interesting twists and turns that some games are adventurous enough to take. If people thought that art was the only thing that could make a successful game, then we’d have plenty more games that were out there and well-known that tried to send more of a thematic message than play well. The fact is, we need both art and gameplay to make a good game, and one without the other is like having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the bread.

The mere fact that games have a smaller, indie market to create titles that are a bit “out there” (like The Path) is a good thing. The expansion of the games market and the target audience to include people who take a more artistic tack on media is really only a good thing overall, and not a bad thing. Really, I think the point is that the fundamentals should not be forgotten when making a game, no matter what message or thought you want to send with it. More significantly, one part of creating a game should not make the game an automatic success, whether that is the more “artsy” ideas of what message/theme you’re trying to send, or the fact that you can turn on a dime with the analog sticks and shoot backwards or upside down. Judging games as a whole should be based on all the factors, not just one which gives it a free pass to evaluating everything else it does. I personally look forward to seeing what art can be done in games – as long as I’m able to make sense of it at the same time, too.

November 12, 2009

Overly Positive Thoughts: The Brand New Review Score

by Frank — Categories: Gaming, Overly Positive Thoughts — Tags: , , , — 2 Comments

42-18969280Over at Destructoid, there’s a particularly great and meaningful article up by Jim Sterling about how to respond properly to a video game review. If you haven’t read it yet, feel free to go do so prior to coming back around to hear about today’s dose of sunshine. A couple of the tips involved: claim bias, make random comparisons, and attack the reviewer. I was definitely enlightened, and you will be too.

One of the things that Jim touches upon, and what I plan on talking about, is the idea that the review scoring system is broken – in the way that anything above a 9.0 is perfectly fine and anything below it means the entire system is borked out. Completely legitimate folks – as someone who likes to give a perpetual 10 to everything I touch, I have to say – positivity is always consistent (10) while negativity is just so darned subjective (what IS a 5.0 vs. a 6.0 anyway?). It’s certainly not because numbers provide a decent context and a fair scale of bad vs. good on an even keel, now is it?

So I say to ye, review scoring system, it’s time for you to go. But what shall we replace it with? Here are some amazing and insightful ideas I just had. Clearly one of these must be implemented as quickly as possible to ensure the future integrity of games reviews.

EleventyOneMade-up Numbers – Let’s face it, folks, math is hard. All these crazy numbers adding and subtracting and dividing into each other. Who needs that inconvenience when you’re reviewing games? Better to go with numbers you can actually trust, like “eleventy-one”, “fourbajillionzillion”, and “42″. With the randomness of the system assured, one cannot criticize the numbers for being vague because no matter what you score a game, it’s all vague. Equality, people – it’s the stuff of legends.

applesandoranges

Fruit – If we’re going to review something and subject ourselves to writing walls of text that will need to deal with the ADD that some people have about the Internet, we might as well make it tasty, right? Fruit’s been around for seemingly forever, and it’s already prominent in cultural colloquialism (apples and oranges are famous by now). Also, can you imagine rating something a “Succulent Strawberry” or a “Passionate Peach”? I’m drooling already. For the negative reviews, you could always go with fruit gone terribly wrong, too. I mean, it’s worked for one site that is totally not subjectively selective at all, right?

…but by personal favorite by far has to be:

funny-pictures-cat-will-kill-dinosaurCats - In the great cat vs. dog debate, cats are clearly on top right now. Why? Because dogs haven’t become an internet meme phenomenon that is an endless sausage factory of amateur-Photoshopped and outlined-text images, that’s why. Cats, being the self-thought rulers of the world that they are, are the perfect arbiters for the determination of whether or not a game is good. Nothing says “good” like cat holding sniper rifle or conversely, “bad” like pissed cat in moose costume. The range of cat emotions runs long and wide, so if you can’t understand that a cat has given a meaningful and intelligent review score, it is, perhaps, time to go back to school.

So there you have it – my totally infallible bunch of suggestions to fix gaming review scores. Better take note, because if you don’t, I might just implement the ideas myself and create great, totally non-biased, non-subjective, non-opinionated reviews of my own. Watch out!

September 2, 2009

Thou Shalt Not Suck – Destructoid’s Brand of Community

by Frank — Categories: Internet — Tags: , — 3 Comments
Destructoid says Wii
Image by extraface via Flickr

Now, I’m not above a little bit of whoring when it comes to giving back some love for a backlink. Sure, that makes me sound like Overly Positive is that person in commercials that “totally endorses” products like male enhancement pills despite the potentially embarrassing side effects (a what lasting over 4 hours??), but it’s more like recognizing what’s cool if people are cool to me.

Such as it is with resident Destructoid forum master Technophile, who was kind enough in his monthly “Forums: We Have Them” post to link back to some tiny little backwater optimist’s blog in a brief mention. What Technophile doesn’t probably know, is that I’ve been a resident lurker in D-Toid’s forums for quite some time – for months, really, and that I stick around said community because I enjoy it. Here’s why.

As a person who has managed all kinds of forums – from the Darwinistic “community polices themselves” kind to special interest forums like for anime conventions, to my most recent, stricter stint as Assistant Site Manager for Warhammer Alliance, I find Destructoid’s to be well-balanced and fun to read. There’s a sort of edgier, more plain-spoken tone to Destructoid in general, and the forums, as they do with many sites, reflect that. The community at Destructoid is sarcastic, discerning, and snarky – close to what my actual personality, for those that know me personally, actually is.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t rules. Any community forum manager will tell you that moderating a forum is a constant balance of enforcing your very objective ruleset and understanding the occasional subjectivity of threads that require that enforcement. Is that thread a troll thread, or is it a cry for something else besides attention? Is a thread that violates rule #4 about exploits or cheating deserve closure, or will more damage be done doing it? You can have a strict community, or one that is more laissez-faire – it can work either way. But I like Destructoid’s approach – creative presentation of objective rules (“Thou shalt not suck”) while making clear the idea is that subjectivity does exist, that this is their house, and that common sense rules violations will simply be dealt with.

What does that lead to? A community that feels unrestricted enough in posting but which understands the rules in a way that they end up helping to defend them, not resist them. The result is a bunch of threads like Go Ahead – Call Attention to Yourself, creatively disturbing threads in the Podtoid forums that have resulted in male hosts having breasts (poor Samit), and the topicless The Bar thread, where almost anything within the rules can be discussed. In short, it’s the kind of twisted little humor that I appreciate daily.

Destructoid isn’t for everyone – its little green vBulletin implementation (another plus in my book, vB is amazing) can scare some people away, as can the idea that you are literally Fresh Meat for your first few posts. But it’s one that I plan on reading for the forseeable future, and perhaps even posting in, because it’s a community that works. I like the communities I’ve read, managed, and participated in, and Destructoid’s is no different. I’d get over there before you get sick of my optimistic ass-kissery of them. Of course, if you were sick of optimism, you wouldn’t be here…

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July 11, 2009

Because Virally Cute Can Sell Games…

by Frank — Categories: Gaming — Tags: , , — Leave a comment
Scribble Larry
Image by jain7th via Flickr

If you guys haven’t seen the rather viral movement to make just about every video game character into a cutesy Scribblenauts version of itself, then you need to roll over to Destructoid to check the link to the NeoGAF forums,  and to artists inspired by them, where someone’s latest creation appears to be Street Fighter characters in Scribblenauts style.

Scribblenauts, a simple little DS game that visually does things to objects based upon what words you use, has been the sleeper hit of E3 and one of those titles that will probably pop up out of nowhere as a novelty that will sell.

Clearly, the cute style is popular with even the blackest of black-hearted gamers, who are apparently putting down their Halo guns and picking up Scribblenauts avatars instead. Anyone who follows me on Twitter probably has seen mine.

If you’re on Scribblenauts’ marketing team, you have to be breathing a sigh of relief for a game getting as much buzz as it is with this giant fanart movement. Whether or not the developers will choose to employ some of the avatars into the game, somehow, remains to be seen, but it’s nice to know your product can sell itself by providing a terribly easy means to recreate its unique style.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go change my avatar to a cute little Optimus Prime…

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June 16, 2009

Podcast Pingback – Podtoid

by Frank — Categories: Gaming, Internet, Social Geekery — Tags: , , , — 1 Comment
The Destructoid
Image by extraface via Flickr

In great contrast to the lack of rant on a minimally visited site such as Overly Positive, Destructoid is a site filled with edgier writing, controversial op-ed pieces, and ranting galore. Once a smallish little blog, Destructoid has grown into the harsh, direct, yet intelligent voice of the gaming community. There are rules in the Destructoid community – ones that you would expect you would have on a gaming site – but the fast and loose moderation based on tenets such as “Thou shalt not suck” has been Destructoid’s trademark. The result is a community not afraid to speak their mind but who tends to think before they speak, lest the wrath of the community fall upon them. For Destructoid, this works to great effect.

Destructoid has several podcasts, but the flagship is called Podtoid – an hour or two of games discussion, banter about the hot topics of the gaming world, and responses to frequent listener questions. Of perhaps all the podcasts that currently sit on my iPod, Podtoid probably has the most diverse and opinionated set of individuals. There are wry and at times acerbic deliveries from Jim Sterling, whose English accent only serves to increase the novelty of his rather sharp criticisms. There’s Samit Sarkar, the podcast’s requisite punching bag, whose love of sports games and his tendancy to ramble are objects of great humor. Topher Cantler is an old school gamer who boils down his preferences to a few, simple concepts, most of which are in retro games. Aaron Linde, the show’s longest member, is a hardened veteran with equally well-traveled accomplishments – not the least of which includes the unintended contribution to a blatantly pornographic game which was supposed to be a joke. Finally, Anthony Burch rounds out the cast as the navigator and resident prison guard to this set of loveable inmates.

Podtoid’s charm doesn’t really lie in being controversial, raunchy, and raw for its own sake, but simply in the fact that these guys are gamers who feel the sort of things that gamers feel – ultimately, it’s greatest strength is its ability to connect with gamers on many levels. While Destructoid has exploded into a popular site visited by thousands under the watchful and savvy eye of its owner and founder, Niero, you never get the feeling that the site has lost where its roots were – as a gaming blog that had an unabashed, unfiltered opinion about anything and everything video games. Gamers you’ve run into at the store, at friends’ houses, at social gatherings, and in malls fall into at least one or more of the niches that Destructoid fills with its podcast. This means you get a podcast that is not just hilariously funny or dangerously rantish, but also full of content from hosts that feel passionate about their hobby.

So while Destructoid’s acidic opinions seems to run counter to my own sort of “c’est la vie” philosophy about geek topics, they’re more than worthy of a listen – if for nothing else, to hear that even they don’t take themselves seriously. Don’t believe me? Try checking out Podtoid 94, which is an MST3k-ish take on the awful Jean Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia movie Street Fighter. Or what about episode 88, in which Jim Sterling talks about the ultimate in game design being the inclusion of, and interaction with, toucan birds? The latest episode, episode 102, jaws about the Prototype vs. inFamous fanboy gang war. No matter what your slant, Podtoid has something for you – just as long as you’re willing to leave that snooty standard of “professionalism” and “industry insider” at home.

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