Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 is an insane, intense, fun and difficult but rewarding Capcom fighting game.

eGamer Rating

Addictive: Yes, most definitely for those who persevere past the basics
Worth The Time: Yes, certainly for fighting game fans, but not necessarily for Marvel/Capcom character fans

Things Loved: The variety of play styles and characters, the jaw-dropping visuals and graphics design, the over-the top free-flowing gameplay
Things Hated: The omission of a few signature characters (i.e. Megaman), the steep-learning curve, the difficulty and timing of inputs

Reasons To Buy: The fighting game depth, if you’re a fan of Capcom fighters and crossovers, for the variety of well-represented characters and franchises
Reasons Not To Buy: The time commitment required to become proficient, the omission of your personal favourite characters

Quick Conclusion: Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is a difficult game to rate for a number of reasons and despite its wide target audience, its gameplay won’t really appeal to everyone. Still, it’s a great experience for those who give it the chance, but those who play it casually might only find it decent to good at best.

[Note: For an in-depth explanation of my review system, go here: Tody's Review System]

Name: Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds
Genre: Fighting
Players: 1-2
Multiplayer: Online (2 players)
Platforms: PS3, Xbox360
Developers: Capcom
Publishers: Capcom
Release Date: 15-18 February 2011
Price: R529-599

Reviewed on PS3

Marvel versus Capcom 3 is the ten-year awaited sequel to the over-the-top, much loved but controversial MvC2 and after a shocking announcement nearly a year ago, the game is finally available to gamers worldwide. Despite my enthusiasm and extreme love of the game, it’s still an incredibly difficult game for me to review. I could call it a ‘love it or hate it’ game, but that’s not really what it is, because it’s almost certain that a huge number of people are going to enjoy it. But I feel like only a very small audience will be able to appreciate it on the level that it’s designed, while others are going to find the intended craziness of the game too chaotic and unskillful for a fighting game. Despite this, it’s still an amazing game with several of its own merits, but I feel like just hyping it up would hardly be fair for a game of this nature.

So let’s start with the basics. MvC3 follows the systems put in place by its predecessor. Out of a selection of characters from various Marvel and Capcom franchises, you select a team of three and then do battle against other teams. As you’d have expected if you’re familiar with other Capcom fighters, the game takes place in a 2D plane and you get your normal attacks, your special moves and your Hyper Combo combos which use up points from your Hyper Combo Gauge in order to do highly damaging attacks. You play with one character at a time, but you can swap out with your teammates when necessary as well as call them in to assist you with special moves, tag them in to continue your aerial combos or have them appear to chain together Hyper attacks among other things.

Simple enough, it might seem, and the game is designed with beginner friendliness in mind, but yet the game still seems to be incredibly difficult to become proficient at for some reason. Street Fighter 4 was a game which could be enjoyed competitively on several different levels but with MvC3, it seems like unless you’re really good at the game, you’re going to feel like you suck. The speed of the game is a lot faster than what we’re used to from fighters these days and, while the inputs are really lenient, the break-neck pace of the game makes it rather difficult to play, especially for beginners. There is a simple mode included, of course, that makes the combos and special moves a single button press, but it comes at the cost of losing most of your character’s special moves so it’s not really practical for anyone who actually wants to play the game for more than a weekend or something.

While the game is difficult to play, I don’t want to give the impression that it’s alienating or completely unfriendly to beginners, but the learning curve is most certainly steep and players with superior execution skills or knowledge of the game most likely hold a massive advantage. Again, I’ll compare it to Street Fighter 4 here. In SF4, even if you weren’t capable of difficult combos or tricky set-ups, it was still very possible to beat players better than you by intuition, timing and mind games, making the game fun for anyone who learned the basics. In MvC3, by contrast, if you play against even a slightly better player, odds are you’re going to be holding on for dear life as you get death combo’d like nobody’s business. Again, the speed and chaos of the game can make the inputs quite tricky at times and that’s definitely a huge barrier to overcome if you plan on becoming good at the game. If you’re just playing it casually, however, you may still find it frustrating at your tendency to mess up even simple combos at times.

However, like anything really, you’ll get a lot better at MvC3 with good old practice and you’ll enjoy it more. But for most people, who aren’t fighting game aficionados, you’re going to find that ‘cheap’ tactics are a lot more effective in this game than Tekken or Street Fighter and you’ll probably just resort to that. The reason for this is that several characters, like Chris Redfield and Deadpool, have fast and strong ranged attacks that can be ‘spammed’ repeatedly to keep your opponents at bay. While there are obviously effective counters to these strategies, the fact that they’re legitimate and powerful tactics will probably annoy a lot of the less tolerant players. Still, the game isn’t all bad, and while it may be alienating to some players, those who give it a chance and learn it are going are going to find that there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had from the combat. While the game offers very little beside arcade mode, versus, training, online and challenge mode, the combat itself is so well presented and fun that you’ll keep wanting to come back to it.

The comic book style graphic design of the game really works well and the models and attack are beautifully animated; MvC3 is definitely the best looking fighting game we’ve seen in a long time. To say that the game looks amazing in action is an understatement of note. And while the game may have a steep learning curve, once you finally figure out the way that the game works, chaining together attacks and combos that look as awesome as they feel is a rewarding experience in itself. The gameplay itself is also deep and fun enough to make just playing training mode on your own to get better a fun enough experience, and when you have friends to play against in this game you’ll increase its longevity dramatically. There are, however a few slight nuances with the game that people are going to take issue with.

Firstly, there’s the fact that high-level combos are incredibly damaging so playing against a player with perfect execution can be about as fun as watching a trailer, especially if you’re outclassed in knowledge and skill. Secondly, there’s the X-Factor ability that you get to use once per match to cancel whatever you’re doing and give you bonuses to damage and speed. The bonuses from X-Factor increase dramatically as your characters die so its primary use is to give you comeback potential if you’re badly losing a fight, but the bonuses from a fully charged X-Factor are so absurd that it’s possible to kill an entire opposing team with a single character, possibly even with one combo each. While playing around or against X-Factor is intended to be a large part of the game, a lot of players are going to take issue with the fact that you can be dominating a match one minute, killing 2 of your opponent’s 3 characters, and then he activates X-Factor and wipes out your entire team with ease. X-Factor also makes you unable to take ‘chip’ damage while blocking, so it can be used to counter your opponent’s X-Factor or for other defensive reasons.

The game has 38 characters with another 2 DLC characters releasing on the 15th of March, which is honestly quite high for a fighting game these days, rivaling Tekken 6′s 40 and Super Street Fighter’s 35 (25 in first SF4). There’s an enormous variety of play styles and the general ‘uneven’ make-up of the characters leaves very few characters even feeling similar yet alone the same. Even Ryu, Morrigan and Akuma, who fans were concerned might be too similar, are so drastically different from each other that they don’t even work in the same teams. There’s a great representation of both mainstream and less common ideas, mostly from the Marvel side, and you’ll see plenty of familiar faces, like Spider-Man and Deadpool, alongside some of the less common characters like Taskmaster and Dormammu. Still, the Marvel side is fantastically represented, with a diverse variety of franchises, references and fighting styles.

The Capcom side, however, while still quite satisfactory, might seem like something of a let down to some people. There are plenty of fan favourites like, Dante, Amaterasu and Zero, but then you have some really obscure characters like Tron Bonne and Hsien-Ko in the face of some glaring omissions like Megaman (isn’t he almost like Capcom’s mascot?) and Phoenix Wright. Still, Capcom roster does offer a deeper selection of characters than the Marvel side in some aspects as several of the characters have previously appeared in fighting games or Japanese action games and there is some consolation with Capcom announcing the high probability of DLC characters in the future.

As I mentioned at the start of the review, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is a very difficult game to rate. It’s not like Street Fighter 4 where we were almost guaranteed that it will be a long-term success loved by pros and newcomers alike. Instead, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is going to be entirely what the community make of it. It draws heavily on MvC2, making it almost seem like a game that was intended for a different generation of gamers, but given the amount of effort put into the game, it has a very good chance of succeeding in today’s times. If it does, then MvC3 is going to be a game that we play and love for years to come as people constantly experiment and discover things years after the game’s release.

However it also seems probable that the chaotic nature of the game may push away experienced players and newcomers alike as they return to more structured fighters, again like SF4. If this happens, it’s possible that MvC3 may fade into obscurity, remembered as being fun while it lasted but ultimately released far too late. Like I said, it’s difficult to say what will happen with a game like this but I’m inclined to believe that it will be extremely popular, but will probably be overshadowed by the future Capcom fighters such Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition and Street Fighter X Tekken.

*Note: for tons of additional information on the characters, be sure to check out our in-depth character rundowns*

This review was co-written by Tody and EX_Machina

I’m a big fan of the first Dead Space game. Between playing it on PC and PlayStation 3, I’ve finished it four times, beat Impossible Mode, and also acquired the Platinum Trophy. Despite its shortcomings as a horror game, there was enough about the gameplay to get me hooked. So when Dead Space 2 was announced, I didn’t really follow the hype surrounding it, but I was very much looking forward to another of Isaac’s adventures through space, while stomping the heads off of Necromorphs… and then Dead Space 2 was released. It wasn’t even three minutes into the game and already I was disappointed and, as I continued through the first few chapters, I only became more and more saddened about what was being presented to me. An hour or two into the game, I just couldn’t take it anymore and decided to stop playing entirely.

Now I’m known as a Trophy-Whore. I don’t play as many games these days as I used to, but I’ve got 17 Platinums and I’ve got no qualms about suffering through Call of Duty: World at War’s veteran mode or finding every single feather in ACII to get 100%; hell, I’ve even played Megamind for six hours to get an easy Platinum… so when I stop playing a game and give up on the trophies entirely, the game must be pretty fricken’ boring… so boring, in fact, that it feels like work (like GTAIV) and I have to stop playing to do something more fun… like watch paint dry.

My brother, Azhar, is the one that’s going to review Dead Space 2 and I know him as someone who tries to look for the best in games even when it’s barely there but even he found Dead Space 2 to be a mindless slog. I’m not going to go into all of the things wrong with it, but there’s plenty of important criticisms to take note of. The first is that the horror aspect has been eliminated entirely. The game now favours cheap and predictable shocks rather than actually trying to build atmosphere, and the enemies are so weak and come in such huge numbers that any fear that you might have of them is quickly eliminated. I’m not joking when I say you might find something close to twenty Necromorphs in a single fight and with plenty of the guns being massively overpowered, what should be harsh survival combat quickly becomes repetitive, tedious Space Invaders. Secondly, Isaac has been changed from the silent protagonist to having a character; only his lines are so sporadic and his reactions are so unrealistic that it’s downright impossible to relate to him.

Any sane man, especially an engineer stuck on a humongous ship filled with thousands of killer aliens would be crapping his pants, but instead Isaac’s reaction flickers between annoyed frustration and bored sarcasm. There’s also zero ambiguity in the plot, with it being revealed about one minute into the game that Isaac is insane and that the ‘ghost haunting him’ is just a delusion and cannot hurt him. You can also add to this that the interesting plot of the first game has been replaced by an absolutely meaningless one in the sequel that amounts to nothing in the end, and serves as nothing more than an excuse to just kill aliens.

So after playing the game for about 2 hours and then watching my brother play almost the entire game, I concluded that Dead Space 2 was probably a bad game and decided to check on Metacritic to see what reviewers had to say about it… it was then that I received a shock greater than any that that insipid game could give me. Not only had reviewers given DS2 a higher rating than its predecessor, they had also given it scores in the 90′s with several of them awarding it perfect 100/100 scores. I was stunned. I decided to read through these reviews and it seemed like I was playing a completely different game. Critics were falling over their feet, lauding on praise to how ‘scary’ and ‘atmospheric’ the game was and how psychologically intimidating the game can be.

The truth is that there is nothing even remotely psychological about the game. Psychological fear comes from the uncertainty and insecurity arising from finding yourself in a threatening situation with no clear escape route and Dead Space 2 certainly has none of that.  Let it be known that I am a coward when it comes to horror – The Shining gave me sleepless nights for two days in a row and even Saw, which isn’t even a horror, disturbed me. You couldn’t even pay me to watch Paranormal Activity – but when Dead Space 2 had necromorphs rise up suddenly off the floor or burst out of the vents while I was in the darkness, I actually burst out laughing… I actually fell on my couch and burst out laughing. I am being dead honest here, the gore in Family Guy grosses me out more than Dead Space 2; the f@#king Twilight Saga is more scary. And yet somehow, the game is receiving more praise than the Godfather trilogy.

I’m sure that many of you have come across instances where you’ve bought a game on the recommendation of a review site like IGN or Gamespot, only to find that the game is absolute tripe and I’m really wondering why this is. Your first answer might be ‘because of money’ but I’m not sure that that’s entirely it. The Movie industry churns out ten times more revenue from its hits than games like Dead Space could ever hope to achieve and yet a site like Rotten Tomatoes has no qualms about giving a blockbuster like Transformers 2 a solid 20%. And Transformers 2 is exactly what Dead Space is, a big-budget mindless action romp with no more substance than a canned fart. The gaming industry has been migrating closer and closer to the film industry over the years but the one thing that hasn’t changed is professional integrity; because professional reviewers have none of it. The only reviewer that I still trust to rate games for me is Zero Punctuation’s Yahtzee because even though he can be petty and ridicule games for a laugh, he’s one of the few people who’s brutally honest enough to call a crap game crap.

I think the key reason why professional reviewers tend to have generic and sell-out opinions is not only because they’re paid to do that (Read up the stories, it happens more than you think. A Gamespot reviewer was fired for rating Kane & Lynch 6.0. Those who have played the game will know that 6.0 is about 5 times the game’s real value) but also because they just aren’t professionals. To be a top professional movie critic, you need to show experience, insight and be worthy of employment by a group as prestigious as the New York Times. To be a professional game critic, you just need to play a lot of games. Movie critics take pride in their carefully calculated opinions and the respect that their position demands; Game critics take pride in the fact that the more games they rate highly, the more games they get sent for free. It seems almost ironic that bashing high-profile games is more detestable than giving them undeserved high scores; hell even we at eGamer got told off by companies for being too harsh on games (fortunately though for us, they learned to live with it).

Creating a truly great movie requires solid directing, excellent writing, good acting and enough to chew on after the movie has finished. Creating a truly great game requires the exact same components. Why then, should the standards be any different? Why can high-budget crap like Tron: Legacy be rated 49%, but mediocrities like Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood are immune to criticism? Sure reviewers take the occasional potshot at some rubbish game like Fighters Uncaged to make themselves feel better for rating every mediocre game 7 or 8, but it’s essentially only the downright unplayable ones that get the bad scores. Too often, high production value is confused with high quality and reviewers are too scared to truly and objectively criticize a game if there’s a big name or a big hype behind it… and that, is the complete opposite of what we need reviewers for.

This, in my opinion, is the absolute worst thing about the gaming industry, because we cannot trust the very people who are supposed to look past the advertising and the hype to tell us which games are truly worth our precious time and money…

This week, rather than give my unwanted negative opinion about something irrelevant, I’m going to focus on giving my unwanted positive opinion on something slightly more relevant. Many of you by now will have heard of Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the long awaited sequel to 10 year old game MvC2 which is famous for pitting the most popular characters that each franchise has to offer against in each other in 3-on-3 over the top battles of ridiculous scale.

If, for some reason, you haven’t really heard of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 then I’m not going to explain the game in this article but rather tell you that it’s releasing halfway through February and it is going to be incredibly awesome. If you want to learn more about the game then I’d recommend checking out some gameplay videos on YouTube because MvC3 is a game best seen in action. This article in particular is going to go through the 36 characters that are to appear in the game at launch and tell you a little about each of them. There’s also a video for each that will let you see them in action. Considering the enormous size of both the Marvel and Capcom brands, you’re sure to see plenty of familiar faces here. So without further ado, let’s get into it. Here is the list of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 characters in the general order in which they’ve been announced.

Because there are so many characters, this column will be posted in four daily installments over the next week. Each day, another 12 characters will be presented and at the end of the week, the  DLC characters will also be shown. So check back with eGamer each day.

Click here for Part 1

Click here for Part 2

Click here for Part 3

This is Part 4

Browse through the pages below to see all of the characters and their details.

This week, rather than give my unwanted negative opinion about something irrelevant, I’m going to focus on giving my unwanted positive opinion on something slightly more relevant. Many of you by now will have heard of Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the long awaited sequel to 10 year old game MvC2 which is famous for pitting the most popular characters that each franchise has to offer against in each other in 3-on-3 over the top battles of ridiculous scale.

If, for some reason, you haven’t really heard of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 then I’m not going to explain the game in this article but rather tell you that it’s releasing halfway through February and it is going to be incredibly awesome. If you want to learn more about the game then I’d recommend checking out some gameplay videos on YouTube because MvC3 is a game best seen in action. This article in particular is going to go through the 36 characters that are to appear in the game at launch and tell you a little about each of them. There’s also a video for each that will let you see them in action. Considering the enormous size of both the Marvel and Capcom brands, you’re sure to see plenty of familiar faces here. So without further ado, let’s get into it. Here is the list of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 characters in the general order in which they’ve been announced.

Because there are so many characters, this column will be posted in four daily installments over the next week. Each day, another 12 characters will be presented and at the end of the week, the  DLC characters will also be shown. So check back with eGamer each day.

Click here for Part 1

Click here for Part 2

This is Part 3

Click here for Part 4

Browse through the pages below to see all of the characters and their details.

This week, rather than give my unwanted negative opinion about something irrelevant, I’m going to focus on giving my unwanted positive opinion on something slightly more relevant. Many of you by now will have heard of Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the long awaited sequel to 10 year old game MvC2 which is famous for pitting the most popular characters that each franchise has to offer against in each other in 3-on-3 over the top battles of ridiculous scale.

If, for some reason, you haven’t really heard of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 then I’m not going to explain the game in this article but rather tell you that it’s releasing halfway through February and it is going to be incredibly awesome. If you want to learn more about the game then I’d recommend checking out some gameplay videos on YouTube because MvC3 is a game best seen in action. This article in particular is going to go through the 36 characters that are to appear in the game at launch and tell you a little about each of them. There’s also a video for each that will let you see them in action. Considering the enormous size of both the Marvel and Capcom brands, you’re sure to see plenty of familiar faces here. So without further ado, let’s get into it. Here is the list of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 characters in the general order in which they’ve been announced.

Because there are so many characters, this column will be posted in four daily installments over the next week. Each day, another 12 characters will be presented and at the end of the week, the  DLC characters will also be shown. So check back with eGamer each day.

Click here for Part 1

This is Part 2

Click here for Part 3

Click here for Part 4

Browse through the pages below to see all of the characters and their details.

This week, rather than give my unwanted negative opinion about something irrelevant, I’m going to focus on giving my unwanted positive opinion on something slightly more relevant. Many of you by now will have heard of Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the long awaited sequel to 10 year old game MvC2 which is famous for pitting the most popular characters that each franchise has to offer against in each other in 3-on-3 over the top battles of ridiculous scale.

If, for some reason, you haven’t really heard of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 then I’m not going to explain the game in this article but rather tell you that it’s releasing halfway through February and it is going to be incredibly awesome. If you want to learn more about the game then I’d recommend checking out some gameplay videos on YouTube because MvC3 is a game best seen in action. This article in particular is going to go through the 36 characters that are to appear in the game at launch and tell you a little about each of them. There’s also a video for each that will let you see them in action. Considering the enormous size of both the Marvel and Capcom brands, you’re sure to see plenty of familiar faces here. So without further ado, let’s get into it. Here is the list of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 characters in the general order in which they’ve been announced.

Because there are so many characters, this column will be posted in four daily installments over the next week. Each day, another 12 characters will be presented and at the end of the week, the  DLC characters will also be shown. So check back with eGamer each day.

This is Part 1

Click here for Part 2

Click here for Part 3

Click here for Part 4

Browse through the pages below to see all of the characters and their details.

Hello one and all and welcome to another exciting episode of Machina’s Machinations. You might notice that this column has come three weeks after the previous one instead of two which would lead you to the conclusion that my lazy habits may be returning, but fear not. I simply delayed this column for a week until the eGamer 2010 awards were posted so that I can discuss what will probably be the most controversial entry on the list: eGamer’s game of the year for 2011. If you don’t know what it is, then go check out this list over here… don’t worry, I’ll wait till you come back. Done? Well ok, let’s get started.

Before we delve into that whole game of the year debacle, let’s take a second to stop and take a look at 2010 as a whole in terms of gaming. I’ll be honest; I was actually not too impressed by 2010 when it came to gaming. Make no mistake, I’m not calling it a bad year for gaming or belittling the quality of the games released this year but I wasn’t as impressed, mostly because 2010 wasn’t very exciting. It was almost predictable in a sense. Most of the top games in the year were sequels of a kind; we had God of War 3, Mario Galaxy 2, Mass Effect 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: Reach, Bayonetta (spiritual sequel to DMC) and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood among several others. The games of 2010 were mostly expected when their predecessors were released a year or two ago and while the quality of games was quite high, there were very few breakout titles that really took us by surprise or exciting new IPs that left us wanting more from the idea. All in all, 2010 was a good year but entirely unremarkable. It was the gaming equivalent of Megamind 3D; an entertaining movie that we thoroughly enjoyed and not without its good bits, but ultimately, nothing we haven’t seen before. In the end, the innovation that came from 2010, stemmed mostly from the indie games like Amnesia: Dark Descent and Limbo and from this year’s only breakout innovation title, Heavy Rain.

Next up before we get to the game of the year are the advances in motion controller technnology i.e. Sony’s Playstation Move and Microsoft’s Kinect. We at eGamer are not quite as excited about or interested in these new peripherals as market hype wanted us to be and I’ll explain why in a moment. It’s not that we find them to be disappointing or let downs as such, but we still aren’t convinced of the capabilities of either of them and we feel that 2010 hasn’t truly given them a reason to exist just yet. Sony’s Motion controller consists of the Move Controller, which is essentially an upgraded Wiimote, and the Move Navigator, which is essentially a Wii Nunchuk. Sony has clearly seen from Nintendo that the motion control industry is a lucrative market and has decided that the best way to enter the market would be to steal Nintendo’s idea entirely, which, while utterly shameless, is not such a bad idea when you think about it. The PS3, as a machine, is far superior to the Wii and the Move has so far proven to be more response and accurate than the Wiimote as well as having a few convenient extra features like the glowing bulb and the relocated D-Pad.

So far, the Move hasn’t done anything exciting at all, but I’m convinced that with the recent affordability of the PS3 and with the right marketing scheme, the PS3 may, at some time in the future, lead to the premature death of the Wii or at least steal a sizable chunk of its market share. So the Move, while nothing really new, is a good competitor to the Wii and we can probably expect some good things from it in the year to come. As for Microsoft’s Kinect, I can’t say I’m quite as optimistic. I’ll withhold judgment for now because I actually haven’t had the chance to experience the Kinect per se, but the concept already seems like a huge risk to me and I’m not sure if the whole controller-less gaming idea will actually pay off. I could very well be wrong, as we might discover in 2011, but, so far, I haven’t heard enough good things about Kinect to become excited about it. All in all, I don’t think that 2010 was the year that showed us the best that these new peripherals had to offer, although I’m sure we’ll see plenty new games for both of them in 2011.

The last thing I would like to discuss, before we lay the memory of 2010 in Gaming to rest, is eGamer’s choice for game of the year. We had 10 entrants for game of the year (9 strong contenders and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood) for game of the year and while most of them were high quality experiences that stood up to the rest, we eventually narrowed it down to just three finalists and pitted them against each other for the final prize. Our top three games of 2010 were God of War III, Mass Effect 2 and Heavy Rain. My personal opinion is that God of War III would have been an excellent choice for game of the year because of its amazing massive scale battles, action orientated experience and substantially improved gameplay but I actually fought against it in our debates for game of the year on the basis that it was essentially a much refined version of God of War II and, while it gave the series a memorable send-off, the last two hours of the game (which is what you generally remember) were arguably the weakest. Make no mistake, we at eGamer are not so full of ourselves that we only reward innovative and/or pretentious games but we hardly feel right giving a game the Game of the Year award when it hasn’t shown us something we haven’t seen before.

This thing narrowed it down to Mass Effect 2 vs. Heavy Rain for Game of the Year and, while I strongly argued in Heavy Rain’s favour, it was a debate that took us quite a long time to finally resolve. Mass Effect 2 is an excellent game. It’s scale may not be as epic as God of War III or RPGs that were released this year but, as Tody generally puts it, Mass Effect 2 is a game that focuses on the small decisions and it does those extremely well. You may not be blowing up galaxies all that often but between questioning an NPC or even buying a drink at a bar, it’s amazing how much control ME2 gives you over the personality of your character. Our biggest criticisms against the game were the lack of ability to influence the main story or the ending in any substantial way but the ability to influence the fate of your 10 or so crew members as well your character’s own actions as the story progresses makes the experience extremely worthwhile. Also, the dramatic changes in both the cast and the gameplay have shown us that Bioware are not scared to tamper with their formula even if it works and any company that’s willing to embrace change and execute it well is A+ in our books. The end result is that Mass Effect 2 is a very different game to its predecessor which made the experience feel very fresh to us, while it kept the aspects which made the first game so successful leading to a much better if shorter game overall.

So Mass Effect 2 was an excellent game and if there weren’t any truly innovative titles this year, then ME2 would have surely won it but, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, there was a game released this year that actually managed to truly surprise us. The game was none other than Quantum Dream’s Heavy Rain. The funny thing about Heavy Rain is that, for such an amazing game, if you describe it to someone they would think you’re joking. The entire game, dubbed an ‘interactive drama’, is 3rd person where the gameplay consists entirely of moving around and performing context sensitive controller movements, known nowadays as quick time events or QTEs. QTEs are largely considered to be the worst of part any 3rd person so basing an entire game on them sounds like an absolutely silly concept but the manner in which it is executed in Heavy Rain has managed to not only prove us at eGamer wrong, but also convinced us that interactive dramas have a real future in gaming. The QTEs are well thought out and contextually relevant which makes the game really immersive when you have to imitate the movements your characters are performing. This experience is enhanced even further with the Playstation Move and I can honestly say that playing the game for a second time when the Move patch was released improved it significantly.

But enough about Heavy Rain’s innovation and gameplay, what truly made it stand above the rest this year was its absolutely heart-breaking and compelling narrative. It’s a murder mystery involving 4 different characters each of which has a strong reason for wanting to find the killer and, what truly makes the game worth playing is not the depth of the characters, or the clever way in which the well written plot unfolds, but rather the emotional experience that the game has to offer. It’s the first game in a long time that has actually made me care what happens to the characters. The main character, Ethan, in particular is so well acted and his quest to get his son back from the Origami Killer is so crushing that you literally cringe when you see what he has to go through; even more so because you’re the one making him go through it all. And seeing him so defeated at so many stages of the game and still pushing gives real weight to the game; it’s a game that definitely leaves you exhausted after you finish it – not because it was bad to play, but because you cared.

Overall, Heavy Rain was able to offer us a thrilling and moving film experience that was further heightened by our personal involvement in it as the player. Furthermore it really pushed the limits of what we thought video games were capable of when it came to drama and provided us with a fresh new look at a very untapped genre of gaming. When it came down to the final battle for game of the year between Mass Effect 2 and Heavy Rain, it was a difficult toss up but it won because Heavy Rain has so many moments worth talking about long after the game has ended. It’s the kind of game you recommend to all your friends no matter what kind of games they play and it’s one that you’ll remember long after you finish. Heavy Rain is most definitely a gaming experience that deserves it’s award as our 2010 Game of the Year and we eagerly await Quantum Dream’s, or any other company’s for that matter, next take on Interactive Drama.

So that’s it from me and eGamer for 2010 in Gaming. To sum it all up: a proficient if predictable year. I have a strong feeling that 2011 is going to far surpass it. Oh and here’s a funny picture that I found on the internet. See you in two weeks people…

It is often said that ‘games are not what they used to be’… and in a lot of ways this statement is almost true. Most of the longtime gamers from the glory days of the PC and PlayStation 1/PlayStation 2 age (mostly before online became so rampant) will claim that the graphics in games nowadays are vastly superior to their predecessors, but the gameplay, development times and originality in games has declined over the years. It’s quite a difficult and contentious issue to debate whether the games of old were actually better and more fun for their times than the games released these days and a lot of it will come down to personal preference, but there are a lot of arguments that can be mode for both sides.

While the games of today can be considered to be ‘better’ than their predecessors in several aspects, such as quality, they are also vastly inferior when it comes to innovation, originality and depth and it’s quite rare these days to find a game that can truly transcend its limitations and still be fun several years from now. I would often agree with all of this, remembering the time when I replayed the Max Payne games a year or two ago and found them to be more fun than most shooters released in our present generation. But as time goes on, I’m starting to think that the above is no longer the case.

I’m starting to think, these days, that maybe the reason that past generation gamers, me included, think that the games from ‘our day’ were better, is simply because we’re growing older. At 19 years of age, I’m starting to consider myself to be a young adult and for reasons I can’t quite explain, I’m starting to think that maybe I’m growing out of gaming in general. Maybe the reason that I, and people from my generation of gamers, consider the older games to be better is because we’ve grown past ‘gaming’ as a hobby, and so nostalgia and faded memories make us remember the times when we enjoyed gaming the most. It’s entirely possible that I consider Metal Gear Solid II to be the best game in the MGS series, not because it’s actually the best one, but because it reminds me of a time in my life when the PS2 was still new and the whole gameplay experience blew me away. I loved MGS4 but I don’t view it as highly as MGS II probably because even though it’s a better game and the story is far more epic, it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen a lot of it before. The same thing happened to me with Bayonetta and the Assassin’s Creed series. While Bayonetta is excellent and Assassin’s Creed is debatable, neither of them kept me entertained nearly as much they would have a younger audience, because by the time I had played them, I had been through a million and one other action platformers, and so nothing was new or impressive to me.

It makes sense that if you grew up playing video games, then by the time you finish school and start getting on with your life, you eventually play less of them, not because the games today have become worse, but because there are very few games that can show you something that you haven’t seen before. I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I’ve certainly found that I play a lot fewer games on my own since leaving school. Since I’m now a university student, a workaholic, an over-achiever, and since I’m studying something really difficult, I end up giving up frequent gaming as a hobby during the semester. As a result, the games that I want to play end up stockpiling during the course of the year, leaving me with a huge number of titles to play through during the holidays. And yet somehow I don’t actually end up playing most of them. I did, of course, make time to play the awesome titles like God of War III and Mass Effect II, but even the good games like Heavy Rain and Red Dead Redemption just slipped right by me. It’s not that I don’t get the time, it’s just that I have no motivation to play them. Hell even Killzone 2 bored me after two and a half hours and I ended up selling it before I even finished it. Gaming as a hobby seems to be a lot less important to me over the years and I can’t really explain when it happened or why. I just don’t find most games nearly as entertaining anymore.

But that’s not to say that I don’t play games that much anymore because, to contradict a lot of what I’ve said, I actually still do a hell of a lot of gaming, although the type of games that I play have changed. These days, you won’t find me beating every single difficulty on the newest Devil May Cry or playing Deathmatches online in Resistance 2, but you will find me playing DotA on Battle.net with my cousins. I still make time to play the super awesome single-player experiences like God of War, but 99% of the time that I’m playing games, I’ll be playing FIFA with a group of friends, while we make jokes and talk crap, or playing knockout rounds in Super Street Fighter IV with my cousins and my brother while we taunt each other and try to determine who’s the best. And to be honest, gaming like this is ten times more fun than it ever used to be back then. In fact, today I had a friend over and all we ended up doing for like five hours was transfer movies and games while playing FIFA and catching up, and it was far more fun than I’ve ever had with a Call of Duty game.

I think somewhere along the line, I’ve evolved – or devolved – into a social/casual gamer and the games I play are no longer as important as the people I play them with. Since I’ve changed, gaming has become less of a dedicated pastime, like watching a weekly TV series or reading a book, and more of a platform for social interaction. Me, my friends and my family play games because we grew up with them and because we love them but, for most of us, it’s no longer about actually playing the games, but about hanging out with each other and enjoying something on common ground. So when I think long and hard about whether or not the games of the past are better than the games of today, I could write ten pages of back and forth arguments for either side but the real answer is no, because the games haven’t really changed — but I have.

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen (but probably mostly gentlemen) to another exciting episode of Machina’s Machinations. This week I’m going to be discussing a game that probably everyone who’s ever read this website has ever heard of and probably even played. If you didn’t guess from the title of this article what the game in is, then allow me to ruin all suspense and reveal that it’s none other than Defense of the Ancients, otherwise known as DotA Allstars, and sometimes known as the most infamous map ever made for a game ever.

The reason I bring up this topic at such an irrelevant time is that I started playing the game again. Now people who know me and read this article might possibly gasp in shock, since I swore never again to play DotA on the grounds that I used to be addicted, but I will reassure you that it’s only temporarily. The reason I’m playing again is that one of my DotA-playing cousins has come from the Eastern Cape to rejoin civilization in Cape Town for his vacation, and with our five man DotA team reunited, the temptation to join forces in the act of pub-stomping noobs is simply too much to resist.

Now that in itself is a rather unexciting story and I’m sure none of you want to hear exaggerated stories of how I got scores of 15-0 with the Wisp in my first game back, so instead I’m just going to discuss general ideas around the game that interested me, in particular how little the game has changed in the one and a half years of my absence from it. To be fair, the way the game is played has also changed substantially since I left; there are new heroes, new items, plenty of changes to existing content and the metagame has also changed completely.

To elaborate, in the international clan matches, the First Tier hero bans have changed from gangers like Zeus and Priestess of the Moon to farming heroes and tanks like Doom Bringer and Alchemist and the 3-1-1 lane strat has gone from being laughable to being a core part of many strategies. There’s a lot to learn getting back into the game about hero picks, hero builds and general strategies but despite all of these hindrances, it only took me a match or two to start feeling comfortable in the game again and start contributing to my team instead of bringing it down. And this made me realize that despite how much content they’ve added, removed and changed from the DotA I knew more than a year ago, DotA is a game that never changes… and to be honest, it’s not such a bad thing.

DotA just seems like it’s just one of those games that’s always going to be around and whenever you’re at a loss for what to play or you just miss the feel of feeding 0-12 and costing your team the game, DotA is going to be there waiting and it’s going to be older, but it’ll still be that game you know and love… or hate. And another thing that I realized because of this, is that DotA is pretty much un-killable. And to be honest, it’s very hard to figure out why. If you think about it for a second, you’ll realize that so many of the features that make DotA what it is, seem to be pretty much designed to prevent the game from lasting. The game has a ridiculously steep learning curve, is very difficult, and is so focused on teamplay that a single weak player can be enough to cost an entire team the match. Further more, many of the skills required in DotA, such as last-hitting, ganging, map awareness and movement are specific to DotA and added to this is the fact that there’s over one hundred heroes, ten shops worth of items and even more item combinations to learn. Slowly you begin to realize that this is not a game that just discourages new players, but rather chases them away and then insults them for sucking at a game they have no idea how to play. DotA is very much an elitist game and for most players, you’re going to endure at least a few weeks of losing badly and being flamed by your team before you get good enough to actually start enjoying the game.

If you’ve played the game, then you’ll know that I have exaggerated absolutely nothing in the above paragraph; the game really is very alienating to new players. And yet despite this, it seems to attract them like moths to a flame, lining them up to have their egos crushed and their mothers insulted by other players online. You’d think that a game as elitist as DotA would contain only a small community of highly skilled players who slowly dwindle off because they get bored or find other games until the game itself dies out, but this doesn’t even seem close to being the case. Somehow, something in DotA is so well-crafted and unique that players forget its flaws and keep coming back for more. I’m not going to deny it, it’s a damn fun game and few other games can make me feel nearly as skillful for winning a match. It’s also quite impressive, when you think about it, that the only reason WarCraft III is still alive is because of a single map, which also managed to spawn an entire genre of gaming all on its own.

But that’s a topic for someone bored enough to discuss it. I’ve still got one more thing that I’d like to discuss before I finish off this article and go back to sniffing glue and trying to create the Ultimate Muffin, and that’s the topic of DotA’s continuity. So far, there has only been one thing (or things) that has managed to put a dent in DotA’s player-base and that’s competition. First there was that God-awful ripoff known as Demigod which had amazing graphics and really interesting heroes, but suffered from very repetitive gameplay with the few heroes that were in the game, somehow being quite similar to each other. I’m not going to go into Demigod’s failure too much other than to say that it only really took the skeleton of DotA’s idea rather than the concepts that made it so successful.

Next up was League of Legends from DotA’s original creators, which I didn’t like in the slightest. Now apparently League of Legends is a decent game but I don’t think it will ever come close to competing with DotA on a reasonable level, and my hypothesis for why is that it piggybacked off the success of DotA yet didn’t offer many sufficient improvements over the original formula. It’s essentially the same game with an inferior engine and graphics and with different heroes and items; and the key word here is different. LoL was different for the sake of being different and didn’t actually give you much of a reason to play it over DotA other than because it was different.

The next game to compete with DotA was Heroes of Newerth, or HoN, which I actually liked quite a lot. The HoN creators finally realized that the DotA community actually liked DotA (shocker… I know) and decided that rather than trying to build up from scratch on a similar concept, they would rather just take DotA as it was and then improve it. And on paper, this sounded like a great concept… but they didn’t really manage to do that. You see, the HoN creators weren’t exactly satisfied with just copying DotA and instead only took a handful of the existing heroes, used modified versions of other ones and added in their own heroes and items to make the game their own. The end result was something which was familiar to and yet quite different from DotA at the same time. The majority of players preferred to stick with DotA which was still arguably the better game, but HoN did achieve a moderate amount of success because of its graphics, variety and its vastly improved online system. It still is the best alternative DotA game out there and it’s still a lot of fun to play.

HoN is the latest game to directly compete with DotA and its success is arguable, but there is one game which I think will actually be able to succeed DotA and finally put it to rest. And that game, is DotA 2. To be honest, there’s not much I can tell you about DotA 2 other than that a few screenshots are available if you click here, but I strongly believe that DotA 2 has what it takes to properly succeed its predecessor, and I’ll tell you why. HoN came close, but DotA 2 is the first game to actually acknowledge how good a game DotA actually is. Rather than try to copy the original heroes or modify them, DotA 2 seems to actually take the same heroes you know and love as they are. It’s not like Demigod or LoL where the Slayer doesn’t exist or HoN where she’s reskinned as the Pyromancer; in DotA 2, the Slayer is still the Slayer and this is probably the biggest thing that will make DotA 2 successful. It’s going to be the first game that can actually call itself an ‘improved version of DotA’, rather than a different one. Also, VALVE and Icefrog are making it, so it’s probably going to be good. But if it does take this route, it won’t be a different game… and that will serve to further prove my point: that DotA never changes…

So that wraps it up for this week. With DotA being such a contentious issue, surely there must be a lot of you with ideas of your own. If you agree with me, disagree with me or have something completely different to say about DotA’s past, future, continuity or the game in general, let me know in the comments section below. See you in two weeks people…

eGamer Rating:

Addictive: Yes, incredibly so for RPG fans.
Worth The Time: Yes

Things Loved: Multiple tree story progression, well designed quests, Fallout’s sense of humour, well balanced skill system, interesting plot, in game freedom.
Things Hated: Annoying bugs and glitches, slow walk speed combined with long distance travelling, slow start, handing in your weapons resets your quick select wheel.

Reasons To Buy: If you liked Fallout 3, Mass Effect or Oblivion, if you even remotely like role-playing games, if you want a game that will keep you busy for a long time, if you like to abuse in-game freedom, if you’re looking for an interactive story, if you’re too lazy to read the review and are obscenely rich.
Reasons Not To Buy: If you’re expecting a first person shooter, if you were expecting a true sequel to Fallout 3, if you don’t like slow games or games with lots of dialogue, if you hated Fallout 3, if you don’t have a lot of time, if Matthew Perry’s voice makes you want to kill yourself.

Quick Conclusion:

Click here for a Quick Decision Tree

Name: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: First Person Shooter/Role-Playing Game
Players: 1
Multiplayer: None
Platforms: PC, PS3, Xbox360
Developers: Obsidian Entertainment
Publishers: Bethesda Softworks
Release Date: 19-22 October 2010
Price: R599-699 (PS3, 360), R299-399 (PC)

Reviewed on PS3 and PC

Fallout: New Vegas, otherwise known as Fallout 3: Again, is the not-very-long-awaited ‘sequel’ to Fallout 3. Although the term ‘sequel’ is used in as loose terms as possible because New Vegas is a sequel to Fallout 3 in the same way that green apples are the sequel to red apples. The point I’m trying to so ambiguously make is that while Fallout: New Vegas does improve on F3 in some interesting and worthwhile ways, the experience is so similar that those who don’t look too carefully might even mistake it for the same game. That’s not to say that it’s a lazy and rushed out sequel – because honestly, Fallout: New Vegas and its brother, Fallout 3, are both damn good games – but if you played Fallout 3 extensively then gameplay-wise, New Vegas has very little to show you. The quickest way to sum it up is that the world is different, the story is different and the quests are different but the FPS and RPG elements are exactly the same, leading to an end product that should be treated as more of a stand-alone expansion pack then a step forward in the series.

A Wasteland: does this look familiar to you?

Because of the similarities between the two games it’s very tempting to make this review a list of differences between the two games, but instead I’m going to assume that you are only vaguely aware of Fallout 3′s existence and more or less start from scratch. Fallout: New Vegas is an FPS-RPG hybrid from Bethesda – the guys who made Oblivion – that’s set in a post-apocalyptic USA after some unexplained nuclear war that broke out presumably around the time of the cold war. The result is that while the game year is somewhere in the 2200′s, the theme of the world and the lifestyle of the people largely resembles America in the 60′s  leading to a very interesting and unique blend of sci-fi in what we would considered to be an old-fashioned world. As opposed to Fallout 3, which took place in the Capital Wasteland (Post-Apocalyptic Washington D.C.), New Vegas takes place in the Mojave Westland (Post-Apocalyptic Nevada) which contains the infamous town/city/whatever of Las Vegas which serves as the central point for the game. The player takes the role of courier who just survived getting shot in the head but the backstory isn’t emphasized much beyond that and the game will fill you in quite nicely as you progress without assuming that you’ve even heard of the first game.

As to be expected from a game set in Las Vegas, there's plenty of gambling

What might have interested some of you by now is that I classified Fallout as an FPS-RPG. This might tempt you to think that the gameplay is varied and balanced enough to interest you if you’re a shooter fan or a role-playing fan but this couldn’t be further from the truth. The game leans heavily towards the RPG side and while the game and it’s combat take place through the first person camera, the game feels absolutely nothing like a shooter and anyone who bought this game expecting one is going to be sorely disappointed. Compared to an FPS like Call of Duty, shooter fans would find the combat sluggish, unwieldy and unnecessarily complicated while finding the game in general to be too slow-paced with nowhere near enough action or high points. That’s not to say the combat is bad, but it’s slower and more tactical for a reason and it accompanies the RPG and character building system quite nicely.

You could be forgiven for thinking this game is a shooter

That being said, the RPG part of the game is downright fantastic and any fan of role playing of any form is going to find the game to be an absolute treat. While it does suffer from that typical RPG flaw of having a slow start, there is always a blatant shortcut that can be taken through any of the quests so that the player can rush the crappy initial quests and get straight into the good parts. The RPG elements are more or less what you’d expect from a game in the genre; there’s the travelling from place to place meeting people, taking on quests and killing stuff but what Fallout does better than any of its competitor games is make you feel like an actual force in the game world. Unlike Oblivion, where you can save the world from the brink of destruction but still have innkeepers offer you fetch-quests, or Mass Effect, where good and evil puts you on the exact same unchanging story path, Fallout goes a very long way to make you feel like you have a real impact on the way the story unfolds. Fallout 3 players will remember some of the drastic choices the player got to make early in the game such as destroying the entire city of Megaton or assassinating some very important game world NPCs, and New Vegas will not disappoint in this regard.

There are a lot of interesting places to visit and people to kill

When it comes to quests, the player has pretty much free reign to tackle them in any number of interesting ways and what’s more is that completing them will actually give you in-game recognition for doing so. One of the examples is that I decided to kill the head of one of New Vegas’s three principal Casinos and, from then on, everywhere I went, people would either be talking about how he got what he deserved or how awesome I am for doing so. And when I say that there are tons of different ways to complete each quest, I really mean it. One particular quest had me trying to help a town of Super Mutants under siege by a bunch of mercenaries hired by the NCR and one of the ways to proceed in this quest was to bribe the mercenaries to leave the town in peace. I convinced the Town’s leader that the mercenaries could be bribed for 3000 caps (when they had actually asked for 2500) but then, instead of paying the mercenaries, I decided to kill them, leaving me with a very fat wallet. This made me quite happy for a while until the town leader told me that he would have been happier with a peaceful resolution and the NCR got so angry with me that they ignored the previous time I had helped them out and sent some assassins to take me out… and killing these assassins only made them even more angry with me for some reason. And pretty much every single quest goes like this, where there are multiple options along each step of the way and you never feel like there’s an option missing that you wish you could have picked.

Find the men that tried to kill you: going to have to be a bit more specific than that...

The game world itself is also extremely flexible to the random decisions you make. Again, unlike Oblivion where every second character is an unkillable quest NPC or Mass Effect where you can’t engage in combat when in non-combat areas, in Fallout you can pretty much kill anyone at any time whenever you please and the game will still find a way to go on. Obviously killing people will ruin your reputation with various factions (I’ll get to that in a bit) and automatically fail you in some quests but the game does very little to hold you back in terms of choices. At pretty much any point in the game you can just waltz into your boss’s chambers and just kill him for no apparent reason. Doing so will obviously have consequences but the game does very little to stop you from feeling like you really can do what you want. And even the most important of storyline characters can be killed whenever you want to; there’s only a very small handful of characters that you aren’t allowed to kill and most 9*of their immunities tend to be only temporary at best. Explaining how this fits into the context of the story missions would be extremely complicated but it’s pretty damn impressive how the game lets you proceed and still have plenty of options even when you do things as drastic as wiping out an entire faction.

Benny voiced by Matthew Perry. There are a huge number of outcomes to the quests involving this guy

However, like I said, everything you do does tend to have consequences. The game still has the good/evil karma system present from Fallout 3 but this has become almost entirely irrelevant; it’s now more of a play-style tracker rather than something that affects gameplay. The real system that determines the consequences of your actions is the reputation system. In the game there are quite a large number of factions of varying sizes and every time you commit an act for or against them you affect your standing with them. And what’s admirable is that it’s not really as simple as a one way scale between good and bad reputation with them. The good and the bad are on separate axes and your final reputation with them is determined by whether or not your mix of actions leans towards good or bad. Anything you do involving a faction will make you more well known to them, but you also need to be careful about offending  a faction because it’s not really as simple as doing a few quests to just win back their trust. It’s difficult to explain this concept without actually seeing it in game, but suffice to say, factions don’t forget wrongs you’ve done to them even if you win back their trust at a later stage.

The Reputation System: not everyone gets me...

So without getting more into it than I already have, the quests are robust and role-playing is excellent. Next on the hit list would be the character building system. You start out by choosing your S.P.E.C.I.A.L attributes such as your Strength and your Intelligence and these stick with you the whole game. Generally these don’t have a huge impact on the actual gameplay, but they do determine how your character starts out with regard to skills and some innate abilities such as your movement speed and how many skill points you receive at each level up. The bad thing about this system is that the game doesn’t fully make it clear to you what each of these skills really affect and since these attributes can’t be changed for the rest of the game (unless you improve them slightly through certain quests), it’s easy for a new player to misalign them and only realize later that he or she made a mistake. But like I said, they don’t generally have that big of an impact and it’s quite difficult to screw up your character even on purpose. Even so, it does leave a sour taste in your mouth when you set your Strength at 4 and then have to waste two perks to push your Strength up to 6 so that you can wield your new shotgun with full effectiveness.

Allocating your S.P.E.C.I.A.L attributes

But what really determines how your character turns out are your skills and your perks. Your skills determine your proficiency at certain tasks such as lockpicking and handling firearms and this is one of the chief areas where New Vegas has dramatically improved over its predecessor. Because of the way the game is now, every single skill in the game is important and can benefit you greatly in one way or another; usually through offering you additional ways to complete quests. For example, if your skill in Medicine is high enough, not only will you be able to treat your own wounds with more proficiency but you’ll also be able to diagnose other characters of their illnesses and this can let you pick up things about characters that you would have missed entirely on a different playthrough. Another example is that the Science skill primarily lets you hack computers but you can also use it to upgrade robots and machines that you encounter along the way. The way the quests have become, every skill is worth taking and previously useless skills such as speech, have now become incredibly important for certain types of characters. This tends to add a lot of replay value to the game and rewards every play style rather than just focusing on killing everything.

Almost all skills come in handy sooner or later in conversations

You allocate your skill points whenever you level up and every two levels you also get to take a perk. Perks are special abilities that you can take it you meet certain prerequisites and these go a long way to defining your character. Some of them are funny, such as Black Widow which lets a female character manipulate men, others are more strategic such as Stealth Run which lets you move at full speed without compromising your position when sneaking, and others are downright silly such as the Cannibal perk which lets you eat dead people to regain health. The fact that you only get a perk every two level as opposed to one (as in Fallout 3) is a bit of a letdown but you level up faster and the level cap is raised so it balances out a bit. The only other change to the character building system is the addition of traits, which you pick at character creation and they offer both an upside and a downside, but most of these are either too small to notice or absolutely useless. The only one worth mentioning is the Wild Wasteland trait which makes the game wackier and adds in some strange jokes.

Some of the perks are really funny

The combat aspect of the gameplay is where a lot of FPS gamers will lose interest. Essentially you run around and shoot people with your various guns, but enemies usually have a lot of health and a lot of technicalities like character accuracy, weapon condition and damage threshold make it a lot less simple than just pointing your gun at your enemies heads and one-hit killing them. That’s not to say that the combat is complicated, but it’s pretty damn clear that the game is an RPG through and through in this regard. The thing about the combat that makes it so interesting is the limb damage system. Damage to each limb of a character is kept track of and dealing enough damage to cripple a limb inflicts certain penalties. For example if you shoot the wing of a giant insect enough, it will crash to the ground and if enemies deal enough damage to you to cripple your arm, then your hand trembles when using iron sights and your reload times severely decreases. Because combat can sometimes get chaotic with multiple enemies running around, the game also gives you the VATS targeting system to help you out. Basically you activate VATS, the game pauses and you get to individually target which areas of which enemies’ bodies you want to attack at the expense of action points; then you activate it and your character will perform the actions in slow motion. While you can do some really cool things like shoot a grenade coming at you in mid air or shoot the gun right out of an enemy’s hand, the most effective strategy on non-boss enemies is usually to just shoot two or three in the head and wait till your action points recharge so that you can do it to someone else. Still, it’s an innovative system and even after a year, it’s still as fun as it used to be.

VATS lets you target each part of an enemy separately

The one new addition to the overall gameplay in New Vegas is hardcore mode, which is not nearly as hardcore as it sounds. You can choose to activate it at the start of the game or toggle it whenever you can change the difficulty but its effects are quite simple. With hardcore mode on, the game becomes somewhat more realistic and challenging, mostly with regard to inventory management. You now have dehydration, hunger and sleep deprivation to worry about and will have to eat, drink and sleep occasionally to prevent yourself from suffering penalties. Also, ammunition gains weight so you can’t carry around an entire supply depot with you and your companions can die instead of getting knocked unconscious. The last thing that it does is make stimpacks heal over time, rather than instantly, and broken limbs can only be restored by a Doctor or a Doctor’s bag. To be honest, I found that hardcore mode did make the more interesting and tactical when it came to managing my items but sometimes it can get really annoying. It is, of course, optional so it’s up to you to decide whether you find it worthwhile or not.

In Hardcore mode, you need to monitor hydration, hunger and sleep levels

The last thing I’d like to discuss before I wrap it all up is an issue that many of you in the know will claim that I’ve been dancing around; and that’s the technical aspect of the game. There have been a lot of rumours and stories going around that Fallout: New Vegas is the buggiest game EVAR and crashes more times than a blind alcoholic driver on laxatives and unfortunately there is some amount of truth to this rumour. I’m not sure of the state of the game pre-patch but I played the game with the patch on PS3 for close to 20 hours and during that time I only had 2 crashes (which wasn’t so bad) and one serious big which really annoyed me. The bug involved one of my teammates just disappearing completely but still being considered in my party, but thankfully I was able to fix it by using an elevator causing my teammate to respawn next to me. On the PC version, I did have some slowdown issues and a crash or two but then again, I was playing on a laptop for several hours and it was beginning to overheat. Overall, I think that some of the bugs will annoy you, but after the patch the game-breaking ones are reduced to an absolute minimum. The only other technical gripe you may have is that of the graphics. Fallout 3′s graphics were decent but unimpressive and a year later they’re still pretty much the same.

NB: My rating system is still experimental and I haven’t fully decided on how I’m going to grade games just yet. For now, the last word will correspond to Tody’s final score on a game.

As I previously mentioned Fallout is one of those love it or hate it games and despite the gripes that you may have, you’re either going to drown hours into this game because of how good the role playing is or you’re going to get bored very quickly but the stats and resource management annoys you and you just want to get into the combat. So here’s the decision tree I recommend for Fallout: Vegas:

Click here for a Quick Decision Tree

I have returned from the depths of Hades…

Now I’d like to think that the majority of you will emerge from the dismal pre-apocalyptic ordeals that your lives have become without me and press me for details about my absence but I know that deep down inside most of you will be thinking: “Who the f@#k is this guy?” – Which is a valid question. A question which I will answer with another question; and that question is: “Do you know the muffin man?” Because if you do, in fact, know the muffin man, then explaining this is going to be a great deal easier. You see it all starts six months ago on June the 7th when I signed a contract in blood with the demonic overlord of eGamer known as ‘Dean’. The contract was as follows: in exchange for a weekly column on eGamer, I would be rewarded handsomely with priceless gemstones from foreign lands and PlayStation games free of charge. And so I signed the contract without hesitation and pledged to submit a weekly column to eGamer under the title of ‘Machina’s Machinations’. [I remember nothing of this -- Ed]

Machina’s Machinations is where some of you may know me from. During the two month period from the start of June to the end of July I wrote a ‘weekly’ column on this very website and now I have returned to do the same. I use the term ‘weekly’ as loosely as possible because over the eight weeks that I wrote for eGamer, I may or may not have submitted only five of the required eight columns. And the reason for this is simple, I abused a clause in my contract… and that’s partially what got me into the troubles that lead to my absence over the last few months. At first I experimented with the loophole, delaying my columns for weeks at a time until I finally figured out how to abuse it to the maximum. The end result would have been me submitting one column per annum and being paid for the entire year’s work plus overtime, which seemed to be a ‘pretty sweet deal’ if I must be colloquial.

But that blissful dream ended when I failed to notice another loophole in my contract that Dean had placed in my contract for perhaps this very contingency. And to this I can only say: “F@#king lawyers”. What happened next is a very long story and it involves several grueling hours in a courtroom – which is not nearly as exciting as television makes it out to be – followed by over fifteen different convictions including fraud, contempt, treason and first degree littering (long story). But South Africa, being the wonderful country that it is, decided that all of my apparent ‘crimes’ (I’m innocent) were worth only three months in a minimum security facility, which may as well have been a hotel.

Those were three long months in prison in which I learned several valuable life lessons. The first is that I should actually try to get myself jailed more often to save costs on DSTV and KFC, and the second is that crime does actually pay (the original loophole in my contract treated my prison days as 24-hour overtime). But everything that has a beginning also, coincidentally, has an end (it does not necessarily have a middle) and after the three month period ended, I was thrown back into the world to fend for myself. After that, I wandered the earth for seven days and seven nights before finally returning home to my beloved computer and PS3. And that was when I found out that I still have a job – because apparently in South Africa, it’s reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally hard to fire people – and that my next column was due in 45 minutes. I, then, began typing up this column…

And that brings my story to a close. Hopefully that explains my absence over the last few months to you in a credible fashion. Thank God it wasn’t really something as boring as ‘I was studying really hard at varsity’ because not only would that just be ludicrous, but also unbelievable. Anyway, enough about the past, it’s time to focus on the future… and everything is going to change. From now on, you can expect a column from me every second Monday and it will somehow be related to gaming. Also, expect the occasional video game review whenever my brother actually let’s me play on my own damn PlayStation. Lastly, columns are going to be quite a bit shorter because apparently all those words that I used to write sent three people to hospital for liver failure which resulted in a currently ongoing lawsuit. However, that’s a story for another place and another time… and another crime… with lime…  on a boat…

So till next time eGamers, farewell and under no circumstances should you accept candy from strangers…

P.S. It has come to my attention that many of you are still wondering what the Muffin Man has to do with any of this seeing as he was mentioned in the first paragraph. I don’t know… why don’t you tell me?

In case you thought my lack of a column the last week had something to do with laziness, think again because It actually had something to do with procrastination! Well anyway, that random QOTW two weeks back about which old game deserves a sequel actually got me thinking about the good old days when gaming was only 80% about the money as opposed to 95%. It was a time when developers weren’t afraid to make games other than shooters for fear of trying something new.

And as I was thinking about which game from that era deserved a sequel, I remembered one game in particular that stood above all as a font of untapped potential; a game called Sacrifice, a Shiny Entertainment cross genre PC game back from the year 2000. Despite being acclaimed by critics as being original, well designed and having a great story, Sacrifice was declared as a commercial failure due to bad marketing and a lack of mainstream appeal, which is a pity because as I’ll try to convince you in the next 2000 words or so, it really was an amazing step forward in game development. Feeling nostalgic, I decided to downloa-… I mean, purchase the game for full retail price and play it again to see if it could stand the test of time. And amazingly, it could… despite being a decade old, there still hasn’t been a game that has even come close to replicating the unique experience that the game presented. In fact, I ended up liking Sacrifice so much that I finished the game five full times in the space of a week (hence the lack of last weeks’ column). Yes Sacrifice is just that amazing and this week I’ll be taking a break from my usual rant to just to tell you all about it and why I think that it deserves a sequel…

As I mentioned in my opening paragraph, Sacrifice was, and still is, a very unique and original game and, as such, it’s not that easy to describe to someone who hasn’t at least seen it in action; the screenshots don’t even do it any justice. The game was an interesting hybrid of several genres but the simplest way to classify it would be to call it a 3rd Person Real Time Strategy Game with Action and RPG elements. Yes the game was quite a mixed bag as far as gameplay was concerned and due to its unique nature, many found it confusing and difficult until they finally learned what the hell was going on.

In the game, the player controls a Wizard from the third person camera and, as you would expect from a game like this, you have health and mana bars and you can run around the world casting spells and summoning creatures. Now since your Wizard is fragile and only has a limited amount of mana, you’ll need creatures to do most of your bidding for you and that’s where the RTS part of the game comes in. You can issue commands to your units to attack enemies, guard units or structures, take up formations and use special abilities much like any RTS but the kicker is that you’ll be doing all of this using the 3rd Person camera. While this may seem quite difficult and unintuitive compared to most RTS games, which give you a full moving birds eye view, you’d be surprised at how well this system actually works.

Obviously things can get a little complicated when you’re in a large scale battle and you have to micromanage your own units attack orders, health and mana in addition to your own, but this is eased by the relatively intelligent creature AI and the added game play conventions. The game gives you a lot of simple options like grouping, formations and continuous orders that really make the game a lot easier to control than it could have been. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t get chaotic at times, because battles almost always do! As your Wizard levels up during the course of the story (in campaign) or over the course of a battle (in multiplayer), more and more spells become available to him and the huge variety of spells in this game really do make it a lot more fun than simply summoning a bunch of units and then just right clicking on stuff. The game can really be amazing when two giant armies collide while their commanding wizards are summoning Volcanoes, Tornadoes, Exploding Cows or even the Grim Reaper himself to aid in the battle.

But despite all the gameplay conventions, the game is still an entirely new concept and it certainly isn’t easy to get right into, especially for players not already familiar with Strategy or Action games. There’s a definite learning curve to the game when you consider that in addition to controlling your own character and camera and watching out for your health and mana, you also need to watch out for your creatures as well. Add onto this that the game also has extremely simplified RTS elements such as managing resources and building structures and it’s going to take you a bit longer than the extremely helpful tutorial to come to grips with the whole system. That being said, once you learn how intuitive it all really is, the game becomes a blast.

The Campaign in Sacrifice is probably the best you’ve ever seen in a Strategy game period. There’s an interesting mix of role playing and strategy here that, when combined with the compelling story, well acted characters and RPG style choices, make it worth playing several times over. The player takes the role of Eldred, a wandering Wizard from another realm who stumbles across a plane controlled by five warring Gods. The gods use Wizards as their agents and since Eldred is looking for a place to escape from his dark past, this realm seems like a perfect place for him to start over. And all seems well, until a prophet arrives and tells the Gods that one of them is going to betray their old laws and bring destruction to their world. And so the war between the Gods heightens and there’s alliances and backstabbing and betrayal and quite a few interesting twists along the way.

Now the game functions like a strategy game in this regard in that there are 10 missions or ‘maps’ to play through to get to the end, but the beauty comes from all the freedom that the player is given. Each of the Five Gods is unique in that they have their own personalities, motives and agendas and each of them reacts differently to the events that take place throughout the course of the game. This is where the RPG elements come in because it’s up to the player to choose which of the Five Gods to serve. Each of them will offer you a mission at the staging area between maps and it’s up to you to decide which missions to accept and which ones to decline. However it’s not as simple as that because serving one God might get you favour with him/her and their allies but you might also be sent on missions that end up offending other Gods. And while in the start you can pretty much serve whoever you wish, as the game progresses you eventually make enemies of certain Gods depending on your choices and I really don’t want to spoil what you get to do later once you grow in power and favour. Also, aside from the actual missions themselves, you’ll sometimes be offered choices that let you change allegiances or influence some of the major storyline events later in the game. A small example would be in one of the earlier missions for the God of Fire, Pyro, where if you brutally murder all of the innocent villagers for no reason, the God of Strife, Charnel, will notice and congratulate you and then ask you to come work for him.

But aside from all of their distinct characters and motives, the Gods are further differentiated by their play styles. Whenever you accept a mission from one of the Gods, you’ll receive new spells or creatures and while often the Gods tend to have similar units, each of them is always differentiated by special abilities or attributes. For example, the God of Air, Stratos, tends to get fragile units with fast movements speeds and strong abilities, while Pyro tends to get units and spells that just deal damage and blow stuff up. But again, the beauty of this system is the freedom. Since you’re not just restricted to serving one God, you can pretty much build your spell book however you wish. For example if you want to serve the God of Earth, James, to get creatures with high defense and then serve the Goddess of Justice, Persephone, to get healing spells to make your army even harder to kill, you can do just that. While eventually the choices you make do tend to have make some Gods refuse to let you serve them, you still do have a high degree of freedom in customizing your spellbook as you level up. And if you finish the campaign, you unlock the ability to create any Spellbook you wish for multiplayer so that you’re not constricted to following only one God’s skill tree.

While the Campaign is only ten missions long, each of the missions is quite lengthy and the later ones can span multiple objectives. And also, since there are five Gods with their own missions, there’s actually closer to fifty missions in the whole campaign, giving the game a lot of replay value, especially given all the choices you can make.

Even though back in the year 2000, multiplayer wasn’t really a big deal, Sacrifice does have a pretty impressive and extremely fun multiplayer in the form of LAN or online. In multiplayer, the game once again functions more or less like at RTS although with a greater degree of customization. Rather than being restricted to playing as Eldred, you’re free to choose from any Wizard in the game and there’s more to unlock depending on which ending you get in the campaign. You’re also free to choose which God’s spells to use, although if you’ve completed the single player campaign, you’re free to build your spellbook as you wish.

Once you have that sorted out, Multiplayer is a pretty straight forward affair. It’s a battle involving up to four Wizards on their own or on teams on any of the many maps available and, while there are different game modes, the most common one is “banish all enemy Wizards”. Well I’ve actually neglected to mention how the Wizard battling system works in this game, but I figure here is as good a place to mention it as any. To win a battle, you need to do a lot more than just kill the enemy Wizard. When a Wizard dies, all that happens is that the Wizard goes into spectral form until he/she receives enough mana to come back to life. While you’re a ghost, you can still move around and command your units but you can’t cast spells or collect souls which puts you at quite a disadvantage. To actually get rid of a Wizard, you need to go to his/her Altar and desecrate it so that when you next kill them, they’re banished from the realm rather than simply being turned into a temporary ghost. The system is a bit more involved than my simple explanation gives it credit, but rest assured that it works very well in the context of combining the RTS and Action parts of the game.

Winning a battle against another Wizard takes a far amount of strategy and building your army to counter theirs or using the right spells at the right time are essential to coming out on top. More than just taking down the enemy’s base, you need to work to gain ground in other ways such as capturing mana fountains on the map or converting the souls of enemy creatures before they can be reused. In this way, battles can sometimes be very involved and chaotic affairs, but sometimes there’s nothing more fun creating a giant earthquake between your enemy’s feet while your army of Phoenixes burn them to death.

As I mentioned before, the game has aged incredibly well and after ten long years of some very large progress in the gaming world, Sacrifice still somehow manages to be very playable and very fun. While you’re going to need the latest patch to play it on Windows Vista or 7, the game will run perfectly smooth without so much as a chink in frame rate or a single bug despite the massive amounts of on screen action. For its time, the graphics were amazing and they’re still quite playable even by today’s standards. While the game obviously does look dated, the impressive visual effects and quirky artistic design are still enough to make a ten year old game serve as eye candy. The gameplay still feels fresh after all this time and you won’t have to worry about the controls, the camera or technical issues getting in your way. The game was honestly a masterpiece for its time and if you can look past the dated, but still impressive visuals, you’re in for a hell of a time.

If you’re interested in playing Sacrifice after all these years then rest assured that it’s not so hard to find as you might think. You could try your luck finding it in a bargain bin somewhere or stealing a friend’s copy, or you could be desperate enough to pay a fortune to import it, but the best way to get your hands on Sacrifice is to buy it as a downloadable game for dirt cheap off of Steam. If you have Steam installed on your PC, an internet connection and a credit card, you can get your hands on it without a problem. However, if you’re opposed to the idea of shopping online with a credit card and your ethics are sketchy at best, you can email me and I’ll tell you of another way to get hold of the game.

I hope that everyone who reads this article gives this game a chance, you really won’t be sorry…

We at eGamer don’t usually post LOLPOSTS…(Snip) [Ed: We at eGamer don't post off topic crap. This is what happens when Daddy's not home] This is a video that should[Ed: Not be here] be shared with the world. It saddens me to think that no matter how good an author I become, I will never be able to write something as amazing as this.

Have you ever played a game, new or old, which was so good that you wanted to play the sequel… only it never got one? Well this week we want to know all about the game that you think most deserves a sequel and why.

If you can give us the most interesting reason and/or idea for a sequel then we’ll give you a free R200 voucher from eDreams with which to buy whatever you’d like.

Leave you answer in the comments section below.

Last week we asked you why more females do not play video games and we got quite a heated discussion. There were a lot of good theories and posts (none of them by M0fla) but in the ended we awarded it to:

DominoZA! Because we stalked your Facebook account and downloaded all of your pictures, the R200 voucher is a peace offering so that you don’t press charges.

Just kidding.

We hope to see more arguments from you in the future. The last ones were pretty convincing.

The rules:

- You must comment with a valid email address else you cannot win!
- This competition is sponsored by eDreams.co.za. They will send out vouchers at the end of the month to minimize admin work. This means if you win this week, you’ll receive it during the first week of the following month.
- Our Competition T&C

In case you were wondering why there was no column post last week, then stop. Sometimes in life, no matter how much we desire an answer to a particular question, we don’t get it. The same is applicable with this column. Just know that everything happens for a reason and that the reason for why there was no column last week had something to do with sharks.

Well after following the repetitive annual hype-fest otherwise known as E3 and sighing as I saw big-wig company execs talking about how awesome their shitty games are, I did a lot of thinking about what was revealed and where gaming seems to be heading in the next few years. This year’s E3 was pretty poor as far as revelations go so don’t expect this week’s article to be spiritually uplifting or anything. Rather than my usual style of presenting my ‘opinion’ as pure fact and trying to sound really clever, I’m instead going to spend the next couple of thousand words (a picture counts as a thousand words) speculating about where I believe gaming is heading and whether or not I believe that this is a good thing or a bad thing. So without further ado, let’s roll…

Well by now, graphics in games is usually so good that focusing on improving them almost seems redundant, but believe it or not, this is one of the primary developments you’ll see in the next few years. Exhibit A would be the Nintendo 3DS which is basically the DS, but with better and more immersive graphics, Exhibit B would be the PlayStation 3 combined with Sony’s own 3D TVs for 3D gaming in the comfort of your own home, and Exhibit C would be games like Marvel vs Capcom 3 which have interesting visual styles that try to push graphics in another direction. This makes you wonder where Microsoft lies with the whole ‘better graphics’ business but then again it may just be that Sony is stealing ideas from Nintendo (again) like they so shamelessly love to do. Either way, I think that in the next few years, 3D will increase in popularity and developers are going to focus on improving video game graphics.

Now this doesn’t exactly strike me as a bad thing, because everybody likes eye candy and, in contrast other critics, I actually think 3D is pretty awesome; it just seems a little but unnecessary to me. As aforementioned, graphics in games have become really good over time. In fact, it’s pretty much reached a point where they’re really believable and we can no longer feel that poor graphics is harming gameplay in any significant way. I am, of course, referring to the Xbox and PS3 here, because the Wii is still pretty sub-par but even Wii graphics don’t detract from the gameplay all that much.

I guess the point that I haven’t really made yet, is that while graphics are awesome, we don’t need them to improve. Everybody likes a game which looks better than real life and 3D is going to make gaming more immersive if it ever becomes mainstream but the overall quality of games don’t drastically improve as a result. Like I keep saying, graphics are already really good. Focusing on improving them will only increase the already long production time of games while not really improving the games themselves in the long run. Because while graphics have reached a point where they no longer need to be improved, game design still has a long way to go. If developers have any intention of trying to create truly memorable gaming experiences or ‘art’ then there needs to be something more than amazing particle physics and really realistic water.  But of course, graphics are the easiest features to showcase during development. It’s really easy to see from trailers and pictures how awesome the rocks look but showing fantastic level design is a different story. I suppose it was foolish of me to hope that graphics would ever be anything but the centerpiece of future game development.

Well I’m sure I wasn’t the only one watching when Sony basically revolutionized the Wii’s control system by painting it black (and by revolutionize, I mean stole). And of course you can’t forget Microsoft’s ‘Kinect’ system which is honestly the most god-awful pun I’ve heard since Nintendo named the Wii. But criticisms aside, it looks like both of the Console giants are stepping up to leech off of Nintendo’s success in their own special way. Despite the very obvious criticism flaw in the design of motion controls (that being the ‘motion’) it looks like they’re here to stay and you can expect standing in front of your TV and waving your arms like a midget on crack to increase in popularity over the next few years.

Now unfortunately, this is a development that I can’t say that I’m too happy about. Besides the fact that I’m cheap and forking out a thousand bucks for a new controller set offends me, I just don’t think its as revolutionary as Sony and Microsoft does. My biggest gripe is that all motion controls do is change, and not improve, the way that users send their input to their gaming consoles; the output stays the same. Motion controls are the effective equivalent of replacing your cellphone keypad with a touchscreen; it’s an entertaining gimmick but after you get used to it, it’s not really all that different than what you used previously. You see, there was never really any major problems with controllers… well at least not as far as I’m concerned. For countless years, they’ve done a pretty good job of allowing us to transfer our input to gaming consoles. Does that mean we should never strive to make something better? Not exactly… I for one, am in full support of fixing what it isn’t broken, but I just don’t see motion controls as the way to do it. Especially not Microsoft’s Kinect because something that gimmicky is going to be more bug-ridden and unresponsive than a piano made of chocolate. Now again, don’t get my wrong. I think Kinect is pretty awesome as far as controlling your music and movies goes… but when it comes to gaming, it just seems strange.

And then of course there’s the problem with motion controls themselves: the motion. Now I’m not going to use the age old axiom that gamers are lazy and blah blah blah, instead I’m going to say that making your console require more energy to manipulate simply isn’t a good idea by principle. You might argue that adding exercise and entertainment works for sport so it should work for gaming as well, but then I would argue that you’re a moron. When you run around a field and play soccer, your actions are having a tangible effect on a real world and since most of us live in that place, it’s a lot more natural for us to manipulate our surroundings with real world actions. When it comes to gaming, you’re interacting with a digital world i.e. a world that does not exist and so there needs to be a comfortable way for us to transfer our intentions into the game and running around in front of your TV just doesn’t seem like a comfortable way to do this. While it’s an admirable dream to want to try and connect the real world and the digital world in a simplistic way, unfortunately it’s not always going to be that easy. I’ll stop now because I’d like to give PlayStation Move and Microsoft Kinect a chance to prove me wrong but I’m predicting that in a couple of years time, motion controls will not have dramatically improved video game experiences beyond the level at which they were at back when we used controllers.

P.S. It doesn’t matter what kind of ontological or scientific argument you use, if you play Kinectimals in front of other people, they will think that you are a retard.

Casual Gaming… well you might argue that I’m late to the party and that developers have become more focused on casual gamers since a long time already. I would respond by saying “Give me a chance to finish, you idiot!”. Now the reason that developers want to focus on the casual crowd is a topic for another article (and it’s also very obvious if you do that arbitrary thing known as thinking), but I’ll go on to predict that Casual Gaming will evolve from becoming prevalent to becoming absolutely dominant. And by casual games, I don’t mean minesweeper or solitaire or whatever else you play while you’re bored at work, I mean mainstream ‘blockbuster’ experiences like Gears of War and Assassin’s Creed. You might question me again for labeling these as casual games but by the time I finish this metaphor, you’ll know where I’m heading with this.

Let’s take movies for example. Say you decide to watch The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (either because you are gay or because your super hot girlfriend asked you to) or maybe Clash of the Titans. You pay a certain amount of money and then you receive the benefits of being entertained for a few hours and then having something to talk about to your friends (if you have any) or whatnot. This does not make you a movie critic or give you some title functionally equivalent to ‘gamer’; you’re just another person who was looking to have a good time. Of course there exists movies with philosophical depth or artistic qualities and pursuing these movies for enjoyment and trying to delve into them probably does make you a movie critic or something along these lines. But for most people, the ‘casual movies’ are not life changing or definitive of you as a person, they’re simply a form of enjoyment. And I think that this is where gaming is heading if it hasn’t already.

In the past, people who play games have always been labelled as gamers and there existed a learning curve before one could actually enjoy gaming as a hobby (whereas watching movies requires no learning curve). But over time, as gaming has become simpler and more mainstream, this distinction is starting to fade. Games are becoming parallel to movies, music and other mainstream entertainment in that partaking in their enjoyment is a simple process that does not arbitrarily label you in any way. In the same way that listening to music doesn’t make you a ‘music lover’ and watching movies doesn’t make you a ‘movie critic’, playing games no longer makes you a ‘gamer’. It’s simply another form of entertainment that you pay for. And while there still exists a ‘higher level’ of gaming that does make you a gamer, the majority of games are not so. Instead, gaming will eventually become something that most people will do for casual fun when they go to their friends houses or are bored at home; it will cease to be the lifestyle that it used to be. And honestly, I actually think this is a great thing. In a couple of years, the idea that gamers are ‘computer whizz nerds’ will cease to exist altogether. In the same way that everyone can enjoy a good movie on a Friday night, everyone will soon be able to do the same with video games.

And the death of hardcore gaming is probably where all of the above is headed. Hardcore gaming has been dying slowly over the years and over time and eventually hardcore games and hardcore gamers are going to become a ‘niche’ market rather than a large community. You know that small group of people who still get together to play the classic Dungeons and Dragons with a pen and a notepad every weekend or two? That’s probably where hardcore gaming is headed. Game critics and dedicated gamers will still exist en masse but the group of players that want to take their skills to the next level or want to explore deep and re-playable gaming experiences will slowly dwindle. Again I’ll use the movie industry as a metaphor here; in the same way that movies developed to showcase artistic film making have become a scarcity, games of the same caliber will become scarcer and scarcer as well. We’ll be lucky to see another game like Shadow of the Colossus or Grim Fandangofor a long time. And while there still are video game series that aspire to so much more like Metal Gear Solid, it’s only natural that these will become more mainstream and action orientated as time goes on (MGS4 and MGS: Rising).

And all in all, this isn’t really a bad thing. There will always exist that large ‘middle tier’ of gamers who are more serious than the casual crowd and less serious than the hardcore crowd and that’s probably where most of us on this website fits in. I just think that the casual crowd is going to get much bigger and much less defined. In the future, professional gaming will probably never be as respected as professional sport but casual gaming will probably become one of the most accepted of all past times. And I think that over time, more people will come to accept this change to gaming than reject it… or least that’s what I believe…

Anyone else got any takes on the future of gaming?

Ever heard of females? You know, those elusive creatures that have their own bathroom and attack with you with pepper spray whenever you try to examine them too closely?

Well no matter how you look at it, girls are a scarcity on the interwebs and this week eGamer wants to know your theory on ‘why there aren’t that many girls that play video games and surf gaming related websites’.

If you come up with the best hypothesis, you will not receive any cookies but you will get a R200 eDreams voucher. How cool is that?

Leave your answer in the comment section below.

Last week we asked you what your favourite game was and it was decided that we’d award the prize to a random participant rather than the best commenter (which was obviously me… again).

That being said — Congratulations Rainy for telling us that FIFA 10 is your favourite game. Even though your opinion is wrong, we’ll give you the R200 voucher for standing up for what you believe in.

Note that this week’s winner, will not be random. Instead, the best hypothesis wins.

The rules:

- You must comment with a valid email address else you cannot win!
- This competition is sponsored by eDreams.co.za. They will send out vouchers at the end of the month to minimize admin work. This means if you win this week, you’ll receive it during the first week of the following month.
- Our Competition T&C

For those of you who still haven’t been eaten by sharks, welcome back to another week of Machina’s Machinations. I would like to apologize for the way I ended my column last week, I know that not all of you are as accepting of cats as I am. On the other hand, if my anti-Portugal sign was what offended you then I would like to inform you that it’s not my fault that they suck.

Now it has come to my attention that some of you actually play games other than Jumpstart: 3rd Grade and Microsoft Excel – you know like real hard-core games such as Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland and Pokemon Red – and for those of you who do, you’ll know that sometimes games can get a little hard. Sometimes games are hard due to a progression of the difficulty curve, sometimes they’re inconsistently hard due to some badly designed sections, sometimes they can be hard because of shitty game mechanics, sometimes they can get really hard on the higher difficulties and finally there exists another type of game which is just hard for the sake of it. Sometimes games are are purposely designed to be difficult just to challenge the player at his own game, as it were. Sometimes they can be punishing in their difficulties and sometimes they can be so hard that they make you lose interest in life itself… and funnily enough, these kinds of games can often be the most rewarding to play.

In this week’s column, I’m going to focus on games which intentionally try to be difficult and explain what I believe to be good and bad examples of this.

In this article I’m not really going to discuss difficulty curves in games because that’s an entirely different story for an entirely different article. Instead I’m going to focus on the games which intentionally try to be difficult. Some games are designed specifically to challenge and frustrate the player and a lot of the times these games aren’t really for everybody. But, as is the case with just about anything, there are good ways to do this and bad ways to do this. Some games are hard due to obstacles not controlled by the player (such as broken game mechanics) which can leave the player feeling cheated of victory while others are hard because they require so much skill to overcome. There are obviously a lot ways that a game can become difficult so I’m going to simplify the whole thing and say that a good example of a difficult game is one in which there is a clear progression in the skill of the player as the game goes on i.e. the difficulty should be determined by the player skill and as the player gets better, this apparent difficulty should disappear over time.

While there still should be a clear cut difficulty curve in games like these, the general level of the challenge presented to the player should require much involvement, player skill or talent to overcome. Now I could explain the good and bad ways to make a game difficult but that would use a lot of confusing words so instead I’m going to explain the entire thing using three examples: a good one, a decent one and a bad one. So, just for the novelty of having this kind of article follow a curve like structure itself, I’m going to start with the bad example and move from there.

The game that I’m going to use as a bad example of a difficult game is none other than Call of Duty: World at War’s veteran mode. Those of you who have tried to play CoD5 on Veteran Mode will know that it’s one of the most frustrating and difficult experiences you’ll ever go through in  your life and not really for any good reasons. Now you might want to say that this is a good example of a difficult game because it’s more painful than kidney stones but the reasons for which it is difficult really don’t feel fair. You see, the problem is not actually that the game is too hard, but rather that it’s hard for the wrong reasons.

Those of you who have played CoD5 on Veteran will know that the sole reason for the game’s ridiculous difficulty level is the broken enemy AI. Your allies will charge through the levels, never killing a single enemy and serving only to obscure your firing range. Your enemies seem to have realized that your allies are a liability and will respond by targeting you and only you, even when you can’t even see them. And of course, the game gives them instant reflexes and ridiculously accurate aim with any gun while it gives you so little health that exposing yourself for more than a second is enough to get you killed. And while this is all fair and well, the real reason why this game comes across as unfair is due to grenades. If you’ve played this game you would know what I’m talking about. Enemies will hurl grenades at you… THOUSANDS of grenades. And they’ll never stop! Now the grenade indicator is great for helping you dodge them but when 30+ enemies are all throwing grenades at you constantly with pinpoint accuracy, you’re going to have to move, and since sticking your head out of cover for a second or more is enough to get you killed, you’re going to die a lot. It also doesn’t help that a lot of the fights take place in confined spaces which means that sometimes you literally cannot escape from the onslaught of grenades and you simply have to die because there isn’t any place to go. And when you have to replay a ten minute section from the start because you only have the reflexes of a superstar athlete instead of the reflexes of an android, you’re going to feel incredibly cheated.

Now look back at my definition of a good difficult game and you’ll see why Call of Duty 5 doesn’t make the cut as a good difficult game. It’s because the difficulty is not reliant on the skill of the player, but rather on the forced difficulty of the game itself. There’s no progression of difficulty or skill as you play through the game itself, instead every single section in the game is a pain to get through because of incredibly harsh AI. The truth is that anyone can beat Call of Duty 5 if they simply have the perseverance to retry each section 100 times and that is exactly the problem: It takes luck and determination and not skill to beat this difficult game. Even after beating Call of Duty 5 on Veteran, if you go back to previous levels or previous difficulties you will not have become significantly better at the game; the same difficult parts will always be difficult for you and this will never change. And because skill isn’t a factor, it’s very hard to call yourself ‘good at CoD5′ if you’ve beaten it on Veteran, only persistent; because if you go back to playing it on Veteran afterward, you’ll still never be able to complete a single level without dying. So bottom line is, this game is bad at being hard because the difficulty is not reliant on skill.

Now let’s take a decent example of a difficult game; God of War II. GoW II probably has the most well designed highest difficulty level in the God of War series despite the changes to the game being so minimal. All that happens is that enemy damage scales up quite heavily, player damage scales down and the benefits that the player gains from healing items and currency is substantially reduced. Now while these changes seem really small on paper, the effect that this has on the game is quite substantial. The game changes from a hack and slash game on lower difficulties to an extremely challenging test of skill on higher difficulties, and the well designed enemies and levels really start to show.

In order to beat ‘Titan Mode’, the player has to learn enemy attack patterns and, most importantly, how to dodge. You need to learn to use short strong combos and learn how to position your attacks so that you can still deal damage while out of enemy range. You also need to learn the uses of each weapon and spell in your arsenal, and the skill comes from using the right moves at the right times while figuring out how best to deal with each particular encounter that you face. Now the reason why God of War II is better than Call of Duty: World at War at being a difficult game is that the game manages to be extremely difficult while also feeling like a true and ‘fair’ challenge to the player. In all honesty, it takes a lot of skill and tactics to beat God of War II on Titan Mode, but the reason why GoW II is only a decent example of a hard game and not a good one is because the game also requires luck and patience.

A lot of the time, luck plays a huge factor, especially against some of the bosses and during some of the less well designed parts of the game. Those of you who have played GoW II on Titan will remember the infamous ‘Translator Battle’, which is so unfairly hard that the only way to beat it is to get really lucky and pray that the satyrs don’t gang up on the person you’re supposed to protect. But these problems aren’t enough to condemn GoW II as a bad hard game and the main reason why it’s still a decent example is because there is a clear progression in the skill level of the play. If you finish Titan mode and then go back and play the game on lower difficulties, your increased level will really show because all of your tactics and knowledge will make the game so much easier to beat. The only problem is that if you go back and play the game on Titan Mode again, you’ll still struggle on the same fights, no matter how good you’ve managed to become at the game. A large portion of the game will be easier with your increased skill level but you’ll still die a lot because you got unlucky or because a single mistake cost you the entire battle. You’ll still have to be patient enough to replay some sections several times before you can do them perfectly regardless of how many times you’ve completed them and this is the factor that holds God of War II back from being a ‘good’ hard game. It thus stands to reason that while God of War II is a good example of a difficult game, it’s still not a great example of one because player skill is not always the most prominent deciding factor.

Lastly, let’s look at a great example of a difficult game and probably what I consider to be the best ‘difficult game’ that I’ve played in recent times; Monster Hunter Freedom 2. While the game has no difficult settings, it’s easily one of the most difficult games ever created. The concept is simple enough; you’re a hunter who fights giant monsters – like enormous dragons and giant wyverns – and the game does a lot to make it feel like that. The monsters are incredibly hard to kill and deal ridiculous amounts of damage; you really do feel like you’re fighting something a hell of a lot stronger than you. And while you do get to upgrade your equipment as your progress through the game, equipment is never going to be enough to get you through the game because if you don’t have the skill, even the best armour and weapons in the entire game won’t be enough to help you defeat even the weakest enemies – I’m not joking; I tried this out when I first started the game. I downloaded an end game save with top tier equipment and still got killed by the second boss. Also the boss monsters themselves are relentless in their attack patterns and can kill you in 2-3 hits and have so many hit points that most of them take ages to beat if you don’t know how to exploit their weaknesses. Add to this that there are smaller monsters constantly chase you around and harass you and you have a game that’s actively trying to make your life hard.

But while the game may seem punishing in it’s difficulty, you never really feel like you’re being cheated out of a win, only that your skill is inadequate. The reason for this is that there are a ton of different boss monsters to fight and each of them is intricately designed and requires a special set of tactics to beat. They all have different attacks and weaknesses and it’s up to you to find ways to exploit this and find a way to defeat them; and it’s honestly the most satisfying feeling when you finally do manage to beat them. Since most of the stronger dragons can kill you in a matter of hits, you really need to learn how to avoid their various attacks while finding ways to make their weak spots or leave themselves open to counter attacks. And you can employ all sorts of tactics to help you get there, such as cutting off their tails so that they can’t attack you from behind or using sonic bombs to dizzy the monsters with acute hearing. Aside from the skill that it actually takes to fight the monsters, it also takes a lot of thinking and ingenuity to find better ways of exploiting the individual monsters’ weaknesses and it can really feel like an accomplishment when you finally manage to kill something ten times your size.

Now the reason why I consider Monster Hunter to be a good example of a difficult game is because it takes a lot of skill, strategy and knowledge to defeat each of your enemies but the reason I consider it to be an excellent example of a difficult game is because of the amazing sense of progression. In the start, you’ll struggle with every single mission but as you progress through the game and become more skilled, you really do get a lot better at it. Sooner or later, something clicks and you finally begin to understand how the flow of combat actually works and suddenly the game becomes incredibly fun. Suddenly you know how the game works and when you fight new monsters for the first time you can usually figure out ways to beat them. And as time goes on, you become so much better at the game and then it really becomes fun when an already difficult game like this pits you against the much stronger and larger monsters. And then when you go back to fight the older bosses, you can beat them so much easier because you’ve become so much better at the game. And this is why it’s such a great example of how a difficult game should be; because player skill is the ultimate determining factor. Sure it takes time, effort and patience to master the game but when push comes to shove, skill wins every time. As you get further in the game, you truly become better and better at it and it’s a very rare occurrence where you’ll blame the game engine or bad luck for your losses. In the end, Monster Hunter is a great example of a difficult game because there exists a real sense of progression in player skill as you play it more and more.

So in conclusion, the more a difficult game relies on player skill, the better it is at being a difficult game. And honestly there’s really all there is to it. Sure difficult games can get you frustrated at times but when you can truly feel like you’ve become good at a game, it really feels great…

Till next week…  someone help me come up with ideas for future columns…

To those of you who weren’t eaten by Sharks last week, welcome back to Machina’s Machinations… and for those of you who were, I express my deepest condolences. Last week I spoke about the decision process of game development companies (found here: Beneath The Bottom Line) and this week I’m going to continue where I left off by speaking about something completely unrelated.

It’s not much of an assumption to make that if you consider yourself enough of a gamer to read gaming blogs like eGamer then you must read gaming reviews as well. Whether you read reviews in magazines (like NAG), websites (like GameSpot), stores (like Take2) or on the back of soft drink cans (like Coke), the format tends to be pretty similar. The reviewer types a long story about their experiences with the game and then ends off the review with one thing: a number. And using this number in conjunction with the other numbers that the various game reviews give you, you now need to make the difficult choice of: which games do you play and which games don’t you play? Because simply put, you don’t have the time and the money to play everything – for those of you who do have the time, get a life, for those of you who do have the money, well played – and I, personally, don’t believe that a number is enough to help you make the difficult decision of which games to buy and which games not to buy. So in this article, I’m just going to discuss a few of the reasons why the number review system is a failure.

P.S. For those of who complained about the length of my article last week, I’ve remedied it by making this week’s article even longer…

The first problem that I’d like to discuss with regards to the number system is interpretation; and believe me, it’s a lot more abstract than you’d initially think. Now for the rest of the article, I’m going to assume that games are reviewed on a scale of 1 to 10 with scores out of 100 simply being a number from 1-10 with an attached decimal point. It might seem fairly simple to most people that rating something on a scale of 1 to 10 indicates how good or bad the game is but what’s never made clear is: what exactly is being quantified here? Does the number from 1 to 10 represent the expected ‘fun’ that will be generated from playing the game? Or how good it is from a technical and objective perspective? Does it represent the likelihood that you’ll enjoy the game? Does it represent how close the game is to perfection? Or does it perhaps represent what quality class the game fits into? Now any single one of these interpretations would be useful as long as it’s clearly stated which of these the number in question is referring to, but, as I stated above, it never usually is.

If this still isn’t clear to you then I’ll illustrate it with an example. Let’s take the number 9 for example. 9 out of 10, 90 of 100, 90%. If you get 90% for a Maths Exam, you display a near perfect mastery of what has been taught to you. If you get 90% of people to vote you in as president, then 90% of the voting population consider you to be the best out of all available candidates. If RottenTomatos tells you that a movie was liked by 90% of critics, then you know that there’s a very high chance that you’ll enjoy the movie. If you know that eating Smarties has a 90% chance to give you AIDS, then your chances of walking away free are close to non-existent. If you own 90% of the shares in a company, then it’s pretty much your company. If the judges rate you 9 out of 10 on idols, it means that the quality of your singing is close to perfect. Now in all of the above scenarios, there’s only one  number, the number 9, but in each of them, the meaning is completely different. The same can apply the number ratings for games, in that it’s not perfectly clear what’s being indicated.

Now those of you who aren’t following might say “The number tells you how good the game is, what’s so hard to understand about that?” and I’d respond by saying that it isn’t all that hard to understand. What’s hard to understand is what exactly you mean by ‘good’. The word itself is so broad and vague and has so many interpretations itself that using it in a definition doesn’t really clear anything up. But all the above is simply semantics. The real problem lies in the next three sections, all of which end up coming back to the root problem of interpretation.

The second problem that I’d like to address is called relativity, and it’s a lot more obvious than the first one. I’ll illustrate using a simple example: if every single game ever made was rated 1 out of 10 then a game which was rated 3 out of 10 would be considered to be fantastic even if it’s only rated 3 on the number scale. And this problem is actually a lot more apparent than you think; usually with the numbers 7 and 8. Since it isn’t clearly defined what the numbers represent, the number 7 is more or less supposed to mean decent or playable while the number 8 usually means fairly good. Now the problem with this is quite obvious, the median score for games tends to be 7 rather than 5 and because of this, the number 7 literally does mean ‘average’ when rating games. I, personally, would not pay R700 for what I consider to be average so when websites rate games 7 or lower, I tend to avoid them, which is much more of a problem than you think. You see the problem is that the number 7 fits on the higher spectrum on the 1 to 10 scale. 5 is actually the average of all integers from 1 to 9, while 7 is actually in the upper quartile (read above average). The way games are rated nowadays seems to suggest that most games are above average, which actually makes no statistical sense when you think about it.

The next problematic number in the whole relativity number is 8. Now on standard 1 – 10 number scales, 8 is supposed to mean really good. It doesn’t matter what foreign country you come from, 8 is on the upper end of the number spectrum and it’s only one step down from the highest reasonable score – the number 9; I’ll discuss the problems with 10 in a moment. It therefore follows logically that if you buy a game rated 8 out of 10, you shouldn’t just be satisfied, you should be pretty damn elated. Regardless of what your number scale represents, 8 is supposed to exist for games that are better than the rest. But if you read game reviews then you already know that this isn’t the case. Just to test my theory, I went to GameSpot.com today and clicked on latest reviews. Of the 10 latest reviews, there was one game rated 5, three games rated 7, five games rated 8 or higher and one game rated 9. Now there’s obviously a problem with the system when nine out of ten games reviewed fall into the 7-9 category. The problem is that 8 no longer represents truly great games, only games that are above average or are moderately good. And the problem with this is that 8/10 is no longer any kind of guarantee. You can’t be sure if a game that scores 8 is good, nor can you be sure that you’ll even like it.

Another problem with 7 and 8 being so prominent is that the numbers 1-6 have become almost useless in the 1 to 10 scale. Since most people are already skeptical of games with a score of 7, a game that gets 6 or lower is mostly considered to be unplayable. For this reason, the majority of the 1 to 10 scale represents essentially the same thing: a bad game with almost no distinction between any of the scores. In the end, there’s probably no difference whether you rate a game 1 or you rate a game 4, you’ve essentially grouped it into one single category.

And that just leaves the numbers 9 and 10. Now, for the most part, the number 9 seems to be done right. 9, in general usually does represent exceptional games that are the of the highest caliber in their respective classes. Now due to the failure of the number 8, there are some games worthy of an 8 that usually end up leaking into 9, but the problem doesn’t really lie with 9 to begin with. No, the next problem actually centers around the number 10, the highest possible number on the 1 to 10 scale. Theoretically a game that scores 10 out 10 cannot score higher and thus, we must objectively conclude that there’s nothing that could be done to make the game better. I’ll illustrate it with this example. Let’s say that you can choose between ‘getting your car stolen’ or ‘getting free sandwiches’. Now it doesn’t matter how you look at it, option 2 is unambigously better, there is no debating this. So if we rate Option 1 on the number scale at, say, 7 out of 10, then Option 2 must then get a rating of either 8, 9 or 10. But if we rate Option 1 at 10 out of 10, then there’s absolutely no way we can rate Option 2 higher without breaking the number scale and so we have to conclude that they are equal… which makes no sense.

The same logic can be applied to rating video games. When you rate a game 10, you are essentially claiming that it’s so good that it cannot be improved upon. And depending on the interpretation of the number scale you could also be claiming that everyone will like it. Now if you look back at GameSpot’s archive to  the games they’ve rated 10 in recent times you’ll see Super Mario Galaxy 2, MGS4, GTAIV. I haven’t played Mario Galaxy 2 but I have played MGS4 and GTAIV. I thought MGS4 was fantastic but this was conditional on me being an MGS fan. And I honestly thought that GTAIV was a bucket of shit that felt more like work than actual fun. But since the game is rated 10 out of 10 and is considered to be perfect, GameSpot is implying that he problem lies with me and not the game in question. I could go on about the number 10 for another 2000 words or so but I’m too lazy so instead I’ll say that there’s a very good reason why games should not be rated 10.

Now if you’re still alive after reading that giant wall of text, then I have but one last point to address before I go back to solving Rubik’s Cubes and trying to invent Human-Flavoured Bubblegum and that’s the issue of comparison. Thus far, I’ve mostly talked about the numbers in isolation but the truth is that the number system only becomes more and more unintuitive the longer you use it. One of the biggest reasons not to use the number system is the impression it creates when you compare one game to another. Now there are two problems here: first the issue of comparing one score to another based on numbers and secondly the issue of comparing one game to another via the scores.

So let’s start with comparing scores. Now as I’ve already explained above, there’s enough of a problem when you try to distinguish between games rated 7, 8 and 9 when you’re not sure about what the numbers are supposed to represent but the whole thing becomes a mindf@#k of epic proportions when you add in decimal points. You know what I’m talking about, the biggest problem is when game reviewers use their infinite wisdom to rate a game 8.1 instead of 8. When this happens, I just scratch my head in amazement and say ‘what?’. Now I hold a triple PhD in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics (ok not really) so it must be quite a big deal for numbers to confuse me. Let’s say, for example, that you ask Mr Genius reviewer to explain the difference between a game that deserves 8.0 and 8.1. Most likely, he can’t. Then ask him to explain the difference between 8.1 and 8.2 and it’s even less likely that he can explain that. When you mark someone’s Accounting Test, the difference between 81% and 82% is a physical tick on a page that corresponds to a question that you got right. When it comes to rating a game, that 1% difference is a non existent subjective anomaly that you suck out of your thumb. This becomes more of a problem when you realize that while there’s no difference between 8.0 and 8.1, no difference between 8.2 and 8.3 and no difference between 8.4 and 8.5, there’s quite a noticeable difference between rating a game 8.0 or 8.5. If this doesn’t seem like a problem to you, then you’re either drunk or are a communist… neither or which is appropriate for readers of this column.

Now the second problem is when you actually take two games and try to rank them against each other using these scores. Now if you take the number system from 1 to 10 and you’re confined to rating playable games 7,8 or 9, you’re going to end up saying that a hell of a lot of games are more or less equal to each other. My theory is that the decimal point system exists to make up for this terrible failure by making the system fail even harder. It’s one thing that you can’t explain the difference between 8.1 and 8.2 but it’s quite another thing when your system implies that a game rated 8.2 is better than a game rated 8.1 and you can’t explain it. Because that’s what the number system suggests. The whole point of the 10 point scale is that each grade is supposed to be unambiguously better that the grade that precedes it, because if it isn’t, then the entire point of rating games in the first place falls away. So the problem surfaces when your number system just ends up breeding inconsistencies and shooting itself in the foot repeatedly.

Let’s use IGN – because I love insulting those Wii-loving Nazis. If you read their review of MGS3: Snake Eater they claim that it’s the best Metal Gear Solid title they’ve ever seen and they rated it 9.6. This is actually quite funny when you consider that they’ve rated MGS2: Son of Liberty 9.7. Now you might argue that the score is more relevant for its time and whatnot but it’s an inexcusable joke when you find out that they rated MGS2: Substance 9.1 when it’s the same game but with more features. Intuitively the number system is actually saying that the game was 0.6 decimal points better when it had less content which is not really as simple as it sounds. If I was someone who just looked at the scores before deciding to buy a game I would conclude that Sons of Liberty must be better than Substance and then go on to buy the game which has less stuff. It’s like someone offers you the choice between a ticket to a soccer match seated next to a rabid Sabretooth Tiger or the same ticket to a soccer match but seated next to Carmen Electra and you choose option 1.

The sad part is that all of this could have been avoided by rating each of the MGS games 9 out of 10 and then just pointing out that they’re all the same quality class but Substance is an improved version of Sons of Liberty while Snake Eater is the best game thus far.

So in the end, when you try to compare games using the number system there’s always going to be discrepancies. It’s enough work to distinguish which class of quality a game fits into and this problem only becomes that much worse when you introduce decimal points.

So in conclusion, I hope that I’ve at least gotten you a bit more skeptical of the 1-10 rating scale when it comes to summarizing reviews and rating games. You should think harder before you trust a single number to help you decide which games to buy and which games not to buy. eGamer has taken a step in the right direction with their summary box but I would only rate their system an 8 out of 10 because 9 belongs only to exemplary world-class rating systems while rating the system 10 would imply that it cannot be further improved… which would put me in quite the predicament should a better system come along. The truth is that games can be rated on so many different levels that there probably can’t be a perfect universal system for each game… but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to create one.

Till next week, here is a cat… also Portugal sucks…

Machina’s Machinations will be around every Monday to school you about something new. Or old. Or exciting. Who knows. Just stay tuned. — Ed

If you play games, troll forums, look at the pretty pictures on gaming news sites and are actually capable of the cerebral phenomenon known as thinking, then you must have questioned the gaming industry’s development choices at times. Maybe you wonder why the long dead Max Payne series is getting another game to further ‘enrich’ its already concluded storyline while your beloved Warcraft III will probably never get a sequel. Or maybe you wish there were original games with new ideas or great stories, but instead all you get are 3rd person shooters made in the Unreal engine voiced by that guy who does Nathan Drake.

Well all these questions have the same simple answer, and most of you will know it already; it’s all about the money. So why am I then writing this article? Well besides the fact that it’s in my best interest to make this column as long and as tedious to read as possible, because I get paid by the word and not per article, there’s actually a lot more to it than: ‘it’s just about the money’. Running a gaming development company, or pretty much any company, is not as easy as it looks on TV — so hopefully by the end of this article, you’ll have an idea of why developers make the choices that they do.

The Fanboys will go on about how much Microsoft cares about them and would do anything for them and only wants them to be happy, but the big dark secret — that everyone knows — is that it’s all about the money. When game developers decide on which games to produce, the first question that has to be answered is: is it profitable? Now this isn’t really a bad thing. Picture yourself in the following scenario: you work for this website owner (let’s call him Dean) and every Friday, you kayak across the Atlantic Ocean to mow the lawn at his Canadian beach house and all he does is pay you back for the lawnmower petrol you used, you aren’t going to be very happy. You’re going to want extra compensation for your time and your effort, and there’s where profit comes in. When game developers decide to make profitable games only, it’s so that you don’t rip them off.

The concept of profit is pretty much timeless and it should come as no surprise to you that developers will only make games which are profitable to them. It’s a decision that you can’t really blame them for because people in general are simply not self-sacrificing altruists who only want the world to be a better place. Now it should come as no surprise that developing video games is very expensive. When you pay R700 for just a disc and a plastic box — and feel cheated, you should take a second to wonder how the developers feel. Regardless of how many plastic boxes and discs you manage to sell, you still have to pay a whole lot of other things. There’s the salaries of the professionals that you have to pay over several years of development, all the development and testing equipment you need,  the advertising and marketing of the game and these are only the direct costs. Remember that they still have to pay for rent and electricity and toilet paper over the years of development and the only time they actually get rewarded for this is if they even manage to finish their game… which takes about 2-5 years usually. When they finally do finish a game, the box and the disc may only cost them like R30 or so but game retails at R700 because they need to recover years worth of development costs and make a reasonable amount of profit for their efforts.

But consider this as well: development of a game takes several years and during those years, companies have to pay costs that number in the millions. They only make money when they actually sell the finished product,  so for years and years they’re just losing money. And the game only retails a tiny fraction of their total costs so they need to sell millions of copies just to break even. And in two to five years, a lot can change. How do they know that their game is even going to be popular, or if it’s going to sell well? Throw in inflation, interest and changing consumer tastes and the only certainty is that they’re going to lose money one way or another. So game developers have to be really, really careful about the games they produce, and they have to be even more careful when they take risks. Which leads me to my next point:

The title is pretty much self explanatory. The more a company knows about anything related to their game, the less uncertain they are about their future. Gaming companies are interested in as much information as they can get, and you’d be surprised by how much they actually know. Using mostly statistics and other methods of extrapolation, gaming companies can usually work out their development costs for games years in advance and, scarily, they can even accurately predict how many copies of the game they expect to sell. Obviously they don’t publish all of their findings, but often enough you get companies that will release their expected sales before a game is even released and more often than not, they’re usually right.

Now you might wonder how they know this. Maybe the reason you didn’t buy Alpha Protocol was because you have a mental disorder that discourages you from buying anything that starts with a vowel, or perhaps you bought God of War, not because of the excessive violence, but because it was the last message your dog left to you in his Will. But despite your otherwise strange motivations, in the end, there’s only one choice you make: do you buy the game or don’t you? And using this information from previous games, in conjunction with all their advertising and whatnot, allows video game developers to predict which choice you’re going to make. Because while the behavior of individuals tends to be invariably complex, the behavior of a giant consumer group is surprisingly easy to predict. The point that I’m so laboriously trying to make, is that game development companies know long in advance, whether or not their games are going to be profitable.

But even if a game would be profitable, and the developers know this, there’s still a very good reason why they may not produce it. Therefore even if you and all your friends at the Harry Potter fan club would buy “Gossip Girl: The Legend of Chuck Bass” and enough people would be interested in it to make it profitable, it’s highly unlikely that the developers will develop it. And the reason for this is simple:

IT’S NOT ONLY ABOUT MAKING MONEY; IT’S ABOUT MAKING LOTS OF MONEY

Which leads me to my next point:

The concept of Opportunity Cost is quite easy to understand, but in case you don’t understand what Mathematics is (you know, that thing with the numbers?), I’ll explain it using the diagram above. Imagine that the World is going to end in 10 minutes and it takes 5 minutes for the fat guy to walk to a pedestal and 5 minutes to eat something. He can either eat the Cake or the Bucket of Glass, but he can’t eat both. No matter what he does in his limited time, he has to make a choice and the option that he forgoes will be forever lost to him (because the world will end). The smart thing to do is to decide whether or not he will benefit more from eating the Glass or the Cake, and the option he loses is called the opportunity cost. If he decides that he likes pain more than chocolate and cream, and he eats the Glass, then the opportunity cost of that decision is the Cake (and vice versa of course).

Now the same concept exists in the games development industry, however it’s infinitely more complex. A games development company only has a limited number of people working for them and because the development process takes such a long time, they simply can’t produce everything. In the same way the fat guy doesn’t have the time to eat the Cake and the Glass, a games development team doesn’t have the time to develop all the games that they want to, even if they are profitable. Instead, they have to look at all the possible options for games that they can develop, and only then go with the one which they think will benefit them the most. It makes sense really, because if you were the fat guy, you wouldn’t waste your time on the inferior option, you would go straight for the Glass — assuming you’re not an idiot who actually thinks that the cake is better. In the same way, a games development company will only turn the best idea that they have into a game. This is also the reason why games aren’t always the best that they can be, especially in the first installment in a series. Developers weigh up the option between spending another year making the game perfect or releasing it now and using that year to start work on a sequel; and they’ll pick whichever option is more profitable.

Which leads me to my next point:

Opportunity Cost is the main reason why so many games nowadays have so many sequels. Take the God of War games as an example. God of War I was amazing where God of War II was considered to be even better, and sold much more copies. However, God of War I took 5 years to develop and God of War II only took 2 years to develop. So even though God of War II was a superior project for the company that developed it (better game, higher profits), it took far less time to develop. And the company didn’t even need to advertise as much because people who knew about God of War I already knew what to expect. Even more important is the fact that the developers knew that God of War II would be successful even before they started developing it, because of the success of God of War I. So it’s really as simple as: developing sequels is better than developing new games.

Developing games from scratch is a lengthy and expensive process that carries a high amount of risk. Following up a successful or well established game with a sequel, is cheaper, has a shorter development time, is much less risky, and it can sell just as many copies as the first game. For this reason, games like Call of Duty and FIFA will receive a sequel every single year as long as they continue to be successful and many other game development companies will follow up their successful games with as many sequels as they can. That’s not to say that developers won’t make new games ever, they just have to be more careful about it. If a developer feels that a new idea has a chance to be successful, they develop them for the long term, usually with a whole trilogy planned out before the first game even goes into development. I’m sure you can see this with games like Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge, Too Human and Mass Effect. In this way, the moment that a game is completed, development of the sequel can begin and, in the rare case that the game is a failure, development can be shut down without the company having wasted too much time. Taking this kind of approach is really good for developers because even if they make a loss on the first game, they can go ahead and develop follow ups to it anyway because the sequels are so much cheaper to develop.

The end result is that game development companies no longer simply develop games; they develop franchises. There’s a lot more to it than just making a single game and hoping that it sells well, it’s all about creating a long term project that will only get more profitable as time goes along. And I suppose that it works to an extent. So, until people can no longer stand the sight of a football or a Greek God, there will always be another FIFA or God of War.

Hopefully that clears a few things up for you and gets you thinking about other industries as well. In the end, developers are not evil; they’re only looking out for their best interests and you can’t really blame them for that.

If anyone has any questions, comments or feels that I missed anything, drop me an email or post a comment. I’ll try to find the time to reply between the long hours I spend stroking my cat and grooming my moustache. If you have any suggestions on what I should speak about next week, then those are welcome too…

Till next week… don’t get eaten by Sharks.