rotsyourbrain.com

Thursday May 22nd 2008, 6:06 am
Filed under: gaming

Grant Theft Auto IV, it goes without saying, is the latest installment of the best-selling crime franchise, and the first to appear on the XBOX360 and Playstation 3. It has unsurprisingly been greeted with record-breaking sales figures and 10/10 scores from critics. On all accounts, it is the pinnacle of the medium.

Certainly, that mantle was deservedly bestowed upon this game?s last-generation predecessor, GTAIII, some six years ago. At the time, the level of freedom, coupled with the relatively mature storyline, was a breath of fresh air to an industry struggling to move past space marines shooting aliens in corridors. GTAIII?s follow-up Vice City, released just a year later, was reluctant to change a winning formula. And when developer Rockstar did decided to play loose with their tried and tested approach, the result was San Andreas, an unfocused, bloated mess.

And so, after getting its fingers burned, Rockstar have chosen to play it safe, and return to the basis of its recent success: Liberty City and GTAIII. Compared to San Andreas, almost everything is scaled back. The map-size, character creation options, variety of missions and locations have all been reigned in to more focused, manageable proportions. The result is a very little more than a high definition retreading of GTAIII. One?s first overriding impression of playing the ?next-gen? debut of GTA is of familiarity. That is perhaps a testament to the overachievements of the PS2 iterations, but it is also an indictment of the lack of ambition or courage by Rockstar to take the franchise to the next level.

As such, the critical hyperbole is sadly unfounded. Liberty City may be six years older, but it offers nothing that we didn?t see last time round.

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Fanboyism?

Wednesday October 10th 2007, 1:59 am
Filed under: gaming

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originally on boards.ie…

Both Microsoft and Sony made big noises prior to the move to this generation of consoles of how gaming was going to move from the bedroom to the living room. Gaming is undoubtedly becoming more and more mainstream, and the new consoles would reflect that, by being the centre of your entertainment world.

Both consoles, to differing degrees, got one part right. They both boast HDMI outputs to connect up to your living room telly, and (in theory, at least) you can stream all your music, movies and photos to your living room. How contemporary, how social, how very grown up.

Of course, the main appeal of these consoles is still their software line-up, and it’s that that’s going to make or break their transition to the living room.

And, to be perfectly blunt, I would be embarressed to play games like Gears of War, Oblivion and Halo. If these videogames have cinemetical parallels, they would be Rambo or Red Sonja. They are creatively bankrupt, showing no innovation in terms of art direction, astethic, characterision, plot - these are the same games we’ve been playing since Doom and Venture, just given a fresh lick of paint, a few tacked on USPs for the back of the box, and presented as the pinnacle of the artform.

And sadly, due to their popularity, it is games like these that luddites like Jack Thompson, lawmakers, politicians, film critics and so on think of when they think of videogames, and so any merit the medium has is completely dismissed.

It’s a daming indictment of the creativity of the industry, and the tastes of the consumer, that seemingly the only games that seem to get onto shop shelves are Space-Marine-Versus-Aliens, Knights-On-A-Magical-Quest or Missile-Launching-Flame-Throwing-Cars. Or Saints Row.

Who’s doing anything about it? Looking at Microsoft’s upcoming line-up, after the potentially progressive Alan Wake, I’m left with immature, derivative titles like Ninja Gaiden 2, Too Human and Halo Wars. I understand that many are counting the days to their release, but in all honesty, we’ve all played them before, under the guise of a thousand other identical games. For me, the brightest light on Microsoft’s line-up is a rerelease of Rez - because though I’ve played it before, playing it again will be more of a breath of fresh air than the afformentioned titles.

But then there’s Sony. Their line-up has all the usual suspects too. Killzone ticks the Space-Marine-Versus-Aliens, there’s more Knights-On-A-Magical-Quest cookie-cutter games than I care to count, and plenty of Shiny-Cars-Racing games to boot. And you know, meh.

But Sony’s line-up looks like it’s gonna take the path less trodden. They’re pushing games like Singstar and Buzz, which I won’t be mortified to play in front of (or, heaven forbid, with) my girlfriend, friends, or guests to my house. It’s social games like these that will truly win the living room for videogames.

And not only does their line-up pitch itself at the mainstream, but they seem keen to create new, artistically and creatively relevant games for the rest of us. We’re seeing it on the Playstation Store with stuff like PixelJunk Racers and Loco Roco, and we’ll hopefully be seeing it next year with stuff like LittleBigPlanet, Afrika, Aqua, Echochrome and more.

Sure, those gamers that see Halo3 and Gears of War as the pinnacle of the medium may easily dismiss them as unknown quantities. Me? I’ll embrace them, precisely because they are unknown quantities.

Technology

Friday August 10th 2007, 1:21 am
Filed under: life, gaming, japan

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If you`ve stumbled upon my blog from an aggregator or blog search engine, you may be a little miffed to find that my entries tagged with Japan thus far havent been a celebration of the technological mecca which the country so cearly represents for many people. So, this is for you.

I bought a new phone, or `keitai` as we say over here. The phone itself - a Sharp 912SH - is beautiful, with a crystal clear rotatable display, 3.2 megapixel camera, digital mobile TV tuner and a proper web browser. It`s a perfect example of the mythical Japanese mobile phone - well designed, feature packed, technologically advanced, unlikely to be for sale on a high stret near you soon.

That, however, may be no bad thing, considering the ordeal I had to go through to get one. In Ireland, you can buy a phone in literally 2 minutes. In Japan, you`d better bring a packed lunch. Whole forests were ravaged and octopi drained to produce the reams of paperwork required to obtain my phone. And if - as happened all too frequently - a comma was misplaced or an i left undotted, everything was ripped up and we started again. And again. When we eventually finished our form filling, the people at the other end of the infernal fax machine had wisely long-since called it a night, and we were big return again tomorrow.

At which point, it all started again.

I have since come to the conclusion that the whole process of buying a mobile phone in Japan is designed to break the human spirity, to render you a shell of a man, ready to be filled with convoluted price-plans and add-ons. Kind of like A Clockwork Orange, but with lots of photocopying.

Oh sorry, ranting again. Hey, I did see a `Brain Training`-styled `Face Training`game for the Nintendo DS today, where you imitate the on-screen facial expressions in order to train your face. For what, I don`t know. Look like a spastic, maybe.

Oh wait, that`s Mario Party 8.

Two weeks.

Monday July 16th 2007, 1:33 pm
Filed under: life, cinema, gaming, reading, japan, sport

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I spent the last two weeks on the family holiday, lazing about in sunny France stuffing my gullet with crepes and butchering the language. Little did I know the world around me stepped up a gear, and I have a lot of catching up to do.

My beloved Liverpool signed players for lots of money. This is new ground for Liverpool fans, and it makes me optimistic for the new season. This, of course, is the classic failing of the Liverpool fan, as every year the team seems to spectacularly not live up to their role as title challengers.

E3 happened, but very very quietly. Mario Kart is coming to the Wii (gasp!), and there’s a new, smaller PSP. The highlights have undoubtedly been the Metal Gear Solid 4 and Killzone 2 trailers. The PS3 is looking like an essential purchase upon my arrival in Japan.

(incidentally, according to lowbrowculture’s rundown on EDGE’s Top 100 videogames, the original Metal Gear Solid is nowhere to be seen, whereas games like Crackdown sneak in. Now, I did enjoy my Crackdown, but Metal Gear Solid is perhaps second only to Resident Evil 4 in the blockbuster-videogame stakes. But hey, it wouldn’t be EDGE without a little controversy…)

I’ve also got a lot of cinema to catch up on - the most pressing concern being Die Hard 4.0. By all accounts a balls-out action fest, the over-the-top action may excuse that the franchise seems to be drifting away from the claustrophobia of the original movie ever more.

(incidentally, I read Scarecrow while on holiday. Imagine, if you will, all the explosions, torture scenes and car chases of a typical season of 24. Then, compact that into a 12 hour time-frame and wrap it up in a ridiculous globe-trotting, infantile plot. There are some bitterly harsh reviews on Amazon, but I found that, despite all these obvious criticisms, the book had a certain charm. If you’re too old to act out this stuff with GI JOE, but still hanker for these kind of escapades, give it a go.)

The day after returning from France, I had pre-departure orientation at the Japanese Embassy. For the Japanese, orientating is something of a national sport, and they really take pride in it. My arse has been numbed on countless occasions to absorb information that could have been given in a combined total of 20 minutes. Still, it did manage to make me even more enthusiastic for Japan, inexplicably. The 3 days of orientation I face upon arrival in Tokyo may dampen my spirits, however.

So, in 2 weeks I’m off to Japan. Tick-tock!

Videogame Violence

Thursday June 21st 2007, 12:45 am
Filed under: gaming

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Rots your brain. I chose the domain name for this blog because consumers of pop-culture have, for decades, been told that such culture is bad, unhealthy, and rots your brain. From rock ‘n’ roll to video nasties and more recently to videogames, pop-culture has been an easy scapegoat for the ills of society.

It’s not been a good week for pushers of violent videogames, with the news that Britain’s BBFC, Ireland’s IFCO and America’s ESRB board have all effectively banned Manhunt 2from sale, and Nintendo and Sony won’t license it to run on their systems.

The initial instinct is to lambast the censorship boards for being out of touch with the consumers of society, or to insist that the responsibility lies with parents. However, in my view, these arguments have little or no merit.

Lets take the first point, that the censors are over-strict or out of touch with reality. As a regular film goer, I have a lot of time for John Kelleher. Generally, he and his his office conduct their duties with the goal of classification rather than censorship, and as such operates one of the most progressive, consistent, open and lenient censorship offices in the world - certainly more so than American, British, Australian or German counterparts.

Do you know how many violent videogames were banned in Ireland prior to Manhunt 2? Zero. Bearing this in mind, and assuming that the staff of the IFCO haven’t had moral lobotomies over the last few weeks, we can assume that the content in Manhunt 2 is simply too graphic and too violent. Honestly, I don’t know if that’s the case, but track record would indicate it is.

But hey, so what if it’s violent? Why can’t the parents monitor and decide what their children play? I used to a proponent of this school of thought. Then, I had occasion to work in a games retailer. The policies in place by my employer were faultless - as well as enforcing legal age restrictions on titles rated by the IFCO, the voluntary PEGI guidelines ratings were also enforced, even to the detriment of sales, and even on harshly rated titles like Timesplitters 3 (18+).

Did it make a difference? Not really. In theory, parents should be responsible enough to monitor their child’s videogaming habits. Those theories are probably based on one’s views of one’s own parents, who are probably genuinely nice people. They’re probably not based on the kind of parent I’d often be confronted with - the kind of parent who, after hearing the laundry list of horrors of Grand Theft Auto, shrugs it off and buys it anyway for their darling, because it’s just a videogame. The kind of parent who shouldn’t be allowed to breed.

Until parents educate themselves about the content of videogames and their affects on young children, they cannot be expected to act as censors.

And what of Manhunt 2? I won’t shed any tears if I never play the game. The franchise was dead and buried until the Daily Mail brigade whipped up a ridiculous frenzy long after the original was released, and sales spiked hugely. The sequel’s existence is a cynical cash-in on this hype - it was created to revel in gore and graphic violence and the media hysteria bound to greet it, and its banning is frankly of no loss to the discerning videogamer.

Indeed, there may be an upshot of all this. If this can encourage publishers and developers to shed their hang-up on violence and lose their hard-on for gore, we might see more genuinely innovative, interesting, creative and engaging videogames.

A Dissertation On…

Wednesday May 09th 2007, 2:05 pm
Filed under: gaming, college

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…Videogame Localisation.

As part of my degree, I had to write a dissertation on an aspect of translation. Not wanting to do actual research, I chose to do it on the impact of the technological arms race on the role of the translator in the videogame industry. Exciting, isn’t it? Yeah. So having spent literally over 5 hours writing the infernal thing, I may as well upload it for your viewing pleasure.

Warning: It’s not very focused, and all very boring, really. Here.

Metal Slug Anthology

Friday April 27th 2007, 3:49 pm
Filed under: gaming

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Again, from gamestoaster.

Even in 1996, the Metal Slug series was old-skool. For the enthusiast, they represented videogaming at its purist, polishing up a tried-and-testing gameplay mechanic until it shone. For the rest of us, in a time of bump mapping and physics engines, their broadly drawn 2D visuals and arcane gameplay just seemed dated. Even so, they’ve found a fan-base, and have graced a multitude of formats over the last decade. Metal Slug Anthology collects the 7 games released to date on one disc for the Wii.

The games are almost uniformly solid to play. The artwork is heavily-stylized, and adds a considerable amount of charm and character to the games. They offer a definite challenge, but rarely does this lead to frustration. They also pack in enough variety - from drivable vehicles to an array of boss battles - to save repetition ruining the experience. A 2-player co-op mode rounds off the package.

That said, it is now 2007, and the side-scrolling shooter has been surpassed in terms of visuals and thrills. If you still enjoy the genre today, then Metal Slug Anthology offers a great example of it, and you’ll get a lot of bang for your buck, as none of the seven games on offer will be strolled through.

Outside fans of the genre, however, it is hard to recommend. Individually, the games would have worked well as Virtual Console releases, but at full-price, it’s difficult to recommend what for many would amount to nothing more than a short dip into times gone by.

Pac-Man Rally

Saturday April 07th 2007, 4:47 pm
Filed under: gaming

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Originally on gamestoaster, here.

Pac-Man, the story goes, was inspired by a tired glance at a quarter-eaten pizza. The round, open-mouthed character was born, and the game followed from there. He wasn’t so much a character, as a single characteristic - a set of big yellow jaws, and the various Pac-Man arcade games employed him in the only way they really could. Why, then, is he now mucking about in go-karts and motorbikes?

Pac-Man Rally is a cartoon racing game very much in the vein of Mario Kart. Various Namco characters compete in a variety of cups by racing across various stages, collecting weapons, power-ups and so on, all for reasons best known to themselves. Split-screen 2 player and battle modes are also present, offering a diversion to the single-player proceedings. It is very unashamedly Namco Does Mario Kart.

There is an inherent problem with this, however. Whereas Nintendo’s roster of colourful cartoon characters lends itself well to such a game, Namco’s catalogue is a little less inspirational. Their most successful games of recent times have been Tekken and Soul Calibur, and their back catalogue is full of arcade relics. Someone somewhere along the line decided that Pac-Man was more child-friendly than Voldo, and left it at that. The result is a character list boasting blue ghost, red ghost, pac-man, ms. pac-man and other personality-devoid creations.

And that’s something of a pity, because with more imaginative characters, the game could be gunning for the top of the podium. The racing is solid, with innovations in the form of fruit-pickups enabled short-cuts and a big mechanical Pac-Mobile power-up, and the multi-player is more than capable. Mario Kart nudges it in terms of challenge offered, albeit by ‘cheating’ AI, but that’s hardly of importance in a game so squarely aimed at the younger market.

So when all is said and done, we’re left with a below-par Mario Kart. it is probably the best option on the PS2 for those looking for similar thrills, but don’t expect a lasting challenge.

The Videogame Translator

Monday March 26th 2007, 5:56 pm
Filed under: gaming, college

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I’m currently writing a dissertation on the localisation of videogames. I say currently, but I’ve yet to really put pen to paper - merely doing lots and lots of reading. Anyway, I wrote this article as a way of focusing my thoughts a little.

Some videogame memories are universal. Burned into the minds of most gamers is Ryu’s ‘You must defeat my dragon punch to stand a chance!’ words of discouragement, or a gravel-voiced Snake checking in with the Colonel, marking the opening of Metal Gear Solid. ‘It’s-a Me, Mario!’ is another to provoke knowing nods and smiles. Raise a glass then, to the humble videogames translator, without whom, we would never have had the chance to create these memories, or the hundreds like them. Without whom, these memories would not be universal, but confined to a cluster of volcanic islands in the pacific.

With Japan traditionally being the most prolific of nations in the sphere of videogame development, and the thirst for Asian gaming ever growing in the Western hemisphere, the role of the videogames translator is more important than ever. However, in terms of accolades, it receives perhaps the least attention. Where are the BAFTAs for the translators? Nowadays, there’s an award for almost every discipline in the industry – from character design to audio production – and yet one of the most crucial is almost universally ignored.

That in itself may be testament to how good a job the videogames translator is doing. A successful translation of a videogame is one that plays like a domestically produced game, with no jarring dialogue to draw attention to the fact that they’re playing a game created on the other side of the planet. Their work ensures that instead of linguistic abominations like Zero Wing getting into gamers’ hands, they instead play slickly realised localizations of the Metal Gear Solids of this world.

If the end result is not enough to deserve a tip of the cap, then the means surely does. The industry has moved a long way since the days of Zero Wing. Money has rolled in, technology has advanced, and games have become much more epic. The Playstation era brought full motion video and high-quality audio, while the Xbox kicked open the online world. Art-teams swelled, programming teams double and tripled in size, and yet the translator’s floor space has remained by in large unchanged, with often a single translator working on an entire game.

Considering that these days, an entire game can mean upwards of 1.5 million words – frequently culturally entwined, presented in a variety of media, and subject to constant change and revision - the challenge is overwhelming. Chipping away at that mountain, and having to do so on a tight deadline, is an unenviable task, and one that deserves huge appreciation from the entire industry.

Still not convinced? Look at your catalogue of games. Remove any games produced in a foreign language. Mario 64? Gone. Ocarina of Time? Gone. Final Fantasy VII? Gone. What are we left with? A near empty shelf, littered with more Need For Speeds than Goldeneyes.

Far Cry: Vengeance

Friday March 23rd 2007, 7:29 pm
Filed under: gaming

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The original Far Cry, when released almost three years ago, turned out to be little more than a plain Jane shooter dressed in a fancy frock. Cutting-edge visuals aside, it failed to bring anything new to the party, and as such the franchise never entered into gamers’ hearts in the way Doom, Halo or Half-Life did.

In the intervening time, the franchise had made its home on Microsoft’s Xbox, before coming to the Nintendo Wii in the shape of Far Cry: Vengeance. Unfortunately, this installment of the series has turned up the party wearing the exact same frock as three years ago, and those blocky shoulder-pads really do stand out against the competition’s more svelte little numbers.

A tropical, jungle environment is always going to be more taxing on hardware than the standard corridor shooter, and this is certainly the case here. Vegetation is big and blocky and rock-faces are ill-defined. And without visual appeal, Far Cry shows itself up to be a bit mundane.

The good points? The controls are the best attempt yet on the Wii. The awful dialogue and plot will raise a laugh or two. The application of feral abilities is by-in-large well done.

However, the game-play is mostly a case of follow-the-yellow-dust road, and straying from the beaten track never offers any reward. There are some drivable vehicles scattered about the archipelago which acts as the backdrop, but the controls are too loose and the vehicles physics too lightweight. And that just about sums up the game itself: too lightweight, too rigid in following the beaten track.