Wednesday, December 15, 2010

December Odds, Ends, and Rock Band 3.

A few mixed things for the month ...

Hear Me Talk About ME!

There is a nice interview of me up in Inside Mac Games. I got to say a lot of things about the game industry, Macs, DRM, and our upcoming game, Avadon: The Black Fortress. I haven't gotten lots of e-mails yet about how wrong and dumb I am, so the interview was probably a failure. But you might find it interesting.


Die, Bunny! Die!

One thing I forgot to mention about Red Dead: Redemption. I spent a lot of time hunting animals, for money, for cheevos, and to break the monotony of long horsey rides.

At one point, I shot a rabbit but only grazed it. It started flailing around on the ground in tormented agony.

Animating characters is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. And yet, someone at Rockstar took the time to animate a crippled bunny. This is the sort of excessive, terrifying craftsmanship that keeps me coming back to their games.

Pity that you don't have a radio, ala Grand Theft Auto. It wouldn't be historically accurate, but I would have loved to borrow 99 Luftballoons from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to keep my energy levels up during long rides across Mexico.

Last Thoughts About Red Dead: Redemption

I finished Red Dead: Redemption, and I enjoyed that game as much as any I've played in a long time. The last time I wrote about it, I heard from some people who were infuriated by the awkwardness going through doors. I suppose the doors could be better, but you really spend very little of the game in places that even have doors.

(Minor spoilers ahead.)

One thing I really loved about the game: The storyline in the last ten missions or so. You see, in most games, after you kill the Head Bad Guy, that's it. You're done. Cutscene, credits, and out. But in this game, after the bad guy is gone, you then have a bunch of missions at your home. You meet your family, try to relate to your son, and work to rebuild your farm.

These missions are quiet, simple, and really quite affecting. It helps a lot that the relationships between John Marston and his wife and son are very nicely done. I really felt for them as characters and it made the last chunk of the game much more engaging. Which might make it a little bit relevant to that whole, tedious "Are games art?" argument that keeps resurfacing, no matter how much we might wish it'd stop.

Rock Band 3 Reviewish Thing

I've never hidden my huge love of Rock Band, and I've written about the series on several occasions. However, I can't work up the energy to write a Rock Band 3 review. It's got a lot of awesome songs, fantastic interface improvements, some nicely done Pro Modes that only 1% of the players will care about, and a keyboard.

But music games are a fad that is slowly choking on its own blood. Don't believe me? Look at it this way. When your development house releases its classic for the ages, and, a couple of weeks later, your owner puts you up for sale, well, not so good.

And, while the keyboard is a nice little bit of variety, it's just more of the same simple "Hit the green button. Now hit the yellow button." gameplay that most people have gotten totally tired of by now. It won't save the genre, and, considering that my half-assed efforts easily put me high up on the leaderboards, not many people are playing.

But hey, I'm a dead-ender. You'll have to pry my fakey drumsticks from my cold dead fingers. And I just dropped twenty bucks for the new Billy Joel pack. I will keep enjoying this niche genre for a while longer. But it will never again be anything but a niche genre.

35 comments:

  1. Since you didn't mention it, I have to ask if you finished the final mission as Marston's son. That's the true ending to the game.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fallout: New Vegas will give you cowboy thrills WITH a radio in tow.

    Damn, but I can't stop singing 50s cowboy hits in actual public. Good thing I've got a cold for extra gravel in the voice.

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Scot Boyd: Oh, hells yeah I did!

    @Cdrjamesone: I will totally play is, as soon as I find out the patch for the 360 version settles the bugs down a bit.

    - Jeff Vogel

    ReplyDelete
  4. I really enjoyed Red Dead Redemption, too. I have no idea what game the people who didn't like must have been playing, because they surely couldn't have been playing the same game.

    By the end, though, I did have one complaint. The story seemed to be suffering a bit from nothing-ever-pans-out-itis. I mean, there wasn't one single scenario or thing that did wind up completly effed.

    As for New Vegas, it's great, and while there is music, there is only somewhere around 4-5 songs.

    As for your interview, in regards to DRM, I think you should actually up it a little. By only using serials, and not even having an online check, you make it far too easy to pirate your games. I mean, it's always easy for those seeking to pirate games to do so, however, with your system they don't even have to go through the problem of downloading it. They can just get a tiny keygen that gives them codes to all your games, and get the games from your site.

    Anyway, if I were you I'd generate the code from hardware profile (which you might already be doing, I wouldn't know), then at least make one initial check that the serial entered matches a purchase.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The story seemed to be suffering a bit from labatterie nothing-ever-pans-out-itis.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hah! Just asked myself why I can't find your games on Steam. Very nice interview you gave IMG! I wish you great success with Avadon and that Steam will publish it there!

    ReplyDelete
  7. I want to play Red Dead Redemption a lot more. I really do. But I want to do it on the PC, ideally, and since Rockstar has eventually brought virtually every single one of their games to PC, the lack of an announced PC version to date is not going to fool me into buying the 360 version the way it did with GTA IV -and- the GTA IV addons. -grumble-

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