A Farewell to My Inspiration.

If you don't like blatant declarations of love that border on the fanatical, then I suggest you skip this post and read one of Paul's articles or wait for the article I'm posting at the end of the week.

Browsing the game blogs today I saw that Ugo Entertainment has acquired 1up.com. Along with this news came word that Electronic Gaming Monthly, one of the best gaming magazines ever in my opinion, would be discontinued with their current issue of the long running magazine being their last. Even worse is the fact that many of those people who worked on the magazine, as well as some of 1up.com's content were essentially left jobless. For a full list of the damage done, click here.

The reason I write about this is because 1up, EGM, and all of it's children were an important inspiration for my current game career aspirations. I've been reading EGM since I was young, and one thing I've always felt the writers and editors excelled at was eloquent writing. Let's face it, most game magazines and sites (including this one at times) suffer from terrible writing. With EGM, that never seemed to be an issue. The people at the magazine wrote well, and knew that their readers were intelligent enough to put up with prose. Their other strong trait was the amount of integrity they had. The editors and writers of EGM made sure that every opinion about a game was that person's honest opinion. People like Dan Hsu were not afraid to ask the game industry people brutal, if not perfectly valid questions. Everyone at EGM maintained as much integrity in their work as they possibly could.

At 1up.com, I became a frequent reader of the many of the employee's blogs. The overall experience felt more personal than many other game sites. The site's review show, aptly named The 1up Show, was an entertaining piece of internet television. The best part was not the cheesy acting in between segments, but the actual reviews themselves. Rather than just talk about a game in the traditional quantifiable way, they simply had a big group discussion about the game. The reviews were much more organic than just talking about the score they gave a game. It was through watching these videos that made me start seriously considering being a game journalist. Yes there was a lot more work involved then they let on, but I didn't care because all of it look liked a ton of fun.

And now both of these, along with many of the people who made them possible are now gone. As I write this, a copy of the last issue of EGM ever sits on my desk. I bought it at the airport over winter break to give me something to read while I spent an eternity in Chicago O'Hare. Even to this day, everything I've said about the magazine still stands. It is still one of the most well written game magazines out there, and I enjoyed reading this issue just as much as I enjoyed the first issue I read way back when.

So to everyone at Electronic Gaming Monthly and 1up.com who have been affected by this acquisition: Thank you. Thanks for the memories and thanks for the inspiration. May you all go on to bigger and better adventures.

When Gameplay is Trumped by Presentation

"The great thing about a single-player game is that an entire virtual world can be made to revolve around you, the player. In a single-player game you can become the king or the galactic emperor or the metropolis's undisputed gang leader or whatever other supreme figure suits the setting because there are no other players for the designer to balance the game for."

Seth Schiesel, NYTimes Video Game Reviewer (reviewing Fallout 3).

I didn't like Bioshock. Why? Because it wasn't fun. And I was so disappointed because it has a 96% Metacritic score (lesson: don't trust Metacritic scores). Only two of my favorite critics (Yatzhee and Edge magazine) didn't like Bioshock. Eurogamer.net gave it a 10/10! I was so disappointed that I sold it to gamestop after beating it. 

Someone at Irrational Games/2K Boston decided that making great gameplay wasn't important. Once I was acclimated to the underwater, dystopian, anti-objectivism, Unreal Engine 3, horror-house, "game" space, I found the story boring, the main characters uninteresting, the gameplay insipid (made worse by your XBOX 360 inability to die, making developing your skill unimportant), and the game suck. From this I remember a gamer's fear, when the "game" part of computer "games" is trumped by the other arts. 

I saw this gameplay problem in GTA IV, too, but unfortunately for Bioshock, I liked GTA IV. I liked it because the radio and the city were awesome, especially the radio; even when GTA IV's NY City gets boring to future humans, the radio will still be awesome. Of the billion missions in GTA IV, I liked....lemme think....five missions (It takes a lot to get me to like an entertainment thingy; some of that $100,000,000 budget wasn't wasted).

So I am somewhat afraid. This summer, I'm going to play Fallout; so many are giving it Game of the Year.  Perhaps my fear is misplaced because Fallout 3 is an RPG, and the most important gameplay of a stereotype RPG comes from we gamers trying to understand and use the RPG elements (knowledge, knowledge, using knowledge); this may be why many RPG purists hate Diablo-style RPGs. But I'm still afraid because the harshest reviews against the game came, once again, from Yatzhee (who sort of liked it) and Edge-online (who didn't). I'm afraid because I think, for many, the fantasy is what is making many people love Fallout 3. Please me be wrong!

I want this blog post to make this question: How important is a game's gameplay for the purpose of maximizing fun? As much as I want to say IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN GAMES, I can't (minus the part where I did). Gamespot's Kevin VanOrd, in explaining why MGS 4: Of Patriots The Guns garners Gamespot's Game of the Year award, posits the counter argument. He says MGS4 is one "seamless entity" of two kinds of entertainment, computer games and cinema, done "absolutely incredible" and "fantastic," "to the point where you're not even sure what kind of entertainment you're participating in." I'm not sure I will agree with his adjectives or his assumption of our schizophrenia, but his good entertainment = good entertainment is good. 

Maybe this is why Eurogamer.net gave Bioshock a 10. How many games do you see have an underwater, dystopian, anti-objectivism, Unreal Engine 3, horror house? 

And did the references to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged tickle? For me, no. Having interest in something and having fun are different. And OH SHIT (I mean YAY), now we can argue about what "fun" is. (I say, "fun" puts a sincere smile on your face, unlike "interesting," which makes you constipated).  

This all is a call for games journalists to take time to watch the best of cinema and read the best of literature (the best, because we don't have much spare time; I recommend game journalists do the movie part with friends.). Since games are a transmedia art, we should be able to judge the other arts well, so when we tell gamers whether or not the non-game art in a computer game is making the game more or less fun, we can use fancy words like "romanticism" or "cubism" or "anti-establishmentenvironmentalorganicfoodism."

And that's the meat of the post.

(On a related note: I just played part of Metal Gear Solid; I died in the torture scene. I was amazed by how much I liked the terrible writing. Kojima's pertinacious iterating of the shittiness of war and the preclusions of healthy, sexual relations is entertaining, and the characters are interesting in a childish way I can't help but love. The scenarios offering varying kinds of challenging gameplay are fun.) 

(On a random note: I'm planning to curse myself by getting the XBOX 360 version of Left 4 Dead, spring quarter. Ah Hell, Horror, Fuck.)