Anjin Unleashed

Thursday, May 17, 2012

This is never a fun topic. I usually like writing about how great games are (and sometime how bad they are). But here we are, standing in a field of crushed dreams, like shards of glass, spread all around us.

38 Studios had a meeting yesterday with the governor of Rhode Island regarding their inability to make a payment on their loan. Today, they were forced to layoff a some employees and skip their payroll to make the required payment.

There is no room for schadenfreude here. We might not know how progressive or regressive they intended the game. All we know is that Project Copernicus is in jeopardy and I'm bummed out about that.

Surprise - Randomly remember that I could preinstall the game. Let the installer run while I eat dinner with my family and play outside with my baby girl.

Anticipation - After watching an episode of Smash and eating ice cream with my beautiful wife, settle in front of my computer to watch Arthur Gies from Polygon prepare his livestream. Watch the opening cinematic. The log in screen floats in the background, taunting.

It Doesn't Effing Work - Error 27 (x 100), actually authenticate and get to the character creator, character creator fails to actually create a character, accidently log out, Error 27 (x 500) mixed with the occasional Error 300008, log in again, accidentally log off again, swear quiet enough not to wake the wife and baby.

Catharsis - Finally log in for real. The character I tried to make before I was logged out before is there even though the game told me it failed. Try to delete character and start over, but fail again. Play anyway.

When my wife started her book blog, she wasn't exactly sure how she should talk about books. She wrote several reviews, trying different styles to find the one that fit her. Time and again, I thought that her best reviews were the ones that discussed her journey with the book. Purely authoritative reviews were fine, but I wasn't nearly as interested in them as I was with her personal reviews.

Above all, as a blogger, you need to be yourself. I can go to any site, probably more professional sites, for general information about a game. What I can't get is your opinion or your personality. The more of yourself that is in your blog, the more it will stand out. Don't hide your voice behind some objective facade. That's not why I read blogs.

When I say put yourself into the blog, there is the implication of authenticity. Maybe you are hilarious in real life and you can express your humor through your blog. Maybe you're super smart and your analyses are cogent and interesting to read. Good luck with that because that is super hard to get right. Most people can't pull off that level of craft. Be yourself. Don't be a gimmick. Trust that you are interesting enough to voice an opinion in your own way.

Remember what it says above: you are your blog. If you're not putting yourself into your posts, I might as well be reading Wikipedia.

Before I get into this, how come no one told me that Syl of Raging Monkey's was such a great blogger? I feel like you were hording her all for yourselves. Shame on you.

So you've all heard of Tera, right? If not, let me sum up the game in three pictures.

Action Based Combat

Big-Ass Monsters

Pedophilia

Do you understand the problem here? No, of course the game is not about pedophilia. But what am I supposed to think when the game world is populated with half dressed prepubescent girls? What am I supposed to tell my wife and daughter? That it really is a great game as long as you disregard the sexualized children? I mean, I already have to get around the hypersexualized women in every other game (which Tera in spades as well). How am I supposed to play this with a clear conscience about the message that it is giving?

This is what the gaming industry thinks of us. This is what we get for being so complacent about sexual imagery in gaming. Good job, everyone.

I was never in a rush to learn how to drive. All through high school, I could get anywhere that I wanted on my bike. Everything in the midsized Central Valley town was easily within reach with no need for a car. The closest I ever came was driving the customized pesticide sprayer through my grandfather's plum orchard. So when the time finally came for me to learn how to drive, I had a lot of questions. And of course, I didn't even know which questions were important or not. I remember asking him how the accelerator worked. Did the amount depressed set you to a certain speed or did it work some other way? Eventually I figured it out. Driving is second nature to me now. But it took time and patience to learn the skill.

Every so often, I pop SSX back in the 360 to give it another try. Unfortunately, SSX is not a drop in, drop out experience. The developers' goal was to make the game much more skill based. They certainly did that. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remember SSX 3 as a game I could drop in and enjoy, though I'm questioning that now. Was it drop in fun because I was over the learning curve? I don't think I've even approached the curve on SSX. I start the game, flail around wildly, finish last, then give up.

I had a similar problem with Skullgirls. I had trouble pulling off the moves in the tutorial. There was no way I could take on the single player mode. Not that I didn't try. The very first opponent, the one you can usually button mash past in other games, cleaned the floor with me. On a difficulty that they labeled "Sleepwalk." Maybe an EVO competitor could sleepwalk through it, but I had little idea what to do against the AI.

Games like these are absolutely intimidating to me. After trying them out, I can see the long climb I have to achieve any proficiency with them. And until I feel proficient, I won't actually be having any fun with the game. I'm sure that mastering them will be quite an achievement. But when faced with that deep of a time sink, I'm not sure that the return on my investment will be any greater than any of the games that I could jump into and enjoy now.