Anjin Unleashed

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Found by way of James Maliszewski of Grognardia, there was the recent discovery of a company calling itself TSR Games. Even more interesting, the first product of the new company will be Gygax Magazine. Tim Kask, one of the primaries on the magazine, tells us that it will be a quarterly that covers both old and new games, and has a plethora of great talent contributing to the first issue.

I signed up to be notified with the first issue is ready. I like the idea of high quality quarterlies. I did subscribe to the defunct WoW Magazine for this very reason. Kill Screen seems to be doing this very thing for video games to great acclaim. So I'm willing to see what they put out.

And there is a little part of me that is happy there is a TSR again. Let's hope that they live up to the name.

Another vote for the "Syncaine was right" camp. Wired Game Life's Andrew Groen has an article up today titled "Star Wars’ Stumble Points to Free, Open Future for Online Worlds."

Modern MMOs are broken and there is nothing to convince me that this line of thinking is wrong. Everyone has taken the wrong lessons from World of Warcraft. Yes, accessibility is a good thing for MMOs. But it needs to be the on ramp to something bigger, not the MMO itself. What worked about WoW is that Blizzard made a big, hard game, then let everyone else play anyway. And I know that the elites don't want to hear it, but EVE Online works because anyone can play, even if a bunch of them play in Empire space.

There is no core to SWTOR or any number of failed experiments. I'm the biggest care bear there is, but I still want to be where the action is. Without that hardcore center, without that major challenge to strive for, there is no action. There are no stories to tell. Why play a mediocre RPG when there are plenty of better single player games on the market.

The verdict is still out on Guild Wars 2. The systems are all kinds of decent, but I'm not hearing any stories yet.

Like the first trailer, watching this has me crazy excited. I suspect that GTAV will be the big game I'm looking forward to this coming year. Sure, Rockstar didn't take a chance by including a female protagonist (actually, now I want them to do that in a new Bully game), but that won't stop me from picking this up day one.

As a side note, I'm glad that Rockstar is moving back to Los Santos. Since they want to use the current economic problems as a backdrop, there is no better way to show that than in their Los Angeles analogue. There is few other places in the world where glamour and desperation stand alongside one another so starkly. There is a reason Raymond Chandler wrote about the place. And I can't wait to get in their and play.

An independent game development company called The Astronauts has posted a blog surely intended to provoke discussion. In the post titled "Why we need to kill gameplay to make better games", they posit that the best parts of many games are the parts that are not what would be called gameplay. Instead, the memorable moments are things at fall between the action. Furthey, the author posits that by removing the gameplay, one might make a more memorable game. This is horse hockey, but I'm sure they are well aware of that.

People play games for various reasons. But the main reason we all play them is because they are games. Games come in all shapes and sizes, from pure mechanics and elaborate simulations and experiences. But at their foundations, they are still games. If you strip that out, if you remove the interactivity that underpins the medium, you are left with nothing more than a movie.

I hope that this was a purely intellectual exercise on the part of the author. But if not, we will be safe to write off any game that company creates in the future. But who knows, maybe their movies will be pretty good.

Game Informer revealed their December cover today featuring the lead story on Grand Theft Auto V. As part of the reveal, Rockstar announced that there will be three protagonists in this edition, all of them dudes. That means there is a tiny uproar on the internet about the lack of a female protagonist.

While I'm not going to yell or cry over their decision, I do think that this is a missed opportunity. Looking at their website, their only game that has a female protagonist is Oni, and it was originally developed by Bungie. I would love to see Rockstar stretch their boundaries a little. For as much as people complain about the ludonarrative dissonance of their games, I think they can be very effective storytellers. This is something I know they can do.