Sharing a PS4 game: A step by step guide

It’s official, I love the new Sony.

They showed that they’ve learned from their past mistakes and are able to carefully correct their course. PS4 updates won’t be such a hassle, you’ll be able to play a currently downloading game, the chip architecture is built for easy development, there is only one unified block of memory (PS3′s divided memory causes severe nut pain for devs) and they welcome any developer with no publisher (hooray for indies!).

All of that led to me being hopeful for Sony and the PS4. Then came the news that devs will be able to block sharing videos and screenshots of their games and I was reminded that they are human and can commit rather obvious mistakes.

Alright, now let’s see what Micros… yeah. Oh, neat conference. It’s 499 US dollars you say? That seems to be too pricey for a game machine that sh*ts all over my rights as a consumer, don’t you think?

And then comes the PS4′s E3 conference.

My god.

That is pure unadulterated trolling.

And I love it.

Damsel in Distress Part 2, where it gets good

The first installment in this series was … mostly boring. It spent 20 minutes enumerating old examples of the damsel in distress trope and then at the last 3 minutes we got to hear some actual analysis.

That’s why it’s a nice surprise to see how well the second installment is constructed. There are still countless examples being shown, some of which being questionable at best, but still her point remains unwavering through the whole thing.

THIS is what the first part should have been.

All I’m left to say is: Well done.

Microsoft is playing with fire

Let me get this straight:

• The new Xbox is called “Xbox One” because it’s the first one to …. because it’s the only one that … yeah, I don’t know. Maybe Microsoft just wanted to f*ck around and confuse the hell out of everybody with their numbering scheme. Way to copy Nvidia.
• This new Xbox requires games to be installed fully onto the hard-drive.
• It also requires games to be linked to individual accounts, and not consoles.
• This in turn requires a “phone home” phase where the game must verify that the user is not “stealing”, which as you might expect results in a mandatory internet connection.
• Games can then be given to another account, but only at a fee. A fee that goes entirely to Microsoft and maaaaybe to the developers that actually worked on the game (we don’t know yet).
• This giving can be done entirely without the need of the physical disk. You know, the thing that you paid 60 bucks for.

So this console is tailor-made to get on everyone’s nerves.

Those games you’re buying? They are services, not products, even if they look remarkably like products. That in itself is a perfect recipe for infuriating hardcore players, the ones that will decide if your console will succeed through the first few years of the life-cycle.

Not content with biting the hand that feeds them, they are biting the hand that actually produces the food. By making the second-hand market irrelevant they’re quite possibly alienating the big … well, no, they are screwing GameStop over and all similar companies that benefitted from second-hand sales. In retribution, GameStop might choose not to sell the Xbox One and offer only the competing products.

If all goes well for the Xbox One, Microsoft will have complete control over every single game being played on any of their consoles.

That is a terrifying amount of power.

If all goes badly, they’ll have to work their way out of their own asshole and apologize profusely for the sins they’ve committed. So, basically, Microsoft is making the same mistakes that Sony did with the PS3 but taking a new douche spin on the whole thing.

We’ll see how this ends. So far, I’m liking the PS4 a whooole lot more now.

(The Wii U is a different story and worthy of its own post, but to mention a few things: nice hardware idea, price could be better, games are non-existent, good attitude towards indies and to top it off, they are not even remotely as evil as microsoft).

America’s fascination: a few questions

Generic space marine with a gun!

That? That is what megaman X was going to look like in its latest remake.

And here’s how far they developed this thing before it got cancelled:

Does everybody want megaman to look like this? Is american fascination with guns and space marines so universal that it must permeate everything under the sun? Are First Person Shooters the only genre that sells well these days? Is the dudebro community the optimal target audience? Must every unique characteristic of popular franchises be homogenized  in order to sell better? Should min-maxing sales projections be the goal? Should artistic integrity be sacrificed at the altar of the sales department?

Does copying the best-selling games actually increase sales? If everything looks the same, doesn’t the market saturate? If all the industry targets the same audience, what happens to the rest of us? If the same franchises release the same games every year and they always succeed, what makes the rest of the industry think that their games can steal the success of these already established franchises?

Giants like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft will never be dethroned by copycats, they’ll die as soon as the audience gets tired of them. And you know what? When that happens, people will move on to other games that offer an entirely different experience. Other kings will be crowned and the industry will proceed to copy the new kings in a futile attempt to steal their lightning.

Of course, this phenomenon is not unique to games. There are mountains of books that copy Twilight and 50 shades of gray. There are tons of movies that copy Transformers. I’m even willing to bet that there are broadway shows that do this exact same thing.

It’s a strategy that works, at least in the short-term and anybody who is quick enough to get on the market before it saturates is going to cash in on it. The problem arises when the same trend has been going on for more than a decade, as it happens to be the case with videogames. I haven’t seen such a cancerous spread of a single trend over such a large range of products anywhere else.

I could venture a guess, but I’d be lying if I said I know why this is happening . It may be the large budgets, the aversion to risk or executives being idiots. I don’t know. All I know is that companies are overestimating budgets and sales while at the same time dooming their games to mediocrity by homogenization. As a result, game development studios are being run into the ground, people are getting fired and customers are not getting the games they want.

I don’t know what you think, but if you ask me, I’d say something’s wrong. Very wrong in fact.

…

On the other hand, this is why indies are thriving. After all, they target audiences not being served by the rest of the industry and that is a very good recipe for success.

I guess it’s true what they say: Every crisis creates opportunities.

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Image taken from here.

Sharing with the PS4

For those of you that don’t follow any type of console news, let me put you up to speed: Basically, the PS4′s controller was revealed to have a new button solely dedicated to sharing content. How it functions is still a mystery but what we know is that it allows the user to record and share video of the game currently running.

Now we have news that … well, just read this:

“There will be parts of a game that the maker does not want people to be able to see,” Yoshida said. “For example, on Vita, developers can in certain scenes disable the feature that lets users take a screenshot, and [the Share function] will have a similar mechanism. The creator may not want to make video of the final boss sharable, for instance.”

So, let me get this straight: If a developer wants to, they can make certain parts of the game (or all of it) not sharable, all in the name of spoilers…

I’m sorry but .. WHAT??? That is possibly the WORST solution to spoilers I could ever come up with. Do you guys even know what the f*ck you are doing? Well, given how the screenshot system works on the Vita (annoying watermarks! yay!) I’m going to guess that you don’t have a f*cking clue.

Look, it’s very simple: Just let the developers tag certain sections of the game as “spoilers”. Videos shared with spoiler parts will be labelled as such and greyed out. That way, everything can be shared but the end user that wants to look at gameplay videos is the one that decides to be spoiled or not.

You are not supposed to let the developer dictate what can be shared and what can’t! Gamers want a better experience of what they already have, not a worse one. Having to pay for a video-capture device to be able to record a PS3 game is a pain in the ass, but many gamers already do this. Speedruns, challenge runs, bloopers, funny glitches, funny accidents, epic moments, etc. Everything can be recorded, so why would you want to facilitate the process of recording but then go and make it WORSE for players? They can already record spoilerish videos and post them on youtube! Nobody complains! Why are you trying to stop that?

Oh, and since we are talking about sharing, can you pretty please not fuck this up by plastering a gigantic watermark in every video? We don’t want the PS4 to fail as hard as the Vita did.

*drops the mic*

A response to pokemon obstacles, why HMs are stupid and how to fix them

This post is a response to this here other thingy. For the purposes of making your life easier I’ve quoted it all below.

[Referencing the image above] The bad part is that you actually need a certain extent of this kind of video game logic to keep games interesting. Sure its fun to joke about, but its necessary. So next time an insurmountable knee-high tree, a locked picket fence or even a strategically placed folding chair that’s blocking your forward progress, just say to yourself, “AH… I see what you did there!”

The short version of my response is: F*CK NO.

And the proper response is:

The only reason for badly explained phenomena in videogames is because game developers are f*cking lazy. Anybody can come up with a better explanation. By making the tree bigger and more imposing, it already starts to make sense. Then you could give it a particular characteristic to explain why it can be cut but the others can’t. Maybe it’s a giant dead tree, easily cut by a pokemon with the right attack but an impassable obstacle otherwise.

There! Problem solved!

Yeah, a fire pokemon could probably reduce it to ashes… along with the rest of the place, so you probably shouldn’t do that.

Any more objections? Good.

…

Huh, that was quick. Let’s talk about something related! How about … how stupid the HM system really is! Why? Because it causes more problems than it’s worth.

The whole system has only one purpose: To give pokemon a reason to exist outside of battles. The problem is, this reason interferes with battles in a negative way. The HM moves are to be avoided like the plague because even if they are useful to cut trees and go up a waterfall, once inside a battle they are in general completely overpowered by other moves. As the comic says, nobody teaches their starter pokemon the CUT move.

That’s the biggest and most often cited issue, but the stupidity spreads across farther than most people look.

The HM system works like a series of color-coded keys and doors. You can’t go this way until you get the red key, so you must ignore this tantalizing branch in your path blocked by a red door and continue walking forward until you get said red key. After acquiring it you’ll have the opportunity to retread your steps and open all the red doors you passed by. Sometimes these paths will lead you to new cities, sometimes they’ll lead you to hidden items. It’s a nice system that has found its way into hundreds of games for a reason: it works. But pokemon does a twist on it that misses the point.

Limitation is a very powerful tool. By limiting player resources the game designer can create meaningful choices. Say, if you could pick up every little thing you see and not care about inventory space then you are not going to care what you pick up and what you don’t. In fact, you are very likely to pick everything, just because you can. But if the game designer limited your inventory space to just three items, then things start to get interesting. Suddenly some items look like garbage and some look like the ultimate thing you must have.

HMs function basically as a limitation on how many keys you are carrying and are inversely proportional to how powerful your pokemon are: The more HM moves there are in your party, the less optimized your party is. In theory, this sounds like it would create this difficult and interesting choice but at the end of the day it’s nothing more than a nuisance. But why? Well, I have my theories, but I think the main reason lays in the fact that HMs are not that useful even outside of battles. Sure, they are necessary, but most of the time you can get by with just a couple of HMs and there’s not that many opportunities to use them. So you have a situation where you can sacrifice something very important for something that doesn’t matter all that much … mmmhh, yeah, that does sound flawed doesn’t it?

The other reason why HMs don’t really provide the player with a difficult choice is because there’s an optimum strategy: HM slaves. By giving all the lame HMs to one or two pokemon, you can concentrate on leveling the other pokemon in the party. If you suddenly don’t need HM moves you can just ditch the slave and replace it with something actually useful.

In a nutshell, HMs suck because they feel like a nuisance more than anything else. They are functionally bankrupt, masquerading as a difficult and interesting choice that turns out to be a dead-brained excercise in party management.

That’s great and all, but only discussing the problem doesn’t solve anything.

Here’s how I would fix it:

Turn HMs into just regular key items that can be used by compatible pokemon to open the figurative “colored doors”. For example, the cut move could be replaced by a pair of trimming scissors that any plant pokemon can use. If you have a plant pokemon in your party, you can cut bushes. If you have a water pokemon you can surf, go up waterfalls and all that stuff. It removes all the unneeded complexity and on top of that, adds a mechanic to gently push players towards balancing their pokemon party (you’ll want to have a plant pokemon, a water one, a fighting one and so on).

Hey Game Freak, look at what you are missing! Hire me and I’ll solve all your game design problems! =D

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Original source of the image: deviantart.

Patent woes

I don’t normally do this, but sometimes I just have to comment on something that isn’t even remotely connected to videogames, and as you might expect, this is that special moment. Feel free to skip this post if you’re a heartless bastard, though!

We’re good? Well then, here, have this video. No, I instist:

Ah, yes, the moral complexities of capitalism…. I’m sorry, but if you have to ask “Is it good that one given company controls and has the complete monopoly of the cure for X disease?” then you’re doing it wrong, even if said company put lots of money into developing said cure. I have no sympathy for the people and companies that want to control health care and turn it from a right of every human being into a way to make money off of the ill. Oh, hey, and if you’re poor? You’re on your own buddy! After all, your condition as a living and breathing human starts to blur the moment you say you have not enough money.

Capitalism!