Microsoft taunts Australians
April 8th, 2011 by Jeremy

Dear Microsoft,

You know that I live in Australia.

If you have a promotion from which you’ve decided you will exclude Australians, would you mind not telling me about it? Would you mind not sending me an email offering me all these “benefits” that you’re planning to block me from enjoying? Would you mind not suggesting that I participate in “Xbox LIVE Rewards” given that when I spend the time hunting down a password and signing in to your service, you will then tell me “Unfortunately, residents of your area are not eligible to participate in Xbox LIVE Rewards”.

So why the bloody hell did you send me an email taunting me with them?

In summary, get stuffed.

Yours sincerely,

Jeremy.

Taking it Personally
April 4th, 2011 by Rohan

So, it’s been kinda quiet here lately. A few things are to blame, but mostly it’s been a dearth of games that aren’t absolutely awful. Also, my PC died and I spent a massive chunk of time working on more film projects.

And playing Minecraft. Oh dear…

Anyway, for those of you with good taste enough to enjoy Digital: A Love Story – there’s another (equally unique) game out by the talented author. It’s a fascinating concept, once again using online interaction as a component in the story.

Yes, it's an anime.

In this case, the game is called Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Aint Your Story (jeeze it feels weird capitalising that). It’s set in a high school in 2027, and you’re the home room teacher for a rabble of year 11 kids. The twist is that in this future, social networking has engulfed the world even more. Every kid has a tablet PC, and social networking in a sort of facebook-wall/twitter type system happens everywhere – almost like the classes have their own hashtags. (They already do at many universities, but this is high school – so it’s much more of a Soap Opera)

Anyway, check it out – I will be. Full thoughts will follow once I’ve finished the game.

Nintendo’s bizarre defence of region locking
January 19th, 2011 by Jeremy

A quote from Nintendo about region-locking the 3DS:

We want to ensure the best possible gaming experience for our users and there is the possibility that Nintendo 3DS software sold in one region will not function properly when running on Nintendo 3DS hardware sold in another.

Is it just me but does the second part of that sentence completely contradict the first? You’re going to “ensure the best possible gaming experience” for me by making my software not work? Uh, what?

If Nintendo was looking for a driver of piracy, something that would push ordinarily law-abiding consumers to dabble with the dark side of the industry, it couldn’t have gone much better than region-coding – a system that sometimes makes it impossible to obtain certain titles lawfully, and encourages regional price-gouging.

Welcome back to 2000.

SimFailure
January 6th, 2011 by Rohan

I admit that despite confessing a loathing (while drunk) for the massive swathe of top-ten lists that infest this time of year I have something of a soft spot for them. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine to stay up at night when nobody can catch me out, reading various critics’ best and worst lists of the year.

Hell, we even did our most recent podcast on just that, regardless of just how cliched a subject it is. I guess it’s an organisation thing. People like making lists – be they shopping lists, lists of girls you’d secretly like to bed or lists of what booze you need to get from the bottle-o next time you sober up enough to drive up there.

So, I decided I’d make up a list to ring in the new year. The real trick was just what to make a list of. For ages, I was playing with the idea of listing something like, say, “The top five video resolutions used in video games on the iPhone platform between January 2010 and December 2010″, but then I realised it was the most boring idea in the whole world.

This idea came about when I was browsing the recent new year steam sales. So many bizarre, cheaply-made simulation titles were on the list! Simulations of things that make submarine simulators or flight simulators look as mainstream as shooter-garbage like Halo.

Thusly, I bring you the second most boring list of 2011 so far:

SIMFAILURE: The Top Five Most Bizarre or Obscure Simulation Titles of 2010

Read the rest of this entry »

RRQ E07: 2010 Wrapup
December 22nd, 2010 by Rohan

RESTORE RESTART QUIT

Episode 07:
“2010 Wrapup”

Jeremy and I were discussing our favourite games of the last year, and things that sucked about the year in gaming. (Namely: most of the games released during it) So, rather than simply have this discussion on our own, we decided to record it and release it, in the name of hubris and ego, just like all the cool kids.

Also, because it’d been a bloody long time between podcasts (I’m the guilty party – I was side-tracked with a few more film projects).

The games we discuss include:

  • Mass Effect 2
  • Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
  • Just Cause 2
  • Red Dead Redemption
  • Minecraft
  • Digital: A Love Story

Also: apologies for the audio quality. As this was an unplanned podcast, I didn’t have my proper audio kit available at the time.

Temporal Worlds in Video Games
December 9th, 2010 by leighh

The strength of videogames is their primary point of difference: their interactivity. So I was struck curious recently by a couple of small flash games which utilised a pseudo-interactive gimmick which demonstrated a flaw in videogame open-worlds in general. Each had its own strengths, but both relied upon repetition of the same ‘level’ (for want of a better term), each time adding subtle changes to make the player feel as though they were progressing. Far from making the games themselves feel cheap (a redundant notion anyway considering they’re both free flash-based games which can be played online), they invoked a feeling of urgency, of a malleable world, and of a sense of importance for the player which can be missing from larger game-worlds.

(I strongly suggest you play both games in question. Each one is 5 minutes long, both can be played in a browser and both are highly recommended. They are Every Day The Same Dream and One Chance.) Read the rest of this entry »

The FPS: Sport vs Spectacle
December 2nd, 2010 by Rohan

So, this morning somebody sent me a link to this in my inbox. A humorous image, showing a top-down view of Doom’s E1M6 next to a single corridor, with ‘cut scenes’ marked at evenly-spaced points along its length. Being a dutiful netizen, after laughing over my morning tea I re-tweeted, facebooked it, mailed it to a few lists and to a few friends who aren’t net-sociable enough to be on any of these things.

Hover-Hitler VS Chaingun. Now that's a story with depth.

After this (doubtlessly familiar) process, I went into the bathroom to scrub a day’s worth of coder/gamer-scunge off myself in the shower, and began to think about it some more. Sure, the image is funny, if ever-so-slightly inaccurate, but there’s more to it than just map design.

There has been a major paradigm shift in first-person shooter development since the days when I played Doom and Quake at LAN parties next to piles of empty coke cans so large as to make you think of something out of greek myths. Buzz-words aside, they are different. Almost different enough, I think, as to more or less be an entirely separate genre.

Sure, the mechanics are roughly the same, right? You move around with the W, A, S & D keys, moving your mouse to tilt your head and clicking to blow away monsters. Well, I’m beginning to suspect that’s actually where the similarities end. Read the rest of this entry »

Review Score Corrections
December 1st, 2010 by Rohan

So, partly as a joke, in the recent twitter game score debate, I said that we should ‘fix’ the ’7 as average’ scoring system by doing the following: -5 from the score, and bottom everything out at a nice, round 0.

As an experiment, I’m going to do that. Here are some scores, by Australian gaming sites.

Firstly, of Halo 3:

  • IGN: 4.5
  • GameArena: 4
  • Gamespot: 4.5

And now, Heavy Rain:

  • Gamespot: 3.5
  • GameArena: 0
  • AusGamers: 4.4

How about Assassin’s Creed?

  • IGN: 2.7
  • GameArena: 3.5
  • Gamespot: 4.0

And finally, Kane & Lynch 2…

  • Gamespot: 1.5
  • IGN: 2
  • PalGN: 2.5
  • GameArena: 0

Does it really make anything easier to get at a glance?

What sort of game scoring system do you prefer? Thumbs up? Out of five stars? Out of ten? Percentile? Out of a thousand? Or none at all?

Do they affect your decision to purchase a game? And, more importantly, do you ever skim review scores after clicking a link to a review, but then fail to read the actual review itself?

Editing & Pacing in Video Games
November 22nd, 2010 by Rohan

I suspect it’s very easy for people to get confused at the idea of editing video games. After all, there isn’t really much by way of traditional “edit-points”. Outside of cut-scenes, you don’t usually switch angles, and when you do (primarily done in third-person survival horror games) it’s usually for practical reasons. There are exceptions – you cut to a a closer angle when Edward Carnby approaches the entrance to the tomb in Alone in the Dark so you can better see what he’s doing, sure, but it might also be an angle chosen to emphasise the claustrophobia of the environment. Or, perhaps, to strategically hide the mummy coming up behind Edward to play up the ‘boo!’ factor when we cut to a wide shot again.

Playing angles for cheap scares in Alone in the Dark 2.

What triggers these angle-changes, however, is the player. Maybe it’s moving toward the edge of the screen that triggers it. Or, maybe, hitting the ‘view’ button in a more typical game. So the idea of the art of editing actually existing within a game – especially a first-person game where your perspective is constant and entirely player-controlled – doesn’t seem like a big deal.

But really, when you consider that the pace of a game is so heavily controlled by the player in a video game, it makes the managing of pace not just more difficult – but much, much more important. Let’s take a look at the most common way of dealing with pace…

Read the rest of this entry »

A Honeymoon of Cut Scenes and Gameplay
October 28th, 2010 by leighh

Rohan: It is with great pleasure that Jeremy and I welcome my brother, industry veteran Leigh H, to join us as a contributor at Restore, Restart, Quit. We will be cross-posting some of his articles here at RRQ – but do check out his blog, which features articles on morality, philosophy, media and more along-side his gaming-related articles.

There has frequently been a tension in videogames which lacks proper definition, and renders criticism vague and at times unfulfilling. There are many moments when the action is intense, frightening, complex, difficult or exhilarating and the button-presses just don’t quite match. I’ll term this interconnectedness ‘gameplay weight’, and want to give a few examples of how it’s been done right, how it’s been done appallingly, and why and how it’s changing.

Doodle Jump for iPhone: a perfect example of how seriously people take modern exponentiontial challenge-based games.

This concept didn’t require as much examination in the 80s and early 90s. Games were still for the hardcore, so gameplay being exhaustingly nerve-wracking the whole way through was common. Other games started slow and the gameplay just scaled up and up and up until you were finally defeated. No matter what your skill level, this game would always find the level of intensity in gameplay which matched your skill and push you just that little bit further. These games still exist today in the form of Doodle Jump, Lumines, Geometry Wars and many others, but they’re now considered small distractions, providing short bursts of excitement in contrast to the awesome scope and power of the big ‘AAA’ blockbusters.

Gameplay began to slow down and become more considered as cinematic prowess in games grew stronger. The advent of 3D, increased potential for emotional investment in characters, and the ability to imbue games with genuine fear brought about the ability for developers to consider a drop in the pace of gameplay where story was taking the fore. This phenomenon has left room for gameplay which just doesn’t belong with the action in one way or another as developers continue to explore this new world of cinematics clashing with gameplay. After all, games require established rules. A certain button-press must do a certain thing or the whole concept of ‘play’ falls apart (which can sometimes be a nice trick developers play, but that’s another story). However, repetition of animations or movements is hardly compelling cinema. So how do developers tackle this tension of establishing rules with unique results every time? Read the rest of this entry »