I Think I’m in Love with Platinum Games

As a development studio, Platinum Games is actually fairly young. The group started as Clover Studios, a development team owned by Capcom that produced Okami, God Hand, and the Viewtiful Joe series. You may notice that all of those games got outstanding Metacritic scores, and are considered cult classics of the last generation of gaming. After some drama with Capcom however, Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil, Viewtiful Joe), Atsushi Inaba (Phoenix Wright, God Hand) and Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry, Okami) decided to leave, and start their own development studio, the rest is history.

Since forming Platinum Games, the dream team of Mikami, Inaba, and Kamiya have produced hit game after hit game. They remind me of a 90’s era Rare Software, being able to make games for nearly any genre, and produce a masterpiece time after time. Let’s look at their short but amazing history:

Madworld: An arena-style spectacle fighter for the Wii, which featured a unique visual style, similar to Sin City, and witty characters. It received excellent reviews, and was a boon for Wii owners at the time who were looking for hardcore titles.

Infinite Space: A space exploration point-and-click RPG for the Nintendo DS that offered a crazy amount of customization and multiple storylines. Some critics felt the controls were cumbersome, while others said the story was “easily on par with anything you’ll find in Xenosaga or Mass Effect”.

Bayonetta: A fantastic game that set the new bar of quality for spectacle fighters. Following in the footsteps of Devil May Cry, Bayonetta featured tight combat, fantastic characters, stylish action, and tongue-in-cheek comedy. If you haven’t played Bayonetta, you are doing yourself a disservice.

Vanquish: A third-person cover-based shooter set in the future, where you fight space Russians. The gameplay is basically Gears of War with a rocket pack strapped to it. Between the lightning-fast pacing and the fantastic areas and bosses, Vanquish’s gameplay is top notch.

Anarchy Reigns: The unofficial sequel to Madworld, Anarchy Reigns offers a robust competitive online multiplayer. Massive arenas allow for multiple gametypes in 16 player battles, with combat similar to God Hand or Custom Robo.

Every game on that list brings something unique to the table, and the future looks even brighter. Metal Gear Rising has a demo available, and looks and feels amazing. In addition to pushing what the current generation of consoles are capable of to the limit, the gameplay is fluid and the story just oozes Metal Gear. Also in development is Bayonetta 2, and The Wonderful 101, which seems to be some kind of superhero game using the Viewtiful Joe art style where you control 100 superheroes like Pikmin?

Yeah, I don't know either, but it looks awesome.

Add to the pile of praise that Platinum games has stated that they are interested in buying the rights to the Darksiders franchise, which could be amazing. Platinum Games has been doing a fantastic job so far, and it looks like the hype train is slowing down anytime soon, so go buy some of Platinum’s games, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

DLC Blues

You know, I wasn't born a cynic. There was a time when I was still optimistic about the release of new games, and developing trends in the gaming industry. It's hard to stay positive after being burned so many times though. Year after year developers and publishers prove that despite amazing advances in technology, connectivity, and infrastructure, they will still continue to get the simplest elements of the development process wrong. Now maybe I'm not being fair, maybe these developers and publishers are just human. Maybe they put their hearts and souls into creating these games and for one reason or another things fall short. Time constraints, money constraints, and more can cause a game that would otherwise be full of originality and potential, to falter.

The latest example of this trend of disappointments is DLC season passes. A number of games over the last couple of years have offered a season pass for their DLC, where if you buy all of the DLC up front, you get a discount and maybe some bonus items. On the surface it seems like a great deal for everybody. You get the DLC at a discounted price, and maybe a bonus, the developer gets money in advance to put toward the DLC development costs, and the publisher gets to see the level of interest ahead of time, so they can set future DLC schedules and pricing, everybody wins.

This is the part where you realize that this looks too good to be true, because it is.

In every case of the season pass that I have seen, the quality of the DLC has gone downhill over time, and as a result the DLC quality ends up worse than if each piece had been sold separately and had to stand on its own. After all, each of the four DLC missions that would normally be sold for $10, and would each have to feel like $10 worth of content, now are being sold as a bundle for $30. If one or two end up lower quality, there’s still lots of content in the “package”. Let me give you an example, and the source of why I’m writing this post.

Borderlands 2 offers a season pass. $30 for four $10 DLC packages. Before any of the DLC associated with the season pass was actually released, Gearbox Software CEO, Randy Pitchford said in an interview that the DLC would be: “four ‘big’ pieces of story content in the vein of the expansive and well-received Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC from Borderlands.” General Knoxx was the best received DLC of the original Borderlands, and the comparison was made in order to reassure fans that buying the season pass would be worth it, as each of the DLC missions would be of high quality.

The first mission was released in October, Captain Scarlett and her Pirate’s Booty, which offered a wide variety of story, side missions, new locations, and post-game content, it wasn't perfect but it had a little bit of something for everyone, IGN gave it a 7.5. In November the second piece of DLC was released, Mr. Torgue’s Campaign or Carnage. The Torgue DLC was definitely up to par with what this DLC package was supposed to contain. Excellent writing and fantastic pacing make it a blast to play through, although I found it to be a little on the short side. IGN gave it a 9.2. Finally, the third DLC mission was just released this past week, Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt, and it falls short in every way. Criminally short main story, limited side quests, less post-game content, and flat writing make it almost a chore to get through. The one thing Hammerlock gets right is a slew of new enemies, but most of them are annoying to fight either because of strange behaviors and tiny critical hit points, or just a variety of annoying abilities and way too much health. IGN gave this one a 6.9.

It remains to be seen if the fourth and final DLC mission in Borderlands 2 will cause the season pass to end on a high note, or if this downward trend will continue. The problem of course, is that if you already have the season pass, you already paid for it, so if it sucks, oh well. The season pass trend has been getting more and more popular over the last couple of years too, Gears of War 3, Saint’s Row the Third, Halo 4, and more all have DLC season passes that encourage you to buy early. The biggest problem is that, by buying the season pass, you are paying for something that you don’t know anything about, with no chance for a refund, which no one should ever do with anything. I know I will never be buying another season pass again, will you?

This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things.

Nostalgia is an interesting thing isn't it? All it does is make you remember things from your past in a favorable light, but that little detail influences so much of our lives that it's astounding. Nearly all of human history is based on trying to recreate the positive nostalgic feeling of the past, in the present day. Everything from the conservative effort to return to the traditional values of the last century, to archaic video game design being tied to modern graphics in the “2.5D Game” genre.

The entire video game industry is based on exploiting nostalgia too. The very first video games were electronic adaptations of classic real life games like tennis and tic-tac-toe. Modern games follow this principle as well. Cliffy B has admitted that the inspiration for Gears of War was a series of games that he himself had personally played and enjoyed, and attempted to recreate the feel of.

The New Super Mario Bros. series exists solely because nostalgia is a real thing. People will sit around their homes and say things like, “Remember when we used to play Mario as kids? That was fun, we should do that again.” Nintendo is of course always ready to take your money, so they developed an entire subset of the Mario franchise based on being similar to the old games, in lieu of new gameplay or progress. These games then go on to sell quadrillions of copies and make a small fortune for Nintendo, when they offer very little in terms of new features or improved gameplay.

There's a reason this game is about collecting money.

So why do we do it? Human scientific progress is based on moving forward, to the future, but as a species we still have such an attachment to the past that it’s baffling. The scientific community has even classified nostalgia as a medical condition, which seems a little odd, it would be like declaring that shyness is a medical condition.

Oh. Wait.

As far as the why, it’s difficulty to say. Nostalgia affects different people in different ways, and to different degrees. I’m sure that some people are just, for whatever reason, unhappy with their current life situation, and wish that things could go back to the way they were when they last considered themselves “happy”, which is usually some degree of their childhood. Is that healthy though? To constantly wish that life was the way it is in your mind? Well, yes, that’s what dreams and goals are when you think about it. I guess even progress toward an ideal of the past is still progress.

That sure is a lot of words about video game psychology.

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You know, video game DRM really isn't the worst thing in the world. Sure, it can be annoying sometimes, but people really get up in arms about it for no real reason. Honestly the reasons behind implemented DRM are more upsetting than the actual ramifications of it, but of course there’s more to it than that.

DRM isn't implemented by video game publishers because they are mean, it's because they are trying to solve a problem their company is facing, usually dipping sales. As long as a player is buying a new copy of the game and playing it as intended, the DRM should be invisible, maybe a one-time code that needs to be entered, but it generally shouldn't affect the game. Sure, some companies like Ubisoft have things like always-on online DRM for PC games, making it impossible to play single player games offline, but they have actually been retroactively removing those elements, and have promised not to bring them back going forward.

The most common argument for DRM is to combat piracy, (although it has been proven time and again that piracy is not a price issue, but a convenience issue) because publishers see pirated copies of a game as lost sales. Piracy has always been, and will always be, a problem for entertainment media, but the most important reason for DRM is actually used game sales.

I used to work for Gamestop, so I've seen the numbers that come out of used game sales. The logic of it is that since Gamestop is buying the game from a customer, that copy of the game belongs to them, and they can sell it at whatever price they want and keep all the money, since they own it. Companies like EA are trying to combat this (since the sale of a used game causes them to lose the sale of a new game, and they don’t see any money from the used ones) by doing things like having a one-time use code for access to online multiplayer in their sports games. If you don’t have the code, it’ll cost you $10 to play online. So what did Gamestop do to fight back? They lowered the used price by $10, makes sense right? But it’s the consumer who wins in this situation. See, it works out to be the same price either way, buying used and getting the code online, or buying new, but maybe you’ll get lucky and the code with your used copy won't have been used, or maybe you’re one of the many people who doesn't play online multiplayer, and don't even need the code.

There is an ugly side of DRM of course, but it probably isn't what you think. The biggest problem with DRM is that it was created to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. In many cases games don’t sell well. Maybe they have game breaking glitches, or maybe they were rushed or incomplete, or maybe they got the freaking DATE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE WRONG.

This is what happens when we outsource American history to Canada

However, instead of looking to fix these problems, or admitting mistakes, developers and publishers will point to piracy or used game sales as the reasons for a games financial failure. In the world of business, it's very important to make sure that your shareholders have faith in you, or they’ll pull their funding and your company will go under, even if that means creating strawman arguments to justify your failings. Just my two cents though.

In other news, new Pokemon game announced today. It’s kind of a big deal.

The Steam Sale Stole My Lunch Money

Welp, it’s a new year. The holidays are over and it’s time to get back to our trudging daily lives. If you are anything like me, however, you have lots of new games to play thanks to holiday deals like the Steam sale. The Steam sale was very good to me this year, and even though I only spent about $50, I’ll have games to play for the next six months.

Interestingly though, most of the games I bought were not actually through Steam itself, but rather through a number of sites that sell Steam product keys, sites like Amazon, Green Man Gaming, and Gamers Gate. I don’t have anything against directly giving Steam my money, although it’s not like Gaben needs anymore of it.

You beautiful man, you.

I buy these games from other retailers because they are offering better prices. How does that work though? It’s not like the product is any different at all, either way you just get a Steam game. You would think that the same product would be the same price everywhere, maybe a few dollars difference, but on cheapshark.com you can find prices at some retailers at half the price of others.

These crazy discrepancies in prices are the result of the magical new system called digital distribution. See, when you buy a physical item, say, a television, there are a lot more costs than just the manufacturing the television itself. Cables have to be bundled up, instruction booklets have to be printed, packing materials have to be put together, the whole thing has to be shipped, and so on. Someone is paying for that shelf space it sits on for six months waiting to be sold too. All of these costs add up, and create a sort of “minimum price” that the object can have; the lowest price that television can be sold at while still covering all of those costs, but digitally distributed games have no minimum price. Sure, there’s still things like bandwidth, but for a big retailer like Amazon, the bandwidth consumed by one purchase is inconsequential, literally fractions of cents.

For these big online retailers, sales like this create this interesting parallel version of reality, where they are making more money off of things like advertising space and loyalty programs than they are off of the product itself. That’s why you’ll find crazy deals, like Scribblenauts Unlimited for $7.50, where everywhere else it was over $20, at certain retailers but not others. That money they are discounting off the price of the original game is worth less to them than the customer loyalty, website traffic, and sales numbers. Amazon and sites like it are only able to give consumers those kinds of deals because the product is effectively just a code in an email, rather than something that has to be stored and moved.

This of course leads to a very interesting situation, what do you charge for digital goods? After all of the production cost is recouped, does it matter? We’re through the looking glass here people, basically all entertainment media has gone at least partially digital. How long will it be before we are taking virtual museum tours in our own homes, thus eliminating the need for real museums? This is just for entertainment media too, what happens in the future when Star Trek style matter replicators exist? Can you just go down to the store and have them replicate you up a new television for pennies at a time? Or better yet, have their replicator make a new replicator for you, so you can make whatever you want whenever you want.

It’s a fun thing to think about, but in some ways, the future is already here. Then again 80’s movies predicted we’d have flying cars by now, so I’ll take what I can get.