Note: This is excerpted from a review I attempted to write, but pulled back as I didn’t complete the game. Some of you asked if I was willing to share my opinion of the game anyway. Last week, Brian reminded me of the strict conditions we have to do a full review, which are as much to protect the site’s credibility as the writer’s. But he also said that impressions are still fair game if the game hasn’t been completed. I haven’t, probably won’t and with that caveat, here are some thoughts on The Bourne Conspiracy. It is not a full review and it’s a month after the game’s release. Take it for what you will.
This reminds me of Sundays in Denver, when Crecente and I (mostly Crecente) would routinely confront an often hysterical editor raving about some sensational report from another news outlet, and then we’d have to go sift bullshit from reality. So, in the wake of yesterday’s shooting in Florida, which authorities linked to an argument over a PSP, we have some other craziness out there:
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Rather than masquerade a single video as an entire post, here are some highlights of what’s available from other sites in the way of movies and screens:
• Above is the new trailer for Lego Batman. We picked it up from Gamers Hell. It’s got Poison Ivy building some evil-looking plant mini-kits, and Bruce Wayne kicking arse with a briefcase.
• Some more screens from Tomb Raider: Underworld. (Also Gamers Hell)
• Also the World Exclusive Debut Trailer for Blitz: The League II. It’s at Gametrailers, because everything over there is a world exclusive.
Ian Bogost has an interesting essay up on Gamasutra, this one on the performative aspects of video games. The beloved word of anthropologists and linguists the world over, the concept of something being ‘performative’ is when something has the ability to do something itself when it is thrown out in the big bad world. So, what does this have to do with games?:
Video games often face a challenge: what does playing a game do to people in the world? In the case of entertainment games, such a question asks about the effects of violence on players, or about how players find and evaluate meaning in games.
In training, advertising, and learning games, the question asks how players take knowledge they learned in a game and apply it in their daily lives. The motivational (and compulsive) aspects of games suggest other ways gameplay can influence behaviour. But such matters cover only part of the intersection between our game lives and our ordinary lives ….
Performativity in discourse produces action. Performativity in video games couple gameplay to real-world action. Performative gameplay describes mechanics that change the state of the world through play actions themselves, rather than by inspiring possible future actions through coersion or reflection.
The performative aspects of games go far beyond ‘serious’ games, and Bogost has a number of interesting examples — good reading for a lazy weekend.
Persuasive Games: Performative Play [Gamasutra]
Some heads-up details that can just go into one post, rather than separate ones:
• There are two new OctoCamo patterns available for download on Metal Gear Solid 4. Laughing Camo raises your enemies’ laugh emotion when they spot you; Raging Camo boosts enemies’ rage emotion when they spot you. They’re out as of now, reports Gaming Bits.
• The new Rainbow Six Vegas 2 patch is out and available for download. We tipped you to it last week. This download gives you a map-pack and a game patch with lots of tweaks to gameplay and achievements. It is entirely free also. Enjoy.
• Reader Max W. writes to say that the demo for Mobile Suit Gundam: Operation: Troy is out on the Japanese Xbox Live Marketplace. “And it’s awesome”. I’m not in touch with Bash right now to verify, but there’s another freebie to play if you’re on that network. Gundam did wonders for 360′s June sales, as we wrote earlier.
New OctoCamo Patterns Now Available [Gaming Bits]
Do we have too many strategists (or at least, strategy fans) in the game design kitchen? Chris Bateman seems to think so — and that may account for the idea that ‘a game is a series of interesting decisions’ (well, that and a misquote from Sid Meier). ‘Game’ doesn’t (and shouldn’t) just mean ‘strategy game,’ but that’s often how it gets used:
I believe the videogames industry has an ongoing problem, in that a large proportion of the people who influence the game design process prefer Strategic play to other kinds of play. But as the audience for games has exploded into the mass market, strategy games (and other forms of Strategic play, such as adventure games) have become niche titles, with even the most popular titles selling no more than a few million units at most, while games with a wider appeal can rack up more than ten million units (as Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, GTA: San Andreas, Guitar Hero and The Sims all demonstrate in wildly different ways).
A good strategy game may well be a series of interesting decisions – but a good game is something that meets the play needs of its audience. If you want to make games for the new videogames market, you’d better start striving to understand just what those diverse play needs might involve.
Certainly, plenty of games are a series of interesting decisions, but as Bateman points out, it doesn’t mean all games are, and many super-successful games don’t fit the paradigm.
A Game Isn’t a Series of Interesting Decisions [Only a Game]
Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica have been locked in a kind of cage match battle for relevancy ever since legions of high schoolers found the former was an excellent tool for half-assing term papers graduating on time research. One thing, however, that hasn’t changed is the length of an article still means something in the Britannica. On Wikipedia, not so much.
Wikipedia is still very much the domain for longwinded parsings of the esoteric, if not completely hallucinated bullshit, a lot of it depending on how motivated that subject’s fanboy corps is. Who’s gonna show up more, Q-Bert’s fans, or President James Buchanan?
Games Radar has put together a list showing the truly distorted priorities of Wikipedia editors and writers, if length is a useful metric. And I think it is. Because according to their analysis, Knuckles from fucking Sonic the Hedgehog gets 7,832 words, and God — yes, that Guy — rates 3,726. There are 14 other hilarious comparisons (Call of Duty vs. World War II; Electronic Gaming Monthly vs Time, etc.) So get out there and start padding entries that really matter: Niko Bellic’s (385 words).
The WTF World of Wikipedia [Games Radar]
Those concerned with ‘virtual worlds’ — as opposed to ‘games’ — spend a lot of time contemplating the role of virtual worlds in a wider market; over at Terra Nova, Bruce Damer looks at the potential future of virtual worlds, which could be a lot bigger than most people imagine. Some potential answers to keep the industry growing? Piggybacking off platforms that are currently growing at a rapid clip, making sure virtual worlds are ‘worth’ something — perhaps some as of yet undiscovered little platform will be the key:
