"Go West Young Man"

Hello everyone, been a while right.

Like I said in my last post, I should be able to post something on here every week or so, depending on how crazy things go at university. With preparations for my master coming very soon, it looks like I will be one busy writer.

That being said, I was able to cook something up for the first week of January. I decided to stay away from the myriad of "Top [X]" lists that have been spawning all over the internet for the last few weeks in favour of a themed retrospective. I looked at four games from 2010 (Civilization 5, Red Dead Redemption, Fallout: New Vegas and Minecraft) and how they touch upon the concept of the frontier. Just go take a look at it.

In other news, it looks like I will be writing about games for school weekly once more the semester. I'm taking a psy class about emotions and motivations, and the work for the semester is to write one to two pages per week about anything in relation to what we are seeing in class that week. It's basically like the myspace business from last semester but without myspace, meaning it's a hundred times less annoying. Let's just hope writing about games weekly in french won't stop me from writing weekly in english.

Also, I went at the Mount Royal Game Society yesterday evening. It was pretty great. I met cool people, saw a live demo of Fract, got my ass kicked by a retro game (damn those monkeys!) and saw a girl wearing a sombrero in the middle of winter on my way back home. Pretty great evening indeed!

Not Dark Yet.

I know I didn't write anything on here for over a month, but I was extremely busy with school. It's not like I didn't write about games though; I just wrote in french. The semester work for one of my class was to write weekly on a myspace blog (urgh) about any subject and make links to what we saw in class. So I basically wrote about games (and once or twice about the internet in general) on a weekly basis. The bad thing is, I didn't have time to really write anything here on back on Bitmob, but the good thing is, it helped me develop a rhythm  and a schedule to write. From January onward, it should be way easier for me to get out some weekly content -- unless I get some crazy work again for some classes.

Anyway, here is a blog post I made on Bitmob about games and politics.

See ya later.

First Impressions: Fallout: New Vegas

Those are my first impressions on Fallout: New Vegas, three hours into the game... at which point my Xbox 360 controller's batteries died.

I guess it would be a bit simplistic to say that New Vegas is just more Fallout 3, but it kinda is. The game looks the same, sounds the same, plays mostly the same and I enjoy it about the same. It's both a good and a bad thing. Good because because I really enjoyed Fallout 3, but bad because that was two years ago. How come the issues that were plaguing the game two years ago are back?

Not that there is anything wrong with using old resources. Majora's Mask is mainly reused models from Ocarina of Time, but it's one of my favorite Zelda game ever. What made it work was the clever way they made the old stuff fell new. They used them in different ways and in different situations. They changed the overall style and feel of the game. New Vegas hasn't really done that yet for me. Sure, everything looks more orange, dusty and westerny, but it just feels like more capital wasteland and not its own place. Maybe that will change once I explore more and get to the strip. The other things that didn't change and should have are the glitches. I was lucky enough not to get into anything too crazy, like the spinning head doctor or the game files erase issue, but I still saw a gecko stuck in a wall, and one who had the mysterious qualities of a ghost -- couldn't hurt him and he couldn't hurt me BUT THERE HE WAS! The animations are still weird... two years after the facts. It has been said before and will be said again but Bethesda needs to get out a new engine, this one is starting to show its age. Oh and the hardcore mode is incredibly useless. Those bars never seems to go up.

On the good side, I mainly noticed two things in my short time playing. They added an interesting crafting system and the writing is way better. Not that the last point had a very high bar to go over but we'll take what we can get. The crafting system is a nice addition, even when I presume you can get through the game without ever touching it once. It will certainly fits a few players (like mine) play-style. It is all about collecting whatever you can find, get to a crafting apparatus, and see what you can make. It is certainly better than Fallout 3's handful of craftable items. I didn't get to experience much of the writing in my three hours, but what I got so far is atleast better than the first few hours of Fallout 3. I just had my first plot twist and boy does it already makes the game more intriguing than Fallout 3's convulsed plot about radioactive water, wild goose chase for a missing dad we don't even care about, and totally dumb use of a good GECK.

So yeah, if I am lucky enough not to run into any frustrating glitches, I think I will have a good time with this game, at least as much as I did with Fallout 3, despite all its flaws in term of writing and technicalities. Looks like Obsidian took care of one problem... and totally ignored the others. War never changes, and neither does dated engines I guess.

The Aug... September Madness... sorry guys.

Alright, haven't posted anything on here for a whole month. That sucks. I was busy with the first few weeks of university and with a good whole week of being sick like a dog. But now I got rid of a few things (mainly my sickness) and I can write again! Well, to be fair, I have to write a weekly post (on Myspace of all places) about one of my class. It's pretty interesting, even if Myspace is clunky, and I get to talk on about games and internet culture in french for notes. Could be worse.

In the meantime, I wrote a bitmob article about Minecraft (because everyone did) and I am probably going to write another iPhone game review soonish.

See ya later peeps!

Babycastles and the Indie Arcades: Getting Social

Something is afoot in Manhattan. A bunch of indie game designers and game enthusiasts are creating an indie arcade named Babycastles. Let’s not imagine that it is an arcade in the traditional sense of the word. It’s not rows of quarter munching machines where you can play your favorite fighting game or SHMUPS with a roaring crowd behind you. Well, not that there is any crowds in most arcades nowadays.

If their Kickstarter page and the articles game journalist and Babycastles promoter Leigh Alexander wrote are to be believed, this indie arcade will be closer to an art-house cinema or an indie music show than the arcades of the old days. Babycastles seams to be about two things really: creating an ambiance and bringing the indie games out of your home computer and into the streets.

I’m not really into the New York indie music scene (probably because I’m neither in NY or an indie music fan) but from what I know, once again through Alexander, Babycastles is pretty much growing out from this particular world. While they are raising money to move in a new location near Time Square, the arcade is currently located at Silent Barn, “a hub within Brooklyn's DIY music scene”. If anything, this is a pretty good indication that they are aiming to create an indie arcade with the similar ambiance of an indie music jam.

Just like indie music or indie cinema, indie games main channel of distribution is not through any of the big guys, but through the web. The Internet is a great way to get known, but the social aspect, that special touch you can have when you are playing in front of a live audience or showing your movie for the first time in an half-full theater is something that cannot be emulated. It’s also something most games and gamers lost over time.

Arcades died when consoles and PCs gained in popularity. Still, people would go to each other’s basement to play a friendly match of Goldeneye, or bring their computers and play Starcraft over LAN. The growth of online gaming killed that too. Seriously, how many games nowadays come with a split-screen multiplayer mode? Not many. Gaming used to be something social; you played games with other people, other gamers, in the same room. I think gamers are longing for the real life presence. This is why there is a growing movement for the return and survival of arcades.

Babycastles and other indie arcades like it (Is there even any?) are doing something new. They are bringing a type of game that rarely leaves the comfort of your computer to the social scene. It’s also about cutting the middleman that is the Internet. You play the game and you get to talk about it around a good beer with other people who just played the game. Some games can create interesting discussions about a variety of subjects, while others are all about the bragging rights of beating the high score. Just like the old days.

I wish a long life to those arcades, the future amazing hangouts for the social gamer; the gamer that wants to hang out with his gamers and non-gamers friend, grab a drink and listen to music, and then kick some ass at this new amazing bullets hell game some dude in Europe just made in a day. Hopefully Manhattan is just the beginning.

The August Madness

August was pretty crazy for me. Parents went on vacation for two weeks and came back with a bad flu, I worked like crazy at the Tim Hortons because a few other bakers were on vacation and I barely had time to write anything. So I basically took two weeks off. Not like there was anything interesting anyway...

I wrote a very quick news post today on Bitmob about Jane McGonigal and co.'s new project, GAMEFUL. Check it out, it sounds pretty awesome. 

As far as my own writing goes, I'll also try to get back into reviewing indie games and iPod Touch games. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up a good writing rhythm with university starting in a week.

Looking At Limbo, Facing Your Fears

A young boy wakes up in the middle of a dark forest. You only know it is a forest because you can make up the vague shapes of trees around you. The young boy is as vague as the forest that surrounds him. He is only, to you, a black shadow with blinking white eyes.

You heard that the boy is looking for his sister in this forest, but the game never really tells you that. It's just a throwaway statement from outside the game. You know this is some kind of platformer. Your physical memory takes over and you proceed to the left -- because salvation in video games is almost always to the left of the world.

You quickly realize that making your way through this forest won't be so easy. You come across some water and try to make your way to the other side. The young boy drowns before you. Damn, you died. This game will kill the young boy a lot too. Each death brings the player two things: information about the world and something new to fear. For now, you learn to fear water.

Not long after, you also learn to fear the giant spider that is stalking you and the "Others", young boys, just like your own avatar you guess, that are stuck in this world, this limbo. But the game makes you fear them, for they will try to kill you. Why do they want to kill you? Is it because you are different -- you have eyes, they don't -- or maybe because they went insane in this grey forest? It does not matter. Each time you will see their black silhouette, fear shall grip you.

Limbo does a great job installing those fears in your head, but it also goes beyond and asks you to face them. Slowly but surely, you will learn how to navigate your environment with your little avatar and how to use those traps you fear so much against your enemies. You will methodically take down all of the spider's legs and use her corpse as a platform (gross), you will kill those lost child with their own devious traps, and you will flood rooms in order to proceed in your journey.

It becomes less of a terrifying walk through a dark world and more of a rite of passage, an initiatory journey through the unknown. The young boy must face his fears and weaknesses to become a man. He must learn how to use what he fears to his own advantage. The boy becomes a man as he learns how to use and master his surrounding. The bear trap isn't a danger anymore; it's a spider-killing weapon.

It is no coincidence then that the young boy makes his way from a forest to a city, or some kind of giant factory. On a mechanical level, this new environment introduces new challenges: electricity, guns, saws and gravity switches for example. Like those in the forest, you will slowly learn how to manipulate them.

On a more abstract level, the passage from the forest to the factory makes a lot of sense if you look at this game as a story about the trials of growing up. The young boy goes from the forest -- playground for the children -- to the factory -- workplace for the adult. Both can be filled with adventures and dangers.

After making his way through the gauntlet, the young boy -- who is now a man -- finds himself back in the wood of his childhood. There, he sees his sister crying. The game then abruptly cuts to black. The young boy never gets to his sister, as if the game was telling us this old morale all over again; the journey is more important than the destination. This old saying is very true in the context of this game. We are never given a reason to care about that sister. The game in itself never even tells us that there is a sister to be found.

The young boy, and the player, is pushed forward to make it through the trials laid down by the game because he feels that the journey is going to be worth it, that there is something on the other side of this monochrome rainbow. Once you are there, you figure out that this sister could as well be an illusion, an oasis of hope for that young boy and for you.

Even if there is nothing on the other side of the rainbow, the boy became and man, and the player held his hand through the journey.