"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!

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!

New Year

Happy New Year everyone! I hope your holidays were filled with gaming goodness, because mine certainly weren’t, and the situation won’t go any better.

First, my brother is leaving home to go live with his girlfriend (who he has been with for only 2 months) and he is leaving with some of stuff, one of it being the HD TV that was his. I am now stuck with the non HD TV.

It really makes a difference in some games. For example, Battlefield 1943’s texts are way more difficult to read. Not that it really matter, the game is about shooting dudes, but the issue is that the enemies dudes and my team’s dudes are pretty hard to tell from one another at a certain distance; bad when you are an avid sniper.

I guess I’ll need to learn to live with it as if it were 2006 again, because there is no way I’m able to afford an HD TV in the next few months, university being a costly mistress. For a guy who says, “I don’t care about the quality of the graphics in a game, more about the style”, I guess I will have to live by my word.

Oh and he also left with the Wii. That will have to wait too, but I can live with it better.

On a related note, I haven’t played a lot of new games during the vacations. I took a break from new stuff after my little run through Modern Warfare 2 and mostly played old favorites like Oblivion and Chrono Trigger (talk about retro). I’m going to wait for the release of Mass Effect 2 to get into new games. And boy will I have to play it tight.

My console gaming time was reduced to about a day and a half, more or less. The worse is, so many great games are coming soon. Mass Effect 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Bioshsock 2, and Heavy Rain. And there are probably that I am forgetting. I guess I’ll need to play some mad marathon sessions to get through these.

Such is the life of an academic. I guess the good thing is, I will spend more time writing and reading about games, and watch movies. Sure, it sucks that I will have less time to play games, which is kind of the point of it, but I will live with it and maybe even enjoy it more as it will become those rare quality times spent with my favorite medium.

And then there’s TV… Oh shit.

50 to 60 hours long ! Sorry but I have a life too.

You know what kind of games I used to like? jRPGs. Back in the days (10 years ago or so I guess), I loved to play those long lasting RPGs, be it FF4/5/6, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and many more. I have fond memories of those times. I was also 12.

I just saw on Kotaku that the new FF13 (confidence: I never played beyond 6) will be a massive 50 to 60 hours long to complete. How true is that? I don't know and I really don't much care.

You see, the last RPG I completed was Lost Odyssey. A great game; very touching, nice cinematography, nice classical gameplay, but a quite clichéd storyline. It really threw me back to my younger days where I would sit in front of the TV and carefully select the attacks of my characters. I guess I was a boring kid.

Do you know how long it took me to finish this monster of a game? 40-something hours. Do you know how spread those 40 hours were? Over a full university summer vacation; from May to September.

You see, I am not 12 anymore. I work, I write, I study, I read, and I watch movies. Sure, I also game, but my gaming periods are pretty much spread thin. I'm currently at the end of my term and the only gaming times I get are on Thursday when I'm back to my parents house (to refill on food and clean clothes) and when I'm not burrowed under papers.

My brother bought Assassin's Creed 2 on launch day. Most of the gamers that did the same finished the game by the end of the same week. It's been 3 weeks and I barely touched Venice. See, that's why I don't play jRPGs (or much wRPGs for that matter) anymore.

Where would I put 50 to 60 hours of game and still have time to play anything else ? What I'm going through happens to a lot of older gamers that are starting to have less time for gaming as they have other priorities or interest.

Don't get me wrong now, I still love video games with a passion. It's my domain of interest. But when it comes to leisure time, my gaming will either go to games that pikes my interest (the reason I play AC2 is because of my interest in history represented through games) or games that will give me a quick satisfaction.

What used to be a major selling point to me, as it is for most gamers, just became a sort of a warning. It's not about replayability anymore. It's about whether I will get to finish the game or not.

I'm sorry FF13, but unless your story touches the subjects of traumatic memories, collective history, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, or actual historical events, I guess I will have to pass and invest my time in writing my papers.

I just noticed the irony of writing this instead of my actual papers.

Snow on the city

There's snow on the city and that means the year is coming to an end. And what is happening when the year is coming to an end ? You make lists! A full month is still remaining(too short when you have 4 works due for the middle of the month) so a lot can still happen. A few games are still gonna come out and other events could get my attention.

But before I go into listing I want to say how happy I am right now. I just learned that Bernard Perron is going to be one of my teacher next semester. I'm really thrilled to be in contact with one of the few teacher really interested in video games. Hopefully I'll be able to get more info on the international conference “Thinking After Dark: Welcome to the World of Horror Video Games” .

Ok, list time.


GotY: One thing is sure, it's gonna be a sequel. It's kinda sad that a new, innovative game cannot be GotY but I guess it's just the way the market is right now. I am sure that everyone, me included, are missing on the best game this year just because everything else was (over)hyped. All of the contenders have major flaws in my opinion. But then again, can we expect all games to be perfect ? No, we can't. I'm just gonna write down what are the flaws with those games since pretty much everyone knows what they did well.

GTA4: Not as much fun as Saint's Row 2. A shame that a game that have a really deep story, makes an accurate criticism of modern America and let the player makes relevant moral choices, and all while showing me around NYC is, at the end of the day, less "FUN" than a game where you play a morally questionable banger blowing shit up. And this is exactly why it's more fun. But then again, Schindler's List wasn't fun either.

SSBB a.k.a. SSBM.2: Yep, the title says it all. But it justified my Wii and was fun..... for a while. But you know Nintendo fanboys will be pushing this as GotY like it was the Christ's return to earth.

MGS4: Kojima is a great storyteller. Weird stories I will admit but it really was a fitting ending to the fucked up MGS series. Twists, turns and people who are not dead but you were sure they were for the last 3 games. Of course, it would be better if the story wasn't told through cutscenes ONLY. Very few story elements are given interactively. And some cutscenes would just go on forever(I'm thinking of a certain death scene). But, to borrow an expression from Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, criticizing a MGS for long cutscenes is like criticizing a midget for being short.

My prediction for the winner ? I don't know. Really, I don't. I hope it's either MGS4 or GTA4 because well, they are deeper and more relevant than SSBB. Sadly, none of them had the impact Bioshock had on me last year. Maybe I'm just jaded, cynical and stressed beyond the point I can't be moved by a game anymore. Well, Lost Odyssey made me cry twice but since it's pretty niche, I doubt most people will see it as a serious GotY contender. I hope I'm wrong.


Disappointement of the year: Wii would like to play.
My Wii has been gathering dust for the last few months. After having my fun with SSBB, the console lost it's appeal. No game really grabbed my attention. I don't really care for wiifitnessing, wiimusciing or Animal Crossing since I've played the game two times already. The virtual console ? Sure it's fun. But it's hardly new material and your Wii will be filled pretty fast and since Nintendo don't have any solid plan to fix this issue, I kinda stopped caring for it.

But the Wii won't fail. It's still selling like crazy, they make 6$ per unit sold and that strange new beast, the casual crowd, is buying. I tip my hat to them for their brilliant business. The core feels left out but Nintendo still prints money.


Hot subject of the year: You've got casual on my gaming and defining a culture and it's actors.
The first half of '08 saw a boom in casual gaming. Developers found an unexploited market and like in the virgin west, they went digging for gold. And they found it. Now that a majority of people "play games" and almost every households have at least one console, companies decided to court the moms and dads. And the success of the Wii shows it works.

The second half of the year but mostly the last few months saw the rise of discussions about the culture surrounding gaming. The latest talk in town is about the role of reviewers and what they should and shouldn't do. I'm pretty sure that discussions about this and the gap between "us and them", not casual and hardcore but culturists and just plain gamer, will pave the first few months of '09.


Special thanks of the year:
Fallout 3: for making me discover a great series of game. I got my hands on 1 and 2 for a bargain and as soon as I have time(in two weeks maybe) I will make my way through them.

Sarah Palin: for an endless source of lols and MILF porn.

Lost Odyssey: for showing me a game can make me cry.


And at last, to get your groove on for the holidays: MUZIC