One gamer's rants....

• 25Sep 06

  Old vs New

  Way back in 1988, a little game called Rampage turned up on the PC, courtesy of Bally Midway and Activision.
  
  The concept was simple. You took control of one of three monsters -- George the Apeman, Lizzie the Lizardwoman or Ralph the Wolfman -- and tried to knock down buildings. The army would roll in with troops, tanks and helicopters and try to stop you, sapping your energy. You recovered energy by eating people.
  
  The game was even multiplayer (at the same computer), and the games of tennis using the tram were always fun.
  
  Now, Midway have released an "update", called Rampage: Total Destruction for GameCube, PS2 and (possibly) Wii. It now boasts 30 monsters, beautiful graphics and (presumably) beautiful sound.
  
  I have two problems with R:TD. The first is a small niggle -- why isn't it available for the PC? I guess one reason may be demographics -- R:TD's probably aimed at the younger market, who're more likely to have a console rather than a PC. There's probably licensing issues involved as well. But c'mon -- those of us who enjoyed it 18 years ago are old fogeys now who can't be bothering with them new-fangled console thing-a-me-jigs.
  
  The second problem I have with R:TD is the implicit "bigger-brighter-louder is better" mindset that pervades remakes. The original game had three monsters, so thirty will make it ten times better, right?
  
  Nah.
  
  The original three monsters were -- and still are -- archetypes of monster movies, the main inspiration for Rampage. While R:TD still has George, Lizzie and Ralph, it's got 27 other monsters that didn't come from classic B-grade monster flicks, but the desperate minds of game designers trying to fill thirty slots. Looking through the list of new monsters, I found almost all them felt "forced". I can just see a room at Pipeworks (the developer) with one of those flip books where you could combine the head, body and legs of three different creatures to get a really weird creature.
  
  Sure, they've souped up the graphics and sound, but how have they improved the game? They've added unlockable monsters? So what -- if the monsters weren't there, they wouldn't need unlocking. You can now climb up the front of the buildings? Big deal. Upgrades to the monsters? I don't remember King Kong or Godzilla getting an upgrade.
  
  I don't want to sound like I'm against updating old games -- if they need it. But Rampage didn't need it. It was perfect in and of itself. The gameplay was elegant in its simplicity, the graphics were clean and the sound was ... functional (okay, the sound could've done with a tweak, but we didn't have affordable soundcards in the '80s).
  
  Where before we had a ballerina gracefully pirouetting across our screens, we have a behemoth on rollerskates plowing through a classic game's legacy.
  
  Sigh. Maybe the missus is right -- I'm turning into a grumpy old man. But it's not my fault -- it's all them bods trying to squeeze some more $$$ out of a classic, and ruining it in the process.
  
  
  • Posted Sep 25, 2006 5:20 am GMT
  • Category: Games
  • 0 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
  • Tweet
• 9Sep 06

  Yet. Another. Patch.

  So I'm cowering behind the wreck of an F-15, trying desperately to cap a flag before the MEC over-run my position. My M-16 is out of ammo, I'm down to two mags in the pistol, one M-203 round left, and I swear my knife is looking a bit rusty.
  
  There's the unmistakable sound of a tank lurking nearby. Ours? Theirs? I'm not sticking my head out there -- you go look if it's so important.
  
  The BF2 1.4 patch has finally been released, and I'm enjoying the "Road to Jalalabad" map that's bundled with it. It feels like a cross between "Strike at Karkand" and "Mashtuur City" -- two of my favourite original maps -- but still having its own character.
  
  The patch itself seems to be pretty stable -- I haven't tested it to death yet -- and the gameplay tweaks it's made look good. And do I detect a hint of minty frustration in the 1.4 readme: "Another attempt at fixing the Red/Blue nametag bug."?
  
  But like so many gamers, I'm not happy about the patch for a very important reason: it exists.
  
  This is the ninth patch for Battlefield 2 since its release, which raises a really ugly question: Why does it take EA, with its massive resources, ten attempts at getting the game right? Or does it not care?
  
  I'm not asking EA to make it perfect for everyone. As Honest Abe pointed out, that's impossible. There are always going to be aspects of gameplay that people loathe. But before you go fixing those 'problems', ask yourself two questions:
  
  (1) Why did you design the game that way in the first place: there must be some reason you made it the way it is; otherwise, you'd have made it differently (at least, I hope you'd've made it differently).
  
  (2) Is it really a problem? Has a wide spectrum of the game's community asked/begged/demanded that the 'problem' be fixed, or is it a small yet vocal minority wanting the change made to suit them?
  
  If you decided the game should be a certain way for a very specific reason, or only a small group are demanding a gameplay tweak, then don't fix it, 'cos it ain't broke. Sure, a tweak may shut up the ones yelling (unlikely -- they'll just find something else to moan about), but you will probably end up annoying the majority of gamers who were happy with it the way it was.
  
  On the other hand, if there was no specific reason -- may be a temporary setting somehow became permanent -- or lots of people are asking for the change (nicely, though -- don't reward those n00bs who think saying "f--k" every 2nd word makes for a reasoned argument), then you need to start asking some very pointed questions about your playtesters. Starting with "Why didn't you pick this up?"
  
  The other purpose of a patch is to fix bugs, and it's this reason that really sticks in my craw. In the first lecture of my first-year Computer Science course, the lecturer tells us that, just because it compiles doesn't mean it's bug-free. I know that BF2 is a lot more complicated than my Java courier dispatch simulator, but there's a lot more people working on BF2 than at my Linux station.
  
  Bugs are inevitable. There's a good book called Digital Woes by Lauren Ruth Wienar that discusses the ways and wherefores of software errors, particularly their pervasiveness. And some bugs should be patched, like incompatibilities with hardware that was very rare or non-existant when the game was released, or to take advantage of new optimisations.
  
  But the number of bugs supposedly fixed by patches 1.01, 1.02, 1.03, 1.12, 1.2, 1.21, 1.22, 1.3 and 1.4 is huge (with a few repeat appearances, like the red/blue name bug).
  
  EA: You should not have released the game in the state that it was in back at version 1.0, especially when you had to know about at least some of them. I refuse to believe your QA department is so bad that it missed all of them. At most, we should have only needed one patch, and certainly one nowhere as big as the 1.4 full patch (531 MB according to EA Downloader).
  
  And so, I give to you, Poss's First Law of Gaming: "If there's a bug you know about; if a playtester says, 'this is unbalanced'; if a programmer says, 'we can do this better': don't release the game."  Fix it, balance it, make it better. Your customers -- you know, the ones who gave you a fair whack of money to play your game -- deserve no less, and they will thank you for it. And how much is customer satisfaction worth?
  
  I'd say far more than customer dissatisfaction...
  

  ---

  Can someone please tell my wife that me exceeding our monthly broadband cap means that she should upgrade our broadband plan, not start divorce proceedings....
  
  
  • Posted Sep 9, 2006 6:56 am GMT
  • Category: Games
  • 0 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
  • Tweet

See Previous Blog Posts »