Highguard low-ball

Highguard is an interesting case study. It’s a game that developed within a safe bubble among a curated number of people, got a massive push at an awards gala, and then launched a generic, corporate-like PR campaign. Sure, let’s call the devs independent while ignoring the money they got from big investors, who put millions into the game. The culture Highguard was developed under wasn’t indie, but the same bubble corporate devs have.

Josh Sobiel was laid off, among other staff from Wildlight Studios, because Highguard wasn’t an immediate success. Sobiel went to his Twitter account and wrote a lengthy editorial about the game and the shitstorm it kicked up. That account is now deleted, and I didn’t have the foresight to save it, just like Highguard devs thought it was a good idea to develop the game inside a bubble and not do any beta testing with the actual audience they might have to get objective player feedback. Luckily, someone else archived it on Ghost Archive.

If you’ve given it a read, tell me what you think about the start of it, how Sobiel begins by telling us how the people connected to their team or the project said it was “lightning in a bottle,” or how they’d “play it all day.” It’s good to be positive, but not to this extent.

I don’t believe Highguard had unbiased sources reviewing the game at any point. Sobiel’s post affirms that gaming media is just an extended PR arm of the industry, naming numerous people who gave support to the game. Perhaps out of altruism, perhaps knowing that if they step too far out of line, they’ll lose access to other games or events. We know people were flown to a special Highguard event, where media personnel were given a curated and guided tour of the game. It’s an industry standard: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Unbiased, my ass. Does anyone even remember when Microsoft gave out brand new X360s to journalists attending E3 in 2010? People might miss E3, but it was a massive event to market things and bribe journalists.

Highguard got a spotlight at the Awards that should’ve gone to Mega Man 12, if I’m honest. Highguard got there because of nepotism, not because it deserved the spot. It deserved the reception it got—an honest reaction from the audience. Geoff is just as out of touch with what game consumers play and want to play as the game industry is.

The reason everything went downhill from The Game Awards trailer is because gaming consumers, especially the hardcore Red Ocean dwellers, are harsh critics. Time and money are limited, and if you don’t wow them in one go, you’re going to disappoint them.

Imagine not taking the customers into consideration and thinking you deserve more than ridicule for recycling existing ideas and concepts into a clashing whole with large, empty maps.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been making a game. Be it two and a half years, be it seven years or a damn decade, it doesn’t matter. You, as a person making a video game, don’t matter. You are only as good as your product is. The ultimate arbiter of everything in the market is the buyer. Listening to other industry people hailing your product as the best there is, something that’ll capture people in one moment, is suicidal. Sobiel’s post reads like the team never looked at market saturation and how hard it would be to compete with existing live-service games. In a vacuum, Highguard probably seemed cutting-edge, but when put against the competition, its edge is dull and rusty.

You can spend however many resources you want on a product, and it can still be violently rejected from the start. Why the game was turned into a joke from the word go isn’t hard to grasp; people have experience. The more experience a person has with games, especially within certain genres, the easier they can tell what sort of things are used as sources of inspiration, what kind of physics there are, and what mechanics are in play. That’s why gameplay footage is so goddamn important: it reveals how the game plays. Also a reason why certain publishers and devs push concept or story trailers first with as little play footage as possible. Also why demos and trials are almost extinct—because people could play the game and test it out before buying the main showcase.

Highguard didn’t get review-bombed either. These were dissatisfied customers leaving before the show was even over. These were potential customers who found the game lacking and walked away. If your game hasn’t put out the best it can offer within the first ten minutes, you’ve screwed up. Start high, start fast; then you can slow down. Highguard will be used as an example of failing to capture the audience.

An honest initial reaction is the minimum any game deserves.

The gaming industry must realize at some point that there are people who don’t deserve success by default. They are making million‑dollar entertainment products and failing at that. They are sitting in front of their desks all day long, be it at work or at home, in an air‑conditioned room where the only danger they have is a paper cut or drowsiness. It’s a cozy-as-hell job. You’re not going to get burned by flowing molten metal, you’re not coughing your lungs out due to dust, you don’t need to deal with people brandishing weapons against you, you don’t need to clean a toilet someone managed to plug with their massive shit. It’s the coziest, safest work there is, and all you need to do is make a game that people would like to buy. Making games is hard, but it’s safe and cozy. Is the Internet getting on your nerves? Get away from social media then.

Highguard didn’t fail because the customers slandered it. It failed on its own lack of merits. If you manage to garner a cult following, that following will defend your game to the very end and spread the good word for free. They’ll go crusading on your behalf if they fall in love with the game and will make sure anyone who would love the game will get to know about it. Maybe the game isn’t there yet, but the number of players already lost doesn’t bode well. Gaming consumers will look into any new big‑name title, and the rest is up to the game to make itself interesting enough. There’s a large number of games that have people hating on them on a daily basis. Difference is, these games also have managed to retain a player base that keeps ’em afloat. No amount of bad press or flaming can bring down a game once valid good word on it is out there.

The millennial financial curse can’t be broken by making a game people don’t want to play. Especially now that people have less time and money to spend on games, now that live‑service games are competing tooth and nail to keep their current customer base. The very model Highguard was built on is at least six years too late. In a contested market like this, you would’ve needed to hit the Blue Ocean market and shake the industry. Instead, the game was a dud on launch. It has a small window where it can carve a niche for itself, but that window is closing fast, if not already too small.

The additional thing is this wasn’t just rejected by chuds. The game was localized to ten different languages, meaning the devs burned all that money on localization instead of putting up a beta or something else to get feedback. The rejection of Highguard was global.

It feels like Wildlife did jack shit market research. The bubble they were living in was enough to convince that they had gold in their hands, and whatever curated group reviewed their game wasn’t large enough to pop it. You can’t really hope to make an impact on the market if you don’t know what the market wants or needs.

As for what this means for indie games, it means nothing. Indie games that want to innovate will keep doing so without resorting to millions of dollars of support. Hit DLSite or something and see what the latest hotness is there. Customers will continue to support games that meet their demands, needs, and standards.

I was going to end this post there, but seeing how I end up sitting on these posts for a while, things change. Now it has come to light that while Wildlife Entertainment presented themselves as an indie studio, they were backed up by Tencent. Highguard feels like Tencent’s attempt to speedrun to produce a popular hero shooter kind of game with microtransactions. That’d explain why the game seems so unoriginal and why it comes with intrusive kernel level anti-cheat program. This sort of lacking transparency is absolutely stupid to do if you claim to be an indie studio. The more times passes, Highguard looks less like Concord and more like Costa Concordia.

The many games of The Most Successful

With Rockstar and Grant Theft Auto 6 in the news for some unsavory reasons, I saw quite a lot of hubbubs about the success of the fifth game in the franchise and its comparative success compared to other games, and other forms entertainment. I’m slightly flabbergasted that someone would claim that GTA5 was the most successful form of entertainment, when people without much contact with the modern world knew about Michael Jackson. Thriller permeated everywhere, you can’t beat it.

Nevertheless, this made an interesting thought experiment on what counts as The Most Successful Video Game. It didn’t help that I saw the goal being pushed after one or two rounds of discussion, under which at least few realized that there’s more than one way of seeing this. Business has a different view on things compared to the customers, and then you have the historical view that has a longer view on how games have affected culture in general. This is why Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout and Pac-Man still live on in the cultural memory, even if the amount of success they’ve seen in terms of money is less than whatever big Triple A title that’s come after.

I should probably note that there’s also a slight difference in how some use the term franchise. While I tend to use it wrong as a synonym with Intellectual Property, an example of a franchise would be Street Fighter II. Street Fighter III would be its own franchise, while all falling under the same umbrella of IP. This is because of merchandising rights and all that business jazz.

Units Sold is of course a big one, the cumulative sales made by one game, or a series of games. For example, the Mario games have a cumulative sale of 957 million units, while Mega Man has 43 million units.

As for individual titles, Minecraft is an evergreen title that hits 350 units sold. GTAV follows It at 220 million units.

Units sold doesn’t really keep you afloat a lot, unless you have Revenue. This is the total gross the series does through game sales, possible DLC, merch, and other licensed material. Pokémon tops this chart with $115, followed by Call of Duty with $31 million.

The way digital games are consumed is different from purchased titles, of course. That’s why something like Candy Crush or Dungeon Fighter Online can top the chart of games with most revenue, as individuals put more money into these games. This compares apples and oranges; the business models are ultimately very different and the amount of money you can squeeze out of a customer via single sold title plus DLC is ultimately less than digital-only but squeezing small amounts throughout their play time. Gacha mixes things with the whole gambling aspect.

I don’t think we should count individual downloads. This is because a download doesn’t translate to a purchase, or revenue. There are numerous cases of curious people testing a free game out and then proceeding not to continue. These people are often counted to the player metric nonetheless, which shows that the total number of players can be skewed to showcase a more positive statistic for PR reasons. This is the same reason why Sony cites the total number of PlayStation 2’s when asked about the total number of consoles sold. It just looks better, and they can fudge the numbers for their benefit.

Then again, Subway Surfers has 2.05 billion individual downloads and spawned numerous imitators so there’s something value in that too.

Player Count is also something that seems to be a significant metric, with Roblox topping the list with the estimated number of players being in billions cumulative. Minecraft hitting a nice spot of 600 million plus players shows that it really is the Tetris of the modern age.

I would argue that the peak number of players, and how long that plateau is held, is a more significant counter simply because it shows how many players consume the game in each span of time. Through this, we get an idea whether a game holds its audience, which is far more important in the long-term in terms of customer satisfaction and how well customers make emotional connection to the game. A game that gets massive sales at the start but sees the player count sink like a rock in water has no lasting hold on the market.

While I don’t give much weight on the Critical Acclaim the journalists give to games (as they are nothing more than just an extra arm in the PR machine), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Soul Calibur top the chart with 99 and 98 according to Metacritic. I’d like to say the User Score is the metric we should use, but seeing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 topping the current list reminds me how customers can’t be any more objective than the journalists most of the time.

If we count Spacewar! as the progenitor of all modern video and computer games (and we are,) gaming is 63 at the time of writing. There are only a handful of game names from the early era of electronic gaming that are still strongly alive. Pac-Man and Mario are the handful, with the rest of their brethren being relocated to nostalgic revivals and retro collections. While we may think the most popular games we have now will last for all time, we’ve seen so many game names simply vanishing, dying out or otherwise fall into torpor. Mega Man is a great example of this, sometimes popping its head up only to fall back into Capcom archives. Maybe we’ll get another game by 2030. Prince of Persia seemed like a name that would never die, but overexposure and simply being owned by Ubisoft clearly took its toll on the name. Same thing could be happening to Assassin Creed now, one can only hope.

Some of you might’ve noticed that I counted Donkey Kong as a Mario title. So does Nintendo, as that’s the first appearance of Mario, then named Jumpman. If you want, we can count Mario being started in 1983, making Mario 42 to Pac-Man’s 45. These are still small numbers compared to something like Universal Monsters, which have lasted for good 117 years. Looking at the comic book world, both Superman and Batman are in their 80s.

However, the gaming industry influences itself. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was influenced by Final Fantasy, which was seen as the premier gaming IP at one point in the Western World. However, going back and seeing what influenced Final Fantasy we find Dragon Quest and its numerous copycats and imitators. Going further back we find both Utima and Wizardry influencing the game, which also influenced so many other Japanese computer RPGs like The Black Onyx, which inspired the creation of The Legend of Zelda. Ultima and Wizardry have their roots in MUDs, which have roots in table-top RPGs, mainly Dungeon and Dragons, which have their roots in the military games generals and other army leaders would play to train their leadership.

The roots of video and computer gaming lie in the games and play of children and adults alike, alongside how stories were told by acting and playing them out. This tangent is to remind ourselves that gaming is not something that just came along with computers and consoles but is just the latest iteration of mankind has been doing ever since we dwelled in caves.

Nevertheless, the game with most cultural impact is probably Pokémon. Its Trading Card Game sales generate about one to three billion dollars per year, which rivals the top-most successful film’s revenue in their lifetime. Of course, TCG is an evergreen product compared to film’s finite runs, so this should illustrate how different the media are. Still, the franchise IP generated that $150 billion plus dollars and probably is Japan’s single most important import product. Pikachu is the face and mascot of the franchise, well-known across the glob, and served as an ambassador to 2014 World Cup, 2020 Tokyo Olympics and in 2025 World Expo. Its yellow face is featured in over fifty embassies across the world. Surprisingly, Pokémon has shown itself to be a multi-generational product, a cornerstone of sorts that sees constant parodies in other shows and games while drawing tourists of all ages to Pokémon Centers across the world, especially to Japan.

Even if Pokémon is a 1990s product, it can be placed alongside Mario and Pac-Man as a long-lasting face of gaming, with it probably ending up as the face of gaming on the long run if we had to choose one, for better or worse. This also illustrates some why Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, and to a lesser extent GameFreak would be freakishly overprotective of their IP. There are numerous other contenders we could put there, but I’m making a point there; there must be generationally recognizable face for all without really any breaks.

The list of games that influenced other games is as wide as the library of games out there. Talking about First-Person Shooting ends up someone tracing back to Halo, then Half-Life, a mention of Quake’s code still running in some modern games, another mentioning Goldeneye 007, with usually ending with either Doom or Wolfenstein 3D in a similar fashion I did with RPGs above.

While we have been seeing the influence of video and computer games on the culture ever since the 1970s in an increasing fashion, it’s hard to determine how well a game or a name will endure as history happens. Only in hindsight can we properly determine the ebbs and flows of masses, something the current gaming industry seems to ignore in favour of trying to appease each other with the press as their echo chamber. When Demon’s Souls was put out for the first time, nobody expected it to become a cultural cornerstone. However, history has shown us that people like to play challenging games, and from that challenge comes customer satisfaction. Well-built world and framing, with play-first mentality, is a sort of silver bullet. It’s not a game for everyone, and that’s fine. You can’t please everyone with one product, and trying to is simply being dishonest toward the game and the customer.

#electronicGames #entertainment #games #gaming #videoGames #videogames

Terminado de copiar el programa "Missione Luna" de la revista Electronic Games / EG Computer nº 13. Un arcade de acción, hecho parte en BASIC y parte en código máquina. Al archivo de Spectrum Computing que va.

Esta vez comparto con vosotros el programa entero. Puede que lo vuelva a hacer con otros programas que merezcan la pena:

Os lo podéis descargar desde aquí: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yq1cqkd3zwiig0kr0bihw/EG_Computer13-MissioneLuna.zip?rlkey=c023znhxguwfbl8nd3roiwpo7&dl=0

#ZXSpectrum #Preservación #Listados #TypeIns #Revistas #Magazines #ElectronicGames #rivista #Italy

The second Microsoft rant of the Month

Satya Nadella says Xbox isn’t competing with other game consoles. He says Xbox is competing with TikTok. This is Nadella effectively admitting Xbox has lost its primary market and must find something else to compare themselves to in order not to look so bad in the eyes of the market, or investors. People thought the Activision Blizzard buyout would’ve changed gaming in a way that Xbox would get all these exclusives, concentrating large swaths of games to one or two platforms, or something along those lines. As it turns out, none of these people looked at how Microsoft has worked, buying out companies and then gutting them when they haven’t turned out to be moneymakers. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

The buyout didn’t increase the number of customers. Simply buying a company and having it produce games doesn’t expand the market. You must deliver something that the Blue Ocean customer might want to have. The issue with Xbox is that it was a lifestyle brand for young boys and teenagers, as well as for some young adults, especially in the US and parts of Europe. It’s a very American brand, loud and obnoxious in a way. Xbox is Sega 2.0, doing the same bit in a different decade. This can carry a gaming console for a generation or two, when it must either expand its audience or try to appease its aging consumer base. Neither is a very good option, as the former is often seen as abandoning existing customers and will fail even worse if the new console and games aren’t disrupting the market, and the latter will be diminishing returns as younger generations or expanding families won’t find the system appealing. The Apple lifestyle brand model doesn’t work in console gaming, as consoles require games, not just expensive looks.

Gaming is changing not because of consolidation of companies. It’s changing because of customer behaviour and lack of competition between game companies. If Xbox is in competition with TikTok, then they are in competition with every other form of entertainment media and that is a losing battle. They’re stretching their battlefield too thin and are now losing in their own market. This is like dick envy from Microsoft, seeing the numbers something completely different from their business is doing and wanting some of that. This is a repeat of Microsoft wanting to get into console gaming with the Xbox after seeing what sort of magic Nintendo and Sony were brewing. This small dick energy has always been something Microsoft, and by extension Xbox, has always had.

Gaming has changed due to the game market changing, i.e. people changing. Currently, the average age of a gamer in the US is 36. European media is 31, the same as China, but Italy tops out at 50. The numbers don’t change much across the world, even in Japan the number is 33. These are people who have some eighteen years of gaming behind them, these all are part of a particular generation in global terms that took up gaming us a hobby in their childhood.  These people now have families and jobs that require their attention. Time to play games grows shorter and thus what kind of games people play.

Why are younger generations going for TikTok and other shortform content instead of playing video games? Because the games that these big companies are bloated mess that hold your hand all the way down and don’t give the kicks. The children yearn for arcade games. Games that get you in fast, give you exhilaration and get you out just as fast. Keep it simple, stupid. Not these tens to hundreds of hours of bloat and framing, these kids want to be entertained now, not in five minutes after the cutscene is over.

I guess this is why Xbox is now whatever. They can’t sell themselves as a lifestyle brand with Mountain Dew and Doritos anymore, so they’re going to brand your phone as an Xbox you can play games on while taking a shit at school or work. Gaming has been competing for the same set of customers without expanding. The Hollywood Approach in gaming dooms it to develop and publish games that take over half a decade to develop and try to appease everyone while being aimed at the core audience. It doesn’t work on the long run. There is always a need for variety, and in this grey mass of Triple A all you get is disappointment.

Sure, Nadella, Xbox is competing with other media for the attention of the customer. Xbox becoming a dedicated gaming PC with windows and Steam is just admitting Microsoft failed at console business. You can’t compete with TikTok by offering the same things that are already offered elsewhere better. If you’re selling tomato sauce, you can’t just offer the same kind of tomato sauce your competition is already selling and then say you’re competing with chocolate bars.

This is why I find Xbox as a console so boring in terms of business and games. They never do anything original, and when they do something that causes an uproar, they do the exact same things they’ve always done as a tech company. They don’t create disruptions, they don’t create better value alternatives, they don’t create original IPs that could last (and when they do, they just kill ‘em off), and now you can pick their games wherever the fuck you want. They’re not even a Triple A gaming company, they’re a tech company with all the woes and none of the benefits when it comes to gaming.

Why would you buy a console that has less unique titles than the competition? If Sony’s getting Xbox titles, there is no reason to buy an Xbox outside brand loyalty. But then you’re missing all the Sony titles. But then why buy a PlayStation when you could just buy a gaming PC at the same price and get both systems’ titles? When you’re not competing with Sony, your biggest gaming rival, then who are you competing against? Everything else, it seems.

Xbox isn’t even Pepsi of gaming. When they can’t win at PC gaming, they asked What else people want to play. Then they went to learn lessons from Sega with the Dreamcast and shat out the Xbox. Now that’s failing, and they’re asking What else people are spending their time one, and here we are. Xbox didn’t grow the gaming market in any significant manner, it simply wallowed what was already there. If Microsoft wants to see growth, they need to grow the market itself. This isn’t “modern audiences” garbage, this is about lapsed gamers and people who have never played games before. The industry will not grow unless these people are met with on a level ground.

What these companies need to do is to tear down the walls that are between games and people who would like to, might want to, play them.

We’ve seen what kind of games the younger generation plays. Roblox is what they enjoy, something older gamers have a tough time understanding, and what other publishers don’t get either but still want to replicate the results. We saw the exact same with Fortnite.

“The graveyard of any industry is filled with the headstones of companies who decided to keep doing things the same old way. Playing only on the margin, making things just a little bit better. That strategy works….for a while, but ultimately it’s fatal.”

You can’t disrupt and hope to come at the top in a market if you abandon it.

“We’re not going to grow the market with $1,000 consoles.”

#customerService #electronicGames #games #gaming #microsoft #xbox

Xbox is now a watered down brand

Microsoft has a history with buying gaming companies, having exceedingly large expectations of them, and then proceeding to cull them for not meeting those expectations. They ultimately call the shots what Xbox as a department does. People were calling buying Activision Blizzard deal of the century, something that would forever change gaming. What we got was the same as usual, just with bigger dollars in the play.

Microsoft has never really got console gaming. They were decent when it came to PC market, but console gaming was beyond them. Maybe that’s why they resorted on delivering PC gaming on consoles. Looking back, the Xbox 360 probably wouldn’t have been the limited success it was if the macro-economics hadn’t been in a good shape and a new generation of consumers had come around. Xbox kiddies are now grown up and remember the days they were throwing slurs to each other in online matches with rose-tinted goggles.

MS and Xbox are doing the mistake all businesses tend to do when there’s a downward spiral; hard sale the decreasing customer base. When these last customers realise that they’re paying at least twice as much as they used to, with less other people around, they tend to explore other venues where they get better value for their money. Only the hardest of the core customer will stay to the sad end, and they’ll be monetarily abused all the way. It’ll help to get some money short term, but on the long term it’ll bust the business.

It’s comedic how much Microsoft’s console gaming is only a pale shadow of PC gaming, as now we’re seeing plans and methods of monetization that have been prevalent in mobile gaming, which itself is an extension of PC gaming. Xboxes have always been just dumbed down PCs with the games largely mirroring this. Microsoft never understood console gaming, which is why they’ve always been a massive failure in Japan, and why X360 didn’t sell as well as the Wii, or the PS3 in the end. The same can be said about modern Sony, where their big name titles all look the same, and their pricing has gone to high heavens. Nintendo lost the plot after Iwata as well.

It’s not a big secret what console gaming is supposed to be; an option for home gaming that is uncomplicated, direct and has high value with relatively low pricing point. It has its own culture around it that is different from PC gaming, both among players and developers. Some publishers saw this, but as the division between the two (and the arcade being the third pillar in this house) has been diminished, so has the quality of the product. PC gamers bemoan how games get dumbed down to console gamers with simplified controls or how ports of console games lack options they expect from PC games. Console gamers then get the same deal, dregs and scraps of PC games that are forced into a mold these games don’t really fit. Double stick controls are still only a bad emulation for Mouse and Keyboard. At the same time, M+KB can never beat the immediacy and tactile controls a console pad has. Probably why people are using first and third party console controllers on PCs nowadays a lot. Both sides suffer (while the arcades stay dead.)

The rising prices and chasing higher-end graphics that contribute nothing to the play has been a detriment for consoles. The more expensive and the more inconvenient a console is, the less it performs. The first point we can clearly say Microsoft started the downfall of Xbox was during X360’s and Xbox One’s transition, when they told customers that couldn’t have an always-online console to buy their older machine rather than invest into their newer hotness. Nintendo’s rep said the same thing when asked about customers who wouldn’t afford the Switch 2. It’s not good form and show how little these companies care about their customers. We’ll see if history rhymes.

If the Game Pass has been disastrous to game sales and money gotten out of MS brand games, mainly Call of Duty, then what does that say about smaller publishers’ and developers’ games on it? They’re probably seeing even less individual sales on their games. Game Pass has simply devalued gaming in general and MS is now feeling it themselves. It appears that individual game sales makes more profit than bundling them into an equivalent of Netflix of gaming. So, nickle and diming become the standard because the Netflix model as it is now with games doesn’t work. You will see ads becoming a standard down the line when maximum amount of nickel and diming is met, and then every other thing will be monetized in some fashion. Hell, I can see things like higher graphics settings being monetized on the long run if things keep going on like this.

Then you have the watering down of Xbox as a brand. If everything that can have Game Pass in some form is a Xbox, Xbox is worthless as a brand. Game Pass has replaced it. If rumours about the next Xbox console are true, then having Steam on the system makes it yet another dumbed down PC that offers nothing over buying a standard PC. The same games appear on Steam, Epic and Windows Store anyway. What’s the point of Xbox as a console at this point? At least Nintendo is still offering first party titles that aren’t available anywhere else, even if they’re insane with their pricing.

When services get more expensive and what’s deliver gets worse, people will turn away and spend their money where they get more value. Alternatively, people will go back to piracy, like in Finland. If people running Xbox as a brand wants it to do better, they have to go back to what made the original and 360 cultural touchstones while learning from the mistakes they’ve been doing all this time. Like Xbox brand name on a $1k ROG handheld. They’re contracting the market instead of expanding it, making their hard business even harder for them.

#consoleGaming #customerAndService #electronicGames #games #gaming #microsoft #videoGames #videogames #xbox

History rhymes

The more things change, the more things stay the same. I don’t subscribe to the idea of history repeating itself. Instead, it rhymes. Certain kind of events keep happening generationally, and the whole hundred years cycle seems to have a point to it. That’s enough generations to go through some hardship, who has children seeing what happens, who can’t really get it through with the next generation, and then we lose the point of connection with people and events. Rarely people look at history and learn from it. School teaches as about history, and that’s where we usually stop. That’s good enough. However, politicians and businessmen should learn from history. That changes the game drastically. Resorting to the way of thinking technological and social advancements somehow refute or disvalue the past successes and mistakes.

Things change constantly even if we don’t notice it ourselves. A lot of things don’t matter to us, and we’re lulled that the world is an unchanging place to a certain extent. Take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an example. After the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union fell, that was seen as a certain point where history ended. The Western World would include Russia, as it was seen the democratic change in the country would make all things better. It was a march for all things good. This didn’t happen. A nation and culture going through a shock treatment of sorts, freeing industries and economy from the socialist stranglehold into Russian version of capitalism, but Yeltsin’s government didn’t implement rules and regulations that would direct the change. Instead, the oligarchs would sweep government issued vouchers (that could’ve been traded for shares of a company, deposited in mutual funds, sold or exchanged) from people who didn’t know investing and owning stocks worked, privatizing Russia’s industries to a large extend under their own names. Not that the government could’ve done much to prevent this, they didn’t have the resources or the knowhow.

Fast-forward to 1998 when the Russian government went through a financial meltdown partly how to oligarchs kept fighting with each other. Russia never had a chance with democracy or proper capitalism. The change was too fast and unregulated, letting people who knew how to game the system take advantage of others and thus screwing up the whole pot for everyone. With Putin in the big seat after Yeltsin, the New Millennium saw oligarchs being chased out of Russia, or killed, as a class. His autocracy and direction promised Russian people better living. Under Putin, Russia is a democracy in name only. His long-term leadership has the long cultural aftertaste of the tzars, and in recent years it has gained the poisonous tinge of leader worship in fashion of Stalin.

Despite the recent history of Russia, and the 2014 Annexation of Crimea, Western powers believed Russia to be a benevolent power that was going toward good for all through hard patches. Especially European powers believed there’d be no large-scale war in Europe anymore, but here we now are. Europe’s defences are largely scuffed, major centre powers were reliant on Russian gas for energy while downsizing their nuclear power, and then the Middle East powder keg began to shake again. People know about the history Russian and Middle East history, but only a few would’ve voiced out loud how we’re going to see the shit hitting the fan. We live through history every day. If you look under the crust of it all, we always live in interesting times. Not necessarily directly related to us in any manner, but the psychohistorical forces are working onwards each day. Some work hard to be on the right side of history, but in the moment of things taking place, there is no right or wrong side. That’s for the future generations to decide with (hopefully) better hindsight. They could be completely screwed by the historians interpreting events and people wrong, politicians intentionally changing the story to fit certain narratives to make them and the people feel better.

The whole SARS-Covid-19 Pandemic is an example where this happens. The amount of first-hand anecdotes historians will have to go through in the future is immense thanks to the social media. Then you have all the cases where politicians and the mainstream mass media told the people you wouldn’t get the virus if you were vaccinated. Of course, that’s not how vaccines work; they give you better resistance, but you’ll still catch the virus and can spread it around. Suspicions about the vaccines themselves were raised, seeing they didn’t go through any of the long-term testing other vaccines had to go through. No governing body was ready for the pandemic, and now that we’re at a point where its endemic, the global response was lacklustre.

The idea of global pandemic had been something that belonged in the realms of fiction. Very few people were alive, who had gone through the Spanish Flu, or the Great Influenza Epidemic. We know about it, but no government had anyone who had learned from it. There were no protocols to rely on, no people who had expert knowledge on what to do or how to enact whatever policies. People just did what they thought was the best, with some taking the advantage of the situation, as usual.

How does this reflect on the general motif of the blog? Entertainment doesn’t really change, it reflects the times and cultures it is created in. A parody of the ruling class made in the Ancient Greece has the same pushing power as the modern late-night comedy show dissing whomever is the in the Big Chair. Games naturally are there to offer friendly competition.

Video and computer games are still a relatively young media, but it has already seen a generational change once or twice. Much like how some people can’t stand black-and-white movies or read books that have old-fashioned language, there is a generation that can barely tolerate games that don’t have polygons. First and Second Generation of consoles are outright dismissed as unplayable junk. Quality of life is a must for everything to streamline the experience, which in some cases means cutting out part of the play. I’m looking at you, Monster Hunter.

The US Video Game Crash of 1983 has been exaggerated (mainly by US video game historians) as it had no real effect on the European or Asian markets, where consumers were buying different kind of machines. Often flooding the market with lousy games and rising interest in personal computers are cited as the main reasons why the Crash took place, but rarely the core reasons are pin pointed. The one point I want to put a pin on is how all the suits pushing for more games at a lower quality weren’t players themselves. They understood making money on video games in then-current paradigm, but not how to sustain the market properly. When you’re looking at the numbers, you often forget the people. You may understand what sells, but not why it sells or how to evolve the market. That only leads to weakened state, where you’re open for competition to disturb the market with a new product. In Nintendo’s case, kick the market back into action in the US, while staying in the second place in European markets.

Currently, the major console manufacturers are in a similar position, where they’re running on investor fumes and chasing an unchanging market. Nintendo must rely on their souped-up handheld now to carry them all the while Sony’s porting all their possible system sellers to other platforms and Microsoft has all but waved a white flag on the console business. A competitor could come from the woodworks and offer a home console at an affordable price with attractive exclusive titles, the lifeblood of console gaming. Electronic gaming is so safe nowadays, nobody is taking risks or chancing to kick the industry into a new curve that might excite customers. None of the Three Big Ones have leadership that understands their customers or play games themselves. At its core, the ’83 American Video Game Crash was because of corporate complacency and unwillingness to have customer-driven approach. Then again, both Microsoft and Sony seem to be bending out of the race

Gaming won’t crash a second time, however. Much like how computer gaming got its rise during the Crash in the US (in Europe, micro-computers were already trending over US consoles, with Sega later upping the stage by offering a cheaper and more accessible alternative than its supposed main competitor, Nintendo), modern gaming is rhyming with the small single-developed computer games of the era.

More than a handful of remarkable games were developed by a small team of enthusiastic people working toward their dream. Ultima and Wizardry, the mainstay examples were developed by what’d be called now as indies. Even if the console market crashed, PC gaming kicked off to a whole new start, leading to multiple manufacturers to compete with their own hardware. Atari’s consoles may have been a footnote in the European market on the grand scale, but the Atari’s computers’ rivalry against the Commodore Amiga had its own system war worth talking about one of these days.

The interest in indies hasn’t vaned since the term was coined sometime in the ‘00s. Just the contrary, indies have become the place where people are able to find far more interesting and daring games that big companies aren’t willing to entertain a thought of. Hence, quite many voices says the most interesting games are now found in the indies-sphere. Some claim to have abandoned Triple A games altogether in favour of indie titles. Not just because they’re more interesting, but also because they’re cheaper and often better optimized.

History rhymes in gaming. I’ve seen a steady rise of want for games that are distilled play. People who played one game for hundreds of hours are now looking for games that are shorter and meatier. People want games that have the arcade spirit, games you can get quickly in, have dense play, and you can get quickly out. Life changes. As a kid or a teenager, you’ve got all the time to walk around in a RPG that’s mostly walking around, a hot-air game. After you start getting responsibilities, work starts to take time, kids roll around, and suddenly you find yourself an adult, games fall behind in priority. That’s only natural, but you can’t really let go of a loved hobby. So, games that pack a punch become more valuable. Mega Man 11 was a great entry, because it wasn’t a hot-air game. It was all play, like Classic Mega Man should be. Arcades as a place may have gone the way of the dodo, but the need for games that have the same function has never gone away.

There is a market for console gaming. Sega’s and Nintendo’s mini-consoles sold out fast, necessitating additional production runs. Sony’s mini-PlayStation lingered on the shelves a bit longer, mostly due to the bad choices in its design and game selection. The current state of console gaming is waiting for some company to disrupt it. I know there are Sega diehards who would like see their return to the home-hardware business, but Sega has largely been a Red Ocean company when it came to consoles. One of the reasons why they had lacklustre success in Japan compared to US and Europe, which the Sega of Japan heads didn’t really understand. Sega’s innovation in the arcades never really translated into innovation with consoles, even when they had the best D-Pad in the industry up until the Dreamcast. Apple probably won’t try consoles again thanks to the failure of the Pippin. Google showing how big money can’t really net you a workable console either, especially when you’re tying it into something crippling like cloud service.

Console gaming fails when the companies behind the consoles are failing to deliver. Nowadays, all the consoles are dumbed-down PCs, Xboxes the most. When all systems share the same library, none of them is unique. Nintendo still has an edge in this regard, but even exclusives will carry them only so far. New physical game carts that function as keys to game downloads and customers not even owning their consoles according to their TOS are all steps toward the customer not owning their hardware and software anymore. At some point, anti-consumer antics will come home to roost and then there’s hell to pay. I keep saying exclusives matter with consoles, but at some point the scales will tip to the opposite direction and only sycophants will pay for lesser value hardware and software. History will rhyme at some point, and if console companies don’t realize it, someone else will be taking the top spot. Big things happen and change will take place in your lifetime. It’s just a matter of time. The harmony of things will get disrupted.

#computerGames #design #electronicGames #games #gaming #microsoft #Nintendo #sega #Sony #videoGames #videogames

About Super Mario Bros. and a rant about game reviews lacking focus on technology

I just recently played through Super Mario Bros. through without Warps or skips for the first time in a few decades. It’s a challenge, especially without Warps. I made a note how in World 4-2 gets harder in its layout and enemies just after the spot where you can get to Warp via beanstalk. This is where the first Buzzy Beetles appear, mirrored to a Green Koopa Troopa. You can get a Star above it, but first time players wouldn’t know you can’t hurt them with a Fireball, leading to an easy death if you’re rushing things.

Rushing things was something I kept doing too much, trying to rely on my atrophied muscle memory and skill I don’t have any more. There’s over 200 seconds in the timer, I could afford to slow down and take in the game’s design the way I properly never had before. While I’m more partial for physics found in Mega Man, the way Mario retains motion and accelerates allows tight control. More skilled players can blaze through the game and abuse some of the coding bugs and quirks, but for a normal player the game is coded so no bugs or errors appear outside some hitbox interactions. Like in World 8-3, where kicking a Koopa shell often misses Hammer Bros. despite the stage layout being designed for it. I recall this being fixed in Mario All-Stars.

Super Mario Bros. is a wonderful game, outmatched by pretty much every single action game that followed it, but nevertheless a joy to play. Being able to choose a stage after finishing the game is a fun thing, and the Hard Mode is for players who want more punishing enemies and stage elements. It’s not Lost Levels, but still.

The main reason I picked up SMB as my weekend game out of all others is because I wanted to stand by my words. You can find tons of references to the game on this blog, and going back with older set of eyes made me appreciate the game slightly more. In a few ways, SMB is almost a perfect game, a perfect home console game. You get fast into it, the game doesn’t waste your time. The game’s mechanics are very easy to learn, but ultimately hard to master. Once you master them, you can proceed to break it. I never really mastered the game, I never could pull off Infinite Lives trick. Not that it is needed, but it’d be nice to have. The music and sounds are all apt, and for a game that’s running on the most bare bones of NES hardware without any extra bells and whistles when it comes to mappers, it’s just nice. SMB was supposed to be the last, greatest cartridge game Nintendo published to the Famicom after all, just before the launched the Disk System. Hindsight is 20/20.

Games don’t become old because technology advances, game become old if there if newer games are better. While subjective, we have objective metrics on which we can measure how well a game is made on. Most of that is subject how well the game is coded and good the controls are. Ghost’n Goblins’ NES port isn’t a good game because its coding is an awful mess, for example. Its various other ports are a lot better though. For example, the Amiga port is a superb game, as is the Saturn port. Not too many games can hit the level of quality SMB has, and when they do, you can often find the stage designs being overly obtuse or some mechanical gimmick being introduced to make it stand separate. Part of why SMB plays so well is because it is very distilled down to the core; there are no unnecessary extra bits bolted unto it to mess it up. Even Nintendo messes this up, introducing gimmicks to Mario games that add no value to the game or its play.

Sometimes I check a younger Youtuber doing a review on older games. Sometimes they mention how they don’t have intentions to consider the times the game was made in, or put the game in its place in its era. All that matters if the game is worth playing now or something else along those lines. I find this a weak justification to ignore what the game was made to be played on, as that discolours the objectivity of the review. Unless we accept that Super Mario Bros. was made to be played on a forty years old console on a CRT, we can’t really have an objective view on it. Sure we can play it on other consoles via re-releases, but as we know, modern technology throws a few monkey wrenches into the mix that make the play less than ideal. Be it from introducing save states to LCD screen lag compared to CRT, the play will be inherently different. Especially on emulators, where people can further muddle up the play as they want.

I inherently distrust a reviewer who doesn’t consider the context of the game. If we don’t, I might as well exclaim stupidly that we might as well delete all the video and computer games from last console generation onwards. Clearly, these are inferior products as they’re on inferior hardware and offer lesser play than newer games. On the other hand, it is also apparent the generations you grew up with are the best and exempt from the whole shebang. You would be surprised how many kids these days have told me that the Seventh console generation was the peak of gaming, that the competition between the 360 and PS3 was the greatest thing there was, with the Wii being a great outlier. Similarly I’ve met people who consider the Sixth Gen to be the best there ever was, citing the massive library the PS2 had, how Xbox introduced online gaming to consoles and how Super Smash Bros. Melee is the best fighting game out there still. The point being, we often forget the context games were made in and what were their limitations. Video and computer games, broadly speaking, have no limitations as they used to have.

Let’s dismiss those hyperbole and superlatives, and let me squeeze the juice out of that; we can’t dismiss the era a game was made in no matter how much we’d like to.

Technology advances, but a game’s play doesn’t. It’ll always stay the same no matter on what future technology it is put on. Recognizing that SMB is a NES game made in a certain moment in time to a certain platform with technological limitations on can only elevate a review, because it would recognize the passage of time and in comparison to any game that’s on better technology.

Hell, I’d go as far as argue that game reviews should put more emphasize on how well current technology is being used alongside its coding. If a generic engine like Unreal is used, then there needs to be even more scrutinizing whether or not the engine is used to its utmost extent and how well it has been modified for the game. We don’t see most reviews mentioning any of these, because most game reviewers aren’t considering the technology at all.

Of course, consumers aren’t thinking about the technology either, generally speaking. The only place where discussion about hardware and coding rears its ugly head is when people discuss low framerates, bugs and play issues. Graphics is something that’s an inherent part of PC gaming culture, so we can dismiss it. I’m like a broken clock with this, but we can’t really escape the unoptimised games nowadays with uncompressed data galore. Developers and publishers are largely moving towards technological progress that isn’t valuable to the consumers, which in turn make developing games cost more and more. One of the many reasons why games end up costing 70 to 100 euro now, if not more. If any of these companies would practice the Blue Ocean strategy any more, they’d aim to product with value to the customer with lower cost. This can be done, and it has been done multiple time in gaming history. It will be done again, once companies and corporations realize ever-rising costs to consumers isn’t the healthiest way of making money.

We can’t really expect reviewers to spend time to look behind the curtains about games though. Very, very few reviewer is adept at coding and looking at how a game is made. Most we can do, in general, is to look at the results how they play. One Youtube channel concentrates solely on framerates and ignores pretty much everything else how a game is built and how it functions, be it enemy AI or something else, and makes a call whether or not a game plays well. I honestly can’t recall what its name is.

There’s no depth when it comes to discussion about the technology behind video games in reviews, but maybe that just reflects the general consumers. Perhaps very few people are interested in reading about the tech, and outlets have optimised their content to match the general consumer expectations. Maybe publishers and devs themselves aren’t really adept making statements about their games outside broad strokes if a game is marketing itself with some kind of technological breakthrough or advancement. These often end up being a dud. The real magic happens behind the scenes, and perhaps that’s where its fated to be in. Ultimately, the consumer shouldn’t really care about the technology behind how things work, but it sure would make their life that much more easier.

Classics sold well for many reasons in their time, and the same classics keep selling nowadays whenever they get new ports. I find it foolish to forget their context in favour of favour of sterile, clinical reviews.

#electronicGames #games #gaming #mario #Nintendo #videoGames #videogames