I still don't see the cause for hate on the eco-cases. They're not that flimsy.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
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Take a look at this. “In the short term, some publishers will attempt to exploit higher prices on the iPad, but we absolutely believe that the future of the ecosystem will be Freemium,” offered Jeffery. “Our entire strategic approach is about building Free-2-Play games and monetising against usage. We believe that consumers should pay for what they enjoy, rather than pay for trial, and we believe that extends to the iPad.” You have to laugh when someone tries to alter the basic relationship of game company and consumer. It never works. But they keep trying and keep hailing it as the next big thing ever. The basic relationship is this: game companies put out premium content. Consumers go out and buy the premium content if it fancies them. This basic relationship will continue indefinitely. Book companies put out books which are ‘premium writing’ and customers may or may not purchase them. Movie companies put out movies which are ‘premium video’ and customers may or may not purchase a ticket for them. Freemium is a polite way of saying crappy content. Can someone point to me a business model where freemium works (that isn’t supported by advertising)? People are driven to content and will pay money for it. “We have certainly seen that App Sales in the US for the first couple of months of the iPad’s life are reflective of higher pricing and quality expectations,” he said. “Apps like Numbers, Pages, Keynote and a number of other productivity apps are still high in the Paid chart, which signifies that the device is being used in a ‘higher’ capacity. “However, games also dominate both the Free and Paid iPad charts – a highly significant indication that a shift away from traditional console videogame usage toward mobile gaming is occurring.” When his own data shows that people are willing to pay for premium content on the platform he is supposed to represent, he dismisses it! Amazing! How does games dominating both the Free and Paid iPad charts indicate a shift? Premium game software is still selling well on home consoles (provided it has quality content). Disruption is about selling crappy products to crappy customers. Disruptive products are often cheaper than what they are disrupting. iPad is very expensive. The customers who are purchasing the iPad certainly are not ‘crappy customers’ but are very much gadget lovers. In other words, if there was disruption you would see housewives and grandmas buying the iPad (they would qualify as ‘crappy customers’ to tech products). You aren’t seeing it because it isn’t disruptive. “The iPhone disrupted the mobile industry and the development community in several profound ways,” he said “Usage changed, friction reduced, and iTunes as a pre-established content path broke down the traditional carrier-provided content model.” This is not true. The iPhone was never a disruptive product. The authors of the disruption literature even point this out. iPhone was essentially a ‘better smartphone’. What the iPhone differed is that it was a type of mobile computer instead of just being a powerful cell phone. iPhone was not a crappy product for crappy customers. And iPhone’s growth has come from customers abandoning other cell phones. They could argue the iPod was disruptive but that was many, many years ago. “The iPad will disrupt the netbook and potentially laptop and living room videogame console model in an evolutionary way – building on those areas of disruption pioneered by the iPhone and the iPod before it.” Simon Jeffrey has no clue what disruption is. There is no such thing as ‘evolutionary way’ in disruption. This is why it is called ‘disruption’ in the first place because it defies the ‘evolutionary way’. Building on areas is called ‘sustaining innovations’. The only way how iPad will be disruptive is through a new advertising model. But this will not break in traditional gamers. It will not break in the old school gamers. It will unlikely break in untraditional gamers. No matter what type of gamer is the person, they all desire high quality content. Freemium models and even advertising models are insufficient to create high quality content. The iPhone cannot even put a dent in the DS. Yet, Simon Jeffrey thinks the iPad is going to cannibalize console market gaming? Good grief. Back in the 1980s, the home console market was declared dead forever not because of the Atari Crash. It was said that the rise of home computers made home consoles obsolete. Since consoles can only play games and computers can do that and everything else, why buy a home console? When the NES arrived, no one paid any attention to it because it was a Japanese 8-bit console when home computers were going 16-bit. The NES disrupted because it was a crappy product for crappy customers. The crappy customers to home computers were children. Children could not easily use the computer or play its complex games. Families could not gather around the home computer to play together. The gameplay of Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda was not new (except to the children at the time). What was new was the content. No one has ever made a game as vast as The Legend of Zelda back in its day. No one had ever imagined Mushroom Kingdom which is a video game wonderland. The issue that no one from Apple is bothering to address, and I suspect it is a legitimate mistake made from the top of the company (of those who are ignorant of gaming), is that computer gaming does not infringe on console gaming. Both computer gaming and console gaming have existed side by side in parallel for decades. The iPad/iPhone are computers and their impact will be limited on the computer side of the equation. Some companies who wish to be like computers, such as Sony, might be impacted. But there is a reason why the DS, released in 2004 (before the Video iPod was even released) still keeps going and going despite the Apple fanboy chorus from Roughlydrafted.com and other areas of the ‘DS’s demise’. If the iPhone didn’t have an impact, why would anyone think the iPad would? |
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Note: This was written several days ago in a draft and is only being put up today. Aside from focusing on Nintendo, the second company I keep tabs on the most is Blizzard. Having seen and participated with Blizzard since when they were just like fifteen people, it is great fun for me to watch them grow and continue to rake in the money. Blizzard’s success is what game companies used to do and what many companies would still be doing if they weren’t taken over by the ‘Industry’. Interestingly, Blizzard is the only game company who confirms that pioneering new gameplay is not important. Blizzard’s priority has been content (though they express that in different ways). On the Blizzcast podcasts, such as #2, you will even hear them say that the focus isn’t the gameplay but ‘the world’, the ‘continuum’. In other words, Blizzard will bend the gameplay of Starcraft 2 around in order for the ultralisk to become useful (as opposed to removing the ultralisk). Content is king at Blizzard. As part of my gaming entertainment, I enjoying laughing at the ‘hardcore’. The ‘hardcore’ live in some distant fictional universe where they, alone, move around like angels where ‘casual gamers’ are like stinking mortals of flesh and bone crawling like worms on the face of the Earth. Starcraft 2′s certainly has its share of ‘hardcore’ and, ironically, they all huddle around the Team Liquid forum. I’ve mentioned one interview in the past by one of its forum owners named ‘Nazgul’ or something. In the interview, he said it was bad how in Starcraft 2, people could select more units than ’12′ and that improvements of the interface meant ‘less skill’ for the game. This struck me as extremely funny so I would joke that in order to create more ‘skill’, it should take more button presses to do actions and unit selection should be limited to only two units maximum. Reading their forum is an absolute hoot. Imagine tons of ‘hardcore’ gamers all concentrated in one area and they are in ‘rage mode’ all the time. Rage about what? Well, it changes day to day. But they are constantly enraged. Today they say it is about Bnet 2.0. Yesterday, they said it was about lack of diversity for Zerg. Day before that, they said it was because of Terran imbalanced. As with most people in rage, what they say they are angry about is not the case. Here is the ‘hardcore bubble’ pattern that goes on with many games: 1) Game comes out and is popular. A, B, C then loop over again and again in a constant cycle. The true cause for the rage is best illustrated in this delightful metaphor. A fish feels good when it is the big fish in the pond. The fish thought he was the ‘big fish’ in the pond because of his intelligence, skill, mastery, and whatever else. The humiliating truth is that the ‘big fish’ is big only because the pond shrank. Once the pond gets larger, the ‘big fish’ suddenly becomes a small fish and just like all the other fish. In other words, most normal people left Starcraft 1 a while ago to play other games or do other things with their life. It is normal and proper that they do so. The people who remained playing began imagining themselves as ‘so awesome’. They thought they were ‘so awesome’ based of whatever characteristic about themselves they admire. But now that the masses are returning for when Starcraft 2 launches, the so-called ‘Starcraft 1′ experts are discovering that they were big fish only because the pond was small. Now that the pond has grown, their status has shrank. In life, business, and love, the more relevant someone becomes, the calmer and more confident that person will be. The more irrelevant someone becomes, the more rage prone, less confident, and increasingly panic-stricken that person will be. I believe the so-called ‘hardcore’ Starcraft 1 players are finding themselves becoming more and more irrelevant with each new day the closer Starcraft 2 comes. This is why they find everything and anything wrong with Starcraft 2. Let me use another example. Remember when Super Smash Brothers Brawl came out? The same phenomenon occurred. The ‘expert’ Melee players were unhappy despite their supreme anticipation. We see this phenomenon occur with almost every sequel to a popular game. Starcraft 2 is a little unique in that it has been twelve years since Starcraft 1. This means the ‘hardcore bubble’ is far larger than normal. It will pop in a most dramatic fashion. Behind every ‘rage’, there is a quiet hiss which mouths that the ‘community’/ ‘fans’, e.g. the “hardcore, experts”, are the true source to the game’s “greatness”. “HELLO BLIZZARD! KNOW THAT IT IS THE FANS AND COMMUNITY THAT MAKE THE GAME WORK! HELLO! HELLO!” Apparently, Blizzard doesn’t make the game work at all. In their view, the Blizzard developer should wake up, load up Team Liquid on their web browser, study the ‘posts’ with extreme intensity, make certain ‘posts’ as company wide memos (no, not making this up. Team Liquid actually believes this should occur…), and when the SC 2 beta was beginning some people there thought game companies would come and pay Team Liquid to ‘test their games’ (hahahahahahaha). It should be noted that most of the people at ‘Team Liquid’ are kids who are younger than 30. Many of them did not even hit puberty until well after Starcraft 1 came out. The ‘elder’ ones there seem to have been in the middle of puberty when Starcraft 1 came out. Much of the ‘rage’ seems legitimate to them only because of their youth. Those who are older have seen this pattern and have a far more calm demeanor. More humorous to me is how they place the picture of the lead designer of Starcraft 2, Dustin Browder, on a dart board. I am not speaking metaphorically. Some of them actually do place his picture on a dartboard! The kiddies there all think they know how to make a better game than Blizzard. They are mad at Browder who revealed the Starcraft 2 creation process was ‘to make an interesting unit first’ and then try to find a role for that unit. The Team Liquid people think this is all wrong. Since Team Liquid who has designed more best selling games than Blizzard, it is right and proper they tell that awful Dustin Browder how it is done. “You know what a game company should do?” says a reader. “They should throw millions of dollars at these ‘experts’ and have them make a video game.” This has occurred before. The game, made by ‘expert players’, was ‘Master of Orion 3′ which completely destroyed the fine Master of Orion series. This is why I say if you think you know how to make a game, try making one and putting it out there. The marketplace will humble you real quickly. Another funny aspect of Team Liquid is the ‘time capsule’ the people appear to be in. For example, they still refer to custom games as ‘UMS’. ‘UMS’ stood for ‘Use Map Settings’ which was done for Starcraft 1 but that term hasn’t been used in any RTS games since (not in Warcraft 3 or Starcraft 2.) Another one that pops up is the use of the word ‘mod’ meaning adding data files to the main directory of the game. This was done in earlier RTS games but has been made obsolete in later RTS games, such as Warcraft 3, since the files are embedded within the map. To those who think “a few mb isn’t enough, I need gbs and tbs”, know that a bad game maker relies on tons of data space. Aside from a few icons, a map like DOTA had no custom assets except the bloated title screen that took up 90% of the map data size. These people need to get up to date on their terms. It is ridiculous to use terms like ‘UMS’ when ‘Use Map Settings’ doesn’t even exist and hasn’t in RTS games for almost a decade.
So grab some popcorn and enjoy the show. The meltdown will intensify the closer and closer the game launches. |
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Dear Malstrom. I am emailing this link to you if you haven’t seen it already. http://www.incgamers.com/Interviews/270/blizzards-frank-pearce-interview This is it. I will no longer buy any more Blizzard games. Before, Blizzard said that they were looking into the features that the fans really wanted, but now they sayt that they were never planned. It turns out that the awesome Battle.net2.0 that Blizzard said would make us forget about LAN was actually a gimped version of the older Battle.net but with Facebook integration and achievements. The detachment to the community that this interview is revealing is astonishing. “We will not add chat rooms, are you sure you really wanted them?” And it gets worse. Before, on any Blizzard game, you could play on other region’s servers no problem, but now it turns out you need to buy 2 versions of the same game if you want to play cross-region. Just look at the Teamliquid reaction. Never have I seen TL so unified, or any fanbase so unified for that matter. I have had my doubts about Blizzard before when they announced that they were releasing the game split into three parts and there would be no LAN, but I always trusted that they would be able to compansate it somehow, and make an awesome Battle.net2.0 service. I was worried about the competitiveness of the game becasue the way that the units behaved didn’t make for any cool micro tricks you can do like in SC1. But since they made the new macro mechanics of each race to be an APM sink and some really cool new abilities, and that they (somewhat) listened to the fans when they made the Phoenix to be able to move and shoot made me at least have hope for the game. Now, I’m not sure I even want this to be resolved. From one of your previous blog posts, I take it you’re in the WC3 camp when it comes to Blizzard RTS games, but you have to understand that the subtle ways that the units interracted with each other and could be microed against each other was a good thing that made for many layers of skill (Without making it harder for newer players! It just gave the game a higher skill ceiling without affecting the skill floor! Easy to learn, hard to master!) and many cool combat situations. If the game were to truly progress, the subtle SCBW unit interraction should have been combined with the micro of WC3, not replaced by it. And this is Starcraft, not Warcraft, is it really fair to SC players to bring Warcraft elements that they didn’t like into a game with the Starcraft name? Anyway, I’m getting a bit off topic. Point is, Blizzard just lost a customer, and I hope they will loose many more. (unless they somehow fix this mess) The same hostility that you feel towards 3D Mario, I now feel against Battle.Net2.0. This is an important email, and I know my response is likely going to anger you (and perhaps get other people angry). So let me go through it one piece at a time. Let’s start with the comparison of 3D Mario. I do not hate 3D Mario. I just think 3D Mario is not Mario at all. A good comparison of 2D Mario to 3D Mario would be Pac-Man to Pac-Man 2.
Pac-Man was a huge phenomenon, and it had some amazing sequels such as Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man Junior. When Pac-Man 2 came out, it was a 2d platformer. Some people liked it. But many Pac-Man fans did not like it. We wanted more regular Pac-Man (which we wouldn’t really see until Pac-Man Championship Edition). Instead, Namco would rather try to cram Pac-Man the Platformer down our throats. Namco was confused as to why Pac-Man 2 did not sell like oldschool Pac-Man. The main character, Pac-Man, was there. He would eat power pellets. He would avoid ghosts. Why didn’t people transition to Pac-Man 2? The answer is because Pac-Man 2 was not Pac-Man at all. It was a totally different game. No one at Namco wanted to make classic type Pac-Man games anymore and kept trying to make a 2d platformer. The parallel is that developers at Nintendo really love 3d Mario and keep making it. However, the audience does not see 3d Mario as a Mario game. They see it as a totally different game. The reason why I call New Super Mario Brothers Wii the name of Mario 5 is because it is the true successor to Super Mario World. Mario 64, Mario Galaxy, etc. are not bad games. They are very good games. But they are not mainline Mario games. When Nintendo made 2d Mario on the DS and Wii, they got massive, massive sales. A similar divide occurs with classic Zelda and modern Zelda. In classic Zelda, the game was action packed, and I could run around and explore at my leisure. But modern Zelda is ‘story based’ and the game is more about solving puzzles than being about action. It feels like a very different game. Since Zelda has not been selling well, I believe the antidote to Zelda is to incorporate the classic values into it. Note that my complaint isn’t that the game is in 3d (just as my complaint about 3d Mario is that it is in 3d). My complaint is that the game skeleton has radically changed and become something else completely. This is why I tried to call 3d Mario as ‘Star Finder Mario’ since all you do is run around trying to find stars. In 2d Mario, you just kept moving to the right and hopped on the flagpole. I believe the Wii Revolution was, in great part, an Old School Revolution as many of the hit games from Wii Sports to Wii Play to Mario 5 all had those Old School values which Nintendo abandoned during the 64 bit and Gamecube eras (and Microsoft and Sony do not have at all). Nintendo has a monopoly on the Old School if they have the courage to seize it. The reason why I champion the Old School is not just because it includes myself but it is the ‘invisible market’ and its values built up gaming and will save gaming today. I delight that children will grow up playing a 2d Mario on a home console again. I just wish children could grow up playing Zelda. Here is where I part ways with you. You say that Starcraft 2 is diverging away from what made Starcraft 1 great (and you cite the micro). I believe the people who know the least about why Starcraft 1 became great are the regulars at Team Liquid forum. Just because you play a game a ton, even if you write essays about it, doesn’t mean you understand why it sells. Hell, sometimes the developers do not understand why a game sells. There were many RTS games around the same time Starcraft came out. What Starcraft excelled at was the three unique races and differentiating them. The content of Starcraft, like all Blizzard games, was extremely well polished. But Starcraft always was the ‘noob RTS’ and the thought of anyone taking it seriously I think is funny. (And yes, I do find South Korea’s tastes as funny.) If you wanted a more complex RTS game, you would have played Age of Empires or Dark Reign or maybe even Total Annihilation. Blizzard RTS games were always considered ‘cartoony’ and very much ‘for the noobs’. Interestingly, this is what people say about World of Warcraft today. Team Liquid really showed their colors when they began to bash Warcraft 3 gamers. They also regularly attack Command and Conquer fans. Now, why attack people who are fans of RTS games not named Starcraft? Beats me. But places like Team Liquid have all the classic signs of ‘hardcore hive’ mentality. These people literally believe they are the ‘elite gamers’. As I said in the post earlier, I believe the main reason why there is so much ‘rage’ is because as Starcraft 2 nears release, reality and these ‘elite gamers’ are colliding. The imaginary world these ‘elite gamers’ have created for themselves never truly existed. This is why, out of the blue, “everything” is wrong with Starcraft 2. A few months ago, “everything” was right with the game. I predict as the launch date grows near, the hostility to Starcraft 2 will only increase from these ‘elite gamers’. But let’s look at the issues people are complaining at one at a time. Where is the micro in Starcraft 2? If you want micro in a RTS game, play Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 is amazing with its demands on micro. But wait, the ‘elite gamers’ said “Warcraft 3 is stupid.” Why? Because it has some creeps and heroes? It is still very much a RTS game and still obeys RTS game rules. The truth is that Warcraft 3 was so complicated with its interlocking auras and diverse amount of micro that it went over most people’s heads. Ironically, the game ended up being ‘too hardcore’ which is why many people gravitated to Tower Defense, dungeon crawler, and DOTA custom games. I cannot take any micro complaints to Starcraft 2 seriously because these same identical complainers dismissed the micro-heavy Warcraft 3. Also, there is tons of micro in Starcraft 2 if you wish to use it. You mentioned the Phoenix. Also, there is the Phoenix ability that lifts units up. There are the stalkers with their blink. There are the roaches with their burrow move. There are the void rays that require their beam to charge and can continue firing while moving. There is the Queen spawn larva, the chrono boost, the M.U.L.E.s, and so on. There is tons of micro in the game. But Starcraft 2, like Starcraft 1, is also more dependent on macro. In other words, the more units you have the more likely you will win. If you want to see a few units wipe out an army in a micro-heavy way, then play Warcraft 3. I’ve discovered most of the Starcraft 2 complainers do not understand Warcraft 3. All the things they are demanding with micro have already been made. And to be bluntly honest, most of the Starcraft 1 hardcore do not sound like they know much about RTS games in general. I find it very difficult to take anything they say seriously when their reactions attack every other RTS game not named Starcraft yet they are so cowardly they do not stand behind what they say. What they do instead is gather around an altar called ‘community’ (which isn’t a ‘community’ at all but just some message forums) and proclaim their ranting is obedience to the Community God. Starcraft 2 doesn’t have LAN. This is old news. Anyone complaining about it today is just trying to find something to complain about. It is water under the bridge. Starcraft 2 will have two expansion packs. We must buy the game three times! This isn’t true at all. The ‘three games’ have turned into one game with two expansion packs. All of Blizzard games have had one expansion pack in the past. Now, there is just one extra. When people mention this, I know they are just trying to find something to complain about. Unlike previous expansions, the multiplayer expansions do not have to be bought. The expansions are primarily for single player. Blizzard has said they do not wish to segregate the Starcraft 2 players by the different expansions. So the ‘new content’ will come in a patch. (This is as I understand it. Blizzard may have changed this lately. Right now, Blizzard is too focused on getting Wings of Liberty out before they can really sit down and tackle Heart of Swarm.) With the longevity of Blizzard games, I’ve always found every Blizzard expansion pack to be worth it. Blizzard did not make a ‘Counterstrike’ like Westwood did. In order to play with people in another region, you must buy the game of that region. While this is different from the previous Blizzard games, this is very common with many games today. It appears the region locking is to help control piracy. Again, I go back to the value argument. Blizzard games and their longevity are of such value that buying a game in order to play with people in that region doesn’t sound ‘outrageous’ to me. Especially considering that once you have the game, you can play it forever (until Blizzard shuts down the servers). I find the ‘outrage’ over this issue hollow because it is the equivalent of not playing WoW for four months. Most games today do not allow you to play against anyone in the world. Starcraft 2 isn’t doing anything different. It is a very different world today than when Starcraft 1 came out. Starcraft 2 may not have chat rooms. As a suggestion to people trying to persuade Blizzard on this issue, instead of saying, “WE ARE DA COMMUNITY, BLIZZARD! DO WHAT WE SAY!”, say something like “You spent a great effort putting in these achievements. How are we going to show them off if there are no chat channels?” I expect private chat channels will eventually be put back in. What it will likely be is some sort of ‘clan channel’ instead. But believe it or not, I have to agree with Blizzard on this one. In Warcraft 3, the chat channels became a cesspool that was filled with lewd behavior and potty mouth kids. It was filled with spammers and with bots. The only real benefit to the chat channels was that you could do something while waiting for the game to find players. As for me, I would recite Shakespeare monologues in a public channel and see how far I got before the game connected me. I remember with the original Starcraft, not long after the game came out, going to the chat window thingy and tried to think of the most absurd chat channel name to join. So I thought of a channel name I knew wouldn’t exist. I typed in ‘sex’ and, lo and behold, I discovered a full channel filled with trading and dealing and likely some prostitution rings. I was shocked that stuff like this was going on below the surface and within Starcraft. With their game being used in such a manner, I can see why Blizzard wants to place the axe on the chat channels. In Warcraft 3, they were even worse. Chat channels introduce a part of the Bnet experience that Blizzard cannot control. So they clearly do not want to do it. However, I expect them to put in some sort of chat channel substitute. Some people who are trying to compare the lack of chat channels to lack of dedicated servers in Modern Warfare 2 are really stretching it. If there is any equivalent to the lack of dedicated servers in MW 2, it would have been the removal of LAN. And crying about the removal of LAN is ridiculous since it is already very old news. You either accept it at this point or don’t. In addendum, I would not be surprised if the standard Blizzard message forums are eventually phased out in the future. There is no reason for a company to allow anyone to post whatever he or she likes on their own website (a reason why I do not allow comments on my website). The current behavior on the forums will likely lead to the removal of them. Blizzard has been killed by Activision. Starcraft 2 is nothing but trying to get monetary gain. This is flat out not true. Blizzard does not answer to Bobby Kotick, and there are legal protections of Blizzard. Blizzard is not owned by Activision in the same way as, say, Infinity Ward was. If Kotick waddled over and told the Blizzard developers what game they should be making, the Blizzard guys could tell Kotick to go fly a kite. Power within a business is based on how much cashflow on e is responsible for. Blizzard is responsible for a massive amount of cashflow. No one is going to tell Blizzard what to do. I can assure you that the Starcraft 2 direction has nothing to do with Activision or Bobby Kotick. This is how Blizzard wants it. One thing many people do not know about Blizzard devs is that they are HUGE Xbox Live fans. This is a big reason why Bnet 2.0 is Bnet 2.0. The charge that Blizzard is only interested in monetary gain also doesn’t fly. Why is Starcraft 1 still being supported when Blizzard could shut down the servers and have people transition to Starcraft 2? It is not in Blizzard’s interest to keep paying for Starcraft 1′s service. Why give away the Galaxy Editor? It would make more sense for Blizzard to sell it if they were interested in monetary gain. Why allow people to get the multiplayer upgrades of the expansion packs without paying for them? That doesn’t sound like monetary gain there. Why not charge people per time for their use of online multiplayer? Aside from places like Brazil and Russia, this isn’t being done. Blizzard is having the service be free. Despite its issues, the service is very expensive to run. Why should Blizzard offer it for free? I don’t think people realize how much Blizzard could be clamping down on if they wanted to rake in money. I’m not seeing anything done with Starcraft 2 that is that different from the usual Blizzard way of doing things (with the main exception of removing LAN). In these situations, I must ask myself: “Is this a legitimate complaint or are people just going into nerd rage like gerbils falling off the wheel?” In this case, I’d have to say it is just baseless nerd-rage. People bringing up issues that are well under the bridge, like lack of LAN support, tells me they are just trying to find reasons to rage. And why are they trying to find reasons to rage? It is because the Era of Starcraft 1 Hardcore is over. Or to put another way, I relish the destruction of the Starcraft 1 Hardcore. When I played Starcraft or any RTS game back in the day, I played it for fun. I played it as a video game. The Starcraft 1 hardcore do not wish to play a game like Starcraft 2 for fun. They play it as a bizarre type of ego-machine and eerily remind me of the WoW hardcore raiders. If you spend your day playing Starcraft for 13 to 16 hours a day, it doesn’t matter how many games you win, you lose the big game of life. Video games are supposed to supplement our lives, not be our lives. There is a difference between being a video game fan and being a video game fanatic. This fanaticism is actually harming Starcraft in the long run, and it is long time for it to be smoked out. Another reason why I detest the Starcraft 1 hardcore is their blind hatred to other RTS games including Warcraft 3. Starcraft 1 was never that great of a RTS game. Just because you grew up with it doesn’t mean it was that good. This Saturday, I watched the so-called “Team Liquid” invitational challenge where they supposedly play for money (not much money though. Neighborhood poker matches easily exceed the amount of prize money they had). What was entertaining about the games was the commentators who got super excited when a scv would get killed. The players, themselves, were not that good. The Little One, who is said to be ‘super creative’, did nothing creative at all in his games and just ended up being rolled by traditional roaches and corrupters. Oh wait, he used a planetary fortress as a base defense. That wasn’t creative, it was dumb as he lost the game and I don’t think the fortress ever fired a single time at anything. In the final games, I saw just traditional attacks and watched so-called “pro-player” Idra make Copper Player moves like sending in countless hydralisks to be burnt to a crip by the long lasers from Collossi. I’ve watched other tournament replays as well. Unless the game of Starcraft 2 is new to you, I don’t see why these games are interesting at all (without their peppy commentators who squeal at the sight of a worker dying. It is entertaining how they find even the initial worker versus worker dual with the beginning scouts to be an ‘epic battle’ hahaha). With those invitationals, they appear to be inviting the same people over and over again. With tens of thousands of beta players, you’d think you would see different people than just a dozen. Starcraft 1 was a ton more fun before the ‘Starcraft Hardcore’ came to be. One of my complaints is the stupid notion of people tying ‘gg’ at the end of every match or ‘gl hf’ at the beginning of them. You have a freaking keyboard in front of you. How can these Starcraft 1 players who brag about their micro cannot micro enough to type in half a dozen letters from their full-sized keyboard that even the average grandmother can do? The only reason why anyone says the ‘gg’ Internet lingo is because they are imitating Koreans. So most of all, I am sick and tired of the bullshit Korean worship from the Starcraft 1 hardcore. It reminds me, in a micro way, how in the 80s many people thought the Japanese were the ‘real gamers’ and everyone should imitate them. E-sports did not begin in South Korea. E-Sports was going on and was far more popular back during the 80s.
Above: Now THIS is real E-Sports. That cartridge alone is worth more than what people think. And… *gasp*… some of this occurred in AMERICA. I even remember the ‘Archon’ Tournaments. And that was the early 1980s. E-Sports is a very old phenomenon. But it comes and goes with particular games. It has never turned into a game industry despite people trying. I don’t think Blizzard will succeed in this where others had failed. South Korea ‘E-Sports’ has already generally collapsed with people trying to fix matches. It’s time to get rid of the incessant ‘Korean worship’ from Starcraft. None of it is productive or helpful. If you are in Europe, play your game like a European. If in America, play like an American. Act like a Korean when you are on their servers. I’m running into more and more people who played RTS games back during the early days of Blizzard and are just shaking their heads at the junk going around today. Back during the Kali days, no one would be taking the game so seriously. I wish Shlonglor still had his game site so he could make fun of these people (the reason why he doesn’t is because he works at Blizzard now, alas). But I know for sure that the people back then would not be acting in the entitlement manner these ‘hardcore’ are today. People complain about the lack of micro. Let me tell you about how Warcraft 2 removed the micro ability from the archers in Warcraft 1. In Warcraft 1, the archers could continue moving around shooting at the orcs. In Warcraft 2, they stopped and then shot. This was horrible to Warcraft 1 players! But yet Warcraft 2 put Blizzard on the map. I thought Starcraft was a decline over Warcraft 2 due to the lack of ‘boats’ and islands (and the interesting gameplay which it caused). I was concerned that Warcraft 3 was going to ruin the Warcraft franchise because of how much they changed in the storyline and how significantly different the game was to Starcraft. I thought World of Warcraft was going to be a bad joke. If there are two game companies people should never underestimate, the first would be Nintendo and the second would be Blizzard. Someone point to me the failed games that Blizzard has published. There are none. All of them have been blockbuster hits. This doesn’t mean Starcraft 2 will follow the same way. However, probability points that it will. But most of all, I am saddened that gamers do not exercise critical thinking anymore. What they do, instead, is surrender all their thinking to message forums such as Team Liquid and point to a ‘consensus’ as a “conclusion”. Message forums are breeding grounds for errors and lunacy. In the past few days, I have seen their rapid complaining be imitated by those on the Bnet message forums. These people outside did not reach this conclusion independently. They are just mindless herd followers. They even copy and post posts from Team Liquid into the general Blizzard forums. Why do they do this? I don’t know. And I bet they don’t know either. I wish players like yourself would come to your own conclusion based on your own critical thinking. Why let message forums decide your thinking on matters? If you do this, the next thing you know you will be spouting Korean lingo during your Starcraft games and consider it ‘rude’ when other players do not respond back with more Korean lingo. The Starcraft 1 hardcore has a choice. It can either… A) Realize that their hardcore ways were nothing more than exercises of vanity and feel-good illusions. or… B) Resist the fact that time has passed them by. They will huddle together, pretending it is the twentieth century, playing Brood War like an isolated primitive tribe when the rest of the world has entered the modern age. I think the complaints, which one must admit are all over the place and even complaining about issues long under the bridge (like LAN) are merely symptoms. The main cause of their distemper is that the Starcraft 1 hardcore ways are no more and were never quite real. The lake is getting larger and the big fish are realizing they were small all along. Good riddance, I say. I welcome the destruction of the Starcraft 1 hardcore and their condescending and arrogant ways. |
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When you go to E3, bring some babes with you. Learn from Gary Coleman.
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I love Zangeki no Reginleiv for how it illustrates the divide between many gamers and our modern ‘Industry’. Reginleiv is very much an imperfect game, no doubt about that. It has many warts. However, it is also doing some things that games today refuse to do. EDF also followed the same course. It was ridiculed from those ‘experts’ but very much loved by many gamers.
The game is so over-the-top that I find it extremely entertaining just to watch it. I find myself laughing. The game is very campy. But it is extremely fun. It is like that movie that all the critics hate and the movie industry hates, but people enjoy the corniness and zaniness of it. One thing Reginleiv does well is that it creates an epic battlefield with many, many units. Zelda used to do this long, long ago. It does not do this anymore. Most games don’t do the ‘epic battlefield’ because that would mean they would be forced to use lower quality textures and models. The weapons are also so over the top such as that exploding wand thing that causes body parts to fly in all directions. Ka-boom! hahaha I miss when games were trying to be zany. Today, every game is trying to be ‘serious’. I do not know whether Reginleiv intended to be serious or not but the result is some great humor. With the fact that a spaceship appears in one level of this Norse god Mythology War certainly points that the humor is intentional. But I love how perplexing the game appears to be to some people. Look at this EuroGame review. Giving the game a 5/10, the review starts with… Does this writer not sound confused? It is like he is saying, “I enjoy playing it, but the game fails on the traditional review method of ‘graphics’, check, ‘cutscenes’, check, and so on.” Much of the ‘badly rendered’ landscapes and all is to allow many units on the screen at once. Sandlot is pretty good at doing that. Fans of their games enjoy the ‘epic battle’ feeling. The price for the ‘epic battle’ is low graphic quality for everything. Talk about an abuse of parentheses. It amuses me the writer does not connect the two in the bolded sentence. Perhaps Zangeki is ‘rarely boring’ precisely because it is shonky as all hell. With things like spaceships appearing, this was intentional. Some of the most memorable old school games were intentionally ‘shonky as all hell’. The Engrish and even Woolsyisms added to the experience. “You spoony bard!” “You son of a submariner!” “It’s a secret to everyone.” We love that stuff. Look at Red Dead Redemption. The most entertaining parts are these ‘shonky as all hell’ parts. The critics and game companies may cover their eyes in shame, but gamers have a ball with them.
The glitches make Red Dead Redemption far more interesting to me than without them. What I find most interesting about Reginleiv are the Amazon reviews. The Japanese translated to English certainly is babelfish, but you can get the gist of their comments. Out of 84 reviews, only 3 are 1 star, 4 are 2 star, 8 are 3 star, 23 are four star, and 46 are five stars. Someone apparently likes this game. (And I think the absurd chopped up ogre nature would play better to Western audiences than Japanese ones). Usually when a game has some people liking it intensely but not pulling in large sales numbers, it means something about the game is very unrefined. The people who like the game have dug through all the unrefined stuff or ignore that part entirely. The masses, of course, cannot. The unrefined parts are pretty easy to identify with Reginleiv. But the game is doing something that is causing much love from gamers. What is it? My guess is that the game is embracing ‘massive battles’. One thing I really wish 3d games would do more often is allow me to see more of the landscape. Many 3d games, such as Zelda games, exist in teeny tiny landscapes with tons of loading screens between them (hello Monster Hunter Tri). I would prefer to have less quality graphics and a larger landscape with swarming enemies than a nerfed landscape with few enemies but better graphics. Remember when Zelda games used to have tons of enemies on the screen? When Link was in the midst of a vast battlefield trying to dodge and crawl his way out of there alive?
As you can see above, Zelda used to have vast battlefields with many units on it. You do not see this in modern Zelda. Twilight Princess tried in some parts, you have to give them credit for that. Some events were scripted like the horse battles. But I think the best moments of the game was when Link was on a large landscape with many units moving around him (like Gerudo Desert with those pig riders). Here is one last Reginleiv video. This one has a dragon! When was the last time you saw anything like this occur in Zelda that wasn’t a scripted boss fight? It would be quite interesting for a dragon to just decide to invade the peaceful Hyrule Field. (Dragon appears at 45 seconds in.)
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Any word on if Reginleiv is coming to the US?
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| Mr Khan said: I still don't see the cause for hate on the eco-cases. They're not that flimsy. |
I agree I have no problems with the ones I have myself.
| theRepublic said: Any word on if Reginleiv is coming to the US? |
Not a word that I have seen about it coming stateside. It looks like it could be pretty fun from that video though.
If Reginleiv had splitscreen multiplayer (does it? I'm not really sure) I'd buy it. It's like Wii Sports Resort fighting just way cooler. But I'm not into single player games to be honest. Yep, I'm getting too old for hardcore gaming, hehe 
I also want Malstrom to demand a new Mario Bros. in every single blog post. We've put about 100 hours into the game and we definitely need more of it. (It's way better than playing Mario World together, obviously) It's really annoying when most of your friends are only capable of playing world 1-4 (over and over again, ugh...)
Malstrom's a little off on using Link to the Past as an example of a Zelda game with tons of enemies - especially since it's the point where enemy count really started to drop off (though Ocarina is where it hit rock bottom).
The game that would be his prime example of a action Zelda game. Is 4 Swords Adventures yet he never mentions it. I wonder why?
| TheWon said: The game that would be his prime example of a action Zelda game. Is 4 Swords Adventures yet he never mentions it. I wonder why? |
If it requires GBA connections for multiplayer, then the game is hurt regardless of the content. That's a big reason Nintendo dropped that after a few years.
A flashy-first game is awesome when it comes out. A great-first game is awesome forever.
Plus, just for the hell of it: Kelly Brook at the 2008 BAFTAs
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