Razer boldly declares 'PC Gaming is NOT dead'

It can be easy to forget why we fell in love with PCs in the first place, and Razer, a leading manufacturer of high-end peripherals, wants us to remember. They have launched a website, taken out an ad in the Wall Street Journal, and pledged to reveal something on August 26th that will "bring a new age of openness and innovation" and remind us all why PC gaming is great.

Perhaps I'm just really susceptible to hype, but this caused me to change my Deus Ex: Human Revolution order from an Xbox 360 copy to one for the PC. I really hope Razer has the goods to back up these claims. It'd be nice to see a revival of the most open, personalized platform ever made. Long live the PC.

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Deus Ex gets a slick new clothing line

As we've learned recently, augmenting yourself à la Deus Ex: Human Revolution isn't a thing you should do. The technology isn't there for that yet. You could do it yourself, but things could get messy. Odds are you'd be ostracized for it as well. Really not a good thing.

In lieu of ruining your life at an early age with physical enhancements that won't work nearly as well as you think they will, Musterbrand is offering a new line of Deus Ex branded apparel. While not as cool as bionic arms, it isn't terrible. There's an array of different t-shirts branded with the games various corporations, but the show piece here is Adam Jensen's trench coat. I wish I was cool enough to wear it.

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Fairness, Difficulty and Game Design

Real life has been intruding on my gaming and blogging time of late, so the next few weeks may be a little light and late on content.  But to wind down now and then I have been playing the 2008 Prince of Persia -- it's not really a reboot, nor is it a remake of Jordan Mechner's original, so the name gives the impression Ubisoft temporarily ran out of interesting sub-titles.

The game took some critical flak upon release for the fact that the player really can't fail.  That is, whenever the Prince (in this game, a bandit rogue who's not royalty in any official sense) is about to fall to his doom or get overtaken by an enemy, his female companion Elika (a genuine princess with magical powers) flies near and rescues him, returning him to the nearest safe ledge or throwing him back into battle.  It's sort of a frequent-checkpointing system, and the fact that there's never a true "game over" scenario was seen as a flaw in some quarters.

But after playing through the 2003 and 2010 Prince of Persia games, I'm finding this approach perfectly comfortable and not at all damaging to the experience.  The 2003/2010 games both featured a time-reversal mechanic, where the player could back out of a mistake as long as some of the "sands of time" remained in a magical dagger.  This "fail-safe" mechanic isn't really that different -- it provides an infinite number of retries, true, but it also forces the player to get through each stretch between checkpoints without the ability to do an immediate rewind.  This has the effect of breaking the game up into very small sections between checkpoints -- but each of these sections has its own challenges, and the difficulty still ramps up, especially in the area of combat.  In this game, instead of battling hundreds of random minions and the occasional bosses, most of the fights involve several colorful bosses who must be faced and defeated several times before a final showdown.

There are some visible automatic difficulty adjustments afoot -- I've noticed that the bosses regenerate health at a less dramatic rate as the battle drags on when I'm not doing well -- but there's also a joy in fighting a smooth, clean battle that gets muted and disrupted by Elika's magical rescues.  So while the player isn't punished for failure by dying and having to start the battle over from the very beginning, there's still an incentive to get the timing and moves down to deal with each boss as effectively as possible.  And the acrobatic platforming challenges at the core of the Prince of Persia franchise aren't weakened at all by this title's approach -- in fact, the lack of the ability to rewind a missed jump makes the small milestones more significant.

All this has gotten me thinking about how game design has changed over time when it comes to balancing difficulty and challenge in a "fair" way.  Games are often perceived as being "easier" today than they used to be, and I think that they are.  But that's not necessarily a bad thing -- early gaming's idea of difficulty often amounted to sheer brick walls of challenge that turned away more players than managed to scale them.  So I think the Prince of Persia approach is valid -- it never allows the player to skip over a tough section, but it rarely forces the player to go back through a section already mastered just to get to, and fail at, the next difficult step.  Maybe I'm just getting older -- my arcade gaming skills are not what they were twenty years ago -- but I appreciate a game that lets me demonstrate I can handle a tricky bit once, and then allows me to move on to something new. 

Don't get me wrong -- I enjoy a good challenge, and I don't want to feel like I've gotten through a difficult section based on dumb luck.  But when I sit down to play a game, I want to make some progress toward finishing it; while getting stuck and fighting through a hard section is classically Old School, having to do the same thing over and over to the point of frustration is very Institute of Quit and Play Something Else.

We know it's bad design when a game doesn't change itself up to offer new challenges, but becomes repetitive and simplistic and padded.  I can't think of any reason why a game's save/checkpoint system should impose the same kind of bad design on the experience, when there are other options available if designers are willing to rethink some long-standing expectations. 

Comments?

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The DTOID Show: Now with a helping of Jim
Sterling!

Oh hey there, Destructoid. I didn't see you come in. I was just watching this evening's episode of The Destructoid Show, starring myself and Mr. Jim Sterling. Oh, and Max makes an appearance, too... I guess.

First up on today's agenda, Square Enix is set to reveal an exciting new IP at their PAX Panel on August 27th! Of course, it still won't be as exciting as Destructoid LIVE, taking place at noon on August 28th in the Unicorn Theater. Next up, Max has some dirty rumors about Fable IV not being on rails and Gearbox planning a Duke Nukem reboot, as well as some stupid Robocop gear you can cop for your Xbox Live avatar.

Jim Sterling joined us on Skype for the second half of our show, where we discuss his recent Deus Ex: Human Revolution review and give our own impressions.

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Machine Gun Jetpack is now renamed Jetpack
Joyride

While Mojang attempts to hold on to the name of Scrolls, fellow indie developer Halfbrick is changing the name of their upcoming iOS game Machine Gun Jetpack. From now on, the game will be called Jetpack Joyride.

As explained in their video, Halfbrick realized that while the machine gun jetpack is still in the game, there are so many other types of jetpacks included that the name was a misnomer. Rainbows, lasers, bubbles, there are a lot more options than just a machine gun jetpack, including vehicles. Plus, alliteration is awesome!

Jetpack Joyride will be released for iPhone and iPad on September 1, 2011, for 99 cents.

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Help the samurai rise in Shogun 2's new DLC

Are you tired of the sengoku period? Most games, books, and media having to do with Japanese history are obsessed with the endless series wars between the Date, the Takeda, the Oda, the Chosokabe, and hundreds of other clans great and small. Don't worry though, because the next downloadable content pack for Total War: Shogun 2 has you covered.

Coming next month, it's the biggest pack Creative Assembly has released, with a full new campaign map that takes place in the 12th century, 400 years before the sengoku period, back when the veryterm "Shogun" was being invented. Back in that day, being a samurai mainly meant being a good archer rather than a swordsman, and wearing boxy-ass armor with shoulder pauldrons the size of picnic tables.

I personally am quite interested in this new pack. I've always wanted a Gempei War-based game that did not involve Giant Enemy Crabs.

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Square Enix announces PAX 2011 lineup

by: Russell Archey
NEWS - Earlier today we reported on Capcom's PAX lineup, and it had an interesting list of titles at the show.  Well, now we have the Square Enix PAX 2011 lineup, and it doesn't look too bad either:

• Dead Island
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution
• Final Fantasy XIII-2
• Heroes of Ruin
• Wakfu

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Square Enix to Announce New Downloadable Title at
PAX

Square Enix is keeping an airtight lid on its reveal for this year’s Penny Arcade Expo. Oho. The publisher announced its PAX lineup today and attendees are able to preview and play titles such as: Dead Island, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Final Fantasy XIII-2, Heroes of Ruin, and WAKFU. It also marks the reveal of [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://monstervine.com/2011/08/square-enix-to-announce-new-downloadable-title-at-
pax/

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Telltale Games releases new screens for Jurassic
Park The Game from Gamescom

by: Russell Archey
NEWS - Recently at Gamescom, Telltale Games releases some new screens for their upcoming game Jurassic Park The Game.  Telltale Games has also said that they will be at PAX Prime this year for anyone interesting in the game, so if you're going to be at PAX Prime, check them out.


Read The Full Article:
http://www.gamingnexus.com/FullNews/Telltale-Games-releases-new-screens-for-Juras
sic-Park-The-Game-from-Gamescom/Item23905.aspx

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Handhelds: Ahead of its time

_{[Every week, we put out a call to our Community for blogs on a specific topic. This week, the assignment was to write a blog about handheld gaming. Our first promoted Community Blog this week is from kidplus, who reminds us all about the game.com. If you want to see your own work on the front page next week, make sure you write a blog for our current topic: Being Social. -- JRo]}

We didn't have a lot of money growing up. We certainly weren't poor, but definitely on a tight budget. Even though I didn't get all the stuff I wanted my mom managed to make it work, and we had a lot of fun back in the day. One of those things I always wanted but couldn't afford was a Game Boy. I mean, who didn't want a Game Boy? It was an NES on the go. How cool is that? Whatever! I missed out, but not for long. It took a little while, but eventually I got a handheld to call my own, and it was awesome.

My very first portable gaming device shipped with a ton of new features none of its competition offered: it came with a touch screen, internet access, two game cartridge slots, and more. You might be thinking it was the Nintendo DS, but you'd be wrong. The console I'm talking about was released way back in 1997 by Tiger Electronics, and in spite of its groundbreaking features, it was horrible failure. Behold! The granddaddy of the modern handheld market: the game.com!

The game.com was a beast that boasted a lot of firsts in the handheld gaming market. Style-wise, the game.com looked like a slim Sega Game Gear, but it functioned more like a PDA married to a Game Boy. It had a home menu with a calendar, a phonebook, a calculator, Solitare, and it even had an "app" that tracked your high scores across all your games. It had two game slots that made carrying an extra game around safer and more convenient. It also had internet access(!) back when many of us were still getting our first computers and abusing those America Online CDs.

As far as software, the thing had modern hits (for the time) such as Duke Nukem 3D, Sonic, and Mortal Kombat Trilogy as well as classics like Frogger and Centipede. Many of these big name titles were either available at launch or soon after. Oh yeah, and it came with a free game called Lights Out that I continue to play to this day on my phone. All this, and the console sold at a very reasonable retail price of $70.

So, what went wrong? This happened. In a move Sony would emulate almost ten years later, Tiger decided the best way to market their snazzy new game machine was a series of bizarre commercials:

Unsurprisingly, it didn't work out.

Besides the awful marketing campaign, the system itself had some issues. It suffered from the lack of a backlight, black and white graphics, and ghosting. It's hard to knock the game.com too much for this, given then time period, but you can imagine how ghosting would be a serious problem when you're playing a Sonic game.

One of the console's biggest issues was a severe lack of software. Sure, it had some decent games to play, but the lineup was sparse. By the time the console was put to death in 2000 the thing only amassed a pathetic library of about 20 games. What's even worse about the poor support is that all games were developed in-house by Tiger. This resulted in a lot of lackluster ports, and leaves me scratching my head as to why more games didn't appear on the thing if studios didn't have to do any of the work.

The last major flaw was the poor internet service. Yes, the internet was still growing, and yes, you can't expect too much functionality in a $70 gaming device from '97, but this was one of its major selling points. Too bad it was virtually useless. To take advantage of the internet feature you have to get a special game.com modem (sold separately, of course) to log into their special ISP. If you used a different ISP, it barely worked. You also needed a cartridge that was sold separately from the modem. Once you'd acquired all that you could send email and upload high scores, but there was no online play. Bummer. You could also browse the web in text form, but in an age when you needed to be connected to a phone line to browse the web why would anyone do it in a shitty text form with a fucking toy? Why not just unplug the thing and use you computer instead? No thanks, Tiger.

Despite this, I loved my game.com. When I got one it was out of a bargain bin for less than 50 bucks with a stack of cheap games available. For a kid that had never owned a handheld before, it was a godsend. At the time, I thought it was an awesome, albeit cheap, toy. I didn't know it was a system that was already DOA, or that the selection of titles would never grow beyond what I saw collecting dust in the discount bin. Even though they were short lived, I had good times with the thing. I thought it was cool. My friends thought it was cool. It had some fun games and I'm glad it existed. It's interesting looking back at how different the handheld game market might be if Tiger made a few different design and marketing choices.

Aww, screw it! Bring on the Vita!

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