Why games should never be P/C

Developers are being asked to fix every dodgy detail, right down to the treatment of digital guinea pigs. But who does it actually help?

There’s been a flicker of controversy around Stardew Valley, the Life Sim / RPG farming game by Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone. It concerns a guinea pig and his treatment. One of the NPCs has a pet guinea pig who is, apparently, being kept in substandard conditions for the animal’s needs.

Not being a real guinea pig, you may wonder why this matters. “It sets a bad example,” goes the logic. “People, especially young and impressionable people, shouldn’t be given information that might lead them to harm guinea pigs.”

A consideration for the future, perhaps; next time, a developer could Google guinea pigs before drawing the cage. The question is whether or not ConcernedApe should go back and rescue the fictional guinea pig already in Stardew Valley.

The problem with altering an existing game is that it censors our reality. The reality is, ConcernedApe didn’t know that you shouldn’t put guinea pigs in exercise wheels, which means that probably quite a lot of other people don’t know that either. His mistake – and most people’s total lack of response to it – tells us something about society that we wouldn’t otherwise have learned.

View full article at this link, on Gamers.

 

Fallout New Vegas: Hardcore Mode

Survival games are games in which a player fights to stay alive using limited resources. Fallout 3 is the most famous example of a survival game – probably because Fallout 3 is not a survival game. It is an RPG / FPS with optional stealth elements and exploration. The same is true for Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4, its sequels, which are basically the same game with different plots and characters.

The lack of change between New Vegas and Fallout 3 demonstrates a sensible “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude by the developers, Bethesda. Fallout 3 was incredibly successful. It has had teenagers listening to old swing jazz on public transport. However, the Fallout series in later generations had no real survival challenge LINK.

One difference was that New Vegas improved on Fallout 3’s total absence of survival elements by introducing a Hardcore Mode.

Grand Theft Auto V: Fun things to do on bikes

If you can get hold of a motorbike or a bicycle in GTA V, the rewards are plentiful. Here is a comprehensive list of daft and dangerous mini-games,  separated into motorbike and bicycle, because you never know which one you’re going to come across around the next corner.

Click here for Fun things to do anywhere, any time, here for Fun things to do in special locations, or here for Fun things to do in cars. Alternatively, go sightseeing.

This blog is frequently updated. New entries since last update are all at the top of their subcategories and coloured blue.

Transport and fast travel

When I’m walking around IRL, I often think how great it would be if you could skitch, jump on a horse, a bike, a motorbike, a moped, a scooter, a skateboard, rollerblades, ice skates, a passing dragon, a helicopter, a power boat, a kayak, on top of a car, the back of a moving bus / train, climb up a building, jump between buildings, hang-glide or parachute off a building, take a lift instantly to the top of a building, sprint infinitely, run on water, teleport anywhere in the world, or otherwise sprout wings and fly. All of these things are available to you in one video game or another. But no video game contains them all.

OK, so it would be odd to have rollerskates in the same game as dragons, and some of these transport options do overlap – you don’t need to be able to skitch and jump on the back of a bus. All you need basically is:

1) A way to travel long distances more or less instantly

2) A way to travel short distances quite quickly

3) A way to travel a scenic route at a decent pace

4) An autopilot travel option that follows the logic and satisfies the impatience of a human player

5) A way to spontaneously generate or easily access all of these options.

Why die in the sandbox?

I live in a house with two older people who don’t play video games. People who don’t play video games often wonder why people who do play video games get so wound up by them. In part, it’s because the engine is inconsistent in achieving what it’s supposed to, compared to real life; think what it would be like if for some reason you go to climb a wall, and you somehow accidentally spring-board off of it straight into the adjacent lake. It should be funny, but you’re having a hard time seeing the joke because, for no reason, you didn’t achieve what you wanted and you got wet.

Doesn’t that sound pointless and annoying? Well, that’s what happens when you die in video games. Non-gaming peoples usually suggest not playing games at all “if they make you so upset”. My response is to say that they’re not likely to become the utopia of fantastical hysteria they’ve been long promising to be if no one plays them and takes to the internet in fury over insensitive game design. When you’re scuba diving in your living room and it feels for all the world like you’re on a real life coral reef, you’ll thank us. And so will the environment.

How to enjoy Harvest Moon

It sounds strange to advise people on how best to enjoy a video game. After all, they are made for enjoyment. The problem is, life sims like Harvest Moon are formulaic, and attract people with a meticulous nature, who get too attached to doing as much as possible, as well as possible, as fast as possible.

Especially as Harvest Moon games generally work at about x10 speed – so ten minutes real time is ten hours game time. This makes you run around like a headless chicken trying to finish everything until the day ends, and you get to start all over again.

A bit of hurrying is fine, because the challenge of that game is basically your ability to Win At Life, which is why life sims have a draw on people with an obsessive streak; real life doesn’t operate so predictably, so life sims give you an escape from unpredictability. But in order to stop my fellow obsessives from falling down the rabbit hole of frustration at one’s inability to Do All The Things, here is a list of things to avoid doing – against the game’s own advice.

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town – Stamina and Fatigue items

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town is a classic Harvest Moon on the GBA and one of the best in the franchise. Its complexity makes for a number of challenges certainly not found in A Wonderful Life on the Gamecube, for example. In this walkthrough, I explain stamina and fatigue, and list the values of stamina and fatigue replenishing items.

Dishonoured

I’ll be honest, I never got far through Dishonoured. I started it several times, and each time something annoyed me enough not to want to go back to it. Although, probably at least two of those times it was the overlong opening sequence that most put me off. If I have to sit through one more cutscene where I’m supposedly being taken to my execution or life imprisonment, I will despair at the quality of writing originality in the industry.

In my first playthrough, the furthest I got was the distillery. It was the first proper level part of Dishonoured, which is linear but partially open-world, with side-quests. I fannied about for a bit, using my magic to shoot across buildings in the steampunk sort of environment, with mediaeval fears of the plague crossed with Victorian technology, Gothic and Middle-Ages architecture, with French Revolution army costumes (think Les Misérables) among the array of creepy cloaks and masks. It fits together remarkably well, making an eerily  atmospheric game.

Once I got into a proper level situation, I started to notice a problem right away. It’s a stealth game in large part, but the stealth options suck. Your most common means of stealthy, non-lethal invasion involved pouncing someone from behind and slowly strangling them. This is extremely slow, and gets dull within about four pounces.

Exploration & Cookery Game

One thing that I find disappointing about Skyrim is how cooking serves no purpose. There’s a paltry Xbox achievement for cooking, mining and chopping wood once. The health benefits you get from cooking are nothing compared to the most inexperienced alchemy, the ingredients of which are cheaper and abundant. Besides which, pre-made potions are two a penny – much more common than cooking spits.

Then there’s the fact that you mainly find food items in towns, where you least need health items. The weight values of vegetables versus their healing properties make them not worth carrying around. Finally, if you calculate it, you notice that selling the individual food items raw fetches more gold than cooking them together. Not that any of them are worth anything like as much as any other piece of junk you can pick up out in the field.

It makes food in Skyrim a gimmick, one that you’ll get bored of quickly – just like chopping wood, which is the least time-efficient way of making money. If you never stole a single item in the whole game, you’d still make plenty of money just going out questing. If you don’t go out and quest, there’s no point playing Skyrim in the first place, which is an exploration RPG, not a life sim. In other words, cooking is pointless.

Mirror’s Edge

Mirror’s Edge is a puzzle-platformer, the mechanics of which are based around parkour (free running), i.e., using city infrastructure as an urban obstacle course. You play Faith, a runner who gets embroiled in a conspiracy and must scuttle across rooftops to evade the authorities while uncovering the truth.

Story

It’s a conspiracy thriller, told part in-game using radio communication and part with cutscenes, usually involving tough people talking about how they Godda Do What they Godda Do. Adequate if you like that sort of thing. There aren’t any surprises here.

Graphics

It has a basic 3D style which is already starting to look a bit dated, but not so you’d be driven to distraction. It isn’t the most polished or visually striking of games. Interestingly, Mirror’s Edge has inverted the old style of the SNES games which used more realistic graphics (sometimes actual film) for cutscenes to make up for the blocky game animation. Mirror’s Edge has manga-esque cartoon for its cutscenes, which have a more retro look than the game itself. Since Mirror’s Edge is in first-person perspective, this means that you don’t see the image of Faith depicted in the box art until the very end.