Hardcore you know the score

The keen-eyed reader may have noticed that we’ve been playing around with the summary tagline that attempts to describe this blog in a single sentence. It’s actually quite a difficult thing to pin down, as Agoners is really about an attitude to gaming and our thoughts that develop from that, coupled with a wider reach on just about any gaming-related topic that interests us. I guess the whole purpose of this blog is founded in my own constant quest to find games reviews & articles by writers who share my kind of perspective on gaming. Whilst I also value a wider or counter-perspective as well, when it comes to the matter of opinion I can trust for buying or more importantly, investing my time in a game, I really do want an author who I can tell actually thinks somewhat like me. So for example, when I’m reading reviews of Madden 10, and deciding not to buy the title for yet another year despite my historical love of football video-gaming, it really helps me to have some faith in a review when the writer compares the actual gameplay to NFL2k5 or to the real sport of football. Ideally I’d also like to see hardcore views on the online & offline competitive portion of the game – but sadly things like this only really come around a few weeks or months after the game’s release, and I’ll probably have to forum trawl, or quiz friends that actually play it, since I know of no-where in the gaming press actually does this kind of hardcore review. Other than painstaking internet research on each & every individual title, nowhere provides the information I’d really like to know. Most of the time I simply have to play it myself to find out, which is unfortunate given how little precious gaming time I sometimes have available.

I seem to keep using that word: hardcore.

“musings of hardcore competitive gamers”

I’d better point out that I completely disagree with the traditional ‘hardcore’ or ‘casual’ gamer distinction. That model is quite clearly an overly simplistic and flawed one… so what do I mean & why do I even use the term at all? Well Only a Game explained this perfectly, so I won’t rehash the same ground but simply direct you there.

When I use the term ‘hardcore’ I mean the confluence of both the dimensions described there: A highly gaming literate ‘gamer hobbyist’, who also particularly enjoys ‘hard fun’ (agon) and punishing games; in particular this is most often found in games with human competition, and so therefore social factors involved in playing that game also often become important.

I’m well aware this is actually a very niche interest & it’s becoming rarer as gaming becomes more mainstream. The peak of gaming fun for me is most often when I’m dying, or losing, over and over in a game and being really challenged and then finally beating it – or even better my opponent – by improving my actual skill – not just winning by getting more ‘levels’ on my character, a better gun, or by luck. Whilst I may get temporarily frustrated, I know this is actually what I enjoy the most. However I’m also extremely particular about the manner in which a game challenges me. Whilst I can enjoy all of the traditonal skill tests in games – strategic, tactical, logistic & diplomatic, I still have general strong dislike for tests of rote-learning (eg. learning the map in an FPS), trial & error (eg. point & click adventure games with illogical solutions), and overly complex dexterity tests and non-interactive parts of a competitive game (eg. long combo strings in a fighting game), and I also have a wider ‘general interest’ taste in games than just this, but it is definitely my core.

A hardcore gamer in these terms will probably identify with more than one of these gamer types but will definitely associate most strongly with ‘Conqueror’.

You’ll certainly come out as some kind of Conqueror type in the Brainhex survey too.

Add in a self-analytical slant & a love of thinking about why you play and what you get out of it, and you’ve got, well, Agoners.

HARDCORE MOTHERF**KERS

Incidently, if any of this sounds like you and you’d like to write for Agoners, feel free to get in touch via the comments! Or if you know of any websites you think I’d like to read that aren’t already featured on our links, again, please comment.

This is my Brain on Brainhex

iHobo just published BrainHex, so I thought any readers of this blog would want to know and could be interested in this survey of gamer types and want to take a look at it & take the survey.

My results were:

Your BrainHex Class is Conqueror.

Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Conqueror-Mastermind.

You like defeating impossibly difficult foes, struggling until you eventually achieve victory, and beating other players as well as solving puzzles and devising strategies.

According to your results, there are few play experiences that you strongly dislike.

Conqueror: 19
Mastermind: 17
Socialiser: 16
Achiever: 11
Seeker: 9
Survivor: 4
Daredevil: 4

Confessions of a Whore

“If you have something to confess, do it now. Give yourself some peace“.

Last night I Achievement Whored.

Well, sort of, as we’ll see… however more accurately I helped out a friend by setting up his attempt to ‘glitch’ Left 4 Dead to allow him to get an Achievement that is very difficult to unlock under normal play conditions. I actually only agreed to do this, because this particular glitch would only affect him – only he’d get the Achievement, and I wouldn’t. Which was exactly what I wanted, because if I unlocked this Achievement I would only find any satisfaction in it by doing it under proper play conditions – so I actively want to leave it locked as a potential goal for another time.

As I discussed the Achievements of L4D more with him, it was obvious there was quite a few “workaround” ways to get many of the Achievements on this game. Glitches like this were pretty complicated, but there were the far more obvious ones like putting it on the easiest difficulty setting, specifically playing solo, or with a group of 4, or the classic the ‘2nd controller’ offline ‘multiplayer’ mode. My friend was quite willing to use any or all of these techniques in The Quest for the Holy Unlock.

However, to defend my friend, as he’s not exactly an iWin controller-using baboon, he specifically didn’t ruin anyone else’s play session in his self-admitted Achievement Whoring, in fact, he explained he doesn’t like playing online competitive or even co-operative  games at all in general – due the the problem of most ‘pick up group’ players being total dickshits – a problem I do sympathise with entirely. So he actually chooses to get even the “Versus” mode Achievements via ‘exploits’ in only offline play where he can.

I came to the firmer conclusion that as I’d already suspected, and like so many games, L4D has some very poorly conceived Achievements.  So it won’t really interest me to try and get some of them at all because of this failure in the game’s design. However, it got me thinking further; why does my “Whoring” friend do it? Whereas I see this gamerscore meta-game as one not worth playing, except in particular circumstances, for the reasons explained in my previous take on Achievements (and also covered in an excellent post on Not Rocket Science too), my friend here was actively engaged in this meta-game and clearly deriving fun from it. I got the sense that he enjoyed for the feeling of completeness he got from getting the Achievements – even via any ‘unintended’ means necessary. Regardless of the method it still made him feel like he’d ‘finished’ the game (or finished a greater portion of). When I asked him about it more, this seemed to fit. He’s the type of player, of which I know many, that generally just plays any game through once, just to ’see the story’ and finish the game, and won’t care if he does it on easy mode or whatever as he doesn’t really necessary want the challenge or the potential frustration along with it. As for collecting achievements he said he mostly did it on a whim, as if it was almost an unconcious decision – and that he doesn’t do it for most games. But for certain games, like L4D, he’d decided he wanted to try to get as many Achievements as he possibly could – and any he was frustrated by not being able to get via ‘normal play’ he was happy to try and unlock via any other method, not for the gamerscore but just because he wanted to and he could. To me this was more the stance of a “collector”, and although surely not mutually exclusive, it does seem to be somewhat different than the ‘badge of honour’ (or skill or knowledge if you like) motivation that is more typical of the Achievement ‘hunter’. Which, when it results in ‘boosting’ play, I see as merely a cheaters perversion of  my own attitude to Achievements. Ie: potentially fun sub-goals and also records of what I consider real fun accomplishments in a game – hence why I refuse to take any measures to shortcut the fun I find in working towards those records.

Hmm, wrong image search...

Once the L4D unlock glitch had been ‘acheived’ though, I started having a quick play on the free demo of Ikaruga. It is on offer to Gold members this week for the paltry sum of 400 MSP, which is only about 3 pounds. I commented at the time in XBL chat that it seems almost rude not to buy it for such a cheap price as it’s a pretty good game that once-upon-a-time I had been totally hyped about… however that’s exactly the issue with it for me. I had it on the Dreamcast, I played it on the Dreamcast, and I still have a Dreamcast hooked up, right there next to my XBox 360 (albeit on an SD-TV as the DC’s lower resolution tends to look better). So really, why was I even  seriously considering spending extra cash on this game, that I could play for no additional cost, and could’ve played ‘for free’ at any point before now too?

Was it just for the higher fidelity graphics? Was it just for the online multiplayer, or the convenience of having it on my “main” console (& TV).. ? Perhaps… but when I found myself actually opening up the Achievements list to decide whether to buy the game or not it hit me. Had I unwittingly turned into some lesser varient of an Achievement Whore myself.. ? Was I really considering spending money just to get some gamerscore? With some relief as I analysed myself, I realised this wasn’t the case.

The main reason I cared about the Achievements was to see if they would give me a new viable “goal” that would make me want to re-play the game again, but the other more surprising reason to me, was that the Achievements, and the online nature of my XBL account itself, were also providing a means for me to to potentially be able to show my respect for the game & it’s developers in a very tangible fashion. If I bought & played the game it would show on my gamercard online on things like this blog and social networks. XBL Friends would see me playing the game. Ikaruga! It’s friggin’ hardcore Treasure shmup! Or if I unlocked an Achievement, I would be able to post it to my facebook newsfeed, and friends would see I was playing this game. I could easily display my liking for Treasure, others might see it and comment, ask what it is, or choose to play the game co-operatively with me or challenge my scores and the like…. I realised it was all of this that was actually the deciding factor in getting the game and playing it again. I don’t know what this says about my style of play – I suspect nothing really. The fact that such non-game features feature into my buying & playing decisions probably says more about me as a person than a gamer really – and just how much I like games in general!

One Year of Wasted Dreams

Without intending this to become a review site at all, I did waste over 120 hours of gaming playing Lost Odyssey during the last year, so I feel it would be remiss of me to let this experience pass by without some detailed Agoner musings on it. Note, there will be some spoilers in this post, so if that bothers you, please look away now – although of course I’d love it if you’d also come back and have a read later.

You may be questioning why someone with my general taste in games was even playing a Japanese RPG. Without getting into the topic of my history with JRPGs too heavily, in the past I have really enjoyed the very best of this genre (eg. Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy 6, Panzer Dragoon Saga). Yet I have been so utterly disgusted by the worst of this genre, that some of the games I consider the worst games ever made fall into this category – eg. Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy Tactics. In fact it was this phase of atrocious JRPG’s on the Sony Playstation that seemed to rip everything I loved out of the genre, cruelly destroying the gameplay I enjoyed with the combined assault of terrible 3d graphics, fixed story cut scenes, huge on-rails game sections, cutout characters and moronic game systems, that had led me to all but give up on JRPGs entirely. I’d certainly given up all hope with Squaresoft/Squenix.

However it had been a long time now, and I guess I didn’t really have high hopes for much anymore, but at least a game slightly apart from ‘mainstream’ JRPG crowd had a chance it could be better, so I took a look around. The other major reason I was looking for one was that I was specifically wanting a game on my 360 that I term a ‘mong’ game, by that I mean a game I can play when I am ‘monged out’ – ie: tired, distracted, eating etc. This meant I wanted it to have little-to-no arcade skills at all – as almost every other game I had on my 360 needed some. I tried out a few other titles like Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata, and even Western RPGs like Mass Effect, but all of them seemed to have too much of some kind of dexterity skill element in their games, whereas Lost Odyssey, short of it’s very easy and also non-essential ring attack system, had none at all. I also went into the game, and this critique, effectively blind on purpose, reading very little about it at all as I wanted to get away from any preconceptions I might have about this kind of game.

For a while, despite it suffering from many things I lament about the ‘modern’ JRPG, I was calling Lost Odyssey the first JRPG in years that didn’t annoy me. The game system didn’t seem to be moronic for a long time, but in the end, it did break down. Right from the start it contained the usual wealth of completely useless attacks and abilities, yet there did seem to also be an interesting set of viable options, at least for optimising and ‘power gaming’ that it kept things interesting, and I was very impressed to actually get killed by the first boss in the game. And oddly, that tiny bit of skill needed with the ring attacks did keep my interest, as it added an element to the combat that meant perfecting the logistics of any particular battle in the game was never an absolute certainty. However, by the mid to latter stages of the game I felt that I had completely broken the system. I was ending up coming out of every battle with a party of completely full health & magic with very little thought or clever tactics at all.

One of the problems was that even without purposefully trying to “level up” my main characters, the immortals, all reached the maximum experience level (99) long before the end of the game. Now I had deliberately tried to get all the available skills, showing the parts of my manager & hoarder nature when playing certain kinds of games, but it was only around level 94 or so I actually went for levelling, mainly just to see if 99 really was the maximum. One of the reasons for this was, appropriately perhaps given the title, I got so very lost many times. Whenever the areas became too maze-like I tended to get totally confused & ended up walking around in circles. I find that the fact that the random battles take you away from the main game screens (& maps) really disorientating, and the fact this was, as mentioned, a ‘mong game’ for me meant I was generally rather out of it and tired when playing it, really didn’t help. The excess of random battles I faced through getting lost repeatedly was very likely a contributing factor in making the game’s levelling curve seem bizarre to me.

In the end, almost without realising I was at the end of the game, I killed the “last boss” in only a handful of turns without any of my characters even ending up damaged at all. In fact, whilst I was annoyed that the game made me wait until it’s last disk to offer much in the way of any kind of open ended gameplay, it was precisely when this open ended portion kicked in that the gameplay started to break and playing started to drag & become really tedious. Perhaps it would have been better off being ‘on rails’ throughout, but the fact it was all contained in one final ‘free play’ section was almost as poor design really. The game became so very easy for so long, it felt kind of pointless to me. When I did complete it, as you might have guessed by my tone and the title of this post, I felt rather empty, like I’d wasted my time on this game, and not to mention slightly glad it was over. Yet I was also annoyed by the game for not delivering more. I didn’t feel interested to go and hunt for all the things I’d missed, which judging by the Achievements there are quite a few, and I certainly wasn’t enticed by the offer of yet more content, especially not soon after the NXE launched:

Worst use of MS Points ever?

Yet another game system issue was how homogeneous the characters became towards the end of the game. All of the  non-immortal characters ended up being little more than “skill feeders” for the immortals, so they offered nothing else once they had maxed their skills. And because any skill set can be mapped to any immortal, you ended up finding the perfect mix and then keeping them identical. And of course two of the characters’ natural weapons and stats meant they were obviously perfect for being front-line fighters and the other two meant they were perfect for being back-row casters, so why would you try anything else? All of the interesting options offered by the front / back row system, such as taunting from a back row, all soon became worthless to anyone wanting to optimise combat. As usual, so many abilities were pointless as they failed to take the hidden action cost of a characters turn into account. Some of them were so obviously pointless it beggared belief; notably some of the special attacks like a 3-hit combo attack that took two turns to do, when during the in the same time you could’ve done two 2-hit combos…

But back to the characters; literally the only interesting decision I found myself having to make in the game was which of my mortals to ‘take along for the ride’ – and even then, it ended up being an obvious choice, as Sed was the only character offering anything unique in the entire game in fact, with his ability to always ignore the enemies back-row guarding effect with his gun attacks. I also don’t doubt there would be a way to map even this ability onto the immortals too if I’d completed everything in the game. It really is exasperating to me to see every multi-character JRPG I’ve played since the SNES make this mistake. I can’t believe that the concept of having a mixed party of characters with each offering truly unique game abilities is the sole domain of Final Fantasy 6 still. It makes any game of this kind so much more interesting tactically.

It was also somewhat jarring for me to find this game actually forced me to take notes in places. Yes, actual literal pencil and paper notes. Now whilst this was something of a regular occurance in games in the distant past, it was pretty odd to have to do it these days, especially when most ‘RPG’ style games, not to mention MMORPGs have such detailed Quest systems and the like.

But, since this is an ‘RPG’ (even if it’s not at all really) what about the story? Well, for me, whilst the story can interest me a lot in a game, it’s really a very minor element, even for an ‘RPG’. It just isn’t the game. The reason I enjoy games and especially video games over all other forms of entertainment is for their interactive elements, and generally, that doesn’t include the story to any great degree. Again, this is a huge topic of discussion in itself, but suffice to say, like so many games I found the story in Lost Odyssey started out reasonably interesting & even touching at times, but ended up turning incredibly generic and boring, and then to worse.

What made this a really tragic shame for Odyssey, was that the immortal’s dream sequences, the “Thousand Years of Dreams” as the game calls them, were truly excellent. These were some of the best written pieces I’ve ever seen in any video game, and for a while, they seemed to really blend with and enhance the main story for the game. The dream sequences are just short stories of text, blended with music and generally static or slowly moving background graphics – the best examples of these became quite literally poetic in the way they blended the elements. Now whilst it does perhaps speak to my emotional state at times in the past year, and while it does nothing but prove a game has never made me cry, I did in fact get moved to tears a great deal of times by these narrative sections.

But once into the latter stages, instead of working with the main game story, they were actually pulling in opposite directions completely! It was as if they were written by completely different writers and teams; which in fact, they were. So as the game’s main plot descended to complete generic farce for the most part, with only touches of melodrama that appealed to me, the moving tragedies of the dream sequences became totally at odds with this. So in the ‘main game’ I’d be seeing some gobble-di-gook Star Trek “tech” explanation of how the immortal characters had come from some other dimension and had come into this other world to observe it’s effect on theirs or some other such mumbo-jumbo, and then a few minutes later I’d be seeing a morbidly emotional dream sequence where that same character would be questioning the reason for their immortal existence – which they, and more importantly you, the player, now had complete knowledge as to why.

I can’t really labour the starkness of this contrast enough, as it completely removed any vested interest I had in the the story or the characters. The main storyline ending was in fact simply atrocious in this regard, figuratively pissing over all of the earlier superb dream parts, seemingly laughing as it defecated on their every premise. You’ve witnessed harrowing thoughts on how soul-destroying immortality could actually be in terms of someone’s view on life, love, emotional state, war and philosophy. Then you are forced to bear witness to mortal and immortal characters chosing to get married and vowing to “love each other forever”… Now I’ve heard forever’s a long time, baby. Yeh, infinitely moreso for an immortal I’d imagine. The real final straw for me though was to hear the main character utter the immortal line “immortality’s not so bad…” without a care or consideration that he would outlive his fostered children that he was happily musing about bringing up.  It was almost as if it was mocking the player, assuming they would be too stupid to think of the flaws in what was being said, not to mention the writer of the Thousand Years of Dreams.

For my final thoughts though, I do wonder if I am simply too much of a challenge-seeking Agoner to ever really enjoy a game of this nature any more. But the fact remains that for large parts of the game I was enjoying it, even when it wasn’t especially challenging to actually ‘win’, it was challenging my ability to optimise and collect in a logistical play manner. I also even felt some fun of the Juggernaught player too. And dispatching the last boss with barely a scratch did unleash a small amount of fiero in me. Not that it proved to be actually challenging, but it was perhaps my own anticipation that it would be challenging that gave rise to this emotion perhaps. I have to completely agree that a good ‘c-RPG-style’ game is incredibly hard to make, and my big problem is, as much time as I do spend on video games, my time is still really limited. Why these games tend to annoy me the most, is that it often takes a very long time to figure out whether I even find them worth playing or not. It’s even given me doubts about playing other c-RPGs right now I had ‘on slate’, which included Oblivion, Mass Effect and perhaps one time in the very distant future, even Fallout 3.

For an excellent review and discussion on Lost Odyssey from a very different perspective to my own please also see: Lost Odyssey – “The (Real) Final Fantasy” on Metagame.

“Nanan da, Anta?”

…is a taunt & win quote from Remy in Street Fighter III Third Strike. It means literally: “What are you trying to do/Why are you doing this?”. And the same thought went through my mind very late last night after spending a huge amount of time gaming. One game in particular I’d played stood out that spurred this thought: Ninja Gaiden 2. It’s a game I’d been put off even getting due to the reviews, in particular the Eurogamer review, written as it was so clearly by someone with a near-identical viewpoint to my own on the first Ninja Gaiden game. But I’d been lent the game by a friend.. so.. why not give it a try?

But last night, during the evening I had stopped playing the game in frustration and switched to playing other games instead. This has been a frequent occurance with NG2. Usually I start playing it full of enthusiasm, but I’ve invariably ended up turning it off with a huge feeling of annoyance, and either stopping play or moving onto something different. Last night when stopped, I put the game back in its case and back onto the shelf and thought to myself “I won’t play this again. I’ll give it back to my friend next week”. However, instead, I woke up today after thinking about it wanting to play it again.

I just =had= to steal this image

According to one model, International Hobo’s DGD1 model I came out as a majority “Conqueror” type player. Now whilst I have other types of gamer in me, I recognise that ‘hard fun’, agon, is certainly my #1 driving force, as you can probably guess from the name of this blog . It’s definitely a large part of it. I simply want to beat this game. But is it just the drive of fiero calling me?

Is it perhaps the lure of those XBox Achievements? I don’t believe so. Such carrots tend not to affect me, as I seem to able to simply choose not to let them. For example a game like World of Warcraft that is fiendishly addictive for those who enjoy that “level up” feeling simply does not addict me. I got frustrated playing that too, and there were certainly some potential fiero-inducing challenges, but even so I did just walk away from playing it easily.

There is another possible strong factor that is “outside the game” as such and so isn’t ever really mentioned in most player models, and that’s the investment of time and money. Simple really, but so often overlooked – once you’ve spent a large amount of time, money and effort on something, you often want to believe it is good and ‘fun’ and you actually start to find more ‘fun’ out of it because of your investment. Talk to anyone with an especially blinkered “fanboy” attitude to any piece of software or hardware and its really obvious this is the case. Again, its part of the factor in a game like WoW, also part of the reason I believe many people ‘happily’ play agon-based challenge games even though they aren’t really predisposed to this kind of play and would be much happier playing something else – although I think there’s a lot more at work there I could go into at another post. I don’t think its possible to be un-affected by this really, I’m likely been as “guilty” as this as anyone, but also personally I’ve found this is as actually likely to swing both ways. Many of the games that I find particulary annoying and I generally consider the “worst games ever made” (such as Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, and a number of FPS shooters), I am aware that a huge part of my loathing for them comes from the fact I wasted so much money, but far moreso I wasted my precious free time on playing them, yet gained little or no enjoyment ‘reward’. But in any case, in this particular situation it really does not apply, since I have not spent a really large amount of time or effort (yet) on NG2, and I have only borrowed the game anyway.

So if it’s not just the fiero (or lack thereof), it’s not just the investment factor…  so what’s the difference with Ninja “Where’s Me” Gaiden 2 where I seem to keep wanting to go back to it, to something like WoW which I was able to drop on a whim and never ever felt like playing again? I feel that is down to what I consider the core gameplay in the game – at least for me; I understand different people will even get different ‘core’ experiences from a game. With NG2, I can see that the basics of the game really do appeal to me. A fighting game engine where I pit my skills against a good AI with beautiful fluid controls, feedback and graphics all heightening the excitement and engagement feeling (more on this in a future post) – sign me up now! It is exactly like my kind of thing.

But of course the tradeoff with NG2 is how this underlying gameplay that I would really enjoy is so obsfuscated by the game. The “levels”, the story, the “non melee”/puzzle-like boss fights, the logistic play of the items and save points.. almost all of this stuff actually serves to hide the part I really like about the game. The first Ninja Gaiden also did this to a great extent which was why I was so surprised I really enjoyed it, possibly because it straddled a line for me, yet never crossed it. But NG2 does seem to cross it at times. Especially, as reviews have said with way it challenges you. Its not so much that it’s hard to beat, its how & why it is hard. It’s hard in a way that feels to be almost random and .. well, you can read all about this in a good review like the EG one linked earlier. What is especially frustrating me is how this spoils the logistical play for me, because I could really enjoy that, but it feels especially annoying to me to ensure a full stock of health items, or to not “waste” a full-heal save point, only to lose all my items, or worse my life only due to what feels like bad luck or an unforeseeable event. I also keep wanting to believe their is a higher level of play possible where you are not affected by these things, but I suspect more and more that is only the case once you have experienced the game multiple times through. But that’s not a challenge that usually interests me with this style of game. Even at all the sections that I became “stuck at” so far in NG2, I knew I could have made them all “easy” simply by spending all of cash on healing items. But if I get to the point where I am just bludgeoning my way through the game with health items, thats when I’ll know I really ought to stop playing it. Then again, the fiero and investment factors may just make me pigheadedly fight to finish it anyway, I’ll have to wait and see how I react.

So. Ninja Gaiden 2, an exceedingly flawed game it appears to me; although part of my judgement is always reserved when I feel I haven’t yet played a game enough as is the case here. I am perhaps guilty of wanting to see the good in it too much – a charge that could be levelled at me in other walks of life incidently, so it is perhaps a personality trait of mine. But I think I know why I will persist with it to a point, even though I don’t for other games, although it is perilously close to the line for me still. I know I’d probably be far better off playing a more ‘pure’ experience of what I enjoy, something like Street Fighter perhaps, which is exactly what I ended up doing last night.

Street Fighter IV and the Casual Gaming Privy of Gold

Like remy77077 I’m very excited by the news and videos that are appearing around the production of Street Fighter 4. But this has been covered more eloquently by remy77077 than I could and since he’s the Street Fighter series guru around here (in this case meaning “slavering fundamentalist and twitch-demon from hell” (in this case meaning he kicked my ass in about 3 seconds last time we sparred in SF2)) there’s not much I could add to his insights into this game at this stage.

Except of course for a couple of off-hand comments that I’m seeing as a worrying trend in more and more games. All of these comments revolving around the term “Casual Gaming.” Which in itself is a harmless, great big, warm and fluffy market of gamers who like to dip into a game for a while and leave it at that. Which isn’t a problem, except for the fact that the population of said market is HUGE! Also known as the “Long-tail” in marketing terms, this is where the money is at and therefore is where all the game studios and publishers want to be. …understandably. The problem for us “Non-casual” gamers is that we get a market full of harmless, warm and fluffy games.

Take any MMO that has appeared in the last year. All of them have taken on the idea of consensual PvP or instanced PvP. Which has ruled out every one of them for me and for a lot of gamers like me who want the chance to lie in wait for an unsuspecting victim to ambush, rob blind and then squat up and down suggestively on their dead corpses. Or alternatively get revenge on somebody who had already subjected me to that treatment (one of the best experiences in gaming that I have come across!)

This is not limited to PvP. Nearly all forms of competition are removed from such “casual” games. A large part of competition is the ability to gain something when you win, or to be punished if you lose. Just knowing that I won or lost isn’t enough to forge that emotional connection with a gaming experience. I want to have a reason to win or to not lose!

So the jury is still out for me on what SF4 is going to bring. The fact that they already have started mentioning that it will appeal to the “casual” gamer has filled me with dread and makes me want to go dragon-punch all those house-wives sat at home playing Sims, thereby shafting any fantastic game concepts and resigning them to a fate of warm, steaming fluffiness.