Bill Abner joins us this week, bringing a report from the front on the war against MMO fatigue, where Jason McMaster is still valiantly fighting and Tom Chick is engaged in a mostly successful flanking maneuver. Casualties are heavy all around.
Our posts of the week are as follows: Bill picked this canny evisceration of the MMO model, Tom picked this personal tale of an Advanced Squad Leader module, and Jason picked this furor over a customer service nightmare.
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From a gameplay perspective, saying there are 108 characters in a Suikoden game really means there are 60 to 80 benchwarmers once you subtract non-combat, non-support characters who are just there to serve as shopkeepers and other RPG jobs for your army. Some have common jobs like innkeeper. Some have uncommon jobs like elevator bellman, gardener, or the orchestra conductor who’s the music playback menu in disguise. Some such as series vet Jeanne do double duty as party member and vendor. Though Jeanne was already doing double duty as rune vendor and sex object. Story wise though, every character contributes at least a bit part. There are quite a few characters with subplots and character arcs. Everyone else at least has unique dialog and portraits, making this one of the few RPGs where the merchant peons have personality. The merchants that are part of your army, that is.
After the jump, why I love the beavers Continue reading →
The first rule of writing for a videogame should be “do no harm”. If your writing, characters, dialog, and plot actively make me not want to play, you have done the worst you could possibly do. For instance, the follow-up to Zombie Apocalypse, called Zombie Apocalypse: Never Die Alone, features writing so sophomoric, so unfunny, so stale, so trite, and so unskippable that it all but kills the game underneath. It squats obscenely in front of and often on top of every level. I have seen a lot of awful horror movies, and I have rarely encountered characters so grating that I wanted them to die as quickly as I want the Canadians in Never Die Alone to die. Sorry, Canada, but this Canadian themed game isn’t doing you any favors.
After the jump, does this game really want to hurt me? Continue reading →
