Ed Del Castillo from Liquid Entertainment joins us to talk about whether Metacritic is horrible. Should three stars for Liquid’s newest game, the charming Paper Galaxy, translate to a 60% on Metacritic? What does that do to Liquid’s future business? And should videogame ratings be more in line with movie ratings? Is the system broken, and if so, which parts are broken? Also this week: the future of violent games in public places, the future of unconsoles, and the future of Skylanders, plus a little Campus Life, a little Devil May Cry, and a little iOS discovery called Dungeon Defiler.
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From an epic-length state of the Guild Wars 2 address from game director Colin Johnson, commenting on plans for the upcoming months:
…we’ll make improvements to culling. We recently ran small tests on Live to help us move towards eliminating as much culling from [World vs World multiplayer] as possible. The results have been promising, and we have a number of additional culling features in development. If all goes well, our hope is 2013 is the year culling ceases to exist, or is as minimal as possible in the WvW experience.
Culling is Guild Wars’ technical trick to make it such an attractive world. The idea is that when you have a whole mess of characters on screen, the game makes a judgment call about which characters to not show you (i.e. cull) so that you can maintain an acceptable framerate. In theory, this seems like a great idea. But in practice, this often means characters right in front of you are invisible, doing things most games don’t let invisible characters do. Such as attacking you. The problem is particularly pronounced when it’s most important to see everyone, namely during crowded battles when you should be carefully picking out targets. That’s hard to do when you can’t see the target.
Johnson’s post also notes Guild Wars 2 has sold three million copies. Three million! If you were to lay those copies out end to end, you would be at a complete and utter loss when it came to the copies that were downloaded. It was so much simpler to lay things end to end before digital distribution.
(Screenshot from this post at Guild Wars 2 Junkies.)
You don’t need diamonds in Campus Life, a sorority-themed free-to-play iOS treadmill unencumbered by gameplay. Well, you need them, but you don’t need them. Sure, you can just watch them trickle in one at a time until you’ve got maybe seven or eight. The things worth buying cost 59 diamonds, and 112 diamonds, and 32 diamonds, and 66 diamonds, all prices that work their way under your nose whether you like it or not because Campus Life is built entirely and only to sell diamonds, like De Beers, but on iTunes instead of Africa. In another week, you’ll have 12 diamonds. You’re well on your way to affording something this November.
So when Campus Life asks me if I want to challenge my friends in exchange for a single diamond, I’m all, like, you bet I want to challenge my friends! That’s why I’m here, playing this godawful unashamed mercenary excuse for a game. I want my friends to suffer like I did when I got a Campus Life spam challenging me to advance my sorority house to level eight. I’m making a mental note of who on my friends list to grief as I press the challenge button. It’s going to be glorious.
It’s only when nothing happens after pressing the challenge button that I realize with horror I’ve just sent a Campus Life challenge to all 195 people on my Gamecenter list. I never got the option to single out the people I wanted to punk. Instead, I have been punked by Campus Life. All for a single lousy diamond.
After the jump, I stick around in case it gets better Continue reading →
