"Pirates to game companies: Make better games and other great stuff"

That's right, it's 2007 and I've bought games and borrowed games (ooo pirated) like anyone else. Piracy will never go away unless you go the "Bioshock" or "Capitalist dictatorship" way (also from bioshocks story lol) where you lock down PC's into Nazi nirvana. You're NEVER EVER going to 'eliminate' piracy, maybe you guys should learn from STARDOCK with Galactic civilizations 2.

When it comes to Bioshock you think that guys making a game about ayn rands capitalist manifesto objectivism, human nature, crime and backstabbing would understand this by now! The truth of the matter is this: you guys are selling LUXURY disposable items and on top of that you're selling a product who's supply is infinite. Trying to apply scarcity economics to such items beyond a limited profit period is immoral, if the world had a fountain of infinite food and all it took was a finite amount of work for the recipe to make such food, is there a point where artificially restricting an infinite supply of food should be illegal? If it was food instead of games that was so easily piratable and available entire industries would go bankrupt overnight but I doubt you'd see people trying to "copy protect" food, but they sure would say "they owned their own recipes". The game industry still profits DESPITE PIRACY, and there are bigger problems in this world then piracy (War, Poverty, healthcare, crime, education, etc)

I've been thinking about this for awhile I really think you guys should WORK WITH the flow of piracy instead of against it. Pirates buy games, they aren't stupid. Pirates are EVERYONE, they aren't some group sitting in a dark corner you can pin down and look down your nose at, they are your brother, sister, mother, father, friends, etc.

I've bought a tonne of games in my gaming career, and I've studied the game industry and game development quite a bit and there are a few features that the industry has got to learn:

1) Piracy will always exist, you efforts are pointless and wasted 99% of the time. It took me less then a week to find a working copy and crack for bioshock.

2) Many games have not reduced in price having gone online and cut out the middleman (screw your customer: Your customer screws you right back).So you create a culture of mutual distrust with the "Screw this" attitude. I went out and bought Supreme commander online because the price was right and I believe in supporting game companies that don't try to screw the gamers themselves.

3) You exist BECAUSE WE INVESTED in the game, we aren't "consumers" we are CO-OWNERS and INVESTORS in the games we buy, by right of INVESTMENT in said PRODUCT - we should have some kind of LEGAL OWNERSHIP powers to force companies to release our INVESTMENTS into the public domain after ~10 years or so. Some fans tried to make chrono trigger remake but were shut down by said parent company, that's not COOL at ALL.

4) Right now consumers simply don't care about their rights so they get taken by industry (not just the games industry). Beware if gamers and other consumers start banding together and start demanding co-ownership rights of games they INVEST IN, not "consume". Gamers and anyone who invests in intellectual property products has been given the short end of the OWNERSHIP stick, big time. With things like EULA's and other legal crap.

Dont you love nostalgia? I know that I do and that I don't, amazing how we can both love and not love something at the same time isn't it? I can remember the best times I had with different games while growing up. I was originally part of the NES era. I did know of Atari and all those other 'obscure' systems (obscure because of my young age). But as I've grown nostalgia for some games hasn't caught up with my growth over time into adulthood. Many games that were the pinnacle of their time have been cheapened partly by the endless rehashes over time and partly by graphical and other evolutionary gameplay innovations. Like who here who was part of the 8-bit and 16-bit era knew that once they saw the power of the SNES or Genesis there was no going back to 8-bit games? The same happened for 32-bit games but not quite in the same way as it was between 8-bit and 16-bit systems.

But I notice one thing about all gamers, is that their first discovery of a the first compelling game or genre is that it helps set the tone for what they consider the best games for the rest of their lives. For me one of the two best games I have ever enjoyed playing were Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 (FF3 in USA/Canada). I can still go back to this day and play thos games and still get near the same enjoyment out of them, while games like Final fantasy 1 I have to "grin and bear" the eternal level grinding, but I don't go in expecting anything else. I go in expecting the cheap NPC lines and non-existant story, a random world with badly done cliches. It always brings a smile to your face when you reach those moments of the game, all the while grinding away on your adventure. But from hindsight you never knew just how tedius some of the level grinding really was. But at the time, there was nothing like those games and it was NEW and it was your DISCOVERY of the unique style of level grind that gave it the quality of a compelling experience.

On Final fantasy 1...

At that time it was the best of what was available, and in many ways even how bad Final fantasy 1 may look today, it has some of the most memorably drawn characters and monsters in RPG history. Who doesn't remember chaos? Or gas dragons? Or sharks and Sahags? What about white mages and black mages? Fighters and theives? Hell you could practically list all the monsters in that game because of the quality of the effort that went into them, and partly because of the cheezyness of it all. After all how could you fight sharks in the underwater temple, or on a boat sea? Made for some rather disjointed and unrealistic encounters. But that was part of it's charm.

The amount of money spent on games visuals today is surpassing investment in designing fun games, new game mechanics and game designs. I don't think I've seen anything amazingly innovative since the Super Nintendo era in terms of interactivity. They've just moved 2D interactivity to the third dimension now and thats about it. People think Katmari Damacy is new or innovative need to think again, check out old 8-bit NES classics like Marble madness and Snake rattle and roll.

I went out and bought WoW after the rave reviews just because I (being an idiot) just had to see what the hype was about and it was much ado about nothing. After coming off of playing Final fantasy 11, Anarchy Online and a little tiny bit of Eve online. I was once again disappointed to find that abstractly... It's the same game wrapped in warcraft art without the real depth needed for an online game which you are paying for monthly. The same old boring automatically controlled characers while you navigate for way too much time (getting bored along the way). Instead blizzard should have been taking MMO's to new places they've never been before focusing on what is fun. I immediately trusted all the reviews that gave wow a between 6 and 7'ish. Everytime I thought about purchasing WoW I lookd at those reviews and I should have listend to the real gamers out there and not these wannabe's that currently play WoW just for the graphical experience and not for gameplay. Being immersed in good art is a lot different then being immersed in good artisticly drawn environment with nothing very fun or compelling to do. Imagine if you took World of Warcrafts graphics and the only thing you could do was play hit the bunny, would WoW get such rave reviews? I think not. But this is what WoW and most other MMO's amount to. A game in which you've done the same thing in other MMO's before which weren't particularly fun to begin with. It's certainly not $15 a month worth of fun. Hopefully Guildwars will restore my faith in "real" game developers that aren't just trying to cash in with graphics and not much game.

The only thing WoW has going for it over other MMO's like EQ2 is the name and warcraft graphical art style that everyone loves and that is about it. There is nothing new under the sun in that game that is truly taking games forward. It's a shame seeing games devolve into mindless cash grab attempts instead of trying to focus on fun and interactivity (or "twitch") gaming as it is now called. I dont know about you but 90% of the games out there involve some level of 'twitch' , even the automatically controlled games like World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 need some level of 'twitch' as your clicking on menu buttons and whatnot. The point is does anyone really enjoy being so passive and not doing anything as they watch their character perform what are actually boring and monotonous feats if you're not really controlling your characters actions? Most real games let you have a fair degree of actual control over your character in action games or so called "twitch" games, this is where most games started and the majority of thebest games ever made are based around twitch control characteristics and game mechanics..

Most MMO's function like automatic turn based games instead the turns are hidden by the computers automatic control and timing of your characters attacks and whatnot. But most MMO's are the pinnacle of what gaming should not be about. The only game I'd even consider worth playing from a pure fun and enjoyment view (and thats what gaming should be about) would be Planet-side. There is actually things to *do* instead of being a passive TV like feeling while munching onon dorritos (or your favorite snack) in front of what currently passes for role playing "games" like WoW and EQ2.

After playing Tales of symphonia that try to take RPG's back to basics and focus on the fun. I'm just not going to miss games like WoW or EQ2. People have to remember games should about the interactivity, the depth and enjoyment of the systems inside the game and the unexpected hilarious moments.

The game with best unexpected hilarious moments: Bunout 3, what can I say about this game? A lot. Epecially when you are playing with even your sister or mom who usually doesn't play games and usually can't play a game out of a wet paper bag. Even they can get in on the action in Burnout 3 and not have to spend inordinate amounts of time to get a session in.
But when we played burnout 3 the most hilarious and unexpected things would happen while we were racing around the tracks, just seeing how you caused some cpu controlled car to cause a hilarious crash chain reaction while racing is a sight to behold.

Even in the single player the impact time allows for some hilarious gaming moments and memorable experiences that just wouldn't be possible if not for such excellent game design concepts such as impact time and attention to detail with the non player cars and how they crash and interact with one another.

This is truly a thing that game designers need to be thinking about. The delicate balance between accessability and controller skill based gameplay (where you master the controls and get better at a game). You dont want to alienate real gamers everywhere but you dont want to make the game so accessable (and therefore easy to master) that your game becomes too easy and loses a lot of enjoyment that comes from challenge or mastery.

While games on the whole have slowly been getting better over the past decade or so, lately they are taking a nosedive in that they are re-hashing themselves instead of inventing new and fun things to be doing. They have taken a turn for the worse in regards to only focusing on graphics while not innovating and concentrating on the game mechanics, feel of the game, and the game types and modes available. If you want to see one of the pinnacles of good game design check out Unreal Tournament 2004, you can tell the game was designed by people that know GAMEPLAY, the mechanics of gameplay, what is FUN and what ISN'T fun, they have a keen sense of what the player is doing over-time and what actions are fun DURING the time the player is in the game, this is very important. Games are all about what the player is experiencing, what he is doing over a period of time, you have to nail down what is entertaining and enjoyable to be doing over-time the time ticking away inside the game.

These are just a FEW of the games this era that were let downs from previous games or generations:

Mario sunshine
Zelda Windwaker
Metroid prime 2
Megaman X8
Final Fantasy XI, WoW, Eve Online and most other MMO's.
Need for Speed underground 2 - This game lacked new game modes to push racing genre in new directions (See: Midnight club series or Burnout 3 for innovative stuff in games).

The game developers who are designing the game mechanics (i.e. what the players are able to do with their characters and actions they can perform in game) are not asking the questions like: What is it about our previous games that is fun and entertaining? What is it about our past games that are annoying and get in the way of players enjoyment? What are the annoying / challenging parts of the game that added TO the enjoyment? What were the most annoying parts that detracted FROM the enjoyment? Were we having the player do to many repetitive tasks over a period of time without a break? Have we over-used this franchise and gameplay mechanics without innovating? (i.e. megaman X8?)

The pinnacle of bad game design is in the modern MMO games, they are focusing on and designing things that are NOT FUN or rewarding. They also do little to keep the good PACING of fun activity going in the game with the player ENJOYING being occupied in game. The problem is with the computer handling so much of the game mechanics as to make the player simply a navigator of an in game robot to which the player sends menu commands if not starts to macro his entire character.

Where is the PARTICIPATION of the person in the game? What made video games great and better then TV and movies was the PARTICIPATION in the game instead of being a PASSIVE OBSERVER in newer modern games (FFX I'm looking at you with way too much in-game dialogue and FMV and huge lack of innovation in RPG battle systems), you were in control of a character and could perform actions on objects and things in the game, you could INTERACT with the game and its objects, do interesting things, actually DO and perform interesting tasks.

A few minor spoilers ahead... you've been warned!

I must say this has probably been one of the strangest years in gaming in a long time. For the PC we got a few awesome titles this year like Doom 3 and Half-life 2 which I both enjoyed even though Doom 3 got a little repetitive a bit more then half way into the game. They definitely over-used the "enemies pop out from behind walls" effect, I think that was a cool trick to use in some parts of the game but to use it primarily all the way through the game was pretty bad move on their part to overuse it. I still dont know why people whined so much about Doom 3, the art and atmosphere in that game was FANTASTIC even rivaling the "almighty" half-life, the bosses in Hell in Doom 3 far out did anything in half-life in terms of "old school" gameplay. The last boss was especially cool, a favorite monster from the original doom series.

This season is filled with sequels, some good and some not so good. Many of them feel entirely like expansion packs if you are a hardcore gamer that plays both Console and PC. The games this season for the consoles feel like dumbed down versions of the same game with lots of art, music and sound effect re-use with slight modifications. I dont know about you but that totally angered me this season. Especially Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, where the story and the world was probably the worst designed in that it is not a cohesive and believable world, you feel like you're playing expansion levels to Metroid prime 1 rather then a "brand new game" you feel like you're playing Metroid Prime 1.5: The expansion pack. I'm not the only gamer feeling like this. I think this is a huge turning point in the game industry where we're seeing tonnes of cash ins on MAJOR franchises RUINING the reputation of the franchise when you re-use game art and assests from previous games without any innovation or new substance, you know you have a problem on your hands.

Metoroid prime 2 and Halo 2 feel like total rehashes and lazy "cut" jobs in order to get them out for christmas, in that they cut out and didn't develop that much new content or add to it they just lifted or slightly modified a lot of the art assets and sounds from previous games instead of doing a GOOD job taking the sequels to the next level adding NEW content and NEW gameplay, they just stayed AT the same level and added new levels and a few tweaks onto their existing game engines and gameplay. For example, Metroid prime 2's premise was to search for keys to unlock and restore energy to Aethers temples for the enitre game. Thats all you did was find 18 keys (3 keys each for first 3 temples, then 9 for the last one) the entire game. It was a complete letdown, definitely overhyped. I should have rented it instead.

Zelda looks like the only promising sequel that will hopefully redeem Nintendo after the WindWaker mistakes, WindWaker was also an ok game but definitely overhyped. The seas in windwaker were the most mind numbingly boring aspect of the game. Thank goodness they included the warp ability to warp around to other sea locations or else the rating of the game would have went down substantially.

Metroid prime 2, this game feels like it was rushed in certain areas to meet the christmas deadline. Spoilers ahead... just so you know. The only concept they could come up with to keep the game moving was to find the keys for the different temples to get energy and save the world of light Aether from the Ing on Dark aether which was caused by a meteor hitting the planet which inexplicably "split" aether into 2 worlds of light and dark which is pretty lame explanation. There are technically 4 temples including the last sky temple and your goal is to find the keys to open the dark temples and then collect the energy from the dark temples and transfer them over to the temples in the Light world of Aether. The attempts at a story this time round were laughable and metroids become regular enemies in this game instead of the bad-ass "Oh my god they're going to kill me!" type they've been throughout the Metroid series. They aren't the fearful kinds of metroids like they were in Metroid prime 1 where you dreaded going into the dark labs in Prime 1 because of the metroids and the anxiety / fear factor. A lot of atmosphere was lost in Prime 2 vs. Prime 1. On the plus side are the bosses and the new suits / graphical updates for outside of samus. The last suit is especially cool, being its the "light suit" really its just silver but it looks very cool, it really looks like Samus joined the "space marines" in her universe with the light suit on. There is a real "comic book" effect when she's riding the light beam between the three temples once you've restored the energy to all three because you get to use the temple energy chambers as transporters to the different areas once you restore the 3rd light temple. Not exactly the most exciting moment in the game finding out all that work you did just opened up a glorified transporter / elevator.

The most frustrating part of the game for most people will most likely be finding the sky temple keys. Without use of Gamefaqs.com or a gameguide I really think some people will get frustrated trying to find invisibly hidden keys in certain areas. The one under the poison water in Torvus is especially non-obvious, its like these guys who worked on prime 2 didn't have enough time to flesh out the gameplay in any meaningful way and in an attempt to get the game out before christmas said "We'll just go with keys and hide them throughout the levels", whoever said that should have been shot.

While the game might seem polished to some, there are a few bugs with the boost ball where you'll have to reset the game in order to get it working right again in the Dynamo chamber in the Fortress level. The game feels rushed and tacky in many places like they were trying to hit that November release date. I think they should have delayed this game to flesh out the story more. The story is the worst part about the game, you dont really care about Aether, the ing, or even the space marines. The lines of dialogue and story are all text and you read through scanned lore and the dead bodies of the luminoth and others lying around Aether. If you dont like scanning objects you wont learn much about what the heck is going on other then you're supposed to save aether from the other world that was created by a meteor that split the world and created the Dark aether and the ing. The luminoth as a race physically are essentially the same chozo models from prime 1 retextured with new heads and a few additions, much of the art in Prime 2 is directly lifted from prime 1 with slight modifications, if you go back to prime 1 and carefully look at the enemies alive and dead the resemblence is there in a huge way. They even brought (lifted) the bee graphics for crying out loud, many of the same enemies from Prime 1 with a little graphical retouch which will make you feel ripped off as you already payed last games artists to make these virtually-the-same models. The only things that are entirely new are the environments but thats not saying much, they still technically dont look any different from Primes in terms of art direction or graphical upgrades. Maybe the gamecube hardware just can't handle any more graphics perhaps? That would seem like the most reasonable conclusion that the metroid prime engine developed currently being used has reached its limit graphically and hence thats why it feels like you're playing new prime 1 levels instead of playing a "brand new" game.

I feel like I purchased a new game with a bunch of the same enemies with new levels and bosses but not much in the way of innovation at all. This game definitely feels like it wasn't properly fleshed out in the design phase, at around the 3rd temple you'll see that the game starts to really drag with the whole "find me the keys" bit to restore the energy to the temple and world of aether to save it from destruction because without energy they will die (for some inexplicable reason). I think this was the worst game design decision in the last 5 years of console gaming. Finding the keys to unlock stuff as a main goal for you in the gameplay department has been a "NO NO" for a long time. Being a hardcore PC and console gamer its like Prime 2 took 1 step backwards and only a baby step forward. This game is definitely not worth buying and is a rental, you can finish the game in under 10 hours.

I really feel that the Metroid prime 2 team didn't flesh out events in this game at all to make them more cinematic and interesting, there was so much there to develop. The dark samus bit was especially strange, she runs around collecting phazon most of the game and taunting you but you dont understand why she even exists until the end (I'm assuming here since I'm just about to enter the sky temple). Then there were bits about the other characters (or dead characters) you see lying around, especially the the "human" ship that landed and who's crew got wiped out, you get a few logs reporting their experiences but other then that you dont get a lot of neat cutscenes or anything to flesh out that side of the story, you get one small cutscene and then the rest come from logs scanned from dead bodies which is pretty lame considering all the cinematic effort that went into the boss intro's before the fights.

I'll report more after I finish MP2, I'm sure I'll have more to say since I'm right at the end.