It would be redundant to discuss the virtues of the game; my previous articles cover this thoroughly. Instead, I want to refute some of the criticisms of the game that have arisen online. There are two significant ones: that the game is merely a graphical update of the original Starcraft, and that the game ignores the evolution of the genre over the past decade. As I will discuss below, these arguments are without merit.

Ooh Shiny Graphics!

‘Starcraft II is just Starcraft with updated graphics!’

I have heard something along those lines so many times since the beta was released that it is becoming tiresome. This line of criticism stems from the misconception that gameplay is what makes a good game and graphics don’t matter. I would argue that gameplay is the foundation of a good game, but to relate to today’s gaming audience a game has to have the right interface and visual trappings.

Graphical technology accentuates visual media

Think about classic films: they have great stories when you break them down to their component parts, and the characters are multi-dimensional and interesting. What holds back most current film consumers from appreciating classic film, however, is both the antiquated style of the film and its technical limitations.

It’s easy to point to today’s low popularity of black and white film as revealing of the shallowness of today’s film audience. This just isn’t the case. Films are a visual medium, and much of what is conveyed in a film that is critical to the story is done visually – not merely by pantomime, but by color, clarity and effects. If the film were entirely about story, it would be equally well executed in book form. What makes a great film great is that it uses visual storytelling methods to accentuate the story, and today’s technology allows for a much greater range of visual storytelling.

There are so many more stories that can be told through today’s technology that creativity is at all time highs. While in the wrong hands much of this technology can obscure the critical story elements of a film, in the right hands they can enhance the total experience. Much the same can be said about graphics and gameplay.

Hydralisks look more intimidating in person. From a top-down view they're slightly less frightening

Style differences alienate the player

Beyond mere visual limitations, the style of speech, clothing and architecture in classic film is hugely different from what we’re used to today. This adds a layer of separation between the characters on screen and the viewers, which makes it harder to participate in the story. When viewing a classic film, we’re constantly reminded that this is something out of the past, and that frequently adds an element to the experience that wasn’t intended by the director.

Today’s technology isn’t just there to add CGI monsters, or to obscure the weakness of the story. It gives the viewer something to hold onto that is familiar, and allows a director to tell a story with which the viewer is able to associate. Updated graphics in videogames are much the same.

The original Starcraft has a strong gameplay foundation, but the viewer is constantly reminded that they’re playing something out of the past when experiencing it. When playing Starcraft, the interface is clunky, the graphics are poorly detailed, online interface is virtually non-existent, and all of these things serve to distract the player from the game’s strengths.

The Starcraft universe has its own heroes. They only dominate the story, however, not the battlefield. They're still merely men (for the most part)

A critic will frequently point to chess as a classic game that didn’t need updating, and Starcraft II is like a developer making your pieces into giant robots so that there are incredible special effects and awesome explosions during the game. I would argue that the original Starcraft was more like playing chess encased in a cardboard box, where you only have a tiny hole to look through to move your pieces. The incredible core gameplay in Starcraft was obscured by all these artificial interface hindrances, while Starcraft II removes the box. There is no longer anything separating you from all that gameplay that makes the classic style of RTS games appealing. 

Two Steps Back

The second criticism of Starcraft II is that it ignores the innovations made in the RTS genre over the past ten years. This argument uses as its foundation the fallacy that all things that are new are better.

It helps right off the bat to use a sports example: let’s say it’s 2020 and the military finally perfects robotic exoskeletons. The NFL is considering whether to add them to the game. Would this be a good addition? Wouldn’t it make things even more exciting? The hits would be harder, the game would be faster and the private sector could add jobs building various sport skeletons for the consumer! Also – isn’t there some rule that more robot exoskeletons are always a good thing?

Isn’t smaller better?

Since Starcraft, the RTS genre moved away from an economy-based large-scale game, to something with no base building, squad based combat, hero units and a cover system. The Company of Heroes and Dawn of War games were a refreshing shift away from the boring micromanagement of Starcraft! Even Warcraft III went small scale and added heroes. That must mean it’s better, right?

I would suggest an alternative: maybe developers couldn’t beat Starcraft at its own game. Much in the same way that nobody wants to make a fantasy-themed MMORPG, or even bring up the phrase ‘WoW killer’ anymore, was it really possible to improve upon the Starcraft formula? It made commercial sense to move away from that, at least for the first few years after release, in order for a developer to carve out their own niche. The fact remains, however, that even given its crippling technical limitations and antiquated gameplay, Starcraft was still the most played RTS game globally before the release of Starcraft II.

Could it really be that those squad tactics and cover systems weren’t different from classic RTS elements and therefore better, but instead were merely different?

Starcraft has never been a game about hero units and squads. Large scale battles are the name of the game

Ignoring bad genre developments is a characteristic of a visionary developer

The worst review of Starcraft II on Metacritic believes that Starcraft II is a bad game because Blizzard requires micromanagement from the player. Tom Chick (who happens to be a critic I hugely respect for always speaking his mind) says Starcraft II ‘rewards the harder core who can wrangle reinforcements, use hotkeys to pop off targeted spell powers, carefully place buildings at a particular choke point, and calculate intricate timing puzzles about when to use how many drones to gather how many minerals for how long.’

Blizzard was very specific about what they wanted the player to manage. Workers automatically mine resources or repair buildings. Units use their spells in an intelligent way so as not to waste energy. Siege tanks even aim at different targets so as to spread their splash damage across an army and not waste it all on a single unit. There are so many automated procedures that some of the ‘hardcore’ Starcraft players criticize the game for being too automated. The fact that there are criticisms from both sides implies Blizzard struck exactly the right balance.

I can’t think of what the point of this game is if it’s not managing the position of your army, using spells and abilities at the correct time to turn the tide of a battle your way, or deciding how you want to use your precious resources. Someone should tell Tom there’s a way to get these functions to automate themselves: let the AI play itself. Without the elements he listed there’s no game.

Many lament the fact that there is no cover system in Starcraft II. One of the great innovations of the Relic RTS games were that if your forces were hiding in trees, or behind a small wall, they would take less damage and dominate a similar force trapped out in the open. This is all well and good because you were using squad tactics and were only controlling a handful of units.

Blizzard has never been a company on the cutting edge of innovation. They identify the fun. Then they distill that fun into a paste that is best consumed in apple sauce to improve the flavor

In Starcraft II, on the other hand, you are controlling vast armies. Control over a battlefield, angles of attack, supply lines and battlefield information are the key strategic elements in a game of Starcraft II. A game falls apart if a developer uses the kitchen sink design philosophy and throws everything haphazardly at a game just so it can be included in the feature list. A cover system in a game that focuses on huge armies and fighting force mobility would be crippling and would detract from the dynamic and fast paced gameplay that makes Starcraft II so appealing.

Tom Chick is essentially saying he wants a different kind of game: one that is smaller in scale. In a hero-unit RTS with squad tactics and a cover system, there are very few strategic decisions to be made. Tom likes tactics and enjoys real time tactics simulations. When you have no base and only one squad there’s never really a question of whether you want to sacrifice a squad in a diversionary tactic, or abandon part of your base to the enemy because it will allow you to catch him out of position and crush him from behind. Starcraft II is a real time strategy game, and maintaining an informational advantage, and countering your opponent’s positioning and unit selection are the critical tasks in front of any budding general.

I could criticize Madden 2010 for not being a futuristic racing game, but is that really a valid criticism considering I have unreasonable expectations? Starcraft II is very clear about what it is: an RTS in the classic style, where base building, economy management and strategic combat decisions are paramount. Much of the game has been automated and streamlined, and the elements that haven’t are what comprise the gameplay. You might not like it, but don’t claim that Blizzard was cowardly or ignored developments in the genre just because they didn’t change their formula. Starcraft II was many years in the making and Blizzard was not unaware of these developments made in modern RTS games. They merely determined that this was not a positive evolution but instead detracted from the core strategic fun.

The success of Starcraft II shows that gamers agree. There’s a reason Starcraft II sold half as many full price copies in its first 24 hours as Dawn of War sold in its entire lifetime. It’s not the hype machine, or the slick advertising. I can think of another Activision game that had similarly slick advertising: Mirror’s Edge.

Starcraft II and its two sequels will be the RTS benchmark for the next decade the same way Starcraft was for the past decade because Blizzard moved back to the core elements of the RTS genre. They had the courage to ignore the foolish gameplay evolution that took place in their absence.

Hell, it’s about time.

Starcraft II will be released in a few short days. Hopes run high among its fan base that Blizzard can recapture the magic that vaulted the original Starcraft to the top of the RTS heap. Blizzard has an impeccable track record, and many fans have received an extended free look at the multiplayer during beta testing. How did it stack up?

Balance

Real time strategy games usually only distinguish themselves through innovation. Balance is typically a prerequisite to being a passable RTS; without balance what does it matter what unique strategic decisions you allow? Rarely, however, is balance not just a building block but a distinguishing characteristic. By rarely, I mean only in one case: Starcraft. Include Starcraft II, and that makes two cases.

RTS games are complicated enough to make - designing tech trees, animating units, creating maps, scripting single player campaigns and recording sound effects is a tall order. Considering that poorly balancing a game can render all other work meaningless, developers usually just make factions symmetrical in function and slightly different in appearance.

Not Blizzard.

The iconic 3 factions from Starcraft: the Zerg, Terran and Protoss, return for Starcraft II. By some black magic Blizzard has managed to make each faction distinct yet perfectly balanced. Many baby seals must have been sacrificed to successfully perform this feat.

These guys might look hardcore, but they are slaughtered by the truckload in-game

Gameplay

A great game is easy to learn but impossible to master. While Starcraft II is slightly more complicated than chess, it is conceptually simple. You harvest resources with workers, and use those resources to build production facilities which in turn consume resources to build an army. You use that army to (hopefully) kill your opponent before they kill you.

There are of course many complicating factors. You don’t have perfect information as you can only see what your units can see. Imagine in chess if your pieces could only see the squares immediately surrounding them. You wouldn’t know how your opponent opened or how his pieces are positioned until you got close, so you would have to make decisions with less than complete information.

A good player in Starcraft II will try to counter what their opponent is doing, so initially you want to be able to scout out their strategy while preventing them from doing the same. You also need to be able to make educated guesses about what your opponent is doing from what you are able to see. At the highest levels, nearly as much can be gained through knowledge of what your opponent isn’t doing as from what he is doing.

The Immortal is one of the most powerful Protoss units that perfectly exemplifies how units are never obsolete even in longer games: it shrugs off powerful attacks but is susceptible to weaker tier 1 units

In addition, you can trick your opponent by allowing them to scout what looks like a certain strategy, destroying their scout, then changing your strategy to what will counter how he was planning to counter you. You can go around in circles trying to outmaneuver your enemy, but like in actual warfare many battles are won or lost before they even happen.

Decisions don’t end when a battle begins, however. There are many tactical and strategic decisions to be made that influence the outcome of a fight. You can take the same 2 armies and have them face each other with different positioning and on different terrain, and the outcomes will be drastically different.

Certain units and armies thrive by being in wide open space with the ability to maneuver around their enemies. Certain units do lots of damage to a small space and funneling an enemy army through a small choke point leads to total annihilation. Air units can outmaneuver their opponents in complicated terrain. Some units can tunnel underground and surprise their enemies from below, or circumvent static defenses.

Even within large battles, certain individual units can turn the tide. Some units can convert enemy units to your side for a small period of time. Stealing a key unit can make the difference between victory and defeat. Some units are good against clusters of enemies but become weak if their enemies are spread out; controlling your army is key. Having the correct parts of your army in the front, and in the back, and sometimes even flanking or surrounding your enemy is paramount. Even if you have a bad army composition because you misjudged your opponent’s strategy, you can still win with proper troop micromanagement.

In Starcraft II you are almost never out of the fight. The further behind in a game you are, the higher risk strategies you must implement, because conventional thinking won’t get you back into a losing game. Never give up. Never surrender!

The Corruptor is basically one of those squid things from the Matrix. Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the corruptor is. They have to see it for themselves

User Friendliness

Starcraft II will be the first game to utilize the full Battle.net 2.0 interface. While many fans of the original Starcraft criticize the system for being too ‘simplistic,’ that is because they’re living in the past. Battle.net 2.0 is a streamlined and comprehensive gaming system.

Games can be set up with the push of a button, and everything is taken care of automatically behind the scenes. Ladders ensure you’re going to be facing players of comparable skill level, and the wait to get into a balanced game is frequently a couple seconds for a 1v1 game, and a couple minutes for a 4v4 game. I’m sure those times will decrease in release as there will be orders of magnitude more players compared to the beta.

In addition, there is a great replay system where you can watch and analyze old games. There are achievements and custom user portraits and decals to individualize yourself in-game. Finally, there is a friend system where you can chat both in and out of games, and eventually across Blizzard games. Battle.net 2.0 might not yet be perfect, but it’s a great start, and over time players will wonder how they lived without it.

Interesting that the protagonist in Starcraft bases his operations from a Terran Battlecruiser. In game, however, Battlecruisers are powerful but still slaughtered by the truckload. Maybe it's a special battlecruiser? Otherwise this might be a short campaign

Custom Content

The award for the game with the most longevity has to go to either Counter-Strike or the original Starcraft. While the actual game of Starcraft II has the potential to be just as long-lasting, its lifespan will be prolonged by user-generated content. Even though the game hasn’t even been released, there are already hundreds of custom game mods created for the beta.

Some of the most popular include variations on tower defense and tug of war game modes. In the popular Battlecraft: Armageddon mod, players receive money every few seconds and have to choose which units they want to spawn to run at their opponent. They can’t control these units, which merely mindlessly run at the enemy. The skill comes in using your money to choose units which counter your opponent’s units for lower cost. The number of game types that will emerge during release when millions get their hands on the editing tools mean that people will be playing Starcraft II far into the future, even if the standard game modes have long been forgotten.

Starcraft II is going to be a massive success. Blizzard has created the RTS that will long be the gold standard considering its polish, balance and refined gameplay. It will storm the sales charts and more than return the $100 million spent on its development. Video gamers around the world are about to find out what we beta testers have known for the past few months: Blizzard has created something really special that we will be playing for a long time.

For those unfamiliar with the system, the game divides you into one of five tiers: platinum, gold, silver, bronze and copper. You are placed into one of those tiers based on several placement matches, and within each tier there are many 100-player divisions.

Chris claims the lack of global tiers are deceptive. He claims the opacity of the system which promotes or demotes you between tiers is harmful to the game. He also claims the way the game decides whether you’re favored or not compared to another player is confusing.

Flaws with the ladder?

Let’s quickly review the reasons he claims the ladder is flawed.

The first aspect criticized is the lack of global tiers. Let’s just assume that the game sells about as well as the original and there are over 10 million copies sold. Instead of thousands of 100-person divisions making up each of the five tiers, Chris believes there should be global tiers.

Because each division is made up of 100 players, if you’re one of the better players in the silver league you might be ranked 25th in your division out of 100. If there were global tiers, on the other hand, the equivalent position would be 500,000th out of 2 million silver tier players.

Chris claims that the divisions are deceptive because if you’re 1st in your silver division, you’re not really the ‘best player’ in the silver league because there are thousands of other divisions; this artificially inflates the ego of gamers and is wrong.

Here is the Blizzard Starcraft II team in a design meeting (with Jace Hall). This is why the matchmaking system has come apart at the seams; too much drinking

The second criticism of the ladder is the way in which it occasionally matches you with players in different tiers. The point of the ladder according to Chris is to match you up against players of similar skill levels, but what’s the point if it’s going to occasionally match you up with players in the tier above or below?

The final criticism is that the system that promotes or demotes you to the tier above or below is opaque (and intentionally so), and this is harmful for gamers.

Does Chris Beault have a point, or is he trolling for hits?

Now let’s analyze those points and provide a counter-argument. First is the concept that separating out each tier (league) into separate divisions is somehow deceptive.

It’s difficult for players to really appreciate progress either up or down the ladders if there are 2 million players per tier. Let’s say you win a game and go from 40th place to 30th place on your 100 person ladder. That’s real progress. If you move from 550,000th place to 500,000th place though, are you really making progress? Technically, sure, but it probably doesn’t feel like it. There are half a million players in your league superior to you.

Matching you against opponents of a comparable skill level is the most important aspect of the matchmaking system

While Chris Beault says this is artificially inflating the ego of gamers, I’d say that one of the primary purposes of videogames is to offer concrete accomplishments where effort directly translates into reward. Outside of videogames, it’s rarely as concrete.

Is it really deceptive to players to divide them into divisions within each league? Does Chris believe there are players out there who see 5 tiers with 100 people in each tier and jump to the conclusion that every player believes there are only 500 people playing the game?

There is even precedent for this type of separation: World of Warcraft has multiple servers, each of which contain a small fraction of the total player base. While this is partially because of server limitations, it’s also because it’s difficult for players to come to terms with numbers in the millions.

You might not notice man, but your buildings are on fire. Might want to check that out

Chris claims it’s deceptive; I say players can easily deal with 100 player divisions. They understand if they’re 30th in their division out of 100 players, that’s equivalent to a percentile. They’re better than about 70% of the players in their league.

The second criticism is that the leagues hold no purpose because you’re occasionally pitted against players in the league above or below yours. I disagree with this conclusion. When you are approaching the top or bottom echelon of your current league, the game pits you against players in the league above or below yours respectively to see if you should be promoted or demoted.

If you’re in the top 5 in your division of 100 in the silver league, the game is going to pit you against players in the gold league frequently. If you lose most of your games against them, then you probably deserve to stay where you are. If, however, you still win the majority of your games, then eventually you’re going to be promoted to the gold league. The same is true if you’re at the bottom of your league; if you still lose to players in the league below you on a consistent basis, then you’re going to be demoted.

It's kind of unfair that this guy's base is surrounded by lava. Usually people can just run right into mine and kill me

The point of the ladders is to match you with players against whom you will win half the time. The pace of games and the strategies used between leagues are significantly different. Just because you win most of the time in your league doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to cut it in the league above yours, or vice versa.

Chris’ final criticism is that there needs to be more transparency in the system that promotes or demotes you. He also wonders why it’s not based solely on wins; after all isn’t that what’s important?

For those that haven’t played the game, after a match ends there is a scoring summary based on resource usage, units created and destroyed and structures destroyed. The exact breakdown of points isn’t revealed, but generally it lines up with the player who performs the best overall having the highest score. This isn’t always reflective of who is the best player; in some 2v2 games for example, a team with both attack and cripple one ally, reducing his ability to perform for the rest of the game. Even if he’s the best player he probably won’t end up with the highest score.

Placement and promotion / demotion is likely partially determined by this score as well as the win/loss record. This is completely reasonable to me as the game only uses 5 placement matches to put you into a league. What if in every match you barely squeak out a win against potentially terrible players, are you really deserving of a spot in the platinum league? You’ll just be crushed until you’re demoted down to an appropriate level (if you even stick with a game where you constantly lose for that long).

If, on the other hand, you crush all your opponents and end the game with 2-3x their score, then you’re likely a more proficient player. It’s not an exact science, but it’s good enough for me. If Blizzard broke down exactly how the game rated you, then people would start to game the system.

Plug and play

Blizzard is trying something incredible with Starcraft II: perfect matchmaking. The long term viability of their game is going to hinge on its success, but I encourage the attempt whatever the result. Being able to press a button that says ‘find game’ and having it swiftly match you with another player at your skill level is incredible.

What Chris Beault wants is the status quo of a decade ago: gamers would create a server and find players of their own skill level on their own. That’s like installing drivers for your new mouse before it would work, or entering the IP address of the other computers on your network. Everything is plug and play now. You just log on and you’re good to go. Why shouldn’t game matchmaking function in a similar manner?

Gamers criticize Starcraft for being too elitist, or inaccessible, or having regressive design. The game is the highest selling RTS of all time though, and one of the best selling games ever. Whatever Blizzard is doing is resonating with gamers, and the interest across the internet for the sequel is sky high.

Not only is the game still in beta and therefore exempt from criticism, but its level of polish is incredible. The matchmaking system could use minor tweaking but at its foundation it is certainly not a flaw.

Is this really what it has come to? Is social gaming the future of gaming, as many Facebook gamers claim? Is a single player experience in the form of ‘core games’ a brief aberration that will be relegated to the least social of creatures?

Social Domination

The games director for Facebook, Gareth Davis, says that solo gaming is an aberration, and that games have almost always been social and with Farmville and other Facebook games they’re just going back to their roots.

He claims that Facebook is the largest game platform in the world and that more people play Facebook games than on any other platform. While there’s no official metric, with 350 million users vs. 120 million Playstations sold I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Shit yeah ... you're right, that *does* look fun ...

What Davis’ statistics don’t take into consideration is that Facebook games are just awful, and barely qualify as games. Farmville is a monotonous money grab, where millions of players fork over money to Zynga to be able to harvest their raspberries faster.

In addition, Facebook gaming is hardly a social activity. Mafia Wars is considered social because your abilities in the game depend on the number of friends you have on your social network. There’s no interaction in the game between you and somebody else though, other than through a generic ‘X player has attacked you’ message that appears every so often.

Many ’social gamers’ would suggest that they’d rather pay $15 a month to harvest crops with their friends than pay it to monster game designer Blizzard who steals lives through the ungodly juggernaut known as World of Warcraft.

According to them, World of Warcraft players are loners who cry themselves to sleep in the dark, rather than social butterflies who love interacting with guildies and other server denizens but are held back in real life by their most likely terrifying personal appearance and crippled self confidence.

Yeah, you're making 'successories,' that really makes you better

Core gamers, unite

Go to any game convention and you’re going to see people dressed up to celebrate their favorite game characters. Nathan Drake, Master Chief, Gordon Freeman, the Left 4 Dead gang, Final Fantasy characters and Solid Snake are just a few of the icons that have brought so much joy to so many. When was the last time you saw somebody dressed up as a blueberry, or a tractor, to celebrate Farmville?

Farmville takes advantage of a simple human need for easily defined accomplishment, and while many games do the same thing, there are also stories told and experiences shared. I guess you could recant the tale of the last harvest in Farmville, but if the person you’re talking to cares (and has played the game) they likely know exactly what you’re going to say.

I take it back ... plant cosplay is great

Core games are the past and the future of gaming, and while Facebook games are going to exist in their own niche, there’s room for expansion and not exclusion.

Brick breaker on the Blackberry is played by millions of businessmen across the globe. They likely don’t consider themselves gamers. I hesitate to call Farmville players ‘gamers,’ as that term is reserved for a different experience.

Do games really need to be fun, though? Not all books are fun, and critics frequently ridicule ‘fun’ books like John Grisham novels or the Da Vinci Code. Nobody can really argue that The Hurt Locker was more fun than some of the other films released this year, but that doesn’t prevent it from winning the awards? Will games always just be fun?

Is fun exclusive from serious?

Think of the critically well received recent games? Grand Theft Auto IV was regarded as a landmark game due to the storytelling mechanisms, but that was still a ‘fun’ game. Bioshock was regarded as an innovative experience due to its narrative, and yet that game was still ‘fun.’

Games are unique in that you can’t entirely diverge from the fun aspects. At the end of the day, games aren’t that great at merely delivering a message. Instead, they’re only viable as an experience if the player is willing to continue.  Otherwise, it might as well be non-interactive.

Oh this? It's just my giant robot head. Oscar voters love that shit

It would be like if you had an Oscar bait film that had 10 minute Michael Bay interludes every 30 minutes or so just to keep you interested. Sure, there’s a message here, but there are also explosions! While Bioshock wasn’t really about killing the splicers but instead was about spinning a tale, there was a lot of splicer killing in there.

Games cannot survive, or at least nobody has figured out how to accomplish this yet, without being fun. Games don’t start with story. The best game designers generally have a concept but the early stages of game design are spent on finding a fun gameplay mechanic, not creating story.

While I think it would be great if the rest of the entertainment industry came inline with how videogames do things and started giving Best Picture awards to District 9 or Avatar, and literature awards to the most commercially entertaining books, I fear the opposite. As games mature, if they want to receive critical support from the greater community, they’re going to have to move away from fun.

Best Actor? Me? Is it my Cary Grant-esque good looks?

Even if you have a great message, if you wrap it up in a Bruckheimer package, people are going to view it differently from if it’s in a Scorsese package. Fun would seem to be antithetical to serious, and that is a shame.

Shigeru Miyamoto thinks games are all about fun, and that’s a great thing. He’s not going to be around forever, though, and I can only hope that the next generation of great game influence has the same world view.

A new game called Ribbon Hero attempts to turn learning and practicing Microsoft Office techniques into a game. This is just the first step: soon everything will use games to teach.

Games used to teach? Outrageous

Games used to teach in the past were fairly limited. We all probably used something to learn to type, either Mavis Beacon or Mario Teaches Typing or something along those lines. Sure, Mario Teaches Typing is far more of a game (and far less useful at teaching kids to type) but they were more useful than rote drills pressing various keys.

How many kids played Oregon Trail in lower school history? All I really took from that game is that dysentery is hilarious, never try to ford the river unless you have oxen to spare, and shooting buffalo is hilarious and the solution to every problem. I didn’t, however, learn much about US history.

Oregon Trail, like you've never seen it before. Bierstadt edition!

Games are used in the form of simulators to train the military and pilots. Games are used to teach learning disabled children exercises in focus. Games are used for many things, but for the most part they’re entertainment. Entertainment and work don’t traditionally mix.

Enter Ribbon Hero

Ribbon Hero aims to change all that. It’s a game that accumulates points when you do certain tasks in Microsoft Office. Did you just modify the formatting of that paragraph? 2 points! There are even challenges that you can perform specifically, most of which probably aren’t in your repertoire of skills. In this way, the game is teaching you what else the programs can accomplish.

Sure, this sounds kind of stupid at first. Who is going to play the Microsoft Office game when you can play Halo? This is obviously not for a leisure time situation. This is an extra boost when you’re doing work, or just need a second to focus on something other than the essay you’re writing.

Mario Teaches Typing ... poorly

Don’t underestimate the appeal of online leaderboards and competitiveness to encourage somebody to do something. A game like Farmville isn’t really all that different from learning Microsoft Word: you perform the same rote activities over and over, and your reward is a visual representation of progression, and competition with your friends.

80 million people play Farmville. Imagine how many are out there using Microsoft Word. You get higher points and a chance to compete against your friends through Ribbon Hero. Game designers know that they can tap into people’s natural desire for that feeling of achievement.

Is this man wearing a uniform to vacuum? Is he some sort of vacuuming cop? Or is this some weird sex game

Soon this could be implemented in many things. Maybe vacuuming turns into a game; I have to vacuum anyway, why not get some points out of it? Besides, you don’t want to be that guy that is made fun of all the time for having a disgusting apartment because his vacuuming score is the lowest.

It’s not something that’s going to happen this month, or this year. But it’s going to happen. Then we gamers will finally take over. So far we’re only taken over Korea.

A fan remade a portion of Mega Man 9 in HD, and while it’s identical to the original game (which was a retro throwback anyway) but with HD graphics, fans have not been kind to it. Critics say it removed the soul of the game. Are 8-bit graphics really that charming and expressive?

What is the appeal?

What is the appeal of the 8-bit graphics? Some of the criticism leveled at the HD remix is that ‘it looks worse despite being in HD,’ ‘the running animation looks really weird to me’ and ‘they sucked all the life and character from it.’

Let’s take these one at a time. The first is that it looks worse despite being in HD. What, exactly, does this mean? I guess what they’re trying to say is that they appreciated the blocky, jerky appearance of the original. Critics also mention the fact that colors were better in the bright and cartoony 8-bit days. Is it truly the pixellated sprites that make the difference vs. the HD version? Are they more expressive than their sharper counterparts?

The second criticism of the HD Remix is that the running looks strange. Take a look at the original mega man running animation. Yeah, that’s not strange at all.

Oh yeah - it's almost photorealistic. My mistake

Finally, critics claim the higher definition graphics suck the life from the game. What does this mean? The game has the same gameplay, and the same enemies, and the same everything except appearance. I thought graphics weren’t supposed to make a game and what really differentiated the Mega Man series was the great gameplay?

The source of all these points is that the HD version doesn’t tap into gamer nostalgia. Mega Man 9 and the recent Mega Man 10 were so well received because they were the first modern Mega Man games that just copied the style of the classic ones back when the franchise was successful. It harnessed that nostalgia that players had for the originals, and reminded them of the fun they had in the past with Mega Man.

The reason that the HD remix is disappointing to them is because this shares none of the nostalgia, and in the current context, Mega Man is simply a terrible game. Platforming games have gone in a different direction (think Ratchet & Clank or Super Mario Galaxy) because it’s far more fun. Without the nostalgia, this Mega Man offers very little.

The reason Mega Man 9 HD Remix failed is because this is how everybody thinks of HD Mega Man. Get it right!

Where is the 8-bit love?

Another reason 8-bit could be appealing is because it allows players to fill in the gaps in the graphics with their imationation. Mega Man used to run ‘properly’ to them because it was such a loose an unrealistic animation that they could interpret it any way they wanted. It was merely a signal that said ‘running.’

In the HD version, on the other hand, Mega Man is actually running in a fluid enough way that there is little room for interpretation. If your imagination of the manner in which Mega Man runs lines up with that version perfectly, great, but if not it’s going to look strange. It would be like a muscular Unreal Engine 3 version of Mario in new games; it just wouldn’t look right.

Artist renditions of 8-bit graphics are accepted because we understand it's merely one person's interpretation of the characters; once they're official, however, watch out. Fanboy backlash

The same thing can be said of the character portraits. In the old game, they were clearly vague and cartoony and I’m sure players imagined some of the bosses to be complicated robots. When you smooth out the graphics and put everything into HD, however, and they’re still just simple and bizarre foes, things get a little strange. The limitations on Galaxy Man in HD could previously be attributed to simplified graphics when to Mega Man he was a sophisticated foe; in HD he merely looks like an idiot.

There are many things to like about 8-bit graphics, but chief among them is nostalgia and room for imagination.

Is the flaw with the HD remix of Mega Man 9 really in the game, or is it in ourselves? Something to ponder. Until next time, be good to yourselves, and each other.*

* Not a serious conclusion to the article (for the inevitable flame responses)

Activision has tasked Sledgehammer games (run by the former developers of Dead Space) with making the Call of Duty game for 2011 which will potentially be in the action-adventure genre. Activision believes they have created a self-sustaining franchise separate from the individual game quality, the same mistake Electronic Arts made with their sports franchises. Call of Duty, meet Madden, the ghost of Christmas future. 

Call of Duty vs. Medal of Honor

The top Infinity Ward brass got their chops in the FPS realm with Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. This was an Electronic Arts franchise which had seen a ton of success and which EA believed was well established with consumers.

While Allied Assault scored in the low 90’s on Metacritic, subsequent games by different developers have scored in the 70s and even 60s, and sales have fallen off a cliff. This is to be expected; gamers will only give a loved franchise benefit of the doubt for a single flop or if lucky, two. After a sustained trend of crap games, FPS fans looked elsewhere for their fix.

MoH: Allied Assault is still regarded as one of the finest WW2 games ever made. Infinity Ward strikes again! Coincidence? Doubtful

Fortunately for them, the Infinity Ward guys were at Activision working feverishly on CoD4: Modern Warfare. This was the first modern Call of Duty game (a decision that Activision management believed to be a mistake). Call of Duty was a successful if not ground breaking franchise for Activision at the time. Modern Warfare changed all that.

It became the fastest selling FPS game of all time and went on to sell nearly 15 million copies worldwide. Call of Duty joined some of the largest game franchises in the world like Final Fantasy and Mario. Infinity Ward became the toast of Activision.

So what went wrong?

Call of Duty is an annual franchise, and yet a game takes more than a year to develop. Activision therefore has two teams making Call of Duty games and they alternate release years, allowing for a 2 year development schedule. The other team is Treyarch, and they are sadly known as the shit team. The ‘Treyarch years’ (2010 for example) is a terrible time and gamers everywhere lament their misfortune that these hacks are allowed to touch the Call of Duty franchise.

World at War's big hook was Nazi Zombies. Treyarch strikes again! Goddamn Treyarch is shit

CoD5: World at War sold well, although not as well as Modern Warfare. That being said, it was still a success because gamers identified the franchise with quality. This was solidified with CoD6: Modern Warfare 2 which came out in November and became the fastest selling videogame of all time and yet another smash hit. It was developed by Infinity Ward.

There was a huge jump in sales from the previous Call of Duty games to Modern Warfare, and that new tier has held up reasonably well. That’s because Modern Warfare was revolutionary and its success flowed through to the subsequent games in the franchise. This isn’t sustainable if the game quality goes from great to shit. Treyarch can’t properly execute a Call of Duty game.

The original Modern Warfare was a groundbreaking title for its multiplayer perks. Infinity Ward strikes again! Coincidence? Doubtful

There’s no reason to believe Sledgehammer games can bring something new to the table. Sure, Dead Space was great, but the shooting mechanics in that weren’t exactly the highlight, and Call of Duty isn’t known for its moody atmosphere. Infinity Ward was the keeper of the flame, and Activision just fired them for what appears to be a disagreement over money.

Infinity Ward is going to go to a new studio and develop what will undoubtedly be a great FPS game. Sure, it won’t have the sales of Call of Duty, at least initially, but eventually it will get that traction. Quality shines through.

Publishers don’t get it

Publishers believe they know how to sell a game. They give gamers CGI trailers and ridiculous promotions. They believe ‘brand management’ is what sells a good game. Gameplay, and real gameplay footage specifically, is what sells a game. Quality and innovation sells a game. Gamers don’t care about the latest CGI commercial, they want to see Quick Looks and behind the scenes videos.

No Ken Levine, no problem? Actually, no Ken Levine = big problem as Bioshock 2 rides the coattails of its predecessor

Publishers believe that because new AAA games have teams of hundreds working on them that no one person can be that important. Why, then, do the same people come out with great games time and again? Why value Sid Meier, or John Carmack, or the team at Rockstar? Why value Ken Levine, or the Blizzard team? Because they’re the best, that’s why. Bioshock 2 didn’t have Ken Levine working on it, and its Metacritic scores dropped 8 points (and will likely drop more) compared to the original. Sales will no doubt follow suit.

Infinity Ward reportedly wanted to go in a different direction from just making Modern Warfare 3, and Activision management balked. They resisted the vision of Infinity Ward during the development of Modern Warfare, but eventually gave in, and look how that turned out? I’m sure the new ideas IW had were the next leap forward in FPS, and fortunately for us gamers we will still see it, just not under the Activision banner.

Their loss.

Why are so many upset, then, when Ubisoft introduces DRM that requires you be online for game saves? Why are so many upset when there are delays to updates, or the Playstation Network goes down, or World of Warcraft server maintenance takes slightly longer than expected? Sure it’s inconvenient, but there are as many if not more benefits to having game services move online than there are drawbacks. Why fight it conceptually?

The outrage of being online

The reason so many are upset about the new Ubisoft DRM that requires online for game saves and authentication is two fold: what if your internet connection fails and you lose some progress in a game, and what happens in the future when they take down those servers and you can’t play a single player game?

My response: seriously? Some gamers were quoting power outages as their fear for their internet connection. I think you have bigger problems than your internet connection losing their servers when the power goes down such as your computer shutting down. I only know from my experience, but my internet fails maybe once every couple months, and if I lose 5-10 minutes of gaming since the last autosave I’m not going to be permanently traumatized.

In addition, there are very few games that couldn’t be played because the authentication or multiplayer servers were offline when people wanted to play them simply because years after a game’s release there is a very small community remaining. The only one that comes to mind is Halo 2 and that was because it was so stunningly popular. This is not going to be a common problem, but even if it is I’m sure there will be a patch to allow you to play without authentication servers. Very little revenue is generated by games years or decades after release so this wouldn’t be a huge profit hit for Ubisoft.

Want to know why your Xbox Live friends list can only go to 100 people? You now know who to blame

In addition, the reason these changes are being made on the PC is because there is so much piracy. I’m sure it will be a huge imposition on the user to download an authentication server crack when you want to play a decade after initial release.

The benefits of being online?

Removing the obvious benefits such as online multiplayer, game fixing updates and digital distribution, there are subtler updates to being online all the time. Services like Steam can be developed, which add massive convenience to the consumer.

I just switched to a new computer and wanted to continue to play Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2. I didn’t have to find my discs again, or find those authentication CD Key stickers on the DVD jewel cases. I just downloaded the free Steam client, logged into my account and went to a movie. When I returned, they were all downloaded and installed and ready to go.

The convenience Steam offers is incredible. Goodbye DVDs, we hardly knew ye

In addition, the prevalence of cross game chat has made finding games and discussing them with friends even easier. You can chat to any Steam user while in any Steam game without leaving. The same thing is being done for the new Battle.net for Starcraft. You can plan a game or chat with a friend extremely easily even while playing another game. This is incredible convenience that wasn’t available in the past.

Finally, being always online allows for out of game experiences such as World of Warcraft’s armory and auction house. You can now see your character when you’re not even at your computer. Not only that, but you can trade through the auction house from your mobile device. This is incredible functionality and the slight drawback from the occasional lost connection is more than worth it.

I understand being annoyed that a game is DX10 only and therefore doesn’t support Windows XP despite that being the OS of choice for over 40% of the gaming community. Don’t fight an obvious and well established trend though. Pretty soon it will be unusual for a developer to assume you might be playing without an internet connection. All computers capable of playing games have a constant connection. Mobile devices now primarily have wireless connections and soon that will be absolute.

DX10 only? Outrageous

A developer can improve the gaming experience with the information and easy access that online gives them in regard to their player community. It’s ok to complain about internet lapses much as it is ok to complain about flight delays. But don’t say that you’re never going to fly again because you sat on the runway for a couple hours. If Ubisoft makes good games, you’re going to play them, because this online only policy is merely them getting ahead of the curve.

Heavy Rain is a unique product that pushes games in a direction that few have attempted in the past decade. Where does ‘experience’ end, however, and ‘game’ begin?

What counts as interactivity?

If you’re not familiar with Heavy Rain, take a quick look at this video. The game is essentially a series of conversations and gestural inputs that mimic what the character is doing on-screen.

If your character is brushing their teeth, you have to shake the controller back and forth to mimic the teeth-brushing motion. If you’re punching somebody in the face, you might move the analog stick to match a punching motion. You also choose what dialogue options you take with various characters.

Heavy Rain has ... yes ... rain

All of these inputs combine to tell a story. Although this sounds like most RPG games, there is a critical difference: you don’t have any input on what happens. Sure, you have to perform the teeth-brushing motion for your character to brush their teeth, but either you do it or they’re just going to sit there and wait for you to do it. The closest Heavy Rain comes to being interactive is when it allows you to control in which direction you’re walking.

The problem with all of this is 1) FMV games have been done before (Night Trap) and are largely terrible, and 2) There is no input on the outcome of the game. Sure, there are lots of linear games, but at least you’re allowed to fail. In Heavy Rain even if you are in a fight and you miss every QTE and get punched a billion times, you still succeed (you just end up with a few more bruises).

If you are given the facade of choice, but every time you choose what the game doesn’t want you to do it says ‘you didn’t really mean that right?’ is that really interactivity?

Night Trap: this looks high budget. So bad I didn't even care about horribly cropping the image

To be completely fair, the game hasn’t come out yet and there are situations where you can let a character die, changing the story. I’m sure there is more to it than some have suggested from previews and possibly I’m being unfair.

In addition, there are games like the Lego series that are for children where you’re not allowed to die; death merely slows down your progress, there is no actual failure. It’s difficult to choose what is encompassed in the ‘game’ definition.

Different demographic

I feel like the previous segment is me being hypocritical. I’m a big proponent of mixing genres in games, why not mix across genres? What’s wrong with adding a little interactivity to films?

Potentially there’s an entire audience out there that likes the slight interactive element in games but doesn’t really want to commit to learning a full control scheme. Maybe they just want to watch a fun story and feel like they’re a little bit involved.

This could easily be a situation where I’m not the target demographic. There’s a reason I don’t play Farmville (mostly because I have no Facebook friends) and it has 80 million users.

Farmville: This shit has 80 million users? Seriously? What's wrong with you people

I will be very interested to see the reception that Heavy Rain receives from the gaming public in terms of sales. Is this going to be a critical success (already looking that way) and a commercial flop, like most games from Quantic Dreams, or is this going to resurrect new FMV games?

Night Trap appeared to be the final nail in the coffin, but maybe everybody who played that is old enough now that they’ve died off.