Min Wage Review: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

I adored Burnout Paradise. I played it for 100’s of hours over the course of a couple of years and there’s still a certain charm about it that makes it easy for me to dive back in even though I’ve already completed everything. Burnout Paradise was, hands down, the best driving game, nay experience I’ve ever had. After supporting it via free and paid updates for an unprecedented 18 months it was bittersweet to hear they were finally ending their support. I was sad because there would be no more expansions and the online community will gradually fade away for good. I was excited that this meant a new game was in the works. That game turned out to be Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

Hot Pursuit is pure high speed, no frills racing at its best. The game looks like Need for Speed but it plays like Burnout. The combination is exceptionally fun and takes the best of both worlds. The driving mechanics aren’t geared to compete with simulation racers like Gran Turismo but they don’t have to be. Criterion are the current kings of arcade racing and their talents are in full swing here.

A cohesive city of intertwined roads, much like Paradise City, has been constructed and events fragment the city, Seacrest County, into endless possible routes. At least that’s the theory. In Burnout Paradise you were presented with a city, a starting point and an end point and the rest was generally up to you. In Seacrest County the events cut off alternate routes (in most cases) and make the courses quite linear. There are still shortcuts but they serve a slightly different purpose this time around. Some shortcuts shave off obscene amounts of time at the cost of minor terrain issues. Some side paths are helpful only if you have a powerful off road racer and some are just to fool you. In any case you’re almost always going to be on the same path as everyone else.

The thing that bugs me is that while Paradise City felt alive and realistic Seacrest County feels anything but alive. The roads are long, arduous and devoid of civilization except for a few sparse areas. There’s a charm to Paradise City that made driving fun because the environment was fun. Seacrest County doesn’t have any charm. There are a few Easter eggs out there and you have the option to free ride throughout the city and take pictures of your fancy schmancy cars to share with your friends but it’s an aimless endeavor.

The events and tracks are varied and deep enough to eat up a lot of hours and are well worth the price. Then take that amount of content and double it. Between being a renegade street racer and a dangerous officer of justice there’s over 100 events to master. The racer events focus on winning races and evading the law. The cop events focus on destroying the racers. Also there’s a healthy amount of time trials for both campaigns. I liked the races and time trials a lot but I personally didn’t like the rest of the missions so much. Trying to win a race with several other racers while a swarm of relentless cops try to destroy you is quite exciting but just gets tedious. I never found myself conquering a Hot Pursuit event and thinking “I’d like to play that again!” It was more like “glad that’s over…” Races and time trials though I found quite satisfying to play over and over to achieve the best time on the leaderboards. I just wish there were more of them and that you could choose any car you want.

If you’ve got a lot of friends with this game and are highly competitive you’ll love the competitive aspect of this game. Even if you don’t have a lot of friends the game will suggest people to add (friends of friends) that have played the game. There are few things more satisfying than finally edging out all my buddies on a tough course. The cop events are so luck based and exploitative that competing over those leaderboard slots just isn’t fun.  I wasn’t as impressed with Autolog as everyone else because it’s not any different than what Burnout Paradise offered with the Road Rules challenges except that Criterion took that concept and expanded it to encompass the entire game. It’s a great idea to be sure but it wasn’t anything radically new in my opinion. It makes me wonder if I’d be happier with a conventional simulation racer with more events and variety.

For everything good that Criterion brought to Need for Speed, Need for Speed brought something bad to Criterion. For one, Burnout Paradise had no loading screens except for brief ones introduced in a late update if you restarted an event midway through. Hot Pursuit has long and frequent load times. For me the load times were so long and frequent that I’m convinced that Autolog’s online functions are integrated into the basic game. Trying to play the game without internet was an act of futility. Multiplayer is a big part of this game but it’s a much stronger single player game.

There’s so much focus on making the cars look gorgeous and making the action exciting that there’s a superfluous amount of interruptions via cut scenes and exposition. If I want to restart an event because I didn’t place first chances are I’ll be interrupted by the game showing off some new item I unlocked and bringing me back to the title screen forcing me to navigate all the menus and load screens all over again. It sounds like I’m nitpicking but it seriously breaks up the flow and overcomplicates what should be a streamlined experience. I’d say for every hour of gameplay there was easily 10-20 minutes of load screens, menu navigation and unnecessary cut scenes. I thought Criterion hated loading screens, what happened?

The biggest problem I have I also had with Burnout: traffic. I understand it and I appreciate the effort but it breaks the game. Around any corner there may be a dozen cars inexplicably rounding the curve like a 70 year old paraplegic just waiting for me to crash at 200mph and ruin any chance of setting a good time. It was bad in Burnout and it’s even worse here where winning a race or avoiding danger is much harder due to the new driving mechanics. This stems from a much bigger problem of lack of depth perception. Due to the limitations of the medium and the way racing games are designed your car is right in the middle of the action. If there’s a car a few hundred feet away chances are you won’t see it until it’s too late. This could be from poor draw distances or your car concealing the road ahead. It doesn’t help that you’re going over 200 mph and traffic seems to go at a smooth 15 mph meaning they go from dot over the horizon to head on collision in about a half second. On an HD TV the traffic was aggravating at times; on an SD TV the game was completely unplayable at mid to high level events. I was willing to let it slide in Burnout Paradise but this time it’s too much.

Is Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit the best racing game of 2010? I wouldn’t doubt it, it’s a solid game with a ton of content and great community features. Is it the best racing game I’ve played? Not by a long shot. I’m judging Hot Pursuit quite harshly compared to other racing games but it’s only fair when compared to Criterion’s outstanding track record. I feel like all the pieces were here to give me the updated, upgraded sequel to Burnout Paradise that I so badly wanted. However, Criterion couldn’t pull it off and left us their unfinished hybrid for us to toy around with. I wanted to love this game to death and I wanted it to be exponentially better than it is. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hit the standard I’ve come to accept and I worry that if Criterion can’t top themselves then who can?

Standardization of Pricing Schemes: Bad for Business?

The standard price of a video game today is $50-60, is that too high or too low? I've got my opinion on the manner but I'm not concerned with that right now. The thing that irks me is how standardized pricing has become despite the obvious differences in monetary investments, promotional campaigns and overall quality of games.


Not all games are created equal and I think they shouldn't have to conform to some superficial pricing scheme to fit in. If a game offers more value and demands more reimbursement from the customers I think that's fair and it's up to the individual to decide whether or not it was fair; vice versa with cheaper and less impressive but fun titles. Since the gaming industry has grown to the size it has, so often you have a console selling game being released alongside niche titles at the same price. It's not fair to the niche title and it's not fair to the niche audience.


Part of the reason why niche titles remain niche is because the pricing scheme isn't conducive to their success. All promotional campaigns are geared to funnel as much money into as few games and franchises as possible. However, there are so many of these 'greedy' games every year nowadays that there's not even enough money to feed them. Is it cool that the experience of Uncharted 2 has been shared by over 3.8 million people? Hell yeah! Is it a shame that barely 1 million shared the latest Ratchet & Clank adventure? Absolutely. Those are two PS3 exclusives that were released within two weeks of each other. Which was better? It comes down to personal tastes (I liked Ratchet) but the fact is that Uncharted 2 was the stronger game with the better polish and more content. It had Ratchet beat in practically every category. Why should a customer have to choose between the two of them as a $60 investment because we know which one is going to win. If that weren't enough Uncharted 2 had a huge hype wave of critical acclaim that demanded everyone with a PS3 buy this experience and those who didn't have a PS3 to make the investment immediately. Did you hear anything about Ratchet & Clank? I didn't.


Now, this isn't a gripe about why I think Ratchet is better than Uncharted. The two games don't offer the same amount of value and production value and thus I don't feel should be priced as such. Maybe if Ratchet were $40 at launch then the sales would be two or three times higher as those rushing to procure a copy of Uncharted 2 would be willing to snatch up a second purchase...but not two $60 purchases, that's not happening. We can't expect people to buy multiple full priced games at a time because there's just not enough money and time to appreciate everything being thrown at us. Now, maybe Ratchet vs. Uncharted isn't the best comparison seeing as they're both exceptionally well made games. There are tons of niche titles selling less than 100K every year that deserve so much better and WOULD perform much better if they were priced based on their worth compared to their competition. If I were offering you a cup of chocolate ice cream and right next to me someone offered a gallon for the same price who would get the sale?


There's not enough variance to video game pricing. We have the free2play games that are starting to take off and surely will make a major impact in the future. We have the $1-10 impulse buy category for cheap, indie titles and apps. They let you try something new without feeling guilty much like a candy bar on your way out of a supermarket. Then there's the $15-30 range which is for incomplete but satisfying games. This would be games like Valve's Team Fortress 2 or Portal which aren't dense or broad enough for a $60 tag but well worth their cost in what they deliver. It's a safe place for medium sized experiments to thrive without having to compete with established franchises. Also, the $15-30 range is home to classics, games that have sold millions, turned a profit and are/were the epitome of gaming excellence and to reward that success get a 50%+ price reduction almost as a thank you to the community (except for Nintendo who doesn't do this anymore).


Then there's $50 and beyond. I think all new games should occupy a variety of price ranges from $20 on up. A few games come out that are introduced at a budget price of $40 but they tend to fail to make waves and expectations are low from the outset. I don't think companies should be ashamed to release and market a game they feel will maximize profit at just $40 and justify that purchase value. Vice versa companies shouldn't be afraid to toss out a $70 or $80 game and feel proud of its quality to carry it through a successful launch if they've gone above and beyond the limits of a typical game. You better have some gaming magic to sell or at least balls of steel if you're going to go into the stratosphere with your prices. I guarantee if prices weren't the same across the board you'd see much better sales across the board. Steam, Amazon and GameStop sales spikes prove this. Games aren't necessarily too expensive or too cheap, they're just not priced to sell.

Word of Mouth Vs. The Hype Monster

Sometimes it's hard to discern the line between the word of mouth hype and the corporate machine's Hype Monster. When a new product is forth coming that hopes to procure everyone's money and attention, which is every five minutes, there's an endless subway train of hype that barrels through us. The amount of attention received is usually directly proportional to the amount of money pumped into the advertising campaign rather than the level of quality exhibited in the product. This is true in most cases but that's not what irks me the most.

The journalists who's job it is to report the facts and give every piece its due are bogged down by the Monster. Now, it's hard for readers and regular consumers to determine whether something is receiving the word of mouth promotion or the latest creation to spew out of the Monster. If a work (video game, movie, etc) is displayed modestly and garners a massive amount of attention by impressed journalists and consumers then that product will thrive off word of mouth promotion alone, advertising is just a bonus to grab the ill-informed. It'll get the attention it deserves even if it never attains the level of sales it deserves. Meanwhile, if a work tries to push itself into our subconscious by going out of its way to remain in our peripheral through expensive advertising and constant praise from within its industry before it even sees the light of day, even if it has the quality of a lemon, then we'll never hear the end of it. The second product will get much more attention in the coming months before release and instill in the readers a sense of urgency and wonder. 'They mention this product a lot, it must be significant, right? Otherwise why mention it so much?' Then it comes out and everyone is underwhelmed and disappointed. All that attention that was squandered could have been spent on works that really deserved attention and are now diamonds in the rough, forever overshadowed by works who put the money in the ads rather than the production budget.

Why can't everything be judged for the attention they deserve rather than the attention they demand? Just because some suits want their product to garner more attention than others doesn't mean we have to reinforce that. A journalist has the power to undermine 'popular' opinion, don't be afraid to use it. 

Min Wage Review: Kirby's Epic Yarn

We’re all pretty well versed in Nintendo’s franchises by now, right? They sport a polish that’s in a class above anything else on the market. They’re cute and approachable. There’s a certain degree of hand holding. Above all else they’re fun and creative even if we already know or don’t care about the story. It takes a certain magic to deliver strong games consistently for over 25 years. Kirby’s Epic Yarn is certainly fun, cute and creative enough to sit comfortably among the ranks of its contemporaries but may not have the goods to be memorable like the others.

Let’s look back at Kirby’s history a bit. Kirby doesn’t have star power like Mario, Zelda or Sonic but he’s certainly not an unknown with an impressive overall sales record going back to 1992. Kirby games are platformers that either test new gameplay concepts or approach typical gameplay in new ways. Most Kirby games are quite similar and are distinguishable from other platformers through Kirby’s ability to copy enemy abilities by eating them. They involve similar storylines and gameplay that rely on Kirby’s adaptability and problem solving. These games vary in difficulty and are pretty straight forward with tons of hidden secrets to uncover. In other games Kirby is a sort of guinea pig for some of Nintendo’s fresh ideas that they feel can’t be carried by a new IP. Canvas Curse was one of these games to help popularize the Nintendo DS and Epic Yarn is one of these games too.

The world of Epic Yarn has been exquisitely constructed out of real yarn turned into video form. Visually and physically there’s very little difference between video yarn and the real deal which is quite impressive. Patchwork makes up the levels and Kirby himself has been turned into yarn and can manipulate the environment in weird, fun ways. There’s a loose button that can be grabbed and scrunches an entire wall creating a bridge to traverse forward. There’s a zipper that can be grabbed and undone to reveal hidden paths and goodies. Enemies made of yarn can be dismantled with a grab or rolled into a ball with a fling and flung into other enemies or obstacles. Kirby also has new yarn-like abilities to compensate for his inability to swallow enemies, because air travels through Yarn Kirby. When he dashes he turns into a car and barrels forward with reckless abandon. He can float across chasms by turning into a parachute. Power ups are littered through levels that require them that turn Kirby into a dolphin, a UFO, a train, a fire truck, a mole and a friggin’ tank.

There are plenty of fun moments throughout the campaign but for the most part you’re just moving forward with little resistance or challenge. By little resistance I mean no resistance, you’re not allowed to die. Enemies and dangerous obstacles are ornamental and only serve to make you drop the currency you've been collecting which has no value whatsoever unless you’re into interior decorating and taking pictures of your living room. If you are inflicted with pain you just hop back like Mega Man, drop a slew of beads and continue on. This isn’t sporting like Sonic the Hedgehog where if you drop them all you die and have to start over. You just can’t lose no matter what as long as you keep moving on. If you fall into a bottomless pit you’re rescued in a manner reminiscent of Lakitu in Mario Kart. I have mixed feelings about this. The lack of harsh repercussions means the player could experiment more without worry and the creator could experiment with more dastardly designs without bringing player progress to a halt, which is how Braid functions. This isn’t the case here. The levels aren’t clever enough to warrant the lack of death. However, with games like Mario and Sonic where death is certain and lives are at a premium there’s no good reason to have finite lives. Finite lives aren’t fun especially with platformers where precision is imperative and takes practice. A platformer eliminating lives is a step in the right direction but this game would be stale even with death although not so much with bosses which are already quite exciting.

A major issue with the game is an identity crisis. If you’re a longtime fan of Kirby, like me, you have a certain expectation that isn’t met with Epic Yarn. This is an experimental title that strays too far from traditional Kirby because it wasn’t built with Kirby in mind. You may notice the little, blue, Kirby-like character with a crown on the box art. His name is Prince Fluff and this game was built for him. The concept was a platformer created with yarn graphics starring Prince Fluff. Fluff still serves as the main character narratively and also serves in co-op as the second player’s character. This doesn’t detract from the game by any means but it doesn’t feel anything like the rest of the Kirby series and a few yarn versions of memorable enemies and characters, no matter how cool they look, isn’t going to change it. However, I did get a bit emotional towards the end when Kirby returns to the real Dream Land for a few stages. Kirby’s abilities aside those stages were the Kirby experience I was hoping for instead of what I got.

The game is great for what it is; it’s a cute platformer with a unique artstyle and some creative gameplay ideas that are great fun but the amount of challenge and sophistication with the levels doesn’t hold a candle to Mario or even other Kirby titles. Luckily there’s no shortage of great Kirby titles and there’s sure to be more coming soon. Epic Yarn just doesn’t live up to its promises as a Kirby title. The presence of highly sophisticated yarn graphics may be enough for some but it isn’t enough for me. For those English aficionados yarn can also mean ‘a tale of incredible happenings’. The story is definitely incredible, in a weird, Saturday morning Japanese stoner cartoon sort of way. The story, and the game itself, is full of cute, loveable joy and laughs unlike anything I’d ever played but it’s certainly not ‘epic’. Perhaps it should have been ‘Kirby and the Magic Carpet Ride’. The game will definitely make you happy but it won’t be remembered as fondly as the classics.

Min Wage Review: Fallout 3

Imagine your idea of a perfect western RPG. A decedent of pen and paper RPGs, like DnD, western RPGs focus on exploration, interactive storytelling and light stat crunching. The only limitations are your group’s imagination and storytelling prowess. In video games these limitations are much more prominent. In return video RPGs offer a different kind of fulfillment and are focused on just one player, the world is built for you. Essentially, the perfect western RPG would be an interesting, fully realized world for you to explore and interact with allowing you to create your own stories with limitless possibilities. Gameplay and character building would only need to be deep enough to be fun and not detract from the overall experience. In this sense Fallout 3 is as close to perfect as any western RPG I’ve ever played.

The world of Fallout 3 is an intricately detailed sandbox set in the area of Washington D.C. 200 years after a nuclear war ravaged life on the Earth’s surface. You’re a Vault Dweller, one who was raised in an underground Vault safe from the dangers of the surface. When you’re 19 you leave the Vault to search for your father who was two steps ahead of you. What lay ahead is a land of crumbling buildings, irradiated plains, mutated animals and scattered traces of how the world was before the bombs. You’ll meet raiders, mercenaries, super mutants, slavers, derelict robots and several factions of soldiers trying to restore the world in their own ways.

What you do next is up to you. There are quest markers to guide you but there’s never any immediacy to dissuade you from exploring the world around you. In fact the game encourages side tracking and exploration by introducing markers on your HUD whenever you’re near one of the 100s of locations littered across the map. Each location is uniquely crafted and house quests, encounters with wastelanders or just historical Easter eggs and loot. This makes the entire game world, which is quite vast and populous, feel realistic and alive. The bleakness of existence deeply affects everything and everyone in the Wasteland and takes gritty realism to a level I’d never imagined a game would or could illustrate.

Aside from the main quest there are no linear directives or predetermined quest paths. Every quest, especially major ones, has several steps with multiple resolutions at every step. Quantifying the bulk of Fallout 3’s quests allows countless permutations and outcomes overall. Essentially you get to act out your own course of action and create your own stories. Do you buy the freedom of enslaved children or do you slaughter the Slavers holding them captive? Do you convince a bigot to let Ghouls reside in his hotel by slaughtering the bigots, slaughtering the Ghouls or through diplomacy? Do you disarm a live nuclear warhead in the middle of a large settlement or do you detonate it for payment from a rich man who sees the town as an eyesore? Hell, you could just skip the dialog trees and just kill everyone, and I mean everyone, in your path if you want. These are the types of choices you can make to pepper your reputation as a heartless barbarian, a messiah of peace or a mercenary with allegiance to none or somewhere in between. Everyone else in Fallout 3 has their own motivations, backstory and beliefs. The path of least resistance won’t always lean one way or another and the path of most resistance isn’t always the most desirable.

In RPGs gameplay tends to fall behind in significance to the exploration and the flexibility and competence of the storytelling. Since this an action-RPG the gameplay should step up and allow for a more immersive experience. Fallout 3 is far from perfect in this regard. It’s intended to be played as a first-person shooter of which there are countless others in the genre for comparison. A first-person shooter’s competence relies on tight, fluid animations and controls. The physics are bad, animations are even worse and the whole experience is extraordinarily clunky and difficult. The game is also unusually buggy. Animation bugs and texture bugs are commonplace; game crashes are annoying but not unusual with games nowadays but the occasional scripting error and frequency of the aforementioned tarnish the whole experience. The whole game is a series of scripts for NPCs and they’re much too fragile that one harmless, goofy action can completely break the game a few minutes later. This appears to be a shortcoming of the game engine more than Bethesda’s design prowess. The entire combat engine of Fallout 3 would be practically unplayable in comparison to other popular shooters if not for V.A.T.S. The implementation of V.A.T.S. saves what would otherwise be a lackluster presentation by allowing you to pause the action and target specific body parts with success percentages based on your skills and the relative probability of the attack. It’s like DnD combat where you roll the dice and are rewarded with gruesome, slow motion kill shots. V.A.T.S. is quite satisfying and has timeless appeal.

Immersion is the key to any work in any medium. The better the immersion the stronger the experience will be. We can forgive some short comings in execution if the level of immersion is above and beyond what we’re accustomed. The Capital Wasteland is a world that will forever be a must-visit for video game enthusiasts for years to come. It’s a world as emotionally powerful and satisfying as any before or since. I’d compare the Capital Wasteland to places like Bioshock’s Rapture, Half-Life 2’s City 17, or Grand Theft Auto IV’s Liberty City in terms of immersion through gameplay, illustration and attention to detail. It’s the little touches that make every room feel fresh and lived in. The incredible scale of Fallout 3 provides enough terrain and locations to explore that could take 100s of hours. Even just playing through the quests and their several permutations and exploring to your heart’s and level cap’s intent could keep you coming back for three or more playthroughs. There’s enough content to satisfy an MMO addict for months with the level of polish we’d expect from top notch single player games and a level of immersion that’s incomparable to any game save those that broke the mold before it. If it weren’t for the lack of sophistication in the combat and the abundance of annoying bugs and glitches, even two years after release, this would be perhaps the best action game released this generation bar none. Let nothing stop you from experiencing the Capital Wasteland.

The Deterioration of the Idea

Lately I've been catching up on a lot of classic and cult movies I'd missed. I'm not much of a movie buff so chances are you could name any film and I probably haven't seen it. Usually I'll find films with connections to other things I'm familiar with and start branching that way. As much as I love my modern films and video games they're by no means originators. Many iconic scenes and concepts from popular films, books, comics, etc can heavily influence future creations. For me, and many more of my generation and any generation thereafter, I often can't find difference between creation and implementation. The reason is I'm not familiar with the materials that have influenced future artists. 

First impressions may not give credit where it's deserved if source materials are consumed in the wrong order. Which deserves the most praise: the creation of an idea or the applied implementation of an idea? The examples I'll give are little more than recreating others' ideas in a different medium and in a different way. These could be considered a sort of artistic plagiarism or just an homage. An example: a scene from 1996 movie Independence Day where American military aircrafts engage combat with an alien dropship only to be overrun by swarms of superior alien aircrafts. This same scene, more or less, is recreated in 1997 video game Star Fox 64's Katina level. Considering the special effects of the movie compared to the limitations of video game technology at the time both were quite impressive. Is Star Fox ripping off, homaging, or implementing a superior version?

Another more abstract example. The 1981 movie Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is set in a post-apocalyptic, desolate, desert wasteland inhabited by merciless marauders and meager human settlements scavenging for a living. All commodities are scarce and invaluable creating a world of chaos after nuclear war destroyed all civilization. Now, this isn't a unique premise within itself but the style and detail of The Road Warrior is quite unique. Video games couldn't match cinema in detail until the last decade. It was only recently where video game worlds could be crafted with the same power of immersion that cinema could create for decades. Games like Fallout 3 and Borderlands draw immediate and obvious parallels to The Road Warrior in many ways. Several design choices, environment design and quests are straight homages, or rip offs, of the Mad Max series in general but in particular Road Warrior. However, Mad Max only offered a glimpse of a world that we couldn't interact with in any capacity. Borderlands and Fallout may not have original ideas but they're unique because we can interact and directly affect how the world unfolds which is quite powerful. The movies set the scenes but the games put you there. Which is more powerful? Which deserves more credit?

I'm in a weird position because I haven't experienced the sources before experiencing the fruit of labor from the influenced. I don't know who I'm supposed to be paying allegiance to: first impressions or seniority. Whatever the proper answer is it'll be affected by the upcoming generations who won't want or won't be able to look back on source materials and understand where ideas came from and who influenced their heroes. The end result becomes the gradual deterioration of ideas. Instead of being influenced by a grand story we'll be influenced by the movie. Instead of being influenced by a grand movie we'll be influenced by the video game. Instead of being influenced by the grand video game we'll be influenced by the remake. Not only will proper credit not be given but the original concept loses power with each iteration. The only caveat would be that once an idea loses it's power and is forgotten that it'll later be revived and praised by a generation who hasn't grown weary of the countless, soulless remakes and are still impressionable.

Dick & Boner's Dirty Limericks: Candy

Dick: How many boners could Candy Suxxx suck if Candy Suxxx could suck boners?


Boner: Just one.