I spent MLK weekend dogsitting a canine that was fond of pooping six times a day and howling at 3am and waking the neighbors. As a thank you/apology, the owners bought me a PS3 for my troubles. So, hey, here's an Uncharted 3 mini-review!
I should clarify that I know full well the worth of bloggers who review popular games months after everyone has already beaten them, and that I mostly do this to organize my thoughts on good and bad design choices.
Things I Liked
It looks gorgeous and takes you to amazing exotic locations.
The characters are (mostly) great and all have excellent voice acting and line delivery
The shooting mechanics are really good, and I really enjoy the seamless segway from gunplay to hand-to-hand combat.
The game has an honest-to-God difficulty curve that proves very challenging towards the end of the game.
The horse chase scene is Goddamn amazing. "Hey! My horse came back!"
The game is often funny. "Oh yeah, I had to top off my minutes. Contract plans are a ripoff."
Some simply amazing level ideas. The ship graveyard and how open it was turned out to be my favorite section.
Things I Didn't Like
A lot of the stealth sections are too rigid and only allow for one kind of come-from-behind takedown of enemies. There's not enough of a margin for error, and engaging in supposedly quiet hand-to-hand combat with an enemy (who is himself alerted, but has not loudly warned his buddies) often leads to an automatic alert that brings everyone down on you.
Not enough variance in tougher enemies. Guys carrying riot shields offer a neat tactical challenge, but they disappear halfway through the game. Helmeted guys in body armor are tough at close range but mostly hang back and pelt you half-heartedly with a shotgun. The heavy armor machinegunners from Uncharted 2 only appear once in the entire game. And the series-favorite "supernatural enemies" aren't really supernatural, and show up for only five minutes.
Instead of tougher enemies that pose tactical challenge, the game institutes way too many enemies that can kill you in one shot, which I find terribly frustrating. Especially when we're talking about a guy with an RPG around a blind corner. That's not "challenging" so much as "infuriating".
Speaking "infuriating", the designers should never, ever put the player in a killbox... unarmed... with no flanking possibilities... facing a squad of heavily-armed men. That's not fun. It becomes trial and error to just survive for 20 seconds.
Enemies are way too aware of your position, usually making flanking irrelevant.
I don't actually know what "Drake's Deception" refers to.
Didn't Cutter shoot Talbot at one point? And then Talbot reappeared fine? After having apparently disappeared into thin air earlier in that same level? It suggests that something supernatural is going on, but it's never explained.
Fighting the whirling dervishes while in that drug-induced haze really sucked and was not fun.
Why, hello there. I'm back from the warm glow of spending Christmas and New Years at hearth and home in Rhode Island. That means that I've returned to my usual city of stubby, unadorned concrete boxes posing as buildings, host to a quixotic collection of ugly white people under severe delusions of grandeur.
One must soldier on.
Or not, since it's time again to arglbargl about Xbox Live Indie Games. For a change, instead of describing its latest indignities through the lens of Cute Things Dying Violently, let's instead focus on Scott Tykoski, a bonafide developer at Stardock who decided to go slumming in XBLIG with the Christmas-themed Elfsquad 7.
Poor Scott recently tweeted that Elfsquad 7 had only sold 600 copies on XBLIG (at $1 a copy) since its release, which is dispiriting for a number of reasons. But since my opinion on how viable XBLIG is as a market should be pretty well-known at this point, I'll only focus on one reason in particular: Elfsquad 7 got lots of good press. Joystiq, Kotaku, Indiegames.com, Gamasutra, and plenty of other sites quickly took note of the professional developer and his game. Lots of people paid attention. And still... 600 sales.
So, we're looking at XBLIG as a market that is even now becoming more resistant to good press, one of the most reliable levers of ensuring (or at least boosting) commercial success in pretty much any market. XBLIG doesn't have many saving graces left for those interested in earning money from it, and one of those few remaining graces is either quickly receding or is now entirely gone.
And Scott's not my only data point. Cursed Loot (formerly Epic Dungeon) was the best-selling game of the XBLIG Winter Uprising that occurred a year ago. According to its creator, Eyehook Games, the title sold 3,800 copies (at $1 a copy) on its first day on the market last December. And that was before that game (and the other Winter Uprising games) got featured prominently on the Xbox Live Dashboard. By comparison, CTDV (I lied, I am talking about it), a game I'd wager was similarly popular, sold 700 copies (at $1 a copy) on its first day of sales about 9 months after the Winter Uprising concluded, and only 800 copies on its best day, when the Summer Uprising ad went up on the Xbox Dashboard.
Two games, both popular and well-received, both backed by prominent Uprisings and similar levels of advertisement from Microsoft... yet one exhibited far slower sales than the other, just nine months later.
There could be many other reasons for that, including purchasing habits of different customer bases (CTDV seems to have sold as well as Cursed Loot over all, indicating that the long tail of purchases has made up for lower initial sales), but I can't help but think that the marked difference of 3,800 sales versus 800 sales is from rapidly-declining market interest. Fewer customers are interested in XBLIG as a whole, and the market is contracting to the point where even consistent good press is losing its relevance.
One final example: the creator of the recently-released twin stick shooter P-3 admitted in the App Hub forums that his game only sold 21 copies (at $1 a copy) on its first day on the XBLIG market. His conversion rate of trial downloads to purchases was 5%, which is... saddening. And I can't help but compare that with my own crappy geography game, which sold 60 copies on its first day of sales back in June 2010. As a genre, twin stick shooters are far more popular than edutainment, so once again I find myself wondering just how much the market has contracted.
Or at least they pretend to. For long enough to humor me, anyway.
First up, an article on Supply and Demand on Xbox Live Indie Games that I posted way back in September has made its way to Gamasutra, where it was yesterday's Featured blog post. Nice!
Secondly, Tim Hurley over at Gear-Fish roused himself from his stupor long enough to review Cute Things Dying Violently. (Tim, it's been out for about four months now.)
Finally, Tim also snuck a few interview questions my way. I hold forth on the usual game dev subjects like upgrading CTDV, future games to be made, and platform preference, but Tim also threw a curveball my way regarding cooking. That was a really fun one to answer.
Bad news, nobody. Someone hacked my Xbox Live account and spent $120 of my hard-earned money on games I don't get to play. While Microsoft is investigating the intrusion (and taking their sweet time in doing so), they've shut down my Xbox Live account, which means I can't use it to test out updates to Cute Things Dying Violently. Which means the desperately-needed Xbox patch for it is on hold.
Great.
In far better news, Kairi Vice of IndieGamerChick has been featuring Xbox Live Indie Games developers on her blog while she recuperates from a medical issue. The series is called "Tales From the Dev Side", and Tuesday saw the publishing of Ian Stocker's (Soulcaster I and II, Escape Goat) article on pricing, while yesterday I had the privilege of seeing my article go live. It's about making your game stand out, which is important no matter what market you're releasing it in, but has a few special ideas just for XBLIG.
I don't care if its the biggest goddamn video game ever. Activision shitcanned the lead developers of Infinity Ward in a ridiculously stupid move, and Infinity Ward is a shell of its former self, so I opted to just Red Box this game for $3. Heh. I didn't want to play the multiplayer (I intend to keep obsessing over Battlefield 3), so here's my thoughts on the singleplayer:
Stuff I Liked:
The East River mission in New York City was great from beginning to end. The Modern Warfare series is lauded for many things, but one of my favorite aspects of the series - its sense of the macabre - is often overlooked. Swimming through the flooded Midtown Tunnel and seeing all the bodies in the cars was creepy. Also? Ramping a zodiac off a sinking aircraft carrier will never get old.
The zero-grav midair sequence on the Russian plane was very interesting. And amusing.
I knew from the get-go that the Eiffel Tower was going to collapse, but it was still amazing and epic to behold. Those girders breaking sounded like God was yelling at me.
Infinity Ward's artists have always done well with smoke effects, so the sandstorm in Somalia looked great and was very atmospheric.
Movie references spotted: Air Force One, The Peacemaker (the red laser stuff), Black Hawk Down, The Hunt For Red October, and more that I'm forgetting right now.
I gotta admit, the death-by-hanging at the end was so over-the-top that it got a hugely appreciative laugh out of me.
Alright, lets talk about callbacks to previous games in the series. Hearing Ghost/Gaz reappear as a previously-minor CoD4 character was neat, especially the line, "Let's do this." I was also pleased by the return of Captain MacMillan, although I was disappointed he that he didn't have any pointers on the Coriolis Effect. I also liked how Yuri's story was connected to Makarov's and the previous games', although it didn't really pack much dramatic punch. And I like that Price gave his pistol back to Soap. I'd love to see what Paul Haggis could do with a video game if the developers weren't spending all their time trying to make an interactive Michael Bay movie.
Stuff I Didn't Like:
Infinity Ward (or what's left with them) included many levels that have no dramatic payoff. It's not that I need a cool setpiece, scripted event in each level... it's just that some levels are just there for the sake of existing. Aside from going inside the Stock Exchange, the Wall Street level was boring. The Sierra Leone level was, too. Everything after the beach assault in the Hamburg Invasion level was bland. And aside from the nonlinear narrative, the Berlin level was underutilized.
Even some levels that aren't narrative cul-de-sacs are dumb. Prague should've been interesting, but wasn't. (When I saw I was going to Prague, I immediately said, "It'll be nighttime and use a heavily-blue palette." I was right.) And what the hell was up with that random castle?
The shooting mechanics still suck.
Levels are oftentimes so cluttered that I can't even spot enemies without using the auto-aim.
The developers really, really need to stop using "Everyone dies!" as a narrative crutch. Especially when they refuse to show them actually dying (apparently that mine at the end collapses...).
The "disturbing scene" isn't. It's a hackneyed attempt to redo "No Russian" from the last game. At least No Russian had the spectre of interactivity going for it.
Why the hell did they hire Timothy Olyphant, Idris Elba, and Bruce Greenwood as voice actors? I wouldn't have been able to tell who they were if hadn't checked beforehand, and they never got any good lines.
Shouldn't I feel guilty for mowing down so many UAE policemen? They're trying to protect the hotel against two madmen in full body armor! They're the good guys!
The whole "Russians are invading everywhere" WWIII aspect is still absurd. Logistics don't work like that. Russian tanks can't just roll down the Champs Elysee just because.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I traded emails with Stefanie Fogel at VentureBeat about Cute Things Dying Violently and developing for the PC. Well, some of my quotes have appeared in her latest article about Xbox Live Indie Games developers switching from Xbox to PC, and you should read it here.
First off, I should point out that I'm quoted in this article alongside the likes of Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac), Robert Boyd (Cthulhu Saves the World), and DJ Arcas (FortressCraft). That is, to be blunt, a huge fucking honor. These guys are all players in the indie community and are talented developers with great games on their CVs.
Also, to be blunter, I don't necessarily deserve to be quoted alongside them. As the article points out, Cute Things has only sold 17,000 copies so far and will probably only gross 30k or 40k by August 2012. These guys all have popular, well-known games that passed 100k sales with their eyes closed. In short, I'm not a peer, I'm a wannabe. That doesn't make me any less awesome, mind you! Just not as awesome as these guys. But one day...
Another thing worth mentioning is that Stefanie only shared a few snippets of the quotes I gave her and the things I discussed. The two paragraphs in her article that discuss me blend a few disparate subjects: I discuss that Cute Things did pretty well but also that the poor filtering on the XBLIG Marketplace scares away potential customers. I also have a bland throwaway quote about how the PC is great for indie developers (no shit), and then that comment about how most of the Uprising developers have abandoned XBLIG.
A few sentiments missing from the article are that I appreciate (and I do!) the huge success that Microsoft and others have afforded me through XBLIG. I don't relish biting the hand that feeds, and I don't think Boyd (a former XBLIG developer) does either. But there are superior opportunities elsewhere. That's just the way it is. 20k copies sold on XBLIG versus 100k copies sold on Steam is a no-brainer.
Speaking of which, I say in the article that I'd love to get my game on Steam, and I would, although it's certainly not a foregone conclusion. I'm certainly not trying to be presumptuous... just because I appeared in a prominent article alongside some wonderful, prominent developers doesn't mean everyone should hang on my every word, or that my game is destined for greatness. I still have my work cut out for me, and I really want to earn a spot alongside those developers.
I've been working steadily on Cute Things for the past few days, and decided that I didn't want to just throw a bland bug-fixing patch at the 360 version. Since I'm also busy working on the PC port of the game, I figured that Xbox owners should get in on the fun. And oh what fun it is! Yessir, we're talking about 18 new Achievements, leading to 24 total if you include the Special level Achievements.
Also, they'll still be called "Achieve Mints" on the 360, thanks to Microsoft's lovely mouth-breathing tendencies.
