Oh The Drama: Mass Effect 3 Edition (Spoiler-free)

5 Apr

It was Friday night. Or Saturday morning. Depending which side of the clock you’re more active.

But for me, it was the culmination of a five year journey. An epic adventure that consumed over 300 hours of my life. And at 3AM that day it was all over. Mass Effect 3′s end credits flashed across the screen and that was it. The first thing I did was delete all the 35-odd GB of game installs lying on my Xbox 360 hard drive since the first game’s debut in 2007. Unlike many a fan I didn’t feel the need to rage, troll, throw a bitch fit, fight for a refund or start a petition. Rather, I was overcome with a sense of relief.

You see, being a big RPG fan and by extension, an admirer of BioWare’s work, I was naturally pumped when I first read about this space-faring odyssey in the September 2006 issue of EGM (acquired second hand nonetheless) but over time, I’ve learned that things are never what they’re meant to be. There’s always some form of compromise at the end of it all. In this case, it was BioWare forsaking deeper narrative, culling out characters central to the game to package off as DLC and slap multiplayer on it in order to sell more units. Having been on the business side of things in the industry, I can understand where they were coming from and I guess they weren’t given much of a choice either.

Given that BioWare got bought over by the same company who thought it was a cool idea to turn what was arguably the greatest strategy franchise into an FPS (that too, after buying the studio responsible for said franchise) I was expecting far, far worse. And sure, it was diabolical enough that the game mechanics forced me to play the multiplayer mode for over 20 hours, it was better than expected and even grew on me.

After all, it’s not everyday you get a semi-decent game from the same developers who gave you the steaming pile of turd that was Dragon Age 2. Craptacular characters, bugs galore, recycled dungeons and lame plot, it seemed like a pre-alpha build on release. Keeping that in mind as well, Mass Effect 3 wasn’t that bad a game.

Yes, a little more exposition would have been nice as would a greater emphasis on your choices throughout the trilogy but if a next to negligible portion of my 300 hours of gameplay ended up being rubbish, it would be stupid to hold it against the developers. Considering that we live in an age of disposable, 5-10 minute games, a mammoth, interweaving trilogy in itself is a tremendous feat.

So what I’m getting at is this, after all that has happened in the past what with the debauchery of the Dragon Age series and their parent company’s reputation, now unfairly voted as the worst in America, we could have been treated to something a lot more distasteful than a brief slipshod ending. An Angry Birds mini-game perhaps? Or maybe a mineral management simulation?  The possibilities to mess this up were endless. And as gamers we could have been a little classier about our response. I’d like to believe we’re a better breed than disgrunted Instagram using iPhone fanboys.

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The Timeline of Tomorrow

1 Jan

A little something I rustled up for Mumbai Mirror’s New Year’s issue. Unedited, uncensored and hopefully, better formatted than the print edition.

The problem with writing a column about the web trends of 2012 is that I can’t exactly prophesies about flying cars, giant robots or alien visitations. Reason being, change on the internet is a little less dramatic (and less cliched) but as important all the same.

2011 has been its growing up year of sorts. From Egypt to Russia along with pitstops along the UK, US and to an extent India, you’d have to be living under a rock not to take notice of the role Twitter and Facebook have played in advocating governmental change.

While this doesn’t mean that we’d stop using social media to document drunken nights of debauchery, it just means the methods of doing so will change. Here’s my predictions for 2012′s internet trends.

1. Social media goes visual: rather than fill in your Facebook or Twitter status updates with random song quotes or banal whining about how crowded the local train was, video and photo uploads allow you those few moments to think “is this really worth sharing?”. Throw in the fact that your average cellphone camera is competent to film and shoot with ease, and that images speak louder than 140 characters, you get fledgling networks like Instagram ( a photo app currently for iOS devices only but heading to Android phones soon) and Viddy (a video editing and sharing app for smartphones) primed to steal a slice of Facebook’s and Twitters social pie.

2. Year of the mobile. For real: every year seems to the be the year when mobile internet takes off. 2012 is one of them. But what makes us believe it will finally happen? For starters smartphone prices are next to nothing, social apps like Facebook and Google Plus are now mobile in a big way and hardware manufacturers such as Nokia are pushing Near Field Communication to allow for contactless payments too. So you’d be using your phone for more than just Whatsapp or Angry Birds. Oh and the occasional call. Now if they’d just lower iPhone 4S prices…

3. Anonymity becomes a hot-button topic: Be it what movies you’re watching or where you are shopping, a lot of what you do in real life finds its way on the internet. If you don’t share, your friends will. It’s this always connected, always sharing system of social media that leads to privacy concerns. This is made worse by the fact that all your information is archived, making it easy to find at any given time. For example, the last thing a prospective job candidate would want, is a recruiter to chance upon his or her not so printable thoughts on Sunny Leone on Bigg Boss. On a more serious note, anonymity allows users to speak up without fear and gives whistleblowers much needed protection. The point is, as more people are aware of the importance for anonymity, it opens up an avenue to charge for it rather than leave you without a choice. Don’t be surprised if Facebook and Google Plus offer that option in 2012.

So there you have it, three of the bigger internet trends for the new year which promises to be more agile, vibrant and effervescent than the last.

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Online Passes: The Death of Single-Player

30 Dec

Distributors and retailers refer to games as products. Publishers on the other hand, like to believe games are services, supported by a torrent of content to ensure that you’re hooked for as long as possible. They’re both wrong. To me, games are moments. They’re those events that make you wet your pants in fear, cry like a little girl or just simply smile. Be it the obtuse humour of Fable, the wide-eyed whimsy of Kirby’s adventures or the sheer adrenaline rush of Vanquish, there’s a lot that make games worth playing. And now, access to newer experiences and feelings that games can elicit are dependent on:

1. How fat your internet pipe is.
2. How often you’re willing to stretch your electric bill in the name of grabbing those levels that should have shipped with the game in the first place.
3. Your willingness to spend $10 for a scrap of paper over and above your used game purchase.

There’s been a lot of drama around publishers and their online policies to curb used games. Be it locking out campaign levels, multiplayer modes or just modern day horse armour, it’s become a bit of a nuisance we’ve grown to tolerate. Gone is the time when you could just boot up a game and play it, there’s an install, patches, and of course, some varying chunks of megabytes of content that you’d to download before you can even think of playing your game. Add the obligatory driver downloads, config file edits and swearing if you’re a PC gamer. You’re spending less time experiencing the thrills of Arkham City and wasting more time waiting for the damn content that should have been on the disc to be downloaded.

I’m worried about is how this would affect single-player only experiences. Now, not all of us (read: me) are big multiplayer gamers. I like my solo fun be it mining for minerals in Mass Effect 2 (I actually liked that, true story) or flirting with fellow classmates in Persona 3, single-player games, particularly RPGS, are, for the lack of a better term, my jam.

Which is why this entire debacle of locking out single-player content in the name of protecting first hand purchases is preposterous. Even more so when a triple-A title like Arkham City does it simply because it sets precedent. But if we’re to be historically accurate, I do believe precedent was set with Dragon Age: Origins’ Shale DLC which punished gamers who didn’t pre-order or buy day one by missing out on the coolest character and her side-quest in the game. To be honest, I don’t think the game would be quite the same without having a big hulking stone golem with a psychotic dislike for pigeons and a disdain for humanity by my side. But I digress…

My major issue with this wholesale adoption of online passes is that it corrupts the design process. It dilutes the impact that a title would have. Imagine how FFVII would have been if you were asked to pay to access the death of Aeris? Or if Modern Warfare’s All Ghillied Up mission was an optional download? Would these have the same effect as they did when you saw them for the first time? I highly doubt it. You’d end up with thinking a little lesser of the game than you should. And you can’t be blamed either.

After all, it’s not like the developers and business folk have the best idea of what should be listed as an online pass what shouldn’t. There are some moments in a game that everyone should be able to access regardless of their type of purchase be it day one or two years hence, new or used.

Hell, it was quite tragic that the Naked City case in LA Noire was a download-only affair in certain territories. Reason being it was, in my opinion one of the cases that the game should have shipped with. It did a good job of fleshing out the details of 1940s Los Angeles’, it deserved more than being bunged in with the rest of Rockstar’s dismal online pass offerings.

Another caveat of restricting content to a digital code is the actual gameplay duration you get out of a single-player game. Fundamentally it means that you’re never going to get all the hours the game promises you unless you connect to the Internet and download the data as soon as you purchase it.

I wonder if any of the executives at publishers have ever thought how stupid it is to keep content out from a paying customer just because of his or her Internet reliability (Warner Bros and Rocksteady, I’m looking at you). It’s not like everyone has access to a blistering fast broadband connection or is comfortable with downloading a ton of data. Mass Effect 2 comes to mind where the collective wisdom of EA and Bioware thought it was a good idea to let us download close to a gig worth of content (Normandy crash mission, Zaeed Massani’s quests) after purchasing the game instead of dumping it on the disc.

Though the US figures show a different picture, it’s not exactly true for the rest of the world. Especially when some countries have ISPs that think it’s cool to have a fair usage policy restricted to 25GB. Sometimes I feel that the publishers are in bed with Internet providers and electric companies in order to make us spend more than we should on electricity and Internet to get something we’ve already paid $60 for.

To sum it up, online passes would, in my opinion result developers create half-assed single-player campaigns that make a mockery of your hard-earned money. After all, it’s not like you make it a habit buy a used car without wheels, or a used book without half its pages. Some might argue that games are not products, they’re services. I believe that games are neither. Games are moments.

And for this reason alone that this entire online pass hoopla is a complete clusterfuck in the making.We’re not far from the time when what could be classic moments that make video games special get sliced and diced as pre-order or day one add-ons. So go ahead, do your bit and don’t support titles that are making a making a mockery of the very core of gaming because as gamers, we deserve better treatment.

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Quit your bitching and listen to mine. Why it sucks to be a gamer in India.

27 Dec

It’s tough living in a supposed third world country. You never get access to great games like Persona or BlazBlue unless you’ve got a credit card plus spare cash to deal with the all but obvious customs charge that follows or a relative kind enough to get you what you need. Reason being, we’re a nascent market, where anything outside triple-A (or purported triple-A tripe like NFS and WWE) don’t sell. Even the mainstream press doesn’t give games or gamers any respect, devaluing the entire ecosystem of gaming, casual or hardcore, PC or console to cheap Chinese knock-offs.

Heck, Nintendo doesn’t even have a legit presence in the region, so we’re officially three formats short.Throw in the fact that the two biggest formats in terms of install base are the PS2 and PC, even games like Forza and Gears aren’t that easy to come by unless you really hunt for them. Having said that, if it’s not labelled God of War, WWE, Uncharted, Halo, Cricket 20xx, Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, GTA or Hanuman Boy Warrior you’d be at your wits end trying to find it.

Digital distribution services such as Steam aren’t exactly the most accessible of options thanks to a glorious Fair Usage Policy (FUP) that caps your downloads to 25GB (yes, I shit you not, I rather get an aneurysm than explain to a customer rep why their policies suck) and the fact that local, physical boxed PC games cost around $20-25 at launch. Yes, we’re perhaps the cheapest for PC games in the world. But that counts for nothing when a good portion of titles don’t even release here, officially or otherwise.

For example my attempt to find a copy of Fallout: New Vegas for the PC was a disaster. Thanks to D-toid and a few friends on Steam who were raving about it my interest was piqued. I figured it shouldn’t be much of an issue getting it. Never had I been so wrong. The first stumbling block was finding someone who knew about it outside my merry band of virtual friends, there wasn’t anyone at retail or real-life per se who had an idea about the latest in post-apocalyptic simulation. Most trips to stores were like this:

“Do you have Fallout: New Vegas?”
“No but we have FIFA 11.”
“Oh, no thanks.”
“Sir we have this new game, GTA4. Just came in. Brand new!”
Me: facepalm

At least Fallout 3 was easier to source due to it being banned (pro-tip: you want a game to sell, get it banned and have parallel importers bring it in and charge a boatload) no such news of New Vegas being banned ensured that my local grey market importers were equally clueless.

Ironic isn’t it? There I was, searching for a game that focused on the sheer lack of humanity in post-apocalyptic times and I never felt more alone in my quest for it in the 6th most populous city in the world. Forget obscure, it hadn’t even been heard of. No, it doesn’t get better.

Entire genres get ignored so much so that RTS or RPGs outside their initial run are absolutely painful to find. This means if you don’t snap up a copy of Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect 2 within the first week or two, you’re more or less boned till it makes it on the shelves as a platinum/greatest hits release.

Don’t even get me started about platform parity, for the longest time, things were so bad with Xbox 360 sales that we only got the arcade SKU a year and a half after the rest of the world did. I guess it probably had to do with MS’ smart idea of straight math, assuming that ten percent of a 1 billion-odd population with a per capita income of $1219 would actually be able to afford a $500 Xbox 360 Pro console. At least we got Xbox Live before a ton of other territories including the Middle East.

However we’re by and large a PlayStation country with PS3 games selling around three to four times as more as they would on the Xbox 360. This basically means if you ever bought an Xbox 360 you’re screwed as games are hard to come by because so few of them are brought in unless you’re the sort looking to pirate because in that case it’s easy to get your hands on a console and games, in some places even easier than getting an unmodified Xbox. The same applies to the Wii in quite a few places as well.

And it gets worse. A few months ago a couple of leading distributors thought it would be a nice idea to start a price cartel, preventing retailers to price games as they saw fit. In fact, no retailer would be allowed to price any EA, Sony first party, MS first party, Capcom or Namco Bandai titles at a discount. All games from these publishers have to sell at suggested maximum retail price for the first two months. The end result? A ton of retailers parallel importing product and some of them doing it catastrophically wrong to the point where NTSC U/C PS2 and Xbox 360 games litter store shelves when we’re a PAL territory.

It’s a bone-headed policy that’s probably going to do more harm than good. Luckily, other distributors aren’t too interested in maintaining a stranglehold on day one pricing. Yet. Problem is EA is the topdog publisher in the region and has a major influence on how other big publishers such as Ubisoft and THQ do business.

Are we going to end up with price fixing that’s borderline, if not completely illegal? It’s too soon to tell, but it’s just one of the many glaring problems that gamers in India face. The hilarity of all of this is, how do you expect to keep piracy down if everyone selling legit games is hellbent on making things more difficult? It’s these inane reasons as to why people continue to flock to piracy regardless of format. Interested in games for your PS3? Sure, hop on over to your friendly neighbourhood store with your PS3 in tow and wait for 30 minutes as the salesman loads the games of your choice on your PS3′s hard drive right infront of you.

All in all,things are oppressive at best. And until the industry decides to be a little more open, a little more perceptive and a little more interested in actually serving a market instead of shoving crap down its throat, it sucks to be a gamer here.

Oh and I did manage to get my copy of Fallout: New Vegas after pulling in a massive favor from a friend overseas. Not something I’m likely to try again. How easy is it for you to get your games in that little slice of paradise you call your country?

Next week, why locally created video game content should die in a fire.

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I’m going to Hell

10 Nov

So this happened a few minutes ago…

Mr. X: Recommend me a sitcom pls :) Dudeee

me: Suits

Mr. X: Dude saw it, anything else

Mr. X: N btw suits is not a sitcom :p its drama

Mr. X: Sitcom is only comedy

Mr. X: Like himym,friends,seinfeld

Mr. X: Think n tell

me: Community :P Big Bang Theory, South park

Mr. X: Seen :-|

Mr. X: Then

Mr. X: Anything new?

me: 2 girls 1 cup

Mr. X: Or really old

Mr. X: Whats that abt?

me: watch it

Mr. X: 1 girls 2 cups is normal :-|

Mr. X: Ok

me: lemonparty

Mr. X: Hmm

Mr. X: Checking these two thanks

Mr. X: Tell me more if u know

me: Goatse

Mr. X: K checkin

Mr. X: Cant find goatse on imdb

me: google or youtube

Mr. X: Wow all 3 not listed

Mr. X: So these just air on youtube

Mr. X: No download :-|

me: look around, you’ll find ‘em

Mr. X: Wtf is that porn?

Mr. X: 0_o

me: lol no

Mr. X: Search says not safe

me: your machine is prolly a pr0n server

Mr. X: Its something to trick ur friends n record reactions :-|

me: lulwut?! It’s not a reality show, it’s a sitcom

Mr. X: Download link pls

me: *redacted*

Mr. X: Is it nsfw?

me: no

Mr. X: Cool

Mr. X’s new status message – Im The Lyrical Gangster \m/

Now Listening to: Metallica- Ronnie

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Now Listening To

20 Sep

from Instagram: http://instagr.am/p/Njz2X/

Sign outside the office. Witches club?

19 Sep

from Instagram: http://instagr.am/p/Nh658/
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