Why do we need yet another DayZ clone?

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What is it about…. What are you’re trying to do here that you think other – you know, like, the DayZs of the world and what not… What is it about having this kind of… The angle you’re taking, the thing that separates it away from those competitors, I guess.

I don’t know much about games journalism or the kind of industry auto eroticism event that is E3. So the premise of this post may be very naive. The quote above is my painstaking transciption of a question – if you can call it that – by Danny O’Dwyer of Gamespot to a Sony rep about the zombie-survival MMO H1Z1 being showcased at E3. I know from experiences that coming up with intelligent sounding questions on the spot can be exceedingly hard but just to be clear, the question was part of a sitdown interview, not a shouted drive-by question on the showroom floor.

My point isn’t that O’Dwyer should have prepared himself better – though he clearly should have, it’s not like it’s not an obvious question to ask – but that he seems to be tying knots on his tongue trying not to sound critical. Here’s the same question, put simply:

Zombie-survival MMO games are a dime a dozen these days. Why do we need another?

My wording, however, implies the possibility that Sony’s game is not only unoriginal but possibly superfluous in a too-crowded me-too-market. Which would be critical in a journalism sense (not in a ‘your-game-is-shite’ sense).

Which leaves me with the  – as I said, possibly very naive – conclusion that these kind of events truly are love fests between industry and game press that brook no critical attitude towards the wares on display.

Brotiful

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My main gaming computer is currently down so any gaming gallivanting has to limit itself to whatever my (work) laptop is comfortable with. And while I could plug in a proper mouse, laptop gaming in my view is something you do on a couch with a scorching piece of meat plastic in your lap. And as little touching of the clit clit as possible. Whether using mouse or trackpad it’s just not really comfortable couch gaming.

That has meant lots and lots Spelunky. But even Spelunky can get a bit samey after 100 hours. So when the RPS impressions piece on Broforce mentioned that there wasn’t any targetting (or ‘run-and-gun’) I signed up.

I suspect the gimmick of using caricatured 80s action heros will wear thin soon (though it hasn’t yet) but the sheer delight in the absolutely classic over-the-top mayhem this little gem can produce will never fade, I hope. Surrounded by pathetically screaming, flaming enemies my bro strikes a nonchalant pose while spewing endless bullets acroos the screen, making the the very ground shake, bake and quake . And I’m grinning from ear to ear. It’s just fucking brotiful, bro.

A Moment in Game Time: Far Cry 3

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With my back to the boulder, I frantically reload my shotgun. 1… 2… 3… The shotgun is only mine in the vaguest of senses. I borrowed it off a guy who wasn’t using it anymore. He had a skull tattooed on his face and a hole in his stomach so he should be easy to recognise if he comes claiming it back.

  • When I find you, I’m gonna gut you!

The voice is coming from the other side of the boulder. I’m in a jungle valley on the northern side of a mountain range and only the faintest of dusky light is seeping through the trees. Whoever is yelling know I’m here beacuse he just saw me run and dive for cover behind the rock. I know he’s there because he’s yelling at me. I aim this way and that. Which way is he gonna come? The tension is too much so I call clockwise and break cover with a cry of ‘Diediedie!!!!!!!!’ and fire blindly. Suddenly I’m face to face with my opponent. He seems as surprised as I am. As I’m already firing I get the advantage. Squeezing off shotgun shells in the general direction of the guy does the trick. I pant and recover and wish this was the kind of game where tension didn’t get the better of one-liner quipping.

‘I found you first’, I finish lamely.

WTF

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We must have played very different version of GW2, because when it played it it’s WvW was among the worst PvP I’ve ever experienced.

Nothing like DAOC at all. The CC was far too weak for a good open world PvP game. You need powerful, AoE CC in a good open world PvP game else the team with numbers almost always wins.

– MobileAssaultDuck, comment on an RPS article on Elder Scrolls Online

I sometimes suspect I’m missing out on stuff by adopting the dismissive Yahtzee stance on mumorpugers. But the sheer AI (acronoymic impenetrability) of the comment above, makes me think that regardless of the merits of MMORPGs, it’s not going to be worth the effort required to enter that particular domain of gaming. Yeah, I could google all of it, but then I could also just play games I enjoy.

Next Car Game: The Second Coming of FlatOut

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FlatOut is one the few games I have more or less completed and probably the only racing game. The nitpickers out there will  probably want to know how I fared in the silly sideshow mingames that involved throwing a ragdoll test dummy out of the window and onto a dartboard and the like. And did I get first place in every race? Yeah, no I got to the final race and won. And then I had had my fill. Game completed. So there.

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Daily Distraction: TrademarkVille

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Trademarkville hijacked my morning. The plot is simple: Words are getting trademarked as soon as they are used. Therefore new words are constantly needed. Your job is to either come up with a new word to replace an old one or guess what a new word means. Once a new word has been made, that word becomes instantly trademarked and so it can no longer be used by other players. If you use ‘female wizard’ as the new word for ‘witch’, neither the word ‘female’ nor the word ‘wizard’ can be used anymore

Example: The word ‘fetus’ has been trademarked. I propose ‘betababy’ as a new word. And then @donofmath comes along and guesses that I’m trying to refer to an unborn child in it’s mother’s womb without getting in trouble with the Trademark Police. I couldn’t write ‘beta baby’ as ‘baby’ had already been used once and so had been trademarked.

The whole thing is obviously a pariody of the whole Candy Crush Saga absurdity where the publisher of CCS tried to get a monopoly on using the words making up the game’s title. Or something like that. The internet doesn’t tend to preserve the nuances of IP law debates very well.

What it is from a player point of view is a fun and silly challenge to be creative in your choice of words. Throw your vocabulary about in search of good, crossword-style synonyms (‘slapstick PA’ for jester? ‘nongreen cucumber’ for banana?) or just mash words together in outrageous punnery (‘man-inna-can’ for knight and ‘femagician’ for witch are pretty neat, no?)

You can get rewarded by other players for particularly good new words but mostly you’ll just be challenging yourself to come up with something at once precise and witty. Which can only be a good thing.