The Armchair Gamer Podcast Season Two Episode Four: There Are No "Right" Choices

On this installment of The Armchair Gamer Podcast I memorialize the recently-deceased Paul Steed. I briefly lament the fact that publishers aren’t marketing hard enough, because I can’t remember when anything is slated to release. Also, I talk with friend of the show Nick Schneider about Telltale’s The Walking Dead.

Listen To The Show At: http://theamrchairgamer.podomatic.com/

Read The Blog At: http://thearmchairnerd.blogspot.com/

(Especially my The Walking Dead post): http://thearmchairnerd.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-walking-deads-abysmal-morality.html

Follow The Show On Twitter At: http://twitter.com/AGPShow

Follow Nick On Twitter At : http://twitter.com/TOGNick

Also The Episode of “Games Dammit” referenced is here: http://www.1up.com/do/minisite?cId=3182486

Listen To Old Episodes: http://archive.org/details/TheArmchairGamerPodcast

The Music

The Walking Dead OST “Alive Inside”

The Video Game Music Hour: Episode One

Hello, dear readers and listeners. I apologize for my absence from the blog and the podcast. Suffice to say, I've had quite a bit on my plate recently. I'm not going to bore you with details, but I'm getting ready to reboot this whole deal. First of all, the Armchair Gamer Podcast is going to be less frequent in its' release schedule, hopefully I'll do an episode a month. 
Instead of focusing so much of my time on AGP, I've decided to follow another of my ambitions, and start a weekly online radio show. Since I'm a very nerdy fellow, rather than playing the newest pop song- I'm going to play retro video game tunes that came out in the 1980's and 1990's, mainly 8 bit and 16 bit music. Since it's a radio show, I'm going to be taking Skype callers with requests for music . The show will hopefully be live at 7 Central Time at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/the-video-game-music-hour

I'll also be making videos after the show where you can listen to the week's music at the Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheArmchairNerd?ob=0&feature=results_main (Please Subscribe)

Also, here's the video

Video Game Music Hour Notes

Track One: “Moon” from Duck Tales

Track from Duck Tales, a NES platformer developed by Capcom and released in 1990. The composer on this game was Hiroshige Tonomura, who was involved with a few other titles in this era.

Track Two: “Vegetable Valley 2” from Kirby’s Adventure.

This is a track from HAL Laboratories 1993 platformer on the NES, Kirby’s Adventure. Two composers on this game were Hirokazu Andu and Jun Ishikawa.

Track Three: “Stage One” from Blaster Master

This next track is from the 1988 Sunsoft title Blaster Master, a run-and-gun game composed by Naoki Kodaka.

Track Four: “Bloody Tears” from Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest

This is a track from the 1987-1988 side-scrolling, role-playing game Castlevania 2 from Konami. It was composed by Kenichi Matsubara

Track Five: A Track I Couldn’t Find a Name For from Rygar.

This next track is from Rygar, which was an arcade cabinet that got ported to the NES in 1987. I don’t have a composer right here, though I imagine it would be pretty easy to find.

Track Six: “Escape from Tourian” from Metroid

This track is from the 1986 title Metroid, published by Nintendo on the NES. It was composed by Hirokazu Tanaka. It was one of the earliest games to really embrace music as a way to give character to a game.

Track Seven: “Fever Theme” from Doctor Mario

This is from the classic puzzle game Doctor Mario, released on the NES in 1990 by Nintendo. It’s a very catchy song on a game full of catchy music composed by Hirokazu Tanaka, who will be in a lot of episodes in the future.

Track Eight: “Sacrifices” from Actraiser

This is from a 1990 Enix-published game, which is absolutely fascinating from a gameplay and musical perspective. It was composed by Yuzo Koshiro.

Track Nine: “The Best Appears” from Actraiser

Track Ten: “Who Turned Out The Lights” from Earthworm Jim

This next track is from Earthworm Jim, a platformer released on all kinds of different consoles by SEGA. This was composed by Mark Miller.

Track Eleven: “Intro Stage” from Mega Man 7

This track is from Capcom’s title Mega Man 7 released in 1995. This game had three different composers, and I don’t know which one did this song. Anyway, this series has tons of great music that I will further explore in this show.

Track Twelve: “Memory of The Wind” from Final Fantasy III

This track is from FF3 released by Square on the Famicom, and that’s why my inclusion of this track is problematic. The version I played probably came from the re-release a couple of years ago on the DS, the first time Americans legitimately got to play this game. Regardless, the series has great music, and this song was composed by Nobuo Uematsu. 

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat Review: A Wasteland Paradise

Game: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat

Developer: GSC Game World

Genre: FPS, Open World, Survival

System: PC

Rated: M (Blood, Language, Use of Alcohol, Violence)

As you may know, I am a huge fan of Metro 2033. Some of you are probably tired of me constantly gushing about it over twitter. Anyway I recently decided to play the other video game series about a post-apocalyptic Russia ravaged with mutants and radiation, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. Specifically for this review I have played the 2nd game, Call of Pripyat.

Gameplay: As mentioned above, Call of Pripyat ditches the hub-based world of Shadow of Chernobyl for a much more open-ended map divided into three different sectors. This vastly reduces the amount of time the player spends in loading different areas and makes the experience much more enjoyable. The map isn’t that hard to traverse, and it usually won’t take you long to get from one end of a sector to the other.

Gunplay is satisfying, and each weapon handles differently from the next without actually feeling underpowered or overpowered. Guns tend to empty fast, so you’ll have to scavenge what you can from the dead, and having several weapons that use different rounds is always a good idea.

Another new addition Call of Pripyat brings is the ability to customize and improve certain aspects of your weapons and armor at local gunsmiths. These upgrades can vary from increasing how a weapon handles to how accurate or how fast it is to how much your armor protects against bullets or environmental hazards. If you want some of the better upgrades though, you’re going to have to look for toolkits. The toolkits aren’t particularly marked on the map, so you may have to ask around to find them all.

A good way of making money is looking for artifacts in anomalies. Artifacts, besides being worth a lot of money, provide bonuses like giving health regeneration or increasing your maximum weight limit but are also radioactive, so you will most likely want to find a firefly or bubble or other anti-radiation artifacts before you equip any other type of artifact. The process for finding artifacts is, at first, a game of hot and cold, and the artifacts are usually right by deadly anomalies. Eventually you get better detectors which make finding artifacts a heck of a lot easier, particularly if you do a certain side quest that nets you a detector which shows the locations of anomalies as well as artifacts

Story: The story in Call of Pripyat follows Alexander Degtyarev as he goes undercover as a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in order to investigate why five helicopters the military sent into the zone crashed without warning. The main story-line in and of itself isn’t particularly interesting, and the conclusion near the end was woefully unsatisfying. I did find finishing each side quest to be incredibly more satisfying. Listening to the epilogue at the end telling you how your decisions affected the zone will both make you proud that you helped Beard and the Stalkers out in Zaton instead of helping Sultan and make you despise yourself for not killing off that hive of Bloodsuckers when you had the chance.

Final Thoughts: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat is a fun game. Its story isn’t going to win any prizes and the conclusion near the end really was a disappointment, but the side quests and gunplay are good enough to more than make up for it. Even if you aren’t the type of person that has to finish every single quest before moving on with the main storyline, I can guarantee you will have finished a good majority of them by the end of the game.

9/10

Armchair Gamer Podcast Eight: This Year In Gaming.

On this, the last edition of the Armchair Gamer Podcast this calendar year, we not only eternally condemn ourselves with irreverent humor, we also analyze some of the high points (and low points) of our personal year of gaming, along with games released this year. Also, we talk a little bit about the way our favorite gaming mag, Gameinformer, once was. Warning: Nostalgia abounds. Thanks for listening, and happy holidays.
Listen Here:
http://theamrchairgamer.podomatic.com/





Or Go And Listen on iTunes:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-armchair-gamer-podcast/id471329603?ign-mpt=uo%3D4
Check out classic episodes on Internet Archives: http://www.archive.org/details/TheArmchairGamerPodcast
First, thanks to everyone who listens to the show. There’s a lot of shows out there, and I’m glad you stop in every once and a while for ours. I hope you have a happy holiday season with friends and family. In case you are wondering, the hectic season and conflicting schedules, along with a noticeable lack of topics this time of year, has led us to deciding to finish making new episodes this year with this episode. This doesn’t mean we got cancelled, though… Starting next month, January, we will pick right back up where we left off, with more of the show, and some new content which I’ll make up some time.
Plugs:

You can follow me (the host) on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/Gamebeast23456
You can also follow Nick Schneider on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/TOGNick
And, if you really want to, you can follow JJ on Twitter, too: http://twitter.com/#!/Thejourneyman66





Also, check out the official blog of the show:
http://thearmchairnerd.blogspot.com/#!/
Finally, like us on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Armchair-Gamer-Podcast/126992900740481

Listener Feedback:
What was your personal game of 2011, and what news story do you find most important?

Some More Worthwhile Questions Than "Are Games Art?"

I'm really, really tired of the debate about whether or not games are art. I have heard every possible argument possible from every side of the debate, and I will not listen to anymore of it. If you love games and have seen their power of telling stories and evoking powerful emotional responses, you understand that games absolutely have the ability to be forms of artistic expression. That discussion should have a bullet in it's skull by now, and the fact that gamers are still discussing it proves we are still unsure of our medium, and we personally aren't sure if we are good enough to be art, which is a destructive mindset. 

Since I will never discuss that topic on THIS blog, I feel there are other topics related to the advancement of fascinating and artistic games that need to be discussed; there are problems surrounding video games as an industry that need to be solved. In this post, I'm going to cover two of these questions, and I hope you think about them, as well. 

Is The System Weighed Against Creative Game Development? 

What is "the system", you ask? Some may classify it as publishers, and the mainstream game market. I find that a little close-minded, and it doesn't really cover the whole problem. After all, publishers are just companies that exist to make money. They follow markets and bet on what they feel will succeed in the current market. No, "the system" may very well be you, and it is definitely is me at times. The things we buy contribute to "the system", subscribing to news organizations that parrot corporate lines contributes to it, etc. 

You may think the statement that much of the industry is weighed against creativity is a little dramatic, and if I  did not see the lineup for games releasing this year I may agree with you. But think about this: What games have you been most excited for this past year? Now list all of the sequels that appeared on your list. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy having more of a great game as much as any gamer- but it seems the video game industry is more occupied on doing more of the same than doing something new. We don't seem to want to leave our comfort zone, and because of that we consistently get more of the same. And then when a game at least attempts something different, or tries to change video games- it is labeled as pretentious because, well, it wasn't fun, or some crap like that. 

"The system" rewards people doing the same thing over and over because it says, "That weird game isn't how video games are supposed to be." "Games have to be FUN or else they have failed as a game." It's one thing to criticize a game fairly, it's another entirely to look down upon the game because the people behind the game are trying something new, and calling them pretentious because they aren't staying with the status quo. 

Are The Personalities We Like in The Game Industry Dragging It Down? 

I will admit that I really like Jim Sterling, the writer of Destructoid.com. Not only do I find his humor ridiculously funny (some of my favorite podcast moments are Jim Sterling going insane on Podtoid in British voices) and I appreciate his harsh criticism of gaming, and his apparent longing for games to become the best they possibly can be. Yet, Jim is very guilty of trying to limit games as a form as well. He has made it very clear of his disdain for "art" games, complaining that they aren't fun, like games have to be fun before anything else. 

Now, it's fine to have different opinions than me. That's what makes the world awesome, there are so many great and fascinating opinions floating around on any topic, and there are people like Jim Sterling who are great at fluently expressing and explaining these opinions. But I find the idea that games have to be fun one of the most destructive of any concept in the industry. It's like saying a novel must have intrigue or else it has failed, it's like saying that a rock album has to have heavy electric guitar riffs or else it is worthless. There is so much possibility in interactive media that saying games have to be fun is ridiculous and limiting.

Yet, people eat up these people's opinions like they are going to give them pundit-superpowers or something. How could non-gamers accept games on the same level as books or paintings when so many people in the middle of the industry feel they need to be toys. I am sorry, but I DO CARE that people accept games- I want more people to be interested in something as awesome as games because I know if we got over this "games are toys" hump, everyone would realize that games are amazing, as I already have. 

I have said my piece, and put forward some pressing questions about trends that are harming the future of imaginative games. I now hope you will disagree or agree with me, and expand this discussion beyond being a one-sided affair. We won't get anywhere in this medium unless these questions are asked, and I am eternally grateful for the internet as a place for asking them. Game on, guys. 

The Difference Between Games As A Product and A Work Of Artistic Expression.

You know, I dog on games like Call of Duty a lot. Constantly, I find myself comparing an artful, indie game to Call of Duty or a game like it. And I am very much guilty of also making the mistake of putting Call of Duty in a position of inferiority, like it is inherently disgusting and shouldn't even exist. Because, despite all of the complaints I've had with the Call of Duty series, I have to admit that for the last three years every single Call of Duty game released was almost a perfect game. You can not deny that Call of Duty is one of the most prestigious, consistently high-octane game series of all time. You have the success of the games alone to attest to that fact. Yet, I can not in good conscience look at the series as a particularly good one, or one that is healthy for the development of video games as a respectable medium of expression. 

With that being said, I think the work of designers like Jonathan Blow, Gregory Weir, and others is far more important to the evolution of games than the near-perfect Call of Duty series ever will be. This is not to say Majesty of Colors by Gregory Weir is comparable in terms of gameplay to Call of Duty. Compared to COD,   this game is nothing- literally five minutes long at the most, with pixelated graphics and one-dimensional gameplay that could never fill a game the size of Call of Duty, but these games have something that Call of Duty and other engineered blockbusters lack, and that's heart. And there's a very good reason why: 

Most Huge Blockbusters Are Engineered To Be Blockbusters.

Why are series like Gears of War, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Madden, etc. so freaking good? Well, part of it is that the people working on the games are very, very talented people who are dedicated to their job and want to make a good product. But the other reason is because the amount of resources publishers have to use on high-profile games is insane. Games are constantly play-tested by non-biased, third-party individuals and tweaked to work perfectly. After all, they can't afford to release a product that isn't as perfect as possible. 

By the time you play a game, it has been turned over and over by dozens of different people that try their hardest to break the game, to find exploits or problems with the gameplay, and to see how accessible the game is. You are getting a highly-refined, carefully crafted product that has been designed with the utmost quality in mind. Which is great, I still enjoy AAA games as much as the next guy. Just a few weeks ago, I basically had a nerdgasm over how freaking awesome Batman Arkham City was. 

However, when anything is distilled- whether it be a game or a movie- the character is often taken away as well. In the interest of making a great game, a game loses the developers touch and the charm associated with playing a game you know was developed by people, not polls and play-tests. 

Recently, I played the indie game Knytt Stories, a Metroid-style platformer full of whimsy and charm. I enjoyed the heck out of the game, devouring the expansions and then going back for seconds and thirds. It was a pure game experience, and my enjoyment of it was comparable to something like Arkham City, which is another near-perfect game. However, this game had flaws, HUGE, GLARING FLAWS! Flaws that could have easily been ironed out if the game was play-tested a few times. But, some of the things that were wrong with the game were also what I perceived as being done right. The game was so charming and fun, it had me spellbound the entire time I played it. 

The game had, for lack of a less-cliched term, character. It had a presence, and the creator of the game created something that was beautiful and unique and awesome. It felt like it's own game, with no ties to anything else in the platformer market. It was pure and unadulterated, and what flaws it may have had were covered up by the sheer amount of uniqueness. 

If we continue to eat up games that are developed like products and not forms of personal expression, if we keep classifying games based on mechanics, if we keep treating games as toys- we're not leaving this spot we are in now, this awkward spot of people pulling in every direction for only AAA games, no AAA games, etc. I'm not saying AAA-games have to go, but maybe it's time we stop looking for perfection in games, and start looking for individuality and fun. Maybe it's time for something that isn't over-inflated and highly marketed. Or- maybe it isn't. I guess gamers will decide that. 

Is It Time To Evolve? (A Look At Genre In Games And It's Relation To How Games Are Perceived)

I am a huge supporter of the idea that video games, a media that was created as an electronic toy, is quickly evolving into an artful medium (I'm not going to go down the road of the whole Video games are/aren't art dicussion, because it's done to death.) The focus on atmosphere, story, and other experential elements is increasing greatly this generation of games, and with that arises several problems that have existed since the inception of video games. The problem I am speaking of today is this: Video games aren't defined into genres by the experiences they offer, or the themes that they deal with in the game, they are defined by gameplay mechanics. They aren't categorized by the experience you have with the game, necessarily, they are categorized based upon the vernacular (game mechanics) that game developers use to transfer ideas and stories.

In the early years of video games, the setting up of genres based upon gameplay mechanics made more than enough sense. After all, not only was the technology behind video games extremely primitive, games were toys. Even the people who spent time developing games were keenly aware that what they were making was nothing more than a toy, a piece of entertainment. A basketball isn't advertised as an object that you can create great stories with, because it's just a toy. It has only one intended function; no one promises you anything more than something you can play basketball with. The same principle applies to early games. In Super Mario Bros. you were performing a series of platforming challenges to accomplish a goal. That's all. No doubt, it has fantastic design and is an all-time classic, but it's very apparent that this game exists solely have fun.

And for a while, this idea of defining games based upon their mechanics worked fine. Even very sophisticated games, like Final Fantasy or Deus Ex, still were very refined versions of a basic style of game. The complexity of games until around this generation was still limited to something that could (usually) be comfortably described using this system of genres. However, in many cases, this is no longer true.

I'll do something I'm a big fan of. I'll use BioShock, because it's a very good example of a game that succeeds on a mechanical and artistic level. Now, if you wanted to, you could still identify this game as a first-person-shooter; a game where you use guns to defeat enemies in a first-person perspective. However, defining this game like that does it a huge disservice, one I find almost offensive. Because Call of Duty is a first-person-shooter, as well. Defining Call of Duty and BioShock as "similar" games, is like saying a more recent Stephen King novel and Edgar Allen Poe short stories are similar. Call of Duty is NOTHING like BioShock, beyond the very shallow comparison that both are games that require you to shoot at people in a first-person-perspective. The whole purpose of BioShock is that it's a unique experience in a dark, compelling world. It's an intense, philosophically charged game that has so little in common with COD it's like night and day. So why are they both classified as the same type of game? Because of that old, outdated idea that video games are toys that exist only to provide basic experiences of say, shooting a guy and jumping from one platform to another. It's that mentality that causes games to be looked down upon. How could you accept a medium at all as a form of personal expression (or of, *sigh* aaaarrrt if you must) when it's defined by mechanics, not experiences?

I'm not saying that games need to have higher meaning than being fun just to fit them into a different genre system.I love shallow experiences where I can just shoot bad guys and not worry about heavy-handed experiences as much as the next video game blogger. All I'm saying is that, maybe, it's time for us to look past a game's mechanics alone to determine what kind of experience a game truly is, and put it in a genre accordingly.