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• Roundtable Discussion: Genre Design Evolution

  Roundtable Discussion takes the intrepid 61FPS blogging team and pits it against itself in the search for deeper truth. The moderator for today is Derrick Sanskrit. Hey kids, I think it's time for another roundtable chat. I've actually been wanting to ask this of you guys for a few weeks now, because I've noticed that lately I've been playing a lot of games I never would have even considered playing as a kid. Am I alone in this or are we all doing it? What sorts of games are you playing now that you didn't play during what I assume was the glorious childhood heyday of gaming we all experienced? What sorts of games did you play then that you don't now? Have our tastes changed or have we merely opened/closed ourselves to certain experiences? What is fundamentally different about how these games are made now and how has overall design changed over time, affecting us as game consumers? I know that's a bit of a loaded series of questions, so I'll kick things off. I pretty much never played racing games as a kid. As a lifelong urban New Yorker, I never romanticized the concept of driving a car and have veered away from it for as long as I've been able. My college roommates pressured me into playing Gran Turismo, but it was Need For Speed Underground that made me a convert. Read More... Posted Mar 09 2009, 09:00 AM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: derrick sanskrit, need for speed, shmup, cole stryker, bioware, burnout paradise, joe keiser, guilty gear, roundtable discussion, design, genre

• Where Is SSX?

  Let me ask you a question, EA Canada: must it all be so gosh darned realistic these days? I’ve played Skate and Skate 2. Cool games. Cool games that helpfully reinforce, digitally, that my brain is not ready to take up skateboarding. The sheer amount of things I need to take into consideration whilst performing a simple trick in Skate terrifies me. If I tried to do this in real life, and I had to think about all the different things I was asking of my body, a plank of wood, some wheels, and gravity, I would experience complete ego disintegration right before rupturing my testicles on a railing in some public park. Why oh why can’t you take me back to the good ol’ days of extreme-with-a-capital-TREME sports, EA Canada. Why can we not head back to the mountain for some good times with a new SSX, the awesomest fake snowboarding game of all time? SSX 4 showed up on a few release lists back at the end of 2006, right around the time that the Xbox 360 was ending its first year and just before the release of the Playstation 3. These were the systems said to be home for such a wonderful sequel. Alas, that game was never ever officially announced and has failed to materialize since. A sort of remix of SSX 3, SSX: Blur, came out for Wii in March 2007 and it remains the single most frustrating game I have played in my entire life. Read More... Posted Feb 23 2009, 07:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, ea, microsoft, xbox 360, where is, sony, burnout paradise, criterion games, dj atomika, skate, skate 2l john Constantine, ssx 4, ea Canada, ssx, ssx blur

• Burnout: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

  I gotta hand it to the charitable folks over at Criterion; since last January's release of Burnout: Paradise, they've released quite a few substantial DLC updates at absolutely no cost to the consumer. Where companies like Namco-Bandai are content to find ridiculous ways to get their hands on your hard-earned money, Criterion doesn't seem to mind playing Santa three times a year to support one of the greatest racing games we've seen this generation. And even though they plan on charging for their upcoming pack of downloadable cars that absolutely don't infringe on any copyrights whatsoever, the creators of Burnout have at least one more free update coming out on February 6. While the last free Burnout updates were largely content-related, this new one appears to be a complete under-the-hood overhaul; and the addition of one hugely-missed option is definitely going to bring me back to a game I should have honestly played a lot longer. The big announcement? You ask – we deliver. Restart is in! You can now quit or fail an event and choose to restart it. You’ll be transferred to the start location ready for action. We’ve always enjoyed the feeling of freedom that Paradise City’s open world delivers, but we appreciate that as you run low on events towards the end of the game, you can spend a little too long in transit. While I certainly thought the open-world nature of Paradise was a nice change of pace, the annoyance of having to drive back to the starting point of failed events made the game much more tedious than it needed to be. Read More... Posted Jan 26 2009, 12:00 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: burnout, bob mackey, dlc, burnout paradise, racing, criterion

• John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Open World

  The strange thing about the way we delineate time is that repetition — twelve hours, seven days, twelve months, rinse, wash, repeat — tends to make everything feel cyclical. Come January, we stare forward, looking at the flow of hours to weeks like a one-way street full of fresh landmarks, memories, and conversations. But when we end up back at December, there’s a collective and pervasive sense of déjà vu, an overwhelming feeling that we’re suddenly back in the exact same shoes we were the last time it was December, and we take stock of everything we saw upon that fresh stretch of road as though we’ve come back to the start. We weigh the fruits of time’s passage and immediately compare them to what came before. Maybe that’s why those of us so obsessed with pop culture, who worship at the altar of creation and consumption, gravitate towards retrospective lists; we just can’t seem to help looking back right before we look forward again. I’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out just how to quantify the videogames of 2008, wrestling back and forth with just what to say. There are games that, by the end of my time with them, I downright loathed, that I never wanted to play again, but that I couldn’t shake out of my brain thanks to one aspect of their design. I never managed to finish Grand Theft Auto IV because I was so repulsed by its schizophrenic depiction of character when it put so much emphasis on story (and more on that later.) GTAIV’s Liberty City, though, is something I still think about on an almost daily basis. It is one of the most beautiful and strange creations I’ve ever seen, something more than a photograph, sculpture or film thanks to the way you are allowed to inhabit it. The game’s goals are frustrating to achieve, its characters more personality than people, and its story is at odds with its interactivity. But its world is astounding, just real enough to be familiar, and just other enough to warrant exploring it when its real world inspiration is right outside your door. I hated Grand Theft Auto IV by the time I stopped playing it, but I have to bring it up here because 2008 was the year of the Open World for me. Read More... Posted Dec 16 2008, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, grand theft auto iv, no more heroes, burnout paradise, far cry 2, crackdown, top ten of 2008, mercenaries, elder scrolls, best of 2008

• Where is Prototype?

  The open world game, or sandbox if you prefer, isn’t a genre any longer. At this point, it’s just another method of structuring other genres in a way that gives you more freedom in how to play the game. Open world games aren’t GTA clones anymore; they’re just games with a modern version of the ol’ Mega Man boss select screen. It’s been neat over the past couple of years to watch the open world platform branch out. Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed, Burnout Paradise, Far Cry 2, hell, Spider-Man; all very different games that let you do whatever the hell you please in their world (to a degree) on your way to completion. One of 2008’s more promising games, Radical Entertainment’s Prototype, is a violent action game with a nice open world foundation. It looks gruesome and brutish but it also has some neat ideas behind it, particularly its brand of character customization. Alex Mercer, the genetically altered amnesiac protagonist with a spooky past, eats his felled foes and gains all of their characteristics, abilities, and memories. This lets you come up with all sorts of horrific, bombastic ways to destroy things but it also lets you blend in with crowds, a nice twist on the open world formula of manipulating hordes of NPCs. Sounds cool, no? Read More... Posted Oct 29 2008, 07:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, where is, mega man, grand theft auto, sierra, activision, burnout paradise, far cry 2, crackdown, radical entertainment, assassin’s creed, prototype, spider-man

• Barack Obama's Sweet Ride

  In news that would have been Onion-worthy satire a mere 4 years ago, Giga Omni Media reports that Sen. Barack Obama has moved his presidential campaign to the world of virtual death racing in Burnout Paradise.  That's right; instead of only seeing billboards for places to buy large, overpriced electronics, driving through the streets of Paradise City may also serve as a reminder that you live in a democracy, and may be asked to get off your ass once every four years.  But, as the article indicates, this move to in-game advertising may be a tad contradictory when compared to comments previously made by the senator: Of course, detractors could accuse Sen. Obama of sending out mixed messages; earlier this year he was telling audiences that parents need to “turn off the television set, and put the video games away.” Then again, since the Burnout billboard specifically advises gamers to vote early, maybe it’s his subtle way of trying to get them off the couch. Read More... Posted Oct 14 2008, 04:45 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: bob mackey, politics, barack obama, election, burnout paradise