Bioshock Infinite: Almost ruined by combat

Bioshock Infinite has torn me in a manner unlike any other game to date.

On the one hand, I thoughtfully enjoyed it. I adored the floating city of Columbia, the mysterious and hidden path of the protagonist, the idle companionship of Elizabeth, and the frenetic pacing of a story based around regret, redemption, suppression and brutality.

On the other, the longer I played through the game, the more I found myself sighing whenever I popped into the pre-determined arena of a "major" battle. The pre-placed rifts featuring an assortment of health packs, salt, appropriate weapons and almost useless cover. Enemies standing around in well spaced positions, with an array of weaponry designed to swarm and suppress my position as quickly as possible. A few hooks to exploit that rarely available "air to ground" insta-stun that rendered you open to attack from everyone anyway.

There's no strategy here. Enemies don't allow it. Entering the battlefield invites instantaneous flanking, rocket spam, random spawns, and sometimes even a bunny hopping Handyman with a convenient weak spot. You can't stealth in and around to land hard attacks. Elizabeth can't use her immense power to actually harm anyone, for some reason, but can through you ammo and salt at opportune times. Every now and again there's a skyline you can hop on, but I found myself thinking that the pace of these fights didn't match well against the controls nor your field of vision.

But what incensed me more than anything else was the sheer pointlessness of many fights. Why did I have to kill Lady Comstock three times? Why did I need to protect a ship when I could have flown to my destination on a giant robot bird I was able to control? Why did every single nemesis have a team of henchmen that I needed to kill almost constantly, when most of them seemed to enjoy having a yarn? Why did the game feel that I should be able to shoot the innocent poor but not the innocuous rich?

I continued playing because I adored the moments in between. I loved finding audio logs which drip-fed various dimensions of the puzzle and offered a different perspective. Winding my way through Elizabeth's prison and earning her trust. Gazing at the sheer beauty and detail in everything - from Fink's enormous factories to Comstock's multi-structure ode to himself. Digging up the detail of this seemingly picturesque locale that was rotten to the core.

So why did I need to kill everything, almost all of the time? Why was my gun on screen during dialogue, pointing at people it didn't need to be pointing at? Why couldn't I explore an area without having to run into
nameless thugs who rushed me for simply existing in that particular place?

It didn't have to be this way either. The game started well. It offered me a weapon but spent a fairly long time establishing the scene without using it. By the time I had brained my first guard, I was ready for a fight, although I didn't know I'd be hoarding ammo and SCIENCE because of the perpetual chance I'd have to electricute a bunch of guys enough so I could blow *all* of their heads off in one shot.

Combat ceased to be a potent mechanic about halfway through the game. I was tired of it. The rare moments when B:I decided you didn't have to do it if you didn't want to, I breathed a sigh of relief. I could explore a little, stare at the posters and hunt around for more logs. Oh, wait, there's a dude in here, better kill him now he's seen me. Oh great, 20 more dudes. Kllkillkillkill until the music stops.

But the final fight was the last straw. Simply put, it was one of the worst climatic fight scenes I've had the displeasure of experiencing. What could have been a powerful lead up to a spectacular ending, was instead a clusterfuck of timed fighting, waved enemies and my personal pet hate, vehicles with health. I grit my teeth and ground through it.

I loved the ending, but I couldn't help but think it was spoiled by the preceding few hours. At the point things got interesting and ramped up, the designers' felt that their only option was to simply overwhelm the player with combat. So much so, that by the time I reached the bow of the ship to meet Elizabeth, I had 3 shotgun shells left.

Can we stop being angry yet?

In the last year or so we've been surrounded by industry controversy, from the shocking abuse of a Bioware writer to the ill considered comments by a Gearbox developer, and it seems that we're always ready for a good fight. To get PROPER angry.

In most cases, it's entirely warranted - sexism, misogyny and homophobia have been left rife and unchallenged within the community for far too long, thus the growing number of people on social media and journalists at large have been fighting (mostly) to expose it. I've happily noticed an ever growing number of people, both male and female, calling foul on most of this practices which tells me there is, however small, movement on tackling these issues.

But the flip-side of this crusade to tackle these problems has increased the level of general anger and antagonism, both on social media, blogs and larger outlets between gamers and journos alike. When most of us would usually bind together to fight as a unit against outside forces (Jack Thompson, Politicans, Mainstream media rubbish), on these problems we prefer to blame each other.

It doesn't help that the internet has created the extraordinarily easy opportunity for any idiot with a keyboard to create a blog, slap on an Ad Words banner, and write a horrible headline with garbage underneath to become instantly notorious. This won't take long to hit the social airwaves and before long, we're all fighting with each other again over a troll.

I get it. These people shouldn't be writing this sort of crap. But we've been through so much turmoil and snark that it really doesn't take much for us to get angry again at the drop of a hat. It doesn't justify flooding your feed with furious retweets and .@'s because you read something designed to be offensive on JoeBlogGamesVille.com - all you are doing is perpetuating the cycle and nullifying the *REAL* rage when someone actually important says or does something offensive.

Let's all step back, have a breath, and focus on the things that matter: The games, the people who make them and the upstanding community of great people who contribute to the creative process every day. Feel free to do your jobs to hold people accountable for their views, but maybe make sure those people are actually worth the effort.

Kony 2012

I'm as skeptical as the next guy when it comes to social network based causes. I've never worn a wristband, I've laughed at the 20 second attention span of teenagers and uni students when it comes to the fad based crap that gets passed around Facebook.

But in this case, I'm a believer. Call me nieve if you like, but the staggeringly large amount of child murder, abduction and forced fighting that Kony and his army plagued Uganda and much of Central Africa with is unconscionable. Of all the horrible shit that happens in this world, Child Soldiers are at the very top of my list - there are countless books available that detail the day by day hell that many (now adult) kids faced, forced to kill or maim their parents and families, become sex dolls for other soldiers, to be stripped of a childhood.

It's pretty disgusting to see some people's instant reactions to this video - sure, it was a little precious at times, but to see this guy dedicate a large portion of his life to protecting children and advocating for the cessitation of child warfare was powerful. So much so that I broke my shield for once and started advocating the video, and even considered heading out to spread awareness in April.

Invisible Children are hardly the most well run charity - they're more of a loose coalition of smaller anti-war groups that have rallied together to support one particular cause. Under scrutiny, they aren't the red cross - a large portion of their funds are probably spent offshore and undocumented. Whether you choose to donate is up to you. I'm not defending them or their fundraising efforts.

The video was about putting apathetic eyeballs back on a situation so few people know or care about. It's using those same eyeballs to make noise and dig a warlord out of the jungle. Sure, it won't "Save Africa", but if a few million people calling their government and asking them to do something is what actually comes out of this, what the fuck is the harm in that?

I think people are far too cynical. We won't solve any problems by being smarmy on the internet.

The truths of community run video game sites.

When I first began writing, I was roughly 15 or 16 years old. I had originally began writing a journal, something my English teacher suggested would bolster my skills, and flirted with short stories, some absolutely dreadful fan-fiction, poetry and novellas. It was around this time that video game journalism had begun to graduate from print to the web, scattered across a number of European and American "networks" - namely UGO and Gamespy. While those sites generally focused on producing paid content from ex-print professionals, many others were more than willing to capitalise on the free labor of, well, anyone.

I started off writing for two sites; the first was a European network called MGON.com, run by a few swedish guys with a taste for the eccentric. I honestly don't remember a lot about my time there, it was about 12-13 years ago now and the site has been defunct for much of that. It was, however, my first experience dealing with an online team, and back in those days, this was something very exotic and exciting. Most of my writing was for one of their Half Life subsites, covering mods, updates and the like. Of course, I wasn't paid a cent, back then noone was, the team is what kept you going.

The relationship lasted about a year or two. Internal relationships between many of the sub-site owners became hostile and unmanageable, and the network slowly began unravelling. About a year after I left, most of the writers had migrated over to Gamespy's network and MGON became just another forgotten example of the tumultuous personal relationships that govern community games sites. Like most, MGON was run almost entirely from the top down, and as a result, many writers and sub-editors were rarely given much autonomy over their content, design and layout.

The team were incredibly talented, intelligent and had a spectacular work ethic. Most of us were teenagers, and had all self taught overselves the skills to create and serve content. Back then, there was no Web 2.0, no wordpress. If you wanted a site, you built it from the ground up, and if you wanted traffic, it spread entirely on word of mouth. It was a simpler time, with Gamespot and IGN still in its baby stages, Gamespy was also new but growing to be the king. Other magazines had slowly become to come online, but the keys were temporarily in the hands of the fans. It was truly a golden age. I'll get to the problems it faced and why it fell over a bit later on.

The second site was called Gamers Pulse, a community run site based out of Texas. Probably one of the most professionally run sites that existed at the time, it was technically part of the UGO network but had almost complete autonomy. I had no issues with management or other staff when I wrote for GP, and my leaving was based on really nothing else but a sense of disillusionment with the investment of time and effort being put into sites I was pretty sure was making money and gaining influence for many people other than myself.

After this I took a break from writing for roughly 6 years. I finished high school, flirted with Uni and sailed through some jobs before landing, ultimately, into IT. My life began to stabilise somewhat so I decided to stop being a reader and start writing again. I was impressed to see a burgeoning Australian media industry growing, particularly around sites like PALGN (then run by Peter James), Ausgamers, Games On Net and Australian Gamer. Emails to all of them went unanswered (funnily enough, two of them are two of my biggest clients now) so I decided to start small and applied to a very tiny but interesting site called Gamer Limit.

Gamer Limit was run by two guys, one was a Tasmanian and the other was a Floridian. I liked both of them straight away - they were friendly, fiercely passionate and intelligent and had thousands of ideas. I took to the site quickly and before long I had graduated to 2IC. It was at this point I found myself sitting inside the echelon of an established community games site, with a significant amount of support and power to make changes and shape the site to something I thought could be amazing.

Alongside the EIC, I quickly decided we needed to change 3 things about the site - the focus, the staff and the layout. All three were dated and ineffective; our traffic was atrocious and the quality of prose was average at best. The current staff were roughly split into great/terrible, and it was obvious we needed to whip things into shape. I put together a stack of policies - ranging from staff performance/expections to what is expected in a particular style of article. We went on a huge hiring spree and chose, what I still consider to this day, to be a team of some of the best writers I've had the privilege of working with - many of whom have gone on to become paid writers at magazines and larger sites.

Once everyone knew their places, we instituted weekly staff meetings over Skype, discussed plans to increase patronage and upgrade the site. Our insanely talented coder ripped the site apart to institute changes to templates, graphics, adding an entire internal blogging system and more. We put together a schedule of regular content and before long we had regular news, reviews, editorials and previews. Our traffic went up 1000%, we started getting offered review copies and press invites left and right. I spent 8 months working on successfully getting the site listed on Metacritic and Game Rankings.

We couldn't believe our success. I started to slowly increase my profile and make a name for myself during my various networking while sprucking the site. We went to E3 two years in a row. We held a successful charity game marathon across two continents with help from Insomniac Games. But by this point I had been working on the site almost 8-10hrs a day, everyday, for about 2 years. I was starting to burnout hardcore, along with the rest of the editorial staff. Then came the monetisation problem.

One of the biggest myths of community game sites is the expectation that you will, one day, make it big and monetize. This will almost *never* happen. Some sites, namely the Gawker blogs and Destructoid, are exceptions to this rule, but almost every other one will never turn a profit, let alone grow a revenue base. One of our biggest issues was getting consistent ad campaigns - we were in a bracket that invited us into more lucrative ads (at our peak we were coming up to around 800,000 unique hits per month) but all of the providers were next to fucking useless.

This situation tore the site apart. As we became more popular, and we expected more from our writers, many of them started to burn out and lose motivation to write consistently and regularly. To keep them going we would reward them the only way we knew how - creating arbitrary positions and promising them press and priority on review copies. This worked for a little while. But you can't fight fate.

The site peaked once we lost the ability to keep ontop of our social networking commitments. It takes at least 2-3hrs a day of pushing traffic to the site to keep growing readership, but we were losing 1 in 4 readers (only one would come back, 3 would read and run, its a pretty common statistic). We couldn't offer exclusives, we couldn't offer video content, and our podcasts were too random and inconsistent. Our sense of community was very small and our forums were always blown away by spammers.

But we just didn't want to give up. We all knew the truth but it didn't matter, we had spent far too much time to get here. We scoured YouTube for up and coming video talent to poach the site. We hired more writers. We eased the restrictions on content. But then we had the split.

During one of the press trips a massive rift opened up between two of the editors. It was almost completely irreparable. Both sides refused to talk, and it eventually became a case of he-said/he-said. Half the staff quit on the spot. It was the death spiral for Gamer Limit. I left, very sadly I might add, a few months after the split. While I try to keep in touch with these guys, most of us have lost our shared connection and barely talk anymore.

The recent very public breakup of PALGN reminded me of how volatile and unstable community run sites are. Most of them are backed by very strong, top heavy leadership followed by a dedicated team. This tenuous relationship is made even more difficult by the fact that noone is being paid, meaning that the only element of motivation is for the games and the team. If the team have no confidence or respect for each other, or is neglected by the leadership, the house of cards will fall like dominos.

Yug, the original founder of Australian Gamer, recently wrote an article on his blog about the DO's and DONTs of running a community based site. All of it's true, sadly.

The Escapist and the trouble with content publishers.

The most recent drama that has exploded across the interwebs regarding the dispute between Extra Creditz and The Escapist would be pretty unsurprising to those who have been monitoring the health of the industry at large. The gradual conversion of TE from a pioneer in mature perspectives on the impact of gaming to a media portal, was largely based on the success of Zero Punctuation, which catapulted the traffic into the weekly millions.

Provided with the possibility of a new business plan to move "beyond the text" and indulge in more of those video based monies, The Escapist scoured the 'net to expand its video portfolio. Before long, the monthly "issues" that originally made the front page focus of the site were marginalized to a few articles and various video series' became the bread and butter of lucrative advertising revenue.

The sheer number of various channels should have raised a few suspicions to the viability of the whole enterprise. The numbers that are coming out of the tens of thousands of dollars in dispute means that TE were promising more then they were reasonably able to provide. Other video based portals like Gametrailers, Screwattack and Channel Awesome compete with TE for those cult-based dollars, and the market, to be frank, just isn't large enough to sustain them all.

Advertising has never been a spectacular earner on its own for content publishers, and I heavily doubt TE are making much on top of the commissions promised to their media creators. The specifics of the dispute aside, what has been agreed on both sides and by other producers is that the Escapist is operating largely on credit. Many people have piped up claiming they haven't been paid for months, if at all, and that the issue that has plagued freelance writers for so long has now spread to video creators.

The fact of the matter is, if you can't afford to pay your staff, don't promise to pay them in the first place. I understand that it must be difficult to keep the hundreds of thousands of liquid capital on hand to pay your bills, but just because the power company and the bank are bigger and angrier then your employees, the money owed to them is equally, if not more, important.

I understand that avenues like The Escapist give unknowns the opportunity for a larger audience, but that excuse does not play when it comes to relying on IOUs. Banking up your debts is a great way to go bankrupt, taking out all of the people who have spent weeks and months generating goodwill and traffic for your website.

There are millions of game related sites on the net, making it one of the most contested markets for consolidated internet advertising revenue. Poking your head above the rest is not simply based on content saturation but content quality. If you're a publisher and are finding it difficult to pay the bills, it might be worth looking at your stable and re-evaluating your position.

It's not fair to expect people to work for free. Sort out your shit, Escapist.

Why DC Universe isn't working out.

It's a statement, not a question. Or, maybe it is a question. I'm not sure, but at the moment I'll work with the former and open up the latter to you, the reader.

DC Universe isn't really something many people currently care much about, nor essentially do they need to anyway. It's just another disappointing mistake from SOE; a company that seems intent on taking great ideas, making muchos mistakes then ignoring the small community of fans who desperately spam ideas on forums, begging for attention and recognition.

But it wasn't always this way. Two of the best examples of originality in the genre came out of the publisher - Everquest was the original timesink, and introduced almost all of the staples of the genre that we love and loathe today. Love it or hate it, EQ was the balls until WoW came along and beat the bastards at their own game with polish and grace.

SOE's heyday included yet another brilliant attempt at genre mashing with Planetside, one of the best team games I've ever played, yet probably underplayed by almost everyone else who just didn't know it existed. It did away with almost every one of the conventional traps and just let you gradually take over the world, point by heavily contested point.

You know the rest of the story. SOE fucked up almost everything after that (Star Wars, EQ2, Vanguard, Legends of Norrath) by dictating to their customers what they needed and ignoring the (originally) positive feedback that was provided to them. But that's just their post-game. Sony have never really been "one" with their audience. They still haven't understood why EQ2 failed so miserably, or why noone appreciated SWG's revamp.

Blizzard know why EQ2 failed. They know why SWG's revamp wasn't received well. They know because they understand what people are trying to get out of these games. They want clean interfaces, interesting quests and evolving structure. They want to feel like they are part of the world and things they do make a difference somewhere. While most people know the game is repetitive, they also understand that there are other things to do within when they get bored.

This, finally, brings us back to DCUO. DCUO fails because it's EQ2. It's an MMO from 1999 with a relatively decent combat system with boring quests and a "snap on" endgame system that doesn't matter. People who care about DCUO right now will not care about it in 6 months. Just like the people who cared about WAR, Age of Conan, Aion, and the countless other forgettable MMOs that launched and failed in the past 5 years don't care about them now.

Yet, I continue to fall into the same traps that I always have. I expect that the new "hook" of the next sexy slut in the red dress will entice me with such terrific gameplay and intutive controls that I will be yet again lost for months inside an online world.

Instead, I'm out $50 and annoyed that yet another random company has my credit card number on file.

Why Blog?

Why Blog?

I've been writing about games through both mainstream online and print sources for a fairly long time. Although it's profitable and generally more likely to be read, it requires forethought and planning, which tends to push most of my thoughts on gaming, tech and politics onto twitter and facebook.

140 characters doesn't allow for deep analysis.

So Games and Lamp will be more of an outlet for my personal thoughts on the above topics. Probably more likely to be split into 80% games, 10% tech and 10% politics, it's simply an impromptu outlet for mind dribble.

None of it has anything to do with the content I write for any other publications, whether they be Hyper, IGN, Pixel Hunt, Ausgamers or whoever else decides that my name is worth gracing digital or analog media.

So don't call me on it. Fuckers.

(I kid, I love you all, read my blog).