Does Kotaku Really Want to Shut David Jaffe Up?

There’s some drama going on between David Jaffe and Kotaku over an article wherein Kate Cox calls him out over a sexist joke. I enjoyed a lot of Jaffe’s rebuttal that I read in a follow-up article by The PA Report.

What Jaffe said was tasteless, but Kotaku’s article was very harsh on the matter. It’s well known that Jaffe is not a man who censors himself, but a lot of fruitful discussion has been stimulated by his free-form rants on such topics as why games shouldn’t tell stories, or why you should follow your dreams. Many people disagree or find his opinions silly, but more often than not his ideas speak to me, and I admire him for just putting himself out there in such an open and honest way. I hear a lot of backlash every time Jaffe opens his mouth, and I think people are missing the point that he’s just trying to channel his feelings.

Game designers like Jaffe don’t have to share their interior monologue with the world at large. Hearing him speak is a privilege, and if he takes too much heat for what he says in public, Jaffe might just decide that it’s not worth the trouble. In fact, I’d be surprised if he isn’t already thinking along those lines given how frustrated he is, and you can be damn sure that other key figures in the games industry are catching wind of this public debacle and deciding to retreat a little further out of the glare of the public spotlight themselves.

It’s obvious what Kotaku stands to gain in the sort term by doing this, since the story has generated a lot of attention across the gaming web community. But in the long run, trying to get gamers to think about sexism by putting Jaffe on the defensive may have the less obvious effect of ensuring that there is less discussion in public about game design and game production in the future. Whether or not that trade-off is worthwhile depends on how much you care about feminisim versus how much you care about games, I suppose.

About the Wii Repair

As previously posted, I sent my Wii into Nintendo support to be repaired. It seemed like the internal disk drive in it failed, and I was curious about whether or not I’d get my same Wii back. Simply put,

• I did not get the same Wii back. I got a new looking one with a different serial number.
• Nintendo managed to salvage all of my saved game files! Much to my surprise, none of my saved data is missing on the new console. I didn’t lose any progress in Shiren the Wanderer, woot!
• All of my installed Nintendo Channels were, however, missing. But my Wii Store account is all set up and I was able to start downloading them without any problems.
• My old Wii had GameCube compatibility and so does the new one.

So yeah, all told, it was worth paying the $100 to get my old Wii replaced rather than simply buying a new one, I figure.

In other news, since the latest PSN firmware update, I’m getting Error 80023102 whenever I try to buy Shank 2. It’s aggravating.

That Was Fast!

Three things:

1.) I sent my Wii in for repair on Monday. It’s Thursday early afternoon and I already have the thing back in my hands. I won’t get a chance to start it up until after work, but I’m confident that Nintendo wouldn’t send it back to me unless it’s really fixed. Also I wonder whether I got the same unit back or a replacement; I should be able to tell by the pattern of nicks and scratches (or the lack thereof).

2.) I pitched in $15 for Tim Schafer’s Kickstarter campaign. It’s making the news rounds for having set a new Kickstarter record for raising something like $400k of funding in just over 8 hours, and it’s currently just shy of $900k with more than a month left in the fundraising drive. I like to think that this will send a message to the big game publishers that they’ve been underestimating their audiences, but who knows–they’re probably not even paying attention.

3.) I’m up to 7.5 hours of Amalur now. That’s a pretty damn solid chunk of time for me to commit during a work week, or for any working gamer to commit in only a few days. Last night I cleared the major quest line for the Webwood area, and found it to be a nice mixture of challenge, plot, and payoff. I haven’t found a gamestat that estimates total percentage complete for the game (seems easy enough to implement; just use the number of completed quests as a metric), but judging from the size of the world map I’ve seen less than 15% of the game. On the other hand, I’m at level 10 and the max level is 40, but it could simply be that past level 40 Amalur shifts the emphasis from level gains towards equipment gains.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning – Hour 4

Last night after I got home from work, I had a light dinner and proceeded to play as much Kingdoms of Amalur as I could before I started to fall asleep. That added up to about 4.5 hours. (I also squeezed in 30 mins of Resident Evil: Revelations last night, but I’m not ready to write about it yet.)

Kingdoms of Amalur kicks a lot of ass. And yes, the full game is much more polished than the demo. There’s still some pop-in and the occasional glitch, but in 4.5 hours of gameplay I didn’t experience anything I would describe as a serious bug, and overall the game looked much better than it did in the demo. (I’m playing the PS3 version.)

I guess I could rant about the game’s features–how it borrows liberally from a cross-section of western style RPGs, including Diablo-like games, EverQuest / World of Warcraft, action-RPGs (Fable, mostly), and The Elder Scrolls series. But that stuff has been said all over the web already. What matters is that the core elements of the game feel good. Exploring a new area feels good, defeating enemies feels good, leveling up your character feels good, turning in quests feels good, and even following the plot feels good. Amalur hits all of the right notes, and the result is greater than the sum of its parts.

One review I read suggested that Amalur overstays its welcome. I haven’t been playing long enough to make that assessment, but based on how strongly the game starts off, I’d say that it’s a “must play” console RPG. I struggle to see it as a PC RPG experience, since it screams out to be played using a gamepad instead of a mouse and keyboard, but hey, PCs have gamepads too.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 Summed Up

…in one screenshot:

So My Wii Died…

I bought my Wii on launch day back in 2006. (In fact, I even blogged about that.) Well, this morning, the hard drive failed in it–or some such. The power light still works and I was able to eject my copy of Shiren the Wanderer, but there’s no AV output. This is the first Nintendo platform I’ve had die on me, actually; I even still have a NES that works.

So I called Nintendo’s support hotline, and to make a long story short, after provincial taxes and a bunch of other hoop-lah, they’ll fix the thing in roughly three to six weeks and for a little over $100. Future Shop, on the other hand, will sell me a brand new Wii bundled with a Wii Motion Plus Wiimote for $150. But there are catches.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 – Hour 5

I’m enjoying FF XIII-2 a lot so far. I haven’t yet finished FF XIII, and the opening hour of FF XIII-2 throughly spoiled the ending of FF XIII for me, but that’s alright. Geeks tend to over-react to spoilers anyway, I find. And besides, what I’ve seen of FF XIII-2 so far is helping to motivate me to finish FF XIII.

Based on what I’d read about FF XIII-2, one of the things I was most worried about was the the plot would either be gibberish or just plain uninteresting, but I haven’t found that to be the case so far. FF XIII-2′s story not only makes a surprising amount of sense to me, but I’m even enjoying it somewhat. It does fall short in the character department, however; Noel and Serah are, to put it bluntly, naive little teeny-boppers, and their views and philsophies aren’t as intriguing as those of the cast of characters in the original FF XIII.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning – Demo

I played through the Amalur demo on PS3 and it’s well worth a download if you’re curious about the game. I liked it, but it’s a mixed experience overall. I think this game shows a lot of potential, but I doubt it will become one of my all-time favourites. Both Dragon Age and Skyrim are better RPGs, but Amalur is different enough from either to demand attention nonetheless.

Diablo 3? Maybe 4?

By now there’s been plenty of talk about the Diablo 3 delay, a lot of it putting the spin out there that this is for the best. Blizzard is making what sounds like some pretty significant changes, akin to going back to the drawing board on major areas of the game.

From the 1-Up article,

“While working on Diablo III we’ve been called out for messing around with systems too much, that the game is good as-is and we should just release it,” Wilson wrote. “I think that’s a fair argument to make, but I also think it’s incorrect. Our job isn’t just to put out a game, it’s to release the next Diablo game. No one will remember if the game is late, only if it’s great. We trust in our ability to put out a great game, but we’re not quite there yet. In addition to finishing and polishing the content of the game we’re continuing to iterate on some of the core game systems.”

I’m skeptical about this position. Diablo III was first announced all of the way back in 2008, and at that point it already looked like near-beta quality. The game currently is in beta, in fact, and still they’re planning to make these major changes. It’s admirable that they want the launch to go as smoothly as possible, but the scope of the changes they’re talking about sounds, on its face, counter-productive.

There’s another way of looking at this, which is the way that I feel is perhaps most accurate: the “real” Diablo III is a game that was never shipped (it should have shipped in 2010) and which was only glimpsed in the public beta. The game that Blizzard is now working on is Diablo IV, some version of which will be released under the title of “Diablo III.” I realize that it’s foolish to question the unassailable wisdom of Blizzard, but that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Hitbox – Hour 2

I bought a second-hand Hitbox arcade stick off of a co-worker, with the option to resell it to another interested co-worker if I decide that I don’t like it. So far it has stayed at work where I’ve used it to play Street Fighter IV on PC, but I intend to take it home and try it out on KoF XIII. I’ll refer to it as a “stick” here, but obviously there’s no actual stick–it’s just beautiful Sanwa buttons, and nothing else.

Hitbox has been pretty good for me so far. I find it easier to execute special moves and some combos on Hitbox than with a conventional arcade stick. Doing so under pressure is a different story, but I think that once I develop the proper muscle memory, Hitbox could be a very powerful tool. Movement takes some getting used to; I still have a tendency to mix-up the crouch and jump buttons, especially under pressure. That’s by far the biggest hurdle facing me at the moment.

The stick is very nicely constructed, although I do have a few minor gripes: the cover is cracked in the bottom-right corner, which I’ve been told is a common fault with these sticks due to how they’re assembled. Also the start button(s) on the top edge are not sunken into the case, so it’s easy to brush up against them accidentally (perhaps with your pant leg or some such) and trigger them, causing an instant disqualification according to typical tournament rules. (I don’t see myself enrolling in a tournament any time soon anyway.) Finally, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to disassemble the stick, whether to do repairs or to install custom face art.

The pros definitely outweigh the cons, however. The button layout is both pleasantly ergonomic and accommodates a number of different hand placements for varying control layouts. It’s a very compact unit–easy to store–but also with some heft to it so it won’t slide around in your lap. I could see this arcade stick working well for games other than fighting games, such as shmpus or rhythm games; it would be a lot of fun to design a game specifically to be played on the Hitbox.

I’m probably going to keep the stick at this point, but the novelty factor still hasn’t worn off at this point, so who knows.