Gig Matrix

Fans of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games can breathe a sigh of relief; they didn’t fuck it up. And they’ll want to breathe while they can, for as soon as Gary Ross’ swift, faithful adaptation reaches the titular games, they’ll find themselves practically holding their breath until the stunning conclusion.

Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen is a steely survivor, long providing for her family after her father’s death rendered her mother practically catatonic. At 16 years old, she prowls the woods with platonic friend Gale, hunting game with a bow and arrow to feed her family and take care of her kid sister, Prim.

When big government comes to town for the annual selection of tributes for the Hunger Games, a futuristic Running Man mandated by the totalitarian state, it’s inevitable that her poor little sister is chosen. Any doubts people may have had about Lawrence are quickly erased as she pushes out from the crowd and bellows, “I volunteer!” her voice cracking with emotion.

Continue reading Game On

Reason No. 2 Charlize Theron is going to have a great summer.

Reason No. 1 that Charlize Theron is going to have a good summer. (As will the rest of us, given all the great movies coming out.)

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Earth is under siege from enormous, timeless robotic squiddy insect-lookin’ things. And our last best hope is Commander Shepard and his/her band of merry … beings. But while we wait for Shepard to come back from some galactic fetch quest, I have a few things I’d like to talk about.

No, I’m not going to spoil any part of the Mass Effect franchise below (except that Shepard survives the first two games).

I wish the multiplayer were free-to-play

The Horde-like multiplayer included in Mass Effect 3 isn’t half bad, especially in light of my low expectations. I don’t think anyone would mistake it for top-shelf third-person shooting, but it’s challenging, fun, and supportive of different play styles. And it’s almost required for those of us wanting to improve our Galactic Readiness.

But the mode doesn’t scale well for small squads. Gig friend Dan and I played a few rounds this past weekend, and until we opened our lobby to strangers, we were lucky to get through the third wave. If Aaron and Brian played Mass Effect we’d have a nice posse. But they don’t. And they won’t.

So for entirely self-serving reasons, I wish EA would make multiplayer free-to-play. If my gaming buddies played ME MP with me every Thrusday, my Galactic Readiness would be maxed out in no time. There’s a (kinda bullshit) microtransaction apparatus built in, so opening MP up to everyone might even make EA a couple bucks. And I think a free multiplayer experience could even serve as an effective demo for the full game. If you like the space-magic-and-guns formula, maybe you’ll like it even more when it’s backed by a decent story.

Speaking of which…

The story and writing are good, but probably impenetrable

Mass Effect’s combat has evolved from “painful” (in the first game) to, at least, “competent.” People who need good shooting in their games would not hate Mass Effect 3.

But so much of the game has nothing to do with shooting, and if ME3 were your first exposure to the series, the story would probably kill your desire to play. So much of ME3’s plot is built off the decisions you ostensibly made in the previous two games. Y’know how J.K. Rowling spends two-thirds of every Harry Potter book setting up little unresolved scenarios, and the last third resolving them into one giant deus ex machina? That’s kind of what’s going on in ME3. If you jumped in to Prisoner of Azkaban on page 300, would you enjoy it?

The underlying plot isn’t anything unfamiliar (overwhelming evil threatens all you know; stop it before it’s too late!), but without the setup provided by the previous two games, the story of ME3 is just a bewildering lattice of alien races, galactic politics and ancient history. I doubt new players would be willing to slog through the story just to get to the shooting.

What other franchises have this problem? Most combat-oriented games do only that; if you’re not shooting (or punching or slicing), you’re watching a cut scene. Your understanding of or investment in the story is almost entirely independent of your enjoyment of the combat. It doesn’t matter how Adam Fenix was involved in the rise of the Lambent in Gears of War. They’re there now, and you need to shoot them.

In Mass Effect games, though, you spend a lot of time talking and gathering and requisitioning and upgrading and outfitting. Some of that you can skip: ME3 includes an option to have the game navigate conversations for you. They become non-interactive cut scenes, and you just play the path the game sets for you. But you still have to run around the main hub environment, navigate your spaceship to places of import, and improve your weapons. All are things some players, like our pal Aaron, would probably consider obstacles to getting to the part of the game they want to play.

If you’ve put time into the previous games, though, the payoff can be rewarding. I played a mission the other day that wouldn’t have happened at all if I hadn’t made a couple of the dialog decisions I did in the original Mass Effect. In fact, huge swaths of this game would be different (or missing, perhaps) if I’d handled the other games differently, a phenomenon Penny Arcade has already explored. I consider this one of ME3’s strengths, and the main reason I’ll play it several more times.

Someone read my post about mobile apps

Well, probably not, considering how little traffic we get here at Gig Matrix. But ME3’s iOS tie-ins are a tiny step in what I consider to be the right direction.

EA published an iOS third-person shooter, Mass Effect Infiltrator, in the days leading up to ME3’s release. It’s not the greatest game I’ve ever played, and if you hate virtual thumbsticks in iOS games, it won’t change your mind. But you can improve your Galactic Readiness rating in ME3 by finding and uploading “intel” in Infiltrator. It’s a small—and ultimately unnecessary—benefit, but I do appreciate that struggling through the game during my commute has some benefit for the Shepard living in my 360.

ME3’s other iOS tie-in is Datapad, a non-game app that gives you access to the game’s codex, an encyclopedia describing every alien race, point of interest, and historical event in the Mass Effect universe. The codex is built into the game, so I’m not sure what practical use Datapad offers, except for obsessives who need to research the Krogan Rebellions in their “off” hours. The app also allows you to improve your Galactic Readiness by deploying “fleets” to points around the galaxy to perform various tasks. It’s rinky-dink stuff, for sure. But I think publishers are just starting to think about how all these platforms might work together. If and when there’s a Mass Effect 4, maybe EA will force Popcap to make a match-three “hacking” game that will let you raise money for your main-game cause. Now wouldn’t that be fun?

I want you to play Mass Effect 3, but you probably never will

Guys—Aaron, Brian—seriously. This a great franchise. And you’re missing out on ME3. But there’s just no way you’d enjoy it if you weren’t already invested in the narrative. Save your money, I guess.

2011 was a fantastic years for games. In fact, there were way too many good games to play, and my pile of shame is embarrassingly huge (Sorry, Zelda!). But of the games that I did manage to play this year, here are the ones that I loved the most.

Continue reading Aaron's 2011 Games of the Year

These researchers from the Japan Institute of Science and Technology obviously went to a bit of trouble to make their demonstration of quantum levitation look and feel like Wipeout, complete with tiny Piranha and FEISAR craft and music from Pulse. The vapor trails are a nice effect, too.

I bought the official Arkham City iOS app hoping — but not expecting — that it would the kind of secondary game interaction I’ve been dreaming about for a couple years. Instead, it’s a Batman-themed PDF annotator/strategy guide. There’s nothing wrong with that; it does exactly what it claims to do. But I’m disappointed.

What the app is

You select a section of Arkham City from the main screen, then (once that part of the map has loaded) you scroll around and tap on icons that represent each challenge. Tapping those icons gives you a screenshot of the trophy or riddle, a brief walkthrough paragraph, and a button to mark the challenge complete. Six buttons on the map screens allow you to toggle the display of completed and uncompleted trophies, Catwoman trophies and riddles individually.

Loading times (going from the main menu to a map screen and back out) are not insignificant, which makes challenge hunting along the boundaries of the districts a bit tedious. The app also seems to disable the iOS’s auto-lock, so running it constantly during a long play session will pretty much kill your device’s battery.

What I wish it were

Before arriving at the finished version of this post, I wrote a bunch of words about how I wished the Arkham City app worked. Then I realized that I was describing, almost exactly, how the in-game map works. So I deleted all those words and wrote these.

In the game, if you’re compulsive about interrogating Riddler’s thugs (instead of just sending them to the ICU like you do everyone else), your map will become littered with icons representing Riddler challenges. You can place your custom waypoint marker on any of those icons so they’re easier to find while gliding around town. As you complete challenges, they disappear from the map.

That’s exactly how I wish the iOS app worked. Basically, I wish I could have the map always available on a secondary screen.

The future of game apps

Bungie (at least) has shown us that it’s possible to get data from a game and into an iOS app (or a website) in close-to-real time. Other developers and publishers have done similar things with other games (Call of Duty and Battlefield come to mind, but I don’t play those). It seems theoretically possible that both ends of the line (the game and the app) could consume a stream of simple data being sent between the two, and changes made on one end could be reflected at the other.

In a game like Arkham City, that could manifest as my dream map app. In a game like Mass Effect 2, in which I spent far too much in-game time scanning planets for resources and far too much commuting time thinking about Mass Effect 2, it could be a minigame that would take some of the tedium out of the main game.

Not every game is going to have a mechanism that would make sense being farmed out to another device, and certainly game devs can’t start assuming all their players will have such a device. But the opportunity is there to build apps that extend your involvement in a game beyond your console (or PC, if that’s who you are). I hope devs and publishers start exploring those opportunities.

The first trailer for The Avengers came out today, and Joss Whedon’s trademarks are all over it:

0:08: Bad guy with a major superiority complex. (Glory, Danger, Alpha.)
0:12: World in peril! (Everything he’s ever done, even Dollhouse.)
0:42: A ragtag crew of mismatched personalities must, ahem, assemble for the greater good. (See above re: everything he’s ever done.)
1:05: Is it just me, or did the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier recycle some Serenity parts?
1:15: Brings the funny. (Always.)
1:25: Strong personality clash leads to in-fighting. (Buffy vs. Faith, Angel vs. Spike, Wolverine vs. Cyclops, Mal vs. Jayne.)
1:50: Again with the funny! (Again.)

So is Whedon just rehashing the same tropes or has his entire career been leading up to this moment? Oh, who cares. Based on the number of times I just watched this trailer, I can’t wait to see it. It’ll be interesting to see what he can do with a big budget tentpole movie. Will fans embrace the mix of action and humor that have so marked all of his works? Will every superhero get ample screen time and an opportunity to shine? And most importantly, who will he brutally kill off?

If you didn’t tune into MTV’s Video Music Awards last night to see Lady Gaga in drag awkwardly hit on Britney Spears or Beyoncé unveil her beatific baby bump, you were probably there for an exclusive first look at The Hunger Games movie (above). And while the clip of Jennifer Lawrence as heroine Katniss Everdeen is short, it’s definitely sweet. I got chills when she deftly leaped over a tree, unsheathed an arrow and fired it at the camera. It’s a small taste, but I’m definitely hungry for more.

The word over at Game|Life is that Halo 4’s warthog will be drivable (though not raceable) in ??Forza 4. That’s cool, I suppose, though it’s tough to get excited about a racing sim I’ll never play.

What’s most remarkable to me about this story is that Halo 4 will have warthogs. You could argue that that was an easy assumption to make, but remember how Halo 3 ended? The Master Chief and Cortana are aboard what’s left of a big UNSC ship, and they’re drifting toward a planet with mysterious patterns of lights on the surface. The door is left open for a fresh set of no-Covenant, no-Flood shooty adventure.

But no, there will be warthogs. And probably human AI buddies to drive them. And probably a universe-threatening infection/giant plant to fight.

It’ll be another Halo.