ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Japan Sucks

This past holiday season was spent playing - and beating - Infinite Undiscovery, a cookie-cutter JRPG that was fun, if you still like that sort of game. Since I've been playing them so long, I can still enjoy the clichéd and boring characters, random battles, tedious grinding, and stale plot. The Xbox 360 has received some choice selections over the past year or so, but lately I've found myself wondering just how much longer I can stand the genre.

Dragon Quest VIII was a great game, filled with awesome visuals and a huge and interesting world. With that in mind, I dove head-first into Blue Dragon, and I still haven't been able to wash the taste from my mouth. The game itself wasn't that bad, but the achievement distribution was simply horrible. Now, I'm something of an achievement whore (check my gamercard on the right!), and I find them to be neat little ways to entice me to get as much out of a game as possible. That is, when they're done right. Some games, like the recently-beaten Assassin's Creed, had them well distributed, in ways that didn't force players too hard to find them but that weren't obtuse either. Blue Dragon threw all that completely out the window and offered achievements that were downright stupid. For example, you beat the game with your characters at around level 62, but the game has achievements for leveling up each character to level 99. Why? Why on Earth would I spend hours grinding over 30 more levels for a 15 point achievement, especially when it has no bearing on the game itself?

Eternal Sonata, another JRPG and one with perhaps the most obnoxious character designs I've ever seen (I hate you Beat, HATE YOU!), is just as guilty. There are music sheets to be collected, and some don't appear until your second playthrough. WTF? I have to play the whole game from scratch a second time just to get some dumb papers? Why?

Most recently, Infinite Undiscovery hit the stupid ball out of the park. An awesomee game with some bland character designs, it too has a multiple playthrough achievement, but even Eternal Sonata has to stand back and say "DAMN!" at just how stupid it is. Check this out: you have to play through the whole game THREE times to get a special boss in a dungeon that's half a dozen levels long with no save. And the achievement for beating her?

Worth a single point. Yep, 1 measly point.

There are other moronic grinding achievements as well, but this one just takes the cake. I beat the game and did maybe one or two more before quitting, and I'll never go back to finish up the achievements in any of these games. With Lost Odyssey sitting on my shelf, waiting for some playtime, I'm loathe to check its achievement list for fear of being assaulted with yet more stupidity.

It's now well known that Japan is about a decade behind the West in game design. Must it lag in achievement distribution too?

Xbox 360 = On Fire

Not literally, mind you, although with the sorry state of Microsoft's hardware these days, one actually catching fire wouldn't be much of a stretch. No, I'm referring to its incredible lineup of software that has dragged me away from my blog for most of the past two months. Look at that - a single entry in the entire month of October! I guess it's not surprising, as games like Rock Band 2, Mega Man 9, Castle Crashers, and Fable II all have my undivided attention whenever I get the chance to boot the system up. Many of the games I'm playing are multi-platform, of course, but my 360 gets the love due to its seamless online capabilities and achievements.

November seems to be continuing the trend too, with Gears of War 2 and Fallout 3. The former is an awesome sequel that ups the amount of players for online co-op from two to five and adds an awesome horde (read: survival) mode. The latter? Well, lets just imagine Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC. I've poured over fifty hours into this one already, and alternating between it and Gears 2 (whose campaign I completed with a friend in an all-nighter), I'm set for the rest of the month.

Oh, did I mention that I've received a review copy of Legend of Wukong from Super Fighter Team, which gives Sega-16 the world's first review of it? Heh, another game to add to my play list, and an RPG at that!

So if you don't see me as much, it's because I'm doing what most game writers should be doing: playing games.

Rock Band 2 Get!

I loved the original Rock Band. I even bought the drums! What I didn't like was that the World Tour mode was only available in multi-player. I can't have people over constantly to play, and my daughter still doesn't know how to play the game (she bangs the hell out of those drum sticks though), so I'm left with a lot of time to play on my own. In order to complete the tour, I had to plug in a second a controller and sing and play guitar simultaneously. This was pretty easy - when you knew the song. Nothing was more frustrating than doing three songs out of a set of four, only to have that fourth song be some eight minute nightmare from the '70s that I'd never heard before. Eventually, I passed the tour, but there's no way I can finish all the venues, because I simply cannot sing and play guitar together on hard.

Thankfully, Harmonix made the tour online in the sequel. Now, I can play bass the whole way through, or even jump around on drums and guitar whenever I get the urge. For points, I can always hit up someone on my friends list to play with me. My band, The Also-Rans, is currently third on my list, with over 600,000 fans. Soon, immortality will be mine!

I love this game, plain and simple. All my downloadable content from the first is useable here, and for a paltry $5, you can rip all the songs from the original disc to your hard drive and use them. How awesome is that? I'm not buying the new drum kit, but I think I might invest in a new guitar. My Guitar Hero II one has a loose whammy bar, and it sucks to have the thing drop down and hit you in your hand while you're playing.

So if you see me online and want to jam, just send me an invite and we can rock the house!

The Problem with Xbox Live

Everything's online today. Once upon a time, it was enough just to be able to whup the butt of the guy playing next to you, but gamers were soon enamored by the prospect of whupping butt cross-country. Being able to take on a real, live human opponent any time and anywhere was very enticing; it still is. So enticing in fact, that modern hardware manufacturers have endeavored to make it a key part of their console strategies. This hardware generation marks the first in which an online component isn't some random add-on peripheral that you can buy if you want. No, this cycle has made it part of the equation for all three systems, and we will most likely never again go back to that world of standing in line to play against someone.

There's a problem though, at least something that I consider to be one, and I'm referring specifically to Xbox Live. While gamers the world over look at upcoming titles and wonder about their online components, this fervor and anticipation doesn't last as long as you'd think. Unless you're looking at a major release, such as Halo 3, Rock Band, or Gears of War; the online lobbies tend to taper off in use mere weeks after a game's release. Come back a year later, and they're practically dead. That's a serious paradox there folks, and it's one that game developers are no doubt taking seriously when they're considering investing the time and money needed to bring a title online. Why incorporate an online component if no one is going to stick with it?

I first noticed this phenomenon back with the original Xbox. Everyone was playing Mech Assault, and full games were not a problem to find. That is, until about five or six months later, when everyone had moved on to the next big release. The same thing happened to me with OutRun 2. People played feverishly for a while, and then poof - they lost interest and started playing something else. About the only original Xbox title with which I had no trouble finding people to play was Project Gotham Racing 2, which most likely had to do with just how incredible it was... and the fact that there wasn't anything really like it online.

This problem hasn't just manifested itself on the Xbox 360, it's grown and multiplied like a virus. Just this past week, I tried to find someone online to play Overlord's survival mode with me. My search came back empty. Pillage? Nothing. Slaughter? Zilch. Curious to see if this was the case with some other titles, I popped in Kameo to see if someone was online. I still have those co-op achievements to get! It was a wasteland as well. I got the same results with Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Where has everyone gone?

No, I know the answer to that one. Just a glimpse of my friends list tells me all I need to know. GTA IV is number one right now, but many are still online with Halo 3 and Gears of War, and... nothing else. I see some sporadic Guitar Hero III and Rock Band in there sometimes, but these three are the only ones consistently played online. And by "online," I'm not just referring to the player being signed in to Live; I mean that an online mode is actually being played.

Xbox Live Arcade titles are even more susceptible to this, as their window to shine is usually about seven days (unless you have a week when MS releases two sure-fire soon-to-be-delisted titles like this one, with Warlords and Suduku). Ever see anyone playing Gauntlet in co-op? How about Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles? The latter is an interesting mention, because I can remember how everyone was dying, DYING to play it in four-player co-op. That frothing demand lasted about two weeks.

Why does this happen? Is it because Xbox 360 gamers are ADD-riddled and have too much cash to spend? Partially, perhaps. I think there are a few other mitigating factors contributing to this quick disinterest in all things online:

• Too Many Games to Play. How many people are still playing Stranglehold online? Not very many, judging by my fruitless attempts to find someone. It's only been eight months since the game was released, and the lobbies are dead most of the time. With a solid online component, I'm sure Midway thought it would ride the top of the Live charts for months, instead of sinking off like a virtual Titanic. Is it the game's fault? Hardly. Who played anything in November that wasn't Halo 3? A lot of titles got their Live walking papers when Bungie's monster hit, and most haven't recovered. Even the mighty Halo itself was staggered by Call of Duty 4, which in turn was toppled by GTA IV. It's almost as if gamers have to embark on a playing frenzy to milk their investment of as much playtime as possible before it's overtaken by the next big thing.
  
• Crappy Online Implementation. The most obvious reason, it alone has the power to kill anyone's desire to play online. No one sticks around for a game that has issues connecting to a lobby, disconnects constantly, or lags like a frame-by-frame examination of the Zepruder film. The XBLA games I mentioned are notorious for this. All the games I mentioned above had horribly laggy online play, some to the point of being unplayable. TMNT was especially heart-breaking, because I had more than enough friends willing to help me kick Shredder's ass, but the Foot Clan apparently hacked into Microsoft's server, thus disabling any attempt on my part to save Splinter. Damn ninjas, always so arrogant with their shurikens and hacking skills...
• Lazy Developers. Ooh, that's right, I said it. Half-ass online play excites no one, yet we continue to see it happen. A game where you're part of a squad loses its luster when said squad always has to be A.I. Even worse are when developers add only a few modes to games that literally scream for full online co-op. GTA IV is a perfect example of this. I wanted to cruise Liberty City with friends and do the missions with them. Impossible, since the campaign is Niko's story, and co-op play would ruin the deep and thought-provoking narrative of one man's journey from one repetitive drop off mission and fetch quest to the next.

Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 used a similarly lame excuse for reducing campaign online co-op from four players to two. "We wanted to enhance the graphics in multi-player," Ubi Soft explained, and by doing so, it crippled the gameplay. If so grand was its desire for software excellence, then could someone explain to me why I never got the achievement for beating the game on Realistic difficulty, even after Ubi Soft patched the game to allow it?

Sierra's upcoming Ghostbusters game did the same thing, adding online play for only "special" missions in a mode separate from the main game. Developer Terminal Reality has stated that it believes that playing co-op would disrupt the narrative of the story. Ok, seeing that the game is being penned by the original writers and features the voices and likenesses of all the Ghostbusters, I can understand that. What I don't understand is why, in this day and age, they simply can't do like the original Rainbow Six: Vegas did. When you played the story by yourself, you got all the juicy narrative and the whole plot. In co-op mode, you didn't, but you got to kill terrorists with three pals.

Anyone who wants to play this new Ghostbusters game (which is probably everyone) is going to play through the story, so why not motivate them to do it both ways? Offer achievements for beating stages alone and in co-op mode, so they have to do it more than once. My friend playing as Egon isn't going to "ruin" the experience for me, because I'll most likely have beaten the game solo already. This is just a poor excuse.

These factors give lower profile releases virtually no online life to speak of. Overshadowed by the major apps and without the hype of the media to generate interest, they fade into obscurity, leaving many gamers unable to enjoy those games that did online right. One simply cannot be expected to play everything released on launch day, and I'm sure that many gamers don't try out certain titles until they've come down in price. Something's gotta give, as they say.

Despite this sad trend, some games manage to avoid this situation simply because of how different they are from everything else. For example, you can always find people playing Uno, and I'm sure there are more than a few titles (Forza 2 and Project Gotham Racing 4 come to mind) that will endure. For the majority of online games however, their time to shine is severely limited, and once they're gone, they're gone for good.

Anyone up for some Phantom Dust?

Thoughts on 1st Gears of War 2 Gameplay Video

So the video went up last night, and my eager little fingers clicked enthusiastically to load it. Bufferring can be sweet, sweet agony, and when it finally loaded, I was treated to Cliffy B giving the rundown on how the game picks up after the original. Things then cut to an awesome scene of Phoenix and the other Cogs fighting Locusts in an outdoor on-rails stage on some kind of mobile battle platform. The battle took place in the third chapter of the first act, dubbed "Assault," a fittingly-named Locust attack on a Cog convoy, and there was much carnage involved. The action starts out with Phoenix and another Cog taking out a group of airborne Reavers, and then Phoenix unloads his Lancer into a sea of rushing Locusts that are assailing the convoy.

A great addition to the already solid gameplay is that Phoenix can now use an enemy as a human shield (which he dispatches afterward by snapping its neck and kicking it overboard), and there are now chainsaw duels! Someone comes at you with a chainsaw, what do you do? You rev yours up and block! Mash the B button madly and you end up slicing the baddie in two. There was also a scene where Phoenix seemed to impale a Locust with his chainsaw. Gruesome but oh so satisfying! My favorite part had to be when all the Cogs concentrated their fire on this massive two-legged beast that sported a back-mounted cannon. When it was on its last legs, they rammed it with their vehicle, knocking it dead to the side of the road.

The visuals look a lot like the original game, but they've apparently been tweaked and enhanced. The first Gears is simply gorgeous, so there isn't much need to improve, in my opinion, but I can honestly say that this footage looked awesome. This is going to rock hard folks, and November just can't come soon enough. Check out these screen grabs to whet your appetite, and then follow the link and see the glory for yourselves.

First Gameplay Video of Gears of War 2 Tonight on Xbox Live!

Joystiq is reporting that the very first actual gameplay of the eagerly awaited Gears of War 2 will go up on Xbox Live tonight at 11:00 p.m. PST. 1up will have the footage a whole half hour earlier, so there's no excuse to not see this! I loved the first (single-player and online co-op, not big on adversarial), so I will be all over this. I'll also be back tomorrow night with some impressions of the video, which I will undoubtedly watch a billion times. November can't come soon enough!