Miscellanea

And Now, A Solution

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 05:02:00 -0700

I realized that after the scathing bolt I fired across the bow of Groff-Hinman yesterday that it wasn’t terribly fair for me to simply say, “You’ve fucked up, you dumb bastards.” What I should have done instead, is to say, “You’ve fucked up, you dumb bastards, and here’s how you should do things in the future.”

I’ll level with you, PR folk, and games media folk, and whoever the hell else is reading this. I’ll tell you the deep, dark secret of how to get a games journalist to cover your product, no matter what that product is. Are you ready?

There is no fucking secret!

Truth is, if your product is bullshit, we’re going to see right through it even before you finish typing your headline. Games journalism is a very cynical business, full of very cynical people — or, at least, very cynical people, and those who are too dumb to ever be successful to any degree — and while this is going to make your jobs much more difficult, that’s reality. As Ethan Hawke is often misquoted, “it bites.”

So, what do you do? Be honest. Unless you totally luck into a cushy gig doing PR for Blizzard or Capcom odds are solid that you’re going to have many promotional jobs in which it’s your role to promote shit that is inarguably shit. Games journalists know this. Those of us whose attention you want to attract get dozens of emails every day just like the one you’re planning to send. The polite among us might read half of those, but the more realistic journalists read two headlines, then toss the lot into Gmail’s Archive.

This is where honesty comes in. If you’re straight up with us about what you’re trying to promote, and tell it like it is, we’ll like you. We enjoy honesty. We get off on truth. That’s why we’re journalists; it’s a big part of the gig. So if you have a stupid iOS game to promote that nobody would ever want to pay any attention to, just say that. Seriously.

If, tomorrow, I were to receive an email like the one I received yesterday which read, “Hey Earnest, listen, here’s an iOS game about zombies and I know you must see tons of these things, but it’s my job to tell you about it, so I’d appreciate it if you’d give me three minutes to explain.” From there you can cover your bullet list of the product’s best features or whatever you want to highlight, but the most important part is establishing that rapport at the beginning. I can’t guarantee that every writer will hear you out — occasionally we have more important matters to attend to — but you’ll have a much higher success rate than you would by trying (and inevitably failing) to trick us into hearing your pitch.

After I received that email I wrote about yesterday I sent a response to Nikki, pointing out her duplicity. Her response? A claim that all media does this, all of the time, and that using Brad Pitt’s name was akin to newspapers discussing the movie Sideways with professional somelliers. How she thought being combative would suddenly win me over is anyone’s guess, but here too is a good place to just be honest. If she’d said, “Yeah, you got me. It was bullshit of me to try to pull that. Let’s talk about this thing like adults,” then I would’ve had at least a modicum of respect for her (which is far more than most PR people ever earn from any journalist).

Alright, so what have we learned here today? Simply put, despite what your bosses at your respective PR agencies tell you, your job is not to sell me on things. I hate being sold on things. I will verbally eviscerate you merely for attempting to sell me on things. Instead, be honest. Be polite. Be an adult.

Honesty is the best policy, even in the inherently duplicitous world of public relations.

How Not To Promote A Videogame

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:43:00 -0700

This morning I received an email from a PR agent named Nikki Czech who works for a group called Groff-Hinman, Inc. Normally I wouldn’t name a PR rep, as they’re generally supposed to remain invisible, but Nikki’s email to me was appalling, so I’m taking this opportunity to call her out on it, and provide an example of how not to push your videogame to the gaming media.

Take a look at the message Nikki sent me, formatted to fit this space, and with Nikki’s contact info removed, but otherwise quoted verbatim:

Brad Pitt Jumps on the Zombie Bandwagon

With the season finale of the hit tv series The Walking Dead garnering 15 million viewers & the $200 million budget blockbuster coming in June – World War Z starring Brad Pitt – the zombie movement is about to take center stage in a big way.

The recent iTunes release of the new & improved GraveStompers – the only 3D zombie v. zombie gaming app on the market – could not have come at a more perfect moment.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new build. Can I send a Test Flight invite or APK for you to check it out?

Thanks,

Nikki Czech

Groff Hinman

So, do any of you see an issue here? Perhaps that this GraveStompers game — which is apparently “the only 3D zombie v. zombie gaming app on the market,” whatever the hell that means — has absolutely nothing to do with the actor, Brad Pitt? For that matter, it also has nothing to do with The Walking Dead, despite that series being name-dropped in the first sentence of the email Nikki sent me.

Instead, what Nikki is attempting to do here is to drum up interest in the media by attaching famous names to what appears to be yet another cookie-cutter iOS app that would otherwise never warrant a second glance. Is this a really clever way of promoting GraveStompers? Absolutely, in the same way that lying about your education in an interview is a clever way to get a job at a law firm.

As I said above, I hate to have to call Nikki out like this, but PR people need to realize that this is total bullshit. Not only do these tactics guarantee that I won’t ever write about your game, they also guarantee that I’ll do my best to slam you and your employers for being so fucking unscrupulous. Whether this email was Nikki’s idea or was pushed on her by her bosses at Groff Hinman is irrelevant; You sketchy bastards are in this together, and you’re both awful.

Darkstalkers Resurrection -- A really, REALLY long review

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:01:31 -0700

To christen this new Tumblog — that’s still what the kids call these things, right? — properly as a repository of all the writing and ideas that I can’t somehow convince a major media company to pay me for, here’s a 3,200-word review of the new XBLA/PSN fighter Darkstalkers Resurrection.

Initially this was supposed to be published on The Escapist, but when my editors saw it they almost drowned in a sea of verbs, nouns and pretentious semicolons. So, to avoid killing anyone with verbosity, I opted to just redo the whole thing. In the end it was easier to write up another 1,000 words on the game than it would have been to slice this text into pieces small enough for the audience to comfortably digest.

The final Escapist review went live on March 22 and you can find it here. It’s quite good, but it doesn’t have the same “I’m on fucktons of painkillers and it’s making me ramble forever” vibe as its predecessor. If you’ve got a half-hour to kill, I hope you enjoy what could have been.

(Post Script: As you read, keep in mind that this thing was rejected before it reached the final editing stages, so it’s not as polished as it should be. I’m always legible, but don’t be stunned if you discover a few typos or formatting issues.)

Hit the jump for the best, worst review I’ve ever written.

With the advent of the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, many games publishers saw the sudden mainstream acceptance of digital distribution platforms as a potential gold mine. These services, by their very nature, completely negate a game’s distribution costs, suddenly making it quite lucrative to release smaller, more experimental titles that would previously have been viewed as foolish business ventures. At least, that’s how things were supposed to work in theory.

In reality, what with humans being as lazy and greedy as history has repeatedly shown them to be, the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network quickly became dumping grounds for any publisher with a large back catalogue of classic titles. Companies like Konami, Sega, Nintendo and even Capcom adopted these digital distribution platforms as nascent arenas in which they could simply rehash the same games that made them famous in the 1980s and 1990s and rely on an audience eternally afflicted with rose-tinted nostalgia for the halcyon days of their youth to purchase each and every title they loved all those years ago, regardless of how many times they’d played them or how little these publishers did to improve on these now-archaic classics.

Fortunately for fans, these companies quickly learned that there was even more money to be made by retooling their older games with relatively minor improvements. Capcom has long been leading this effort, and over the course of the past seven years the company has done its best to revive almost every one of its beloved fighting game franchises with modern accoutrements. For proof of this shift, you need look no further than a game that is perhaps Capcom’s most famous title, Street Fighter II. 2006 saw the Xbox Live release of Street Fighter II’ Hyper Fighting, a game that is widely regarded as one of the most technically solid fighters ever released. This version of the game, while a respectable recreation of its original arcade iteration, added little more than online multiplayer gameplay. A mere two years later Capcom would issue Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, a reworked version of one of the later Street Fighter II semi-sequels that featured all new, high-definition artwork courtesy UDON Entertainment, along with online gameplay and an impressively robust training mode.

As time rolled on, Capcom continued to evolve its attempts to resurrect fan-favorite games from yesteryear. 2009 would see an enhanced re-release of Marvel Vs Capcom 2, while Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike received an impressive overhaul in 2011 which included online gameplay, special pseudo-achievements that subtly trained players to perform better during combat and even the ability to upload matches directly to YouTube from within the game’s extensive options menu.

Fast forward to today, and fighting game fans have received what may very well be the finest example of a classic series being improved for the modern, ‘net-obsessed gaming industry. Darkstalkers Resurrection isn’t just an overhauled re-release of the classic, long-forgotten Darkstalkers series; It’s one of the best fighters available on any platform in existence.

Let’s start with what Capcom has included in Darkstalkers Resurrection. The most famous and popular entry in the series, at least in Western territories, is arguably the original: Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors. It hit arcades in 1994 and at the time was seen as a shocking, yet welcome departure for Capcom, a company that many fans believed would simply never stop rehashing Street Fighter II. The first Darkstalkers was particularly exciting as while it had superficial similarities to Capcom’s most famous franchise, it also added a huge number of new features, many of which would eventually be adopted and popularized by the more successful Street Fighter Alpha series. Darkstalkers was Capcom’s first attempt to add concepts like air blocking, mid-air fireballs, block canceling and reversal attacks (complete with helpful on-screen prompts alerting players to their successful efforts). If those terms just flew right over your head, don’t fret; The important takeaway here is that Darkstalkers was wildly different than what Capcom had done previously, and these ideas were so successful and well-liked that they can still be found in a huge number of fighting games today. More crucially for Darkstalkers’ success, the game’s graphics engine (which used the same CPS2 hardware as the Street Fighter II games) allowed for gorgeous animation and surprisingly colorful artwork the likes of which had never been seen in a fighting game before. Fans immediately fell for Darkstalkers’ charms, but this love affair would last only a year. Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge hit arcades in 1995, and it was less a sequel and more a refinement of the concepts found in its predecessor that instantly rendered the original Darkstalkers obsolete.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise to find that Darkstalkers Resurrection totally ignores the first entry in its titular franchise. Instead, Resurrection includes updated versions of Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge and Darkstalkers 3. As you’ve probably realized, the lack of the first Darkstalkers in Resurrection is no huge loss, given that its sequel includes improved versions of basically every feature found in the original. But just in case you were wondering, this is why the game includes only two different titles, instead of the three extant Darkstalkers games (and for simplicity’s sake we’ll ignore the official tweaks cum full releases which Capcom dubbed Vampire Hunter 2 and Vampire Savior 2).

Alright, now that you’re all up to speed on the history of this series, let’s discuss what Capcom has wrought with its latest rehash. Actually, scratch that. “Rehash” has too many negative connotations to it. Darkstalkers Resurrection may be based on two games from the mid-1990s, but it adds so much to those now-ancient arcade titles that I’m willing to accept it as a new thing all its own.

Those of you who’ve played Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition will be instantly familiar with many of the nascent additions found in Darkstalkers Resurrection. Obviously the title includes effectively arcade-perfect iterations of both Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge and Darkstalkers 3, but both titles have been enhanced with online multiplayer options, pseudo-achievements that offer players points for completing certain tasks during combat and an extensive, two-pronged training mode that frankly bests even that found in Capcom’s most recent, big-budget fighters, like Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 and Super Street Fighter IV. Further, hardcore fans of the Darkstalkers series will be happy to hear that Capcom has packed a massive swath of bonus material into these titles, including concept artwork, classic cinematics, and even the original High Score tables found in the initial arcade releases of each title. That last example is the kind of detail that almost any player, no matter how rabidly devoted to the series, would not miss terribly were it left out, yet having High Score listings which hail from the Clinton administration included in this package just goes to show how dedicated Capcom is to ensuring that Darkstalkers Resurrection is the ultimate version of these two games.

Or course, none of that matters if the core gameplay in Resurrection is terrible. Fighting games are more akin to Chess than, say, the Madden NFL series, and even the most minute flaw in how a character handles or how quickly attacks are launched can completely ruin the experience for true devotees. Fortunately, despite all of the wonderful extras Capcom has crammed into this package, the gameplay is the true shining jewel in Darkstalkers Resurrection’s crown.

Before we get to that, we need explain one more basic facet of the Darkstalkers franchise. Whereas the Street Fighter games were populated with borderline-racist caricatures of the world’s various nationalities (and Blanka, who I’m pretty sure isn’t an accurate depiction of the good people of Brazil) the roster found in the Darkstalkers series is largely lifted from classic Universal Studios monster movies. At least, that was the idea at first. You’ve got Demitri Maximoff, the Dracula-esque vampire (who just so happens to feature a moveset that directly mimics that of Street Fighter protagonists Ryu and Ken), Jon Talbain, the British werewolf who inexplicably has some sweet nunchaku skills, and Anakaris, the 5,000-year-old mummy whose bandages somehow allow him to both teleport and extend his limbs like some kind of Egyptian Dhalsim analogue. Continuing the theme, you’ll also find a zombie, a Frankenstein’s monster, a creature from the black lagoon and a big, hairy yeti.

And then things go right off the rails.

As the Darkstalkers series found success and Capcom expanded the franchise, it needed new, original characters. It’s very impressive to see a fighting game from the mid-90s that doesn’t rely on simple palette-swapping techniques to generate “new” characters, but as the roster grew it quickly became apparent that the developers behind the series ran out of classic films to reference. As a result, you’ll also find a Mayan robot, an alien made of living fire, a bizarre take on the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale that replaces the sweet, naive heroine with an Uzi-toting, bloodthirsty monster hunter (think: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as reimagined by Japan’s wackiest instincts) and *sigh* a sexy cat girl. You all know who I’m talking about, and you should feel terrible for agreeing with that descriptor.

Despite the increasingly bizarre cast (or, more likely, because of it), the Darkstalkers games are some of the most engaging, endearing fighting titles in history. By comparison, the pugilists of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are as exciting as lukewarm milk. You say you can throw a fireball using only your fighting spirit? Pfft! Who cares? I know a girl who’s the queen of a race of humanoid, demonic bees who harvests human souls instead of pollen.

(Oh, and those things you thought were her eyes? They aren’t. The dark, compound, insectoid lumps in the middle of hair allow her to see. Still think she’s hot?)

Derail: over. Back to the gameplay.

If you were ever lucky enough to enjoy either Nightwarriors: Darkstakers’ Revenge or Darkstalkers 3 in the arcades, you know exactly what to expect from the core gameplay in Resurrection. Thanks to the power of modern gaming consoles, both titles included in Resurrection are more or less arcade-perfect, with one minor caveat. When you first fire up the game and attempt to select a character you’ll find that Capcom has replaced the original character portraits with updated, high-definition artwork. It’s debatable whether this choice was made for aesthetic reasons or because the old artwork was simply lacking the necessary number of pixels to look good on modern HDTVs, but whichever explanation you prefer is moot. If you don’t like the new art, you can simply turn it off.

Likewise, Resurrection offers players a huge number of visual options that allow anyone to customize how Resurrection looks to an incredible degree. Not only can you choose between the original arcade resolution (in all its pixelated glory), but you’ve also got two additional smoothing filters that arguably make the game more palatable to modern eyes. Further, you can also change the game’s aspect ratio, whether or not the screen features arcade-accurate scanlines and what sort of border appears around the game screen. Personally I prefer the standard viewing options and believe the pixel smoothing technology is the best Capcom has created to date, but if you want to go truly old-school, you can flip a few switches and play the game from the point of view of an arcade patron, complete with an impressively detailed, 3D, virtual recreation of a classic Capcom arcade cabinet circa 1995. What’s more, all of these viewing options function perfectly, no matter which gameplay mode you’re using. From online multiplayer to simple, free form training modes, the aesthetics of Darkstalkers Resurrection are almost entirely in your hands, and none of the options have detrimental effects on the strength and stability of the game’s online multiplayer modes (which, I should stress, is amazingly reliable, owing to the use of GGPO netcode). Choice is wonderful, and I’m giddy that Capcom went to the trouble to offer it in such abundance.

Gameplay-wise the biggest addition to Darkstalkers Resurrection is the aforementioned pseudo-achievements. I’ll freely cop to inventing that phrase, but how else would you accurately describe a series of goals found in the game that instantly and tangibly reward players for completing goals that are, at once, arbitrary, yet also subtly nudge players toward improving their skills? Yes, Capcom calls them “Awards” within the game, but that doesn’t really convey what purpose they serve. For example, one of these goals tasks players with throwing an opponent five times in any number of matches. This is a rather easy task that most players will complete simply by playing the game for a long enough period of time, and as a result completing this assignment only earns a player ten experience points. This being a fighting game and not, say, a roleplaying title, you might be wondering what purpose these points serve. In truth, they serve two functions. First, they allow players to purchase items within the Darkstalkers Resurrection Vault which is where you can find all of those bonus concept art pieces and extra content I mentioned above. Second, once you’ve snagged enough points, your overall level will increase. For the most part this is a mere numbers game. In a superficial fashion higher levels theoretically denote players of increased skill, but since there are so many relatively easy ways to earn experience points this doesn’t actually hold true until you attempt to differentiate between players whose levels are at the very highest pinnacle of the ranking system. As players can only complete each pseudo-achievement a single time, there’s no way to farm experience points (thus artificially boosting one’s level), but outside of being able to unlock pretty pictures and ending cinematics there’s no real benefit to having a higher level anyway.

Still, this system does encourage players to spend more time with Resurrection than they might otherwise, if only so they can witness all of the extra content Capcom has included with this release. More players, playing the game more often, should result in increased average skill levels for those willing to venture into the daunting wilds of online fighting game competition, and in that regard this system is a deviously clever way for Capcom to ensure that the competitive community surrounding Resurrection is as strong and durable as possible. Thus, those hoping Resurrection will offers months and years of solid online combat should be very happy to see such a scheme in place, even if they have little to no interest in staring at pre-release imagery of Morrigan.

Of course, the only true arbiter of how successful a fighting game could be in the long run are the hardcore, competitive fighting game players. The kind of people who save up their hard-earned cash to fly to Vegas every year for the annual EVO tournament. Even the most promising fighters can die off after a few weeks of existence if these hardcore fans are unwilling to support them, but since the titles included in Resurrection have already proven themselves as fan-favorites years ago, and their latest incarnations are functionally arcade-perfect, there should be little concern about the game’s potential longevity.

Notice that I couched the term “arcade-perfect” with the qualifier “functionally?” There’s a reason for that. While I really hate to nitpick a game as objectively excellent as Resurrection, that is what they pay for me around here, so I’ll share with you all a little known secret about this game which serves as the most major (yet inarguably minor) area in which the game diverges from its source material. Remember the sexy cat girl I mentioned above? Her name is Felicia and most of you should be familiar with her. She’s long been a favorite character among fans, though that has little to do with her abilities as a fighter. Instead most seem to like her because … well, she’s naked. Granted, she has a few strategically placed tufts of kitty fur where her lady parts might be found were she human, but for all intents and purposes she exists to add a bizarre sort of sex appeal to the Darkstalkers universe. Realizing the detrimental effects Felicia might have on a whole new generation of gamers already prone to sexualize any character with even the vaguest hint of sexy bits (even if said character is, and I repeat, NOT A HUMAN), Capcom has opted to slightly alter Felicia’s in-game appearance to make her a bit more modest. This makes sense, given that in-game lore has long described Felicia as an honest-to-Jedah nun, but it does stand as the most egregious example of the game being unfaithful to its inspiration. That said, most players won’t notice the change, and to be honest with you, the only I reason I know of it is that I’ve got a frightening number of colleagues with really icky sexual peccadilloes.

Since Felicia’s Resurrection incarnation is otherwise arcade-accurate this aesthetic alteration shouldn’t prove an issue for the majority of players (particularly those who enjoy the game for its entertaining fighting game engine), but there are certain subsets of humanity for whom this change might mean the difference between rushing to their nearest Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 and buying Darkstalkers Resurrection, and instead scoffing at Capcom’s gall, and spending the rest of the evening among the darker corners of the internet where the concept of human sexuality is replaced wholesale with imagery that would make Sigmund Freud worry that his mother might’ve been a centaur. If you’re among that latter group, we won’t judge you, and specifically mention this issue so you won’t be disappointed after dropping $15 into Capcom’s coffers.

Beyond that one minor issue though, I can’t praise Darkstalkers Resurrection highly enough. This review clocks in at a little over 3,000 words, almost all of which are my hyperbolic attempts to impress upon you how phenomenal this game is, and yet I still don’t think I’ve done it justice. Darkstalkers Resurrection isn’t just an excellent rehash of a classic Capcom franchise, it’s a brilliant game in its own right. Forget comparing it to other classic fighters that have received modern updates; Darkstalkers Resurrection stands among the finest fighters to hit the scene in our modern console generation. It ranks alongside Super Street Fighter IV and Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 as the best fighting game efforts to emerge from Capcom in years, and if you aren’t convinced by now that you really ought to pick this thing up, the only possible explanation I can think of for your reticence is that you went blind seconds pulling this review up in your browser. After you convince a friend to buy the game for you, please seek medical assistance.