You're Doing It WRONG!

For some time now, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has been assigning content ratings for video games and software (to include mobile apps), as well as 'enforcing' advertising and marketing guidelines for the industry. Here is my beef, their rating system is stupid as hell.

They wanted to make a rating system that was easy for parents to understand: EC, E, E10+, T, M, AO. Yup, parents can REALLY get a lot from that at first glance! You can see their guidelines here.

Once you have looked at the rating system, you may think "Why are they using a new system to something that is already in place?". Great question, because it would make sense to use G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17! Something almost all American parents already know and understand.

They even go so far to say "This is O.K. for 17+ and this is O.K. for 18+". Like one year really makes a difference. The fact that they started a whole new rating process for a fairly new type of media is asking for issues to arise. In fact Unicorn, Puppy, Dragon, Sex would be more understandable for parents that have no clue what video games are (and there are a LOT out there) yet buy Mass Effect for their 8 year old.

The JRPG, why you should play them.

I have played Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPG) for a very long time, and they have always held a place in my collection of video games. When talking in passing conversation, a JRPG doesn't sound like any fun at all; you have a party of 3 to 5 people while, in battle, you choose what you do from a list of commands and everybody takes a turn. Yeah, hurrah, sounds like lots of fun there. But in reality, the JRPG is closest to a pen-and-paper (or table-top) RPG.

Generally, you have turned based combat. This means, just like in elementary school, everyone during the battle gets to take a turn (though there are stipulations). Different classes have different abilities, mages can cast magic while the thief classes are the only ones who can steal from monsters  (wow, who would have thought)! So balancing you classes with the options you have is key to being able to beating bosses, clearing dungeons, and earning loot!

"WAIT!" you might say, "A JRPG is killing, clearing and looting? AWESOME!" But little Timmy, you must remember that the real key to a JRPG is its story. A good JRPG has a well thought out story that flows, like a good fantasy novel. They also generally have very decent music and artwork that all wraps a game in to a neat little package ripe for the consuming.

So for the tl;dr, they play like table-top RPGs, the godfathers of all video games, and the story is usually much better then what you DM comes up with. Tack on some pretty decent graphics and a good music score and all you are left with is an enjoyable experience.

The Final (Fantasy) Count Down I - IV

Recently, I have decided to complete every Final Fantasy game in their numerical order. I wanted to gauge story and mechanics against each other, so I figured beating them in the order they were created would be the best way to do so. I have only made it through the first four right now, but I should have the core collection almost complete by the end of the year.

Starting with Final Fantasy I, I decided to take close note of everything the game had. You are able to create your own party! You got to choose four characters, which you got to name, from six different classes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. At a later point in the game you could evolve the character’s class in to a stronger version. This stuck me as a wonderful mechanic, and reminded me a lot of the pen and paper game Dungeons and Dragons. The story was a standard save the world, but the attraction was trying to get the most out of my party composition and level up to the best of my ability. It really surprised me for a video game released in 1987, and it definitely kept me interested.

The second game in the series (Final Fantasy II) was also an interesting installment. Though not released in the United States until 2003, I got a chance to play it in the PlayStation 1 collection that came with the first Final Fantasy. This game had no levels in the typical sense of, kill monsters get experience and if you break the experience threshold your stats increase making what you do better. Instead, the more you used a certain skill, like attacking with swords, the more your sword skill and strength went up! The down side is that it was rough to make a well-rounded character, and more often than not magic overshadowed melee by a long shot. The story felt improved over the previous installment with having set characters; instead of create your own, as it followed them from a hostile empire takeover through the rebellion and salvation of the world.

Final Fantasy III was the first game that Square released that implemented a new type of customization to the game. Like Final Fantasy II, the characters were set sprites that fit in to a neat story (which I found to be very bland for the series). But, more like Final Fantasy I, you were giving control over the characters job classes. Once you met certain story milestones you would unlock more job class options that you could have any character use; you could also easily swap out the current class for another! I had an issue getting through the DS version of the game, but when I thought about the mechanics of the game I was still impressed. Another NES(Japan only at the time) game that managed to do so much with what we would consider so little in the hardware department.

Final Fantasy IV originally released as Final Fantasy 2 in the U.S. on the SNES; named so because it was the second one released in the U.S. at the time. This was my favorite game for a very long time growing up, as it also was the first entry in to the series that I had played. The game was almost a step back in the mechanics department. You had a set cast that followed a good story of yet again saving the world. This time though, each character possessed one class that you could not change. As the story progressed characters flew in and out of you party, constantly changing the makeup. Though, it did lend itself to enhancing the story pretty well.

So far, each installment has developed in different ways, the story got better (worse with 3rd in my opinion) and the mechanics progressed as well. I cannot wait to compare these older games to the more recent ones! Check back later and see how I outline the more recent games and compare them to their predecessors.

The new ‘good’ is crap!

Welcome to Critical Miss. In this article I will be covering how accepting we have become with rating our video games.

‘Seriously?!’ I shouted, as I found out I had to kill one of the apprentice mages in the College of Winterhold in Bethesda Softworks’s new hit game The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. A glitch in the software made it where I could not complete the quest as normal on the PS3. Then, in my sleuthing adventures I found that there are guides to all the PS3, 360 and PC workarounds there are just to play the game. This got me thinking…

HOW DOES THIS CRAP A GOOD GAME?!

It seems to me, that reviewers rate games like they are on a balancing scale, rather than an average representation of the game as a whole. A game riddled with bugs that hinder your gameplay should not be rated so high!  I will continue to use Skyrim as my example for the rest of this article.

The gaming industry tries to impress us with many things (graphics, music, story to name a few) and sometimes it backfires. The thing we have become complacent with is overlooking some grave errors that would have burned lower budget games. $60 is a good clutch to be dishing out on a video game, and we have a right to be mad when it feels ill spent. That is about 10 hours for someone working on minimum wage! Even at $12 an hour, that game cost you about 6 hours of work.

So when a big named company (Bethesda Softworks) releases a ‘AAA’ game (Skyrim) it makes you wonder, why would anyone bother paying that much for a broken experience? Why do reviewers at large companies manage to overlook these errors as if the graphics manage to make up for it, or that the controls are ‘solid’?

The excuses I have read from press statements have led up to one big issue for Bethesda Softworks, they do not know how to write code for the PS3. It wasn’t until the expansion, Dawnguard, that they were willing to admit this; even then they are just now reaching out to Sony for assistance on how to make it work.

I would say, the overall experience was alright; but if I had a time machine, I would tell the slightly younger me to hold out until I could get it for under $30.

In The Beginning...

Hello and welcome to my blog, Critical Miss. Currently, I am living in Denver, Colorado and have decided to pursue a blog about one of my favorite hobbies, gaming. Video games and I go back to the NES era, and I feel it is time to start gathering some ideas and thoughts together as we enter yet another era in gaming.

Here I will be assembling some thoughts and philosophies based on my experiences as a gamer. We will have podcasts set up eventually, and forums later on down the road as so to integrate further with the gaming community.

I play a varied assortment of video games, from Harvest Moon to Borderlands to Tales of series to Battlefield 3. I currently own, and play on, a PC, 3DS, PSVita and PS3 and will mostly be talking from those perspectives. I have owned, throughout my lifetime, the NES, SNES, almost every version of the Gameboy, N64, Gamecube, Xbox 360, PS1, PS2, Sega Genesis, Sega Dreamcast and Wii.

Signing off,
Mikey