Don’t buy the Fable 2 “Knothole Island” DLC

It took about ten minutes, or less, to get to a point of the Fable 2 “Knothole Island” DLC that made me greatly regret having bought it.

Do you remember in the original game a particularly frustrating bit involving having to shoot (using Fable 2’s maddeningly imprecise and slow firearm targeting system) a series of glowing balls that moved quite fast and if you didn’t get one in time you had to start all over again? Do you remember thinking – if you made it past that section without throwing your controller at the TV – “that was awesome, I wish I could do that a bit more”?

If so, then you’re in LUCK! Not only does the Knothole Island expansion require you to play a variant on this idiotic challenge, it makes it last for a dozen iterations, evenly spread between the three different combat types. Miss one – and you will, particularly the yellow shooting bits – and it’s back to the beginning with you.

Designed by Nazi war criminals

Whatever possessed the Fable 2 developers to highlight the limitations of their own control scheme with a mini-game that’s almost impossible to complete using it, and to make that mini-game an unavoidable part of getting anywhere in the DLC storyline, god only knows. Or basement cat.

Whatever, I had to turn it off and play some nice soothing COD:WAW to get back to a state of equilibrium.

I cannot believe that they playtested that section of the Knothole Island DLC. No-one played that – no sane non-masochistic person, anyway – before it shipped. It’s just not possible.

Developers – if you’ve made an action RPG where the control scheme is not really all that precise, DON’T make players endure a timed shooting event that’s almost impossible to complete using it. And if you must include such a thing, at least make it optional, not an unavoidable part of getting through the main content.

Owners of Fable 2 – avoid Knothole Island, unless you enjoy being tormented. Save your money.

More things that suck about BF1943

There’s no way of telling what quality connection you’ve got to the current match before you join it.

There’s no way of telling what quality connection you’ve got to the current match after you’ve joined it (apart from people not dying when you shoot them).

Why is it that developers of online shooters still can’t get this right?

They’ll fix it if we buy it

The new Battlefield 1943 is apparently now almost working, and some people in Australia have managed to get on and get through a game, adjusting – as usual – for the lag.

And – good news! They’re going to set up some local servers, thereby making the game actually playable!

Weirdly, they seem to consider that this is doing us some kind of a favour:

I had to fight hard to get this after we got the sales numbers and Australia had really low sales numbers, it was 8 times less than Japan, 24 times less than the UK, and 34 times less than the USA! I hope I see this change so I can add even more servers in your region!

We need to buy the game first to justify them making it playable? That seems a bit arse-backwards to me.

I hope Gordon explained to his bosses that the REASON for the low take-up might be that Australians are sick of online games that are nigh-on unplayable due to lag. We might have put up with it by buying COD4 and L4D in large numbers – but that naive goodwill was sure to run out eventually. Maybe it has now.

EA MAY RETIRE THIS GAME AFTER 30 DAYS NOTICE POSTED ON www.ea.com

Looking at buying that 1200 MS Point ($24.75*) Battlefield: 1943 today?

Check out this little note at the end of the “description” -

EA MAY RETIRE THIS GAME AFTER 30 DAYS NOTICE POSTED ON www.ea.com.

So – you buy the game, and EA can simply take it away from you at their discretion.

I think they were hoping no-one would notice.

What a fantastic development. Henceforth game studios won’t have to worry about you onselling your second-hand games – they’ll just delete them for you. It won’t be “does this year’s update offer a good enough reason to upgrade?” It’ll be “Um, where did last year’s version go?”

Let’s hope this catches on, eh?

*Technically, $24.75 will leave you with 300 MS points left over: it’s just that the smallest possible amount you can spend on this, given that the points come in multiples of 500, is 1500. MS wants you to ignore that you HAVE to buy an extra 300 points – I think they should be called on it. It is a cost you must pay before you can play the game.

Microsoft tries to convince users that advertisements will “enhance” their Xbox Live experience

XBox Live director of programming Larry Hryb moves to reassure subscribers to the expensive online service about upcoming “silverlight” advertisements:

“I need to let you know that you don’t need to worry about a huge influx of ads across the dashboard. One of our core principles is to enhance, not interfere with the gaming experience, and we work directly with our partners to only deliver experiences that are relevant to the Live community.”

“Enhance”, Larry? Advertisements would only “enhance” Xbox Live if they reduced the price. TO FREE.

But, based on the precedent of existing Xbox games now featuring real-world advertising – which are just as, if not more expensive as they used to be – that seems unlikely.

What you’re planning to do is use this “rich media” technology to make the ads that are already on Live more annoying – with attention-hogging animations, noises etc.

Microsoft thinks that now that you’ve shelled out for a bunch of online Xbox games, you’re stuck with them FOR THE REST OF TIME. Which will make it that much more satisfying when, the day after it happens, I upgrade my computer and go back to PC games.

Gaming ripoffs that Wired has noticed, too

Wired notices several of the ripoffs we’ve talked about recently – from digital downloads that are not cheaper than the physical product (or in fact more expensive) to funny money.

When boss fights suck (Prototype)

Note to Prototype’s designers: turning a boss fight into an hour-long slog without checkpoints, with a monster that has an instant-kill attack and in a game where the controls can often guess entirely wrong what the player is trying to get them to do, is A BAD IDEA.

I am talking, of course, about the infamous fight with an enormous tentacle creature in Times Square, about two thirds of the way through the game. The fight itself isn’t particularly complicated – the player has to take out three smaller parts of the large tentacle before they can damage it; this can be accomplished with hit and run attacks. A LOT of hit and run attacks. What worked for me was going around a corner and consuming hunters until my health was maximised, then running out, using the most powerful attack I had on the closest part of the creature, watching it reduce its health a pitifully small amount, and then running back around the corner before its instant-kill fireball attack was activated. And doing it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over. You can’t do more at once, because if you try for TWO attacks there’s a fifty percent chance you’ll get knocked off your feet and killed in the blastwave.

It’ll take you four or five times hitting the main tentacle to kill it, and each of those times is prefaced by a twenty minute fight with the three smaller parts – run in, run out, heal, run in, run out, heal etc. It takes FOREVER. And there’s one checkpoint after the first time you damage the main tentacle, and then none. So, if the finicky targeting system gets you stuck against a wall when you’re just about to finish off the last tentacle component after an hour of playing, and you are killed, you have to DO THE WHOLE BLOODY THING OVER AGAIN.

Checkpoints are stupid, and should be replaced on modern consoles with at-will saves, but if you ARE going to rely on them, then bloody well make them more frequent than NONE IN THE COURSE OF AN HOUR OF PLAY. One every five minutes would be good.

Also, if you’re designing a boss battle, make it interesting. As soon as the player is doing the same thing, over and over and over again, end it. Don’t just give the monster ludicrous amounts of health and make it a time-consuming war of attrition. Where’s the fun in that? That fight would’ve worked fine if each of the parts needed one or two attacks, and the monster itself could be killed in at most three major attacks. Half an hour on one boss fight is fine. More than that, particularly when you don’t actually have any ideas to vary the challenge, and it’s just boring repetition – well, that’s bad game design.

Memo to potential purchasers: if you’re thinking about buying Prototype, have a real think about how much tolerance you have for the above sort of bullshit before laying down money for it. Paying $100 for that kind of frustration kind of burns.

UPDATE: Seriously, stop it. It doesn’t deserve this kind of commercial success.

“Exclusive” = “worse”

Memo to game companies: even when they’re not appalling cock-ups like the way the Ghostbusters developers sold out to Sony and prevented consumers from buying the better version of the game, “exclusives” are not a positive, and gamers are learning to resent the word.

Something being “exclusive” means that, even if it’s “exclusive” to the console I own, the developer has been unable to divide consistent design costs between a larger consumer base – the upshot of which is, if the product isn’t more expensive, it will be of lower quality. They can spend fewer resources, because they’ll be getting a smaller return. If the GTA:IV “exclusive” DLC was also available on PS3, then it could cost less, or provide more content.

“Exclusive” means the company is cutting off its nose to spite its face, and the consumer pays.

As for “exclusives” driving consumers to other platforms – not really. We just miss out on those games, costing the company a greater install base to be interested in sequels. Owning multiple consoles capable of pretty much the same thing is not good use of money, space or anything else.

The word “exclusive” makes us groan. Now’s about the time you should start realising that.

PS God of War III? Katamari Forever? The Last Guardian? Flower? SHUT UP. I don’t care.

UPDATE: And Afrika.

More digital distribution ripoffs

What’s wrong with this announcement?

Microsoft said at E3 earlier this month that one more title – widely tipped to be Halo 2 – would be released for the Xbox Originals service ahead the August rollout of Xbox 360 games for download…

Prices will be in line with retail boxed copies and new games will be added regularly.

Oh, come on. More electronic distribution at the same price as boxed copies?

What a ripoff.

Firstly, downloaded content has lower value for consumers. You don’t get a disc. You don’t get a manual. You have to pay for the bandwidth to download the game. Your content is locked to your console or gamertag. You can’t resell it.

Secondly, downloaded content costs manufacturers much less. They don’t have to pay for physical media, paper, printing costs, packaging, shipping, retail space, middlemen – if the free market worked properly, they would necessarily reduce the price accordingly.

Do they think consumers can’t see this? They’re potentially prepared to accept the disadvantages (no physical copy or supporting material, no ability to resell), provided that the the potential advantages of digital distribution (content provided quicker and cheaper) outweigh them; but if you’re going to take those away, and leave them only with the drawbacks, then why would they bother? Or, at least, why would they bother going through you? How do you think you’re going to build this new model, with all its advantages for you, if it’s obvious to everyone you’re trying to sell it to that you are unreasonably gouging them?

There’s a reason a whole generation has learned to pirate music, and it’s not that they’re flat-out unwilling to pay for it.

Invisible walls

Red Faction, a game about smashing things that for some mystifying reason seems to delight in regularly imposing its shitty driving model on players by forcing them to traverse a maze of mountains across the map every few minutes, eventually gives the player a short-range jetpack. Suffering players may think – “Excellent! Now I can just fly over that annoying mountain range there, rather than going the tedious long-way around”. They would be wrong. Not because the mountains are too steep for the jetpack – but because the game blocks the player with INVISIBLE WALLS. You can fly up and down, but you’re not going through that imaginary impenetrable barrier.

No! You shall go back and walk around it. It’s our way of ensuring you get your money’s worth (in terms of time) of entertainment.

Seriously, developers, fuck off.

Solution: Don’t use invisible walls. Particularly when they’re not even necessary to keep the player on the map – they’re just there to stop the player taking a less boring and time-consuming route. If there must be a barrier, fit it into the environment plausibly. At least make it visible, so that the player does waste time trying to surmount an obstacle that he or she should, according to the other rules of the game, be able to conquer.