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Games of 2012: Diablo III

I’ve spent a lot of time in 2012 playing games, but not a lot of time writing about them. As I did last year, I’d like to tell some stories or share some thoughts about the ones that meant the most to me this year. I’ll be posting one a day until Christmas. See all Games of 2012 posts.

Diablo III

This past weekend, one of the most reviled – and (it should probably be mentioned) most successful – figures in the gaming industry received a lengthy profile in the New York Times:

Mr. Kotick, 49, has reason to be annoyed. Not since the music industry’s heyday has there been a business with such a wide disparity between the popularity of its products and its customers’ perception of the chief executive who made those products possible. Video games are among the most successful segments in the entertainment industry, and the disdain heaped on Mr. Kotick in video game blogs is second only to the admiration for him on Wall Street.

Bobby Kotick is seen in such negative light not because of the success of Activision, but because of how he gets there. Notorious for rejecting games that couldn’t be “exploited” into yearly franchises, Kottick personifies a lot of disliked trends in the gaming industry.

Blizzard, which is part of Activision, has generally been seen as the exception to Kotick’s rule. The studio famous for World of Warcraft and Starcraft, it is believed, tends to follow their own hearts and dreams. And when Diablo III began its long gestation (around 2005), it was widely given that the game would turn out magnificently. A ship date of “when it’s done” was grumbled about, but accepted. Genius takes time.

But with that long a development cycle, some questionable choices are always going to get made. The color palate went from traditional Diablo to something more akin to watercolor; gamers revolted, and it went back to dungeon-esqe. Achievements were added, something the series had never had before. Then came news the game could only be played online, leaving those people who might want to play without an active internet connection out of luck.

If there was any design decision that sucked the fun out of Diablo for me, it was the inclusion of an Auction House. I generally have nothing against the transfer of digital goods, but it defies the model under which I played Diablo in the past. The joy of the game was always doing runs through levels, hoping that some amazing loot would tumble out of a corpse or a chest. But why leave the game to chance when there’s seemingly every permutation of item in the game available in the auction house, so long as you have enough gold?

Once the auction house went live, my entire style of play shifted. I found myself no longer hoping for that magical drop – most of my loot drops were getting thrown into the auction house for someone else to buy. Once I stockpiled enough gold, I’d do a quick appraisal to figure out what I needed the most, and then quietly stalk the auctions until just the right gear was available. My character evolution became less about playing the game, and more about being a good shopper.

That’s what killed Diablo III for me. Not the lack of PvP all these months later, and not the rather dull end game. It was that they implemented a very modern, very smart revenue stream that ended up sucking the main reason I play right out of the game.

I blame Bobby Kotick for that – even if he had nothing to do with it.

Diablo III is available for Windows and OS X. My experiences were largely with the OS X version.

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Games of 2012: The Grading Game / Cook, Serve, Delicious

I’ve spent a lot of time in 2012 playing games, but not a lot of time writing about them. As I did last year, I’d like to tell some stories or share some thoughts about the ones that meant the most to me this year. I’ll be posting one a day until Christmas. See all Games of 2012 posts.

I’m breaking my own rules tonight and highlighting two games that seem like absurd things to have been made into games. Both of these games were released after I originally put together my list of games for this blog post series. In the end, I couldn’t decide which deserved the feature more – and seeing as I can’t stop playing either of them, here’s praise for both of them.

The Grading Game

The Grading Game is proof that eventually, everything will get turned into a video game. In this case, you are a poor hapless TA trying to pay off your student loans. Grouchy faculty member Dr. Snerpus is more than happy to give you sums of cash if you’ll just do one thing: flunk your fellow students.

No, really. A virtual term paper (culled from various places online) will be thrust in front of you, and your job is to tap on the randomly added errors. Typos, capitalization errors, grammatical mistakes, and run-on sentences are all right before your eyes, in an assortment of different game modes. Sometimes there’s only one error in a fairly long paragraph. Others, there’s more errors than normal, but tapping on a non-error drains your clock heavily.

As a gaming concept, I know this sounds completely ridiculous. Who would want to grade papers (particularly terrible ones) for fun? But like any good “find the hidden object” game, The Grading Game works because you’re having to process information very quickly to find the things that are out of place. The pressure of the clock and the bizarre topics for the papers (Grief houses! Sun sneezes! Jigglypuff! Shoe Throwing!) make it a tense, abstract puzzler.

Besides, is any game that can help improve your writing skills that bad? (Everyone loved Mavis Beacon way back when.)

Cook, Serve, Delicious!

Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a little more traditional, but only just – it’s a “hardcore restaurant simulator”. The daily grind of operating a restaurant is an exercise in planning and multitasking.

Take menu construction: do you go with simple foods like french fries, which you can turn out quickly for limited return? Or do you tend towards expensive soups that require more prep work? You may think maximizing profits sounds great now, but when you’re fielding three orders and a sink full of dishes during the lunch rush? Not so much.

You’ll balance the need for equipment upgrades against buying new and upgraded recipes. Health inspectors will come by. You might get robbed and have to provide an artist’s sketch of the perp. Catering gigs become available. Invites to an Iron Chef-style competition arrive. I think there’s even a dating component and some sort of Kickstarter system.

It sounds like work, and it is work. And like all work, sometimes the reward is in doing a job well. When you get a large combo rolling and juggle complicated orders without missing a beat, you feel firmly in the zone. Completing a round in Cook, Serve, Delicious! provides a lovely sense of relief and completeness.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the original Cooking Mama, but with a shorter fuse and higher stakes. Definitely worth a look.

The Grading Game is available as a universal iOS app. Cook, Serve, Delicious! is available on Windows, OS X, and for the iPad. My experiences were largely with the iPad version. Both games are on sale for the immediate future.

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Games of 2012: FIFA 13

I’ve spent a lot of time in 2012 playing games, but not a lot of time writing about them. As I did last year, I’d like to tell some stories or share some thoughts about the ones that meant the most to me this year. I’ll be posting one a day until Christmas. See all Games of 2012 posts.

FIFA 13

I was originally hesitant to include FIFA 13 on my list this year. Despite playing more in my third year with the series than either of the two previous, most of my confusion from last year remains. The game remains difficult to learn the nuances no matter how much time you spend with it. Just a week ago, I finally figured out that when you’re taking a free kick, up and down are for the direction of spin, not where you want to place the ball (ala how you take a penalty). Yes, this took me three years with the series to figure out.

Even with its obtuseness, I have a much deeper appreciation for FIFA this year, because I’ve had a chance to see what an institution it is worldwide.

– Just about every soccer player cares deeply about how they’re represented in the game. There’s a certain measure of self-worth and pride related to how close to reality one appears in the game. Stats, placement in the lineup, and accuracy of the player model all matter on different levels. Dax McCarty, the defensive midfielder for the Red Bulls, was perhaps the most glum on the team about FIFA 13; mostly because he wasn’t in the team’s starting lineup (despite starting nearly every game this season), but also because his character model had been given clown-red hair instead of his actual strawberry blonde hair.

– It’s become the sort of game where EA must blow millions of dollars on promotion. There were a variety of game changes from 12 to 13, but the biggest (and most costly) was easily EA wrenching away the image rights for Lionel Messi from Konami. Observe this year’s “JOIN THE CLU13” ad and try to ponder the budget involved in getting some of the top names in the sport crammed in for so many little cameos. Even the parties are absurd, as best illustrated by Graham Parker’s amazing recap of the NYC launch party. (I didn’t get an invite this year; clearly this is the next big step towards my legitimacy as a sports journalist.)

– If you think free-to-play games on Facebook are terrifying, then you must not be familiar with FIFA Ultimate Team (or more commonly, “FUT”). FUT has a simple enough premise: open packs of cards, assemble a team, play as that team through seasons or tournaments. But the cards have limited contracts, so they can only be used so many times before you have to apply a contract card to extend their usefulness. You have to be cognizant of preferred formations, chemistry with nearby teammates, fitness, morale, and possibly which month the player’s birthday is. The in-game currency for winning matches is rarely enough to keep your team operating for very long, so soon you’ll turn to the marketplace in an attempt to buy and sell cards to achieve enough of a profit to keep things going.

There was a big rash of Xbox Live account hacking last year that was linked to FIFA. People would crack accounts, quickly purchase Microsoft points, buy gold player packs, and transfer all the cards to another account. It became known as “getting FIFA’d”. How many freemium games do you know that get used as a nickname for a specific type of criminal activity?

FIFA 13 is so engrained in soccer culture, it’s hard to not be into it if you’re into the sport. Journalists, players, front office staff, musicians, fans – everyone’s in. Come on – how many other games are going to lead to me talking smack with a player I respect?

FIFA 13 is available on just about every system known to man. My experiences were largely with the PS3 and Windows versions.