The issues surrounding Dota 2 are news to few and Valve have done something very unusual in creating this game. While it is the case that Valve have taken what were essentially mods and created full-blown games in the past, a practice now often seen in the indie movement, in this case they have taken a mod so deeply entrentched in a specific game and its world that controversy was bound to follow.

And, to an extent, I can understand the backlash by Blizzard, original DotA fans, Riot Games and others over this. It does seem a bit strange for Valve to take Dota 2 like this without getting a more workable response from the community as well as Blizzard. They only ever recruited the lead developer from the past 7 years, there were two developers before IceFrog, one of whom was the creator of what is the almost exclusively played version of the map. That creates a pretty strong case against Valve’s claim that they can register Dota 2 as a trademark.

Valve have a problem as it seems Blizzard are very willing to take them to task over the Dota 2 trademark claim and I think, as much as I dislike anything part of the great beast that is Activision, Blizzard are in the right about this one. The disappointing thing is that I have played the Dota 2 beta and Valve have a great products on their hands but I can’t help and wonder whether Valve’s aggressive push forward in developing and trademarking this while these issues remain was a bit more shrewd and manipulative that it might appear to some. Valve don’t normally have a reputation for developing something so polished, so quickly.

Certainly, Valve’s Dota 2 will come out in some form even if Blizzard wins its case and I have lost all ability to see Valve as the little guy fighting the big bad beast here because, as small as they are compared to what they now go against, they aren’t little and they should have forseen these problems. I just don’t trust Valve to throw straight dice in this. The questions I wonder are, if Valve wins this upcoming battle, will it affect Blizzard’s own DotA efforts or any continued development of the original Defense of the Ancients? With Team Fortress, Valve hired anyone and everyone who was part of the modding team and it wasn’t tied into one game’s world or mythology so deeply. IceFrog’s claim to the DotA trademark is suspect at best and the game is so bound up with Warcraft III that I can’t see Valve winning this one. At the end of it all, though, I am cheering for Blizzard on this one and I think it’ll be a good thing if Valve don’t get that trademark.

I’ve had a bit of a disappearance due to work and, well, gaming. However, in recent news was the long announced (and inevitably delayed) release of Minecraft which brought a lot of things that irritate me to the forefront.

Its user score hit amber on Metacritic a short while ago. I don’t think it’s a mediocre game, far from it, but I can understand the reaction of many of the gamers who are reacting against the squealing Notch fanboys and the strong bias of professional critics who rally behind the idea that the game is the best thing since sliced bread. I thought the older user score of 7.5 was a little more realistic, but it’s continued to drop.

Here I wanted to put forward five games out around about the same time that, I would argue, are a better investment than Minecraft. Of course, it’s all mostly subjective (assuming you’re not a dyed-in-the-wool games are art type) and there aren’t many games that do what Minecraft do the same way or as well as it, but none the less:

#1) The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac has a classic, rogue-like element mixed up with older console adventure games. You won’t get anywhere near the amount of play hours out of it as Minecraft, but it’s a great example of indie weirdness. It has a vague allusion of Judaic mythology as the player controls Isaac who must escape the basement from which his warped mother wishes to sacrifice him, encountering monsters and deformed siblings on his way to freedom.

#2) Saints Row: The Third

In many ways, Saints Row picked up where GTA 2 left off. By the time GTA 4 was hitting shelves, the series had gone a tad insane in many ways. The first two games were anarchic and did not take themselves seriously in the least. GTA 3 started a trend of trying to add a gritty side to the games and by the time GTA 4 was on screens everywhere, it was hard to see coherence between the bleak existence of the central protagonist and the zany slapstick carried over from the earlier games. Saints Row became, in many ways, the true inheritor of the pure slapstick of the first two GTA games.

#3) Orcs Must Die!

An interesting new take on the old tower defence model. Your basic job is defend a series of towers from hordes of orcs and their cohorts. The production values are good for an indie and the game has good humour running throughout that does not feel forced. As with games like Sanctum, the game boasts a large amount of DLC and the ability to get involved with the suppression of invading forces as opposed to merely leaving it up to the defences you build.

#4) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Most people will know why this game is considered great already, but I’ll re-iterate here. State of the art graphics and sound with more varied terrain than Oblivion, randomised dungeons and countless quests, a more skill-focused character design with perks each level. Based off a new internally-designed engine and a new character generation system, the game opens up a lot more possibility for customisation than removed with its radically changed character design. The game world feels more real, more dynamic than Oblivion and the continued improvements in these areas point to even better in the future.

#5) Bastion

I have to admit, I was rather late on the bandwagon for this one. There’s very little to say against this game though, a paragon of action adventures, it combines elements of gritty fantasy with frontiersman Wild West and post-apocalyptic searching. The aim of the game is to rebuild the city that has fallen under a terrible blight (known as the Calamity) and cracked into several floating islands by finding and reclaiming the cores, bringing them to the sanctity of the bastion where the townsfolk were meant to gather. The game features gameplay and stylistic choices influenced by JRPGs, of which I’m not normally a fan, but its execution is slick and well-crafted.

I’m not saying Minecraft is a bad game. I just feel there’s a lot of hype around it and that the rating of 7.5 I first saw was a lot more realistic to the end product than the near uniform bleating of the praising critics. After his bad air with Bethesda and the nastiness with Yogscast at MineCon, maybe the mediocre user reception will make Notch a little more humble, because he needs to be brought down a peg or two.

So recently I’ve between making an effort to actually mop up some of those games I’ve not yet completed and I decided to try getting through the entire collection of Super Mario Bros. All-Stars on the SNES. I did a bit of a push on Overlord too as that kind of fell out too, though I did enjoy the game.

But I’ve kind of broken a taboo I once held because I saw Rift (they capitalise the entire word, though I’m not sure why) on special offer in a Steam daily deal and snatched it up (a month’s free subs, it would definitely be worth the £6 I dropped to get that, I could always cancel my sub before month’s end) and I concluded that it’s actually worth keeping that sub there for a few months longer as I’ll be getting 4 months for less than the full price of the game anyway. After that, I’ll see where I go.

The thing that really pulled me in was the fact that the world seems very open and large for an MMO that has been around around 8 months. I bought it in the sale celebrating the 1.5 update and sizeable updates are being added every two or three months with more minor updates in-between. The options seem more varied than the standard MMO fair with my level 19 character already far ahead of the mainstream quests that are the staple levelling up mechanic in most MMOs I’ve seen so far. This is because of a lot of random elements such as random group dungeon crawls and rift invasions allow a lot of traditionally end game content a chance to shine through to newer players. I doubt I’ll end up playing for the game until the day I die, but I could see myself keeping up a sub for a long while to come.

My housemate and I also paid some cash to get our Minecraft server running ready for the 1.8 update and lo and behold, 1.9 is already on the horizon. I actually quite like these new updates as they appear to be adding new stuff at a good solid rate. My big problem with 1.8 was the Endermen. They are not really scary or all that threatening and have ended up a minor annoyance at best, damaging my woodlands fortress with the occasional missing block or leaving a tree floating in midair.

The Endermen need to be improved a lot. First their AI doesn’t often work properly and this leaves them ignoring me as I stare at them and they move and place blocks in a random fashion. If there were ancient Endermen ruins that they sought to rebuild of Endermen settlements and their placement had more rhythm and reason, that would be excellent. They just feel an arbitrary new addition to the game.

But having criticised Minecraft for its slow updates, I don’t want to be too harsh now that Notch actually seems to be getting on with it. It just should have happened earlier and the updates could be a lot better. Still, we’ll all see next month when Minecraft leaves beta what sort of state it is in and what the future holds. Until then, things are looking a lot more improved.

The new villagers in 1.9 are the real big change as I see it. What they really need is a host of interactions and more ordered AI that makes them feel like real people and not just a couple of re-skinned pigs. Given how easy it is to create something like the 1.9 villagers, I wonder why Notch didn’t add them in before. Now all he needs is a slight modification to their AI and a buy/sell interface with currency and the basics are down, I don’t see why it is so hard.

Last week, the recently F2P MMO Crimecraft: Bleedout had a special offer on that was typical of special offers on the F2P sections of Steam: join, try it now and you’ll get in-game advances and items for which you normally pay. These offers work because it gives an incentive to try a F2P game out of the bunch that you wouldn’t normally pick up.

I play a few F2P games, I generally aim to be cost-effective when it comes to gaming, a hangover from bygone unemployed days and F2P games give a lot of room to try before cash changes hands. This is good and I generally find the games that I pay into are not ones I feel I need to pay into to get ahead, they are games like League of Legends that end up making pay cash almost as a ‘thank you’ to the developers. That’s the attitude I’ve stuck by, games that feel like they are wrangling cash from me fall by the wayside.

Now, this sort of offer on Steam is great because I can’t download and try every F2P, nor would I want to. My games catalogue is massive on PC alone, not adding in the catalogues of my retro home computer and console gaming or the tabletop gaming I do. I will never run out of what I already have to play unless I moved into my dad’s attic and quit my job and all social contact. Further, I would need to wade through as much rubbish as my current catalogues to find the League of Legendses or Lord of the Rings Onlines. These offers are a great way to tapping the flow, as it were, and offering up the F2P buffet in manageable plate-loads.

The problem is when a game company seems to want more players than it is willing to reasonably support. So this offer on Crimecraft was up until the 29th and I made several attempts to get in there, create a character and play. I download the game via Steam, create my account, login. There are two servers. The first (Exeter) is full and the other has a population of high (Euricho). So I try Euricho first and I’m put in a queue of nearly 700 people. I estimated by the drop rate that it would take me about half an hour to forty-five minutes to get in, so I try later.

Later does not work. The same problem in both servers. They are stretched beyond what they can reasonably support. I don’t mind the game supporting such a limited userbase, it’s ultimately up to the game publishers, but why have a special offer trying to draw more players in when the special offer will only be accessible to a remote portion of those players?

Sure, it will potentially increase the player base and, therefore, income for the game. I tried logging in today and neither server was a problem this time, so it was short-term, but it doesn’t say much for the game’s attitude to its players. Imagine logging on to the game as a loyal player who’d been playing that game before the offer. Suddenly, you cannot play or are forced to wait up to an hour because they want to cram their servers full with potential cash-giving players.

Vogster (the developers) have a more than healthy sized community playing their game for the resources they allot it, unless their servers report false stats about player numbers. If they want to increase their base beyond what they currently have, they need an extra server.

The bigger problem is that this is indicative of some of the bad thinking behind F2P models. Players aren’t there to sell a set product to or build relationships with, they are cash pumps and you fit as many of them as you can in your game. Crimecraft isn’t necessarily advocating this outlook, but it would seem it given they made a drive to get more players than they can support comfortably. People need to be very sceptical of F2P games and I think they really need to know the sorts of business models being used before they feel comfortable investing.

Recently in a Steam sale, I picked up the game VVVVVV. The name draws attention to two features of the game, the fact that each of the six characters have names beginning with the letter and the triangular spikes that litter the game. The game is a deliberately retro platformer and it wears its intentions on its sleeves from the ZX Spectrum-era music to the loading screen from those by-gone days.

When I tend to think of retro games, I tend to think of games beyond a certain point in time, more than two generations in console terms. PS2 and Xbox games aren’t retro to me yet, but Playstation, Sega Saturn and N64 games (as well as their contemporary PC titles) are. What I’ve seen, however, is a lot of people use the term retro gaming to refer to games specifically from their childhood days. Now, my first gaming machines were from the 16-bit era and, as such, long after the video games crash of 1983. As such, when I see VVVVVV it really harkens back to an age of gaming where I was not alive, let alone playing games, but I have played video games from the 70s and 80s and do consider myself a bit of a retro-gamer, but playing VVVVVV made me think.

It presents itself as a very hard game and it really is. It also presents itself as very frustrating and, perhaps that is true for the hardcore fans who saw their first games before I was born and are pushing towards middle-age or have reached it by now, but I never found it frustrating. There’s this one bit where the game puts you through a series of levels where you have to dodge carefully placed spikes to reach a platform which you bounce off to get to a trinket on the other side and it almost seems to gloat (given the screen names) about how frustrating, unfair and, ultimately, how unrewarding the trinket is at the end.

And that’s something that bothers me. It’s not frustrating me at all because there’s no real challenge there. It’s simply a matter of time and death is barely a setback. Sure, I died a few hundred times getting through that puzzle, but the point is I got through that puzzle.

What do we actually want from older games? The fact is their difficulty alone wasn’t enough to make them good games. Castlevania on the NES was hard, but it was possible to do it first run, you just had to sit and think about how you were going to approach each task rather than learn by rote what you needed to do at what moment in order to get further. VVVVVV isn’t like that, there’s a lot you learn to do simply by rote and getting your timing right can be very hit and miss.

It’s not an awful game, it’s got a lot of charm to it. What it does, however, is make me very thankful that games have blossomed beyond the very limited set of genres and ideas that games in the 70s and early 80s had. In Charlie Brooker’s Gamewipe, he gave the example of a programme from the early days on computer gaming where one presenter dismissed games as lacking any long-term or mass appeal. He criticism wouldn’t stand today because, at the time, games only came as aesthetic variations on one of a few concepts.

My point to all this is we should not harken back nostalgically to a supposed golden era of gaming where things were better, because games are much better today than they have ever been. It’s fun to play some of the older games that were good at the times, but can we really compare classics like Space Invaders to the best of modern day gaming? No, Space Invaders bores me to tears quickly because it’s the same level repeated for the sole achievement of earning an increased number near the word ‘score’ that does not appeal to me as much as it did to those gamers. Pac Man is a little more fun because there’s a bit more balanced challenge and variety but, again, modern gaming wins out. After the NES came out, the face of gaming changed radically and grew into new forms; it still does.

The problem is every time a Brink or a Dungeon Siege III or a Duke Nukem Forever comes out, players are rushing to praise how older games had it right, but they are comparing the better games that they remember to any game coming out today. The fact is that there was plenty of crap coming out then, why does anyone think the crash of ’83 happened? But people won’t remember Custer’s Revenge or E.T. on the Atari 2600. People remember the first Castlevania more than they remember Simon’s Quest and we don’t realise that we do this all the time (and not just in gaming).

So I have a criticism of VVVVVV and that’s the assumption that pins a lot of the talking that games are too easy, too soft on gamers today. They’re not, because the difficulty of games like VVVVVV aren’t a complex, satisfying challenge; they are just arbitrarily difficult to extend game length and we should not condemn modern games for cutting this out. What’s worse, I don’t get irritated or give in to the frustrations of VVVVVV because death is so trivial and arbitrary that it’s turned itself on its head and become fairly easy to complete.

If there’s one thing I want anyone to take away from this, it’s that, regardless of how much we loved Black Isle and how good their games could be with proper QA, we should just stop buying Obsidian games until they either change or die off. The sad fact is they are not improving their QA after 8 years of buggy games.

Obsidian Entertainment recently released Dungeon Siege III and while Metacritic scores are veering towards the better side of mediocre, user scores are hitting the same lows as games like Dragon Age II. While it’s easy to treat this as a sign that you shouldn’t take professional reviewers at face value due to their unfortunate tendency of being less critical of games that they ought to be, there is a distinct problem at Obsidian that needs to be solved.

I am talking about their bug-ridden software. Defenders of Obsidian often point to their game’s large scope and depth as a reason for the bugs and we should expect these problems. This simply doesn’t work as a defence, Dungeon Siege III had a larger number than any comparably-sized release I’d seen for a long while and, more importantly, launch-time patches designed to fix problems introduced even more problems that seem so surreal and outlandish that it is hard to imagine how any programmer could derail a patch so.

It’s not even as if Dungeon Siege III is the only bad release, either. Look at the Wikipedia pages for Fallout: New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights 2 or Alpha Protocol. Of them, only Fallout: New Vegas got a positive Metacritic score across both professional and user ratings. While it’s the case that Fallout and Neverwinter Nights 2 both have fans of older, non-Obsidian games lowering their user ratings, the lion’s share of complaints from both games seem to be about bugs.

It’s interesting they don’t mention Neverwinter Nights 2 or Alpha Protocol in this.

What is worse, as demonstrated by the Dungeon Siege III launch-time patches, is that Obsidian’s patching policy makes the problems worse. Dungeon Siege III with its control reversal problem or its hour-long game lockout due to two separate patches is not the first to do this, both Fallout and Alpha Protocol fell short here with new problems introduced as old ones are being (often only partially) fixed.

Dungeon Siege III is also plagued by a horde of poor design choices: co-op mode puts the second player, in the words of Penny Arcade, in the role of a side-kick in the first player’s story with no long term gains; players cannot reconfigure any keys or controls for the keyboard, and many complaints on the forums have been met with a “use a gamepad” response. There is also the fact that many older fans of the series complain that the game doesn’t live up to the earlier games, but to what extent these sentiments are based on problems or just dogged gamer conservatism is hard to tell.

If I’m not holding punches for Mojang over this, I won’t for Obsidian. Various game magazines have spoken with people at Obsidian about this issue and they have received the same line: Fallout’s problems were unfortunate, but we’re working extra hard on the QA of Dungeon Siege III.

They evidently didn’t work hard enough, as evidenced by these new patches. They are like the trainwreck spouse who keeps coming back with a promise this time will be different and ends up wrecking it for you yet again if you let them in. In this situation, part of the blame lies on the person who keeps foolishly letting someone like that back into their home, likewise the consumer needs to be more demanding and more savy about what they are getting for their money. There aren’t really any major consumer rights groups for video games out there that have really made themselves known and it’s long overdue.

The short of all this is that Obsidian needs to change the way it views QA, but no promised internal effort on their part has enacted such a change. If a company fails like this, repeatedly over the course of at least four games, then it is time for the consumer to force the change. The simply answer is do not buy Obsidian’s games, do not buy Dungeon Siege III because you liked Black Isle and want to see Obsidian survive regardless of how talentless they are at QA or because you need that third instalment of a loved series. Stay away from Dungeon Siege III because it is buggy and mediocre, just like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Alpha Protocol.

It’s been busy again and I really can’t maintain earlier levels of activity, but the blog isn’t going away. I’ve been playing a bit of Terraria recently and it seems that it’s kept up a few of the promises in version 1.0.4 with a new boss fight, extra equipment and enemies and a new type of equipment in the form of social attire (along with the accompanying NPC). It’s got further expansions on the horizons, but the new content is working just fine and it does one thing especially well in that it adds extra tasks for player characters who have maxed out everything, been everywhere and have everything.

It’s only minor stuff so far, but when you have the ability to suddenly descend back into the underground jungle in order to gather seeds for an above ground jungle that produces extra goodies, it effectively adds a new quest, something new to achieve. This is something that Minecraft lacked with major updates. Version 1.0.5 is apparently already looking at end-game content specifically and really, that’s something that will make Terraria shine brighter.

But there is something that I detested about Minecraft that has happened in Terraria, something awful. The latest version of Terraria suddenly had buggy code when it came to host and play multiplayer that meant changes to the game world weren’t properly saved. This was not a problem when using the separate server software, but not everyone uses that anyway and I had to learn the hard way that server problems occured using the base game’s host and play feature.

This is something that pales in comparison to Minecraft. Minecraft released beta version 1.6 recently, only to add so many bugs that instructions and Youtube videos popped up on how to revert back to version 1.5 (even after the bugfix 1.6.5). This is a point in a long history of buggy updates for Minecraft and I think that in the long-term, Terraria mustn’t get into the habit of adding bugfixes only in updates that also have extra content (as they will do with version 1.0.5) or they will inevitably get into a cycle of “bugs in, bugs out” that mixed content updates and bugfixing patches bring. Beyond that problem, however, the game is still more played at my house than Minecraft is despite having two formerly keen Minecrafters.

I wrote an article a few weeks back on the conflicting claims about the effects of piracy on the PC games market. A friend then recommended to me a very interesting article by Tadhg Kelly in GameSetWatch, arguing that piracy itself can be a beneficial marketing technique and that building relationships with gamers is more profitable in the long term than viewing games development as what he calls a “content business” where the game’s content has value.

My intent here is to show several reasons to view his arguments with suspicion. I think that a certain model of game does lend itself to his view of piracy and that this model (the free-to-play model) has produced some excellent games (League of Legends and Bloodline Champions are two shining examples), some enjoyable, but ultimately more average, games (Champions Online or Dreamlords: Resurrection) as well as some really bland stuff that is often fairly ruthless in getting your money (a lot of Facebook games belong here). While I believe that the gems that this model produced has clearly justifies its existence (the majority of the non-World of Warcraft MMO market runs on this model), it should not ever become the sole gaming market model and that’s one part of what Kelly seems to be saying.

Before he talks about this though, he makes several assumptions to which I take objection and are contentious. He writes:

“[Most game developers are] seeing their business as a content business, where the content is the thing that has value. This is not the case.

The games industry, like all the arts, is about finding and interacting with fans, so that value comes from a relationship. As we slowly move into the post-platform, single-franchise future, understanding the difference between the two is crucial.”

His emphasis on content business and relationship are the crux here. He describes most developers as belonging to the former view, that they create a certain piece of content that has value and attempt to sell it whereas the ideal is the latter. I think there is both an overt and a tacit assumption here that I want to knock out.

First, the overt assumption is that games development is like creating a piece of art. While a lot of ardent games are art types will treat this idea as sacrosanct and often not even debate any of its critics properly, their belief extends exactly zero metres beyond the borders of people already keeping the faith. I would not defend the idea of games as art, even as I ardently defend their value and worth, because even if games could be art (which, in their thousands of years of existence, they still fail to be even as younger things like cinema and photography take up the mantle of art uncontroversially), I don’t want aesthetic concerns to ever override what I want from games: to be entertained and enjoy myself.

The more subtle assumption is that this view between games as a content business and games as creating relationships is presented as a dichotomy, that there is no ability to view games as a content business while building relationships with customers. I spoke in my last article on piracy of games like Gratuitous Space Battles and The Void where the designers did create an outreach to customers, but did not ever assume piracy to be a good thing. They did view their content as being stolen, but seized an opportunity to build relationships and encourage sales.

It’s clearly not the case that you need to abandon the view, as Kelly recommends, that there is value to your content. I find it borderline offensive, even, that a man whose work seems to consist largely in basic microtransaction-based Facebook games like Soccer Hero has the audacity to tell Ice-Pick Lodge or Positech Games that their work has no value.

Kelly goes on to make an analogy between the circulation and sale of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and sale of sequels in gaming. Piracy of originals, he argues, could raise awareness of potential sequels in which people are more likely to invest. He compares this to the higher success of the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man in terms of sales than the first part despite the necessity of familiarity with the first in order to understand the more successful second.

The problem I have with this analogy is that it simply doesn’t require piracy in the equation. Borrowing games, watching friends play games, playing them with your friends, these are what are needed and there is another strong argument against DRM within this, but not piracy. Paine’s first book was not widely known because of piracy of the text, but because people shared the physical medium of the text. Piracy never came into it.

Beyond this, he moves into another suspect analysis of the industry. He writes that the industry commits the “one shot fallacy” which is that developers seem to think of games in an atomistic sense. They don’t talk of games with sequel potential unless the game has been successful enough to merit sequels. My only response to this at what game industry is Kelly actually looking? Has he not looked at one of the overriding criticisms of Activision? Activision has long been criticised for only seeing games in terms of long-term exploitable intellectual property, it effectively tried to bury Brutal Legend because it didn’t think it would produce sequels, just compete with its own IP. This view of games in terms of sequel potential is simply not a healthy approach and Activision is the proof one needs of that.

Furthermore, let’s look at the sort of model he suggests, building social features into a game that requires purchasing features (such as support or extra content) after the game is already in the hands of the gamers. This is effectively the F2P model and that’s all well and good except the fact I don’t want every game having this model and neither do the majority of gamers. One of the key criticisms on Metacritic from users of Portal 2 was that it had an in-game store for a game that required a base payment.

I can take this further, one criticism a friend made of recent versions of Team Fortress 2 was that it now has boxes that contains items which you need to pay to unlock and get the contents. This is, in an otherwise great game, a rather awful feature. Even if this was a game where there was no initial payment, is that what we would would be happy with in every game?

Would we be happy where every game is freely distributed only to then get its money from you via social features and in-game quirks like the locked box idea of games such as Team Fortress 2 or Allods Online? It’s nice that the F2P model exists, but it occupies a niche, I simply don’t want every game to work on this model because the F2P model has produced a few gems and mounds of rubbish Facebook apps that I have to keep blocking.

Of course, the other part of this is that copying the raw install files for League of Legends or Bloodline Champions for a friend is not piracy, it’s legitimate distribution (unless I messed with the files somehow). What he describes as piracy is in fact, perfectly legal under the F2P model and not piracy in any sense of the word. Where it would be piracy is if I gave a friend an unlocked version of either game with all the characters unlocked already (apparently, with League of Legends, unlocking extra skins illegally was once possible). Something tells me that if I distributed genuinely pirated copies of Tadhg Kelly’s game, all the social features and extra content promised after the gamer started playing already unlocked, he might have a bit more of a problem with what I was doing than his article would suggest. That is piracy.

Video games in the early nineties rarely portrayed sexuality. Early examples such as 1973′s Gotcha by Atari or 1982′s Custer’s Revenge are crude and often marked by immaturity or worse, but it has acquired an increasing presence in the medium since the mid- to late-nineties. The usual cries sexism, pornography or objectification has come from the usual conservative or identity politics groups, and arguments that have been dead since the days of the Meese Report continue to snap at the heels of game in a largely ineffectual way.

Video and computer gaming continued to explore these concepts and eventually explored more varied themes as well as darker ones. Sometimes, it went into the utterly tasteless but, I would argue, not as frequently as did cinema; most of the time, it was a tasteful affair, even when the media portrayed it otherwise (Mass Effect is a famous example of this).

A different response gained the attention of games journalists recently. A certain gamer, Bastal, posted on the BioWare forum, claiming to represent “straight male gamers” and wrote about his problem with the fact that several male characters were flirting with him.

His complaint was shot down very quickly by David Gaider, a writer who worked on Dragon Age II. Gaider argued that the romance options were designed with as wide a group in mind and there are still options available to everyone, regardless of gender/sexuality combinations. This is all well and true, but I think a lot of Bastal’s critics ignored a fundamental flaw in Bastal’s argument that renders a lot of the debate moot.

Bastal speaks of the minority groups he claims are being excessively catered for as acting as if they have a right to such. He wrote:

The idea of privilege is ridiculous. The “privilege” always lies with the majority because if your goal is to make a game that will be liked by as many fans possible, then it makes sense to focus on that largest group. Why should one fan’s enjoyment be more important than five others? It’d more accurate to call “privilege” the idea that some minority group gets special preference for political points. If you really want to be all-inclusive, then I don’t see why homosexuals should get special preference while leaving other minority groups out.

The fact of it is that there is no should here. It’s BioWare’s game and they are under no obligation to make the game appeal to any individual or sets of individuals. They should try to make the game to their own design ethic and, ideally, should make it profitable. Metacritic user scores indicate they have have failed to impress people, but that is simply over the thought that the sequel was dumbed down.

They are, ultimately, a private company with with privately owned intellectual property. The privilege lies with whoever Bioware chooses to privilege in their games. For all this, though, I think the other reason that Bastal’s argument falls flat is there was probably no thought in the mind of the writers of really catering for gays per se. A long time before this, Fallout 2 allowed for homosexual and bisexual characters and suffered no such complaints largely because people will play different characters from themselves more often than they would try to create characters who are simply themselves projected into the game. If Bastal thinks these sexuality options were implemented to draw in homosexual gamers, I doubt he is entirely correct.

I take Mass Effect as my example here. I really don’t think that the inclusion of Liara was aimed at being inclusive and more at the idea that a fair number of people like seeing members of the sexually-preferred gender getting on with each other. If nothing was wrong with this then the idea that idea that there should be a wider palette in Dragon Age II definitely qualifies as acceptable.

On the other hand, some might complain that the prevalence of non-heterosexuals seems a little too high. Certainly, this criticism might appeal to me if every other character were throwing themselves at my feet (a criticism I do have for the staunchly heterosexual game The Witcher, which does get a little tasteless), but this is not what is happening. While the presence of such a high number of non-heterosexuals would seem unusual, it hardly breaks suspension of disbelief. There are a lot of background assumptions that can be made as to why this presence is there. They could be biologically geared more towards bisexuality in a way species not too distant from our own are in real life (I am speaking of our fellow hominidae, the bonobos) or cultural factors could come into play. It can be explained within the game world more easily that the fact that women in their sixties still have the body of an 18-year old.

Despite receiving lukewarm reviews, Magicka sold very well and there are certainly a lot of good reasons to get it, I certainly don’t regret playing it, but it fails because of things that would be so easy to solve. There’s DLC already available and an expansion coming out in the form of Magicka: Vietnam. However, the game still sports so many bugs that makes going through an entire chapter only for the game to bug out at the boss battle (for me, that averages once a day) or having everyone bar the host get stuck in cutscene mode a nuisance, and while we are here: what is it about the beds in the inn at chapter five that makes it impossible for wizards to sleep on them properly?

These are just examples, there are more, but the game is no where near as bad as it used to be. If it was in its current state upon release, I imagine the reviews would have remained lukewarm and the mention of bugs would have still been there, but at least the game is playable. The Arrowhead team, however, had best tread carefully with this new expansion as they need to keep squashing bugs as well as adding content and that new content must not add new bugs itself.

There’s the deal breaker and what really determines whether or not Magicka will really be worthwhile in terms of continued investment for players. I think it’s already missed the opportunity to become a real gem of indie gaming in the same way Darwinia, Braid or World of Goo have, but I will admit possibility of error here. I just imagine it will take its place amongst games like And Yet It Moves, as a great B-list member of the indie games menagerie.

Still, despite all its problems, Magicka shines brightly through the murky problems and that is where it differs from Dungeons (reviewed in the last entry). Dungeons’s problems are such that the game feels like it’s made by programmers who aren’t the most committed of gamers. Magicka feels like the reverse and so the charm really is there behind the lacklustre coding. I’m normally the first to want to string up games companies that release buggy software, but something here makes me think Arrowhead deserve a second chance.

But they do need to work on a few improvements and here is my short list of things I think they really should do.

1) Check points

A lot of people were bemoaning the lack of a sufficient number of these and while I did find it irritating to get past a particularly tricky part only to die shortly afterwards and have to go through it all again, I found those moments fairly rare. What I did find especially irritating was that if your game crashes, you have to finish or you click restart thinking it will take you back to the start of the boss fight then you are propelled straight back to the beginning of the chapter. Many games, like Braid or NightSky, have the ability to select levels within chapters and there’s no reason why selecting a chapter in Magicka shouldn’t send you straight to a checkpoint selection screen.

The problem is that games obviously provide a level of frustration and irritation. These are often vital parts of the enjoyment of the game as long as they remain in the background of the overall experience most of the time. I was fighting the boss at the end of the Murky Swamp level, I’ve reached a point where I can see that I’ll win too and then an explosion sends us both flying. Before we land, the screen blanks then I see my desktop. If I could load up the game and resume my battle from the boss then I would have kept playing, but the thought of all the effort I had to put in getting through the swamps being for nothing just left me with the frustration and that just leads to a sense of burnout. I tend to turn to other games after those moments happen and I doubt I’m the only one who does that.

2) Single player games and difficulty

I learnt very quickly that Magicka was a multiplayer game. The game feels a lot emptier when playing it by oneself and what detracts from that experience is the frustration of being swamped and cornered by a vast array of opponents that would be a lot easier for multiple wizards, but just chew you down and don’t really give you much opportunity to counter them. This is actually a bit annoying in multiplayer, but it’s something the players can potentially use to their advantage.

One possible solution is AI-controlled wizards a la Left 4 Dead. The AI of enemy magic-users leads me to believe that this would require quite an overhaul of the AI, so maybe the solution is just allowing a difficulty slider in the options. If it can be dynamically adjusted in-game then all the better.

3) More bugfixes

I understand that they must be busy creating more content for Magicka but I don’t really think that Vietnam should be released with a lot of these bugs still remaining in the core game. Personally, I would be more likely to buy Vietnam a month later with all the bugs that really hinder the game squashed.

Of course, I can’t really blame developers for this rush to get out content. It seems that a model favouring earlier release dates and increased DLC and content does sell a game more successfully that one of methodical QA. Given this, I can’t really expect that all the bugs will be gone by Vietnam’s release, but what is ultimately important is whether or not Vietnam brings more bugs into the mix or the game remains a relatively stable, playable experience with it.