![I try not to reblog everything game related I see on tumblr but this made me LOL.
gamefreaksnz:
Snake’s on a plane.
[via.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_li8dz6gdnB1qzwtdlo1_r1_500.jpg)
The trained Monkey
A trained monkey. That’s me.
Recently I got my second platinum trophy, this time for Mafia II, 2KCzech’s open-world Goodfellas-simulator. What did I have to do to get this coveted virtual proof of being awesome? Here is the game’s trophy list. Lots of hoops to jump through. Us usual, some trophies are easy, some are difficult, a few are very hard. But one is simply ridiculous. I’m talking about Card Sharp, whose description innocently reads “Find all of the Wanted posters”.
There are 159 Wanted posters.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I know there are other games with large numbers of fetch-items. The Assasin’s Creed games come to mind, with their many flags and feathers. Or my personal favourite InFamous with its 349 Blast Shards. But these items are always positioned in such a way that you will come across most of them during regular gameplay. Yes, there will always be a couple of hard-to-gets for the obsessive completionists (like me), but the majority of fetch-items are usually accessible for normal players. Common sense seems to say “Keep it challenging but don’t make it impossible”.
Enter Mafia II.
Many reviewers commented on Mafia II’s strange dichotomy of giving the player a large sandbox world to explore, while at the same time presenting a very linear story through missions that rarely leave any time to stray from the scripted path. There are no side missions in the game, so there is no incentive to walk around and stumble over a Wanted poster. Most of them are hidden completely out of sight and finding them requires being in places where the game itself never makes you go. You really have to go out of your way to encounter them.
The most notorious example is one poster located on a roof and getting there involves driving a car on the freeway, crashing through the guard rail, landing on the roof and breaking your momentum with the chimney, because otherwise you’ll slide off the roof before you have a chance to get out of your car!
Are you effing kidding me?
There is really no way to get all the posters without strong determination and a good map. Thankfully, IGN and Achievement Hunter had some excellent maps available – but even then it turned out to be a chore. Since there is no in-game map showing the location of the posters (like in InFamous), there’s no way of telling whether you had found all poster in a certain area or not. Also, the in-game numbering of the posters doesn’t correspond to their location, so even a systematic approach to collecting (like starting with an area and clearing it before moving on) won’t tell you if you have missed anything.
So, if getting this achievement is such a drag, why did I do it? Because one day I suddenly found myself with all the trophies under my belt except that one. I hadn’t really planned on 100%ing the game – largely due to the absurdity of the Card Sharp trophy – but now that I was so close to it I sat down with IGN’s map open on my iPad and started actively seeking out the missing 80 or so posters. Like a trained monkey I roamed a virtual city in search of virtual items to obtain a virtual price that would net me virtual bragging rights in the end. It wasn’t even fun. But like a good monkey I soldiered on and finally the double *pling* of Card Sharp and Platinum Trophy signaled that I had persevered and could go to bed now.
After the immediate rush of pride had died down (Card Sharp also happened to be my 1000th trophy), I started to wonder what I had done there. I had spent hours with a tedious task that was decidedly unfun for what exactly? Virtual glory? A trophy that nobody could see as soon as there was a power outage? An achievement that wouldn’t help me in a job interview or any other real-world situation? I imagined the developers in Prague and Brno laughing their asses off as they monitored how people around the globe unlocked the Card Sharp trophy, giggling and hi-fiving each other as tiny light bulbs lit up on the giant world map in their secret underground lair … “Ahhh, another one!” “Pass me the vodka, Marek!” “Told you we should have made it harder.” “Look, there’s one in Germany, he even got the platinum now.” “What a tosser!” Something like that. Then I went to bed, feeling exhausted, stupid and awesome. I had done good.
Like a trained monkey.
My Precioussss …
Platform Wars
Last month Joystiq’s own Justin McElroy said this in a tweet:
Show me “soldiers in the console wars” and I see kids who need to mow a few lawns, buy a second console and rejoin the adults.
I’ve heard this assertion a couple of times lately, usually followed by the internet equivalent of a silent headshake with some overtones of “Kids these days …”. But on that particular day this paternal stance rubbed me wrong, so I retorted
Show me platform agnostics and I see guys who don’t have to pay for their consoles with their own money.
Which is of course an overly simplified view of the issue but hey, it’s the internet! What I really meant with that quip is this:
We all know that platform wars are stupid. They are a waste of breath and time. They are also a natural extension of how we function as social beings. Saying platform wars are stupid is like saying jealousy is stupid. It may be true but saying so won’t make jealousy go away.
What people (and game journalists, who usually don’t have to pay for all the games they play, in particular) seem to overlook is that console buyers don’t just choose between two competing consumer electronics brands — they are making a commitment. While you can buy a Panasonic DVD player, hook that up to a Sony TV and watch Disney movies on it without problems, choosing one of three leading consoles means that you miss out on the exclusive content for the other two. Want Marcus Fenix? OK, no Kratos for you and don’t even ask about Mario. Like Nathan Drake? No Alan Wake.
Just try to imagine the real-world equivalent to this situation: No James Bond on a Phillips DVD player, no Indiana Jones on a Samsung TV, no Scorcese movies on LG devices. Sounds crazy? Welcome to the world of video games.
In this scenario the choice of a consumer electronics device has far reaching consequences. If committing to a Phillips DVD player means for me that I’ll forego any James Bond movie ever (not just the new ones but the classics as well), it also means that I’ll probably develop a more profound affection for the content that is available on my system. Suddenly I’ll realize that James Bond has always sucked while Indiana Jones is Da Bomb and always has been.
Now consider that game consoles are more expensive than DVD players and the kids who use these things the most usually don’t have the money to buy one for themselves, much less two or three. They are forced to decide and that decision is often shaped by external factors, like “How much can I afford to spend” and “What are my friends playing”. Living with that decision is the tricky part. Nobody likes to admit that they’ve made a mistake, much less if it is a costly one. That thing over there under your TV that you (or your parents) bought has to be good now. And since we define the value of things by comparing them to other things, that other system must be a piece of crap for my console to be great. You can call it Stockholm Syndrome if you want. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert calls it the Synthesis of Happiness.
So yes, platform wars are stupid.
As is jealousy.
Sony and Microsoft are sooo screwed!
Well, no, they won’t collaps tomorrow or anything like that, but if you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, this is what this year’s E3 has shown us: Sony and Microsoft have ceded control over where the game industry is headed to Nintendo.
Meet your doom
Think about it: In 2006 Nintendo turned the gaming world upside down with the Wii. Everybody assembled had a good laugh at the silly name and declared that motion control was a gimmick and a fad.
Four years and a couple of millions sold Wiis later, Microsoft and Sony spend an entire E3 to huckster their versions of motion control (no one’s calling Natal Kinect a fad, right?) while Nintendo quietly unveils The Next Big Thing: 3D gaming without glasses. On a portable. With a new Resident Evil, Solid Snake and Kid Icarus.
You get the picture.
In fact, this scenario reminds me somewhat of the phone industry, where you have one company out-innovating the rest of the industry while the other guys are playing catch-up to last years concepts.
All this certainly doesn’t mean that Microsoft or Sony will die – but they have relegated themselves to the position of follower. You don’t need to expect any paradigm shifts from either company for at least five more years, while Nintendo can use that time to grab mindshare from a new generation of gamers. When nobody remembers Marcus Fenix any more there will still be kids who love Mario.
…
(And before you get the impression that I’m a Nintendo fanboi who hates the other consoles: I just pre-ordered Killzone 3. So there.)
Steam, Steam, Steam.
Unlike me in my unfocused rant from last week, Dan Wineman actually took the time to write a concise post about what’s wrong with Steam on the Mac. He even managed to keep a civil tone, whereas I would be foaming at the mouth by now …
dwineman:
I knew this would be a love-hate relationship from the start.
You see, Steam for Mac, I love your games. Well, some of them. A lot of them are crap. But the ones your parents, Valve, made, like Portal and the Half-Life series, are unparalleled. Team Fortress 2 seemed like great stylish fun when I tried it briefly (under Windows), although it’s not really my thing. And you distribute some unbelievably great third-party titles too, like Braid and Machinarium.
I love how everything seems to perform better and crash less under OS X than under Windows, even on the same hardware. And I love the way I can switch from a full-screen game to any other app instantly via ⌘-Tab, and then switch back with no delay or funky redraw problems. That’s something I’ve never seen under Windows.
But I think you have some really bad ideas about how Mac apps should behave. Here are just a few of the things you’re doing wrong:
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You have a “Run Steam when my computer starts” preference which is unchecked by default, while “Open at login” for Steam.app is secretly enabled as Steam installs. That’s downright deceptive, and no way to win friends.
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You’re putting the software I download in my Documents folder, which is inside my home directory. That’s an incredibly bad idea. Documents is for, well, documents. I might keep my homedir on a second drive, for one thing. I might have a different backup strategy. There are tons of reasons this is the wrong choice. What’s the right choice? Authenticate and install into /Applications, like every other OS X vendor does (yes, even Adobe). Keep your data files inside the application bundle they belong to. If you have data files common to more than one game, they can go in a Steam folder in /Library/Application Support. The only things that should go in my home directory are things pertaining to my own user acccount, such as settings and save files. (That’s what ~/Library/Preferences is for. Not ~/Documents.) This isn’t Windows, where you can just ejaculate files all over C:\ and no one cares.
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When I choose “Create an application shortcut” during an install, you put the shortcut in an Applications folder inside my home directory. This makes so little sense I don’t even know how to respond to it.
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If I also ask you to create a desktop shortcut, what you create isn’t a proper shortcut (we call them “aliases,” by the way): it’s a full copy of the app bundle you stuck in ~/Applications. That’s nothing but a pointless waste of disk space.
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Speaking of wasted space, you’re also inexplicably installing the Windows executables for some games. I hope you’re doing something really clever with them.
We could talk for hours about how awful the Steam app’s user experience is — how your tooltips deactivate your main window, how you won’t stop bombarding me with ads for games that won’t run on my Mac — but all that is secondary, and besides, it only hurts you when I decide not to shop at your hideous store. But the issues I listed above are all demonstrably bad practices that make my computer harder to use.
Please, Valve, hire some experienced Mac developers who care about doing things right. And fix your shit.
