Destiny: A Static Adventure

There I was, standing at the edge of a martian canyon, peering down on the rocky red wasteland. Surrounded by a ruined city, and enemies of all types that had one thing in common. They all wanted the Guardians like me dead. With wonderful vistas, landscapes and brilliantly detailed enemies, NPCs and player characters, Destiny appears to have it all. Appearances can be deceiving however.

Bungie really went out of their way to make this game and it shows, at least in some respects. In other aspects of the title though, the player is left wanting or wondering why certain things were done they way they were. A perfect example of this is the beautiful, yet seemingly sterile environments. Outside of the Tower, the place where our Guardians call home, is a very empty and sad galaxy. Places like Venus and Mars have abandon and collapsing dead cities that only seem to be populated by your enemies. No humans or even other races out there, it's just a large expanse that has so much potential that seems to be wasted with nothing in it. Even the player's side-quests are called in via some intergalactic intercom that dishes out a slew of similarly themed missions. For a protector of the light, and one of the most powerful warriors in the known universe you may not be able to shake the feeling that you're simply a paw, someone sent to do the shitty jobs that others are too busy for.

While there are plenty of games that have come out with sterile, cold and soulless environments, this strikes a particularly rough chord with Destiny. For a game whose ad campaign spoke of exploring and saving the galaxy from Darkness and protecting life everywhere, you will find that there really isn't any life worth protecting, except for one, massive city on Earth. For all the wonderful design choices that were made for this game, it seems Bungie missed a few key things that could have easily made this title one to go down in the history of First Person Shooters. The players can't really help but scratch their collect head and wonder "Why?"

To the credit of Bungie and Destiny, the title does a whole lot of things correctly. Combat feels good, really good. The weapons all have a different balance and function, especially in the campaign and cooperative portions of the game. Having a few teammates that are rolling with different firearms than you really helps to add a feeling of tactical control on the battlefield. Whether you're wielding a shotgun and Auto-Rifle with a rocket launcher or a Pulse Rifle, Sniper Rifle and Heavy Machine gun there are plenty of choices for load outs. The Hand Cannons are a nice touch, these revolvers pack quite the punch and add a nice gunslinger from the wild west feel to the game, while still maintaining it's strong connection the science fiction. All these weapon options are also available in PVP, however the choices you make may affect your score more then it would in the story or cooperative portions of the game.
The competitive side to to Destiny's multiplayer side of the game is also pretty fun. The learning curve is pretty shallow and there's really not much to the simple game-types that are available. The types of PVP missions available in Destiny's Crucible are modes like "Control," which is exactly like it sounds, simply a capture point-style game. "Rumble," which is the everyone for themselves, classic death match we're all used to seeing. "Clash" is the team death match option. There is a mode called "Skirmish." Which is a smaller team-sized twist on your standard team death match and finally "Combined Arm." That's the vehicle based team death match. All these modes are pretty strong and fun to play. The PVP aspects of Destiny feel very competitive and exciting. While the modes may be simple, they are certainly done right and have a good balance to them. A higher level player does have a bit of an advantage to lower level players in the realm of gear, but ultimately it's experience that sets these players apart. It provides a good challenge and some nail-biting close fights. What seemed like something that could have been tacked on or an after thought to keep players happy who enjoy the PVP arena of MMO titles and online play turned out to be one of the most attractive and riveting options for players.

Unfortunately the story mode does not hold up to the same quality and guidelines Bungie seems to have put forth with the PVP parts of the game. There just doesn't seem to be any meat to it. The story is forgettable, the characters are sparse and lack any sort of definitive personality. There are characters that seem to pop up in the game that do have a stronger screen presences but are never revisited or are expanded upon in any meaningful way for the players. Most gamers can recall playing games with stories like this. The real travesty here is that it seemed to be a development choice and there is honestly no good reason for a choice like this to be made when considering the good of the game. The player collects Grimoires throughout the game. Progress for these are achieved by defeating various enemies or collecting certain, sparse items through the games world. These Grimoires manifest themselves as collectable cards the player can go and examine at Bungie.com when they log-in to check out their character. Not a poor idea by an stretch of the imagination, the problem with this is there is a lot of backstory and explanation given on the backs of these digital cards that is not in the game. If Bungie is trying to build an in-depth, immersive universe for our Guardians to exist in and the players to fight through, this was a decidedly poor choice to say the least. To willingly cut so much substance from the game, making it only accessible through a player's web browser breaks the connection to the game and the world that the player has. This decision, arguably more than any of the other poor choices made during the development of Destiny, hurts it the most.

 With all this said it is hard for a lot of gamers, myself included to put it down. After logging somewhere around 40 hours into Destiny, it feels like the title has hours more of good gameplay to offer, especially as you approach the end-game content like raids. With the core mechanics of the game being as close to perfect as they can get, combat is satisfying, whether in the PVP arena or you're just cruising around a few of the planets in our solar system. Once you've tackled a mob of enemies, blasting your way through every one of them with extreme prejudice, it's hard to shake that. While it is certainly a bit of a grind, similar to many other MMO titles, the level of twitch play and fast-thinking in the moment really makes this game something special. Unfortunately, it's not as special as it could have been. Populating planets like Venus and Mars with remnants of  advanced life, desperately hanging on to their homes or including much more back story directly into the game and it's plot would have dramatically improved the game, but for some odd and completely misunderstood reason Bungie left these sorts of things out of the game. What could have been a ground-breaking, online shooter experience falls short, ultimately landing amongst the droves of competent, but short-sighted shooters. If you're looking for a game that's going to beat-out their previous Halo series, this isn't it. If you're looking for a good reason to get together with your friends and kill a bunch of NPC aliens and robots, or maybe even a few other players then I'd recommend it, but  "Game of the Year," is just not fainted for Bungie's Destiny.

    

What to Make of the Oculus Book, or the Face Rift?

Hello gaming friends of the internet, now that the smoke has cleared and the rage-gauges have dialed themselves down to normal and functionally communicative levels, I'd like to take a look at Facebook's absorption of the famed Oculus Rift and it's development team

After Oculus Rift's purchase by Facebook, the soul sucking corporation whose one and only goal is to know and control all your information and eventually the world as we know it! Gamer's were up in arms, taking to the streets, burning cars and murdering puppies, punching old ladies and stealing families mail! Alright, so that may be a bit of an exaggeration to say the least, but the amount of explosive rage and irrational anger that came from this particular purchase announcement burned like white-hot plasma for approximately two whole days, then cooled off into a non-existent footnote in the year that is 2014's game development season. Just as quickly as it started, it seemed to be over. I thought that it would be a very interesting topic to explore, however I wanted to wait on this subject for a bit, with strong opinions of both sides of the fence, it would have been very easy for my message to be misconstrued.

Now, I don't have facebook. In fact I fucking hate facebook. It's a waste of time and largely full of idiotic, under researched opinions from the four corners of the internet. You don't have to share my opinion. I understand 100 percent that there are indeed some useful features in Facebook, just not features I think useful enough to subject myself to so much trash information. With that opinion forever out there, galvanized for everyone to see, Zuckerberg revolutionized internet communication and gave everyone their own little space to call their own a "Home Page" that, for many actually felt like home. A place where your friends contact you and also pushed a unified (be it clunky as all holy fuck sometimes,) system that everyone could easily learn use. What Facebook and Zuckerberg did for social networking that their competition couldn't do for this medium, and still can't do (I'm looking at you, Google,) was no less than amazing.

All of that is all but irrelevant when we discuss the topic of the Oculus Rift. People should maybe, be slightly weary of the Oculus purchase. Not necessarily because backers should feel betrayed, or because the hardware was purchased by some giant, frightening Corporate strongman. What people should be wary about is this one very simple fact. Facebook has not once yet dabbled in consumer grade electronics. We should be taking a "wait and see" attitude towards the Rift now simply because the company that bought-out the Rift for a bargain at what now amounts to less than 2 Billion dollars has just jumped in the hardware market without so much as even testing the waters, specifically the gaming hardware market. Mr. Zuckerberg has vision, I'll give him that, but the O.R. team may not have actually made a smart move here, sure they got stock options, and a boatload of cash in relative terms, but the connection that Facebook has to gaming at this point is tenuous at best. Facebook "games" have been a time sink and the laughing stock of the internet since they came out, hardcore and casual gamers alike both agreed that facebook gaming was not in fact gaming at all, which you may agree with or not, depending on how much time you've sunk into things like farmville.

What gamers should be worried about is the lost potential of the Rift now that it's own by a large company that simply doesn't fit the hardware they've purchased, not now at least. Zuckerberg's vision, stated that he saw people getting together through VR headsets and communicating in a virtual world with one another. Now, this idea is hardly revolutionary for starters. We've had things like "Second Life" for years, and "Playstation Home," yeah Sony basically updated the idea of "Second Life," already as well. You build an avatar, could buy trade and sell objects, communicate with friends and even party up to game together. The only thing "new" about Mr. Zuckerberg's vision that we know of is that it's introducing the Oculus Rift into the mix. It's nothing but Facebook coupled with digital worlds, worlds that, at the very least already exist in some fashion somewhere else; and a new piece of hardware that, frankly at the moment is nothing more than a gimmicky pipe-dream that hasn't even remotely realized a faction of it's own potential.

Now, please don't take this the wrong way. I am not bashing on the Rift because I think that it is going to be a repeat of the mid-90's VR crash. Any of you old enough to remember the promises that Virtual Reality developers made will know that they fell hard and flat on their faces. What I am worried about is the development team and owners of the project's own short-sighted vision may have accidently handicapped their own product. Not on purpose, mind you. The fact still very much remains that Facebook has not made a play in ANY hardware market, let alone the competitive market that exists in gaming. Facebook also has sort of a bad habit of implementing changes that users don't want, or have not been fleshed out enough to make users happy. This is a problem with Facebook's digital environment that cannot make it's way over to the hardware side of things. People deal with this on the facebook website since the site is "free," but if you've paid $250.00 or more for the Oculus for a buggy, virtualized Facebook client you're most likely going to be pretty pissed off. This won't spell the end for consumer accessible Virtual Reality, but it will mean the end of the Oculus Rift as a piece of hardware that people take seriously.

Is it fair for us to discount the Rift after it's been purchased by Facebook? No, without a doubt that would just be short-sighted and ignorant of anyone who is at all curious about this renewed hardware landscape. What it should do though is make you a little bit more wary of what will become of the project now that Oculus Rift has been moved into a major corporate playground where ideas can change drastically, promises are forgotten and products themselves can completely evolve into something else altogether more amazing, or abysmal.

Oculus Rift does have some competition to in being the first to market though as well. Sony has jumped right on board with their own headset that will supposedly work with the PS4 and maybe even PC's. Sony's design is admittedly much more sleek looking than the Rift, as many Sony products do a wonderful job of combining form and function. WIth this in mind though, Sony is still behind the 8-ball though. The Oculus team has well over a year's head start on Sony in development, but maybe selling to a large corporate entity was the only way they thought they could compete.

While their logic is arguably flawed, staring down a giant like Sony who is knocking on your door is more intimidating that myself, or most of us can even imagine. It is hard to completely fault the team for selling themselves off to someone who they think could compete more easily. What I am not convinced about though and still remains to be seen is that if Facebook is the right choice and if they can actually compete with The Gaming Giant, Sony. If Zuckerberg's opening plan is to sell a $250.00 virtual reality social networking headset, without other third party, major developer support on release day one, then I think the sad fact is they won't be able to match up. Still, I'd like to be cautiously optimistic that Facebook's entry into the hardware market will be marked with the success of a well-polished, fun, exciting and experience-changing peripheral. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Tomodachi Snow Ball

"What is up with everyone being so touchy these days?" That's the question I keep finding myself asking, especially in the realm of gaming. People seem to be more than willing to get worked up over just about anything recently. The Social Justice Warriors and Professionally offended seem to be taking to the streets over the most asinine things. To a degree it's always been kind of like this, and gaming seems to have a lot of hot-button issues for some reason. The last couple of weeks, Nintendo found themselves at the wrong end of the internet for their choices in "Tomodachi Life," and as usual with things like these, it's for really stupid reasons.

 Nintendo's "Tomodachi Life." Seemed to have really got people worked up. To a degree I can kind of see where they are coming from. There was a bug in the game that allowed for same sex companionship, the problem was that this bug was a bug. It was not ever intended to be included in the game to begin with. From what I have read this bug was also game breaking; which if you're not up to snuff on the terminology, basically means that it corrupts the save, or otherwise stops the player from continuing "correctly." In this case, the player's save file was corrupted and could not be recovered.

I've also seen unconfirmed statements in forums on the web that this was not the case, only that it was mistranslated and that the bug was fixed quite a long time ago. Now, I've not see any of that information from an official source, so I am going to stick with the facts that I understand to be true for now.

Tomodachi Life had a bug that caused the save to be corrupted. It needed to be fixed, period. That is something that cannot even be argued at this point and anyone saying otherwise is just a fool who either wants thing done their way, or just wants something to be upset about.

Was it short-sighted that Nintendo didn't include this into the game? Yeah, probably. Nintendo also was not expecting this backlash from the American public either, which is clear from the statement they made about the game. They weren't expecting a silly, Mii-based game to generate the controversy that it did, over here in the states. Nintendo was absolutely not making a statement about same-sex partnerships. Omitting something is not the same thing as making a condemning it, which some sites like Kotaku and Polygon seemed to think. Simply because you refuse to comment on something does not mean that you're inadvertently making a statement about anything. In this case, Nintendo leaving out same-sex couples is not the same is Nintendo coming out and saying they are against same-sex couples. Anyone who said or thinks this should probably be pretty damned ashamed of themselves. Simply thinking that is ludicrous, but actually coming out and saying it is a special kind of dumb that seems to collect in droves on the internet.

This game is targeted towards children, or at least it seems to be based on what I've seen about it. There is going to be a time when a kid asks questions like "Why does Uncle Steve always bring his roommate, Greg to Thanksgiving?" That's fine, that's a part of life, it's a part of growing up and it's definitely part of being a good parent. What people shouldn't expect is a video game to expose this to people! Why folks think that it is, is totally beyond me and frankly, any rationally thinking human being. There is a time and place for those conversations. They should be discussed by from parent to child, around real-world people with real-world connections and emotions. They shouldn't be getting some half-assed, character representative from a video game as the starting point.

Nintendo did try to address this like rational adults, who did actually apologize. Some company representatives even made statements in agreement with those who were upset, yet the Internet Hate Train had already left the station and was barreling down the tracks at breakneck speeds. Nintendo's public statements to quell people's anger only seemed to make it worse and for what? Because one Mii couldn't marry another? Folks, seriously get a grip on yourselves. We've got real problems in the world, with people's rights and lives being ruined by others and THIS is what you're getting worked up about?

It's not about people liking or even hating homosexuals. This issue is much more simple than that. Stop trying to inject your own social views and goals into other's lives. It's not okay to be pushy, it's not okay to piss and moan because you didn't get what you want, (from a game that was incredibly close to being finished at that,) and it's not okay to completely turn on of the greatest, fan driven companies in our modern society because you didn't get what you wanted. It's childish and it's counter-productive. Nintendo has never been known for making social or political statements either in their games or to the press. They've done all they can to avoid that kind of shit. There is a really good reason for it too, that kind of social and political commentary simply does not fit Nintendo as a company, it never has and it most likely never will. If you don't like what they've done with Tomodachi Life, then please don't buy the game. That is an infinitely more powerful statement that bitching on some websites. Do what any other rational thinking human being would do and don't support something you find to be tasteless or lacking in depth; it really is that simple! No one is going to force you to buy Tomodachi Life.

This next point is very important, so please pay attention. It may actually be the most important point of all! When someone concedes and has admitted that they had a lapse in judgement, that something should have been done differently, or that they are simply wrong; STOP! You've made your point and in this case, moving forward Nintendo seems to agree with you. Once you continue to argue and knit-pick, all you're doing is hurting the cause you are supposedly championing.

Stop the madness. No person or company is perfect. They never have or will be. Every company, Nintendo included is bound to make a misstep here and there. Demanding that they go back and fix every little mistake with a seemingly unending well of intolerance turns you into the exact same thing that you're supposedly fighting against. Have some patients, some understanding and for fuck sake, calm down. In the end its only a Video Game, that is something a lot of people seem to forget. As it stands, 17 out of 50 States in the U.S. have legalized same sex marriage. So ask yourself, what's more important? Getting pissed at a Japanese company who has no control over the taboos or laws that exist in America, or actually doing something about it within your own country. If you think for a second that having the ability to marry to same-sex Mii's is a world-stopping problem, then my friends, you've got some serious re-prioritization to do.