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Civilization 5: Standing the Test of Time

editor@tokengamer.net (Natalie Waldrop) — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 11:51:57 GMT

Sid Meier’s Civilization 5 has been out for two weeks now, and as I predicted, it has consumed me entirely. That was more or less a foregone conclusion from the moment that I played it (in 3D, no less!) at PAX. I only had ten minutes with it there, but already I could feel the hooks worming their way into me, the familiar feeling of immersion, the tunnel vision. “Just one more turn” is a familiar catchphrase for fans of the Civ franchise, and the newest entry into the series keeps that tradition alive.

So let’s begin, shall we?

Upon opening Civ 5 for the first time, what you’ll almost certainly notice - apart from the conspicuous and much-lamented absence of Baba Yetu - is that the game looks incredible. Every game in the series has made impressive improvements to both visual style and quality, and Civ 5 is no exception. Firaxis nailed perfectly the balance between distinctive style and realism. Hand-painted mountains and hills tower above fields of swaying grass. Each leader is instantly recognizable and lovingly detailed with distinctive and varied facial expressions. And yet, it runs perfectly acceptably on computers that, like mine, would not have impressed anyone even three years ago. For the budget PC gamer, Firaxis was kind enough to include a top-down “strategic view” that makes the game resemble Settlers of Catan moreso than Civilization 4, but is still very much playable - at least, that’s what I am assured. Personally, the game’s main visuals enrapture me enough that I hate to look away.

PAX Recap 3: The Importance of Being Earnest

editor@tokengamer.net (Natalie Waldrop) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:25:03 GMT

I have to admit, I’ve been dreading writing this article for reasons that I can’t really nail down. The premise should be fairly simple, right? I’m supposed to be trying to articulate why PAX is important. When I set out, I could picture it easily in my head: I would write a stirring discourse on the fact that PAX is for gamers rather than the media and marketing gurus, and was therefore more welcoming than E3. Or the fact that PAX is almost exclusively about games rather than television, movies, and comics, which is why it feels like a more close-knit community than Comic-Con. I had the words on paper in front of me, but it still didn’t feel quite right. It felt incomplete. So, if you’ll permit me, I’m going to take off my Serious Journalism Hat for a little while. I have a few stories to tell that I hope will help fill in the gaps.

There are three Q&A panels at PAX, one for each day of the convention, and they always take place at the main theater – in this case, at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle. It was their first year using this venue, because they were expanding the already-huge expo hall into the old main theater at the convention center itself. For the significant portion of the people reading this that do not live in Seattle, Benaroya Hall is where the Seattle Symphony Orchestra performs. It’s a huge, stately theater that felt quite inappropriate for the subject of the hour – a Q&A session with Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, two more or less completely normal people who happened to write Penny Arcade, an accidentally successful comic strip about video games. The seats were plush, the acoustics incredible. Ushers wearing suits – actual suits! – directed us to our seats. It was intensely surreal. As the lights dimmed and Mike and Jerry took the stage to their traditional entry song (Rick Ross’ “Hustlin’”) I looked around nervously, almost expecting a stage manager to run furiously out onstage tell someone to turn down that goldurn ruckus.

Nobody did, of course.

Dark Heresy - Live!

editor@tokengamer.net (Michael Wedge) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:04:31 GMT

Tonight, Monday on TokenGamer, we try an experiment. At 8PM, eastern standard time - otherwise known as 'now', we'll be recording the first in a series of live RPG sessions, set in the Warhammer 40K universe, using the Dark Heresy gaming system. Together with a rag-tag group of friends from the D2 Brigade and the wider TokenGamer Armada, we'll attempt to conquer mutants and heretics in the emperor's name, avoid horrific mutilating death, and generally embarrass ourselves terribly while telling bad jokes. LIVE! To be a part of this first ever event, join us at the official TokenGamer ustream channel, and speak up in our chat room! {jcomments on}

And for those of you unfortunate enough to have missed our live broadcast, a full recording of the evening is now available, and can be found right here, in the extensive archives of our stream. Please note, the stream is NSFW due to some harsh language and many bad jokes. Terrible, horrible jokes.

PAX Recap 2: Future (Imperfect) Tech

editor@tokengamer.net (Natalie Waldrop) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:47:53 GMT

Completely apart from debuting and previewing games at PAX, the expo hall is an opportunity for publishers to show off their new tech. You'll see cutting-edge video cards, processors, and of course a new and more detailed look at the console peripherals that Microsoft and Sony announced at this year’s E3. Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's Move were both on display just about everywhere, but neither Microsoft nor Sony were able to change my mind on the inherent irrelevance of their new products.

The simple fact of the matter is that it’s going to be really difficult for Sony and Microsoft to change the existing narrative about their entrance into the motion control field: Nintendo got there first and Nintendo does it better. After seeing what the Move and the Kinect can do at PAX, that narrative strikes me as being even more true. The release dates for Move and Kinect fast approach, but even with ostensibly completed and fully-tested hardware, there was very little about either offering that impressed me.

Microsoft demoed Kinect Sports, which is a fairly shameless carbon-copy of the now four-year-old Wii Sports. Tennis, boxing, and bowling are in, as well as soccer, volleyball, and track and field. I had the opportunity to play with the boxing controls, and I walked away thinking “that’s it?” The controls were clunky and unresponsive, even by the current standards, and it simply wasn’t as fun as its Wii counterpart. The Kinect seemed to have a hard time differentiating between opponents at times, and subtle movements are completely lost on the hardware, which inevitably leads to a piping-hot mug of shame and embarrassment as both competitors are required to move in comically over-exaggerated ways. The game’s visual aesthetic seems to be focused on cramming as much onto your screen as possible, perhaps to distract players from the significant input lag.

PAX Recap 1: The Games

editor@tokengamer.net (Natalie Waldrop) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 19:36:03 GMT

Earlier this week, I returned from the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. As you’d expect, a 75,000-person strong festival of games deserves more than a little coverage, and I’m pleased to report that I have a lot to say. So without any further ado, let’s talk about the games of PAX - the good, the bad, and the really, really ill-advised.

It would be impossible to talk about the weekend without at least mentioning Duke Nukem Forever. Yes! It’s real. Gearbox, the developers of, most recently, Borderlands and Brothers In Arms, actually own the Duke Nukem license. They purchased it after 3D Realms folded in May of last year. It seems appropriate that the core team at Gearbox - most notably Randy Pitchford and Alan Blum - are escapees from the sinking ship that was 3D Realms. Pitchford has nothing but kind words about 3D Realms’ former head George Broussard, which is to his credit - rather than dwelling on the past, Pitchford wants to focus on Duke. Let’s hope that the long and utterly bizarre road they’ve taken to get to this point doesn’t detract from the game itself. Release Date: TBA (2011)

TokenGamer Manifesto

editor@tokengamer.net (Michael Wedge) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:41:57 GMT

Welcome, old friends and new readers alike, to Token Gamer. TokenGamer.net is staffed by an assortment of people, from jaded industry veterans to newly minted writers, all of us linked by the same desire. A desire to create a home, a pulpit and a loudspeaker, to provide a voice for the issues that have plagued gaming, as an industry and a hobby, for far too long. This site is the realization of that desire, the culmination of more than a decade of experience in, around, and covering the gaming industry. In that time, we’ve seen some things change for the better, but too many issues - issues of access, of representation, of equality - have been ignored or shouted down. Gaming has grown from a niche hobby, from one man studios and basement development, into a billion dollar industry that rivals Hollywood. The high-definition era has brought us heretofore undreamt of visual fidelity and dramatic vistas, while the revolution of the Nintendo Wii and the casual game explosion has challenged our very idea of what it means to be a gamer.

Of course, when we talk about gaming, we're not just talking about a hobby, or an industry - we're talking about a culture of our own, with games as our touchstone and shared language. Though you may live a thousand miles away from the friends in your guild, clan, or team, you are all united by a commonality of experience, of purpose - a shared language of trial, tragedy, and triumph. Through the empowering tools the internet provides, people who frequently felt alienated and rejected in mainstream culture have been able to create a global culture entirely our own. And yet, for all the ways in which this culture has empowered and connected us, for many people - too many people - it can still feel like a provincial clubhouse, a locker-room with a ‘keep out’ sign stuck across the door.

This fledgling community has allowed people from all walks of life, from every nationality, gender and race to come together, defined by the one thing that unites us all - that we are gamers. And that simple fact - the fact that we, all of us, are brought together by this shared passion and these shared experiences, should be enough. Unfortunately, things often aren‘t the way they ‘should‘ be. For years, a sore has been festering beneath the surface of gaming culture. It doesn’t take much effort to find it erupting to the surface as a sickness - homophobic slurs and racial epithets in online console gaming, women treated like second class citizens or circus attractions in their own communities, companies insisting that protagonists have to be straight, white, and male, if they’re going to sell. And far too often, this sickness passes without comment - or, worse, is accepted as ‘just the way things are’. Far too often, those voices struggling against ‘the way things are’ get shouted down, told ‘it’s just a game.‘

At Token Gamer, we believe that when we passively accept a culture that tolerates prejudice and privilege, we are all lessened. We believe that we all share a struggle for simple human dignity and equality, in the face of the sometimes pervasive injustice that demeans us all, as gamers, and as humans. As gamers, we created this culture, and no one is going to police it for us. No one is going to fix it for us. For better or worse, it's all up to us. For better or worse, this is our struggle, and this site is meant to be an ally in that struggle.

We are not just tokens - we are gamers, united.
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Always Be Leveling

editor@tokengamer.net (Travis Stroud) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:35:09 GMT

If you haven't heard of Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale yet, I envy you. You, dear reader, get to download the demo and enjoy the hours and hours of succulent play provided by just a sample of this adorable import. I've already sucked everything I can from it and, at least until the full game drops on September 10th, the only way to get my Recettear fix is to jabber about the game to anyone who'll listen.

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is an indie rpg from Japanese developer EasyGameStations that focuses on one of the unsung heroes of the adventuring industry: the item shop owner. The main character is Recette, an earnest but rather dim (not to mention overwhelmingly moe) young girl who lives alone in her father's house in a faux-French fantasy city with easy access to a big hot mess of dungeons and ancient ruins. That last bit is important. These locations have drawn in countless suckers...er, adventurers whose presence has turned the city into something of a 10-foot pole based economy over the years. Anyone who wants a life of excitement and lucre can sign up with the city's adventuring guild and, if they make it through the Hall of Trials, they're a bona fide adventurer with license to crawl anything that even remotely looks like a dungeon.

Recette's father is one of these adventurers, which is how she gets stuck running an item shop. He ran off to fight a dragon weeks before Recettear's story begins and never came back, leaving our dreamy-eyed heroine to account for a nightmarishly large loan he took out from the Terme Finance Company. This debt is to be collected by a stoic, down to earth fairy named Tear. Luckily for Recette, Tear's stony-serious demeanor hides a soft interior, or perhaps she's just savvy enough to understand that Recette will never be able to pay her father's debt back if Terme forecloses on her. Either way, she takes a rather shell-shocked Recette under her diaphanous wing and shows the girl how to turn her home into a lucrative business so she can pay off her father's debt.

What follows is one of those rare game experiences that creates nourishing complexity through extreme simplicity. The tutorials delivered by your bespectacled fairy are almost childishly simple (appropriate once you get to know Recette) as are the mechanics behind them. At its core, Recettear boils down to two different games.

Locked Up Abroad: European Adventure Gaming Edition

editor@tokengamer.net (Henry Crossen) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:49:25 GMT

Once a proud, dominant gaming genre, adventure gaming has been reduced to a mind-numbing litany of derivative games drawn from the same limited set of templates. If I visit one more abandoned-yet-haunted-or-is-it-something-else-moo-hoo-ha-ha house, town, island, or whatever full of obtuse puzzles involving water pressure and sliding blocks in an adventure game I don't know what I'll do. Rare is the adventure game these days that distinguishes itself by offering a different experience, and rarer still are adventure games worth even playing out of the bargain bin that were developed in America. And yet! Adventure gaming isn't dead, it just relocated to Europe. Apparently word never reached across the big pond that adventure gaming was being read its last rites, because our wacky pals in Europe have been cranking out some pretty impressive stuff. Naturally, not all of their offerings are noteworthy, much less play worthy, but I'll be damned if these guys aren't trying and succeeding far more than their American counterparts. Off to Europe I go!

My first destination was France and Vigil: Blood Bitterness. Many critics have lamented the fact that V:BB has no instructions beyond keyboard commands but I'm fine with that. I think it's funny the Hints section is just videos and text that you've already seen and read playing the game. It's like an instant replay of you finding a puzzle as a hint for solving it, ha ha ha! That's all part of the opaque mystique of our transcontinental friends! Though (poorly) subtitled the audio is still in French, which is great because not only do the comically deep voices sound appropriately moody and add to the overall grim, haunting setting of the game, it also sets up my favorite foreign game conceit: Non-Subtitled, Mind-Boggling Death Cinematic. It's like a brief fever dream that leaves you waking up in a cold sweat in the Options Menu. Brrr! I can even stomach the unforgiving traps that spring with no warning and the lack of save anywhere which forces replay of significant portions of the game. No, V:BB's big failing is its attempt to copy Frank Miller's Sin City's art design. The game world is a stark, mostly black and white affair. That sounds intriguing until you realize it's little more than a copout to make do with shitty, blocky graphics. Worse, there are many locations in the game where you can easily fall to your death thanks to the terrible sense of perspective. Even I tire of the same art house death cut scene after the hundredth iteration.

Next I set sail for the tranquil locales of Belgium, home of the Tale of Tales development team. They’re fully dedicated to the pursuit of truly obtuse, capital "A" Artistic game design. I sampled their most recent offerings, The Graveyard and The Path, games I affectionately refer to as The What and The I Have No Idea, respectively.

The Graveyard is absurdly short and linear - heck, you can play almost the entire game for free with the demo version. This is because those wacky Belgians wanted to see if gamers would be willing to suffer through watching an old lady hobbling through a graveyard who gets serenaded by a giant floating ghost head in French as a free demo, and then pay ten bucks to...watch her die. You'd think I would applaud the game for this but the problem is that most of the game is the serenade, essentially making it a musical, which is as American as Liberace and manifest destiny.

Rock Band Pedagogy

editor@tokengamer.net (Travis Stroud) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:53:24 GMT

“Why don't you learn to play a real instrument?”
{jcomments on}

If you play Rock Band or Guitar Hero you have almost certainly heard these words before. What's worse is that, if you're like me, you probably bought into the idea. The fact that the games are fun as hell should be enough to neuter accusations that they're wastes of time, but it's hard not to wonder whether I could have learned how to play guitar in the time it took to master Green Grass and High Tides on Expert. The drums and vocals in Rock Bands 1 & 2 and more recent Guitar Heroes do a little to ameliorate this, translating at least some of the player's time into real world skill, but what if even more could be done?

This might actually be the case very soon. Harmonix and Mad Catz have pulled out all the stops with the peripherals for Rock Band 3. The two most exciting offerings are an actual midi keyboard and a guitar with 102 fret buttons and six nylon strings in place of the old plastic paddle. The new Pro Mode makes full use of both controllers, as well as improved cymbal attachments for the drum kit, in four new difficulty tiers added above expert that will require the same skills used to play instruments outside the game. You won't be able to pick up a guitar and thrash from day one, but the skills you'll pick up in Pro Mode should be enough to get you past the frustrating plateau which drives so many people to give up learning a real instrument.

Harmonix's mission statement from the beginning has been as much about celebrating rock music as creating a game, and despite the scorn of certain Artists-Formerly-Known-As they've already exposed huge swathes of gamers to music they might never have encountered. Rock Band 3 is poised to take it a step further, enriching not just the audience of rock music but the participants as well. Even more exciting, however, is what this might mean for the place of video games in our culture; if Harmonix is successful it could be a watershed moment in both gaming and pedagogy.

Gamebreaking: That New Game Smell

timo.omit@ymail.com (Natalie Waldrop) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:58:43 GMT

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By now, you may have heard about THQ’s statement that they would really rather you not buy their games used. Actually, that’s an overly kind way of characterizing their statement, - I’ll let Cory Ledesma, THQ’s creative director for their wrestling games, be more blunt about it in his interview with CVG.

"I don't think we really care whether used game buyers are upset because new game buyers get everything. So if used game buyers are upset they don't get the online feature set I don't really have much sympathy for them. That's a little blunt but we hope it doesn't disappoint people. We hope people understand that when the game's bought used we get cheated.”

The fallout from Ledesma’s interview was nothing compared to the fallout from Penny Arcade’s characteristically acerbic take on it, both in comic and newspost form. Here’s part of what Jerry Holkins wrote:

The idea that THQ is somehow "disrespecting customers" with this kind of rhetoric misunderstands the situation as completely as it is possible to do so. In a literal way, when you purchase a game used, you are not a customer of theirs. If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can't figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous.

If you were insulted by Jerry’s insinuation that buying games and pirating games are somehow on the same level, you’re not alone. The ensuing melee was such that the PA guys suggested setting up a hashtag on twitter - #PAgamedialog - to contain the discussion. The discourse over twitter has been lively, heated, but to the credit of Penny Arcade’s readers, mostly civil. So, what have we learned?