The pitch I’d heard when this game was running the preview circuit was that it was a wrestling game targeted at average joes, and I can definitely see how that would be the case. The premise itself is transparently designed to sucker in the non-fan: half the roster is made up of superstars from the 80s and 90s — the sort of guys you remember seeing on TV when you were a kid — and the other half is made up of dudes that are rasslin’ in the WWE of today, presumably there to bolster the interest of the nostalgia crowd (though how even over the top attack animations are supposed to make the likes of Jack Swagger or Drew McIntyre interesting is a mystery to me). The game plays less like your typical Smackdown vs. Raw affair, and more like a Marvel vs. Capcom game; they even put out an All Stars branded arcade stick to coincide with its release. And the gameplay is actually pretty compelling and, more importantly, approachable.

At face value, the fights are a fairly straightforward affair. There are two buttons each for strikes and grapples, and certain combinations can pull of a wrestler’s signature moves under the proper circumstances. In contrast to other games in the genre, there’s a heavy emphasis put on executing combination attacks — while each wrestler has only a handful of standing striking moves and grapples, stringing together a combination of light attacks and either a strong attack or grapple can result in pulling off a move you wouldn’t otherwise have access to in your arsenal. Beyond that, each wrestler is designated as either a grappler, a brawler, an acrobat, or a big man, and each style has its own unique qualities. Brawlers and big men can charge up a powerful striking attack, acrobats can perform quick springboard arial moves from the second rope, and grapplers can execute not just striking combinations, but can transition their grapple attacks into multiple successive suplexes with proper timing. Brawlers and grapplers can also charge up their grapple, but near as I can tell the only move you can actually execute with it is a boston crab, which leaves me kind of scratching my head.

Beyond that, countering is actually a fair bit more intuitive than I’d normally expect. Every move can be countered, and the timing varies from move to move. An on-screen indicator signals your opportunity for a reversal, but by the time you see it, you’ve more than likely missed your chance. It’s not really there to test your reflexes though, but to give you a gauge of what to shoot for in the future. Despite some early frustration, before long I was countering strikes and grapples on a fairly regular basis. You can even counter counters, which makes dealing with an often cheap AI a lot less stressful.

While there are a lot of great ideas on display here, unfortunately they fall flat just as often as they hit. Starting with the obvious, this game redefines ugly. THQ decided to go for an over the top style here, and this manifests in the form of insanely stylized moves (for example, Hulk Hogan leaps fully 25 feet into the air for his signature legdrop while simultaneously doing his “listening to the crowd” gesture) and character models that run the gamut from hideous (Big Show) to goofy (The Rock) to downright terrifying (Edge). As a bonus, each character’s torso is about as big around as an oak. Sadly, their heads have not been inflated to match.

Beyond that, there’s not a whole lot of depth to the game modes available. Match types are sufficiently varied — there’s 1v1, triple threat, fatal four-way, handicap, extreme, steel cage, and tag team (tornado only; this here’s an arcade game!) — but the single player story offering is fairly shallow. There are three “story” missions that task you with taking on The Undertaker, Randy Orton, and DX respectively. However, aside from a couple of poorly cut promos, each one is practically identical; win 9 matches, then take on the title character(s) in the 10th. Bonus points for the inclusion of Paul Bearer were quickly revoked once I remembered how annoying he is to listen to. There’s also a mode labeled “Fantasy Warfare”, but it’s just a series of 1 on 1 matches between old and new stars with similar gimmicks. Each one has a video introduction, for whatever that’s worth.

Still, the most disappointing misstep on display in WWE All Stars is the lack of variety in wrestlers’ moves. While each wrestler has a handful of signature maneuvers, beyond that every grappler, big man, brawler and acrobat shares a virtually identical set of grapples with only about a dozen varieties of striking moves between them. If you’re of a mind to circumvent that by rolling your own created superstar, prepare for disappointment; created wrestlers can only be given one of the existing wrestler’s predefined move sets. You can select a finisher, but most of those are locked away at the onset. Even with the anemic single player options available, some more dynamic move sets would have really helped give All Stars some lasting appeal, but unfortunately the developers dropped the ball.

So, while WWE All Stars has a face only a mother could love, and while you can blow through the single player modes in a matter of hours, it still manages to be a pretty entertaining little game. I certainly don’t think it’s worth $60 of my hard earned cash, but neither did I feel particularly cheated by Blockbuster’s exorbitant $9 rental fee. If you’ve got even a passing interest in wrestling games, and especially if you’ve got a like minded friend, at the end of the day it’s definitely worth checking out. Just don’t tell THQ you bought it used.

A couple of days have passed since your initial call for e-mails on this subject which may as well be a couple of years in internet time, but I thought I’d drop a line and weigh in all the same.

The problem I have with the quote from Cory Ledesma, and similar quotes from folks before him, is that in effect he’s lashing out at his potential customers because of his frustration with the way the game market works. Cory’s words are actually pretty tame compared to some that have come before, which equate buying used games to pirating them, but the same scorn is there, and it strikes me as fairly boneheaded from a PR standpoint since, valid point or no, it comes across as the whining of an overprivileged child.

Education is one thing. When you buy a game used, you’re not giving any money to the people who created said game. Valid. However, the fact remains that whether or not there’s so palpable a villain as GameStop in the picture, people are going to buy used games; it’s just like any other commodity, and to expect consumers to eschew a habit that is both their wont and their right is ludicrous. I don’t buy the “you’re picking my pocket” mentality because, to be honest, every other form of media that you can buy at a store, you can also buy used, and those industries are still thriving despite it. Now, some folks rightly point out that movies make their money in the box office, musicians make their money on tours, and that books don’t take hundreds of people millions of dollars to create, but that argument rings hollow because at the end of the day, it’s just sour grapes over businesses that have different advantages than they do. It still doesn’t give them the right to change the rules because it’s harder for them to make a buck.

They do, however, have plenty of tools at their disposal to make buying a game new, and holding onto it, more attractive to the consumer, and a lot of companies do just this.

Option 1: Make sure your game has content to keep people coming back. Of course the feasibility of this option depends drastically on the type of game. For some, it’s as easy as keeping up a reasonable schedule of DLC. Popular shooters do this with map packs, and the Rock Bands of the world do it with songs and constantly updated challenges. Some games have long-life built into them. Animal Crossing and its ilk keep you coming back if only because there’s only so much you can do on a given day, and to fully experience it, you need to log time all year round. Probably the best recent example is Dragon Quest IX, where they dole out post-game quests for a year past the game’s initial release. While none of these tactics would stop you from buying a game used, it does at least give you a very compelling incentive not to sell the game back to GameStop in the first place.

Option 2: Keep your costs low so that you don’t need to sell as much to recoup them. This is a fundamental problem with the industry as it exists today. Master Chief and Nathan Drake have misled developers into believing that they need to be bleeding edge in order to compete. While those games are absolutely selling gangbusters, and there will always be a place for them, perhaps the takeaway is that if your game isn’t selling well enough to offset its exorbitant production cost, maybe there’s not enough room in the AAA space for it! There are lots of developers, Atlus is the first example that springs to mind, that are extremely successful despite not producing any mega-million sellers simply because they are realistic about how much return they’re going to get on their investment. If developer A wants to sell a new property to us, and that new property happens to share a lot in common with God of War, they shouldn’t be surprised when God of War blows it out of the water! Okay, so not everyone has a desire to produce the equivalent of a Persona or a Half Minute Hero on a (comparatively) shoestring budget, but I think there’s a middle ground to be found.

Option 3: Digital distribution. This one is a no-brainer, and it certainly doesn’t apply to everyone, so I’ll just put it out there and leave it at that.

Option 4: New purchase incentives. One-time DLC, pre-order bonuses, special editions, these things all fit the bill, and I don’t have a problem with them. Normally though, these things will be mostly aesthetic rather than functional upgrades in nature and don’t effect the actual gameplay itself. Something like the DLC code-only multiplayer strikes me as a bit harder to defend. There you’re taking what is a core game mechanic, and one where, if you’re playing on an Xbox, you’re already paying a monthly fee for the privilege of, and tying it to new purchases only. Sure, it’s well within the publisher’s rights to do this, but then it also sends the same message as overly intrusive DRM: We Don’t Trust Our Customers. Whether or not they have a valid gripe, the face they’re showing their potential customers here isn’t a favorable one. A person who buys the latest WWE game used, while not technically a customer of THQ’s, is at the very least showing that they’re willing to put down money on one of their games. If they aren’t hip to the politics of gaming on the internet (and what percentage of people at a game store are?), they’re going to see this kind of maneuver as a cheap offense that will likely color any future purchases. Quotes like Ledesma’s may as well be saying “I don’t care whether or not you like my game. Just whether or not I’m getting paid.” Again, that’s his right. I just don’t think it’s a very productive attitude.

Another point that doesn’t get brought up much is that, unless a game is having an extremely successful multi-print run (in which case, you’re making your money! Shut up already!), if I buy it NEW, but do so six months after its release, I’m probably just as useless to its creators than if I bought it used. The problem isn’t as simple as ‘the ignorant consumer’ or the ‘heartless distributor’; it runs to the very core of an industry where sales have to be frontloaded to have any meaning. In the fast paced, cutthroat race to the top of the heap, a lamentable small percentage of publishers have any way of implementing the slow burn strategy that so many other industries have been able to benefit from. The blame for this doesn’t lie on them solely — the entire industry is going to have to evolve or face the music at a certain point, and I’m not sure how it’s going to come about.

But to have a game that took hundreds of people years to produce at the cost of millions of dollars made or broken by its first month or two of sales isn’t exactly a model that can sustain itself forever. My heart goes out to the hardworking people who’s blood and sweat goes into making the electronic amusements I so enjoy, and I do try to go out of my way to support those who I feel do a good job of it. However, that doesn’t make it my responsibility. I’ve got my own family to feed.

Fallout (Mac)

Unfortunately, the seeming inability to play the game in a windowed mode (exacerbated by the fact I’m playing the mac port) combined with copy protection means that there won’t be any screenshots this time around, but I’ll try and make these amusing enough to make up for it. Let’s get some of the preliminaries out of the way before moving forward.

The Choice
Thanks are due to everyone who responded to my twitter and facebook posts, and to all the Talking Tyrants that filled up a thread with suggestions. I ended going through a lot of choices before deciding on where to start. At first, I thought I’d pick something that I’d either already played through a fair amount of (Dragon Quest IV) or that required a very small time investment (Half Minute Hero), but at the end of the day, I realized that my initial problem was games boring me. To that end I wanted something oozing with story, and that knew how to tell it well. All signs pointed to the Fallout series being as close to a sure thing as I was going to find, and considering I’ve been chomping at the bit for some post apocalyptic action after renting Fallout 3 a few months back and subsequently watching A Boy and His Dog and every Mad Max movie, there wasn’t really even a choice anymore. After scrounging up a mac port, I ended up playing a trial game for a few hours, just so I could get a feel for the interface and the way the game worked. Now that I’m pretty comfortable with the game’s world and systems, I’d say I’m ready to start the honest-to-goodness playthrough.

On Spoilers
I’m not going into this completely spoiler-free, as I did some research ahead of time. That said, I’m only using spoilers in the net-hack sense (game mechanics) and not the Final Fantasy sense (story). I’m fully prepared to fuck myself over as part of the learning process, but wanted to arm myself with at least a bit of information about which stats are important, and some benefits/drawbacks to different traits/perks, and inventory management (pickpocketing your allies for great profit!). To this end, I found myself a pretty decent FAQ and just read up on the author’s general character design philosophy. Beyond that, I’m keeping myself as free from information as possible, beyond what I was already privy to. It’s also worth noting, though this may be obvious from the LP nature of this endeavor, that I will not be spoiler tagging any of my content here. If you’re planning on playing Fallout at some point, and don’t want to have plot points revealed to you, turn away now. For the rest of you, let’s begin.

My Character
After a bit of thought, I decided that “Dirk Kiljoy” was a suitably ridiculous name for my vault dwelling explorer. As far as my character build is concerned, I ended up using a pre-defined sniper class I found in the aforementioned FAQ, with some slight modifications to fit my play style. I ended up going with a sniper build, as that seemed more user-friendly than a melee build for my first playthrough. I am also using the Gifted trait, even though I know it’s kind of overpowered (since a good INT stat can make up for the skill hit, and 3 free points is pretty crazy good). My feeling is that on my first go-around, I don’t mind being a little unbalanced so long as I can enjoy the story and get my footing. I’m going for low CHA, mediocre END in favor of high PER, INT, AGI and LCK. Primary skills are Small Guns, Lockpicking, and Speech. Traits are Gifted and Small Frame.

Our Story Begins

War. War never changes.

In the late 21st century, all of mankinds greatest fears came true when total nuclear war reduced most of our planet to an irradiated wasteland. Most people living on the surface died instantly, and those that remained found both their bodies and their way of life forever changed in the holocaust that followed. A particularly lucky subset of the population were able to escape unmolested by nuclear winter in airtight underground “vaults”, though only designed for short term use, these survivors were able to extend their stay for generations, at the expense of cutting themselves off entirely from the world outside. I am one of these fortunate few. My name is Dirk Kiljoy. My home: Vault 13.

I’ve always had a curious nature, never entirely satisfied with life in the safe but relatively dull confines of the vault. When a crisis arose, perhaps it was this very nature, combined with my nimble hands and aptitude with a firearm that made me the perfect man to leave home in search of a solution. Perhaps denizens of the vault just didn’t want my curiosity to spread. Whatever the case, it was on an otherwise uneventful December morning that the Overseer, top man and spiritual leader of the vault, approached me with a mission. The cornerstone to the vault’s self-sufficiency has always been in its ability to produce clean drinking water, a feat made possible by the water purification chip every vault has installed. However, Vault 13′s chip has finally seen its last day of operation. It’s malfunctioned, says the Overseer, and without a new one, the vault will be out of usable drinking water in a mere 150 days. While the chip cannot be repaired, and parts aren’t available to build a new one, there are rumors of another vault, not far off, that could be the key to vault 13′s salvation. My task will be to investigate that vault, and bring home a new chip by any means necessary.

150 Days Left: Shady Sands

After dealing with some rodents that had made the caves outside the vault their home, I emerged and looked upon the sunlit wastes of what was once California for the first time. There wasn’t much time to take it all in, however, and immediately I headed east, in search of my quarry. It wasn’t long before I encountered what would be the first of many very odd sights — I was set upon by a pack of what appeared to be oversized praying mantises. While proving little challenge for the vault-issued Full Metal Jacket rounds in my trusty sidearm, the sheer enormity of the beasts gave me pause. I had no idea they would be just the tip of the iceberg.

It seems the last traveller to come by these parts was not so lucky, but his corpse did at least provide some extra ammunition, sundries, and a spare pistol. Curiously enough, he also seemed to have a copious amount of what looked to be soda bottlecaps. While I didn’t necessarily understand, I knew enough to pocket the caps — they could come in handy, if I could discern their purpose.

After a few day’s journey, I found myself at what looked to be a makeshift settlement. The sign on the gate read “Shady Sands”, which the guard posted there confirmed to be the name of this tiny hamlet. His name is Seth, and while you couldn’t call his demeanor inviting by any stretch of the imagination, he was at the very least courteous. He greeted me, and explained that their town is fairly self-sufficient, but not used to seeing strangers come calling. However, he noted that if I wanted to make myself useful, the town’s been having some problems that they could use some help with. Raiders are a constant problem, but he cautioned me not to approach them alone. The more immediate threat was the Radscorpions, apparently another larger than life irradiated version of creatures I had read about in my youth. He cautioned that they’re not to be taken lightly, and in fact he’d already lost his brother to them not long before. Razlo, the town doctor, might be able to help with a cure for their venom.

Before making my way to Razlo, I decided to talk to some of the locals. Katrina, another former vault dweller, actually used to live in vault 15 — the very vault the Overseer had sent me out in search of. She confirmed that they did indeed have a working water chip when last she was there, but cautioned that the elevators weren’t working, and told me I may want to make sure I have some rope handy before trying to explore. She suggested that I try bartering with the people in Shady Sands, as they are always on the lookout for supplies and bottlecaps, the universal currency of this brave new world (so THAT’S what they’re for!).

It’s worth noting at this point that in my trial playthrough, I managed to miss out on talking to Katrina, and made my way to vault 15 woefully unequipped. I had even noted that one of Shady Sand’s residents had a rope, but didn’t bother trying to trade for it! Suffice it to say, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake this time around

The next person I spoke with, at Seth’s urging, was Aradesh, the town’s leader. He seemed happy that I wanted to help, but was very reserved throughout our conversation. He balked at my request for payment in return for clearing out the scorpions, but he did have a rope handy that he was happy to trade for a few caps. All in all, not an entirely wasted encounter.

Finally, I met up with Ian, formerly a bodyguard for merchant caravans, but after some injuries in the line of duty, he decided to settle for a more peaceful life in Shady Sand’s relative comfort. He’s a bit more worldly than the rest of the town’s residents, and as such was able to point me in the direction of a few larger trading settlements, should my journey to vault 15 prove fruitless. While he was reluctant at first, I was actually able to convince him to tag along with me, in exchange for a share of whatever profit I end up making. After all, bottlecaps won’t be much use to me, once I return to the vault, and Ian seems like he’d be a valuable asset. While he got ready to go, I flipped through some of the books on his shelves, and found a fascinating volume entitled “Scout’s Handbook”. There were some bits about hand gestures and badges that I kind of glossed over, but I learned some things about tying knots and lighting fires that I won’t soon forget. Once Ian had made ready, I decided to head for Razlo’s, to check in before heading out.

The good doctor is something of a cold fish. He didn’t offer much in the way of advice, but told me that if I was able to bring him some tails from any radscorpions I kill, he should be able to concoct an anti-venom from them.

142 Days Left: The Radscorpion Cave

Seth was able to lead us to the edge of the scorpions’ lair, and he did not exaggerate with his description of the place; it was positively teeming with the beasts. Immediately I was glad to have Ian with me, as his dead eye and quick hands made short work of our adversaries. An extra pair of hands was also more than welcome, as their tails are positively massive, and I wanted to make sure to bring back absolutely as many as we could carry.

it’s also worth noting that, thanks to my piss-poor charisma, Ian wouldn’t agree to go with me in my trial playthrough without payment — I guess I just got lucky the second time around. That, combined with the fact that I had initially thought my turns would come sooner if I didn’t spend all my action points (not the case, it would seem), I ended up not learning that it’s probably a good idea to use my remaining AP to put some distance between myself and the scorpions until I’d blown through the vast majority of my stimpacks. The second time around was FAR less painful.

Once all of the beasts had been dealt with, we travelled back to town, hands full with spoils from our encounter.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about beating video games in which I divulged that I can pretty much count the RPGs that I’ve played to completion on my fingers (on one hand, depending on your definition). He was, of course, appalled by this revelation, and when pressed for a reason, I came back with what tends to be my problem with games in general.

The thing is, I have some real OCD behaviors when it comes to gaming. It’s not that I need to min/max my stats for ideal efficiency or that I need 100% completion before I’ll consider a game done. Rather, my compulsion is that I need to feel like I own 100% of whatever accomplishments I achieve. This makes sharing a controller difficult, because even if someone else plays through 30 seconds of a Mario game while I’m taking a piss, when the controller finds its way back into my hands, it feels like my playthrough has been tainted somehow. Odd, but true.

This tendency gets exacerbated when RPGs enter into the mix, because as I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost the ability to play games for more than a couple of hours at a time unless I’m really into it, and as this can stretch a 40+ hour game into multi-month territory, I almost always find myself playing something else at some point. This would be all well and good, but once I return to an RPG after a significant enough amount of time has passed, I invariably feel lost. I don’t remember what I was doing or what plans I had made for my equipment, skills, et cetera. Even when I turn to an FAQ or walkthrough for a refresher, I still feel like I’ve picked up somebody else’s save and am taking control from where they left off. This of course leaves me at an impasse and I end up starting games over from the beginning countless times — see previous paragraph.

I’ve started to slowly ease myself out of this mode of thought, but it’s still a work in progress. I was able to play Pokemon Platinum and Dragon Age: Origins to completion, both of which I’d put down for a while somewhere in the middle. As it stands, however, the list I was able to come up with when pressed in that conversation was:

• Chrono Trigger
• Final Fantasy III/VI (SNES)
• Final Fantasy IV DS
• Final Fantasy X
• Kingdom Hearts
• Pokemon Leaf Green & Diamond
• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I’ve beaten a couple of 2D Zeldas (LttP and LA, if you’re wondering), but nothing else springs immediately to mind.

Now, I love RPGs — they’re probably my favorite genre — so I want to broaden my horizons somewhat. I came up with the idea the other day that I’d ask the same friend for a list of 10 RPGs to kind of serve as a cleansing of the palette, and I’d see if I couldn’t use that as a jumping off point. Here’s what I got back:

In no particular order:

Final Fantasy V (SFC). Do not play the buggy and slow PS1 version. Do not play the GBA remake with the screwy extra job classes. Get the original. I waded my way through this with a faq and rudimentary kana ability – the story is a throwaway anyway! – and had a blast.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (PS2). It’s not the hardest RPG ever created – well, unless you go for the best ending anyway – but it will try your patience in ways Persona games never will.

Dragon Quest VIII (PS2). I was initially going to put DQV here – I’ve played about a third of it on the SFC and love it to death – but I haven’t played the DS version yet. DQVIII gets the nod for having probably the best localization I’ve ever seen blended in with comfortable DQ gameplay. Shame about the new menus, though.

Final Fantasy III (FC). The prototype for Final Fantasy V, and easily the best of the FC games. I’ve played this to completion on actual hardware, and it was the most soul-crushing gaming experience of my life (the last dungeon, with no save points, takes well over an hour to get through – and that’s if you know where you’re going). Naturally, you should use an emulator if you value your sanity.

The Bard’s Tale III – Thief of Fate (PC, Apple //, C64, etc.) Not the first first-person dungeon crawl I’ve played, but one of the best. Also, automapping.

Demon’s Souls (PS3) – It’s an action game. No, it’s a RPG. No, it’s a dungeon crawler. Whatever. I was on the edge of my seat for fifty hours with this game. It’s frustrating as hell, but every little bit of progress is so, so satisfying.

Front Mission 3 (PS1) – it’s like Armored Core and Final Fantasy Tactics had a baby, but without the shitty controls and nonsense localization.

Quote:
Originally Posted by nick
but…but… that’s only seven! your counting skills need work!

Well, yeah. I could have stretched it out to ten, or even twenty, but I would at that point have to start getting into games that I liked, but I don’t necessarily think someone else should play.

I guess if I did have to make an honorable mentions list, it would go something like this!

-Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga (1 and 2, although I haven’t finished the latter)
-RoboTrek
-Faxanadu (not really an RPG!)
-Fallout 3
-Wasteland

This is a great jumping off point, but he was quick to remind me that his own scope is fairly limited and recommended I open the forum to a larger group, which is what I aim to do now. Here’s what I’d like y’all to do for me, if you can spare a moment:

Recommend an RPG to me. It can be from any system or console generation, and I’ll sort out the details of how to play it, if in fact I choose to do so. I’d like you also to include a brief description of why you feel that this particular game is worthy of recommendation (feel free to recommend multiple titles). Japanese-only titles are more than welcome (I’m rusty, but I shouldn’t have any problem with ‘em), and if there’s a particular version you think needs to be played, I’m all ears. I tend to favor story over mechanics, but the right unique quirk can absorb me for quite some time.

Once I take a look through the list, I’m going to try and pick a few that interest me the most, and attempt to play them from start to finish. While I’m doing so, I’ll try and chronicle my progress in an amusing fashion of some sort (I haven’t really given it much thought, but I’m thinking more thorough than a brief summary, but not quite as OCD as a Let’s Play). Until that point, I leave myself in your capable hands, internet. Do me proud.

You’re welcome.

Edit — My better half never misses a beat:

Luana: oh, snap. typo!  
“mediocrity”
me: ah! good call
Well, at least mediocracy is a word — I could have done worse
heh
Luana: well, I guess 
me: WE WILL BE GOVERNED BY MEDIOCRE 3DS GAMES