jbrocky

I joked about my son becoming a buff-bot only once... lol.

Yeah he does really well. This morning I woke up for work and found him awake playing Fat Princess online... before anyone else was awake. He had the sound down really low so only he could hear it, was laying on the couch, just collecting wood and repairing/building stuff up. I found it comical. It's going to be brutal when school starts back up, he's going in the 1st grade and the transition from his first summer off of school to the daily grind is going to be quite tough I think. Oh well, has to be done I suppose. 
 
Thanks for the comment. :)

Yeah I have to agree. I didn't make it quite as far as you did, I only got to 6 hours and stopped. I really don't like the direction it went at all, it's way too linear, and the game play is so much different. Just not my cup of tea. 
 
The last FF I played before this was 9, and I found it to be solid and well made like the rest. I am really confused at this move in a seemingly wrong direction. And yeah, the new fatigue system just won't work here. Perhaps the Japanese won't mind that steep of a hit to XP gain, but I don't think that will fly with most Americans. The Japanese and Koreans make every single hardcore gamer look like casual players of the Life board game though, so like I said, maybe it will work there.

 So this weekend I took my son to get some video games. I did a little research and discovered a game I really wanted to play and it was a couple years old. I went to Gamestop with the express intent of buying it preplayed. Now, I won't buy newer used games like this because the price difference isn't enough to warrant it, but if I can get a game for 15 bucks and it costs 20-25 new, I am saving 1/4 to 1/5 off of the price. That is quite a difference.

We end up buying three used games. Dead Space for me, and my son picks out two games for himself, Lord of the Rings: Conquest and The Force Unleashed. I walk out spending 40 bucks and get three games, two of which I am looking forward to playing myself. That is a pretty good deal where I come from. All of the discs were in excellent condition, and I expressly asked for nice cases and got them. I really enjoy having a game collection, and I display them on my book cases along side titles like Moby Dick and other classics. A lot of them deserve it and are just as much masterpieces as the classic novels.

I began to ask myself what the purpose of buying a brand new game (that I didn't want to play immediately/ was looking forward to) was. Why spend $50 on a new copy of God of War 3, when I can buy it from Gamefly, used, for $21 (and it plays the EXACT same)?? That is quite a bit in savings. All I do is take a little disinfectant and there you go, Bob's your uncle. I did a little a little research on the PS3 disc, and Blu-Ray in general to get a little info on them. Blu-Ray is engineered to be very scratch resistant. I honestly cannot say I have ever seen a scratched Blu-ray PS3 o movie disc. This is all that really matters when buying a game for me, scratch free disc and clean case. I have found this to be the situation when going to Gamestop as I have purchased now purchased 5 used games from them. I was reluctant at first, but after I played Demon's Souls used I was immediately hooked on the low-price quality games that a used disc can be. Now, in a lot of situations Gamestop is really just ripping you off, maybe taking 3-5 bucks off the price of it new. The key is to buy an older, lower priced game to make the difference a larger percentage.

If that doesn't work for you, I found Gamefly. They don't always have everything for sale, and they don't have a lot of the newer, hotter titles because of the rental demand, but what they do have for sale is normally substantially different than the new, or even used prices at major video game retail stores. Take for instance the aforementioned God of War 3, it's $21 from Gamefly and $40 at Gamestop... that is a price difference of $19. I could buy another used game for that difference. Not to mention that Gamefly's cases/booklets are pristine, as they are put into a bin and never touched until they are sold or thrown away.

I am now, and probably forever more, addicted to buying used video games. Not only does it save you money percentage wise, but it also saves you money because you can research and use GameSpot for what it is for, reviewing games to give you an idea if you will like it. Well, that is until video games aren't sold in stores and can only be downloaded. Maybe then we'll have to buy a key from someone? I wonder how that will work out... 

 So last night I spent some time looking through my games and their associated achievements. I found most games to offer up a couple online trophies, but some platinum trophies required the gathering of all trophies, and this includes online only achievements. I am not sure this type of paradigm works. Doesn't this limit the game's longevity!? What about the people that cannot go online due to circumstances outside of their control but are still into trophies?

In the future, just a couple years from now even, when people are trying to get older games completed to plat, they won't be able to. They're hope for a plat trophy will be stopped by a simple fact that no-one plays that specific game anymore. Now, I understand that not all games are meant to be single-player, I'm looking at games like Fat Princess and such where the ideal scenario is playing online against and with others, but a lot of games that are single-player in design have multi-player elements with achievements that are needed to complete a platinum game. Right now I am trying to Platinum Bioshock 2, but the online achievements are nearly impossible to get. I can't get some of them because frankly, there isn't anyone to join the co-op to compete against or with for the achievement. This game is only a few months old, but happens when games are a year+ in age!?

My basic gripe is that while I understand games are sometimes online exclusive, others are not. Games like Red Dead Redemption and Zombie Apocalypse offer a few achievements that are online or single-player obtained. I get that not all games or achievements can do this, they should still strive to become game-play-type independent so future players of the game can at least plat that game if they desire. Or maybe we shouldn't care, and that there are so many games to play, we will have a veritable smorgasbord of plat trophies and those games are just out of luck.

I personally am of the generation that says we don't want to waste things, so why make a game that isn't entirely re-playable in the future, but then again, how many people that play and buy games only play for the trophies they unlock.

My real question is:

Have trophies and achievements become the actual game now, and the actual video game the medium by which we complete it?! 

 My son has been playing video games since he was 3. His first game was World of Warcraft; he would love to watch me play. One day I left my account open at the character select screen while I went into the kitchen to grab us drinks. I came out maybe 30-45 seconds later; he had crawled into my seat, created a new toon, and was in the game shooting tigers with his night elf hunter's bow. He was using WASD + mouse like he had been using it for years. I found this to be amazing as I had given him no help, no guidance, nothing at all toward ever teaching how to even use a computer. He just watched me play, and he began to play by himself following my actions. He absorbed everything from what I did, without me ever knowing he was even paying attention to it. I just figured he was watching the colors and pictures; in reality, he was gleaning what I was doing, how I was doing it, and what it did to the screen when I did it.

Ever since that fateful day he has become a very good gamer. I have seen this child wipe out entire groups of people in PvP as a Choppa in Warhammer Online. I have seen him play his heart out completing quests using a quest guide system in WoW just so he can get in a battleground to kill people.

This kid is obsessed with PvP or Co-Op play. Most recently, at 6, I have seen him turn into an extremely efficient gamer. I can't believe the skill this kid has. He uses immense strategy in games like Modern Warfare 2, sometimes surpassing even what I would have done strategically in a given situation. His best finish was recently when he had 26 kills and 13 deaths. This is a 6 year old boy playing against people at least twice his age and probably much more experienced. It literally took him 3 hours to get used to an FPS control system on a console controller. It took me far longer. He jumps into pretty much any video game and begins to play it without any real thought or help. He can beat me in Street Fighter, he can kill me often in Modern Warfare 2 local split screen, and he has helped me through many missions in the Spec Ops mode. He has accompanied me through hills surrounded by dragons, he has healed me through invasions of Alliance, and he has helped me live through zombie infested areas of Zombie Apocalypse.

All in all, I can't believe how good he is at this. While it may be for naught in his eventual career path, he is still very good at them. I often show off his skills when people come over, or rather, he demands people watch him play video games because he loves it. Especially in a game like Guitar Hero where he is center stage, he loves the attention. Maybe he'll be a rock star!?

We are currently into some serious co-op games; we are playing Zombie Apocalypse, Trine, Fat Princess, and Deathspank right now. It's a great experience and well worth the little monetary investment for the memories. I am excited for what the future holds for us when Star Wars: The Old Republic comes out. He is reading now, and by then, he should be pretty fluent. It will be awesome to go through a game with my son as possibly two Jedi or Sith. It's an experience no one could have ever imagined would happen. Fairy tales becoming reality. Father and son, hunting down a Rancor... how much fun will that be!?!?

Some people say that these experiences aren't real. That I should be out making memories with my child, playing baseball, football, and all other sorts of "real" things... but I ask you as Morpheus asked Neo... What is real? What defines real? Is it an experience or a taste!? Clearly I understand that playing baseball with friends on a game and playing with them in real life are two different things, but both are real memories. The experiences are both real and are lasting memories. I would not deprive my son of all types of experiences, realities, or memories, but you cannot tell me that they are not all "real" memories.

Real is the experience we have and its associated memory. It's the experience I had when I kissed my wife for the first time. It's the experience I had when I drove my first car. It's the experience I had slaying my first dragon in a table top game. It's the experience of my first raid in Everquest. It's the experience of my first relic raid in Dark Age of Camelot. It's the experience of my first play-through of Super Mario Bros. It's the experience of defeating the god Hades in GOW3. It's the experience and emotions I had when I watched Ariel die in Final Fantasy 7. It's the experience I had going to my first Charger's game. It's the experience I had playing in a Little League state-wide championship game. It's the experience I had playing football in Louisville Cardinal Stadium in a high school state championship game. They are all experiences, they are just different.

Being a Navy brat has stopped me from making close friends from childhood. I moved too often to keep long-term relationships going. Thankfully, some of my closest and longest friends are the ones I met online while in college in 2000. Fist of the North, I salute you. I have some of the best memories of my life with those guys and gals. Experiences are just memories in the end. Granted, a person needs to have many different types of memories and experiences to be a well-rounded adult, but whether they happened digitally or concretely, it's the memory in my brain that is the reality of it all. 

 I bought Final Fantasy 13 the same day I bought God of War 3 (the day GOW3 was released). I was so excited about both of these games. I got home and put in FF13 and played it for about 30 minutes. I thought the mashing of the X button was different and boring, but I figured I was just in the basics of the game.

I equate it to an MMORPG style beginning. The story was good, but the action not-so-much. Sometimes, especially with MMORPGs, take a bit of playtime to take off. If I did the same thing with let's say EQ, WoW, or DAoC, I would have never stuck with the genre. Let's face it, the first few levels of spamming 1-2 buttons are seriously boring in some games. Anywho, I took the time to stop for a while and put in GOW3, which I knew from the demo I loved. (I hadn't played GOW 1 or 2 because I hadn't owned any console apart from my Wii since I sold my PSOne in 2001 right before I bought my new PC for DAoC.)

I was thrilled with the gameplay, it was a blast and the story was great. (I didn't know anything about it at the time. I am just about to start GOW 2 as I just finished GOW 1 a couple of days ago. Since playing through GOW 1 and 3, I can guess at the general gist of GOW 2.) After finishing GOW 3 I went back to FF13. I played through for a couple more hours, getting through the tutorial of the Paradigms, and the story. I found the story great, but the actual gameplay boring. It's linear, not very FF like, but I don't mind that as much except for the fact that the combat has been boring me to tears. I pretty much just Auto-Battle and Paradigm shift when I need to heal, or just flat out use a pot because I want to finish faster.

I got to the first boss and beat him pretty easily, all I did was auto-battle and paradigm shift some more when I needed to heal. It wasn't hard. I googled some info on the combat system. Apparently the loot drops depend on the speed of the kill which is determined by how fast you can DPS it (obviously), but that has me feeling more like I am playing in a WoW raid against Rotgut rather than a strategic RPG.I do like the star system in concept though, I love a driving force behind doing better than just auto-attack. It peaks my competitive teet.

I somewhat miss the old style of FF combat, but from what I have read it does get harder, shifting gets more strategic, and the battles become fun. I am all for this and hope they are right. Possibly I am just not giving it its fair chance, and while the combat has changed dramatically, it is just as strategic and difficult(at times) as it has been in the past.

One can only hope this to be the case. Otherwise, quite honestly. I'll be disappointed.

I like the idea of this game's MMORPG, it's not traditional, it sounds like a good mix of MMORPG and Diabloish style MMOG gameplay, I like it.