Seriously. This shit is getting out of hand.

With the videogame market being one of the few not being ruined by our current American ecinomic crisis (GameStop is apparently opening 600 new stores in the next two years), it seems that fatcat bigwigs are doing whatever they can to maximise profits and appeal to as many demographics as possible with every single release. While this might seem like a sound business plan, it seems to be pushing forth a trend in gaming that leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that it’s awesome that the appeal of gaming is growing and becoming mainstream. I get that. I even like it. However, as someone who’s always gravitated towards larger, more involved and more complicated titles, I’m beginning to feel a bit left out in the cold by developers now a days.

Take, for example, one of my all-time favorite franchises in the RPG world, the Elder Scrolls. The first three Elder Scrolls games are UNFORGIVING. They’re huge, they’re open, they’re involved and complex and they’re fucking incredible for it. The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind? Fuck, man…I spent about a year of my life living in Vvardenfell. I want to be immersed like that again…and I thought that I would be. I bought an Xbox360 specifically for TES4: Oblivion. I rabidly awaited, checking screenshots and sifting for any nugget of information on the daily. Then, the game releases (after a whole shitload of delays i might add) and all iof a sudden I feel pressure on my prostate that I didn’t ask for and sure as shit don’t approve of. Here’s this game, that I waited many a sleepless night for, and all I can feel is that it was either extremely rushed or dumbed-down to the point of being garbage. Here’s a few examples:

Consolidated weapons skills: all bladed weapons (ranging from daggers to small one handed short blades to massive claymores) are all governed my one skill. I’m not a weapons expert by any fashion, however I thikn that it’s safe to assume that someone that’s mastered the subtle art of daggers couldn’t grab the most massive sword ever made and wield it like a pro, and vice/versa.

Simplified clothes and weapons: I’ll keep this short. Morrowind: Nine armor slots (helmet, chest, greaves, right and left pauldrons, gauntlets and boots) and thousands of clothing combinations. Oblivion? Five armor slots (most of them have been grouped into easy-to-swallow sets) and about seven outfits for clothing, pre-expansion.

Five voice actors: After blowing their budget on Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean and Terrance Stamp (two of which read all of three paragraphs in the game), Morrowind’s cast of twenty voice actors and actresses (10 races, male and female) was consolidated so that Nords and Orcs sound exactly the same, and three separate (and very different) races of elves all share the same homosexual voice.

And it’s not just the Elder Scrolls. It seems that developers are trying their hardest to rope in the “casual” gaming crowd at the cost of pleasing the die-hard fans that have kept the industry alive for all these years by making every new game more stupid simple that the one pervious. Now, I have no problem with your grandma or your sister or anyone else playing video games, but stay the hell off of my Elder Scrolls for Christ’s sake. This wouldn’t be a problem (or even warrant an article) if the equation were balanced…but it isn’t. You see, game developers see dollar signs in the legions of new, casual gamers entering into the fold, and any company follows where the money is.

Another great example is Jumpgate: Evolution. While anything I say is specualtion and/or educated guesses because the game is still in pre-release, the heads at NETdevil recently dropped a bomb on fans in their IRC chat in the form of a new game announcement: It’s basically being stripped into a casual friendly carebear-fest with no player piracy, no multifaction squads (JG:E’s guilds, which played a massive part in the original Jumpgate’s PVP), designated “safe-zones” that are easily accessible during active engagements and no cargo loss upon death / ship destruction. Needless to say, old Jumpgate players are pissed, and here’s why. Essentially, NETdevil made the concious descision to piss on their fanbase and dumb-down their game to make it more “WoW-like” (see also: nerfed casual garbage.)

Another problem is that this pull towards casual gaming his causing a rift between the casual and hardcore markets, resulting in a huge gap with user-accessable games like Oblivion and Fable 2 on one end and unforgiving assbusters like EVE Online and DOA4 on the other with almost no middle ground. 

I’m not saying to leave casual gamers in the cold by any means…I’d smiply like to see game developers acknowledge the two separate demographics. Not all games need to be impossibly complex, but we don’t all our games watered down to the point of being idiot-friendly. Casual gamers can go buy a Wii and have a wide selection on any console or even the PC, I don’t mind…it’s just that I see the hardcore gamers that have kept the industry afloat being left out in the cold in exchange for little kids and their parent’s dollars.

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With crossovers being a major staple in the world of superheroes, you’d think that twisting together two separate universes wouldn’t be such a foreign koncept. Leave it to long-time game developer Midway to take an idea brimming with awesomeness and lead it down a path toward failure approaching epic proportions with their newest installment of their classic, blood soaked fighter Mortal Kombat, predictably titled Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s a fully capable fighter, it just lacks the sheer kickass factor that you’d expect from an alchemy of these two trusted pedigrees. It’s sort of like most rock-and-roll super groups…combinations that look good on paper but wind up being something far less than they should be. This title takes many instantly recognizable faces from both worlds like Sub-Zero, Rayden, Batman and Wonder Woman and salts in a few third-tier douchenozzles like Jax and Captain Marvel (lolwut?) for (debatably) good measure, because I guess that Bizarro, Mr. Freeze, Doomsday, The Riddler, Steel and Lobo were all too busy to participate. 

Massive chins a'plenty.

OK, so let’s talk about the things that make me get a sour taste in the back of my throat every time I actually call this a Mortal Kombat game. First, I immediately noticed (as in about ten seconds into my first match) that the fighting and combat system was ridiculously shallow for an MK title. Each player only has a few combos at thir disposal and about 80% of them are recycled (EVERY character’s first three combos in the list are X, X, Y on 360. Every one.) and a lot of the special moves (now called ‘power moves’ for some reason) show that the developers easily favored some of the characters…this is shown in glaring detail after you try Sub-Zero, The Joker or Rayden who are a bit unbalanced. On the same note, most of the DC Universe characters feel a bit light on power and awesomeness…Batman is without some of his cooler gadgets (although he gets two different version of his Baterang – one of which is what Douglas Adams might call ‘mostly useless‘) and Superman just doesn’t feel that Super.

This is about the most blood you'll see.

MK vs DC Universe does another thing to piss on the Mortal Kombat pedigree by removing the one constant that the series has seen over it’s seven previous titles, namely the series’ trademark violence and over-the-top fatalities. While there still is a moderate blood (this is the first T-rated Mortal Kombat), the fatalities (or DC’s ‘Heroic Brutalities’) were apparently grown with some care on the stupid farm. From Superman’s overly cartoonish “pound someone into the floor”, the Green Lantern’s “dual energy sledgehammers of doom” or The Joker’s toned-down “shoot ‘em in the face” fatality (which is unfortunately mimicked by Deathstroke, who has pretty much the same thing), every last fatality in the game is either lame or just plain weak at best. Also, you’ll find another series addition (from MK 4 on) missing in action, the multiple style palette switching and weapons. While I was reluctant to this addition at first, i did fall in love with it the first time I found up fighting a skilled player in MK: Deadly Alliance and things went from a heated fistfight to and all-out swordfight within a matter of seconds…and with heroes present like the sword-wielding Deathstroke or The Joker (who, if he’s true to character, is carrying an assortment of knives somewhere on him) this could have been easily implemented, in my opinion. If it wasn’t bad enough, add the obligatory poorly written (and equally poorly voice-acted) story mode to the mix for even more (piss-poor) flavor.

4chan users will have fun with this one, I'm sure.

MK vs DC isn’t a complete failure, find a few friends for multiplayer and overlook it’s shortcomings and you can actually have fun pitting some of the better characters against each other, and several new mechanics like a pretty intriguing grapple system and what I call ‘Falling Kombat” where characters actually beat the piss out of each other while in mid-air and the real-time bruising and suit tearing and you’ll have a degree of fun, but ask yourself…is it really $59.99 worth of fun? This gamer thinks not…but look on the bright side: at least Brandon Routh has some competition in the “make Superman look like a pussy” department.

Verdict: 4/10, pretty damn mediocre.

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Well, perhaps not yet “born” yet, per se, but it’s definitely somewhere in its second trimester and we have gotten quite a clear ultrasound at this point of NETdevil’s high concept sci-fi space shooter MMOG, Jumpgate: Evolution. While the game is currently in a solid alpha-build stage, what we’ve been allowed to see thus far has been impressive and looks to be a innovative and creative addition to a pair of suffering genres, namely the Space-Simulation and MMORPG genres, to be precise. With the last great space sims being as far back as 2005’s X3: Reunion or 2007’s Spaceforce: Rogue Universe (although nothing has been able to quite top Microsoft’s 2001 opus Freelancer in this gamer’s opinion in terms of sheer playability or longevity -- Freelancer has been kept very much alive to this day by an active modding community and several privately run multiplayer servers) and space-based MMO’s being rather nonexistent with the exception of CCP’s EVE Online and the general MMO market at large being dominated by Blizzard’s powerhouse World of Warcraft, both species of games seem to need a little something to come along and breathe some new life in.

There’s no way to accurately discuss Jumpgate: Evolution (or JG:E if you don’t like typing out entire words) without mentioning it’s 2001 predecessor Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative (or JG:C for Jumpgate Classic), a PC MMOG that first brought the infinite vastness of space to the massively multiplayer genre. JG:C featured several unique ideas that helped it find it’s niche upon release, the most notable being the “Newtonian” space flight physics, essentially meaning that piloting your spacecraft was alot like, as one JG:E wiki editor put it, driving on ice, accurately simulating what it might be like to steer a ship in a vacuum with no gravity. It’s a bit tough to explain, but basically don’t expect to make any 90 degree turns at high speed and it can take up to two full kilometers to go from full throttle to a complete stop. Unfortunately, JG:C was plagued by a steep difficulty curve and sub-par graphics (even for it’s 2001 release), however it’s creative approach to space flight have given it an active user base to this day despite an overall lack of traffic that led to the merging of what started as several servers into one “global” server. Now, enough about the past. I’d first heard of JG:E through a few web forums while looking for something prettier to replace Freelancer as my main “blow shit up” space sim, and upon viewing their official website at www.jumpgateevolution.com, I was forced to run to my kitchen to grab a hand towel to stop the constant flow of drool.

It’s clear that JG:E won’t suffer from it’s predecessor’s fugly graphics. Also, it’s graphically scaleable to run on systems as small as 800MHz processor and 32MB of video memory - without pixel shaders.

JG:E’s lead creative director Hermann Peterscheck has been quoted as denouncing the design decisions of games like EVE Online in which space is dark and empty (and, in EVE’s case, repetitious and actually quite boring) by saying that “space should be beautiful”, and by God, is it ever. JG:E’s high-contrast and colorful vision of space makes for intense eye-candy and serves as quite an immersive backdrop for the games action-based play system… and by action-based I mean that JG:E provides innovation by throwing away the character classes and pen-and-paper style dice rolls for hit chance and damage persistent though every successful MMO to date in favor of a “twitch based” live combat…so basically this MMO will be based more on player skill rather than how much time you have to repeatedly farm Karazhan for the leetest gear for your class. That’s right, no action bars, no skill trees, no lengthy cool downs, just frantic reticule-based shooting and real-time dogfights. Player skill is even required for tasks such as docking your vessel at a station, a procedure during which player ships must approach at the correct angle and velocity to physically pilot their ship into a station’s docking bay.

I’ll be sitting, parked and giggling as I watch newbie pilots crash into stations like these while learning to properly dock.

The flight model found in JG:E will be a reworked version of the JG:C physics described above, allowing for full vessel control including pitch, roll and yaw, with thruster control allowing for the obvious forward thrusters and afterburners as well as strafing thrust for left, right, up and down. JG:C’s Newtonian flight physics are in full effect, allowing players to slide around targets and even fly backwards, however this time there is a switchable “inertial dampener” system in place that give things a more “arcade-like” or “stickier” feel for novice pilots or pretty much anyone that needs to do some tight maneuvering, and given JG:E’s wide array of diverse locales containing hazards such as dense asteroid belts or disused ship foundries (rife with broken-down husks of massive capitol vessels), it’s this gamer’s opinion that you’ll find yourself switching them on and off pretty regularly depending on the current terrain you need to navigate. Another solid win in the control department is JG:E’s full support of analog joysticks and HOTAS (hands-on-throttle-and-stick) flight control setups, allowing for an incredibly genuine and totally immersive experience.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4AjNRdmMJ0

While the details of the character creation system are still firmly placed under wraps by the developer, it is known that players will be divided into three separate factions: the industrious yet corrupt Solarian Commonwealth, the firmly religious Quantar Paths and the militaristic Octavian Empire, with several NPC-only factions like the secretive Hyperial Protectorate, the technologically advanced Anamath (believed to be extinct), the overtly hostile Conflux and a pirate faction known only as The Infernals. Each faction hails from a separate section of space and feature, yep, you guessed it, even more eye-candy in the form of highly varied star system design and vastly different tech. These three playable races set the stage for some interesting PvP and RvR action in the form of open-world Player vs. Player skirmishes as well as instanced battles based on flag capturing games and, my personal favorite, a squad based “destroy the other team’s battleship” game who’s name implies that it’ll be simply…intense. As for RvR (or Realm-vs.-Realm, a concept known well to Dark Age of Camaelot and Warhammer Online players), players will be able to seize control of sector control bases in contested systems, claiming that system for their faction and gaining themselves and their compatriots certain bonuses while in the sector until the base is either destroyed or assaulted and reclaimed by an opposing army. Another original gameplay mechanic devised for JG:E is called “soft grouping” where multiple players engaging the same hostile target will gain experience and loot regardless of whether the participating players are “partied”. This simple idea shines in the fact that it subliminally encourages comradery between players through rewards…I can’t even count the times that I’ve had to watch my character in WoW get crushed by an NPC monster as members of my own faction simply run past without so much as a second glance or even an offer for assistance, or alternatively having quest-related creatures “ninja-ed” from my party by members of my own force.

Large-scale fleet engagements await you in the universe of JG:E.

Thus far, NETdevil has been allowing information regarding this unique title to trickle from their offices at a painfully slow rate, with even the release date slated to an ambiguous “Q1 2009” with a closed beta launching “sometime soon” (The beta can be applied for on their official site -- although with keys being doled out in clusters of 1000 and nearly 150,000 applications as of mid-November the chances of getting into the closed beta are slim at best). From what we’ve seen so far, JG:E is shaping up to be possibly the best new MMO released in some time. Combining furious action with RPG style progression and some impressively realistic space flight, Jumpgate: Evolution gets my vote as THE title to watch for in the coming months. Look for my forthcoming full review either a few weeks after the game launches, or earlier if I can finagle my way into the beta. For more information, visit their official site at www.jumpgateevolution.com or their meticulously updated wiki at www.jumpgateevo.wikia.com.

I’ll leave you with an in-game footage reel to wet your space battle appetite. Enjoy.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cX491A9aLk

Note: Thanks to IGN.com for hosting a whole ton of images with handy-dandy embedding HTML.

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