Remake Mistake
October 21st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
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You have the money and most importantly the desire for more money required to make a game, but you have no ideas, nothing that will capture the imagination of the fat-walleted public. There are two ways to solve this problem: remake an old game, or remake an old game but pretend you haven’t by slapping a different name on it.
The second variety is shockingly common. These are usually sequels or spin-offs that follow exactly the same pattern as the last game. The most obvious example is Pokémon, which not only releases the exact same game every single time and brings it out twice, but in different coloured boxes to double the hassling of the parent.
After selling Crash Bandicoot for undisclosed squillions of monies, creators tried to emulate Naughty Dog with a host of similar animal games hoping to recreate the magic, but it never quite worked – remember Ty the Tasmanian Tiger? Lame, Electronic Arts. I like my Austral-Asian creatures from the major continent thank you very much.
The other type is straightforward remakes and this is actually much trickier and needs to be handled quite delicately. You may want to bring your once-successful pixel baby to a new audience, but there are hordes of die-hard fans of the original, ready to shit on your doorstep if you screw up.
The latest game in line for this treatment is GoldenEye 007, originally released in 1997 for the Nintendo 64, to cash in on the recent Bond movie. It was an overwhelming critical and financial success. It’s remembered as one of the best first-person shooters ever made and topped dozens of pointless “best of the decade, century, millennium” polls.
13 years on however, is there anything a remake can offer? Better graphics of course, and more interactivity considering it will be released for the Wii (my guess is some Wiimote action on Natalya Simonova). For an FPS, the Wii is not a good choice. The Wii is for cartoons, for pretending to chop celery; not sexy violent Bond action. They can’t be marketing it at kids, so is it for the Dads who played it in the 90s?
The market is flooded with realistic FPS; Halo Reach just came out last month, so who is going to buy GoldenEye 007? There isn’t even a Bond film coming out and apparently the plan is to delete Bronson and sellotape Daniel Craig’s face in there. Wicked. But in this cruel cynical world, I can’t help but feel this shameless cash-in will pay off.
Civilization V Review
October 5th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
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You may have noticed the distinct lack of nerd around the place the last week: the library is empty, grammar mistakes have gone unnoticed and Wikipedia disputes are down 40%. Don’t worry folks, come out of your bunker and put that rifle away; the zombie revolution hasn’t started quite yet. Civilization 5 hit the virtual and actual shelves on September 24th and anyone with blood lust and €50 note has been glued to their computer ever since.
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| Take that, peasant! |
If you’ve never played before and have no idea what I’m talking about – Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy games. You start in 4000BC with a settler and you have the span of human history to build an empire and take over the world. Global domination can be achieved through violence or through culture and diplomacy or usually a bit of both. Although since the original in 1991 game play has remained largely similar, things are adjusted and refined with each release. In the 5 years since the less than impressive Civilization 4’s release, game technology has moved on a bit so I was very curious to see what was in store.
The thing that struck me most was how difficult it was. Game play is much slower than before. In Civ 4 you’d zip along to nukes and rockets in an afternoon – 2 hours into Civ 5 and I was still using Hoplites. Resources are no longer unlimited; if you find ‘6 Iron’ it means you can only build 6 things that use iron. The new scarcity of resources makes empire building crucial and the always tricky ‘Diplomacy Victory’ even more elusive.
Another important element of Civilization 5 is the introduction of City-States. These are tiny one city countries don’t compete for empire. To be honest I found them a little pointless. It’s very expensive to maintain an alliance with them and trading is almost nonexistent. They join their allies in war but during campaigns I didn’t see a single troop coming from them. If you decide to hell with it all and attack, the other civilizations treat you like an utter bastard.
But if the amount of work I got done this weekend is any gauge, then this is a great game. It’s like the sexy love child of Civ 3 and 4 – the brilliant strategy of 3 with the swish streamlined beauty of 4. Best of all, you don’t have to listen to Leonard Nemoy giving you the history of your latest discovery every five seconds (I fucking know what pottery is, Spock). It’s fun, addictive and an excellent way to work out your lust for power without any unsightly genocides.
