Not to say I'm entirely depressed since I'm am enjoying freedom while friends are going back to college for another year of school, homework, studying and tests. I do miss UC Irvine for the social outings I did. I'm pretty much done with one of the game projects and am looking at finishing the others on my own; however, my time has been taken up quite often recently by things like looking for job offers, updating my resume, posting availability everywhere that relates to the game industry. Job hunting has definitely been depressing since the economy is bad, people aren't hiring, and the game industry is sinking. A lot of the business in the game industry is turning to China since their economy is now booming with success. Japan is unfortunately falling behind in the game industry with quality games diminishing. At the Tokyo Game Show this past week, Keiji Inafune of Megaman Renown expressed his concern about the game industry in Japan saying: "I think Japanese gaming is dead," Inafune told the New York Times. "When I say these things, I'm called a traitor. But I love Japan. I want to save it." Kotaku's rebuttal to his quote is that Japan is still flourishing with companies like "Nintendo." I was thinking the same exact thing when I read the article about the interview with Inafune, but I also understand what he is concerned about. Nintendo alone is not going to hold the industry in Japan by itself, and it is evident that they're becoming an international company rather than just a local one. Nintendo didn't even attend TGS and put all their efforts into E3 instead to get international attention. Nintendo took the show when I was there, as people waited 1-4 hours in line to play ANY of Nintendo's titles and merchandise. What's happening is that the most well known companies such as Nintendo, Sega, Capcom, Atlus and others may still be around, but are slowly losing their once numerous support they had just a short while ago. Within 4 days of the release of Halo: Reach (which looks incredible), Microsoft confirmed that 31 million players were playing on X-Box Live. According to Inafune, the much anticipated Resident Evil 5 sold 5 million copies from release. What happened? I bought the game and already beat it with my sister and admit that it's not like the older RE games, but it's good. Inafune's concern is that Japan is 5 years behind the market in the gaming industry in terms of technology, graphics, and trend. I don't think that's the case. Part of the huge success of China's market in the gaming industry at the moment is because of free online games. This popular trend started in Korea and has made most of their profit in Japan, China, Singapore, and Malaysia, not Korea itself. The average person in Asia doesn't have the same luxury we do in the United States to buy so many unnecessary goods and entertainment. With free online games, you could choose to pay small amounts of money to buy items and perks for your characters in the game. This method of marketing is called "micro-transaction." There are literally billions of people in Asia, and when you add up all those small payments of $5, they become millions. More over, China are having more research and knowledge in the game industry which allows companies from the U.S. and Europe outsource all their jobs to China for dirt cheap. All the entry-level positions, available positions, and business partners are being given to people in China so that people here and Europe don't have to pay as much! It's just like the industrial revolution of the past and corporate companies of the present! Well, it can't be China alone that's causing the diminishing sales of Japanese games, so what else? The economy is bad, and people try to save money. What are people doing in the United States? They're also playing free online games from Korea and China. Japan has a few as well localized in America. American companies saw this trend and thought to use it within their market, thus Zynga. They have made Billions just on their design on Facebook (which I find evil and ingenious at the same time). That, and people buy one game and play it forever. When did this happen? Last year, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game is $60 and is STILL $60 because Activision knows that people will still buy it. People can complain how broken the game is with all their bugs, noobtoobing, and imbalanced gameplay, BUT the game is fun nonetheless. It can't be denied that MW2 is a good game as several million players still log on and rack up hundreds of hours onto it each month. It's the same with World of Warcraft. It's over-rated to a lot of people, but ultimately it's fun and is $15 a month compared to $60 a month. For me, I've been playing free online PC games for the longest time, but have recently gotten back to playing PS3, Gamecube, PS2, and Wii more now since I am trying to learn more about games, design, the industry and everything in-between.
Okay, so from that ridiculously long rant, what am I trying to say?
-The economy sucks and the game industry is poor, no one will hire me! They rather pay a few dollars an hour to someone in China. That, or every other position is senior level with a requirement of 5-10+ years of game industry experience.
-I'm not getting any money, games are expensive and I'm trying to play a lot of them since I've missed out on so much because of 18+ years of school. And I keep losing time each day to play them because I keep having to look for job positions and send out resumes.
-Family and friends are nagging me each time I see them to get a job. I know they care for me, but it's depressing being reminded that I have no work experience and will have a difficult time finding a job with the possibility that I might have to move far away in order to find a job.
Man, this is turning out to be a really long blog. But yeah, it doesn't really stop there:
I had the opportunity to beta test 2 more games: Legendary Champions & Final Fantasy XIV
[Legendary Champions - PC]
Made by a Chinese company and feels very much like a game made by Perfect World, but is not. The game is based off the Three Kingdom history of Ancient China with the twist in story. Cao Cao was backed into a corner in a battle against Shu and decided to use black sorcery to summon the greatest warriors of all time and space to fight for him. So you have people like Mulan the female warrior, Sinbad the pirate, Beowulf with a chainsaw, etc. in the game as a summon for your character. The trailer portrays the game to be rather exciting and intuitive. It caught my attention when it said it has "DotA-like map style PvP gameplay." Time for the break down: The graphics were outdated, but bearable. The animations to the models were awkward during battle as characters and enemies teleport, slide while attacking, get glitched, or some other problem. I loved some of the music in the game, but not all of them seemed very cohesive, and sound effects were rather generic. The gameplay was sadly slow and repetitive. In the first 30 or so minutes, I spent my time walking around the town and talking to everyone the NPCs directed me to and leveled up to 6 just from it. When it was time to fight, I spent nearly 1-2 minutes fighting one enemy. I chose a mender (healer) for my first character, but sheesh, a game shouldn't have the player whacking the same enemy for so long with the same 2 attacks available for them. When I finish a quest to kill 10 bears, I get another quest to do the same for another enemy. It then repeats itself in a mindless cycle of pointless killing. Twelve Sky 2 did a much better job in keeping the player interested, even though it followed the same method of gameplay.
The good thing about traveling in this game is that you start off with a horse, unlike Heroes of Three Kingdoms where you auto-route and walk for ten ridiculous minutes. Sadly, there's still quite a bit of traveling in Legendary Champions that can't be avoided. One thing I really loved about the game though was summoning your Champion and owning everything around you with one hit. The problem was that you can only summon your champion for 1 minute and can't summon them again for half an hour. I can't go on playing a game I enjoy playing 1/30th of the time. I waited the entire summer for this game, and it disappointed me.
[Final Fantasy XIV - PC]
I may be very biased on this game.....because I LOVE FINAL FANTASY! Yes, I know the huge gripes and complaints people had about FF13 and now FF14, but I still love it because it's Final Fantasy. That doesn't necessarily mean I'll love the game itself. So a spent a good amount of time customizing my character and going through the cut-scenes. I never played FF11, so I wasn't sure what to expect of the battle system. The fighting is still turn-based, but you can move around and plan it. It was archaic, but somewhat satisfying. I walked around town and realized I was going to be there for a while. There's a lot of talking and roaming around, but nothing as bad as Legendary Champions or Heroes of Three Kingdoms. I noticed the game was going to be more about the experience and story rather than the core game mechanics as all Final Fantasy games tend to be. Graphics were breath-taking, animations were superb, sound is excellent and music was surprising enjoyable (I found myself humming to it while I played), gameplay is a bit slow; however, if I ever had the time and money, I'd probably invest it playing through the game. Well, I like the game, but everyone that knows me knows that I don't play pay2play online games. I'm glad I got to try it and say I at least know what it looks and feels like. The disappointing part would probably be that my computer could not handle the game very well and so I graphically lagged a lot and had long load times. If you're an avid online gamer or Final Fantasy fan, I say go buy it.
My friend and I had a theory that FF11 and FF14 weren't even Final Fantasy games to begin with but was transformed into one after Square-Enix picked it up for publishing. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is like that (coming out soon!). I'm also guessing that Golden Axe: Beast Rider is like that (I'm playing through that right now). Which reminds me of my 1 week - 1 completed game mission:
[Mirror's Edge - PS3]
I BEAT IT! And I finished the game in normal mode without shooting a single person. It was an incredibly difficult task, and I was very tempted to shoot everyone on the last part, but I resisted and came through. The game is extremely fluid and graphically pleasing. I could see a lot of the textures and models were downgraded just so it could fit the sheer amount of data into the game, which I find to be acceptable. The presentation of the game is breath taking and immerses the player into the world rather well. The story wasn't very deep or thorough, but it was satisfying and gratifying in the end. I hear that a 2nd one is in the making. I will consider buying it as I've really enjoyed the challenge, puzzles, action, story, characters, and the experience it gave. I liked it so much, I think I might play through it again in the future. But next time, I shoot everyone!
[Last week's Challenge: Golden Axe - Beast Rider]
I'm still working on it actually. I could have finished it last week, but the game is so frustratingly bad and broken that I couldn't bear to sit more than 2-3 hours playing it. So far, I hate it. I'll get back more on it once I finish it.
[MAG (Massive Action Game) - PS3]
MAG is a first-person shooter played exclusively online with 64-256 players at once. I've been looking out for this game ever since it game out an finally got it used for $40. The game is rather challenging when there is limited communication between people (not everyone is going to buy a headset, I didn't). New weapons can't be acquired unless you gain the skills to reach them, which can take a while. I find the music to be unfitting for the game, but I also find it humorous, so it's okay. The game plays similar to most fps games like modern warfare. All levels play with each other, so it sucks when I'm level 6 with no items or weapons while I'm going against level 60 snipers with power scopes, little recoil, and extra health. I've been spawn killed before, but it doesn't happen often. Definitely not like Modern Warfare where you get spawn killed 10 times in a row and have carpet bombing, helicopters, grenades, knives and machine guns killing you the second you spawn where you had died. The gameplay is slower than Modern Warfare since there is a countdown between deaths before respawn, and it varies in time. I haven't figured out what makes it shorter or longer, but waiting can be bothersome when it's over 10 seconds. Either way, I enjoy the progression of levels and large scale matches in the game. In fact, I'm going to go play it right now since I didn't play anything the whole day yet.
Yup, it's been depressing lately.....
