I can't stand 'em. I have no problem with mini-games per se; it is specifically optional mini-games that get my goat. You know what I mean, the kind that you can skip without hurting the game but if you play all the way through are guaranteed some sort of reward. Like the shooting gallery game in Resident Evil 4. Or the, uh, shooting gallery game in Dead Space. The Shenmue series is one of my favorites of all time, but it is a serious offender in this category; though the games include required mini-games (which I have no quarrel with), they are also chalk full of optional challenges that don't need to be completed to finish the game.

These mini-games follow a pattern. The challenge must carry some sort of reward, otherwise it's just a way to waste time. You know that when Isaac in Dead Space interrupts his attempts to get off the alien-infested ship so he can partake in a little zero-G air ball, it's because he wants to get some big reward at the end. Even worse are the games that rate you behind the scenes; it's like, you finish the game, and the screen says "Congratulations on finishing the game. However, you failed to find all of the furry bunnies. Your rank is E-." I hate that. It's bullshit. If they wanted me to find all the bunnies then then should have made that part of the required conditions for winning. Look, I am sorry that I failed to carry out all of the books in the goddamned library without dropping any of them three days in a row, Master, but could you please give me your special advice that you promised anyway so I can get on with the freaking story?

Here's the problem with optional challenges: they are very rarely ever the same level of quality as the rest of the game. When development teams responsible for these games see their deadline approaching, the optional mini-games always take a back-seat to the rest of the content because, hey, it's optional. Required games, on the other hand, get played by the team a lot more because they are required for progression, and as a natural consequence they end up being a lot more fun. Carrying books out of a library? LAME. Catching leaves from the tree outside the library between your fingers. AWESOME. That's how it always works--optional content always loses out to the required content when time is short and push comes to shove.

Now the real deal-breaker, at least for me, is that optional challenges are not really optional. I want to beat the game, and that means BEATING THE GAME. I mean all of it! I got stuck for about three months on the original Shenmue because I refused to progress in the game until I had achieved first place in the forklift race mini-game. You know what, that mini-game sucks! If you so much as brush a wall with your forklift your velocity instantly goes to zero and you have immediately lost. I played that stupid thing about one hundred times, to the point at which I was able to get second place every single time, and yet I never, not even once, came in first. Finally a friend beat it and discovered that the great reward for such a difficult challenge is a miniature forklift item that says "first place," at which point I gave up and just played the rest of the game out. The shooting game in Dead Space was probably intended to be a fun diversion, maybe a way to give out an achievement or something, but I spent an entire hour beating that stupid thing. It wasn't fun, it wasn't ultimately rewarding, and it didn't "break up the game play" in a good way. It was a challenge that I decided to complete, and when it was done I swore one last time and moved on with nothing to show for it but a new power node.

So, to bring this rant to a close. Developers: make your goddamn mini games required for progression. If you do that and your game is no longer fun, it means the mini games suck. Fix them or cut them. Just, whatever you do, don't make them optional.

In the last post I talked about how game reviewers often approach their reviews of games as if the games are consumer products. They evaluate each feature in isolation from the others, and at the end assign a score based on some attempt to objectively determine the "quality" of the game. This is in stark contrast to reviews of other media, such as books and film and music, which are reviewed based on the reviewer's subjective opinion of the work. Actually, it's not just reviewers that assume this attitude. Just look at the back of the box of any game: the game is invariably described in terms of the features that it contains. Consider the "Product Features" section from Amazon.com's page on Resident Evil 4 for the Wii: Advanced AI makes enemies smarter than ever and use their cunning in deadly attacks Use the Action button for better player control New 'Aim and Shoot' targeting for zeroing in on enemies with your weapons Behind the camera view for intuitive movement Conversations and monologues can be heard in real time Now, in addition to being pretty poor English, this list of "features" fails really dramatically to effectively describe Resident Evil 4. They are similar to the back of the box (though the box at least contains a few plot details). Now compare that list of features with the product descriptions of the first Resident Evil film (a synopsis of the plot is given), the Resident Evil soundtrack CD (samples can be listened to), and even this Resident Evil book (the first page can be read). All of these other forms of entertainment give some sort of information about the content of the work, not just a sterile description of "features." The game page is much more similar to the page for the Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Controller, which is a consumer product and, as such, contains a list of product features. So the games-as-products mindset doesn't begin and end with reviewers. Games are advertised this way, and marketing makes a big deal out of the special features that each game contains (consider the common tactic of releasing a "game play video" to show off some unique mechanic; Alone in the Dark 5 is a recent example). Reviewers are not solely to blame for this product-oriented approach (and actually, I think that many reviewers try very hard to give readers good information without realizing that their style of writing is vasty different than other forms of media). The real question is, why does this discrepancy exist? Why are games treated differently than other types of products? Maybe it has to do with the persistent association with toys. The Nintendo Entertainment System's primary competitor in 1985 was Teddy Ruxpin, and to this day many people consider video games a branch of children's toys rather than a medium (which is also the cause of a lot of controversy surrounding video game violence, I think). Or it might have something to do with video games being interactive: perhaps by enumerating features that are related to how the game is played, marketing is attempting to show how playing this game will be better than playing anything that you've ever played before (which, if you think about it, makes game reviewer's tendency to compare games to other titles make more sense). Or maybe it is because games are sold with PCs and game consoles (which are certainly consumer products), and the product-ness of these host platforms "rubs off" on the media as a whole. Those aren't bad explanations, and they probably are at least partially true, but I think that there's a more important reason that trumps them all: the price point. Games cost too much, both to develop and for the consumer. High development costs push the street price up, and the street price is extremely high compared to other media. Here in California, it costs $10 to go to a movie in a theater. Renting a movie is around $3.00. Buying a DVD is usually around $15. A new novel costs between $8 and $30 (hardbacks are more expensive, but paperbacks are always available eventually). CDs cost $15, and though that form of media is on the way out, it is being replaced by digital distribution models like iTunes that work out to just slightly less. But a new game for your Xbox360 Most PS2 games didn't review well. or PS3 is $59.99. A game for the Wii is probably $49.99. Though budget titles do exist, they are the exception rather than the rule (and usually hover between $20 and $30). That means a new game can cost four times the cost of a new DVD! Now, some might make an argument here about the length of a given game vs a movie or book. But I think that "length" is just another technical detail, not a real metric of quality. If you read the reviews of The Orange Box, you might have noticed reviewer after reviewer harping on the amazing "value" that the set provides (several high-quality games for the price of one). But no reviewer rewards a long book for having "value" because it takes you longer to read it; in fact, excessive length is often considered a negative when books and films are reviewed. And other media isn't priced based on its length; Neal Stephenson's excellent Cryptonomicon only costs $8.99 despite its lengthy 1168 pages. His interesting In the Beginning... There Was the Command Line is a thin volume (160 pages), and it still costs about the same. No, the "duration of entertainment" isn't a factor in pricing other types of media, and I don't see why it should be for games either (and, as an aside, 100-hour RPGs don't cost more than 5 hour adventure games, so even within the game market length doesn't seem to be a factor). The problem with expensive games is that a lot of games are actually pretty bad, and the consumer can't tell which are good and which are bad by looking at the box. When I did research for my article on sales vs game scores, I found that, across all PS2 games, the majority of titles got a rating lower than 80%. About 20% of all PS2 games got "good" reviews and the rest got mediocre to poor. That's in keeping with Sturgeon's Law, which stipulates that most things are really crap, which I think applies to movies and books as well. The difference, of course, is that for $8 - $20, the amount of risk that the consumer assumes when buying a book or movie that they know nothing about is very small. $50 - $60 is a much larger investment, and therefore the consumer is likely to be much more careful about what he buys. My theory is that the high price point of games moves them out of the "disposable media" category and into the "product investment" category in the consumer's mind. In that context, the consumer needs to know if his purchase is really going to be worth the money. And as I mentioned in the last post, things like plot are subjective and are not guaranteed to be liked by everyone, so marketing, reviewers, and in turn, consumers, fall back on objective facts about the game in an attempt to define where that $59.99 is going. You can see this mindset everywhere in the game industry if you look for it; consider, for example, the customers who got angry that Halo 3 only supports "640p", as if 80 pixels of screen real estate have any tangible effect on the quality of the game. You can see this mentality in the way that games and game hardware is marketed: the PS3 had better be able to make games that we've never seen before; otherwise what's the point of spending all that money for it? And I think that endless flame wars amongst fanboys usually boil down to insecurity about a purchasing decision; once a fan has made up his mind to drop his cash on a specific game or system, it's common to really want to believe that the decision was correct and the money not wasted. The price point for games, and, to a lesser extent, game systems, changes the tone and context within which games are perceived in the market. If all games cost $15 new, I don't think we'd have very many discussions about quality in terms of feature sets; at a lower price, the risk of failure is lower and people will be more willing to try new things, and I think the conversation would shift to being about the content rather than being about the technology. Alas, until games can reach a much larger market, or until they can break out of the never-ending technical arms race, there's not much hope that the street price of video games will fall any time soon. You can see, though, that some companies are trying; Nintendo's strategy of cheaper hardware, cheaper games, and a wider target audience is definitely designed with these goals in mind. The jury is still out on whether or not they'll actually be able to make a long-term difference, though some people think that the evidence is already clear.

What if you opened up the paper one day and read a review for a new book that went like this: "This book was printed on the new XBS series of printers, and you can really see the improvement in quality of the words on the page. The font is crisp and easy-to-read, and the page numbers are all carefully arranged at the upper corners of each page. One thing that's not so hot is the texture of the front and back covers--it's just seems a little too flat and smooth. We would have preferred a little more variety. Overall, a solid book. 4/5 Stars." Maybe on the next page there might be a movie review: "The explosion effects in particular look really nice, which is not a surprise since this film was shot on the latest high-end digital cameras and composited using a $200,000 editing system. We did notice some aliasing when in the blood particles when two of the characters get into a fight, but it wasn't enough to ruin the experience. The water scenes, unfortunately, look really bad; I don't know if the camera crew just picked the wrong day for shooting or what, but the dialog scene in front of the lake looks really unrealistic. The alien ship looks all right, but it's just not as impressive this time around as it was in the original film. 60%." What would a review of a new album look like in this fictional paper? "While it's impressive that the four man set can create such a diverse sound, you can tell that they had to cut some corners in order to accommodate their restricted resources. The high-hat, for example, seems totally underused; we only counted three instances in the first track where it is audible. Maybe if the band upgraded to Gibson guitars they'd be able to achieve real brilliance, but as it is we only see a glimmer. And the vocals are pretty old-school; it's hard to go back to just one person singing now that the industry norm has progressed to 2- and 3-man vocal teams. I say give this one a rental." If you read these reviews in your local paper, you'd probably be pretty annoyed. I mean, the reviews don't tell you anything substantive about the works that they are critiquing; the focus is entirely on details of the production, not the content itself. Who cares if the words on the page are extra crisp? What you want to know is if the book is interesting or not! This is how game journalists, for the most part, review games. There are a couple of noteworthy exceptions out there, but the majority of critics review games like consumer products rather than like other entertainment media. I mean, if you're going to buy a new camera or something, you probably want to know what version of USB it supports and how many megapixels it shoots, and if you are a little more hardcore then maybe you care about how the white balance can be adjusted. Critical reviews of such consumer products are focused on the feature set of each product. Games are often reviewed the same way: as an enumeration and consideration of the list of features the game offers (quality of graphics, number of levels, improvement over another game, etc). But reviews of most non-game media are focused on critiquing whether the work is worth your time or not. Don't get me wrong, technical details still have a place in such reviews (it's normal for critics to point out bad performances by actors, etc), but the main message of most book, film, and music reviews are "was this thing interesting or funny or enjoyable?" And "interesting, fun, and enjoyable" are all things that have very little to do with technical details. Is Phoenix Wright a technically complex game? No. Is it a lot of fun? Yeah, it is. But it gets scores lower than it deserves because it's built on simple 2D graphics and text. I want you to consider this excellent review of the movie The Italian Job by film critic David Edelstein. Go on, read it--I'll wait. Edelstein opens the review by enumerating all of the reasons that The Italian Job is a bad film: it's a remake, it's an advertising vehicle for the MINI Cooper, and it's just one cliche after another. Then he spends the rest of the article describing why, despite all these technical flaws, he loved the film so much. Edelstein understands that what makes a film good is not its special effects, or even its script or its editing or the performances of its actors; good films are those that make the viewer feel something. The Italian Job was an exciting film for Edelstein, and his review is consequently glowing. Part of the problem with game reviews, I think, is that game journalists often try to offer objective analysis of the games that they review. It's easier to be objective about something if you just stick to the obvious facts, which is maybe why games get treated like products rather than works of art. But in reviews of other media, there's no attempt to be objective; enjoyment is intrinsically subjective anyway, so why bother? The reviewers don't all have to agree, and all you have to do to get quality reviews is find a critic with whom your tastes are aligned. Like every other form of media, games are more than the sum of their parts; the only real metric by which we should be judging games is "is it fun." In the next post on this subject, I'll discuss my theory on why the industry works this way.

You can learn something about the American economy by watching horror movies. It's true: when times are good and Hollywood is less risk-averse, we are treated to subtle, interesting, and original horror movies. When the economy is shitty (I hate the word "downturn," it's so saccharin), Hollywood responds by reverting to tried-and-true vehicles for turning a profit from teenage audiences (read: whatever worked before; usually sex and gore). During these times the penny-pinchers are looking for "sure bets," films that they can count on to make a profit, even if that profit isn't ultra blockbuster. I think that there is probably enough historical evidence to make a Horror Film Quality economic index at this point. Where such an index to exist, it would be (correctly) indicating that the American economy is in the toilet right now. Take the up-and-coming release of The Eye, a remake of a Hong Kong film from 2003, this time starring white people speaking English. The thing is, the original film wasn't all that great (at least, I didn't think so), and by all accounts the remake is even worse. The concept for the film is interesting enough (a woman undergoes eye surgery to restore her vision and subsequently can see ghosts), but the reason that Hollywood decided to remake it not because it is a good film but rather because it is safe. All the risk was taken back in 2003 when the film was originally made, so all Hollywood has to do is reshoot it with some white actors, throw in some superfluous CG, and call it a day. The whole endeavor is really cheap, so profit is almost guaranteed. How does this process anger me? Let me count the ways. First of all, I'm constantly incensed by Hollywood's need to "sanitize" foreign films for American audiences by inserting white actors and changing the script into English. God forbid we have a movie with an asian (or Indian, or Middle Eastern, etc) protagonist, who could even (blasphemy of blasphemies) speak a different language. Heaven help us if the details of the plot are not explained to us in such excruciating detail that we actually have to think about the film on our own. And it's a well known fact that no movie with subtitles could possibly be enjoyed by American audiences (oh how quickly we forget). Secondly, for all of its cash Hollywood is almost totally unable to innovate in this genre because films are treated as a business rather than an art. There's nothing wrong with business--you need money to fund art, after all--but good art requires risk, and business is the process of removing risk in order to maintain profitability over the long term. So instead Hollywood remakes like The Eye, The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water (not to mention non-horror films like Shall we Dance) are made on the backs of the people who took the risk and made something interesting for a change. These are usually minor film makers with almost no budget, working without the aid of high-end special effects teams or multi-million dollar marketing campaigns. Once they've proven that a new idea might actually be something that viewers want to see, Hollywood can just pluck up the rights, discharge a remake, and take all the credit (and profit) for somebody else's hard work. That doesn't help the genre progress, it doesn't expand the size of the audience, and it certainly doesn't encourage the propagation of original films. It's a one-sided business weighted entirely in Hollywood's favor. Finally, films like The Eye are hardly worth remaking! If they enjoyed the original, why not just re-release it here with English subtitles and a small marketing blitz? That'd be far cheaper than reshooting the whole thing, and they have a chance of creating an instant cult classic. Besides, the critics prefer the original versions of these films almost every single time--it's not like improvements are being made by Hollywood. The original Eye isn't such a great film, but it's better than the American rendition. Hollywood remakes are like Bizarro versions of real films: flakey and nonsensical. The industry and its audience would be far better off if the original films were just released verbatim in this country. Maybe when the economy corrects itself there will be a return to interesting American films (or even better, a surge of foreign imports), but for the moment the pickings are pretty slim.

I should probably apologize for the previous post. My New Years resolution is to stop reading internet forums (except the one here, of course) because I realized that I was spending a huge amount of my valuable free time reading and participating in arguments about topics that have absolutely no value whatsoever. I really enjoy online discussion when it's interesting and informative; there's nothing better than reading a really insightful post by some anonymous internet guy and feeling like you've actually just learned something. But I quit forums because 99% of the posts seemed to be argument for the sake of argument, with almost zero actual interesting discussion. So I just went cold turkey a few weeks back and I have to say that the effect has been like quitting smoking--all of a sudden I have much more free time and energy than I had before.

But I'm sort of interested in what it is about the internet that causes people to defend some meaningless, trivial point as if it is a matter of life and death. I mean, look at Wikipedia's list of Lamest Edit Wars Ever for an excruciating number of examples of people getting into intense verbal battles over the spelling of a word, the heritage of some long-dead aristocrat, or whether or not a particular comic is really the first appearance of a particular character. So much energy spent for so little return! These discussions are, as I said in the previous post, asinine because they are not constructive. You can debate whether Resident Evil 4 is horror, action-horror, survival horror, or whatever until the cows come home and neither side will have actually learned anything.

So the previous post was something of an experiment, and it was a little underhanded, which is why I apologize. I deliberately constructed that post to first complain about asinine arguments and then proceed to make such an argument myself (though I did try to actually include some interesting stuff). I was interested in which point would garner the most responses: the point about opinion wars of trivial topics being stupid, or the point about whether Resident Evil 4 is a horror game or not.

Well, it's been about 48 hours since that post, and I'm not sure whether to call the experiment a success or a failure. On the one hand, the post worked as designed: it prompted a huge amount of discussion about one of the points and very little about the other. On the other hand, the level of "discussion" was much more intense than I was expecting. The test wasn't exactly fair because once people started to respond, I sort of egged the discussion on by reiterating my arguments from the post. As of this writing there are 29 comments (including a few of my own) to the previous post, which I think makes it the most commented-on piece I've ever written. That's right, the post about whether or not Resident Evil 4 is horror or not got more responses than the post on racism in Resident Evil 5, more responses than the article on Japanese horror that I spent months writing, and even more responses than my controversial decrying of Cold Fear. While a couple of people got my poorly-communicated point, a lot of other people took the proposed argument far too seriously. To tell you the truth, it's pretty depressing that some asinine (if inflammatory) post can generate this level of response while the much more constructive and informative posts hardly garner a comment.

So, in light of the rather scary result of this experiment, I have a request and a proposal. First, I would like to humbly request that we spend our time on this site at least attempting to have constructive discourse. I don't mind arguments of opinion, but if you are going to post something about how you feel, please go into detail about why you feel that way; even if we don't agree with you, it's much more interesting to learn about your perspective than if you just say "No, wrong, here's how it is." The previous post was an experiment that I'm not excited to repeat. I know it's like this all over the internet, but my request is that we at least try to rise above squabbling about truly trivial topics.

In addition, I'd like to propose some topics that, while related to the argument put forth in my previous post, are infinitely more interesting. Maybe we can spend some time talking the following things:

• What about Resident Evil 4 is different than previous games in the series. What is similar? Why do you think Capcom changed the formula the way they did?
• What design aspects of Resident Evil 4 improve the game's ability to scare the player? Which aspects damage that ability?
• If you enjoyed Resident Evil 4, what did you like about it (be specific!). If you hated it, what was the problem (again, specificity is key here--ranting usually has a very low signal to noise ratio).

Or we can talk about some other topic; we don't have to stick to these prompts. I hope that future discussions will be more like conversations and reflections rather than opinion wars.

This picture is not out of date, I swear. If you run a site about video games, or read message boards about video games, or even give Wikipedia articles on video games a passing glance, you are sure to find people arguing about asinine details of unimportant topics. I'm sure this is true for all kinds of subjects, especially those that have to do with popular culture, but since most of my internet surfing time is devoted to video game related sites, I've noticed it most dramatically in relation to video games. This site is no exception, of course, and today I am going to present an argument for an asinine detail of an unimportant topic that I've seen come up a few times: whether Resident Evil 4 should be considered a horror game or not. There are a few arguments in particular on this topic that I want to address, and I've enumerated them below. My real message here is that classification of media is an inexact science, and therefore it is pointless to argue the particulars of any particular classification. That's a little academic and esoteric-sounding, though, so I'm going to use RE4 as a way to ground that assertion. Point 1: Resident Evil 4 is an action game, which means it can't possibly be horror.. This is a very narrow-minded viewpoint that I've come across several times. The idea, I guess, is that horror games, particularly survival horror games, are required to scare the player by de-emphasizing combat or making it arduous. Previous Resident Evil games have rationed ammo and health, the Silent Hill series prefers bludgeons to guns, and games like Siren make combat extremely difficult on purpose. As I've written about in the past, many horror games seek to make the protagonist more vulnerable by weakening them in combat in order to increase tension. The problem with the idea that action and horror are incompatible is that to believe it you must assume that there is only one right way to make a scary video game. Consider horror film: we have no problem lumping Child's Play, Jacob's Ladder, and Werner Herzog's Nosferatu into the same "horror" category even though all three of those films are very different. I think the key requirement for a horror game is that it must attempt to be scary any way it can; whether that is achieved by making the player vulnerable or rationing save items or using excessive darkness is just a detail. I also think that Resident Evil 4 is very clearly designed to scare the player. The key difference between it and previous Resident Evil games is that the protagonist is much more deft at combat and ammo rationing has been removed from the equation. But think about how the Los Ganados swarm Leon from every side; consider the unkillable Chainsaw Man; recall the tension that is induced by those goddamn Regenerators; remember how the first encounter with a Verdugo made you dread the second. These are all classic Resident Evil-isms: they are the developers using over-the-top monsters to put the otherwise tough-looking protagonist in a weak position to induce fear. Making Ashley's life the player's responsibility has a similar effect, as does the extremely personal camera perspective. The fact that Leon cannot move and shoot at the same time should be a clear indication that the developers didn't want to make him so competent that he is never in danger. Compare their approach to the one used in Gears of War, which takes many of its stylistic cues from Resident Evil 4 but fails to induce tension in the same way. Point 2: The controls in Resident Evil 4 are too easy. Other Resident Evil games made controls difficult in order to increase tension. I am constantly astounded by this perspective. Perhaps it's my experience as a games developer that makes me feel this way, but Point 2 is so wrong in Holding up to run towards the camera can't be done in a lot of games. so many ways. It's true that the earlier Resident Evil games were known for their difficult control scheme, but the idea that such a scheme was intentionally used in order to make the player feel even more vulnerable is nonsense. Here is why the original Resident Evil control scheme was made the way it was. When it came out, the Dual Shock controller with its analog sticks had yet to be released; the controller that came with the PS1 only had a simple D-Pad. Most 3rd-person 3D games then (and now) employed a camera that followed behind the player, rotating with the player's movement; when the player pressed "up" on the D-Pad, that translated into "forward" in the world, where forward is whichever direction the camera is facing. Resident Evil, on the other hand, used fixed cameras, cameras that never rotated or moved from their position. This style of camera was a requirement, as Resident Evil used pre-rendered backgrounds (the fixed perspective also helped Resident Evil be so scary). The problem with that approach is that the definition of "forward" changes with every camera cut, and the player has no idea when that is going to happen. If you are holding up to run forward down a hall and then suddenly the camera cuts to an angle perpendicular to the previous view, your character would rotate 90 degrees and run straight into the wall. To compensate for this, the developers at Capcom made the control scheme local to the player rather than related to the camera. Thus "up" on the D-Pad moves the player in the direction that their character is facing. This way the player can run forward across any number of camera cuts without worrying about their character accidentally changing direction. The problem with a character-centric control scheme is that it makes no sense to people at first. The camera-centric scheme that most other games employ makes a lot of sense, and so to play Resident Evil people needed to train themselves to be able to drive their character around like a tank. A few years later Parasite Eve would mostly solve this problem by allowing the player's movement direction to persist across camera cuts; this approach was eventually polished and made standard by Devil May Cry. But in 1996 when Resident Evil shipped, the only reference for this type of game was Alone in the Dark, which used the same sort of control scheme to solve the same problem. Resident Evil's awkward controls were designed out of necessity, not because they served another purpose. If the developers had really wanted to make the control scheme difficult, they wouldn't have included the auto-aim functionality when shooting. More recent Resident Evil games (such as the GameCube remake) have featured other, better control schemes (Type C is awesome) without damaging the horror elements of the game at all. Point 3: Resident Evil 4 isn't horror because it is missing < insert favorite feature from previous games in the series >. A surprisingly large number of people can't get past the fact that the game says Resident Evil on the box and yet the content is so different from previous games. I don't really know what to say to these people; just like everything else, video games change and evolve. You don't have to like the new format, but I think that you are fooling yourself if you believe it to be intrinsically inferior to the previous format. It's a different design with different goals, but it reuses characters and themes from the rest of the series. That's not complicated, right? And there you have it. As promised, this was a lengthy rant on an asinine detail of an extremely unimportant topic. I feel like I've done my part to contribute to the internet, and no longer have to worry about getting into some flame war on a forum in order to fill my asinine topic debate quota for this month.

I know I've been fairly negative lately about the games I am playing. I really don't want to just hate everything that comes my way and hold it up to some impossible golden standard, but damn, there's been so much disappointment in my gaming life lately.

Take Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, for instance. I really, really want to like this game. There are a ton of neat game play ideas in it, and the narrative is so well told. But part way through the game stopped being about horror and started being about shooting, and as a shooter it's pretty miserable (even with my discovery of the Aim button--holy crap it was hard before that). The damage model is too unforgiving, the reload time is way too long, and your short-term goals are really unclear. I've had to use a faq twice now for this game (which I loathe to do), and both times the places that I got stuck at were really trivial tasks. I find myself playing the same section over and over again, not because it is hard to figure out what to do, but because it's so easy to fail. These are sections that the game designers probably intended the player to spend less than five minutes on, and here I am wandering around for hours because an item that I needed to collect refused to be collected when I tried or because the subtitles don't show up reliably. It doesn't help that the health and damage systems, which I discussed in the previous post, are harsh even for a stealth game, and then the designers drop you into situations where gunplay is the only option. In these cases (like the raid on the boat) you basically can't take any hits because you don't have time to heal and even the most trivial hit will kill you eventually thanks to blood loss. Argh!

It is rare for me to feel so mixed about a game. Usually it's a failure at every level, mediocre across the board, or consistently inspired. But with Call of Cthulhu, I'm finding a huge amount of variability in the moment-to-moment quality. The insanity effects, the audio design, the story, and the story telling are all excellent. The graphics are good and I like the character design, the dialog is well-written and well-acted, and the way the narrative branches is really interesting. But on the other hand, the gun play is a disaster (and a central game mechanic), the stealth aspects are unrewarding, and the game is really poor at communicating goals to the player. Some of the puzzles are needlessly obtuse (don't tell me to go find an item that doesn't actually exist, please) and the game has actually crashed on me twice now (though I am running under emulation on a 360, so I should probably give the developer the benefit of the doubt).

Call of Cthulhu should, by rights, be a great game. It's got everything it needs to be absolutely awesome. And yet I feel like I have to punch myself in the face while playing it in order to get to the next awesome thing.

If the player fires at this exact instant, he'll probably miss. Every couple of months I pull out a game that I've started but never completed. I play these games for a while, make some progress, then put them down again, sometimes for months. Usually these are games that just never grabbed me (like Extermination), or games that I was playing before I got interrupted by something else, and this way I eventually am able to complete them. But there are a few titles that keep coming up in the rotation over and over again that I'm never able to make any progress on whatsoever. Right now the worst two offenders are Rule of Rose and Cold Fear. Both of these are terrible games, and actually, they both have similar problems: the game play is so broken that progression is either extremely frustrating or downright impossible. I recently complained about Rule of Rose, so now it's Cold Fear's turn. OK, developers, here's the deal: any time you have a source of infinite damage, you need to match it with a source of infinite health. For example, Cold Fear contains enemies that respawn every time you enter certain rooms. Respawning in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it means that the player can be exposed to a potentially unlimited source of damage. If you do not pair respawning enemies with respawning health and ammo, the player can eventually get into a situation where they have no means to defend or heal themselves and yet are required to progress. At this point the player has little recourse other than starting the game over from scratch, as there is really no way to play any sort of game that only punishes and never rewards. Now, I know that in Cold Fear, you guys at Darkworks made it so that some enemies drop ammo and health, especially if it looks like the player needs it. But it's not enough; if I've run out of ammo shooting the same goddamn respawning monster for the nth time, there's very little chance that I'll survive my next encounter long enough to actually kill the thing and search it for more ammo. And the problem is compounded by the rocking of the boat (which makes it harder to aim than in any other game in this genre), the need to shoot guys in the head, and the lack of a map; you might know where the rear deck storage hold is, but I sure the fuck don't, and every time I backtrack through certain rooms looking for the one unlocked door, you spawn another zombie. Do you see where I am going with this? The game play has me wondering around a ship, trying not to run out of ammo or health against an infinite number of zombies, who by the way can kill me from off the screen before I realize they are there. I got to a point in Rule of Rose where my options are to a) start over from scratch, or b) never play the game again. Progression is impossible given the amount of life I have left and where I managed to save. I'm not quite at that point in Cold Fear yet, but I am close: I played the same section over and over again about 15 times this evening, sometimes dying after 10 minutes of play, sometimes in the first 30 seconds. It's not that the game is hard that frustrates me, it's that it is unfair and arbitrary. Everything else about the game is actually sort of all right, but the whole experience is utterly ruined by a few fatal flaws in its design.

Only one of these scenes is controversial. I've been thinking for a while about how best to address the controversy surrounding the recently-released Resident Evil 5 trailer. The trailer, which depicts Chris Redfield (a white male) shooting black zombies in what appears to be Africa, has raised more than a few eyebrows. Kim Platt is one of many people who find the trailer disgustingly racist, and you can read her thoughts on the matter at her blog Black Looks. Racism is such an inflammatory topic here in America that I've thought pretty long and hard about how best to discuss this matter here without the debate degrading into personal attacks. I think that the problems that this country has with racism and bigotry are extremely important to discuss, but the internet has proven to be full of really offensive people, so I hesitated before posting this. Still, it's such an important topic that I don't think I can really ignore it. Briefly, I want to describe the criticism against the trailer as I understand it. As Platt puts it, the trailer is "problematic on so many levels, including the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that this video game is marketed to children and young adults." I'm going to set aside the "marketed to children and young adults" part of her complaint for the moment, as it's a common stereotype that many non-gamers hold and doesn't really pertain to the real discussion here. Platt is echoing the reactions that many people have when they see the Resident Evil 5 trailer: a white guy shooting mindless black dudes is not socially acceptable in American society. There are a few things I want to say about this controversy. We have had a pretty interesting discussion about this on the forum, and I want to sort of collapse my rambling posts from that thread into something more coherent here. The first thing I want to talk about is culture clash. When I first moved to Japan in the late 1990s, I slowly experienced the sensation known as culture shock. In my case, it was a feeling of being perpetually off-balance, and it was caused by curious juxtapositions or behaviors of people in Japan that I couldn't quite explain. I made the mistake most people make when they visit a foreign country: I mistook superficial similarities in my own culture and the Japanese culture as proof that the people in Japan operate pretty much the same as people in America. I saw neat buildings and neon lights and people going to work every day and figured that Japan was pretty much like America except that they drive on the other side of the street. Culture shock began to take hold as I realized that while Japanese people do many of the same things Americans do, they don't necessarily do them for the same reasons. The critical mistake I had made was the assumption that I could look upon some superficial Japanese thing or event and somehow divine what the motivation behind it was. I can do this in America, but I eventually realized that I can't do it with any level of reliability in Japan. Since then I've become a lot more conscious about how things I consider to be "common sense" may not actually be all that common outside of my home country. And that is why I don't believe that the people who made the Resident Evil 5 trailer are trying to be racist, even unconsciously. It's true that depicting a white man shooting African villagers is unacceptable in American society, but this video isn't the product of American people. America has a terrible history of racism, slavery, and subjugation, and our continued struggle with these issues as a culture is reflected in this controversy: clearly, the video invokes images that remind people of a not-so-distant past where this sort of thing may have happened not to zombies, but to real, living people. But the people who made the game that this video comes from have none of that history; Japan has its own set of problems with racism and xenophobia, but they are not the same shape as America's. I think that people like Platt find the trailer so disgusting because they assume that anybody with common sense would understand that these sorts of images are bound to offend, and therefore they conclude that the people who made the video must be intentionally trying to offend--it seems like unabashed racism. But I think Platt has made the same mistake I did back in Japan: she assumes to understand Capcom's intent because she assumes that the cultural signals she is receiving are the same ones that were intended to be sent. But this isn't necessarily true; when dealing with a different culture, I don't think you can make any assumptions about what "common sense" is. And if you don't understand the motivation behind the work, I don't think you can justify the extremely serious allegation of racism. Please note that I'm not trying to argue that the RE5 trailer isn't offensive. People take offense at things based on their personal sensibilities, and I'm not about to tell anybody that they are wrong to be offended by anything. It's your personal prerogative to be offended about whatever you want. And frankly, I do understand what Platt is talking about; the trailer does invoke images that make me uncomfortable, but because I don't really know what the creators of the trailer are thinking, I think that discomfort says more about me and my culture than it does about them. I also think it is fair to fault Capcom for not being more sensitive to their target audience. They should have anticipated this sort of response, and while I don't think it's fair to call them racist, I do think that the label of insensitive and clumsy is appropriate. Resident Evil is not their only problem either: they recently removed an Islamic phrase (link requires Gamasutra account) from one of their other games after they received complains from Muslims. But I think that there is a huge difference between racism--the purposeful propagation of a negative or dehumanizing stereotype--and inadvertently offending people because of cultural insensitivity. I also want to talk very briefly about the trailer itself. I want to note that this entire controversy is based on about 30 seconds of footage from a game that we know nothing about and that isn't scheduled for release until 2009. I also think that people too quickly overlook the content of the game itself. While it might seem like shooting zombies is a pretty straight-forward video game premise, it is worth remembering that Night of the Living Dead, the film that spawned the zombie genre as we know it today, is a pretty damning commentary on race relations in America. Given how little we know about Resident Evil 5, I think it's a bit premature to make judgments about it, especially considering the roots of the zombie genre. One last point to make here. After Kim Platt wrote about her reaction to the Resident Evil 5 footage, her blog became the target of angry gamers who left a barrage of extremely offensive comments. To the people who posted those comments: you are the problem with this country. It's not video games that perpetuate racism, it's assholes like you! People like you give the rest of us gamers a bad name, and you are actively contributing to one of the central problems in America today. What century do you think this is? Shame on you.

The internet has been lit up lately by a bunch of people posting their opinions about video games. Actually, I guess it's that way all the time, but lately the specific question being asked is: 'does quality matter?'. As next gen prices rise and making a profit gets harder, developers and their marketing departments are often of conflicting opinions when it comes to how much quality can be allowed to degrade before it affects sales. The debate has been particularly lively in the last few months because the Wii is selling much better than most people anticipated.

So in my latest feature, When Pundits Attack, I tried to add something to the conversation that is based on hard market data. This article has a lot of graphs and almost nothing about horror games, so if you are only interested in exploding zombie heads you might want to skip it. If you follow this kind of stuff, however, it might be a little more interesting.

hard work by Luis Becerril I wake up at 6:45. Brush my teeth, drink my coffee, realize I have to brush my teeth again. Check my work e-mail from home, read through the 30-odd messages that have already arrived, and respond as coherently as possible to a few. I try to get out of the house by 7:30, and I have a 30 minute commute down the peninsula to work. The drive isn't bad; I take the old highway to avoid the traffic jams and huge trucks. At 8:00 I'm sitting in front of my computer reading yet more e-mail and downloading the latest changes to our project. I spend most of the next ten hours tracking down an annoyingly difficult crash bug and trying to keep up with the constant flurry of e-mails. I'm drinking coffee like a maniac, four or five cups a day at this point, and even skipping lunch I don't have enough time in the day to get everything done. This is crunch. This is the dark underbelly of the game industry, when the plans have failed and now a hardcore push to the finish is all that can be done. Nose, meet grindstone. Whether or not this level of effort is required is hard to say: there's a lot to be done, but it's unclear if working 70 hour weeks will really result in a perceptibly better game in the end. I sure hope it does--it would suck if we all killed ourselves for nothing. This is part of the reason that bad games get made. Nobody sets out to make a bad game, but when time gets tight and people are working their fingers to the bone, a lot of stuff ends up on the cutting room floor. Sometimes it is stuff that nobody will ever miss, like an extra level that was never any fun, or cut scene that didn't impact the story. Sometimes it's a more dramatic cut, like something that is required for the game to be enjoyable. But usually, these cuts are made because at the end of the day, the choice between shipping a bad game and shipping nothing at all isn't even a choice. By the time crunch mode sets in, the money has already been invested and there must be some sort of return. Will our project turn out well? Right now it is hard to say if we'll pull it off or just start in with the scalpel. I get home and completely exhausted. Even as I type this my eyelids are heavy. Tomorrow is Saturday, and I'm getting up at 8 to go in again. Soon we will ship and I'll be able to write more coherently. Soon we will ship and I'll be able to think straight again.

I'm off to E3 tomorrow. Though the conference runs for three days, this year I have decided to visit for only a single day. After six or seven hours in the Los Angeles Convention Center I find myself almost unable to stand and mostly deaf.

Last year I posted a lengthy rant about the direction the industry is moving. The gist of this rant is as follows:
This year I have pretty much the same beef with the industry, though I am invigorated by the idea of a cheap console with an innovative control scheme, even if it is called the Wii. And with Sony's recent and amazingly unsurprising announcement that the PS3 will cost $600, I am even more convinced that the next generation consoles are not good for gaming. Innovation is a function of cost, and the new hardware increases cost by a huge amount.

But anyway, maybe there will be something cool this year. Last year was really terrible. This year I am interested in checking out Alone in the Dark 5, Siren 2, new Silent Hill information, Resident Evil 5, Rule of Rose, and Possession.

I'll be sure to write a report upon my return.

Warning: long, sort of pointless rant that has very little to do with horror game follows.

If you read this site often you might have noticed a recurring theme in my rants: I'm of the opinion that the video game industry is shooting itself in the foot with its death march towards computational perfection. Every time we increase the power of video game machines, we also increase the cost to create games, but this cost increase is not accompanied by a similar increase in game players. The result is higher risk to game publishers (they need to sell more units to make the same profit as before), fewer games on the market, less overall innovation (it's too risky), and greater reliance on licenses and other tie-ins to artificially improve the size of the audience. This ground is well trodden on this web site, I think.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about the few developers who actually have the ability to try something new. Now, I'm not talking about the huge self-publishing companies like Capcom or Konami--these guys are large enough that they can absorb a lot of risk, and their products are pretty consistently innovative. No, I'm talking about second- and third-party developers like Surreal (The Suffering series), High Moon Studios (Darkwatch), Headfirst (Call of Cthulhu), and the now-defunct Computer Artworks (The Thing). These guys are in an odd spot: they are paid by some publisher to make games (and often must relinquish some degree of creative control to their publisher), but they are also small teams who can maintain an innovative vision and execute on it. At big publishers like EA, teams are shuffled around for every game, and the long term fiscal outlook of the company as a whole is the deciding factor when selecting games to produce. But these smaller studios have, to some degree at least, the ability to choose their destiny and (assuming they can secure funding) work on innovative products.

Take The Thing, for example. There is a crapload of new game design ideas in this game. It's got a fear/trust system that has never been done before, where you need to convince your team mates that you are not an alien (and thus stave off their irrational fear) by giving them weapons and ammunition. The level design is intelligent, and the way the game uses the license from John Carpenter's 1980 film is excellent. This should have been a revolutionary horror game, but instead, it fell apart because of a few design flaws.

The alien test system is broken. You are supposed to be able to administer a blood test to people you meet and see if they are aliens or not, but in practice the test tells you nothing because it might return a false result 30 seconds before they change into an alien in a cutscene. The Thing's designers had a cool idea about having team members with different roles (you can't turn on the lights unless you have an engineer with you), but this falls apart when you realize that any of your team members can be killed at any time (so it ends up being that you can't turn on lights yourself if your engineer is alive, but you can do it yourself if he's died... dumb). These are probably the result of the schedule for this game being compressed, or of a lead designer leaving in mid-development. These few flaws pretty much ruin the whole game, and they were probably the result of having too little time to finish the game.

Which brings me to my point, if I have one. Innovation is a hard thing to do. It takes a LONG time to get new things right. If you look at games that are known for their innovative content, you'll see that they invariably have extremely long development cycles. Companies like EA don't have time to waste on the sort of iteration necessary to make an innovative game, but smaller studios like Computer Artworks do not have the funds to set their own schedules. The result is that innovative games don't get made, or they get made poorly because they were crammed into insufficient development cycles. The Thing should have been an awesome game, but Computer Artworks also needs to pay its employees which means that its publisher (in this case, Vivendi-Universal) set the schedule based on when products will be most profitable for them. Basically, it's a sucky model that does not link innovation to profit.

Sorry for the rambling rant. This came out way longer than I intended. Oh well, it was cathartic to write.

Producer #1: Ok, we need a movie to fill our release schedule out in March 2004.
Producer #2: Hmm, we should target teens... how about a horror movie!?
Producer #1: Sounds good. We should be able to throw one of those together in six months. But we need a hook... how about a demonic web site that kills you if you go to it?! That's edgy, and kids like edgy. Plus they use the web!
Producer #2: Hmm, yeah, but we're already remaking Pulse during that time, and it's got web sites in it. And we sort of lost money with Feardotcom.
Producer #1: Oh, yeah, I don't know what happened there. What else to kids like these days?
Producer #2: VIDEO GAMES!! All the kids play 'em. They are addicted, it's the new heroin for kids.
Producer #1: Video games? You mean like Space Invaders?
Producer #2: Yeah, but now they are more advanced and very violent. Some even have nudity!!
Producer #1: Ok, that sounds perfect. It'll be a double whammy: a horror film with teens about teens playing video games, which teens love. They won't be able to resist! We'll make money hand over fist!
Producer #2: Ok, so just so we're clear, they play a video game and then get killed, right?
Producer #1: Right. Get a writer on that. Also, we need at least one shower scene.
Producer #2: I'm on it.

If you don't know what I am talking about, try watching the Stay Alive trailer, or, if you can stomach it, check out the first scene. I guess I am glad that games are becoming more visible to general society, but it's fairly painful to watch Hollywood make such blatant asses of themselves while trying to make movies for gamers.

So I just noticed that my page has been broken under Windows Internet Explorer for who knows how long. Every other browser--Safari, Firefox, Opera, Mac OS IE--renders the page correctly, but IE under Windows XP fails horribly. Specifically, all the text on this page was mysteriously centered. I've fixed the problem, but the real solution is to STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER. In addition to being an insecure hunk of garbage, it can't render pages right, it doesn't follow the HTML standard, and it's slow. If you are on Windows, download FireFox now!. If you are on a Mac, use FireFox or Safari. Linux users--I already know what you are using.

Seriously, switch away from IE. Every other browser on the planet can block popups, filter ads, and prevent spyware from getting onto your machine.

I'm off to E3 for the rest of the week, so updates will be sporatic-to-non-existant. In my absence, why don't you roll over to Die, Zombie, Die!, a highly excellent horror game website. Spookycreepy has a new monster image gallery up, which I recommend you check out forthwith.

So here's my pre-E3 take on the state of the industry and games in general. It will be interesting to see if my perspective has changed by Friday. If millions in marketing and 110 decibel music don't change my mind, little will. Beware, the following rant is long and probably boring.

[RANT]

The thing is, folks, that the industry is in trouble. Some of us see it coming, but most of us don't realize how deep in it we actually are. This last generation has seen an amazing decline in game creativity and and an amazing surge in game production values. As developers, we've quite publicly lamented the mediocrity and sameness of recent game designs, and the mood at GDC this year was clearly one of frustration. Don't get me wrong, a number of really high quality, really original games have been released in the last few years: Animal Crossing, ICO, Katamari Damacy, Grand Theft Auto, and Rez, just to name a few. But all of these games--all of them--were risks to the developers that produced them and the publishers that marketed them. Though some of them did well (GTA in particular), many of them failed (good luck finding Rez nowadays; ICO sold terribly). Developers realize the quality of these games (Keita Takahashi, the designer of Katamari Damacy, got a standing ovation for his talk at GDC this year), but few of us have enough influence to actually get experimental concepts produced.

The problem, ladies and gents, is not a lack of creativity. It's not a lack of drive or laziness or an odd nostalgia for mechanics of the past. It's two things: cost and fear. Actually, it's really only cost, because fear is the fear that the game won't sell. Games are expensive to make, so expensive, in fact, that any publisher that makes a competitive game is taking a large financial risk. Publishers pay the bills, and they see a correlation between high quality graphics and high sales, so they poor all of their energy into making sure the graphics and presentation are top notch. And game design is always, always the element that gets slashed when time is tight and cuts need to be made. But the scary thing for developers and publishers alike is that even production value alone can't produce reliable sales. Look at what happened to Prince of Persia: that game had excellent graphics, top-notch production value, and loads of game design innovation, yet it pretty much flopped in the market. The result? For the sequel, Ubisoft dropped the originality a few hefty notches, inserted a heavy dose of generic rage, and did everything they could to make the Prince as "extreme" as possible. The result looks like pretty much every other game to come out last year.

The stakes are high and nobody really knows what consumers want. The developers think that consumers want new experiences. The publishers think they want nice graphics and characters they are already familiar with. The journalists think they want flawless execution of all of the above. In the end, it turns out to be less of what consumers want and more about what they will accept.

So here's the kicker: the next gen is going to make this problem 100 times worse. Games cost too much to make, and as games become more realistic, more complex, and more detailed, the costs will skyrocket. And when cost is high, publishers want risk to be as low as possible; be on the lookout for for fewer games, more knockoffs of the Last Big Hit, and many, many more licensed games. There will still be Capcoms and Konamis and Bungies and Blizzards making extremely high quality original games, but the rest of the industry is going to be struggling to keep up.

Of course, the most frustrating thing about this situation is that the next gen is going to provide a technical basis for all kinds of things that we've never been able to do before. Xbox 360, PS3, and Revolution would be amazing systems to experiment on if only experimentation didn't cost so much. Instead, what we'll get is the same games we've played before, only this time with specular lighting, normal mapping, and self-shadowing models. Yipee.

There's no good solution. You can't very well charge more for games (well, not yet--it's already happening in Japan), you can't pay the developers less, and you can't really get away with less-than-state-of-the-art games. I think games will be a whole lot shorter in the next gen. Barring some sort of grass roots indy game movement (which could happen; witness the music scene before and after Nirvana), or a sudden explosion in the size of the game-playing public, the next gen doesn't look like a particularly good time for innovative games.

I hate to be all doom and gloom here. There are going to be original games, just not enough. If you look back as recently as the Dreamcast era, you can see that the market has been reduced to just a few surviving genres; there's no way a game like Crazy Taxi could be made today, licensed music or no. The market isn't going away any time soon; in fact, the game industry is going to get bigger. But if the current trend continues, the day that games are regarded as a culturally relevant medium is far away indeed.

This year, I'm interested in a few very specific things at E3: Killer7, the vodoo doll controller, Nintendogs, Katamari Damacy 2, Siren 2, Animal Crossing DS, and of course, anything horror related (Suffering 2, I have my eye on you!). Hopefully, I'll come back from E3 totally energized about the next gen and just hopping up and down with excitement about the games I saw. Hopefully I'll be totally wrong about this whole innovation-costs-too-much thing. It could happen.

[/RANT]

I've made a few changes today. First of all, I've added some more links to the side bar, including The MagicBox, which is where I get almost all of my news lately. I've also enabled comments in the news archive (they were broken before). Finally, I've noticed that some people were using the new rating system to rate games that have yet to be released, a practice that I must take issue with:

**BEGIN RANT**

Games must be judged on how fun they are, not the license they represent or the graphic engine they employ. Judging a game based on screenshots and movies is not a useful practice: you haven't the slightest idea if a game will be fun or not until you've played it. In fact, I think that part of the reason we get so many crappy games is that people often decide how high quality a game is based on external factors (such as license and graphics style/quality) alone.

Case in point: everyone pretty much agrees that Enter The Matrix is a horrible game, yet it has sold over a million copies. Why? Because people hear the word "Matrix" and suddenly decide that they must own the game. Remember The Bouncer? This game received an extraordinary amount of hype, and featured an incredibly high quality graphics engine. But when the game came out, it was universally panned. It turns out that even having wonderful graphics can't save a bad game.

When you judge a game based on marketing and hype, you are encouraging developers and publishers to make games that are easy to hype. That is, you are telling them "I want the prettiest graphics, or the best license, even at the expense of fun factor." Fun factor should be number one here: if a game isn't fun, then it is a failure, right? By judging games without playing them, you are telling the marketing guys that you don't care about gameplay; you've already made up your mind. This trend only encourages game publishers and developers to make awful games.

Don't judge a game until you've played it. Don't buy into hype... graphics, license, etc do not matter if the core gameplay isn't fun.

***END RANT***

So, the net result is that you may no longer rate games that have not yet been released. Please only use the rating system to rate games you have actually played, otherwise it is useless.