Video Game Tuesday: The Supposed Battlefield Controversy is Bull

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m taking a look at some really funny bullshit coming from butthurt men who can’t seem to understand that a Video Game can be inclusive and fun at the same time. It’s all about that The Supposed Battlefield Controversy is Bull!

Huh?: So recently the vitriol breathing portion of the gaming community has been “torn” by the news that Battlefield V will include the ability to play as a “gasp” woman on the field of battle.

Disregarding the fact that this actually occurred in World War 2, the arguments used by these sore bottomed individuals that the series has been about historical accuracy is just laughable. This is the series where people have pulled a loop de loop in a fighter jet, exited the vehicle to shoot a rocket at another fighter jet and scored a kill and then re-entered the jet and flown on without a scratch. Or have three people riding a horse with one of them firing a flamethrower while it runs across the battlefield.

That’s stupid!: Agreed, honestly some people get upset at the dumbest things and defend people who actually do abhorrent and incredibly bigoted things and get away with little more than a slap on the wrist.

But but historical accuracy over political correctness: Again three people on a horse using a flamethrower. The series has never been that belivable, not to mention that just using a blowtorch on a vehicle will repair it to tip top shape?

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.

Video Game Tuesday: The First Rule of Game Design

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m covering the first thing I ever learned about Game Design. It’s the fundamental First Rule of Game Design!

What is The First Rule of Game Design: KISS, or Keep It Simple Stupid. Complexity is great, but it prevents some people from playing. A simple to use or play game is always going to appeal to more people than a highly complex game.

Give me an example: Well take Steel Battalion for the Original Xbox. It had a huge ass controller required to play, and it was complex as hell. Then you have something like Halo Combat Evolved, which was stupid easy to play. Which one sold more? Halo obviously.

But that’s a pretty easy thing to do: Sure, it’s fairly simple to decide not to include a huge ass controller that must be used to play the game. But compare a game like Soul Calibur II to Super Smash Bros Melee. Both were of the same generation and Smash Bros was always more popular, despite the fact that Soul Calibur was a lot better looking. Soul Calibur was also stupidly difficult to play. Take the character Ivy for example, she has some of the most complex combos to pull off in any game, ever. She has a combo that will instantly kill the other person, but it requires you to input 32 commands, and some of them are frame inputs. For those unfamiliar with the term it means that you have the space of a single frame of action to input the command correctly. Frames go by quite fast, I don’t remember the exact FPS of the game, but let’s assume the game ran at 30fps, or 30 frames per second. You had a 30th of a second to input a command. That’s freaking insane. Oh and actually getting that move to connect? Nearly impossible unless you could buffer other actions to cover the fact that you are building up that combo input, or else it’s going to be obvious and will miss. So add even more complexity to perfect countless other moves in order to get this single move to work properly. Now look at Smash Bros. It’s incredibly easy to play and while it was difficult to master every tiny nuance of the game, it still wasn’t nearly as hard to do as even getting a single frame input to work in Soul Calibur. Simplicity is key, especially in control methods.

There is a particular reason I hate playing Battlefield games on consoles and that’s because you don’t have the hardware to drive the vehicles with a simple controller. Why the developers decide to make it so difficult is beyond me, but if they made it simpler I bet they’d outsell Call of Duty easily. Star Wars Battlefront II, or any Halo game, have the perfect vehicular control schemes. They are incredibly easy to use, but difficult to master.  Driving a Warthog in Halo while giving your gunner the most cover and stability is incredibly difficult, but it’s still a thousand times easier than successfully taking off in a fighter jet in Battlefield.

Are these enough examples for you to get the point? I hope so, so when you complain about how simple a game is and how it could be more complex really think about what that actually means. It’s really hard to make something simple, but if done right it’s worth doing over any complex scheme any day.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday!

Video Game Tuesday: Battlefield 3 [Console Edition Review]

This week on Video Game Tuesday I’m covering the second most recent entry of a favorite series since the first one back on the PC, it’s Battlefield 3.

Plot Synopsis:  Battlefield 3‘s Campaign story is set in 2014, and covers events that occur over the span of nine months. Most of the story takes place in the Iraq/Iran region. Other locations include the Azerbaijani border; Paris, France; andNew York City, New York. Most missions occur as flashbacks on part of the interrogation of Staff Sergeant Henry Blackburn, and do not occur in order of events.

The Campaign puts the player in control of four different player characters. For most of the story, the player controls SSgt. Henry “Black” Blackburn (portrayed by Gideon Emery), a member of the U.S. Marine Corps 1st Recon Battalion and main protagonist. The player also controls Sgt. Jonathan “Jono” Miller, a M1 Abrams tank operator deployed in Tehran; Lt. Jennifer “Wedge” Colby Hawkins, an F/A-18F Super Hornet Weapon Systems Officer; and Dimitri “Dima” Mayakovsky, a Russian GRU operative. The main antagonist, Solomon, is an overseas asset for the Central Intelligence Agency. Non-player characters include: Misfit 1, Blackburn’s squad (including David Montes, Steve Campo, Christian Matkovic, and Cpt. Quinton Cole); Dima’s GRU squadmates Vladimir and Kiril; and CIA Agents G. and W., who interrogate Blackburn for much of the Campaign.

Plot: I made to the first flight mission in the campaign and than had to stop playing because the control scheme for consoles, and to be honest for PC’s as well, is convoluted as hell without a flight joystick which won’t work for anyone not playing the PC version.

Gameplay: It features the classic King of the Hill Game type where you try to dwindle the enemies store of reinforcements, read respawns, by capturing certain locations on a map and hold the majority of them while killing the other team. I really enjoy this type of gameplay and except for the flight controls, which suck like I stated above, I enjoy hopping into vehicles and using them to destroy the other team. I really wish the flight controls would have taken a hint from the Star Wars Battlefront series, or I might have actually played this game for more than 3 days. When it comes to graphics and some gameplay decisions it’s great to be life-like.Except when certain gameplay designs make it hard for a beginner player to have fun then it ruins the rest of the game.

Music: It was decent, but got old really quickly.

Art: It’s a first person shooter, you are looking at a gun most often and they looked okay, but it wasn’t anything spectacular.

Overall: A disappointing game, that should only be played by those with a masochistic streak who enjoy beating their heads against a wall when using a controller to fly planes.

For those who like: The Battlefield Series, Vehicles in their FPS games.

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above, or shitty controls that get in the way of fun.