Monthly Archives: November 2012
MMO Beat-Em-Ups (Off Week Update 11-30-2012)
You know I haven’t even touched the next game I’m working on yet?
Ok, so with the release of Episode 32 on DarkBlood I was starting to notice just how often I seemed to gravitate toward this genre. After all, if you recall the opening to Episode 0, we were all about to play Turtles in Time before my Xbox crashed. (The actual situation that was based on, we were about to play Castle Crashers.) Regardless, the games in my hypothetical and parenthetical situation were both Beat-em-ups. I fucking LOVE Beat-Em Ups. I have no idea why. If you had any idea how much time I spent with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game on XBLA for that review, you’d be all the more mad at my release schedule for MMO Grinder giving me only a week and a half to work with any given title. (This is also when scripts took me 4 weeks to 3 months to complete, I had a worse microphone, and didn’t quite have a grasp on how to talk to the camera without staring at it like I was afraid it was going to hit me.)
Yeah, the games are repetitive, yeah they’re much less fun to play alone, and I totally don’t care. Get one like Castle Crashers, River City Ransom, Scott Pilgrim, where there’s a bit of progression and a variety of moves to use, and I’m all over it. Not AS much of a fan of quarter-muncher Beat-em-ups, but I’ll still give one a few playthroughs when I have the chance. (It’s where you’re most likely to find me at MAGfest, really.)
So now that’s I’ve sampled 4 different MMO versions of this genre. Let’s take a quick look back at all of them and how my perspective has changed:
“In Name Only”: A personal philosophy on the developer/publisher relationship.
If you think I’m doing this to discuss SWTOR, let’s let that one stew for a bit more. Right now feedback is related to restriction shock, and my voice acting comment. Again, I’ll give it a while before discussing it.
No, today, I’m talking about a line that was either ignored, or baffled many a viewer when I stated it in my Special Episodes: Guild Wars 2, and The Secret World.
Why would I place so much emphasis on saying that GW2 was published “in name only” by NCSoft, and TSW published “in name only” by EA?
Because people HATE NCSoft. And people HATE EA… and the worst part, they’re completely unwilling to separate a game from its publisher, even when said publisher has little to no creative control over the product.
MMO Grinder 