By Joe Donato

When does the word “free” stop being a bad word in the eyes of a corporate giant like Microsoft? The line is surely drawn differently throughout their zip code-sized campus. Today my attention is drawn to their games publishing arm, Microsoft Game Studios. Specifically, the effects free and paid content have on their games and what their choices spell for the community.

Xbox Live has blossomed into a full-fledged marketplace for downloadable games, expansion packs, movie rentals, TV show purchases and thousands of worthless jpegs. Much of this content is considered “premium” and has a cost attached to it in the form of Microsoft points. Anyone who has purchased content on Live knows that the dollar-to-points conversion scale is absurd, the purchasable quantities are deviously mismatched with typical costs of downloads, and much of the content feels unreasonably expensive. While these are all valid issues, none are as problematic as the content that started it all—the expansion packs available for most online games.

Since Xbox Live’s humble beginnings five years ago, downloadable maps (multiplayer arenas) have been a mainstay of the service. Most of them have come at a premium price—a price which has made a sharp increase as of late. It’s not something I have a problem with. Developers should get paid for their work and they’re free to price them however they want. The problem is that it’s never the developers who have any say.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Halo 3 community. With two map pack releases and the recent freebie Cold Storage (a remake of Halo 1’s Chill Out), developer Bungie has kept busy and vocal about the state of their content. Microsoft and Bungie have been making compromises on the price of their content since Halo 2. As the publisher of the game, it is ultimately Microsoft’s decision, but Bungie has stated they don’t want to charge for content. Microsoft’s stance is that offering free content devalues any similar content that isn’t free. In past releases they reached a compromise in which map packs would cost from five to ten dollars for three months and then become free for everyone. Microsoft made their money off of early adopters and Bungie’s community wasn’t indefinitely fractured between haves and have-nots. Ultimately, everyone was happy.

But what happens when the premium period for content never ends? In the case of Halo 3, where it’s convenient matchmaking system automatically finds opponents and selects a map for you, the premium content is rarely seen. In order for a map to be played, all players in the 2-16 player matches must have downloaded the map, and it must be selected by matchmaking amongst the full set of maps. In my experience, I have never played a premium map in these conditions. Once the maps are free, Bungie requires them for matchmaking, and they come up far more often. However, with the newest premium offering, the “Legendary Map Pack”, there are no plans to make it free.

This is Microsoft’s call—as stated in the recent Bungie podcast, MS wanted to experiment in offering the content at a discount rather than free. This puts Bungie in the difficult position of deciding if and when they’ll require the map pack for matchmaking. Further escalating the situation, Microsoft would not allow Bungie to release Cold Storage for free unless the latter agreed to require consumers to purchase the map pack before being allowed to play Cold Storage in matchmaking.

Through these methods, Microsoft is needlessly complicating things and splintering the Halo 3 community. They are creating ill will towards the brand, the Xbox 360, and the Xbox Live service. Worst of all, they are leaving Bungie to clean up the mess. Along with the release of the free map, Bungie also released a new video explaining the requirements to play the map online. Needless to say, they were nearly as confused as we are about the situation.

It’s clear that “free” is a word Microsoft Game Studios still fails to understand. Their business model calls for profit in nearly all aspects of the Xbox Live service. They charge a subscription fee, charge for content, charge developers to release content and more. On paper it’s an appealing model, but it’s clear they are shitting in the faces of their customers and the developers who toil for years on these games just to make a quick buck. The question is: how long will we let them get away with it?

By Joe Donato

Fine German engineering—we find it in automobiles, pork products and board games.  Yes, board games.  Forget Monopoly, Battleship, Chutes & Ladders and Mall Madness, because for the last decade or so, Germany has been home to some of the world’s finest board games.  Now, thanks to the popularity of online games, three of Germany’s best strategy board games have been converted for the Xbox Live Arcade.

Settlers of Catan

Catan is easily one of the best board games ever, and the translation to XBLA is impeccable.  Catan is unique in that it does not have a solid board; instead, hexagonal tiles are arranged randomly to form the playfield.  Players place their initial settlements and roads and begin rolling dice to collect resources, allowing the development of further settlements, roads, cities or special cards.  The dice rolls create probability rather than blind chance.  For example, building a settlement on a hexagon labeled “6” or “8” is helpful as they’re the numbers most likely to appear when rolling two dice.  Conveniently, these probabilities are clearly labeled on the tiles for the statistically challenged.

Strategy, or being an asshole, means making solid trades with other players, taking the best settlements and catching others off guard with your winning move.  Trading is one aspect of the game that could have been lost in translation, as a live game usually involves lots of communication.  In the XBLA version, a simple and clear trading screen is supplemented by voice chat.  The trade screen works well enough alone too, making Catan a great game for human competition, without all that annoying human trash-talking.

If there’s one flaw with Catan on a TV screen, it’s that the game can’t be played as a party game.  Seeing others’ hands would ruin the flow of the game.  Get a good group of players online, especially friends you enjoy chatting with, and Catan on XBLA is every bit as fun as its cardboard counterpart.

Ticket to Ride

The latest board game translation on XBLA, Ticket to Ride offers a fast-paced, strategic and deceivingly simple experience.  It also offers some of the most epic asshole opportunities seen in strategy board games.  Believe me, tears will be shed.

The game is played on a map of the United States, with colored train routes connecting major cities.  The rules are simple—each turn you may take one of three actions, draw train cards, draw destination cards and claim a route.  Train cards are traded in for the actual trains used to claim routes.  Destination cards require you to complete a route for bonus points or risk penalties if you fail.  The trick in Ticket to Ride is being discrete about you plans.  Revealing your intentions opens you up to bastardly maneuvers like others blocking you from your vital routes.

Having never played the actual board game, I’m finding Ticket to Ride to be the most fun of the three to play online.  Games are quick, addicting and the competition is stiff.  In the beginning you’ll probably lose a lot, but once you embrace the role of a slimy train baron and start ruining everyone else’s day you’ll be hard-pressed to stop playing.

Carcassone

Carcassone is a bit of a mystery to me.  It’s not that I don’t understand the game, but calculating who wins seems like a nightmare.  Luckily it’s all automated on the Xbox Live Arcade version.  Unfortunately, Carcassone failed to grab me in the way Catan and Ticket to Ride did.

Over the course of the game, players take turns placing square tiles and claiming structures, roads and farmland.  Connecting similar tiles creates larger areas to claim and nets you more points.  Much of this is left up to chance; the tiles are drawn from a deck and there are many different shapes.  Strategy is relegated to moment-to-moment tile placement, while any planning is stifled by high levels of randomness.  The best strategies seem to involve limiting other players rather than accomplishing anything grand for yourself.  The end result is a game that can seem haphazard and unfulfilling.

However, I do have to give credit where credit is due.  The quality of production is there.  I’d imagine the score tracking makes it a replacement of the physical board game for some.  Not only that, but unlike Catan, Carcassone lends itself to local multiplayer, allowing four players to duke it out on one couch.  With that said, it’s not a bad game, but a lot more is left to chance compared to Catan and Ticket to Ride, a style of game design I find as appealing as random battles in Japanese RPGs.

By Joe Donato

In 2000, Sega released Shenmue on an unprecedented 70 million dollar budget for the Sega Dreamcast.  Set in Yokosuka, Japan, the developers set out to put the player in a living, breathing recreation of small town life in the 1980s.  While the story was pulled along through encounters with seedy fellows and the mystery of who killed your father, much of the game was spent working odd jobs, making acquaintances, playing parlor games, and talking to sailors.  It was one of the first games of its kind, and while the resulting gameplay was boring more often than not and the big budget production was ultimately a sales disaster, the immersion in the world was unparalleled.  In the eight years since Shenmue’s release, few games have matched that sense of place, that feeling of being somewhere that could be real.  With the arrival of Grand Theft Auto IV we have a game that does for New York City what Shenmue did for Yokosuka and a thought-provoking social commentary and morality play to boot.

Like Shenmue, GTAIV presents its world not as a stone-cold accurate rendition of its base city, but as a world that nails so much of the aesthetics of the real thing that any geometric inaccuracies are moot.  The infamous skyline looms in the distance in the initial hours of the game and when Algonquin, Liberty City’s rendition of Manhattan, becomes available the trek across the bridge as the towering skyscrapers approach and nearly swallow you whole is nearly as awe-inspiring as the real thing.  And it’s not just those big moments that define the game and its world.  On the contrary, it’s the little touches that continually caught me off guard.

The minute details of our reality that Rockstar has brought into GTAIV can be easy to take for granted, but there are moments that hit so close to everyday life that I found myself stopping and wondering if I’d imagined them.  You’ll simply accept many of its touches like potholes, garbage in the water at Coney Island, dead leaves collecting in the side streets, and the ambient noise which is constant in all but the most remote areas; all elements that subconsciously immerse you in the world.  Then a moment will come along that’s a little too real.  Cars clink and clank as they settle and cool down when you leave them.  Phone signal is lost in tunnels and the radio makes that bip bip-bip-bip bip-bip-bip interference noise just before you get a phone call.  A wild throw in bowling will send your ball into the opposite lane (something I’ve experienced in a real alley).

It’s not to say the game is truly realistic.  All of those details are at odds with the total disregard for traffic laws and wanton destruction you eventually cause.  When you’re flying over the city firing rockets out the side hatch of a helicopter you won’t be thinking about how true-to-life it all is.   No one is going to claim that GTAIV is a life simulator, but the downtime between missions can be entirely pedestrian.  Even the opening missions border on mundane, a chance Rockstar took that paid off, drawing attention to all the elements of the world that set it apart from nearly any game before it.  It was several missions into the game before I’d even fired a gun, and by then I’d already gone on a date, received a text message, watched TV, and got completely wasted, taking a taxi home.

The networked lifestyle you take on becomes one of the major themes of the game.  While all of our technological advances have been slowly fed to us to the point where managing friendships over the internet is the standard, GTAIV is the first game to simulate it.  With a fully functional cell phone, internet, email, TV, and radio, you forge friendships, relationships, and memorable events for the first time in a game, and it puts a little perspective on things.  The absurdity of buying ring tones from your favorite in-game TV show, setting up online dates, and replying to emails from mom in a game made me realize how much we take it all for granted in real life.

Just as Shenmue was about life in the 80s (in Japan, anyway), GTAIV is about life now.  All these immersive elements come together to tell a story with resonance.  While the protagonist, Nico Bellic, is fresh off the boat in search of the American dream, a story that’s become timeless, his path is certainly modern.  When pushed to kill off a character I’d grown to like, after the deed had been done I stopped at an internet cafe and found an unread email from them, saying how glad they were I’d helped them out and suggesting we hang out soon.  I wanted to try out the online dating site in the game, and when I picked up the girl I felt bad that I’d turned Nico into a murderer and a cheater, having a girlfriend at the time.  Experimenting further I picked up one of the series’ infamous prostitutes, selected from three different “services” and watched with shame as the dialogue and animation was much more graphic than the hilarious car bouncing (with the two parties sitting quietly in their respective seats) I was used to from previous GTAs.

It’s that detachment from everything that made the previous Grand Theft Autos nothing more than a violent playground for me, but here all your actions carry a little more weight.  Even driving, which was so stylized in previous games and much more realistic here, can say something about a person.  While I never followed traffic laws, I made a point to never run over innocent pedestrians, and I almost always paid the bridge tolls.  At the same time, when it came to the so-called bad guys I found myself to be ruthlessly opportunistic.  A dirty cop asked me to take down a local dealer, and rather than meet him face-to-face I blew his head off with a sniper rifle from across the street and ran off on a motorbike.  I later found out if I’d gone and talked to him I could have worked things out more peacefully.

You can’t always feel bad though, as the game pushes Nico as a character as much as you are his puppet master.  He’s one of gaming’s strongest protagonists, with a story to be told and morale compass all his own.  When forced to kill one key player or another, there is no option to let them sort it out themselves, or kill both.  Take that as limited game design or keeping the plot to only two possible paths, but I saw it as part of Nico’s character.  He’s a soldier, he’s given a mission, and he carries it out.  The option of sparing both of their lives was never there for him.

The limited freedom of choice, the realistic world juxtaposed with excessive violence, and the borderline misogyny (a topic for another article entirely) threaten to tear down the whole thing.  Ultimately, Rockstar strikes a balance and it all comes together.  Few games (and almost no action games) push you to think about the world, or even about yourself, and when games stop simply being about rules or beating an opponent, it’s the ones that make you reflect that will ultimately matter.  It’s weird to say all this about Grand Theft Auto, but in this newest version it’s true.  And while Shenmue’s living, breathing world was an inspiration for GTAIV, GTAIV will surely be an inspiration for an even more memorable game.  Hopefully we won’t have to wait another eight years.

Over the summer you can catch continuing Red Ring Circus game coverage on my blog site, RedRingCircus.com.  Feel free to leave comments there or send your thoughts to RedRingCircus@gmail.com