THE BEST HOCKEY POOL EVER INVENTED

THE BEST HOCKEY POOL EVER INVENTED
(From the ground up)
(by a guy named Will)
(…from Montreal)
(this week)

So, we were trying to figure out how to run the work hockey pool at work. I started developing my own system, but it got scrapped because we’re trying to make it really accessible (there are a lot of casual fans in the office, so having insane rubrics for points is maybe not the hottest call). I’m really particular about the way mine run, in so far that I like them to be a “simulation,” in a way. I hate it when you lose because your top-tier goalie got played in a few less games than someone else’s top tier goalie. I hate that there’s no space for guys who get less than 70 points a season.

So, I set out to make my own pick ‘em type fantasy hockey league. Here is the digusting baby-mutant that I ended up with in the end!

1. WHO TO PICK.

To play, you need 4 LW, 4 C, 4 RW, 2 extra forwards of any position, 7 defensemen, and 2 goalies. Easy, right?

2. YOU MUST BE SALARY-CAP-COMPLIANT.

Ooh, dang. You really did think you’d have guys like Zetterberg as your fourth-line energy guys? No dice. The salary cap’s about $56mill this year; as such, you gotta check the player’s earnings (I recommend nhlscap.com) and make sure you’re compliant.

Okay, that’s the easy-to-explain stuff. Now, the harder stuff. My point system is somewhat based on the Yahoo rotisserie style, but it attempts to fix some of my biggest issues with their system; first, it gives weight to some stats over others. This basically means that your goalies are as important as your forwards, not like 12x moreso. I hate that there were always like 9 skater stats, and 5 goalie stats, and yet each of those five were worth the same. The second issue I had was that there was no happy medium between “points” and “rotisserie;” in points, you could boost one stat to absolutely no detriment, but in rotisserie, having 100 more goals was the same as having 3 more goals than the next guy. So, there’s a points system that works as such:

There are six stats tracked: G, A, +/-, PIM, Wins, Spct. Each has a weight (see below). The General Manager whose total in a category is most gets the maximum number of points; everyone else gets [maximum(own/leader)] points. That may not make sense, so here’s an example.

GOALS CATEGORY, WORTH 15 POINTS
Jim: 45 goals.
Chuck: 44 goals.
Bobby: 20 goals.

Since Jim has the most points, he has 15 points for “goals.” Chuck gets 15 points, multiplied by 44/45 (his goals over Jim’s goals). So, for goals, he has roughly 14.7 points. Bobby, however, has significantly less; 15*20/45, as per above, means he’s sitting on 6.7 points. However, he may be able to maek up those ponits in other categories.

The weighted categories are as such:

GOALS — 15 points
ASSISTS — 10 points
+/- — 10 points
PIM — 5 points
WINS — 2 points
SVPT — 3 points

I think this makes good defensemen incredibly palatable (+/- and A are amazing) but keeps snipers as hot picks (which is often reflected in their salary). Goalies are still vital to win, but are no longer the entire point to play. Someone who is *dominating* a stat is rewarded, but can still be beaten if they don’t keep a properly balanced team.

THIS IS WHERE IT BECOMES MORE OF AN EXPERIMENT.

There are other things, too, that make the simulation more fun. For example, leadership is key on any team, right? Well, at the end of the season, if any of your players wore the “C” (or would have worn the “C” if the NHL just changed that rule… I’m talking about Luongo here) during the season, you get +1 point. If anyone wore the “A,” you get +0.5 points (perhaps 0.4, haven’t decided yet). This emulates leadership for your team, and C/As are often paid more, so it is difficult to game. I would even want to keep it a weighted stat, if it were possible… but there are no game-to-game statistics kept, that I’m aware of, that track what player wore what letter. Alas.

There are other things to consider too. Do all 14 forwards score you points, or just the 12 you play? What happens in the case of injury? How often can you switch players out? Do you draft, and therefore one GM can only use one player, or do you just allow everyone to try to pick the best possible players? How often can I acquire new players? If it were a draft, I’d say weekly, but if it were a non-draft, I’d limit it to only a few times a year.

Holy shit, I can’t believe how much I wrote. Let me know what you all think.

Hockey Playoff Pools– How I would run mine

So I thought of a new way to do playoff hockey pools. If anyone in the world is reading this, let me know what you think.

You ask every player to give their predictions for all of the rounds. Simple enough, right? Well, here’s where it gest tricky.

First round picks are worth 1 point.
Conference semis are worth 2 points.
Conference finals are worth 3 points.
Cup finals are worth 4 points.

However, at the end of each round, you must change your guess for any matchup that’s no longer possible, and remove one point from the potential winning for that round. So, you can continue playing, but someone woh accurately guessed it will score higher than someone who changed it after a round or two. Let’s look at an example:

Here’s the eastern conference for ‘08.

MTL vs BOS
PIT vs OTT
WSH vs PHI
NJD vs NYR

Let’s say I pick MTL, PIT, WSH, and NJD. Then I pick MTL to beat NJD, and PIT to beat WSH, and MTL to beat PIT and make it to the finals.

Now if it all goes acourding to plan exactly, I pick up 4 points in the first round, 4 points in the second, 3 points in the third. Total of 11 points.

However, let’s say the Rangers and Philly win instead now. Now, I HAVE to change my NJD and WSH brackets to reflect that MTL will play against PHI and NYR will play against PIT. So, I can only get one point if I predict these now. However, I don’t need to change the “MTL vs PIT” unless I want to. It will stay at three points. And let’s say MTL  and PIT win– I get 2 points for the first round, and 2 points for the second round.

I think this is the best way to benefit guessers who do well without screwing players who don’t. What do you think?

Most expensive football players, by country.

I read somewhere that Dimitar Berbatov was the most expensive Bulgarian of all time and it got me thinking– who is the most expensive player from other places in the world? So, with the help of some free time, a couple of messageboard, and an utter lack of a life, I’ve started compiling this list which is SORELY lacking on the internet.  I’ll try and keep this list updated as people move.

AND PLEASE, if you see any errors, let me know at tabqwer [at!] gmail [dot!] com so I can fix them ASAP! Thanks! First Column is country, second column is player, and third column is there in case there’s a contreversy on the various boards I’ve been talking about it.

COUNTRY		PLAYER	OR???
Angola	-	Manucho
Argentina	-	Hernan Crespo
Australia	-	Mark Bresciano
Belarus	-	Aliaksandr Hleb
Belgium	-	Daniel Van Buyten	Vincent Kompany?
Brazil	-	Ronaldo
Bulgaria	-	Dimitar Berbatov
Cameroon	-	Samuel Eto’o
Chile	-	Marcelo Salas
Colombia	-	Juan Pablo Angel	Ivan Cordova?
Croatia	-	Eduardo
Cyprus	-	Michalis Constantinou
Czech Republic	-	Pavel Nedved
Denmark	-	Jesper Grønkjær
Egypt	-	Mido
England	-	Rio Ferdinand	Wayne Rooney?
Finland	-	Mikael Forsell
France	-	Zinedine Zidane
Germany	-	Miroslav Klose	Jorg Heinrich?
Ghana	-	Mickael Essien
Greece	-	Georgios Samaras
Iceland	-	Eidur Gudjohnsen
Ireland	-	Damien Duff
Italy	-	Gianluigi Buffon
Ivory Coast	-	Didier Drogba
Japan	-	Hidetoshi Nakata
Lichtenstein	-	Mario Frick
Mali	-	Mahamadou Diarra
Mexico	-	Nery Castillo
Montenegro	-	Dejan Savicevic	At the time, was Yugoslavia.
Nigeria	-	John Obi Mikel	martins, yakubu, or okocha?
Northern Ireland	-	Keith Gillespie	David Healy, Steven Davis?
Norway	-	Tore Andre Flo
Paraguay	-	Oscar Cardozo
Poland	-	Dawid Janczyk
Portugal	-	Luis Figo
Romania	-	Adrian Mutu
Russia	-	Andrei Kanchelskis
Scotland	-	Craig Gordon/Alan Hutton
Serbia	-	Nemanja Vidic
Slovakia	-	Martin Skrtel
South Korea	-	Ji-Sung Park
Spain	-	Sergio Ramos
Spain (Basque)	-	Gaizka Mendieta
Sweden	-	Zlatan Ibrahimovic
The Netherlands	-	Arjen Robben	Marc Overmars?
Togo	-	Emmanuel Adebayor
Trinidad and Tobago	-	Dwight Yorke
Turkey	-	Fatih Tekke
Ukraine	-	Andriy Shevchenko
Uruguay	-	Diego Forlan	Alvaro Recoba?
USA	-	Tim Howard	Claudio Reyna?
Zimbabwe	-	Benjani

PC, PS2, and DS: Top games, 2007

TOP 5 NINTENDO DS

- Picross

I used to have about three or four hours of mass transit to contend with per day. That dropped to a more merciful 90 minutes once I started getting a one-way carpool to work, but during those dark days of yore, Picross DS saw me through. Just thinking about this game makes me want to play it again. It’s like… some sort of… visual… sudoku. But not stupid. Plus, when you’re done playing, you’ve drawn pixel-perfect Mario drawing and stuff. Play this if you like your brain.

- Front Mission

I’m pretty much th know who’s championing this game, but boy, it’s a fun one. I haven’t played FM2 or FM5, because it’s not in my crazy Canadian language, but out of the other ones, this is my favourite Front Mission. I played a translated ROM years ago, so I figured there wouldn’t be much for me in this game, but it presents an opportunity to play an alternate storyline with a decent 15 hours in it. If you’re not into really wonk-friendly TBS, or you don’t love giant robots beating the crap out of each other, you might not dig this game. It’s also a touch easy after a certain point.

- Hotel Dusk: Room 215

I almost forgot this came out this year. I’m not a big fan of novelties in video games; my mind wasn’t blown when Psycho Mantis made me switch controller ports, I was mostly annoyed. Now, this game has a few of these kinds of “puzzles;” using the DS in novel, meta ways. I was bothered by that. Te rest of this game, though, is super immersive and interesting. It feels like a really mature title, and not like Gears of War is “mature;” this game actually felt like it was for grownups, not bulbous, overgrown eight-year-olds who like to watch beefy men explode the crap out of each other.

- Glory Days 2

I haven’t really heard much about this gem, but if you haven’t had a crack at it yet, do yourself a favour and pick it up. It’s like a shmup controlled by the stylus, with a Battlefield 1942-style scoring system (capture flags and kill little men for great justice) and a surprisingly weird and sad little storyline (that hardly interrupts gameplay, for those who hate game stories). I can’t believe how little press this game got, and it’s definitely my “underrated game of the year.”

- New York Times Crosswords

I only put this near the last place because it’s barely a DS game as much as it’s a repackaging of newspaper stuff. It is great, though, because I never get a chance to play the New York Times crosswords in real life. This was the only thing to tear my mind away from Picross, and the sheer number of hours of play in this game are probably staggering; there are something like a thousand crosswords in there. And the hard ones can take an hour. That’s at least a few hundred hours. And that’s why people buy games, right?

TOP 3 PS2

- Persona 3

I thought I was done with jRPGs. I loved them as a kid, but as the years have passed, I’ve played less of them, and just had no patience for them. I barely played any jRPGs on the PS2, but this game made me want to check it out anyway, and I was not disappointed. Even after getting my 360, this is why I went back to my PS2. A phenomenal sense of atmosphere is built up through the cut scenes, music, and really clever after-school club alternate life pacing style dealie. It captures a feeling that I’ve never felt in a video game, and I don’t think I can quite explain it. I gave up after about fifteen floors, mostly due to the previously mentioned 360, but I intend to go back once I’ve got a hole in my gaming schedule (which is coming up, given the January/February games drought).

- Odin Sphere

I didn’t get too far with this either, but intend to. It feels virtually nothing like a side-scrolling beat-em-up, but it is. With extra beating up, since you have to go build up your levels by beating up the same guys over and over. But still, this game s so gorgeous and so satisfying that it can’t be ignored.

- GrimGrimoire

Again… didn’t even get that far with it. But I will. What I played, I like, and I appreciate the side-scrolling console RTS concept a bunch. I should really play this more.

TOP 5 ON MY SHITTY PC

- Scrabulous

What can I say? I can’t believe I haven’t been fired yet. Scrabble is good, playing online through Facebook is better.

- Football Manager 2008

This is the only game here that isn’t a web browser game. I’ve played only the last three FMs, but this is my favourite yet. Sure, it’s a really complicated chaos engine mixed with a trillion spreadsheets. Sure, it’s for sports nerds. But if you find me anywhere in video game a more complex number-crunching geekfest, I will give you a kiss. I love this game to bits and will play it consistently until the next iteration is released. Plus, this is the only game where the publisher sent me a free copy (I won it by answering a nerdy question on their podcast).

- Passage

I don’t really want to talk about this game in case people haven’t played it. Thanks to Destructoid for turning me onto it, though. As a game narrative, it really stuck with me for a while and explored things in games that haven’t really been explored before. I should remember to send that guy some money.

- Desktop Tower Defense

Yeah, I played a bunch of this too. This game is fun, and addictive, and awesome, but the thing that really put it over the top for me was being able to compare my high scores to everyone else on my favourite secret message board whose name I definitely won’t tell you even if you ask.

- Peggle

Rounding out my “games you can play on a shitty broken computer with half a brain and a mouse” list is Peggle, which I only even started playing in 2008. Like most Popcap games, it makes my eyes burn. I am not sure why I play it, or why I like it at all. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I hate it. Yet, when I sit at my computer and have twenty minutes to kill while checking my e-mail, I inevitably boot it up and throw some stupid little pachinko balls around. WHY WHY WHY do I play it?! Someone, tell me!

My top five retail 360 games of 2007.

- Mass Effect
I can see the opinion of people who can’t look past this game’s many, many flaws. Weird, irritating loading times,  weird conversation choices, repetitive sidequests… blah blah blah. What I liked about this game was the look of it. Going to dozens of little planets and looking at their sky inspired me so much that all I could think about for months was going to space. Yeah, I’m a giant nerd. Yeah, this game should’ve been in the oven a while longer. But the incredibly immersive universe they created, from the Citadel full of aliens to the awesome red dawrf-scorched skyscapes of backwater planets with a marine outpost plopped somewhere near the middle, drew me in and didn’t let me go until the end. And, actually, the story was pretty good. The last fifth of the game has a couple of plot twists that rival KOTOR in sheer awesometude.

- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
In contrast to Mass Effect, here’s a game that is polished to near-perfection. The single-player game is a stunning piece of videogame storytelling which uses the inevitable lack of control over parts of videogame stories to crushing effect (and I mean that in the good way). It may not be a very long campaign, but it is one that you won’t hate starting over right after you’ve beaten it. It’s that good. The number of really, really memorable moments in the game is massive. And that’s not all, either; the multiplayer, in my opinion, is the most solid multiplayer FPS experience on the console. Forget people’s complaints about the “levelling up” system. You start with everything you need to play well. In fact, I find the more you think like an actual person who actually doesn’t want to die, the better you do. At early levels, I was crushing people because I’d slowly crawl through grass up to snipers and quietly take thme out form behind. The bonuses you get as you level up are more like shiny toys and less like real advantages. This is the only game I play on Xbox Live Arcade anymore.

- The Orange Box
Two first-person shooter titles on my list is kind of crazy, because they’re definitely not my genre, but this is almost definitely their year. Half-Life 2 got a really awesome conclusion. Team Fortress 2 had things that I loved about it (well, mostly just the videos… I find it looks boring in gameplay, and worse, I don’t really enjoy playing it. But, the use of voice in the multiplayer FPS format is just stunning). Then, there’s Portal. I’m not sure if it’s even worth extolling the virtues of this game at this point, because it’s been said much better by pretty much everyone else (I’m looking at you, N’Gai and Totilo) (…he said, as if they were actually reading this). But, if you haven’t played it, it really feels like a monumental step for first-person shooters in spatial innovation, as well as video games in general due to its tone and storytelling. It may be only four hours long at best, but without Portal, I doubt Orange Box would’ve placed in my top five.

- skate.
I’ve only started playing this recently, but I am completely enchanted by it. I realized that I spent upwards of an hour trying to land one specific fliptrick to grind last night. When you do something properly in this game, the sense of satisfaction is awesome. It is excruciatingly difficult at times, but at the same time, always feels kind of hazy and calm, like spending a lazy sunday outside kicking around a real skteboard (I assume… I never had one). The advertisement is a real irritator, and the stick feels a bit random at times, but other than those little niggly issues, this is a game you can sit down with and not stop playing until something forces you away– be it five minutes or five hours later.

- Stranglehold
I won’t pretend this is a game you should own, but I really feel like everyone who loves awesome singleplayer games should give this one a rental. It’s really fun to watch, and even more fun to play. The John Woo attitude just oozes out of the game, and kind of plays out like a really long Woo movie. It also plays out, more importantly, like a perfectly paced action game. It’s never exhausting, and there’s only one point where I found it boring (and that may have been my own fault for not getting where I was supposed to go). It’s difficult at times, but never repetitive. The mini-game mode fits in flawlessly and keeps things fresh. The “tequila bombs” have a suitably dumb videogame name and are each really stupidly fun to use. Play this. Thank me later.

Stay tuned for top five 360 Arcade games, DS games, and top three PS2 and low-end-PC.

My favourite games from before my birth

I was born on August 15, 1984. It’s a pretty special date, because it meant I was born into the recovering videogame (Boy, I hate that spelling… thanks, VG Styleguide. I only do it because at least someone’s standing up for standardization in videogame editorials) industry. I didn’t experience first hand the epic failure of E.T., or the resulting drought that nearly choked video games out of existence. By the time I was old enough to crawl, the NES was strong and a new era of gaming had begun.

However, I spent a lot of quality time with games older than me while growing up. Our house was an anomaly: we had a games console and a computer, which many others didn’t have, but we always had very dated, second-hand equipment. During the reign of the NES, I could only play jealously at other houses, wishing my father would upgrade us from the Atari 2600. When the Pentium 100 came out, and I watched my friend play Warcraft II, I wished my father would replace our old Atari ST desktop. He did– with his friend’s old 486 (not even a 486DX! The horror!). The Christmas when the N64 came out, my mom gave me her boss’s kid’s SNES (in my opinion, they got completely shortchanged here. The 64 was good, but I got an SNES!).

Some of these games suck now, but they have a certain magic to me. That magic is impossible to capture due to the Internet, nowadays; before you even look at the cover of a game, you can now know if it is good or if it sucks. Back in the day, you couldn’t even rent these games. You had to get them at garage sales, which were usually run by the parents of people who owned the games, so they couldn’t even tell you if they were good. That’s something that’s probably lost on kids nowadays. Back then, I didn’t even have someone to compare games with. If I ever have kids, I will give them all Game Boys, and not let them on the Internet until they start needing it for school. Then I wil buy them horribly shitty Game Boy games that they will love, despite the crap, because they don’t know better. Every nerd should experience loving a dud game.

[b]Breakout[/b]

This game pretty much solidified my opinion of how games should be played. Why play Pong with a friend? If my friend is over, I want to run around and play guns or draw pictures or pretend to be spacemen. If I am home alone, however, I want a game to play! Breakout was the first “Pong vs. A Brick Wall” game and I still have never stopped playing games like this (Alleyway on Game Boy, Arkanoid on Commodore Amiga, Nervous Brickdown recently on DS). I still don’t “get” multiplayer gaming. I always think there’s something better I could be doing with my friends. I’m barely talknig about Breakout… or am I?

[b]Space Invaders[/b]

This one I only got to play in arcades, and not very often, but I loved it. It was probably the earliest example of videogame masochism I can remember. My parents would give me one or two quarters and leave me at the local mall arcade for an hour while they took care of their business. I would usually play the newer, shinier games like TMNT: The Arcade Game, but for a while, it was Space Invaders. I’m not sure I ever beat the first wave of baddies (I sucked at games then, just like I do now). The game I played was in black and white, too, with coloured cellophane over the screen to make it look like the aliens had color. Awesome.

[b]Asteroids[/b]

This is probably the game I played most on my Atari ST personal computer, with the possible exception of Bubble Ghost (which came out in 1987, and doesn’t make the cut for this list). Boy, this game was amazing. I think the version I was playing was actually “Asteroids Deluxe,” but it doesn’t matter. This game had one of my favourite mechanics to ever not be really ripped off by every game ever; the “warp” mechanic, which was essentially the “oh shit, I’m probably about to die, if I hit this I might live… or I might TOTALLY die right away” button. When I got bored of the game played normally, I’d challenge myself to only move using warp, and forego the up/down/left/right controls entirely.

[b]Gorf[/b]

My friend scored a VIC-20 from a garage sale with this game. It was the first game I ever saw that you had to load from a cassette.  The wait was excruciating. It made me really glad that I had the Atari 2600, whose load times were virtually non-existent. But, once Gorf was running, it was a masterpiece. The game was punishing, like Space Invaders, but once you passd that first level, it was practically a brand new game. This was the first time I’d ever really experienced the feeling that a game could present another scenario instead of “the same as before but harder.” Now, that’s taken for granted, but back then, it was like finding $5 in an old pair of pants. A completely unexpected surprise (remember, there was no Internet to tell us!), and a reason to go to that friend’s house way, way more (aside from his other awesome stuff, like later, an NES, and before that, his dad’s hidden adult mags).

[b]Combat[/b]

I know I said I didn’t like multiplayer games above, but this was one of the first examples of me changing my mind. You could play as tanks, planes, or… uhh, faster planes in this one-versus-one shooter. The tanks were the best. Trying to explain the game just doesn’t get the message across, I’ve learned. It’s a game that I think everyone should experience with a good friend at some point. It may have been the most perfect 1v1 shooter ever made, and it’s held up fabulously. Seriously, go play this game. Like, now. After hours, when you’re sick of tank mode, try the planes mode.

[b]Donkey Kong[/b]

This is one of the three 2600 games I actually owned, and probably my least favourite of the three, but that’s not saying much. The first (or third, or fifth, or…) level is the one you’d recognize if you’ve never played the game; a questionably wobbly looking tower with a monkey on top, throwing barrels at you. THIS WAS NOT THE BEST LEVEL. The best level was the second level, with four perfectly level floors, with two poorly built rivets each, and a really nasty, high-speed fireball on each. See, the fireball had free range on the level until you jumped over and killed a rivet. Then, it could only go back and forth between the wall and the rivet (or, if you trapped it in the middle, the rivet and the other rivet). I’m not sure I am doing this justice. But, the feeling of being over on the ugly side of a rivet, and timing your jump so that you went over a rivet AND the fireball at the same time, AND trapping the fireball on the useless side of the building, was so epically awesome that you felt like an absolute master of video games. I never managed to do that more thna twice in one level (you get four chances), so you felt like you’d done something really special. I don’t know if this game is actually hard anymore, but back then, it was the perfect level of punishing. Not hopeless, but NOT easy.

[b]Ms. Pac-Man[/b]

I never had Pac-Man, but I had Ms. Pac-Man. I think I cried when my dad bought it, not because I knew Pac-Man was a better game, but because it looked like it was for girls. But, I played it. And I played it a lot. In fact, this is one of the games I got to the “end” of (not really, as I’m not sure there even was an end; however, every Atari game I had would eventually glitch up a few levels in, forcing me to start over. Thanks, dust, for complicating my young gaming life.). I should play this game again; since, I’ve only played a bit of Pac-Man and a bunch of Pac-Man C.E. (which will make an appearance on my top games of 2007 list, so stay tuned). Ms. Pac-Man was also very unique in that it had a main female character who wasn’t included to make dudes want to bang her. Nice one, Namco.

[b]Mario Bros.[/b]

This isn’t Super Mario Brothers. This is the game before it, for the Atari. You’ve probably played it while playing your friend at SMB3 on the Nintendo, when you enter the level he’s standing on. But, that version pales in comparison to the original. You had to commit to jumps, back in the day. You had to save that POW block for when you really needed it, not just when you felt like messing with your buddy. I think my game had a glitch, too, because there weren’t any coins when you killed a badguy; there was a weird spinning multi-colored wafer. I remember always thinking they looked like candy, and wanting to eat them a lot.

That’s it for this segment of “Will Missing The Good Ol’ Days.” I hope to do segments on later generations of games, and later consoles in the future. Keep an eye out for a Game Boy retrospective. I’ll try not to talk about games you’ve heard too much abotu already, like Pokemon, and stick to ones you have definitely not heard enough about, like Final Fantasy Legend (the first), Solar Striker, Baseball, Super Mario Land (the first), and maybe a few others.

The Easiest Fix for Game Journalism

Listening to the Games For Windows’ podcast today, and a reviewer from 1UP was talking about how frustrated he is with those who pay too much attention to the number given in a review, and not enough to the information therein. This is something I can agree with; I, myself, am a rehabilitating review non-reader. I’d take the numbers, or worse, the “metanumbers” at face value, and assess whether or not I was interested in a game by these numbers. Of course, the numbering system is sort of a journalistic cold war; you need to keep the numbers there, even if they mean nothing to you, to keep attracting the stupid public. Remove them, and nobody will pay attention to you.

Imagine, though, this weren’t the case. Imagine every site and magazine stopped publishing numbers, but moved to some other ranking system. What could replace numbers and their obvious uselessness? First of all, I think the problem needs to be assessed more thoroughly; namely, what exactly IS wrong with numbers? Off the top of my head, I can think of four things:

1) The quality of a game is not quantifiable, while a number is.

This is probably the most obvious flaw. What makes this game an 8.5 and this one an 8? Is there any unifying system? Most reviewers I know start with what number they “feel” should fit, and work their way out. If the second thing I play is better than the first, I rate it higher, and the opposite. But these numbers are almost never based on any sort of metric.

2) Every publication, or even every reviewer, rates differently.

Some games get the shaft because their reviewer treats 5 as an average game instead of 7, or that reviewer won’t give out a 10 to anyting less than gaming perfection, whereas another throws them at everything he thinks you need to own. This is especially bad within one publication, because some people might trust that publiction above all else, not knowing that one man’s 7 was another man’s 9. Metacritic makes this worse, as you don’t even see who wrote an article, or get a context of their average score, or what other games that reviewer has given that score… it’s just an amalgam of contextless, arbitrary numbers.

3) It’s arcane.

New gamers aren’t privy to the numbering system, and it could be intimidating. It doesn’t tell them why they should like a game, or not like it; just rubs a number in their face that comes from a weird evolution over twenty years of games journalism.

4) It’s clumsy.

People, no matter what, want a quick answer as to whether or not they should play something. If they just trust a number, though, they’re only seeing an overall 1-10 bad-good scale. It doesn’t say what needs improving; it might be irrelevant to them that the story is juvenile, for example, while it changed the reviewers number. They

Right, so as I was saying, alternatives to numbers. Warning: The following ideas tread the fine line between satire and not-satire. What that means is, they seem silly, but they all probably work better than those cursed numbers. That said, let’s jump straight into the ideas.

A PICTURE IS WORTH 1000 WORDS.

Instead of a number, each reviewer takes a photograph of themselves that best represents how the game makes them feel. For example, if I were to take a picture of myself after playing Ico, there’d be this incredible sense of wonder on my face, maybe some sparkles in my eyes, or even a single tear. If I were to take a photo of myself after playing Descent: Freespace, I would be vomitting… but giving the thumbs up. Halo 3: I’d be yawning. Street Fighter III: Punching my friend in the nuts with a maniacal grin on my face. If any of those appeal to you, you should definitely check out the game!

The Positives:

+ More expressive than a stupid number.
+ Encourages and inspires creativity!
+ Plays to the user’s emotion, which is awesome, because so many games ellicit an emotional response, and a number can’t really get that across.
+ Takes about as much time to absorb as a number.
+ Very entertaining.
+ Throw Photoshop in there, and you’ve got an entirely unexplored palette for game criticism!
- Gives actors work.

The Negatives:

- Most nerds have about three facial expressions: blank screen stare, bitter bully-just-hit-me snarl, and dopey girl-is-talking-to-me?! face.
- The left-brained folks will hate that they can’t quantify it, and, more importantly, can’t contrast it to similar games.
- May leave even more open to interpretation (is that a grimace of pain, or a grin of deviant joy?).
- A lot of pagespace for print and a lot of bandwidth for Internet (weakest argument ever).
- Gives actors work.

THE INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE OF PERIWINKLE TRIANGLES

This is another one that will look like it fell out of a Montessori school. It’s also somewhat quantifiable, but that’s part of the magic of it; it will communicate several numbers in one simple, easily understood symbol. The workings would take some getting used to; you select the three most important criteria to you — we’ll pick control/gameplay, presentation (visual and audio), and theme (story, or whatever else you think fits here) and assign one of each to those: hue, saturation, and brghtness. Let’s say that gameplay is on a scale of red to green taking a detour through blue, presentation is represented by the richness of the color, and theme can modify the game by up to 50% darkness or 50% lightness (the former is Bioshock, the latter is Katamari Anything). What do you display these colors on? Shapes that represent the kind of gamer that will enjoy them. One shape might be the “critic” shape. Games like Bioshock or Knights of the Old Republic fall into this– let’s call them “heady” games. You can make up shapes as you go along. Maybe that one’s shaped like a head. Games that appeal to nostalgia get a heart, and Gears of War gets a giant crotch. Or, have every reviewer on your staff represented by their own face, and use the face of whoever champions the game most. If it’s nobody, just make it a generic smiley-face. If they only support it weakly, use a morph program to split the difference between your reviewer and the smiley. If everyone loves it unanimously, use a picture Shigeru Miyamoto or Master Chief or whatever inernet face-meme is in at the time of print.

Positives:

+ Gets many ideas across very quickly.
+ Aesthetically appealing, particularly when many are lined up beside each other.
+ Easily “scalable” for those scared of running away from the numbers game entirely.
+ Quickly rates a game based on multiple important criteria.
+ Funny.

Negatives:

- You look like an idiot.
- No, seriously, it’d look pretty dumb.
- It may be hard to tell some colors once darkened or desaturated.
- Still dumb.
- Some people will still complain; “Why did you give this game #ffc107?! Clearly it deserves at least #ddff12!!!”

SUM IT UP IN A SENTENCE.

Some sites already do this. Unfortunately, Metacritic just tends to pick a sentence out of the review, which, out of context, often paints the game in the light not actually reflected by the review. So, instead, a good option is to take all of your ideas and fit it into ten words. Avoid lazy games-journalism words like “if.” Seriously, you’re wasting everyone’s time if you say Luminous Arc is a decent game “if you’re a turn-based strategy fan.” Tell me why I might like it, and why I might not. For that game, I’d say something like “Easy, light TBS romp; but, generic and irritating menu system.” Ten words, and you have a good idea of the good and the bad. If it catches your fancy, you might read the more in-depth review contained after the tagline. Want another one? Bioshock: “Thrilling FPS; storyline beats average videogames’, but not genre-transcendant.” Ta da! Man, if I had more games, I’d totally be an amazing reviewist.

Positives:

+ Infinitely more useful than a number in determining why a game is good or bad.
+ Short enough that even the most ADD of readers can follow.
+ Encourages people who might actually be interested in the game to read the review, instead of anyone who likes numbers of 7.5+.
+ At the very least, gives metacritic something to quote you on, that isn’t a random sentence from the review.

Negatives:

- It’s not easy to say everything in ten words.
- A point that may actually be relevant is that non-English readers are in the lurch. Every other idea so far is not English-based.
- Okay, that point I made about the ADD readers? Probably not true. They will not read your ten words.
- Even if you’re a master of concise English like me (look at how concise this article is! Look how little of this is redundant of otherwise entirely cuttable!), you still will use the wrong words or fail to sum up your idea in ten words or something.

CONCLUSION

Those are my opinions on the matter. What can you, as a reviewist, do to contribute? Your editors are surely breathing down your neck for the numbers, whether you’re interested in delivering them or not. Below are some options for that:

1. Just say no. They can make up their own numbers based on whoever’s paying them the most, and you can say that “the man” is giving numbers to yor “work,” and you have mahbe even more cred than before.

2. Rate everything an 8/10. No matter if you loved it or hated it. This is what I am doing for my film reviews at The Spoilerist (look for Will! Reviews coming soon!). It’s like an act of protest and a totally stupid, silly thing… all at once!

3. If you’re going to rate seriously, PLEASE rate on an actual 10 point scale, instead of a grade-school scale. I know a C grade is average, but a 7/10 should not be. 5 out of 10 is average; this gives you five levels of excellence (6, 7, 8, 9, 10) and five levels of crapness (4, 3, 2, 1, 0). Give as many zeroes as you do tens. Give as many ones as you do nines. Remember that a great game might be average compared to others. Remember that a game with a rating of three may, in fact, be worth playing.

4. Fuck your dream job and go back to copyediting.

William

Are “indie games” the “New Wave” of videogaming?

I don’t mean “new wave” like the descriptor for the shiniest, newest games for next-gen, or “new wave” like the synth-heavy 80s music, but “new wave” like the movement(s?) in film. Big companies are sinking millions into games, so to ensure that they sell, they make them like games that sold well already. Wolfenstein begot Doom begot Goldeneye 007 begat Half-Life begat Halo, etc etc etc. Sure, each blockbuster, trillion-selling game broke new ground for the genre, but Halo 3 is still just a really fancy Wolfenstein 3D. Plenty of now-tried-and-true genres have gone through the same crawling evolution: real-time strategy wargames, Japanese role-playing games (a la Final Fantasy), North American RPGs (baldur’s gate springs to mind as an example), strategy RPGs (think Ogre Battle), stealth action (metal gear or splinter cell style), rhythm games (all guitar hero did was add mainstream songs and a novel controller), platformers, shmups (they’re fucking awesome, but they’re all still Galaga), third-person shooters (we also have The Matrix to thank for “bullet time”), and plenty more I can’t be bothered to think of right now. Even the (relatively) new genre of MMOs has already fallen into its own tired clichés, but that’s another debate for another day (the entire economy of MMOs is built on dissatisfied players. Ask me more!)

But then you have games that are just different. The flash app series “Grow” comes to mind; google it if you haven’t already experienced it. It’s a game, in that you have an objective, but it’s not immediately familiar. You interact with it, and it rewards you with fun animations. It’s got what video games have always been about, at least to me: it gives you an arbitrary system, and forces you to learn it and exploit it. The system is just very different from the systems we’re seeing over and over in games. There’s another, unrelated game called “flOw,” which, admittedly, I’ve hardly played, but it is similar in its difference from everything else. It makes no sense at first, but you learn it as you go along. Katamari Damacy (and the sequels), too, is a game whose concept wasn’t really explored before, but nonetheless worked out very well. These games aren’t the blockbusters, though; I’m unsure as to how much the Grow developer made via advertising and hosting and stuff, but it can’t be even one ten thousandth of what Halo 3 made in its first 17 minutes of availability. And that’s not even including the preorders.

But, that’s not why people are making these games, I don’t think. They’re making it because they’re unsatisfied with video games’ current climate. I could just be projecting, but when I play something like Toribash (the best turn-based hyper-violent sphere-based fighting game since Ballz was played on a shitty, slow emulator). The “auteurs” of games, however, are from an older age– an age before the videogame industry WAS something to reject. There’s always been innovation (look at R&D1’s masterpiece “Super Mario Land” for the Game Boy– commissioned with making a Mario game without Miyamoto, they made something that may actually be the best game with the name “Mario” ever) and there’s always been fantastic creativity (love them or hate them, the games that put Molyneux, Miyamoto and Kojima on the map are incredible). I think the point, though, is that the door is simultaneously more closed and more open than it’s ever been to young, fresh-idea-filled developers. On one hand, you have the EAs of the world, whose bread and butter is re-releasing the same games with a new cast of characters (that they don’t even need to invent– the sports world writes itself, people!). On another, you have the “creative” break-off developers like Lionhead and Clover, which, while producing something interesting, are not allowing NEW talent to be creative– only their auteur-of-olden-tyme of choice. The third option, though, is the web (and, to a lesser degree, modding other games). It’s free, and, while you may never see anything in the way of money or career opportunities, you get to make something you want to play. I think that’s where I see the similarity. Oh, and I just remembered the name of another amazingly fun flash game: “Gimme Friction.” Check it out, it’s also really cool.

First post! And, a search/destroy on DS games.

Hi there! This is my new blog. I plan to use it to talk about a lot of things. One of those things is video games. It won’t be strictly a video game blog, though, so watch out. Anyway. The DS is amazing and is getting a good batch of upcoming stuff. Here’s my SEARCH AND DESTROY (concept ripped off from a favourite messageboard):

SEARCH: Touch The Dead / May15
The previews say it’s pretty fun. I dunno how a shooter will work with the stylus, but it looks fun!

DESTROY: Marvel Card Trading Game / May22
Apparently even the playtesters are saying this game is shit. Avoid like plague. Not that you were planning on buying a card game (lol SNK v Capcom)

SEARCH: Naruto 3 / May22
I know some of you guys like Naruto, and this is apparently fan service + a fun side-scroller, what more could you want?

SEARCH: Etrian Odyssey / Q2 2007
Okay, I’m turning into an Atlus fanboy a bit… I don’t even really LIKE Atlus games, but I want to play them ALL. Fans of the old-school first-person RPGs should find something to dig here, cool use of two screens.

DESTROY: Nintendo DS Browser / June4
Apparently buggy. And if you don’t have a laptop or a cell phone already, you don’t deserve to check your e-mail while you’re at Second Cup, you berk. Just kidding, this one’s a “search” for sure. Because cell phone internet costs money and laptops are bigger than DSs.

SEARCH: Super Collapse 3 / June4
I don’t know how many of the features have translated from the original program for Mac OS X and Windows, but this one is fun. I liked it more than I like Puzzle Quest. But I don’t like Puzzle Quest. At all. And I was a HUGE Warlords fan when I had my Amiga, and I LOVE good puzzle games… but fucking puzzle quest… ugh. Butt ugly and boring and the AI is a buttplug. SC3 will be sweet though and give you your new puzzle game fix.

SEARCH: New York Times Crosswords / Q2 2007
The best crosswords on your DS. Apparently there are 1000 of them. So, more than you’ll ever finish. AWESOME.

SEARCH: Heroes of Mana / Summer 2007
Hmm. All the “Mana” games since the fan-translated SD3 have been shit, but this one looks cool. It’s a strategy game.

SEARCH: Hoshigami Remix / Summer 2007
Probably more of a destroy, but I am a sucker for tactical RPGs. And Atlus. And things with “remix” in the title.

SEARCH: Phoenix Wright 3 / Sept
Here it comes, it’s in the trees

SEARCH: Dragon Quest IX / Sometime 2007
This is a destroy for me but i’m sure someone will enjoy it. Fuck old school RPGs (unless they’re by Atlus).

SEARCH: Phantom Hourglass / Sometime 2007
Zelda. DS. Why am I saying ANYTHING?

SEARCH: Warlords DS / Sometime 2007
Remake of Warlords 2, the best warlords game ever. Turn-based strategy in the vein of Heroes of Might and Magic but way, way better IMO.

SEARCH: Lost / Sometime 2007
lol guyz their in pergatori