It was recently announced at Microsoft’s Gamescom conference that the next Tomb Raider game will be coming “Exclusively to Xbox One” in Holiday 2015. This immediately (and rightfully) raised something of a shitstorm amongst PS4 and PC users. Will the game ever come to other platforms? What does this mean for the Tomb Raider franchise going forward? What exactly is Square Enix thinking?
To that last one, I think there’s a very simple answer: they hate money.
So by now, many of you will have heard of this. After operating under a working title of There and Back Again, the third installment in the needlessly-trilogy’d Hobbit movies has been renamed to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in an Oscar bid attempt to take home the award for “Most Uses of the Word ‘The’ in a Title”.
Already there’s a bit of nerd rage circulating, and while I don’t want to fall too far into the “rage” category, I’m also not super jazzed about the change. Obviously it’s just a title, and what’s important is the content of the film, not how good the film’s name looks on a movie poster. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is kind of a silly name for a film, whereas Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home actually sounds pretty great, but everybody knows that the reality of each of these films is the stark opposite; Khan is the best entry in the Star Trek movie franchise and Save the Whales is possibly the weakest. Titles are not at all an indicator of film quality, though a good title does make things a lot neater. The concern I have about this recent title change isn’t that it sounds dumb or is too long or anything like that. Rather, it seems that this is another bit of evidence indicating that Peter Jackson and company might be losing sight of what the Hobbit is really about.
What with the recent announcement of the PS4 there’s been a lot of talk stirring up again about “next generation” games and hardware. Between EA claiming that it will be narrowing its scope of development to fewer games this generation, Activision predicting that development costs will double (those two seem connected to me) and a dozen other theories, guesses, and rumors there’s a lot to talk about right now. But what I really want to focus on is a very old debate that’s seen a bit more attention ever since the Sony press event and the reveal of the PS4 a little while ago.
As part of the media blitz to let people know that the PS4 will have games and it’ll be able to do cool stuff with them, David Cage gave a short tech demo, showing us what the PS4 can do graphically. All fine and good, that’ll give people something to talk about over the water cooler for a bit, but I’m not interested in what was shown so much as I am the ideology that Cage demonstrated during the demo. In it, Cage posits that technology is the main avenue game creators use to reach players on an emotional level. He claims that with every advance in technology and visuals we get closer and closer to replicating real human emotion which can resonate with players much, much more than a graphically-inferior game could. To make this point, he talks about the early days of cinema and how actors had to over-emphasize every movement and action in order to convey the correct tone. He notes how with improved camera technology, advanced understanding of lighting and sound, and all around better production quality movies were able to convey much more subtle emotion with smaller, less grandiose gestures. Scenes from The Great Train Robbery play on the screen behind him to demonstrate his point, and he then displays the tech demo itslef, showing how with the technology available through the PS4 characters are able to make much more subtle movements, conveying a wider range of emotions. This, he says, is the foundation of all emotional storytelling within games.
Stark Raving Sane 