Ahh the amazing “myth” of Scorpia…
Little known fact, but Scorpia is actually Heather Locklear and would play computer games in the nude…
ok, maybe that was just in my head…but I’m sticking with it.
He did say “incredibly unfriendly to the point of hostility to the rest of us,” which I may have misinterpreted as belligerent. But by my reckoning, that’s pretty belligerent – even unprofessional. I understand the contentious relationship between writer and editor, albeit in the newspaper business rather than magazines, so I understand what you’re saying about editor loyalty. Was she being arrogant or suffering from awful social skills or just angry about the changing guard at the mag? Only one person knows that answer, I guess.
Thanks for the insight, Arinn. Oh, and thanks for the image of Johnny in drag.
Arinn’s assessment is pretty much the truth here. This is what it boiled down to. The “you hated Baldur’s Gate so you’re out!!!” thing is really misleading and not what it was about. Every single writer/editor who’s ever written for CGW (including me) has liked/hated a game that went against conventional wisdom. That in itself is of course not a bad thing.
It’s really what Arinn said, and what I said in a previous post: Scorpia’s relationship to CGW was a relationship with Johnny Wilson. Even though I was her assigned editor for many years, for example, she’d email her stories to Johnny. Just one small example.
When George Jones took over as EIC, there was simply no real relationship to anyone on the staff except for an extremely vague and sometimes hostile/annoyed one (though, as Arinn says, some of the personality stuff could possibly have been attributed to shyness rather than diva-ness, which, unfortunately, is often how that comes across), and so it just made sense to cut that tie.
And , hey, she’s back, she has her own website, so yay.
I’m pretty sure she attended some of the GEnie sysop conventions, but I never went to any of those.
I still miss GEnie sometimes.
It’s good to share.
–Arinn
I agree for the most part, but I think this applies more towards criticism of the arts than of consumer products. If I review cars and I think driving a stick gives me better performance and is more interesting, I had better be able to set aside those feelings because the market and the manufacturers have embraced automatic transmissions.
What I miss about someone like Scorpia is the sense of the reviewer as an idiosyncratic personality I can get to know and whose sensibilities I see reflected in the reviews. Those critics are still around – Tom’s one. I wish there were more, though. I think too many reviewers go out of their way to avoid any controversy.
Yep, that’s all I care about.
Maybe she was difficult to work with, but her work was excellent. I liked the fact that I could count on Scorpia having played the game she was reviewing to completion. Also, her taste in games was similar to my own, e.g. she disked the fedex quests that make up a large part of most rpg’s.
I would go so far as to say the Scorpia was one of the few “true” reviewers of computer games. I find that most reviewers are pretty much shills for the game companies. Excluding, of course, Tom and a few others.
Malcolm
Wouldn’t Indigo Prophecy/Farenheit count here? Decent previews, generally good reviews, etc.
Somebody tell Klosterman that we’ve already had the Lester Bangs of Gaming and his name is Scorpia.
Yes, Indigo Prophecy should have counted but while playing it was, in my opinion, a great experience, there just wasn’t the same sort of hype surrounding it that Baldur’s Gate enjoyed well before its release. That’s why I think Sam and Max has probably the best shot out of any adventure game, and it’s probably the last one that will enjoy its position. I hope TellTale makes the most of it.
Sam and Max enjoys having an already established fan base, both in the comics world and in the gaming community. The LucasArts S&M game is widely accepted as one of the best adventures of all time (personally, I think the game is great but it wouldn’t make my top five list for adventures), and even people who’ve never played adventure games before stand a good chance of probably at least knowing about the old game.
The only other recent adventure of memory that enjoyed a somewhat similar position was Dreamfall, but since The Longest Journey, while a great adventure game, wasn’t released in the “golden era” of the early-to-mid 90s it was itself considered an anomalous success, and a moderate one at that. It was a great success in the adventure niche to be sure, but in the era of blockbusters-or-nothing it was barely a blip on an often overlooked area of the radar screen.
Also, Indigo Prophecy was such a different sort of game that it was hard for it to find its audience. It was different from the blockbusters that surrounded it, and it was different from the adventure games that its target audience was familiar with. There wasn’t a lot of puzzle solving, there were Shenmue like “QTR” events, etc…Indigo was the realization of the much ballyhooed (and abused) Interactive Movie term from the early CD-ROM days. It wasn’t so much a game as it was the interactive experiencing of a story. It’s really hard to market something like that, and even harder to get people to understand it even if you manage to get their attention.
The media repeatedly telling its audience that it does not want games like that anymore doesn’t help, either.
Getting back to the What Is A Game Critic? question for a second, I have to wonder what happened to the days where fans of a genre were the ones who covered and reviewed the games in that genre. It seems today (and I could very well be wrong, so feel free to correct me) that many outlets tend to have a stable of reviewers that are assigned various titles with little regard to where their true interests lie.
For example, I have to wonder if there are even any adventure genre fans writing reviews for the main outlets these days, so that on the rare occasion when one of the several new adventure releases is actually reviewed (at least beyond a quick one or two paragraph blurb of a review), it’s done by someone who doesn’t even like the genre to begin with. That’s not what I’d call a fair shake.
I remember when magazines had the RPG critic, the Adventure critic, the Strategy, the Simulation, the Action critic, etc…Does this still happen at all anymore? I tend to think it does to some degree, but not with any hard-line definitions provided by the reviewers themselves which is carried on and identified to the reader, and that makes it difficult for me to trust any review source. While I’ve never based my purchases on reviews, I know that there are a lot of people out there who do. That, coupled with my earlier mention of how much more influential the major media is than might be expected, add up to painting a picture that tends to foster the limited blockbuster approach of publishers.
The irony here is that so much of the media tends to lament the blockbuster mentality while I really think that it not only helps support it, but encourages it as well by not having certain standards and regulations in place such as having dedicated genre reviews and other approaches that would lend not only integrity to their copy and instill trust to its readers, but would also open the door back up for equal coverage of all genres on an equal playing field, regardless of the “mass-appeal” (or marketing budget) of any given title.
I’d just like to weigh in with a “me too!” remark. Back in the days of Bard’s Tale I would play the game over and over, feeling that I should really be enjoying it, that this was my kind of game, yet… something wasn’t right and I didn’t have fun.
Over the years the odd game came along, Lands of Lore (the demo which constantly crashed my machine), Albion… but there was something missing.
For me, the Infinity Engine games represent the golden age of RPG gaming. A focus on party, dialogue and story, the things I love above all else. Perhaps some of my love for Baldur’s Gate is because I had never been a part of the Ultima crowd, or Wizardy, or any of those big names from “back in the day”. Maybe it comes from being unemployed at the time I finally got around to trying to finish it (with BG2 on the horizon). I have fond memories of taking a party of people I cared about out into the wilderness to solve mysterious and defeat creatures. I lost myself in the game, and I love it for giving me that feeling of escapism that I value above all else.
For me, that was what an RPG should be like, and obviously others feel the same way.
Since then we’ve drifted away from party RPGs, at least on the PC, and we now have MMORPGS (games about as detached from RPGs as is possible) and sandboxes like Oblivion where you are alone and story, dialogue and so on mean nothing, because freedom is everything, an experience that does little for me.
I mourn for the passing of “my time”.
Maybe I’m a curmudgeon, or a heathen, but I really did not care for the Baldur’s Gate series and saw it as a step backwards from the Gold Box series in the days of old.
When I play D&D on paper, I want to be able to see the grid during combat. I want initiative and proper turn order and turn based planning and strategy, and this was all thrown out the window for a real-time/turn-based bastardization that just did not work for me. I would have been more than happy, THRILLED, to have seen the Baldur’s Gate games as they were, but when combat is initiated change to a grid based combat system with the area and objects approximated for the location.
For me, the golden age of RPGs was the mid to late 80s when Origin could do no wrong and even Electronic Arts turned out some fantastic titles as well. That said, is Scorpia single?
It’s a mystery to me how you can value a focus on party, dialogue, and story above all else and somehow not be part of the Ultima crowd. Those things are really all Ultima is from Ultima 4-7.5. Maybe they just didn’t gel with you for some reason, but I’d be curious to find out what it was about them that put you off. If you never bothered with Ultima 7 and 7.5, you should really give them a chance.
Baldur’s Gate was, in a lot of ways to me, an Ultima clone without the interesting characters, places, quests, and story and with an over-emphasis on micro-managed combat filled with lots of silly D&D rules I neither understood nor made any sense to me. The casting and forgetting of spells will always confound me. Always. I cast magic missle! POW! Um, how’d I just do that? Dang! I’m stupid again until I can get a good night’s sleep. Curses!
Baldur’s Gate 2 kept the combat heavyness but cleaned it up a bit, plus it threw in the added bonus of having a good party with intersting characters and places to see, etc…As much fun as BG2 is though, it’s still no Black Gate or Serpent Isle - but I don’t think anything could ever come close to having the appeal that Ultima does for me, having grown up playing it from the beginning. BG2 came as close as any game can though, while BG1 couldn’t even keep up at the tail-end of line.
I didn’t dislike Ultima, I simply never played it. I got into PC gaming around the time of the 486, a little before Doom, and somehow the whole thing just passed me by. I do recall being mighty tempted by Ultima 7 screenshots though. I bought the Ultima collection off e-bay, so I do intended to play from at least 4 onwards.
And herein lies the problem. If I want a TBS then I will buy a TBS, not an RPG. This is why BG was an enjoyable game, it didn’t mess around trying to compete with another market.
But when you buy D&D, I would think it natural to assume turn based combat as that is how the game is played on pen and paper, particularly since if you tried doing it realtime, it would end up in utter chaos, which to me was how the combat played out in BG.
Speaking of turn based, pretty much every RPG up until that point had turn based combat, going way back to Ultima 1 all the way through the Fallout series and just about everything in between. It clearly wasn’t broken, so why try to fix it?
Well, no, not really. Perhaps that is how PnP D&D players think of it, but to me D&D means “fantasy world with traditional fantasy creatures” and nothing more.
As for “not broken”, I wonder how many people buying BG were like me, people who didn’t play Ultima, hadn’t liked RPGs up to that point. To say that RPGs should have stayed turn based because, basically, you had liked it that way, is ridiculous. All that had been shown is that there was a market for RPGs using a turned-base mechanism for combat. Myself, I’m not interested. X-COM is one of the few games I’ve played where I felt that real-time would be a negative thing.
Ultima stopped having turn-based combat after Ultima V, I believe. The combat really becomes secondary, almost tertiary by Ultima 7. It becomes all about the story and characters and the world they live in. The combat is there because it needs to be, but it’s by no means anywhere near the spotlight of the game. A lot of longtime Ultima fans grumbled about this when it happened.
Personally, I don’t give a hoot about stat management and +2 this and -4 that in my RPGs. In fact, seeing all of those numbers tends to shatter the illusion for me and I quickly only see the math. At that point, the game breaks down into a transparent arithmatic activity and it’s usually then that I begin to lose interest in the characters, story, world, etc…which are usually pretty weak to begin with. Ultima does (did) a great job of stripping all of the standard trappings of the RPG away and distilling them down into only what was needed while piling on gobs and heaps and oodles of ways to immerse the player in their alternate lives.
Quitch, if you get around to trying Ultima 7 and 7.5 one of these days, be sure to grab Exult. It will make your life much easier.
I’ve seen Exult mentioned a lot. Should I use 1.2 or the snapshot?
I’ve always just used the official releases. I guess it depends on if they’ve done anything particularly spectacular in the latest snapshot that you might want to try out. The official release does everything I want it to do, so I don’t worry with the snapshots. I enjoy setting all of the whiz-bang features to off so that I can run the game more or less exactly as it ran for me back in the day. That, and I can’t stand how the anti-aliasing filters make the graphics look. I guess a lot of people really can’t tolerate jaggy drawings, but they add to the nostalgic flavor for me…that, and I don’t get ugly and blurry approximations of what I should be seeing on my screen.