Thursday 25 August 2011

Quality guaranteed?


I always found whilst I was growing up that there were certain things about a new game that got me excited about it. The genre, reviews and screenshots in magazines (this was before I had the internet people!) were of course a part of it but one thing above all else made me salivate and yearn for a game to come out; the word 'Squaresoft' printed on the cover. Back then if I saw that logo I was buying that game. End of discussion. I cottoned on to this notion that Squaresoft games were awesome long before I realised, for example, that I will almost certainly love a Christopher Nolan film. Hell I was noticing this even before I started reading different books by the same author after reading one I liked. This realisation has revealed two facts to me. Firstly I like video games more than other forms of entertainment (granted this was not a shocker) but also that the games industry can have a dramatic effect on their customers, at least equal to that of directors and authors of their movies and books.


Unfortunately Squaresoft no longer exist. Over the years they have degraded and become what we know today as Square Enix, a company turning out tripe like Kane and Lynch 2 and the biggest disappointment in my gaming life to date, Final Fantasy XIII. The changes to this particular series need to be rectified very quickly indeed.


I'm not saying trying to say that the Square Enix logo is a sign of a poor quality game, you only have to look at Deus Ex: Human Revolution to see that that would be an absurd statement; it's just that the Square name is no longer a sign of the superb quality we used to get. They have now branched out into so many different things that I think they've lost their focus on the games and instead turn their hand at anything, such as Mindjack...don't even go there with that one.


This wasn't intended to be a Square shooting gallery so I'll change the tone and introduce the company that now represents an almost sure fire sign of a great game, Bioware. I've always like Bioware games and hold both the Baldur’s Gate and Mass Effect games very highly. The one thing I have found that is true of all Bioware games is that they are well written; even Dragon Age 2 which I didn't get on with quite as well could not be said to have poor writing. I am aware that i hold this particular attribute of a game perhaps more highly than a lot of people but it is certainly important to the immersion within a story and I can't think of anyone who does it better than Bioware.


Right now I find myself in the odd position that the last game I desperately wanted (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) and the next (Star Wars: The Old Republic) are split between my old and new favourite companies. I worry slightly that Deus Ex won't live up to my expectations as at time of writing I have yet to play it (cursed Steam download taking ages, I bought the damn disc why make me download the... stopping there, ranting imminent) but I hope that Square Enix have brought out another gem for me to enjoy. My only fear about SW:TOR is that I will lose friends as all my free time is spent glued to my PC.

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