I bet a lot of you never asked this. Everyone have their own tastes and probably never asked themselves how come they like what they like and dislike what they dislike. So, today while talking at Twitter, I came across with this question. How the place you grow up influenced your taste in games? And come to the conclusion that this have a greater influence than we may ever think.

I am from Brazil, and the Brazil from my childhood was a very different place than it is today. When I was young, life was way harder. My family was very poor, we had to deal with hyperinflation and a country that was generally terrible. This made didn't made Brazilians gather a pessimistic look at life, but a hopeful one. We always spoke about Brazil turning up as the 'country of the future', so we always expected that things would become better. In a way, we still expect.

So, as I was a child, I was growing up on the promises of better days to come. That reflects in my taste on games because I hate games (and any other media like movies and books) with depressing, hopeless ends. I always expect for a good end, and it is specially bad in games when you got a bad end, because you, technically, is under control and should be allowed to do things differently, or at least supposed to be. A bad end, despite all you do, crushes the hopeful view of life I grown to have.



Other things that changed how my game taste is today is that different than many countries, I grow up with a different number of cultures around me. Not only Brazilian culture, but also American and Japanese culture were very present in my younger days.

TV had cartoons and shows made in the US, but also it had plenty of Japanese shows when I was young. I not only grew up with The Smurfs, Disney cartoons, Dungeons & Dragons, Thundercats and other American cartoons. I grew up with anime like Macross, Zillion, YuYu Hakusho and tokusatsu shows like Dengeki Sentai Changeman and Kamen Rider Black. And with Brazillian shows like Os Trapalhões. All that left a mark in me.

I grow up in a multicultural environment, making me more receptive of different outlooks in life, of different approaches and philosophies to the same problems. Brazilian shows usually relayed on thinking smart, not hard work. It makes me appreciate games that offer several ways to approach problems. American shows came into two flavors. You are either a badass to the core and are way skilled from beginning or you are part of a group and following the group. This reflect in my gaming tastes as I always hate games were you are underpowered and to appreciate games were creating a united group is key to victory. Japanese shows usually showed that there is always someone stronger than you, but you should not gave up and must keep trying and specially to think out of the box to surpass a challenge. This make me love games that always allow you to try again easily and games that offer creative ways to solve problems.

Not only that, the reality of gaming in my country changed how I approach games. Games here were always very expansive. That made having tons of games nearly impossible at first. In my Atari and Master System days, I had just two games. I never bought games for them, in fact, just played the ones they came with. So, I played them to death. Not only that, every time I was able to rent a game, I played them the most I could before having to return them. So, I usually don't jump from game to game with frequency (something I am doing a lot this month). So, I would most of the times stick with one game till I beat it. And since games still are expansive, I still do that.

But now with PS+ having some sweet deals, and I having a job, it made me buy more games and play more, yet I usually will play them for a few hours until I find that one game I will keep playing till I got tired of them, which sometimes would take days of playing.



I am, tough, an exception in Brazil's game preferences. Most Brazilians prefer simple games where no English knowledge is necessary, because our poor educational system make most gamers have zero knowledge of English. My own English, as many of you probably know already, is very bad, but is way above average when you compare with the knowledge of English most people here have.

Most Brazilians will play mostly games like FPS, racing games, soccer games, fighting games and nay other genre where understanding what the characters are saying in the screen is unnecessary. Me, on the other hand, prefer games with actual stories and enjoyable characters. This come from my time with the PS1 and its JRPGs, which were in their golden years at the time. Because I grow up with lots of Japanese shows, I also grow up to appreciate the way they made game stories and developed characters.

To this day, I prefer games with stories and development of characters. part of that is because I was and still am a loner. I moved a lot during my life, not living more than a year in a city till I was 14. And even after that, I never stayed in the same school more than 2 years, making creating lasting relationships a problem to me. And games, in a way, helped cope with that, since I could see other developing relationships in the games.

That is why games like Persona and Mass Effect are specially great in my book by allowing me to work out creating relationships. And why I prefer way more games that story revolve around the characters and their relationships with others than games made out of set pieces and epic events. And to prefer games where working in group to win are more fun to me than games based on lone wolfing to victory.

So, that is why I like many of the games I like. My childhood, how I grow up and where I live are all key components to understand why i like the games I like.

And you? have ever wondered why you like the games you like?

How Assassin's Creed III: Liberation finally achieved what their predecessors failed to.




One of my main grips with the previous Assassin's Creed games I played is the fact that, for a member of a secret order of stealth assassin's, you surely was a lousy assassin. Altair and Ezio were hardly able to accomplish a mission without having all city in alert, leaving a trail of bodies in their way. And this was hardly their fault.

Ubisoft somehow believed that secret assassins are no different than any action hero, with them being forced, even after avoid detection for a long time, to fight hand to hand the twenty or more bodyguards their target have. A target that was always expecting you to come. Trying to approach them silently and stab them when they least expect is something you only did in the first or so mission. All the rest of the missions was you fighting dozens of guards to finally being able to engage in a length fight with your target.

Wait, now that I think about it, yes, it is all Ezio and Altair's fault. they walk around in broad day light with their trademarked assassin's hoods and weapons. Of course everyone would know who they are and what they intent to do. They hardly behave like the members of a secret society, but as members of some kind of ancient biker gang.

And that is why Aveline and her multiple personas make her the first true assassin in the series.



Many people criticized the Lady persona because she is the less combat competent persona, but this is the one I love most till now. There is an utter satisfaction of having this identity, hiding in plain sight. Using her charm skill to lure a guard from a door, luring him to a secluded place and stabbing him is very rewarding. It makes you finally feel like you are a secretive assassin.

Aveline dual life, of the daughter of a rich merchant and of a member of a secret order, add to the fact that she is a member of a secret order. You will not see her outside mission freely walking around in her assassin's gear, but as the lady. All this make you feel you are finally playing a game where secrecy and stealth is important.



I am still in the very beginning of Liberation, having completed the two first missions. till now, my main frustration with the Assassin's Creed series, the fact of no really being able to choose a more stealth route to kill your targets not being a real possibility, is not here. You still have to fight the bodyguards that your targets always have, but you only fight them in the very end of the mission and you still can kill your target first. And your way to the target is way more satisfying.

Using the blow gun to silently poison the guards around the house is very satisfying. Either killing them or making one going crazy so they start fighting each other is what you expect an assassin trying to remain hidden to do, not having to fight dozens of enemies at the same time.

I think somewhere in the middle of creating the Assassin's Creed franchise, someone at Ubisoft decided that the combat system was awesome and that players would prefer to use it than just walking on roofs and trying to sneak around, but when they decided to create Liberation, a spin-off, they decided they could try a different approach. And in my opinion, it was a very good decision. Liberation feels different and more of what I want to do in a game like Assassin's Creed.

Aveline feels like the first assassin to really live to the role. And I hope that Liberation sells enough to Ubisoft see it is worth trying this approach more often. Because Liberation have being a great game all around, and if you have a Vita, it is worth trying.

Probably everyone here must be familiar with the Greek Myth of Pandora's box. In the most popular version, Pandora receives a box from the gods, that warn her to never open it. Pandora goes and opens it anyway, her curiosity allowing all that is evil escape the box and plague the world with all the evils, like despair and fear. The only thing that remained in the box is hope, that humanity kept. it is interesting how this tale is similar with Eve's tale and how she disobeyed god and ate a forbidden fruit, costing her and Adam paradise.

It is an interesting tale, warning humanity to leave some things alone. And in fact, one driving point that many games have taken before. think about it: how many games have you played that main plot is the antagonist trying to do something that nature, gods or basic common sense, that would damn all the world and now it is your job to close that box and expel the antagonist from 'paradise'?

It is an interesting dilemma. Humanity always strive to do better, to improve, but at the same time fear the consequences of improving and what could happen if they go too far. In searching for immortality, we could create undead hordes. In searching for perfection, we could create heartless monsters. In searching for divinity, we could destroy creation itself. The fear of advancing while striving to do it.



Meanwhile, many times the heroes use the exact same mechanism the antagonists search for, sometimes with similar intents. They fight against the immortality seeker because they fear death. They perfect themselves with training, equipment, sometimes even with alterations of themselves because they need to defeat monsters that are changed creatures themselves. They try to fight a god-like opponent because they fear he will destroy the world the previous gods created.

This kind of duality is really interesting. To gain hope, we need the worst evils to exist. To gain knowledge, we must open hand of the bliss of ignorance. In many games, the only difference between heroes and villains is whom you control. Many times, the villains have the same desires than your character(s) have and are just more eager to make it happen.



I don't remember by now any game were the heroes motivations (except maybe by Shadows of the Colossus) ended up doing more harm than good. this is something interesting that more games would do great in exploring. What if you are in the wrong side? If what you seek for will ended up releasing monsters and destroying the world? If the box you open and the fruit you eat would be better left unopened and uneaten?

We like to assume that the side we are with is always the right side. But we all fear to discover that we have being in the wrong one all along. This is a kind of fear that is very real, very human, and that I wish was more explored. Because there is no more difficult question than this.

What if I was wrong?

Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Resident Evil 6 received a very poor reception from reviews. Yet, despite this, they are selling quite well. RE6 sold over 3 million units, making it hardly a flop. In the other hand, a game like Okami is receiving a second chance with its HD remake, and the original game sold poorly. In fact, it sold something akin half million copies between all its platforms at its own time. And reviewers loved the game.

What this says about the importance of reviews?

First, it says that the number of people that look at reviews before going to buy games is in fact smaller than many people think. We tend to think that all game buyers are like us and forgot that people who frequently go to gaming sites is far from being the majority of gamers. We tend to apply our own standards to everyone, thinking they behave, or at least that they must behave, like us. This is clearly not true.

Brand recognition and marketing have a more powerful influence in the game buyers than word of mouth marketing than what we want to admit. Resident Evil is one of the most famous franchise in game history, so many people will recognize it in the shelves and buy it anyway. Meanwhile, EA have the marketing power to make people remember that MoH: Warfighter exists. Many people when in doubt about what to buy will buy what they are familiar with.

Second, it just show how much importance many people is giving reviews nowadays. Many people I know comments how they don't regret not following a review and buying certain poorly reviewed games and have lots of fun. I am one of those. Many games I bought with poor reviews showed up to be some of the best I played. Meanwhile many highly regarded games by reviewers were huge disappointments.

I would have missed this great game if I let 'reviews' have their way.

The reason for that, in my eyes, is that reviews are less and less a guideline for potential buyers and more and more just the reviewer saying how he felt about a game. It is like going to buy a car for 8 people and the seller trying to sell you a two seats car because he loves sports cars and hate vans. It is not anymore about talking about if a game fit what gamers want, but about one person saying what he wants.

That undermined the confidence many people I know had in reviews. Many, like me, just read reviews to see if the game have any kind of game breaking glitches or other technical problems, but ignore everything else. I prefer to trust my own guts nowadays and some of my friends opinions about games than any reviews. And I am not alone in this.

If consumers in general cannot take reviews as a guide to what buy or what avoid, one that answers the question 'should I buy this' instead of 'should the guy who wrote the review buy this', they will stop caring at all. They will just buy it over demos, previous experiences and the guy at the store recommendations than anything reviewers says over the net.

This lack of trust in reviews will cause distortions were bad and so-so games with strong marketing and brand appeal will sell way more than good and great games that have stellar reviews but lack the marketing power. This have implications on how publishers and developers do games in the future.

If they start believing that consumers don't trust reviews, they will just ignore them. For now, they give a lot of importance top them, more than they deserve. Many publishers make payments based on Metacritic's scores. But they do that because they see a relation between sales and review scores. If this relation is not there anymore, they will just concentrate in sales. And good games with relatively poor sales will have even less chance of getting a 2nd opportunity to show what they can do.

When people go buy a car, they want to know if the car will fill their needs, not what a random guy who loves cars want to himself. They watch Top Gear if they want to know someone opinions about cars. In fact, this may be what is happening here. Too many reviewers are acting like they and their reviews are a show apart instead of trying to help their readers to make a decision and that people read reviews to be entertained by them. That making reviews everything they aren't supposed to be.

Maybe many people writing 'reviews' should stop using this word as such. It clearly doesn't fit what many writers do in it. Opinion piece is more fitting to what many writers do. If they want that their opinions to be the center of the show, they must just go ahead and call it that.

Great game too. Bought day one without any regret. My guts were right about this one.

A review was, when I started gaming, writers trying to help gamers to decide if a game is worth their time and money. Today they are treated as a show in themselves, an opportunity for the writer to shine. And that is not very helpful to undecided consumers.

I am not sure what the future reserves, and if reviews continues this trend of being less and less helpful to make conscious purchase, I will say this:

Reviews doesn't matter. Don't base your purchases on them. Play demos, watch YouTube, ask a friend that have a copy to let you play it a bit. This will be way more helpful than any writer's opinion he/she tossed on a site. Above all remember: nobody knows what you like more than yourself.

What do you fear?




I started to play Dead Space for the first time this weekend. And that the game isn't 'scary'. I haven't jumped of my seat because of the traditional scary tactics like monsters jumping from windows/vents or attacking you from behind. All is very expected from it. I have plenty of ammo, healing items and other things that make not fear to be outnumbered, wasting ammo or getting killed because of a camera angle or because the controls are too slow.

But I fear the setting and atmosphere in there.

Walking around the derelict ship is an exercise in awareness. While fighting the monsters haunting around is not really difficulty, you don't want to be get by surprise. A surprise attack will be costly, maybe deadly. I started to be always tense, always looking around and shooting anything that could turn into a monster later on. It is not that I would have an adrenalin rush of a monster jumping out of the vents. The monsters aren't what I fear in the game.



It is the insanity and the atmosphere.

As I walk by the ship, I found survivors. I already gave up in attempting to save anyone. They are all dead already, just waiting the inevitable, and that is an horrifying thought. That I cannot, even if I wanted, save anyone. While I have no special connection with any character yet, I would hate to develop one and than failing to save them. If there was a Clementine here and I see her dying in front of me, I would be destroyed.



And there all the others small touches. Finding the messages left from the dead describing their horrible last moments. Seeing the few survivors are now insane and either doing horrible stuff against each other or against themselves. How many of them become monsters even before the monsters arrived. This is a really fearsome idea.

The ship is not really dark, except in the moments where the lights fail or some corridors. And you don't need it to be taken by fear. The sounds you hear as you walk is way more terrifying than the dark. Listening to the panicked screams far away, the sound of sobbing, the people screaming for help or wondering why this nightmare is happening and if someone will come to save you.

A good horror story is not the ones who make you jump of the couch every now and them. A good horror story is one who make you fearful even after the end of it. It is the ones that make you question 'what if it was me?'

Dead Space is a great game. And it is a good horror story. It is not 'scary', if you believe that 'scary' means being frightened here and there. Its horror doesn't come from monsters jumping from the dark. Its horror comes from the setting, what is happening with the people and the fear of any of that happening to you.



It is said that what people fear in monster stories is not the monsters themselves, but what of human those monsters represents. In the case of Dead Space, what I fear is the insanity. The distorted monsters are made of human remains, they still have the resemblance of its origins, but now they are something so different, so terrifying. And you still have tom deal with the people who, while not changed physically, have their minds destroyed and are as, if not more, terrifying as the monsters.

What I fear in Dead Space is the madness.

What do you fear?

I am officially old. I have being gaming since the days of the Atari 2600. I got into game in 1987, which is actually in the last century. I had a 8-bit system, skipped the 16-bits for a bit, got a PC, than start gaming in 16-bit, got a PSone, PS2, PSP, PS3, a PS Vita and finally a game capable PC (Pentium i5 3.2 GHZ, 8MB RAM, GTS450 video board). Thanks to community member and friend TH3MORROW, I received as a gift Half-Life 2, a game I haven't played before. And I must say, I am very mixed about this.

I do not evaluate the quality of a game based in its graphics. Graphics are the least important thing of all the important things in gaming. Gameplay design, story, sound are all more important to me. And something shocks me every time I play an old-time game. I just can't get the same enjoyment I got from new games. Again, I don't care about fancy graphics (and Half-Life 2 is far from being ugly, specially in maximum settings). It is the actual gameplay I discovered I can't enjoy anymore.

Despite enjoying them in the past, mind you.

Half-Life 2 clearly show the evolution of gaming. He is a link between old shooters like Doom and new ones like Call of Duty. It have elements both old and new and I can clearly see why people love it. But I am, failing to get into it. Maybe it is because I am in the very beginning of it. But Half-Life 2 is not an isolated case.

Too much time doing nothing...

The PS3, through its Playstation Plus program, gave me several old-time games, specially beat-em-ups from Sega, like Streets of Rage II and Golden Axe. And I failed to enjoy them the same as I enjoyed them when they were new. Golden Axe was one of my favorite games of its time, but I just can't stand to it anymore. Even classics like Sonic make me cringe every time I die because of an unexpected enemy.

I may be weird. Because in theory, I am the guy that should enjoy old-time games more than new ones, yet I am one that defends that new games improved in so many things that going back to the old ways is in fact really hard. And that is not because of graphics. It is because of gameplay frustrations.

Dying in the level and returning to the very beginning of it. Dying because I can't find a healing item to help me or because I missed an enemy for pixels. Not finding my way around because of lack of auto-map. Not hearing the characters speak but having to read texts. All of those make me have less enjoyment now than I had in the past. Playing a game without many voice acting now feels weird. Getting lost is not as funny anymore. Having to memorize every enemy pattern and level tires me.

Shooting things with rocket launchers? Fun.

Maybe it is me, that I am old to admire those old designs. I don't feel like I have time to keep replaying the same levels again and again until I get it right. It is not that I don't want to spend time in game. I just feel that games now need to do more to keep me in them, to entice me in keep playing. I always preferred games with a deep story than games with none. New things happening all the time always made me go forward than long walks killing the same enemies over and over again.

Other things is because of old designs decisions. Many games have controls that would be classified as weird for today's standards. Levels and the way you transverse them would be considered bothersome and nonsensical by many.

Maybe that is why I couldn't felt so compelled into Half-Life 2. I have passed a time too long going too point a to point b without anything interesting happening. To the point of getting happy when enemies appear shooting at me. Again, I am in the very beginning of the game, so it may get better with time. Other games don't have the same chance. Playing them beginning to end was a chore full of frustrations that killed a bit of the nostalgic feeling I had for them.

I know a lot of gamers around my age become very happy when a game with the old school flavor appears. I don't condemn them or envy them. It is just that I can't go back. I know it. Every time I get a game with old school mechanics and designs I know that those old games were good at their time. Some are in fact good today. But all the changes that happened in gaming through my near three decades of gaming made games better for me. While a few games are still fun to play as they were when I was a little kid, many don't hold that fantasy, that pleasure anymore.

If you read my blog with certain regularity, you know that sometimes I talk about games from the past that seemingly are forgotten by the game community. Those are games that even today would hold themselves. There is games, true classics, that were not only the base for modern games, but they are so well done that they simple don't age. Other games, on the other hand, simple belong to their time and should be left for there, as a nice memory of great times.

Not all games can be timeless classics as this one.

In the end, this is a very personal thing. I know plenty of games that wish that the 'classic age' of gaming, an age that exist only to themselves, could make a return. But me? I am very happy with my brand new games right now. A return to old school would just drive me away from games.

So, I will try to finish Half-Life 2. I will always keep in my mind that it is a product of its time and be grateful that it paved the way for many modern games. But it is the modern games I will look for and left many old games were they belong. In my memories.

Except this one. I still want to play it again.