VentureBeat » Middle Manager of Justice

GamesBeat weekly roundup: THQ bankrupt, Machinima downsizes, and Shaq is back

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:30:12 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, THQ files for bankruptcy, gaming video giant Machinima lays off 10 percent of its staff, and we crown The Walking Dead as our 2012 Game of the Year.

You’ll also find reviews for Black Knight Sword, Mass Effect 3: Omega, and Middle Manager of Justice.

News:
The DeanBeat: The Newtown shooting will turn up the heat on video game violence — but will it make us think?
DayZ lead designer considered leaving the project
This week in the Nintendo Download: Mario, Wario, and Alex Trebek
Turn your friends into Pokémon in the next Mystery Dungeon game on 3DS
Writer McComb isn’t worried about the lack of the Planescape license for the new Torment game
Valve gives Plantronics the rights to officially brand headsets with Aperture Laboratories and Mann Co. logos
Visualizing a tough year for the retail core game industry
Rabbit pulls reimagined video chat out of its hat
THQ’s bankruptcy filing reveals new games
THQ files for bankruptcy, assets sold to investor Clearlake for $60M
Valve pulls The War Z from Steam over fan backlash, offers refunds
Nintendo’s TVii available tomorrow, but it won’t be fully functional
MeritShare finds a way to gamify employee recognition (exclusive)
Green Throttle Games launches developer program as part of play to take over living room gaming
Assassin’s Creed III glitches and issues addressed in massive patch (full details)
Dartmouth professor names Zynga’s Mark Pincus one of the worst CEOs of 2012
Get ready for great games on a thin laptop as AMD preps new mobile graphics chips
Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic
Nvidia’s next Tegra 4 processor may come with 72 graphics cores
Minecraft documentary free for Xbox Live Gold subscribers this weekend
Online gaming firm Aeria Games merges with Japan’s Gamepot
The spirit of BattleBots lives on in a new robot-building game
Arktos Entertainment acquires majority stake in game studio Hammerpoint Interactive (exclusive)
Why Google predicts Microsoft’s next game console will beat Sony’s
Developer id Software releases Rage add-on next week
Game videos giant Machinima lays off 10 percent of staff
NRA blames video games for mass murders

Mobile News:
Kabam scores big with highest-grossing game on App Store for 2012
Apple freezes the App Store in advance of the holiday app-downloading bonanza
Jordan Mechner’s Karateka remake returns to Apple (iOS) devices today
Mochi Media says 86 percent of Flash game developers are expanding into mobile (exclusive)
MindSnacks’ new iPad games help you learn languages, pass the SAT
After 6M paid downloads, mobile hit Pocket God wraps up with its final, apocalyptic update
Kamcord is helping users record 7 mobile-game videos every second
With more than 20M downloads, Battle Bears mobile game hits San Francisco’s billboards
Plain Vanilla releases its multiplayer video game quiz for iOS
MediaBrix’s responsive design ensures in-game ads will always look right (exclusive)
SGN launches its MasterKey tool for making cross-platform social and mobile games
Gamevil surpasses 200M game downloads on smartphones
Exclusive: Go Ninja developer brings Shaquille O’Neal back to video games

Best of 2012:
GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year: The Walking Dead
The best indie games of 2012
The best games of 2012 (GamesBeat staff picks)
The game industry’s 2012 holiday cards

Interviews:
Heroes of Newerth 3.0 adds bots, hopes to teach new players (interview)
Crytek’s chief: Nothing will beat Crysis 3′s graphics for at least two years (interview)

Previews:
Hawken’s open beta shows a thoughtfully designed mech combat game (preview)
Insomaniac’s Fuse lets you lead a team of four badass agents (preview)
Toki Tori 2′s simple mechanics reward your curiosity (hands-on preview)
Zen Pinball 2 on Nintendo’s eShop gives you a choice of dozens of pinball tables (preview)
The 3DS library gets a little weirder with these quirky eShop games (preview)

Reviews:
Marvel Heroes needs more humanity, more warmth, and more MMO
Black Knight Sword’s punishing difficulty requires more luck than skill to overcome (review)
Middle Manager of Justice is all business, no gameplay (review)
Mass Effect 3: Omega is explosive, nostalgic, and somewhat pointless (review)

Pieces of Flair:
What sales managers can learn from the four types of online gamers
Solving a Wii mystery: The fate of the awesome toy WeeWaa
Exploring why some players are unable to initiate Halo 4′s single-player campaign
A history of bodies: Video game violence and the player
Love your free players to unlock the full potential of free-to-play games
What are your holiday gaming traditions?
Justin Bieber, Minecraft’s Creeper, and other cameos in modern games (gallery)

Filed under: Games

Middle Manager of Justice is all business, no gameplay (review)

Rob Savillo — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 20:00:00 +0000

If the goal with this freemium iOS release was to re-create the experience of being an actual middle manager, developer Double Fine succeeded. And that’s not quite a compliment.

I’d forgive you for thinking that Middle Manager of Justice would be anything like Elixir Studios’ amazing Evil Genius, where you play as the head of a clandestine criminal organization vying for world domination. All the trappings of the genre (organization management sim) seem present on the surface: You’re in charge of directing a group of superheroes as they fight crime around a featureless city, building up an office with various support faculties in the process.

But this ain’t no Evil Genius.

As the head of a profit-challenged branch of Justice Corp., you’ll be a fine Bill Lomberg: You’ll do “desk work” that’s hardly productive, you’ll delegate the important tasks to others, and you’ll take forever to do anything at all. Sounds a lot like the oppressive claustrophobia of an endless, gray cubicle farm, doesn’t it?

The feeling extends to Middle Manager’s design, which is really no different than any other free-to-play title: Do you value your time or your money more? I mean, who doesn’t love making purchasing decisions in the middle of what’s supposed to be an engaging experience?

What you’ll like

Jokes and jokes and jokes and ha ha ha ha
The premise is entertaining in itself, and Double Fine has put in enough humor to give me a chuckle or two. But this ultimately feels like a gag stretched way too thin. How much material can you really derive from a mediocre salaryman with a comic-book backdrop? Not enough, apparently.

It’s pretty?
Middle Manager of Justice has a clean, Saturday-morning cartoon style that fits well with the presentation. It’s nice to look at. What more can I say?

What you won’t like

Time or money, take your pick
Middle Manager of Justice has three resources: coins, “superium,” and time. You earn coins by keeping portions of the city happy, defeating thugs and henchmen in battles, and doing “desk work.” Coins let you upgrade your base facilities and buy items and equipment. You earn superium for knocking out supervillains, which you need to hire more superheroes. And you spend time when you want to increase any stats or abilities, sometimes upward of 15 minutes. Yeah.

Here’s the insidious part: You can spend superium to instantly level-up, which you can buy from the in-game store with real-world cash. And since superium is difficult to come by through regular play (and you want to save it for hiring new heroes, anyway), you’re stuck either waiting a lot or paying a lot. How is this entertaining? How is this good game design?

I don’t mean to single out Middle Manager of Justice because this is the core philosophy that nearly all freemium games employ. The mechanics involve a lot of long timers counting down while you’re given busywork too fill in the waiting period. And if you’re not patient enough, you can fork over actual dollars for some space bucks to speed things up. Is this really the future?

Combat is rote and joyless
Even if you’ve elected to pay your way to victory rather than wait hours for your heroes to train on punching bags and plasma-TV-equipped treadmills, you’re still stuck fighting these monotonous battles. Your heroes exchange blows with thugs and henchmen, who sometimes have funny things to say before the fists start flying. You can use items and abilities to give your guys and gals an edge. That’s all there is to it.

If anything is a clear indication that combat was an afterthought, it’s that you can delegate these tasks, which puts the events on the world map with a 1-minute timer. Still, it’s always faster to just handle these yourself, so you’ll end up overseeing each fight anyway. Sending out your heroes on their own is risky, too, because you can lose easily based on a percentage-to-win displayed before committing to the engagement.

But in the end, you have to take on the bad guys in order to fill out a villain meter to progress through the city. Combat ends up just being an unavoidable chore.

You can’t lose
Middle Manager of Justice has no fail state. You can make all the wrong decisions and do all the wrong things and still make it through the end just for showing up.

On the city map, crime events each pop up with a 2-minute timer and box with four stars. When one counts down to zero, it loses a star. As that happens, the smiley face, indicating the happiness of the area, drops from a high of ecstatic green to a low of bawling red. These different levels relate to how many coins you earn from each section of the city in intervals (which you have to tap to collect — another common iOS mechanic that’s entirely tedious), but you can’t ever lose a borough even if you ignore it forever.

That’s a missed opportunity and is likely the result of the business model negatively affecting the game’s design. I mean, Double Fine can’t very well let you lose a game after you spent all that real money on space bucks used to speed up your progression. You’d be mighty pissed!

Oh, and sure, you can lose individual fights with the bad guys. But your heroes will just return to base and need a nap to restore their health bars, which takes time. And you can “motivate” them to increase their morale after having lost (using the same smiley-face scale), which is just more waiting around.

Conclusion

I have to wonder whether Middle Manager of Justice is just an elaborate joke. At one moment, I thought the game was self-aware of just how nakedly exploitative the design is: when a thug responded to my heroes’ criticism of his criminal behavior with a plea to give him a break because of his in-app purchase addiction.

But this isn’t a concise examination of the sad state of affairs that is free-to-play game design. Middle Manager of Justice goes on and on and on. Playing feels like walking a treadmill on the slowest speed with the best option being to just buckle down and pay for gastrointestinal surgery. But then, what’s the point? You’re paying to not play the game.

Score: 40/100

Middle Manager of Justice released on iOS devices on Dec. 13.

Filed under: Games

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GamesBeat weekly roundup: More Zynga executives leave, CEO Perlman leaves OnLive, and Bethesda announces new Skyrim DLC

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:09:04 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Zynga loses more executives, Microsoft announces that its surface tablets will run Unreal Engine 3, and Double Fine reveals its first iOS game, Middle Manager of Justice, that’s all about managing superhero careers.

You’ll also find reviews for Transformers: Fall of Cybertron and the Origin PC Eon11-S gaming laptop as well as previews for Resident Evil 6 and Adventure Time.

News

Mobile news

MMO news

Interviews

After big hit on iPhone, only 30 percent of Kabam’s revenue comes from Facebook (interview)

Reviews

Previews

OnLive

House of Zynga

Windows 8 and Surface tablets

Filed under: Games

Double Fine reveals Middle Manager of Justice, a superhero office-management sim for iOS

Sam Barsanti — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:49:10 +0000

Everyone knows Superman and Wonder Woman, but what about the unsung heroes of the world’s many superteams? What about the guy who keeps the lights on and the tights clean? Where’s his iOS game? Thankfully, Double Fine has just announced Middle Manager of Justice, which is about exactly that.

The game puts you in the role of an office manager at the newest branch of Justice Corp, which is apparently some kind of superhero corporation, and tasks you with keeping your staff of costumed crime fighters in shape and on task. To do this, it looks like you’ll have to tap into your own powers of time management and poking stuff, since the gameplay appears to function in a similar fashion as something like FarmVille or Game Dev Story, but with supervillain battling thrown in.

Obviously, as evidenced by that description, the game features a grim and brooding tone similar to Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. Oh wait, Double Fine developed this game, and it’s the master of the wacky and cartoonish (and the makers of Psychonauts and Costume Quest), so it’s probably going to end up being wacky and cartoonish…which is a much better idea anyway.

The game will be free-to-play, with two forms of in-game currency: coins and Superium. Users will earn both simply by playing, but they will be able to pay real money for Superium if they want to experience things and strengthen their heroes quicker. Fortunately for cheapskate gamers, Double Fine is being very quick to assure everyone that it is possible to experience everything in the game without having to pay for anything. Real money is simply used to make things go faster.

Middle Manager of Justice will be available soon for iOS in Canada and, according to project lead Kee Chi, everywhere else “soonishly soon” after that.

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat Review Vault

GamesBeat Staff — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:20:17 +0000

Below you’ll find a listing of every GamesBeat game review to date. They are listed in reverse chronological order with the latest review appearing at the top. Note that the dates listed are for when the review was posted, not necessarily the actual release date for the game. That information, along with platform tested and more, can be found in the actual review.