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2010-01-16T20:28:00.002-05:00

Hey! Blogger is an awful, buggy mess of unfinished code and horrible GUI decisions so I'm using Wordpress! Go there instead! There's a ton of great new stuff, including a whole slew of Wallet Abuse updates.

http://bigredcoat.wordpress.com/

Wallet Abuse Wednesday 10-28-08

2008-10-28T22:59:00.000-05:00

An abbreviated WAW today, as I spent most of Tuesday wandering around Manhattan in the pouring rain and I think somewhere outside the Citigroup tower I was able to pinpoint the exact moment I contracted pneumonia.

So if you're concerned about not seeing Disney Faries: Tinker Bell, Singstar Country, Rubik's Puzzle World, Six Flags Theme Park, High School Musical Three, MySims Kingdom or Scene It Office Smash, I assure you they came out this week, and they're all crap. And then there's this crap:

All Star Cheer Squad (wii) ASCS has me excited for two reasons. One, there's this:

And secondly, Nintendo has created a situation where it's become fiscally feasable to sell videogames to cheerleaders, and I like anything that further justifies my seething hatred for Nintendo and all it stands for. It's sort of like being excited when hearing that the Dallas Cowboys signed Roy Williams simply because you know it'll piss off TO and make everyone involved look like even bigger assholes than they already are.

Bella Sara (DS) Research reveals this to be a Nintendogs-clone based on the popular girls's equine ccg Bella Sara, which leads us to the question-- what the fuck is Bella Sara?

Oh, that's Bella Sara. Not wishing to do too much research into Bella Sera and wind up with Chris Hansen knocking on my door, I'm left to wonder exactly what differentiates a girl's collectible card game from something like Magic the Gathering. I mean, we can assume that your horses don't actually fight each other, because a game centered around unicorns impaling nightmares would be something that'd have appeared on my radar well before now.

Fallout 3 (360, PS3) aaaah, there we go. I'm not going to be the most unbiased opinion on the merits of Fallout 3, seeing as how I've already ordered the CE despite, you know-- not possessing a working 360 console-- But do you really need an unbiased opinion to tell you you need to be playing this game, right now, despite whatever laws of physical reality and your own local police jurisdiction may unfairly impose?

Okay, so at worse it's going to be Oblivion with a Mad Max skin. I don't think there's any real reason to think it'll work out that way, but that's your baseline. Bethesda doesn't make bad games, and provided you're willing to pretend Brotherhood of Steel was never produced, there's never been a bad Fallout game. And really, even if it's not a hundred percent faithful to the Fallout universe or ethos, isn't it about time we had a western RPG that broke free of high fantasy?

Y'know, one not already made by Bioware. What I'm saying here is that, at worse, you're still looking at what's probably going to be the best WRPG of the year. If it can live up to it's promise, then it's going to be very, very special.

Guitar Hero World Tour (Everything) Guitar games are like Madden games to me at this point-- I can't play them worth a damn, I like seeing other people play them, I'm sorta baffled as to why people keep buying incremental updates every six months.

Imagine Party Babyz (Wii)

You have to admire the breadth of vision with Ubisoft's Imagine series-- not only is it a full-on assault against good gaming, but it also actively reinforces gender roles by convincing young girls that their proscribe career paths involve babysitting, tending house and little else. Now we have Party Babyz, in which Ubisoft makes the argument that babies should be used as personal combatants in frenetic party games. I can't say I'm disappointed with this development, as the next obvious step is Imagine: Baby Cockfights, where you strap kitchen knives to infant foreheads and the the little runtlings scoot about until one baby is left crawling.

Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ (DS)

Now here's the sort of stereotype-shattering title that only hardcore gaming can deliver:

Yeah, it's a good thing no one at NOW owns a DS, otherwise we'd be fucked. Still, there's nothing about this game that's convinced me I can't not buy it.

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift

As much as I've enjoyed the antics of lolSony over the past two years, I gotta admit to indulging in more than a bit of fanboy jealousy over the Motorstorm franchise. It's simple, well-constructed arcade rally action, something that Sega just can't get right anymore and Codemaster's Colin McRae games simply aren't interested in doing. Plus, it looks simply fucking stunning in HD, one of the few titles that you can point to as being unquestionably PS3-like as far as graphics are concerned. Pacific Rift looks particularly neat, as it's taking Motorstorm's formula and adding evolving track design that features paths that can be each be exploited in thier own way by Motorstorm's varied vehicle classes. I want to play this, and am annoyed at the utter lack of an analogous title on the 360, especially with with no recent news on the horizon of the Rallisport followup Turn 10 is supposedly working on.

Moto GP '08 (PS3,PS2,360)The annoying thing about Moto GP '08 is imagining how cool a bike racer by Capcom would be if it were played out like a traditional Capcom game instead of a sim racer. You could have Isabella from Dead Rising show up on her Harley, instigate bike-mounted knife fights, have The Tyrant appear as a boss battle atop a pocketbike-- It'd be like Mario Kart, but with tits and evisceration. Y'know, pretty much the best game ever.

Ninjatown (DS) Sorry, Random Child's Play kid. You're never going to get a copy of Lego Batman because Shawn Smith is an asshole who made a tower defense game about chibi ninjas and took all my money.

Neverland Card Battles (PSP) Yeah. I don't know either, man.

Out of the Chute (Wii, PS2) For some reason I keep mixing up Crave the shitty budget-title developer with Cave shooters, the guys who keep making shumps for the Dreamcast. I think this is mainly due to the Cave brain squishy I picked up from the last Atlanta E3, and for whatever reason the company has managed to insinuate itself in my head as a quality developer, and I'm shocked whenever I remember they make stuff like The Bible Game or Hard Rock Casino or this blight upon our hobby.

PopStar Guitar (Wii) Wait. Grips? Why does the Gamestop listing mention gri--

Hahahahahahaha holy shit

NEXT WEEK~!

NARUTO: ULTIMATE NINJA STORM is MOCKED AND DERIDED

I attempt to summon interest in GEARS OF WAR 2 BRATZ KIDZ: SLUMBER PARTY threatens to bring SEXUAL DEVIANCY charges against me!

Wallet Abuse Wednesday 10-21-08

2008-10-21T22:47:00.000-05:00

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?: Make the Grade (DS)

This is actually a pretty neat game, as it's very meta. Here's how you play:

1: Buy Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader
2: Find a 5th grader with DS
3: If said 5th grader is playing any game other than Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader, you fail.

Back at the Barnyard: Slop Bucket Games (DS)

The existence of Slop Bucket Games raises a number of troubling questions:

*Why does THQ hate us?
* If you're in the market for Slop Bucket Games, do you consider yourself above the Harvest Moon series?
*Is there an artificial insemination minigame using the stylus as a syringe full of cow semen?
*If not, why?
*Why on earth is this being sold for thirty bucks?

Bioshock (PS3)

It's good to see the PS3 finally become as viable as the 360--

--from August 2007.

I question if Bioshock can still hold up as a AAA title. I loved the game when it first came out, and consider it GOTY for 2007, but perhaps more than any good game in recent memory, it doesn't really hold up well after the initial play through. The vaunted Little Sister gameplay mechanic never fully realized itself, and the Big Daddies held little threat after the first five hours of gameplay. It was a game victim to it's own multitude of options-- once you started exploring the levels and gaining weapon upgrades and powerups, the game became almost absurdly easy. But the story and setting are enough to make this must-play material for hardcore gamers, it's just a shame the game never really lived up to 2k's own expectations.

Disney Sing It (Wii, PS3, PS2, 360)

I can remember a time back in the 32 bit era where a Disney karaoke game would be contending for the most embarrassing thing to happen to gaming for the entire year, between the N64 shaped like Pikachu and news that Sega was calling their new system the "Dreamcast". We would stand around the Babbage's counter, share a laugh about these developments while talking about how awesome Parasite Eve before going home alone to masturbate to jpgs of hentai pornography.

Now I'm not sure I'd be willing to call Sing It the most wince-inducing videogame so far this update.

Eternal Sonata (PS3)

Note to PS3 owners: don't bother sending out resumes to Ernst and Young.

Fable 2 (360)

I loved the original Fable to death, right up until about the three hour mark where I realized I was basically playing a fenced in Zelda with funny accents. That said, I felt Fable could be a legitimate AAA game if it weren't for a few fundamental flaws:

* A main quest that lasted all of five hours
* No consequence at all given the lauded good/evil gameplay mechanic
* Three-foot high fences that were impervious to jumping, axes, magic and swearing

To counter these complaints, Peter Moleneux endowed Fable 2 with the following:

* A seven hour long main quest
* Map dog

More distressing to fans of the original game are Moleneux's pleas to the gamer press to "Please don't review this game in the same way that a hardcore gamer would. In fact, if you could get non-gamers to review Fable 2, that'd be better. Maybe someone blind and without thumbs. Do you have a dog? Dogs are good. Hey, you remember Dungeon Keeper, right? "

A month ago, Fable 2 was up there on my list of must-buy titles of 2008, along with Fallout 3 and Mirror's Edge and Prince of Persia: The Next One. Now Fable 2 ranks somewhere between elective spleen removal and purchase of a grocery bag full of skunk anal scent glands.

Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon (PS2, PS3, PSP, 360, Wii, Sinclair ZX Spectrum,-- just kidding, it's not actually on the PSP )

There are some concepts so brain-dead obvious for translation to videogames that developers just can't get right. Transformers games, for instance. You'd think a game about cars and jets that turn into robots would be a natural for the digital form-- but the Mech Game Corollary comes into play and ruins any attempt at creating a decent game of the concept.

Same way with dragon games. They're huge, breathe fire, fly, eat villagers, generally ruin shit. It seems like they'd be obvious candidates for the basis of good gaming-- However, unless the game features Panzer Dragoon in the title, dragon-based games are downright horrible.

So wither the Spyro franchise. which has had sixteen games, five developers, and virtually every game-capable hardware platform to create a single memorable videogame experience, yet when you ask hardcore gamers what we think of the series we're stuck trying to remember if that was the one with the commercial of a marmoset screaming into a bullhorn outside of Nintendo HQ.

As far as this particular Spyro goes, this is the first game in the series that allows the player to fly at any time during the game-- which, I dunno, you'd figure would be the main component of a game series based on being a flying, fire-breathing lizard. It look these people ten friggin' years to finally think that free flight would be a good idea?

Little Big Planet (PS3)

Media Molecule has exceeded my wildest expectations with this title-- If I had to guess any company to finally unleash the Jihad Al-Talib upon gamers, it'd have been Sega. Good work, guys.

Lovely Lisa (DS)

I'd do more research on this title, but I'm positive I've been placed on a New York State pedophile watchlist just for looking up the box art on Gamestop.

Master of the Monster Lair (DS)

This would appear to be a combination of Tecmo's Deception and Monster Lair using the DS, and if hearing that doesn't cause a tingling in your nether regions then you're reading the wrong website.

Midnight Club LA (360, PS3)

I'm not really sure what Midnight Club is doing anymore that Need for Speed doesn't do every single year.

But it's a dry year for quality racers, and it's not like Rockstar makes bad games. That said, you'd think Rockstar would be clever enough to figure out a way to include Midnight Club cars in GTA4 and vice versa.

Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution 2 (Wii)

Fuck this noise, I'm going to use this paragraph to talk about a real ninja game-- Legend of Kage 2 for the DS.

I've not been shy in my opinion that ninja games make the very best videogames-- even the passing presence of ninjas can largely suffice to make an otherwise annoying and obtuse game kickass, as evidenced by Metal Gear Solid's Cyberninja.

LoK2 is the very essence of a ninja game-- insanely high jumps, air dashes, rampant eviscerations, busty women in improbably loose-fitting gis-- add in a giant rock dude and a healthy dose of superfluous bare breasts and you've pretty much got Ninja Scroll, the videogame. It's development was quite obviously a labor of love from Tatio, much like Space Invaders Extreme before it, and it's presence makes me yearn for the same treatment to be given to Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden and (especially) Strider.

It's not perfect, but then what is with gaming, especially when you're dealing with a very deliberate throwback to the 8 bit era-- the graphics are sparse, the levels largely interchangable, the DS Lite buttons entirely too small and indistinct for the type of game you're playing-- but it represents what I feel to be the very essence of gaming, and encapsulates so many things of what made me fall in love with the medium that I can easily overlook it's faults. At twenty bucks we should probably all own it, if for no other reason than to become a little more grounded in an age of Wii Sports and Guitar Hero and Brain Training. This is a videogame, unapologetically so, and something that deserves our attention, if not devotion.

Pass the Pigs (DS)

We now have a videogame based around a game based around tossing rubber pigs on a table and seeing how they land. We're talking about a mechanic barely a step removed from tossing coins in the air, and THQ is selling it to an unsuspecting public for twenty dollars. A random dice roller is more sophisticated than this game! I don't know to be horrified or amazed.

Penny Racers Party (Wii)

Prior to filing this report, I had the pleasure of being privy to an exclusive interview with Tomy CEO, Kantaro Tomiyama:

Nfinit: It's a pleasure to meet someone with such an initmate connection with the industry an how our games are HOLY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR EYEBALLS?

Tomiyama: Shortly before my company got into the business of producing videogames, I was invited aboard the experimental starship Event Horizon. Upon that ill-fated voyage I saw sights so horrific that I felt compelled to tear my own eyeballs free of their sockets. In unrelated news, I recently promoted myself to Tomy's Quality Assurance team lead.

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows

Funny thing about Web of Shadows-- it may wind up being a better Fable 2 than Fable 2 itself. At the very least it looks like it may actually deliver on a storyline the player has some actual input in the outcome of, and something actually resembling a good/evil mechanic that does more than effect housing prices.

It looks incredibly well-done, which surprises me, as I associate Treyarch more with Call of Duty games and cash-in movie tie-in games than AAA-contender titles. The fact that comic book games have generally sucked since Capcom stopped doing Marvel Vs games doesn't help its pedigree.

Star Ocean: First Departure (PSP)

The only thing this game does is annoy me that we're never ever ever ever going to see a proper Phantasy Star V.

Touchmaster II (DS)

Upon closer inspection, this game has absolutely nothing to do with Ifeelmyself.com. I feel betrayed. And drowsy. But mostly betrayed.

Wii Music (Wii)

I'm not going to get into the argument if Wii Music is or isn't a game, all I know is it's a game that I have no interest in whatsoever. But that's okay, I'm not interested in Beverly Hills Chihuahua either, but it doesn't keep me from enjoying W.

The larger question is if something like Wii Music-- which firmly establishes Nintendo as a lifestyle company instead of a videogame company-- is harmful to the industry as a whole. May be. But I know this is also the same industry and same console that allows me to play No More Heroes and Mad World and Mega Man 9, so the damage must be limited in scope-- after all, we're talking about the same industry that generated 13 billion dollars in 2006 while selling Okami and Gears of War and Twilight Princess. There's simply too much money to be found selling games to hardcore gamers for something like the Wii Music-- or the Wii in general, really-- to do any sizable, long-term damage.

But you do have to be worried about Nintendo-- when Shigero Miyamoto is no longer interested in Zelda as much as he is in flailing his arms vaguely in time with the theme to Zelda, you may have a real, quantifiable problem.

2008-10-13T22:44:00.001-05:00

Avatar: The Last Airbender: Into the Inferno (DS, Wii, PS2)

Avatar has this weird TMNT vibe where it has fans entirely too old to be following a Nickleodeon cartoon series, and not in the ironic Spongebob way, and generally speaking Gen X children do not rank among Avatar's target audience. Combined with this game supposedly representing the last Avatar season ever, there's good reason to believe that THQ may make an honest attempt at raising this title above shovelware status.

To that end, Into the Inferno lifts gameplay elements from Okami and Twilight Princess, all which serve to make the game sound interesting until you remember it's a Nickelodeon game from THQ. It may be Perfectly Acceptable Gaming for twelve year olds, and as long as you're willing to go into this game with the realization that it's not really supposed to be aiming higher than that, it'll probably at least be enjoyable.

Blitz, The League II (PS3, 360)

I like that Midway went with Roman numerals for this franchise, it helps to have an air of gravitas when you're curbstomping the starting quarterback for the Cleveland Steamers into a drooling retard.

Further innovations from the Madden formula include Lawrence Taylor as a playable character, which we can only hope means a minigame where you collect and deliver hookers to rival team's hotels the night before your game.

Boogie Superstar (Wii)

You remember Boogie, right? The first big exclusive release for the Wii by EA, everyone convinced themselves it was going to be something interesting and new before it turned out that it was basically Singstar with random wiimote waggle?

This is that, but with songs by Aly & AJ. If you buy this, you're part of the problem.

Cesar Millan's Dog Whisperer (DS)

At this point we can only assume something horrible happened in Yves Guillemot's formative years to cause him to hate gaming and gamers to the point where his life's goal is to bring to Ubisoft's financial might to bear upon the singular goal of destroying our hobby. To that end we have Ceasear Millan's Dog Whisperer, which we hope is a more openly sadistic Nintendogs.

Dead Space (360, PS3)

Among the first in a wave of self-professed Very Important Games to be released this holiday season, Dead Space would appear to be a blatant and unapologetic merger of RE4 and Aliens. Which probably isn't bad thing. I just have a hard time trusting a game set forth to be the centerpoint of a media franchise instead of being a fundamentally good game.

Like everything else EA does these days that doesn't involve the DS, it'll be competent and polished and hard to find any actual fault with, but also diluted and detached and shipped with two or three flaws that feel like were left there entirely to give the devs something to improve upon for the sequel(s).

And I'd be lying if I said I'm ignoring all the above for Mirror's Edge.

Dokapon Kingdom (Wii, PS2)

Gameplay video reveals an attempt to create a party game out of bog-standard menu-based JRPG gameplay, an idea that looks even worse than it sounds.

FIFA Soccer 2009 (everything)

If I can't be bothered to summon enthusiasm for videogame representations of sports I actually enjoy, why would you expect me to have anything interesting to say about soccer games? The only point of interest this game holds for me is the chance to edit Manchester United's AIG sponsorship to Amtrak.

Golden Axe: Beast Rider (PS3, 360)

As a Sega fan dating back from the original Shinobi, the most frustrating aspect of Sega's downfall-- you know, aside from utterly incompetent management and the abject failure of the Dreamcast-- was seeing Sega fumble away it's classic franchises. While the golden age of JRPGs waxed and waned with the Playstation, we never saw a proper Phantasy Star followup; while Strategy RPGS came into their own on the GBA and DS we saw Shining Force reinvented as a Diablo clone; while Mario 64 was redefining the platformer, we were forced to accept the perversion and humiliation of Sonic the Hedgehog. So in that regard it's good to see Sega did nothing with Golden Axe for nearly twenty years.

I should like this game. I loved Golden Axe, I love DMC clones, I love beheadings, I love busty redheads topless on horseback. I mean, I should have the pre-order slip for the LE sitting in my wallet, right? There should be a Beast Rider wallpaper on my desktop, right? So why can't I summon interest in Beast Rider, much less excitement?

It's Sega, of course. This is the company that couldn't even get Shinobi 3d right. Sure, God of War: Tits Edition ought to be hard to screw up, but Sega's already shot themselves in the foot by failing to include the one thing that sat the original Golden Axe apart, multiplayer. Dave Halverson ejaculating over the disc in October's Play magazine didn't help matters, as people who remember Bullet Witch can attest.

Then there's the developer, Secret Level, who's last title of note was Final Fight: Streetwise. Until proven otherwise, this is strictly bargain bin fodder.

I'm operating under the assumption that the sequence of events depicted above represents a hallucination brought about by badly expired taco meat. The only other explanation involves the company that's funding Mirror's Edge spending ten million dollars developing a series of games where you run a pet shop full of dogs suffering from Down's Syndrome, and that's not a universe I wish to be part of.

Naruto: Path of Ninja 2 (DS)

You may wonder how Naruto: Path of the Ninja 2 fits in with last week's theory that all ninja games are awesome, always; and I counter that by saying that a ninja game really isn't a ninja game unless dismemberment is heavily featured, and I don't think Naruto features limbs forcibly removed from their parent bodies. I can't be bothered to verify this theory though, as all my attempts at Naruto research somehow ended in Sakura Haruno bondage hentai. Can't fault me for not trying, though.

Rock Revolution (PS3, 360, Wii)

Rock Revolution-- the Libertarian Party candidate of guitar games.

(I should probably stop with that, right? I probably don't really need to point out that Konami would make more money selling Guitar Freaks song packs on Rock Band, right? Right, carry on.)

Saint's Row 2 (360, PS3)

The sandbox game for people who thought Crackdown was too cerebral.

SR2 is a throughly by-the-numbers GTA3 clone, but it appears to be enjoyable despite that, and to be honest it's been long enough since GTA4 for there to be good reason to look into SR2 if sandbox games are your genre of choice. You just sorta wish there was more to say about the improvements from the first game outside of Tera Patrick.

Socom: Confrontation With Headset (PS3)

Here we see Hideo Kojima's influence finally filtering down to Western developers.

Tak: Guardians of Gross (PS2)

It's always reassuring for the entire first page of google results for a game to result in links regurgitating the press release pablum. It's my theory that the Tak games exist as a way for THQ to repackage unsold copies of The Polar Express game, and if you're in Tak's target audience you have no real way of knowing the difference or even particularly care anyway.

Ten Pin Alley 2 (Wii)

It's good to see gaming finally embrace the one-legged schoolgirl market. Alas, I'm not sure if this represents a step down or step up for XS game's last effort, Funkmaster Flex's Digital Hitz Factory.

You have no idea how badly you wish I was making that last bit up.

NEXT WEEK~!

LITTLE BIG PLANET confuses; infuriates non-PS3 owners!
WII MUSIC urinates on the bleeding, ravaged corpse of the videogame industry
FABLE 2 probably sucks!

2008-09-30T22:02:00.000-05:00

Harvest Moon Tree of Tranquility (Wii)

I'd like to say I conducted an exhaustive research of Japan's agriculture industry to shed insight to the insanity inherent in Harvest Moon, but in honest truth I spent about fifteen minutes in Wikipedia and all I could find was that an agriculture ministry employee was once reprimanded for editing the Japanese-language Wiki entry for Gundam two hundred and fifty times.

The gimmick for this particular entry in the series is the ability to farm your own offspring in addition to pigs and horses. You may then restart the game as your child, and may in turn again bed your own father or mother-- I might that repulsive if I hadn't already spent my formative years reading Heinlein.

Silent Hill Homecoming (360, PS3)

When the first word Gamespot uses to describe your franchise is "venerable", you may have a problem. The Cincinnati Reds are venerable. The British Motor Corporation is venerable. Senator Ted Kenned is venerable. Game series shoudln't be venerable, especially a series that debuted as a late-generation release for the PS1. How does Silent Hill fade into the realm of "venerable" when we're still holding serious debate over the lack of tank controls in RE5?

As far as this game in particular-- who knows. Something something soldier missing family something fog something Pyramid Head rape something. If you pre-order with EBStop, you get a free DVD of Silent Hill: The Movie, which may be the first instance of a calculated effort to prevent pre-order sales.

Sonic Chronicles: Dark Brotherhood(DS)

Try not to make logic of 1up's 9.0 review score-- down that path only lay long nights of Neogaf and hard drink. Rest assured that Dark Brotherhood is probably terrible, if for no other reason than it's association with Sonic and it's insane, degenerate fanbase. Yeah, that's right, I'm callow enough to pass judgement on mass media experiences based on the fandom for that franchise. This is not altogether irrational-- Tom Cruise is insane; Tom Cruises' fanbase is insane; no one really takes Minority Report seriously anymore.

(If Sega is the Tom Cruise of this relationship. that means Bioware is Katie Holmes. Which I think makes Dark Brotherhood the Suri Cruise of videogames. I'm probably overthinking this.)

We Cheer (Wii)

I'm onto your game, Namco. Between We Cheer and Idol Master you've moved into the lucrative market of ferriting out closet pedophiles for local sex crime law enforcement agencies. This theory also explains many of the more troubling additions to Soul Calibur IV:

What I'm saying is, buy with cash.

Pop Cutie: Street Fashion Simulation (DS)

I live in New York City. I know what "Street fashion" implies. Vomit crusted beards, a pair of pants composed of three other pairs of pants joined with an insulating layer of newspaper, a suspciously nice overcoat-- not this:

(Also, being a programmer for Koei of Japan has to be the most soul-crushing game industry related career short of Gamestop night manager, right? If you're not working the Dynasy Warrior salt mines, you're stuck producing yaoi cosplay simulators. What happens when this company buys out Tecmo? We're all buying Ryu Hyabusa's Magical Shibuya Adventure, right ?)

Princess Debut (DS)

I'd like to take this moment to congratulate Clay Akins on his courage and his flabbergasting amount of obliviousness regarding America's perception of his sexuality.

Mobile Ops: One Year War (PS3, 360)

Gameplay video would appear to reveal a mixture of Earth Defense Force and Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. Following our earlier discussion on how console mech games are never ever good, it's going to be interesting to see exactly how Namco manages to fuck this one up.

Valhalla Knights 2 (PSP)

Etrain Odyssey for the PSP, but stripped of maps, character, personality, and dominatrices. Also, gameplay appears to be based around setting your teammates on auto attack while you run toward the camera.

NEXT WEEK~!

Fracture: Because the statute of limitations on Red Faction has expired!

Guilty Gear 2 Oveture causes me to bleed from my ears!

I make hot sweaty manlove to Legend of Kage 2!

2008-09-25T20:14:00.000-05:00

Wallet Abuse Wednesday 9-24-08

Sim City Creator (Wii)

For all intents, Sim City Wii, but better than that because it has the flying around town segments of Sim Copter built in. This is the casual gaming that's encouraging to see on the Wii, and the sort've thing we should try to trick our otherwise unsuspecting co-workers and family members into buying.

For the rest of us though-- well, if you can get past this:

then SCC allows you to draw in roads and train tracks using the Wii Remote-- Allowing for such visionary public works projects as traffic circles shaped like Tia Tequila's boobs, or the Metro Express Fuck Wii Music Line.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway (360, PS3)

Is anyone else depressed to learn that the brilliant talent behind Opposing Force have been stuck making third-string WWII clones for the past five years? Supposedly Gearbox is being tapped for Halo 4, but I have a hard time differentiating how it's a step up to move from Generic WWII Shooter Product #874 to Generic SciFi Shooter Product #901b.

Anyway, apparently this one is about Operation Market Garden. I dunno. I can't be bothered to care about a WWII game unless it features vampires and werewolves.

Cabela's Dangerous Hunts '09 (360, PS3)

My hardcore sensibilities recoil seeing "Cabela" in the title, and I was further nonplussed by the concept of a "dangerous hunt". Sure, you may be hunting a wild boar but you're still human, you've still got a high-caliber rifle, you've still got roughly four hundred thousand years of evolution and technology on your side. But then I saw this:

And read this: (courtesy IGN)

Players will face raw danger as they encounter the fiercest animals on earth, including lions, grizzly bears, jaguars and more. Accurately modeled Cabela’s equipment in the game means the firearms, tactics and gear are all realistic and precise – but this won’t always help in the face of an unpredictable, open environment packed with avalanches, elephant stampedes, and piranha infested waters. If you do miss a shot and fail to stop a charging man-eating animal, you will be forced to fight it via a melee defense – but pay attention; it's likely another nearby animal will join the attack.

When the did Cabela games become hardcore? Look at this!

You are Dale Earnhardt Jr engaging in melee battle with a lion! Okay, a stoned lion, but still! We've got the best FPS companies in the world devolving into a soup of indistinct pap, and the Cabela guys went and made Teddy Roosevelt: The Videogame. It's only $40, if my 360 weren't currently a doorstop, I'd totally buy this.

Lego Batman (everything)

It's Lego, it's Batman. If you dig either, then this is your thing.

But Batman, he's pretty mature material for the Lego franchise to delve into. He threw The Joker into a vat of acid, he's ruptured a guy's spleen with a car battery, and the current Frank Miller comic has him performing systematic psycological terror on an orphaned 12 year old-- So knowing that, maybe we can see the Lego games opening into new territory.

Here's what I want to see-- since the Lego games are basically texture swaps at this point-- You remember a couple months back when the Dirty Harry movies were re-released in DVD in one massive scumbag-slaying block of Clint? There was obviously an attempt at creating a Dirty Harry revival going on, but I don't see why we should let the opportunity pass us by.

I want Lego Dirty Harry.

Your guns would have unlimited bullets. You'd recharge health by calmly eating disgustingly messy deli sandwiches with one hand blasting punks with the other. You'd have a revolving series of sidekicks who'd be violently dispatched every two minutes. You'd have this guy

as an end boss!

We have the technology. We can do this.

My Japanese Coach (DS)

Doing a GIS for "My Japanese Coach" doesn't result in nearly as much pornography as one would hope. "My Japanese Teacher", "My Japanese Tutor", "My Japanese Lessons", none of these really work nearly as well as you'd expect, in fact you have to resort to "My Japanese Schoolgirl" to get anything interesting, but that's just cheating.

Samba De Amigo (Wii)

Sega was doing the whole rythm game thing nearly ten years ago on the Dreamcast, but instead of guitars or dance pads or randomly shaking around a Wii remote, they were doing it with maracas and MEXICAN ACID MONKEYS

(I can't tell if this is the DC or Wii version, and neither can you)

They were even doing the clumsy sesor bar thing first:

As for the Wii version, it's mainly there to screw over people who paid a hundred bucks for the complete DC versiony. Thanks, Sega!

(Also, somehow or another, this is being done by Gearbox, of the aforementioned Brothers In Medals: Battlefield Honor. How the hell does that work?)

Warriors Orochi 2 (360, PS2)

It's sort of hard from the outside looking in as to what exactly it is about Koei's Dynasty Warriors games that make them so successful. The company basically has no need to produce nothing but the series and it's various spinoffs-- they all look pretty much the same, demos and videos relveal they all play pretty much the same, and the story can't be terribly compelling for those of us who aren't affecianados of feudal Japan. This particular revision would appear to be something of a KOF for Dynasty Warriors.

I've only ever played Ninety Nine Nights for the 360, as I figure if you're going to play one of these games, it may as well be the one with the most blatant t&a.

Kirby Super Star Ultra (DS)

Before Nintendo was in the market of making minigame compilations with only vague implications of gameplay, they did stuff like Kirby Super Star, which is...well okay, it's still a minigame compilation, but one with character and challenge and able to hold the attention of people other than drooling charity cases and baby boomers.

This is pretty much the SNES original with vastly improved graphics and a few token extra minigames thrown in, all of which probably cost Nintendo exactly five bucks more than the renovations that will be made for Animal Crossing Wii.

(Also, Masahiro Sakurai totally ripped Nintendo's Wii business strategy at a press conference with Grasshopper Studios. So Kirby's alright by me)

Nancy Drew: The Hidden Staircase (DS)

Wikipedia reveals that Nancy Drew: The Hidden Staircase is, in fact, the second Nancy Drew book written by Carolyn Keen. That's all the research I can really be bothered to do for this.

Zoo Hospital (DS)

Someone explain to me how Cabela hunting games get secretly awesome while DS owners are being subjected to...

and this:

Not to mention:

And I'm cheating a bit with this one, but:

And even:

Disgaea DS (DS, oddly enough)

Amazingly, NIS has taken what it bills as "The Most Hardcore Game Ever" and turned it into shovelware. It's the PS2 game beaten and mutilated to fit inside a DS cart. Think I'm kidding?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlJyhcA4hog&feature=related

That's actual footage from the final version of the game that's currently being sold in Japan.

In a certain cynical point of view you have to respect a high-profit cash in. All the DS games I just listed are all coming out this week and are all cash grabs to some degree. Cash grabs are important, they help fund risks like Bioshock and Mirror's Edge and Dead Space. Yes, Hamtaro Ham Ham Challenge is going to be godawful, but it'll make a lot of money and help insure that another Rune Factory can be made.

Disgaea DS though, that's another kind of cash in entirely-- the harmful, lazy we-know-the-fans-will-buy-anything cash-in that results in hurt loyalties and a damaged fanbase. It's an insult written on silicon.

Wario Land: Shake It (Wii)

I don't know how you sell a console 2d platformer for $50 in this day and age, but god bless Nintendo for trying.

And while it's neat that Nintendo keeps trying to make Wario into a platform hero, what happened to Wario being Mario's nemesis? Why isn't there a section where Wario punches the Giant Mario Head from Mario 64 into a bloody pulp? Why can't Wario chase down Toad using his sweet purple El Dorado from MK:DD? Where is his character, his personality?

Instead of these poorly-received gimmicky platformers, I want Grand Theft Mushroom Kingdom, starring Wario and his quest to brutally murder Mario and deflower Princess Peach.

My Little Pony Pinkie Pie's Party (DS)

If the Bratz Poniez sluts thought they could step on the My Little Ponies' turf and not expect a fight, they made a miscalculation of tragic proportions:

Oh it's on, bitch.

(Fun fact: No footage of this game exists. This is probably best for everyone involved.)

de Blob (Wii)

I really want to say bad things about this, but it's made by a handful of independent student game designers, wasn't even supposed to be a game when it was first developed, found a following on the PC and was eventually picked up by THQ. It's basically everything that's supposed to be right and good about gaming circa 2008, provided you can ignore it's on disc and not digital.

Counting Wario Land, hat's two games for the Wii this month that I'd actually admit to owning if I owned a Wii. I gotta find something to hate about this system, and soon...

Brothers in Arms: Double Time (Wii)

Oh thank god

Long time no see, LithTech.

Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (DS)

When Rhapsody first appeared on the PS1, it had one interesting hook-- it's battles were done in tactical strat-JRPG style instead of the standard flat 2d menu-based battles usually seen. So naturally that feature has been removed.

I'm not sure what this game is supposed to be doing that wasn't done fifteen years ago on the SNES, and maybe that's the point, but if you want to play sixteen bit RPGs on your DS there's better options.

Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked (Wii)

Judging from the screenshots I was going to write this extended DS game off as completely useless. But then I saw there was a minigame where you play a well-endowed woman repeatedly punching her own boobs:

So there's that.

Pitfall: The Big Adventure (Wii)

Seeing Pitfall: The Big Adventure is like seeing a beloved uncle from childhood on a city bench, his face shunken and teeth lost from meth addiction, a single grimy hand clutching a cup full of pigeon shit and spare change, asleep amid a pile of plastic shopping bags.

What I'm saying is, if you buy this, you're only encouraging bad behavior.

Twin Strike: Operation Thunder (Wii)

You know what? No. Wii owners have been forced to endure enough this week. Let's instead reminisce about Desert Strike.

Fuck yeah, Desert Strike!

NEXT WEEK~!

SONIC CHRONICLES: DARK BROTHERHOOD is PLANESCAPE FOR FURRIES!

SILENT HILL HOMCOMING reminds us that Silent Hill games are still being made!

NORTH AMERICAN HUNTING EXTRAVAGANZA-- DANGEROUS HUNTS FOR WII!

2008-09-15T21:08:00.000-05:00

Wallet Abuse Wednesday 9-17-08

Rock Band 2 (360)
Here's my question about guitar games-- if keeping abreast of Rock Band and Guitar Hero is equivalent to a $120/year subscription fee, why doesn't EA or Activision skip the retail bullshit allow a $10/month unlimited updated playlist option? Wouldn't everyone involved be better served if the yearly updates are treated like the song packs they really are and save the retail sequels for every other year, when the devs can make some noticable progress with features or graphics? It's not like Madden games where the fans will be happy to follow thier teams every year-- A newcomer to the guitar genre is just as well served with GH1 on the PS2 as he is with Rock Band 2-- Maybe moreso, depending on taste in music.

You have to wonder exactly where the half life for this genre is, if we haven't already eclipsed it. Save for the inception of Rock Band, only real thing Activision and EA (and now Konami) have been doing for the past four years is adding More Stuff, not New Stuff. At some point the influx of new fans just collapses and the publishers are forced to focus on the existent, dwindling, increasingly hardcore fans-- In many ways you can already see this happening with Konami's blazingly difficult Guitar Revolution.

But I could just be bitter in that I've never been able to enjoy a guitar game, despite virtually every other gamer I know owning a surplus of plastic Stratocasters. Guitar games go into that strata of cultural puruists that annoy me in my inability to enjoy, along with Jaquline Carey's epic tomes of fantasy magic smut, or The Beatles.

Dragon Quest 4 (DS)
On one hand, I like the idea of taking a classic game and periodically re-making it for new audiences. On the other hand, it would appear that only Squeenix is doing this regularly and even then only to Dragon Quest 4 and Final Fantasy 4. Meanwhile Deus Ex looks like low-res ass and no one in their right mind wants to bother with Planescape: Torment anymore.

The upside to this is that Squeenix has largely forgotten Final Fantasy Six ever existed, and thus they can't do anything to screw it up. The downside is that it could be decades before they get around to Final Fantasy 13.

Yggdra Union (PSP)

I predict a strong collector's market for this game, not due to it being a niche title for a niche system mainly notable for pirating PS1 games, but mainly because the name makes it all but impossible to ask a store clerk for a copy, save for those in an enclave of Polish-American strat-JRPG stalwarts in Weyerhaeuser, Wisconsin.

Also, how did this game make the leap from GBA to PSP without ever touching the DS? Yeah, it's technically a DS game in that it can be played on a DS, but that's like saying there's technically an F-Zero game for the Wii. Searching Wikipedia further research shows that that the DS sequel, Knights in the Nightmare, will be sold with a GBA cart of Yggdra Union-- that's either stupidly convoluted, or kinda cool in a "Radiohead on vinyl" sort of way.

Speed Racer (PS2)

Unless Gamestop's webpage is screwing with me, this is only just now coming out. How do you miss a cash-in PS2 racer by three months? Did the development team have to wait for the movie to be released before they knew what the game was supposed to be about?

The PS2 release happens to coincide with the DVD release, which contains it's own Speed Racer game on disc. Which raises an interesting experiment for some poor, brave soul-- which is the worse experience, Speed Racer: The Movie; Speed Racer: The Movie: The Game; or Speed Racer: The Game of the Movie on the Movie?

Rebel Raiders (Wii)

There's this neat little subgenre of arcade flying games that's developing on the Wii. Which is a good thing, it's not like Nintendo has any arcade flying franchises it's ignoring in favor of making Wii Music or anything.

Force Unleashed (everything)

I'm personally disappointed that Namco is cashing in on this series so quickly, and pretending that Ivy and Raphael never existed. It's just insulting.

(On a related note, you know the magazine covers where Starkiller is pulling down a Star Destroyer from orbit? That looked like it was going to be insanely cool a signature event that you'd be talking about on boards for the next week, right? Yeah, that's a quick time event. You remember Kratos's sex scenes in God of War? That, but with Tie Fighters instead of boobs. They took what could have been one of the most iconic sequences in gaming history and made it into a game of Space Ace. I'm not a game developer and thus I couldn't tell you exactly how you make the task of singlehandedly destroying a Star Destroyer into an compelling gaming experience, but if Simon Says on a Dual Shock 3 this was the best they could think of, maybe they shouldn't have bothered.)

Armored Core: For Answer (360, PS3)

One of the more disappointing developments to come about over the past handful of console generations is the utter failure of software makers to develop a single decent mech game, with the possible exception of Virtual On. The Armored Core series has managed to turn something inherently fun-- giant robots blowing the everloving crap out of other giant robots and the immediate surroundings-- into an exercise in ponderous, slow, exhaustingly exact combat more befitting submarine warfare than an episode of Voltron.

To resolve this issue, I propose that the next console cycle feature a "Fun Mech(tm)" chip in every console. This chip would, upon insertion of an Armored Core game, immediately boot to Shogo: Armored Police instead.

Battle Fantasia (360)

When Mercs 2 blew up my 360, I wasn't terribly upset as there wasn't much I was interested in on the 360 this year besides Fable 2 and Fallout 3, so I wasn't in much of a hurry to have it repaired. Then I found out that those assholes at Arc Systems went and made Odin Sphere: The Fighting Game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x3FItgimIQ

Unless you know to look, it's hard to tell those are polys. I'm not sure if it's doing anything new in the fighting game space, but I don't care, I'd gladly pay full MSRP for the art alone. Y'know, if Pandemic hadn't left my 360 a smoldering pile of ruin.

(On another note, how does it work out that the 360 version is coming over to America, but not the PS3? If this game doesn't firmly represent the exact market that should have been sealed up by the Playsation brand, what does this leave for the PS3? Microsoft has managed to out-otaku Sony, and I'm not sure if any of us are ready to mingle Halo 3 and Guilty Gear cosplayers.)

Pure (everything)

Sure, the previews say it's fun, but these are the same guys who made all those generic ATV/BMX racers on the PS2 and PSP-- fun is the baseline. ATV racers are the Kraft Dinner of videogames, it's more noteworthy if you manage to screw something like this up. Unless you're a 360 owner envious of Motorstorm, why wouldn't you play Dirt instead?

Red Bull BC One (DS)

Apparently portable DDR is a genre now. I greet this development with the same enthusiasm as a lit major learning that Twilight has it's own shelf at Barnes and Noble.

Imagine: My Secret World (DS)

If portable DDR is the Twilight of videogames, the Imagine series is Gossip Girls. We have only ourselves to blame, really-- when parents come to us asking for safe games to steer their daughters to (while secretly hoping their little princesses outgrow the whole videogaming phase) we should have mentioned Harvest Moon or Katamari Damacy instead of Nintendogs. Now in ten years games like this will be directing popular culture.

If you think it's outrageous of me to link Nintendogs to the death of western civilization, you've not been reading enough of my articles.

Line Rider 2 (DS)

You should probably buy this. One, it's good to see an indy game designer make it big using nothing more than a sketch on a notepad, and two, it's Line Rider on the DS for only twenty bucks. You weren't using that money for anything important.

DEVELOPMENTS THAT SICKEN ME AND I CANNOT BE BOTHERED TO DISCUSS:
Di-Gata Defenders (DS)
Unsolved Crimes (DS)
Igor (Wii)

NEXT WEEK:
Baja: Edge of Control makes Pure even more redundant!
Rhapsody: Musical Adventure questions our masculinity!
Kirby Super Star Ultra is more rehashed tripe from Nint-- oh who am I kidding, I'm probably buying this.

2008-09-09T00:30:00.000-05:00

Upcoming Sept 9 2008

Kevar points out from lasts week's that the few who Viva Pinata were, hardcore gamers and that the game was genuinely well-received by critics. And while I won't argue those points (84% at Metacritic, after all) that's not the point I was trying to get across. Yeah, you can say that it was the hardcore that wound up buying the game, but I'd argue that that's largely because on November 2, 2006 there weren't a whole lot of options for the 360. VP and Gears of War were virtually the only 360 exclusives on the field. We were legitimately excited for Sneak King and Pocket Bike Racer, for chrissake. If you happen to exist at that unlikely crossroad of 360 ownership and Harvest Moon fandom yeah, VP2 is your title. But that doesn't mean it exists within the 360's market.

Last week you may remember me carrying the water for Mercenaries 2. As you may note from my general scorn and derision for 90% of the games I list here, legitimate excitement over a game is a rare for me, and Mercs 2 represented the first time I've paid full retail price for a console game since Ninja Gaiden 2-- and maybe the third time all year between those two and Devil May Cry 4. And while I don't regret this, Mercenaries 2 has overall been a disappointment.

Mercs 1's biggest problem was it's general lack of polish, and along with that a full suite of bugs and and hilarious geometry errors. And while the game has received a gloss of EA polish-- you've probably already heard the theme song the bugs have at best, been revised.

Geometry errors still abound-- your helicopter pilot seems unable to grasp the concept of flying over palm trees instead of through them before giving up and dropping your cargo (whether it be something as simple as a crate of AK-47 ammo or a fully equipped Abhrams battle tank) wherever he got suck and then popping out of existence. The frequent race missions represent an exercise in speculative physics; NPC soldiers tend to get stuck in interesting locations such as the space between the body of a tank and it's turrent, being none worse for wear despite the ordeal.

Brand new bugs include a radio dispatch operator who's continually advising you to return to base for nonexistent missions, A GPS system so horribly broken that deciphering it's quirks constitutes it's own mini-game, and bikes equipped with a truly remarkable gyroscopic stabilization system that resists gravity, tumbles fromatopmountain precipices and broadsides from rocket propelled grenades. Mercenaries 2 also continues a troubling trend where developers try to cram as many functions into one key as possible, to the point where large swaths of the controller become unused in favor of the all-inclusive Action Button.

All of which makes for a frustrating experience, and this is in despite delays and an upgrade in publishing companies. It's still a fun game and one I don't regret buying, I wish Pandemic had been as inspired in QA as they had in producing the rap jingle.

That's all ignoring that Mercs 2 has caused my launch edition 360 to red ring-- which is confounding, as the game basically looks like the XB1 original with better geometry and light blur. In closing, fuck you, Pandemic, fuck you for blowing up my 360 and fuck you for screwing up Mattias' voice.

*Spore (PC)

I don't get sim games. I don't mind them, I just classify them in the same space reserved for ballet or lacrosse or the Beatles, pursuits that are probably more culturally important than the things I enjoy and cause me to feel guilty for not enjoying.

However, I feel people are going out of their way to refuse to classify what would otherwise appear to be a classic Will Wright sim. And maybe it's because this has never been my type of game-- a decided lack of ninjas or beheadings or Lotus race cars-- I've never been terribly interested in the game Spore as much as the concept of Spore. That said, I can't be mad at a game that allows me to create a walking, spiked-club wielding penis to do battle with alien cultures, and you have to respect a concept that refuses to patronize it's players, even if that comes with a certain lack of accessibility.

'course, that's ignoring the real possibility that Spore might not be a fundamentally good game, if impressions from the pirate community are to be believed. Let's just hope that the confluence of software pirates and 4x exploration fans turns out to be rather low.

*Spore Creatures (Wii)

I've spent the past two days reading impressions and watching gameplay trailers for Spore Creatures and I still cant' tell you what it's supposed to be about or what it's supposed to do with Spore PC. At best I think it's supposed to be Cubivore with Paper Mario's art style. Maybe. I dunno. It's probably wretched.

*NHL 2k9 (Everything)

If you're going to buy one NHL game this year... well, this is going to pretty much have to be it, isn't it?

You know, hockey is a pretty easy to translate to videogame form, and is one of those concepts that make for better game without official licensing or faithfully-reproduced physics. Knowing this, why hasn't someone paid five bucks for the Blades of Steel name and run with it?

*Mystery Case Files: MillionHeir (DS)

While none of us were paying attention, a company called Big Fish Games has made an enormous amount of money producing Myst games for housewives in the guise of the Mystery Case File series, and this is the culmination of their efforts.

The point of these games is to-- and I say this will all seriousness-- to find items in the background and click on them. Did I say Myst? Obviously I meant Where's Waldo.

This goes beyond simple casual gaming, beyond your parents waving a wiimote in the general direction of your TV screen, this is a game your three year old niece would be personally offended if it were installed on her LeapFrog.

At first I wondered how something like this garnered a hundred million downloads and six games, but then I saw where Big Fish Games was founded by the same guys who founded RealNetworks and it became obvious-- they tricked people into buying these, same way they tricked millions of poor suckers into downloading RealPlayer and RealArcade. So in the unlikely event you buy a DS game in the near future, be careful-- there's a good chance these assholes have infested that copy Bangai-O with Realplayer: The Game Series.

*Lock's Quest (DS)

A hardcore-ized version of Tower Defense ginned up with anime-style art (although it's about as Japanese as a Toyota Camry, having been developed by the Drawn to Life guys); If it's $20 I'll buy it, if any more expensive than that you wonder why they've bothered.

(I do, however, like this idea of flash game concepts making it over to handhelds, and am saddened to learn that Tower of Goo -- pretty much The Perfect DS Game-- is going to WiiWare instead.)

*Mazes of Fate (DS)

Normally, I'd be excited to play a handheld Shining in the Darkness. But then I remember Etrian Odyssey already exists, is five hundred million hours long, and features dominatrixes with enormous boobs as a playable character class. And suddenly I no longer care about Mazes of Fate.

*Bratz Poneyz 2 (DS)

Yeah, we're going to talk about Bratz Poneyz 2, as I think it's important that we bring a game who's ultimate goal is raising a doe-eyed horse slut into the national conversation.

Those sassy, naughty little ponies.

This is the point where I feel I should confess my crush on Megan from the My Little Pony cartoon, so maybe I'm coming into this with mixed emotions and I'm not a fair judge of this game's ...merits... but I feel this game is not only offensive to gamers and the unfortunate eight year old girls and effeminate boys who receive this for Christmas, but aslo to the entire anamorphic equine community.

Between this and turning their delicious bones into Jell-O desserts, we're going to have a lot to answer for one day.

*Zoids Assault (360)

What the fuck is Zoids Assault

*TNA Impact (PS3, PS2, 360)

A fake wrestling game (They've removed grappling and submissions!) for a fake wrestling company that represents a fake sport. Have I mentioned that these guys have been paying Kurt Angle money to stay on their payroll for the past two years, a guy who's neck vertebrae have all the structural integrity of a granola bar?

That said, if Kevin Nash's moveset is simply him taking four steps into the ring and then instantly retiring, it's at least worth a rental.

*Active Life Outdoor Challenge (Wii)

Or as I like to call it; Irony: The Game.

*Yakuza 2 (PS2)

I'd never played the first, having passed it off as a weeaboo-friendly GTA3, but it seems I may have been a bit rash in that decision, or at least should not pass that opinion off to it's sequel. This could well be the last Really Important Game PS2 owners lay in the system's spindle. If any company were to give us the PS2's swan song, it's only fitting it should be Sega.

NEXT WEEK:

Force Unleashed continues the epic story first hinted at in Soul Calibur 4!

Rock Band 2 HOLY SHIT THIS THING HAS LUMP I HAVE TO BUY IT

Battle Fantasia:

Is alright by me!

2008-08-29T23:38:00.000-05:00

Upcoming 8-30-08

Yakul from last week's comments mentioned that this could well be the worst worst generation for software ever-- and judging from my cynical dismissal for everything other than Castle Crashers, you may think I share that opinion. But I believe we're receiving some genuinely great titles, from No More Heroes to Bioshock to Fallout 3-- but it seems there's more dross to sort through than previous console generations, and the crap that's there isn't even interesting crap.

But this generation is far from the worst. Ignoring the 2600 and the Crash that it created, I'd say we're doing better now The 16 bit era, something we treat as sacrosanct, lauding luminaries such as Chrono Trigger while ignoring Bubsy the Bobcat and Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.

Yes, there's a lot of crap this generation, but it's crap that's recognizable and avoidable and not masquerading as triple-A titles. There's also a greater diversity of games this gen as compared to the endless string of mascot platformers on the Genesis and SNES.

Finally, (and this may be only my own experience talking)I think games this generation provide a far greater value than years before. The NES/SNES eras and even most of the PS1 cycle were still largely driven by the arcade, a model that gave us $50-70 games that lasted less than a weekend. Publishers were forced to counter the rental market by increasing difficulty to the point where only the most skilled were able to enjoy the entertainment investment they'd made. And while such logic still exists to some degree, it's now possible for even a novice gamer to garner full enjoyment from GTA 4.

Also, I've been reminded that Castlevania: The Next One will be arriving on DS later this year. I retract my statement, then: Instead of Chrono Trigger being the only noteworthy title on the DS field from here until-- well, whenever-- there's Chrono Trigger and Castlevania SOTN VI.

I'm pulling this update out early this week as for some inexplicable reason Mercenaries 2 is releasing on Sunday. I suppose that makes sense in that it allows to celebrate Labor Day by blowing up Venezuelans in many unique and hilarious ways, but now we're just madly refreshing Cheapass Gamer in hopes that Best Buy breaks street date.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (PS3, PS2?!, 360)

You may be asking why Mercenaries 2 so important that I'm willing shuffling around my busy drug-and-supermodel-oriented schedule to bring us this update a full forty eight hour earlier than normal Well, I'll tell you.

In Mercenaries 2, you can hijack a helicopter, pick up another tank (also likely hijacked) and then use that tank while being flown around via helicopter.

Forget your opera house scenes, your colossi, your hours of meticulously scripted codec conversations-- this is the defining point of gaming, and I'm not sure if there's any where further to go once atop this precipice. Mercenaries 2 will simultaneously save our generation and destroy it. There's no need to keep the wheezing husk Western civilization around any longer. Soon the world economies will be driven toward one goal-- transmitting the binary data of Mercenaries 2 to the distant stars, in hopes of spreading this game's wisdom, virus-like, to the cosmos.

Hopefully the lack of review scores and initial impressions doesn't mean this game is going to suck, as I've already cashed out my 401k for a microbus, two hundred pounds of pot and all the zig-zags to be found in Astoria.

Infinite Undiscovery (360)

It's by Tri-Ace, the Valkyrie Profile guys, so that's a good sign. And while it's doing some interesting new stuff with stealth gameplay and a party system that makes use of it's entire cast, 1up is complaining of it's Wii-level graphics and the plot is your basic “keep big bad from becoming god” JRPG trope. But I'm more troubled by Squeenix's continued inability to create characters that don't look like absolute poofs:

It's sort've hard to connect with a guy wearing a muffin on top of his head, y'know? Amano's stuff was less frilly than this, and his characters had more estrogen than a CLAMP anime. As I don't keep on top of JRPGs, can a kind reader please explain why anyone would chose this over Tales of Vesperia other than the Squeenix logo on the front of the box?

Viva Pinata: Trouble In Paradise (360)

Rare didn't make the case to 360 owners first game in this series and the followup doesn't look like anything remotely what they'd be interested either. Which is a roundabout way of saying this Isn't Meant For Us, but you wonder who it's meant for at all. The market VP2 is targeting just isn't ever going to be within the 360's sphere and a single series isn't going to expand that market to where the system becomes attractive to parents of 12 year olds.

Warhammer: Battle March (360)

Speaking of target audiences-- this is an expanded version of the Warhammer PC game Mark of Chaos, a middling quality quasi-RTS with a number of quality control issues. Hopefully those have been cleared up for the 360, But at $60 it's hard to make the case for a two year old PC RTS that plays like point and click Dynasty Warriors. If Namco had released this at $40 they may have generated some middling interest and maybe provided a vehicle for DLC. As it stands the most sales this will produce will be from the used bin.

Rapala Fishing (Wii, 360)

Fooled you!

Shred Nebula (XBLA)

How do you follow up something as critically acclaimed as Braid, something as anticipated as Castle Crashers, something with the nostalgic weight of Bionic Commando ReArmed? If you're CrunchTime Games, you release an updated version of Subspace-- which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Subspace was a good game and it's due for an update, but it's the sort of thing that's completely useless if you don't have a Gold subscription.

Pirates vs Ninjas Dodgeball (XBLA)

You know everything you need to know about this by reading the title. Various internet memes come to life to play dodgeball, made all the more tragic for the lack of the Will It Blend Guy. Looks harmless enough, but what would compel a person to purchase this over Castle Crashers?

Tony Dungy Simulator '09! (PS3, 360)

(not seen: Jesus smiting Rex Grossman; Peyton Manning being awesome, Tom Brady hanging Super Bowl rings off his lingham)

I'm not sure why something like this isn't rolled into the yearly Madden updates, but that's assuming EA would ever need to expend effort to sell Madden.

Facebreaker (PS3, 360) Facebreaker KO Party (Wii)

There's no reason for a boxing game to exist on any other platform than the Wii, which leads a person to wonder why the title was split in the first place.

Fading Shadows (PSP)

There's two reasons you've not heard of this: one, it's a PSP game being sold exclusively by Gamestop (A breach of logic and common sense that's a hallmark of Agetec); secondly it's Mercury without the accelerometer gimmick. What it lacks in a defensible sales model or gameplay, it makes up for in a plot that came from the darkest recesses of a Mortal Kombat fanfic writer's meth-addled id:

Evil is afoot and the villainous Master Gardal has diabolical plans. With the aid of his faithful minions Quiph and Morg, he intends to conquer the famed Castle of Heaven... the supreme fortress built to protect the world from forces of darkness. The only way for Gardal to breach the castle gates is by sacrificing the pure, untainted soul of Erwyn, a young boy mentioned in a millennia-old prophecy. Gardal and his minions have already captured the boy and imprisoned him inside a dungeon to await execution. Yet Gardal didn't count on the help of Aira, Erwyn's clairvoyant sister. To save her brother, Aira has sealed Erwyn's soul within a single teardrop and transformed the teardrop into a protective orb. Now, in order to free her brother she must safely guide the orb into the Castle of Heaven using a magical beam of light. Unfortunately, sending the beam of light to Erwyn has used all of Aira's strength and she cannot control it any longer... Will you help her?

The copy editor must've wrote this under the impression he was working on a White Wolf RPG before was told to work the play mechanics for Marble Madness into the plot.

NEXT WEEK:

Spore! Confirms/denies evolution/Intelligent Design!

Zoids Assault! It's existence confuses and angers me!

Yakuza 2! Gives us false hope in Sega!

2008-08-24T20:33:00.000-05:00

Upcoming 8-26-08

Following an unprecedented 12 month span where no games were released or announced I, your faithful servant, return to warn you about what you should under no circumstance spend money on this coming Wednesday. Luckily for your 401k, despite a relative heavy deluge of gaming this week nary a single one is worth venturing forth from your impoverished hovel to obtain.

Playstation 2

DT Carnage PS2 Racing

Not a lot of information exists on DT Carnage, including review scores-- the few things to be found other the standard PR palbum is it's price-- $15, and it's publisher, Agetec. Which is more than sufficient evidence for anyone with any self respect to ask themselves why they're purchasing videogames at a Wal-Mart.

Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli

A racing game with four times as many names as car makes, Ferrari Stradale Challenge Truffle Profiterole reeks of the same sort of cash-in mentality that brought us Ford Racing and Corvette Challenge. Of course, Ferrari are remarkable whores, so this should come as little surprise, you'd just have rather they would have had more dignity than to farm out the Prancing Horse to a developer who's last game of any note was Impossible Mission. For the Wii.

Shining Dragon

At first glance this would appear to be another in Sega's endless attempts to wring blood from the Shining series stone without having to actually bother making something resembling a Shining game. But no, it's a piece of anime fighting fluffery based off something called "Ikki Tousen". If you should happen to be an "Ikki Tousen" fan, this probably means something to you, if not this game shouldn't mean anything to you either, unless you're willing to drop $14 on an end-of-cycle Japanese 2d fighter that'll probably sell 10,000 copies and-- Oh who am I kidding, I may as well preorder now. Maybe there's an LE with an Ikki Tousen mousepad or something.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09

If you're the type of person who buys golf games, you're probably not the type of person that reads review scores to golf videogames, and you're certainly not the type of person that reads articles talking about review scores to golf videogames. Like you weren't going to buy this anyway.

Playstation 3

Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty

This would appear to be a downloadable standalone expansion for Whichever Rachet and Clank Was the Last One, which in itself is a rather neat idea, after all it's nice to see aftermarket content for something that isn't an FPS or racer, and a 360 owner, I'd like to see more stuff along these lines come to Live. PS3 owners however, probably aren't thrilled to receive what amounts to an utterly mediocre map pack for a series that has snuck it's way into becoming Sony's flagship franchise. But it's either this or spend more money on song packs.

Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice

So this is interesting, if not exactly good. What we have here is a sequel to Disgaea-- an critically overlooked strategy RPG that quickly became a cult hit among the weeaboo set-- transported over to the PS3 with little gained from the process other than higher resolution sprites. Which in itself isn't all that bad-- after all, if there's anything we need more of is turn-based RPGs in the vein of Shining Force-- But you have to question Atlus' sanity, seeing that the vast majority of their fans have as yet seen little reason to upgrade to a PS3, and reasons diminishing by the day. Even the horrific spectacle of Disgaea mutilated to fit on the Nintendo DS will sell more than this.

Vampire Rain: Altered Species

I don't know how you can combine Metal Gear Solid and vampires and make a bad game out of it, much less a horrible one, but Artoon managed to do so and now they're hoping they can catch, shell-shocked PS3 owners unawares as well. Eighteen months might buy you a new subtitle and better box art, but the shame still shines through.

In addition the PS3 will receive versions of Tiger Woods '09 and Ferrari Tourino Fratelli Garbanzo Trebuchet-- Set your resolution to 1080p and re-read what I wrote beforehand.

Wii

Mario Super Sluggers

Remember that Mario baseball game Namco made for the 'cube? No, of course you don't, it's a Mario baseball game, even the most slavish of Nintendo devotees have to be reminded of it's existence. Well, this is that, but with waggle tacked to one end, sealed in shrinkwrap and shoved in the face of the Wii Sports set in the hopes none of them played Mario Superstar Baseball either. And of course, they won't have, and of course it'll sell thirteen million copies.

Freddi Fish: The Case of The Missing Kelp Seeds

Like I'm Even Going to Bother.

Margot's Word Brain

The only way this could be even marginally interesting is if it were "Margo's Brain Rot". Moving right along...

Pajama Sam: Don't Fear the Dark

Now you're just screwing with me, Nintendo, there's no way you actually allow--

Spy Fox In Dry Cereal

So this would appear to be Fail Week for Nintendo, as we skip NES quality standards and go right for Chase the Chuckwagon territory. If you're reading this next week and hear me talking about General Custer Wii, upgrade your videocards.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 All-Play

Take my last Tiger Woods comment, pull the resolution back down to 480p and combine it with the entry for Mario Super Sluggers. Then get rid of all that, as golf is a sport that actually makes sense for Wii functionality, and EA has assigned it's head development team Tiburon to this title, unlike every other damned time they've make a Wii game and left it to languish to three guys with a PS2 SDK in a garage somewhere in Austin, Texas without air conditioning. With a major developer treating a Wii platform title as it's flagship SKU for the series, perhaps we'll finally see a renaissance in third par--

Kidz Sports: Crazy Mini Golf

---nevermind.

Xbox 360

Crash Time: Autobahn Pursuit

I have no clue what this thing is, and no one outside of IGN does either, and all they're doing is regurgitating the official PR docs. But apparently it's a chase game-- whatever the hell a "case game" may entail-- that's associated in some way with a German action TV show. It's thirty bucks and by the screenshots would appear to involve German armored personnel carriers in some fashion and while it sounds hard to imagine how you can make a bad game out of that, we've already went over Vampire Rain today. The fact that the developer's last game of any note was something called "World Racing 2"-- I guess "General Racing Product 2005" wasn't spartan enough-- doesn't help alleviate my concerns. But it is my understanding that ramps are involved.

Tales of Vesperia

The 360-- despite all logic, common sense and wishes of the larger gaming public-- remains the go-to system for next gen roleplaying games. Which, you know, would be great news for Microsoft if this were 1997 and it were possible to sell a videogame system based on the amount of support Square/Enyx throws your way. I've never played a Tales game, I guess if you're into this sort've thing you already know if you're going to buy it or not.

(While we're here--Vesperia? At least Symphonia had a recognizable root word. This sounds like it was bankrolled by a prescription lung decongestant)

Castle Crashers

Unless you're the remarkably rare confluence of hardcore gamer and golf enthusiast, this is undoubtedly game of the week, maybe even game of the month if Mercenaries 2 winds up sucking wind. My fellow Live Arcade subscribers have been waiting since 2006 for this title, patiently ignoring the fact that if it'd be on any other online network we'd have spent the past six months playing this bastard child of Knights of the Round and Alien Hominid into the ground as it cleared Microsoft certification. My only real concern for this title-- other than if it's worth dropping $15 bucks on if you're not a subscriber to Live Gold-- is the difficulty level vs Behemoths' last game, the aforementioned Alien Hominid. It's as yet unclear if Behemoth knows how to build a fun game, even if that game looks like it can't possibly go wrong.

Nintendo DS

The DS is the usual swamp of shovelware this week, littered with luminaries such as "My Chinese Coach" and "Sims 2 Apartment Pets" and a friggin' Digimon title of all things. But there is a new Harvest Moon game out for it this week, as well as N+ finally moving to the platform it was destined for. And if you haven't bought Bangai-O Spirits yet, do so. Otherwise 2008 is looking dire up until Chrono Trigger.

PSP

The Week in PSP in summary:

At least Nintendo can keep a certain air of dignity about itself as it diligently goes about it's task of destroying the industry.

Next Week!

Mercenaries 2! FINNISH MADMEN BLOW THE FUCK OF VENEZUELA!
Infinite Undiscovery! HAS A NAME THAT MAKES NO SENSE!
Rapala Fishing Frenzy DOESN'T GET TALKED ABOUT AT ALL!

Upcoming August 14th

2007-08-14T04:11:00.001-05:00

In a startling turn of events, this actually turns out to be a decent week of gaming, even in the face (or perhaps because of) of legions of slavering Madden fans descending upon stores come Wednesday morning. Also, Persona 3 pops back up again, after what Atlus will only describe as a "printing error" leading to a three week delay. If nothing else, this should prove a fascinating social experiment as okatu and jocks mingle in the same annoying, stress-inducing line at the local EBStop.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance (PS2)

Apparently Raven's kept the visuals up to par with the 360 version (Which sounds impressive until you remember everything in this genre is zoomed out to something just under low Earth orbit) and it's a third of the asking price for the next-gen versions of this game. If this is your thing and you haven't picked it up yet, it looks to be a decent diversion. Even if this isn't your thing, you have to figure it's at least twice as good as The Red Star, and doesn't feature a minute and a half of unstoppable credit screens every time you want to start the game.

The timing on this is actually rather remarkable, as it gives dads something to keep their kids shut up about while huddling in the living room with Madden.

Fatal Fury Battle Archive (PS2)

Pay attention. This is something incredibly rare in gaming, a package that's so brilliantly fucking fantastic and priced so low that hardcore gamers cannot justify not owning it. Game companies simply don't do this sort of thing anymore, and as much as I hate the whole "reward consumerism" mindset, it's something that's deserving of our retail dollars. Herein you will find Fatal Fury, Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury Special and Fatal Fury 3, on one disc, for fifteen fucking dollars. And okay, yeah, while you're probably either going to wind up playing FF Special or FF 3 and not touch the rest of the disc, it's still a rather incredible event to witness, especially if you're of the generation that can remember calculating exactly how much overtime they'd need to work to justify a Neo Geo purchase. Fifteen years ago this package would have cost you something along the lines of eight hundred dollars to collect, and that's not counting the price of the console itself. I could not possibly recommend this enough. Now if there was just some way to convince SNK to release a disc consisting of their non-fighter, non-Metal Slug Neo Geo stuff. There's an entire generation of gamers out there who've never played Magician Lord!

Madden '08 (PS2/PSP/360/PS3/Wii/DS)

The yearly event that exposes the rest of America to the dank, filthy halls of EBStop is upon us again, causing us to both recoil in horror at what we may one day become and begrudgingly admit that without stuff like this it'd be impossible to justify Shadow of the Colossus and Bioshock.

A quick rundown of what each version features:

The 360 version runs at 60fps, and is thus considered the "full" version. It is unknown exactly how much money traded hands for Microsoft to pull this off, but safe to say there's been an alarming amount of trade happening between EA and MS, including advertising rights, PR Marketing heads trading places between companies, and of course Microsoft's compliance in EA's continued destruction of the integrity of Xbox Live. I'm not saying that Madden '08 is better on the 360 simply because EA and MS are in bed, but it sure looks weird.
The PS3 version runs at 30fps. Rumors as to virulent mold spores being packaged in each Blu-Ray case remain wholly unconfirmed.
The PS2 version is the one people will wind up actually buying
The Wii version is like the PS2 version, only a pain in the ass to actually get anything done with
The DS version is further proof of the lack of a kind or loving God
The PSP version is there because hey, PSP owners are sorta dumb anyway.

Persona 3 (PS2)

And now, presenting the case for Persona 3:

Well, I mean, if you insist...

Also, apparently you contact the spirit world via repeated ritualistic suicide. That's kinda different. And as always, the Last Great Hurrah of the PS2 until something comes along next month to further justify never buying a next-gen system. I swear, this generation isn't going to end until we wind up with seventeen million unsold copies of Toy Story 4 buried somewhere in Utah.

Metropolismania 2 (PS2)

No reviews for this thing exist, and every preview site googled up regurgitates the exact same PR boilerplate. But it looks like SimCity for people who order pocky online-- since Natsume is involved, I can only assume there's cows and an awkward dating game involved somewhere. So yeah, imagine Harvest Moon, only you're a city planner, and instead of crops you've gotta harvest crack rocks and manage prostitutes. Only everyone's got enormous fucking doe eyes, so it's even creepier than what I just described.

Dungeons and Dragons Tactics (PSP)

What the hell is this and why is it on the PSP instead of a system I want to actually own? It's a tactical RPG using D&D 3.5 rules, and if you're the sort of mutant like I am and actually enjoy D&D 3.5 combat, you're a tad dumbstruck at the thoughts of a videogame appearing on the PSP that may just justify removing your firmware hack in order to play.

Seriously Wizards, fuck you. Aren't you guys aware that PSP owners don't buy videogames?

Pile o' DS Crap: High School Musical and Operation Vietnam.

I'm almost positive I've seen High School Musical: Making the Grade here before. What possible quality control issues can be involved with a High School Musical game that could even remotely justify a delay? Was the text replaced with nothing but anti-Semitic slurs? Did someone screw up the order form and buy a half million blank Game.com carts? Was AIDS found lurking in the staples binding the instruction manual together?

As far as Operation: Vietnam goes, just imagine. This is how Vietnam vets think our generation views the sacrifice of their youth:

With any luck our nation will refuse to go to war ever again under the fear that game developers will make shitty games about the experience.

Finally, a trio of shockingly good DS games by way of Japan.

Heroes of Mana (DS)

It took the better part of three years, but someone finally built a quality RTS entirely around the DS, and it's coming from Squeenix of all people. To confound matters, it's coming under the guise of a "* of Mana" game that doesn't suck the will to live out of anyone attempting to play it.

Rune Factory (DS)

Natsume has plastered IGN with banner ads labeling this as a "Fantasy Harvest Moon", which I guess tells you everything you really need to know about this. Of the one recent review to come of this to show up on Gamerankings Nintendo Power docent seem to like it much, bestowing a 70%. But then, Nintendo Power gave Puzzle Quest DS a 40%, so what do they know?

Luminous Arc (DS)

And to compliment Heroes of Mana, someone remembered the DS ought to have a lot more Strategy RPGs on it than it does by now, and thus we have Luminous Arc-- Which by all appearances is your bog-standard SRPG affair with your demons and fallen gods and all that noise, but hey, it's gotta beat playing through Tactics Advance for the seventeenth time... So you know, you can play this to death until Tactics Advance 2 comes out. And since it's published by Atlus, you get to stare at stuff like this for sixty hours.

Also, apparently it comes with a dating sim minigame. So this is pretty much the greatest "I'm a social pariah yet I still need to go to work everyday" videogame ever created.

NEXT WEEK! I Spy Treehouse for the DS! Brunswick Bowling for the PS2! Something called Bioshock for the 360!

Bigredcoat Summer Gaming Blowout: The Red Star Doesn't Suck!

2007-08-10T03:41:00.000-05:00

I'm going to let you into a dirty little secret of mine, one that's even more perverse than my Lucy Lawless as an English nanny fetish.

I collect videogames.

Yeah, okay, so we all "collect" videogames, but when I say I "collect videogames" I mean in the way that some people "collect comics" and other people "collect comics". I mean buying Valkyrie Profile for $120 and only playing it long enough to see if it boots up. Or buying copies of Zone of the Enders 2, simply because every so often I catch it selling for five bucks at Blockbuster. Or owning a copy of the Dungeons and Dragons Arcade Collection for the Saturn despite having no earthly idea what's going on, seeing as how the entire thing is presented in unsubtitled Japanese. So when I saw Archangel Studios selling The Red Star for The PS2 off their website for twenty bucks, I figured it'd be worth hitting up on the off chance that it may suffer from a low print run, what with it being a fairly niche game produced by a small publisher released at the end of a console's life, a combination that saw many a hundred dollar Ebay special for the Saturn and PS1.

Then last week at Best Buy I saw The Red Star in the budget rack alongside Ford Extreme Racing, so I went and broke open my copy.

And surprisingly, it doesn't suck! Now I'm not going to say it's a great game, because man, it's not great. Not at all. Or even particularly good. I mean, if I'd spent fifty bucks for the thing, I'd be pretty pissed. At best, you can say The Red Star is pleasantly UN-horrible. But at twenty dollars, it's just right, and you can even order the game directly from the studio and get a warm fuzzy feeling from sending money directly to the publisher and bypassing the bloated retail apparatus.

As far as the gameplay, the best I could say is that it's something like a 3d beat 'em up combined with portions of a bullet-hell shump. Which sounds fantastic, (and in all honestly, it plays good enough) but it's the details where things start to come apart-- details such as Dreamcast-level graphics, or the lack of a lock-on system that actually works, or a difficulty curve that resembles a hockey stick. It's that last bit that's most frustrating, as for the first dozen or so levels of the game you're presented with an enjoyable, if a tad easygoing beat 'em up where you can safely take on a screen full of enemies at once, but then at around the eleventh level the game presents you with enemies that roll/phase out of every attack, are capable of removing a quarter of a life bar with every hit, forcing you to creep along the screen not daring to take on more than a couple at a time. It's also around this same time that the game suddenly becomes very stingy with it's life-sustaining halliburton briefcases.

But it gets the important things(or it's "core competencies" if I were the sort of hack to use techy buzzwords like "core competency") right, as the gameplay is solid if a tad banal. Rush up to soldier, pound crap out of soldier, toss soldier into the air, pound crap out of soldier some more, slam soldier into the ground, repeat. In between crazed melee rushes you're allowed to whip out a pair of guns and blast at enemies from range, although this is mainly a boss-fight sort of thing and is where the bullet-hell shump portions of the gameplay come into light. There's even a couple of levels where you board a jet plane and take to the enemy shoot-em-up style, and while a bit clumsy and certainly inelegant they serve to nicely break up what would otherwise be a monotony. And while the storyline and atmosphere are good, they're almost entirely irrelevant, as you'll find yourself skipping the mission briefings without any repercussions whatsoever. Not to sound like a dick, but I don't play beat 'em ups for the story-- if it was Archangel's intent to get the Red Star storyline out to a wider audience, they should have done so in something more resembling an RPG. (For that matter, with it's high-magic, steampunk tech and alternate universe USSR universe, this would have made for an excellent RPG experience.)

While it seems harsh to call a game with decent gameplay "surprisingly un-awful", it's not like we're talking God of War here-- or even Final Fight. Think more along the lines of Golden Axe, but with better enemies. Which isn't bad mind you, but it's not the sort of thing you can really justify purchasing in this day and age at other than it's budget price point. In fact, I wonder if it shouldn't have been cut down to fit on Live Arcade instead, as I'm positive Castle Crashers will wind up outclassing it on every level.

Mild recommendation to buy, as long as you come in not expecting anything mind-blowing or unique-- and sometimes, that's just fine.

Technorati : Archangel Studios, Game Reviews, The Red Star
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Do the 360 shuffle

2007-08-07T04:14:00.001-05:00

With official word of the oncoming price drop of 360 consoles come this Wednesday, it has come to my attention that Microsoft will now feature no less than four distinct SKUs, staggered at price points that defy any attempts at rationalizatinon. Some would call this an embarrassment of riches. Other people, who are not slavering Xbox 360 fanboys, would call it goddamned retarded. In any case, it's all very confusing, so I, humble servant to the gaming community that I am, will provide the public a breakdown of each SKU, along with the associated pros and cons.

Xbox 360 Core

Price: $279

Pros:

Removes money from bank account that may otherwise have accidentally found it's way to the Church of Scientology
Memory card (not included) will one day be shown to your children as a curiosity, much like Sony Betamax videotapes, or Sony PSP videogames.

Cons:

No memory card
No hard disc drive
Wired controller
Fumes emanating from back of unit known to cause cancer in lab rats
Will make your children cry should you purchase it for them
Will make you wonder why you didn't spend the money on a Wii
Instills gnawing feeling of doom as you realize you need to spend an extra hundred dollars on a hard disc drive to get anything done with the stupid thing
Really, what the hell are you thinking?
Just give me your money, I'll buy you a nice coat instead. Or maybe one of those official Lord of the Rings Swords.

In one of the more baffling maneuvers Microsoft's pulled off thus far in the console wars, they've managed to release a 360 at a price point that not only is still not competitive with the Wii, but in neglecting to include a savegame card, they've managed to produce the only next-gen console on the market today that lacks any form whatsoever of standard game storage or wireless controls. Feature-wise, it is actually a step backwards from the original Xbox, where at least you never had to worry about buying a memory card.

Xbox 360 Pro (nee Premium)

Price: $349

Pros:

Actually comes with a goddamned hard drive
You can play games with this one
Not to mention download stuff
Doesn't lead to a long, awkward pause as you try to justify to your friends why you bought a 360 Core
Free headset!
Swank dual use composite/component AV input cords
As with all 360 units, superheated air emanating from the rear of the unit may be used to power a small hydroponic garden
Comes with a free copy of Rockstar's Table Tennis

Cons:

Comes with a free copy of Rockstar's Table Tennis
20gb hard drive instead of the Elite's 120gb
No HDMI video input
As with all 360 units, will eventually melt into a puddle of semisolid plastic and silicone, possibly lighting house and/or small pets on fire

For the most part, the Pro remains the best value of the lot, despite it's rather tiny hdd drive. Still, 20 gigs is more than large enough if you intend to do nothing more than save games, XBLA downloads and game demos. The choice of free game here seems odd to me-- Yeah, there's a market for Table Tennis, and people other than me seem to think it's a good game and all, but I have to wonder why they decided to lowball the pack-in here and not include something really enticing, like a Kameo/Perfect Dark Zero double pack. The XB1 Sega GT 2000/Jet Set Radio Future pack was what finally convinced me to buy the first Xbox, and I can't help but imagine two quality, hyped release titles that have more than served their useful purpose would be a better fit here than an overly complicated Pong update that's more at home on the Wii anyway.

Xbox 360 Halo 3 Edition

Price: $399

Pros:

Features an HDMI a/v port not found on the Core or Pro
Comes with a free controller recharge kit
Looks... different

Cons:

Seriously, we're talking pea soup and copper here
Despite being labeled the "Halo 3 edition" and being plastered in Halo imagery, comes with no actual Halo games.
Still has the 20gb hard drive
Space beetles, attracted by it's color and prodigious heat output, may attempt to mate with your system, ruining your Dead Rising save file
Will cause one to yearn for the simple dignity of previous game-specific special edition consoles, such as the Pokemon Yellow N64.

I... dunno. I mean, I guess if you're a big Halo guy and you don't yet own a 360, this may be tempting, but I can't help but imagine that in addition to Table Tennis, you can actually buy a full-fledged 360 game using the price difference between this and the Pro. Even if this shipped with nothing more than a double disc of the previous Halo games and their respective map packs I could understand the need for this thing to exist, but as it stands it's main advantage over every other non-Core 360 is that it's garish.

Xbox 360 Elite

Price: $449

Pros:

It's black!
120gb hard drive vs the 20 gig drive found in the Pro and Halo 2 units

Cons:

You're paying four hundred and fifty dollars for a system that you're still expected to buy a separate wireless adapter for
No free game
Not even the controller recharge kit found on the Halo 3 system
Upon learning that you purchased a 360 Elite, an annoyed, sweat-drenched beer truck driver will invade your home, inform you you've lost your right to sell Miller High Life and remove all cheap, flavorless beer from the premises. Ordinarily I'd list this as a "Pro", but the hand trucks will make an utter ruin of your linoleum floor.

Unless you find yourself greatly enamored with the color black and/or find yourself tempted by the thoughts of downloading TV shows off of Live Marketplace and thus need that extra hard drive space, I really can't see much reason to buy the 360 Elite, even with the price drop. Not many 360 games will make use of the extra resolution brought forth by the built-in HDMI port. This thing only ever really existed to take advantage of the three month gap that the market was without a $500 PS3 option, and now that Sony's resumed the $500 SKU, it's hard to find a reason to justify this thing's existence.

Overall, this price juggling is typical Microsoft-- confusing, slightly disappointing, likely ultimately meaningless once all is said and done. If Microsoft was going to keep the Core around, it needed to be dropped to $250 with a memory card-- that could have provided Microsoft with a real weapon against the Wii. The 20gb hdd shouldn't even exist anymore, and the $120gb hdd should take it's place. The Pro sports an incredibly weak pack-in game-- SKUs should at least feature Perfect Dark and/or Kameo at this point-- Or any of the other multitude of Xbox 360 launch titles that have long since served their useful purpose. The "advantages" of the Halo 3 SKU amounts to a fifty dollar sticker set; the Elite should, at the very least, include a bundled HD-DVD drive, and there's no logical reason for all the SKUs not to include wireless controllers and wireless internet adapters.

Of course, any need for any of this juggling exists the moment Microsoft comes to it's senses and simply releases a 360 w/hard drive at $300, with maybe a stripped down, no-frills Core at $200. This is the only way Microsoft will ever start to catch up with sales of even the original Xbox, not to mention the juggernaut that the Wii is starting to become. Microsoft came out of E3 with the best hype and the best games on the market, and could have parlayed this price drop into some actual momentum-- and in typical fashion, they half-assed everything and made the whole affair an even bigger mess.

Technorati : 360; Microsoft

Upcoming August 7th

2007-08-06T02:43:00.001-05:00

This week gamers saw an enormous setback as Daisenryaku 7 Exceed (and with it it's whomp-ass cover art) had it's release pushed back over a month, presumably to allow Crave Entertainment to explain exactly what it is they're trying to sell to retailers. Until then, gaze upon the wonder that might have been--

They could sell this game for $170 and wrap it in hepatitis-encrusted razor wire, and I'd still buy it. In other news, this week's real, honest-to-god released videogame selection is pretty goddamned horrendous.

Tomb Raider Anniversary (PSP) (80%)

I know what you're worried about, PSP owners. Sure, Anniversary may bring the classic gameplay of the original Tomb Raider to the PSP with prettified graphics and modern game design elements, but what you really want to know is how well Lara's ass has handled the translation to the handheld medium.

And it saddens me to report, not well. Not well at all.

Blurry, grainy, distorted, ill-defined-- This is not an ass worth losing your firmware update for. Yes, yes, the gameplay has largely come across unharmed-- but at what cost?

Boogie (Wii) (N/A)

Remember when EA said it was going to focus on the Wii and more unique, non-franchise titles? And all the Nintendo guys suddenly forgot that EA is condensed, tangible evil and started to chow down on EA's theoretical corporate manhood? Yeah, well--

Admittedly, that comes with a mic (which, according to Game|Life's Chris Kholer, is apparently junk) but you know EA is feeling the water here, seeing exactly how far they can get with the Wii audience. Which will probably be a lot, considering this title pretty much screams HEY, WII PLAY GUYS, BUY ME! At least when Nintendo tries to sell a marginal videogame to the Wii Play set, they do so by bribing them with a free controller.

High School Musical: Making the Cut (DS)

At first I was disappointed to see no reviews of Making the Cut exist, but then I realized there's no real point to reviewing this sort of thing as the target audience isn't really the sort to peruse IGN. Matter of fact, if you're the sort who may be in the market for Making the Cut, or any game produced by Disney and/or Nickelodeon I'd prefer you not read this site either. Seriously. Chris Hansen scares me!

Megaman Starforce Pegasus/Leo/Dragon (DS)

Speaking of games where the target audience shouldn't even be registered for Myspace yet, there is this, a blatant moneygrab for gamers whom don't find playing Pokeman in public quite socially damming enough.

Steve Allison: Warden of a Legacy of Mediocrity

2007-08-03T04:07:00.001-05:00

Anyone else remember Midway?

Nice little arcade company, made Joust, Cruis'n USA, SCUD Race, a couple of really awesome retro compilation discs? Yeah, those guys. Midway. Most recently known for giving John Romero a job for a few months until he decided to fuck off and make MMORPGs instead.

Midway has been trying to claw it's way back into the public eye and it's upcoming John Woo Presents:Stranglehold may represent a turning point for the company. After all, it's presented as a "sequel" to Hard Boiled (Thus the "John Woo Presents: of Stranglehold) and movie franchise aside, the game looks genuinely intriguing, what with the team from the well-regarded Psi-Ops behind the project.

Fortunately for gamers already despairing over their abused wallets this upcoming holiday season, any concerns that Midway should somehow screw up and turn JWP:S into a decent game are readily dispelled by Midway's chief marketing officer Steve Allison, who wants to let everyone know that under no circumstance shall he allow gameplay get in the way of his company's commitment to mediocrity.

(From an interview shamelessly stolen from N'gai Croal's blog, Level Up.)

Execution is Only The Third Most Important Factor In A Game's Success. Yes, Third

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to make great games. Nor does it mean that a great concept gives developers the license to make a crappy game. It simply means that execution alone is no guarantee of commercial success. The developers who understand this will thrive in the next generation home console business. The ones who don't will fall victim to the realities of the shifting marketplace.

The average reader of this piece, especially one working in the gaming business will say, "Wait a minute. A great game whose review scores average 90 or higher can ship when it's done and it'll still be a great game." Or they'll say, "Whatever the concept may be, a great title is all about the game mechanics." Unfortunately, this is not true.

A great game is one that is a commercial success. Period.

Well, so much for the preorders.

In a way, he's right. Shareholders don't give a shit about level design, learning curves or anything else representing a quality gaming experience. But as far as gamers are concerned-- especially those of us who would be interested in a videogame sequel to a John Woo movie to begin with-- hearing a marketing guy basically say that Hannah Montana was a "great game" sorta makes us wince and want to curl up in a corner to play Ninja Gaiden until the pain goes away.

(I should take this moment to note that Steve Allison's last gig was as VP of Marketing for Infogrames-- a company that had so throughly trashed it's own reputation among gamers that it decided it'd be better to dredge up the old Atari name instead. Mull on that for a bit.)

Continuing on...

Consumers review games with their wallet, and you don't get to sell them a million units at full price unless a bunch of people love your work--especially at $59 a pop. Sure, your craftsmanship may be amazing. But if your concept is not a powerful and relevant male fantasy, executed in a timely fashion, at a level that delivers on the promise of your core idea, you've probably just delivered the videogame equivalent of an art house film.

An art house game certainly proves that your development team is really talented but it also demonstrates you're really not in tune with the audience. This kind of creativity is only fine as long as your art house game was built on an art house budget. But an art house game made on a blockbuster budget--especially the sums of money required to be competitive on Xbox 360, PS3 and high end PCs--is fiscally irresponsible.

Ignoring the bit where Steve Allison says "art house games" do not fulfill a "powerful and relevant male fantasy", there's a way around the problem of high-concept games not selling at the full $59.99 price point. Stop selling games for sixty dollars, you fucking loons. Katamari Damacy sold well enough to develop into a franchise, and it did so in large part by being sold for $40, an impulse buy for the hardcore and temping enough for adventurous mainstream gamers to take the risk.

The concept of selling hardcore-targeted games at full MSRP is doubly absurd when you consider Midway, EA, Ubisoft the like place most games in settings where it's easy for them to sell in-game advertising, the sort of thing that a person could expect be used to help "art-house games" sell cheaper. Then you have tools such as downloadable content and digital delivery, both of which could readily be used to price "art-house games" competitive instead of the current practice of expecting things like Senko no Ronde to sell at the same price point as NCAA '08.

But hey, Katamari. That shit's for girls.

And the hits keep on coming...

The truth is that there is no correlation between review scores and commercial success. If there were, "great" games Beyond Good & Evil, Ico, Okami, Psychonauts, Shadow of the Colossus, Freedom Fighters, Prey and Midway's own Psi-Ops would all have been multi-million unit sellers. The aforementioned games are all games that average review scores of nearly 90 percent out of 100, some even higher. The reality is none has sold more than 300,000 units at full price in the U.S. and a couple of these less than 250,000 units lifetime even with bargain pricing. In today's home console business, a true next generation game costs between $12 and $25 million dollars to produce, which sets the breakeven point at 1 million units and in some cases even 2 million units, depending on how high the budget has gotten.

The implication is clear- Midway has no intention of creating a great gaming experience. They instead wish to create games that are good enough while while selling to the broadest market possible. Which I suppose is a noble effort on behalf of the shareholders, but one wonders how far Pixar would have made it under the same philosophy. This is the same thinking that gives us tripe like Chicken Little, or reality TV programming, or Midway's latest affront to good gameplay, Hour of Victory.

And while Steve Allison lists some notable commercial failures, he fails to recognize games like God of War, Halo, Gears of War and Twilight Princess, games that are not only grand and epic experiences, but have gameplay to match their lofty aspirations.

Let's be clear: it is not the amount spent on marketing that determines how many units of these games are sold. A game's sales potential is entirely determined by the strength of its overall concept, while the difference between its sales potential and its final tally is determined by its execution. And given the phenomenal execution of Psychonauts, Ico, Psi-Ops and the other art house games listed above, their failure can be ascribed to a misguided concept, poor timing or both.

Beyond the obvious implication that Midway expects JWP:S to sell on the tired old concept of videogames as movies instead of it's merits as, you know-- a good video game--It should be noted of those games listed, two if them, Psychonauts and Ico, were advertised so poorly that it was impossible for the mainstream gamer to know of their existence. I don't know if he was trying to equate either game to a large marketing campaign, but if that campaign was there, apparently all the commercial broadcast time was purchased to air in Bolivia, or Nepal, or perhaps Christmas Island. Aside from the usual gamer magazine marketing blitz (an effort wholly wasted on anyone outside the hardcore community), there simply was no noticeable marketing effort present for either title. Then there's the bit where Psychonauts was a pretty lousy video game, but that's for another post.

To give Steve Allison credit, he is right on one count-- Midway's timing for Psi-Ops was abysmal. Not only was it a new shooter franchise being released amid the likes of Far Cry, Painkiller, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Chronicles of Riddick, it had to do so saddled with the yoke of being published by a company no gamer, hardcore or mainstream, was willing to trust to provide a quality gaming experience.

Thus Stranglehold's greatest obstacle, a hurdle marketing suits like Steve Allison are blind to avoid-- Even if Stranglehold turns out to be a good game, no one trusts the company producing it. Little wonder people are more interested in the free Blu-Ray copy of Hard Boiled than they are anything regarding the gameplay itself.

Technorati : Midway, Stranglehold

Upcoming July 31st

2007-07-30T03:32:00.001-05:00

World Championship Cards (PSP/PS2) N/A

Now, I'm not going to deride this sort of thing as pointless, as there is a market for casino games, and that market provides the money that supports the justification for Atlus' entire library. I do, however, wonder about the wisdom of putting this sort of game on anything other than a handheld system. The DS or PSP is practically made for this kind of casual pick up n' play fluff, but I have a hard time imagining that there are people who have access to God of War, Burnout and Soul Calibur at home and decide "hey, I'll play a game of virtual cribbage". And if those people do exist, why couldn't we get them to play Phantom Dust?

Crazy Taxi Fare Wars (PSP) N/A

Speaking of casual pick up n' play fluff, this fits the very definition, and handily doubles as vindication for those who think Nokia was too quick in killing the N-Gage.

You can see in the distance where the game gives up trying to render Crazy Taxi and wants to draw Moon Patrol instead. In all fairness, a portable disc containing Crazy Taxi 1 and 2 sounds tempting, but I dunno how tempting a game can be right now to justify losing your bios hack.

Harvest Moon: Boy and Girl (PSP) N/A

By this point Harvest Moon has become one of those games where fans of it know exactly what their getting into, while non-fans sorta look on from the outside and wonder why in the world people would want to role play as a farmer. This one looks to be the same as the other eighty seven hundred Harvest Moon games to be released, only this time more squished...

... and featuring lolis who want to make a suit out of your skin.

Brave Story: New Traveler (PSP) N/A

The latest in a long line of generic PSP JRPGs, perfect for the gamer who refuses to let go of the era where PS1 was king and JRPGs were relevant. This time though, you get catgirls!

Which will no doubt appeal to a certain segment of the population. To that segment I say 1) you're sick and 2) where does a person go to get decent Felicia x Fran hentai?

Mario Strikers Charged (Wii) (77%)

Look, I need to come clean with you guys. I hate Nintendo. I can't explain it anymore than a Carolina fan can explain why he hates Duke, or a Warner Brothers guy why he has a seething hatred for Disney. Just that there are some choices people make in life, and mine was Sega over Nintendo, and I'm standing firm on that issue despite Sega being run by collective of lobotomy victims from back in the 1950's when they used to jam an icepick into your eye socket and call it a day. Just rest assured that I hate Nintendo, I hate their legions of smug fans, I hate that they're creaming Microsoft and Sony and I hate it when some jerk like Capcom or Konami goes and releases a game on a Nintendo platform and forces me to buy the stupid thing.

Fortunately for me, Mario Striker's Charged is not from either of the above. Indeed, it is a Mario Soccer game, and thus manages to combine three things I hate, sports games, Mario and Nintendo. It is nearly a perfect representation of everything I irrationally hate, all it's missing is Mike Krzyzewski as a playable character. So in lieu of an objective report, I'll instead supply a stream of snide comments:

So is this the first Wii game that wasn't supposed to be on the Gamecube first, or what?
I have it on good authority that Super Princess Peach was developed entirely to help fill out databases for America's sex offender registry lists.
This is the first Wii exclusive since Super Paper Mario not to be an abomination against all that's good in the world (Escape from Bug Island) or an attempt to single-handedly destroy the game industry by filling it with old men and non-gamer girlfriends (Brain Training Wii; Mario Party 8). Super Paper Mario, you'll remember, was released shortly after Ronald Reagan's first term of office.
It is my understanding that a large portion of Mario Striker's Charged gameplay consists of holding the Wii remote thrust directly before your groin and gyrating your hips to and fro, while at the same time shouting "This is exactly how I would like to fuck Ed Norton".
Mario Kart Double Dash? Double bullshit.
Nice work on the friends codes. Get back to me when Nintendo's figured out a more sophisticated matchmaking system than what was found on Duke Nukem forever.

Pool Party (Wii) (N/A)

Best case scenario: a game of virtual marco polo featuring your chesty, jiggling video game babes.

Worst case scenario: Generic billiards game featuring token Wii remote support.

Never mind.

That said, although the Wii's showcase for the week features a wholly mediocre soccer game and something that crawled out of the Wal-Mart shovelware bin, it's miles better than the PS3 and 360 offerings this week, consisting of jack and shit respectively.

Glory Days 2 (DS) (61%)

One of the more unique titles to come along as of late, this would appear to be choplifter meets Grim Grimore. I say "seems to" as that's all I could gather from the Eurogamer review and the screenshots, which, much like a Stephen Hawking powerpoint, have a habit of looking both awesome and horribly confusing.

I have no idea what's going on here, but it's awesome and there's no way the low ratings can be trusted.

Pile o' Shovelware Shit: Chameleon: To Dye For; Bratz Ponyz; Professional Fisherman's Tour: Northern Hemisphere; Spelling Challenges (DS)

No week would be complete without a collection of irredeemable shit that will still outsell everything else on the list combined. I find myself horrified by the implications of Bratz Ponyz. If it follows the aesthetic (I use this word loosely, much like a movie critic would the "aesthetic" of a Bang Brothers movie) then these will be the biggest sluts known in the equine universe, featuring thong bridles, mains woven with extensions, and a rear end that no doubt caused the toy sculptor responsible for producing the prototypes to start drinking Sterno.

Also, I question the logic of one fishing title for the entirety of the Northern Hemisphere.

Picross (DS) (82%)

What does it say about the state of gaming when the best original game released for the entire month of July is a friggin' Picross title? Man, fuck July.

NEXT WEEK! The PS2 gets Daisenryaku 7 Exceed! I have no idea what that is, but there's a TANK on the cover and thus it is GAME OF THE WEEK! The WII gets INCREDIBLY GAY with Boogie! The DS gets THIRTEEN MEGAMAN GAMES! PSP owners shall know the joy of LARA CROFT'S SLIGHTLY POLYGONAL ASS in Tomb Raider Anniversary!

Summer Gaming Blowout Special Update: Oh Lordy Does Bullet Witch Suck Edition

2007-07-26T04:11:00.001-05:00

Rented this last week, lacking anything better to do as well as basic common sense. The sheer awfulness of the Bullet Witch experience cannot be properly translated if I incorporated other games into this update, so I'm giving the title it's own review.

Before I begin, I'd like to give Cavia Inc, the developers for Bullet Witch their due and point out exactly what Bullet Witch does right:

When the schoolgirl outfit for the main character, Alicia, is selected and you have Alicia running up stairs, you can see directly up her dress.
In order to avoid claims that the point of offering a strong, independent female lead is negated when users can easily select blatantly sexualized outfits such as "catholic schoolgirl" and "naughty secretary", or (and so help me god I"m not kidding) "sexy mummy outfit", the game neglects to transfer these new outfits to cut scenes, allowing Alicia to call upon her supernatural powers to leap from outfits that barely cover her buttocks to an elegant black silk ensemble in the blink of an eye when confronted by NPCs.

Things Bullet Witch does not get right:

The concept of "clipping". Alicia can step right through random vegetation, park benches, wooden pallets, dead bodies, file cabinets, and a great many other obstinately solid objects. While this may be explained away by some unforeseen aspect of her supernatural powers, it doesn't explain why a 3-inch rise from porch to patio deck wholly negates any forward movement.
Pacing. One may easily find themselves wading through zombies through completely blind dead ends, as vast swaths of any given level are dedicated toward nothing resembling any actual goal or point, with open fields leading miles away from any actual action. Your goal may be a half mile behind you and receding in the distance, or it may be around the next random alleyway. There's absolutely no way to tell, and by the time you've figured out what the game designers were expecting you to do, you've already wasted precious hours of your life, hours that you will bitterly regret eighty years from now as you lay dying in a hospital bed, the prime of your youth foolishly spent playing bad videogames because it was Friday night and Blockbuster was out of copies of Lost Planet.
Geography. The large cosmopolitan city laying across a vast bridge in the middle of what would appear to be San Francisco Bay is policed by University of Nevada police officers. Also, leading up to this bridge is an offramp for Salt Lake City.
Compelling characters or plot. Alicia has Goth Powers, and a voice inside her head that offers the occasional snide remark regarding humanity. Also, a gun that is also a broom. Or something. You fight incredibly stupid zombie soldiers. This is your motivation.
Anything resembling good gameplay.

I'm not kidding about the last bit. The AI, such as it is, is laughably stupid. When given the choice to fire at innocent civilians or at the poorly armored emaciated-looking woman firing a machine gun at them, they'd far rather try to kill the citizenry, all the while offering dialog such as "Which limb shall I tear off first, your arm or your leg?" or "you'll have to do better than that if you don't want to die!", provided instead the zombies aren't expending vast quantities of ammunition into Nevada's oceans. Often the game will rappel in squads of zombie soldiers to do battle with Alicia, only to drop these soldiers off so far away that they aren't able to recognize Alicia as a threat, allowing the soldiers to stand around staring at each other making zombie soldier chitchat while Alicia calmly uses her supernatural abilities to goth-throw a taxicab into their midst. Then there's the bit where Alicia can circle-strafe about her zombie oppressors, safely plugging hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the shambling horde while the undead marvel helpless at Alicia's invincible sideways-walking strategy. "Walnut Heads", floating humans with enormous, pulsating heads, sorta just sit there and float while you unload into them, unconcerned that their engorged brainsacs are about to explode in a gush of viscera. Gigas, titanic zombie soldiers with enormous, pulsating hearts, thrash and stomp around unconcerned as you unleash a hail of lead into their throbbing chests. Citizens run back and forth into zombie/Alicia firefights. Enemy tanks are rendered harmless when you come within five feet of their hulls, their turrets fruitlessy tracking you as they sit, still as stones. Bullet Witch's AI isn't just bad, it single handedly nullifies nearly a century of Hollywood scaremongering regarding both zombies and evil robots. If this is the horror we have to look forward to when the zombie apocalypse finally shambles upon us, it'll be a simple matter of standing five feet away from any given undead as they wander off to fire round after round of machine gun ammunition into Nevada's vast shoreline.

If Bullet Witch's sins a matter of bad AI, inconsistent clipping and poor level design then Bullet Witch would be guilty of being merely awful. But no, this game takes suck to new heights, creating what may well be the earliest recorded case of a gaming atrocity to appear on the 360.

Despite a deep and varied selection of destructive Goth Magics(you can tell it's goth magic in that A: Alicia is a witch and A: she's very bored while performing it), there's only one you really need to use, that being the supremely powerful lighting bolt attack, and the only reason you'd only want to even go that far is because it's the only thing that can kill tanks.
Despite featuring four gun/broom combinations to unlock, there's no good reason to use anything other than the bog-standard machine gun.
When reloading your gun/broom's clip (you never run out of ammunition in Bullet Witch, you merely need to remember to reload your magazine regularly) you can skip the canned reload animation by jumping.
When jumping, you are more or less invincible
Your health bar constantly regenerates. Therefore, in the rare occasion when Alicia faces death, you merely need to flip about like a Matrix reject until the danger is past. then resume circle-strafing.
Objects that can explode-- cars, fuel tankers, randomly scattered barrels-- may or may not actually explode. Also, object that can be pushed around by Alicia's "Willpower" ability may instead chose to stay put.
Whereas many games are trying to get away from the whole "obtrusive cut-scene" thing, Bullet Witch bucks this trend by constantly stopping play to present the player with a barrage of gameplay hints, most of which you will have figured out well before the hint itself imposes itself.
The game often tries dramatic, Crackdown-esque cinematic explosions, resulting in gouts of flame erupting from the ground as all and sundry are thrown into the stratosphere. Unfortunately, whereas Crackdown was created as a labor of love by professionals who obviously cared about their craft, and Bullet Witch was created by drooling fucktards, the game slows down to a nearly unplayable crawl.
In the aftermath of said explosions, it's not at all unusual to find zombie soldiers standing around, unharmed by and uninterested in the conflagration that had so recently engulfed them.
AND MANY MORE! Special abilities that grant health bonuses in a game where you are never in danger of being at anything less than full health! Zombies that rematerialze if the game realized you need to fill up your magic bar! 1-hit-kill zombie snipers that cannot be avoided once they spot you! Voice actors hired from the back alley of sperm donor clinics! Civilian NPCs that are wholly unharmed by any explosion you cause, car you throw, or bullet you fire! And an impossible boss fight set atop a flying 747 jumbo jet!

Now, I have a point to this insane rambling, and it's this-- Dave Halverson of Play Magazine gave Bullet Witch an 8.5 out of 10. I'm not sure if Dave simply masturbated to the intro and then slept through the part where he was supposed to play the game prior to reviewing it, but here's a short list of games that have received 8.5s from Play or less-- Super Paper Mario (8.5); Mercenaries (8.5); Project Gotham Racing 2 (8.5); Crackdown (8.5); Burnout 3 (8.0); Alien Hominid (8.0); Dead or Alive 3 and 4 (8.0 each) Suikoden V (8.0)(Which, I have on good authority was the best in the series to appear on the PS2) and only five points worse than Soul Calibur III (9.0) which had a habit of destroying your memory card.

According to Play Magazine, one of the more respected and successful publications in the industry, Bullet Witch, a game which cannot be bothered to have enemy soldiers fire in your general direction, is on par with Mercenaries, Crackdown and Super Paper Mario, and is quantifiably better than motherfucking Alien Hominid. Not only that! But the magazine the game was featured in not only had a Bullet Witch cover, but six pages of coverage, including two (two!) developer interviews!

Editors of Play Magazine; you owe me five dollars for the rental, as well as an Alicia wall scroll. Thank you.

Technorati : Bullet Witch, dave halverson, play magazine

The Gaijin Box

2007-07-25T02:43:00.001-05:00

(Submitted to The Platformers 7-25-07)

Gaijin Box
Gaming otaku don't know how good they've had it.

Back in the sixteen bit days, fans of Japanese games had to go through outrageous contortions to satisfy their cravings. With more than a half dozen console companies and a of myriad hardware configurations, we had to either accept the paltry few examples of Japanese gaming genius that washed up on our shores or happily march into bankruptcy.

Sony's Playstation made everything exponentially easier. Gaming otaku enjoyed and embarrassment of riches as Japanese developers hopped aboard Sony's bandwagon. The result was a hobby that was not only less expensive, but no longer did devotees of Japanese gaming need to dedicate an entire entertainment center to enjoy the entire Capcom product line.

For over a dozen years, the story was much the same. Sure, Sega lingered around for a while and there was always the odd Konami or Treasure novelty popping up on Nintendo's hardware, but Japanese game fans never needed to want as long as they owned a Playstation, and the situation only improved once Sega gave up it's hardware ambitions with the arrival of the Playstation 2.

But something strange has happened. Independent Japanese developers that have long stood as Sony stalwarts are either treating the company with sudden trepidation or have jumped ship entirely. The next Katamari Damacy, a niche otaku series if there's ever been one, has been announced as a Microsoft 360 exclusive, as has the latest Ace Combat sequel. Game series that would never have made sense on American hardware before-Resident Evil, Virtua Fighter, Sega Rally and Devil May Cry, among others- are scheduled to share appearances on both the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360. And through liberal use of good ol' filthy lucre, otaku-targeted games such as Culdecept Saga, Trusty Bell, Ninety Nine Nights and Blue Dragon will appear exclusively on Microsoft's 360. All the while Japanese developers grow increasingly vocal in their frustration with Sony's vision for the gaming industry.

So fans of hardcore Japanese gaming have to ask themselves- Did Microsoft steal the gaming otaku market while no one was looking? Or did they simply pick up a ball that Sony dropped and has thus far shown no interest in recovering?

Profiles in Corporate Belligerence

For Sony, the reversal is as sudden as it is bitter. Namco has throughly embraced the 360 as a development platform. Capcom, conservative as ever, has decided to split development focus on both systems. Square/Enix is sitting the next-gen fight out until 2008 at the earliest. Even Konami, seemingly Sony's last remaining friend, has threatened to shop Metal Gear Solid 4 to "other systems". In the meantime, most every independent Japanese developer will produce exclusives for Nintendo's Wii and DS systems.

Observers may be tempted to cite PS3 development costs as the primary factor. But it's not a very satisfying answer in light of the far cheaper development costs for Nintendo's wildly successful Wii. Developers cite PS3 and 360 development costs to be roughly equal, averaging some twelve million dollars per game, while a Wii game can be developed for as little as s five million dollars.

While true there have been rumblings as to the difficulties in producing PS3 games verses their 360 counterparts, make no mistake, this is about the numbers of Playstation 3 consoles Sony has sold. Or rather, haven't sold. It's easy to imagine that Japanese developer, seeing the overwhelming advantage the 360 holds outside Japan, would realize hedging their bets is the safest course, and develop the same games for both systems, if not outright snub the PS3 until Sony's house is in order.

As with all problems the Playstation 3 has experienced since release, it boils down to Sony lost touch with the console market. Sony has yet to show any indication that they are aware of the consumer rebellion against the Playstation 3, and as a result independent developers are reluctant to trust Sony and whatever misguided vision Howard Stringer holds for the gaming industry. Even if the 360 is doomed in Japan, the worldwide numbers and hardcore backlash are impossible to ignore. The market will not absorb a console at the PS3's current asking price, and with debacles such as the three-week-long price "drop", Sony has done nothing to regain the community's good will.

Enter the Bridesmaid

So whither Nintendo? The Wii has dominated Japanese sales charts whereas the 360 could charitably be called a disappointment. Considering the Wii will almost assuredly overtake the 360 in North America by the end of the year, why have Japanese third parties yet to embrace the Wii, especially when, as previously mentioned, Wii development costs represent a fraction of the 360's?

Perhaps the Japanese third parties remember the sing of Nintendo's lash, and the consequences of being beholden to a single console maker. Back in the NES era Nintendo was so strong they could force third party developers to limit the number of titles released each year, while Nintendo released a steady stream of their own in-house brands. While it is easily argued that Microsoft is a more predatory and monopolistic company than Nintendo has ever dreamed of being, memories die hard, and the legacy of Hiroshi Yamauchi churlish rule remains fresh.

As it stands, games on the 360 tend toward the hardcore crowd, while the Wii plays hosts to experimental, family-friendly titles such as Treasure Island Z. In that light, perhaps the third party embrace of the 360 over the Wii is simply a recognition of where the respective markets lay-- the Xbox brand was built on hardcore college-age gamers, the sort who expect to be wowed by high technology and expect an an epic gaming experience. Companies know the market on the 360. Meanwhile developers are trying to determine if Wii owners will even accept non-Nintendo titles, much less non-traditional games without the gloss of advance graphics. Perhaps this explains why the Wii's Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles consists of a retelling of previous games optimized for the Wii's controller while the 360 and PS3 receive the series' true sequel in Resident Evil 5.

A Market Sundered

So what's a gaming otaku to do? Embrace the Gaijin Box and accept that the Japanese gaming market has been hopelessly split by Sony's gross incompetence and Microsoft's ambition? It would not be unprecedented. Twelve years ago Japanese developers left for Sony, abandoning Nintendo's misguided and arrogantly-conceived N64. At the same time these developers snubbed the expensive to buy and difficult to develop for Sega Saturn-- Sega, crippled by this shift, never fully recovered.

If there's anything we've learned from the the first Playstation, it's that game developer's affections can be fickle-- and violent.

Upcoming 7-24-07

2007-07-23T04:36:00.001-05:00

The thing that's struck me the most about this series is that, for the most part, games are terrible.

I'm not talking about merely mediocre, or games that are enjoyable if you're a fan of the genre. No, the vast majority of videogames should not be purchased, rented, played or are worth spending any amount of precious time you have left on this mortal coil with. Most all videogames are, in fact, detriments to human civilization, proof to the likes of Roger Ebert that gaming can never be art, and that gaming is a vapid waste of time probably not even suited to a child's intellect.

Which is why my job is important. I'm here to tell you that, despite being the biggest week of releases in over a month, there's not a single worthwile gaming experience to be had there that's not Persona 3, and the only reason I can't bring myself to deride even that game is because I enjoy the art direction and I haven't been able to understand what's going on in a JRPG in 12 years. If you buy one single game this week other than Persona 3 and Guitar Hero 80's edition, you're not just wasting money, you are a bad person and I don't want to be your friend!

PS2

NASCAR '08 (N/A)

For gamers who find the milieu of track selection in normal racing confounding, here's one where every turn not marked "left" has been removed.

NHRA Countdown to the Championship (N/A)

And if that's too complicated, we also have racing games where corners themselves are removed.

Honda Motor Ignition Simulator 2k8 (N/A)

Start a variety of Honda motors, from the legendary CVCC ED1 to the Formula 1-spec RA807E. New for this year are bright purple grounding wires.

The Word of Recaro Professional Sitting in a Chair Tournament Starring Johnathan Wendell (N/A)

Sit in a chair and vegetate in over a dozen meticulously rendered locals. Defeat Johnathan Wendell and earn the sponsorship of Team Fata1ity!

Shen Megami Tensei: Persona 3 (84%)

The only thing I know about the Persona games is that they feature a girl who wears leather catsuits that have hearts where the nipples should be. So I'm already a fan of this series, even though I've never played a single one of them.

Guitar Hero Rocks the 80's (n/a)

The last Guitar Hero produced by Harmonix, and thus probably the last Guitar Hero anyone's going to worry with before switching over to Rock Band. As much as a cynical money grab as this is sure to be, I can't hold any ill toward anything featuring Limozeen. I just wish I could play a single one of these things-- Sadly my malformed, sausage-like fingers pretty much assure I'll be ponying up for a Rock Band drum set come Christmas.

Wii

Alien Syndrome (N/A)

I think it's neat that Sega can't remember it's been sitting on the Streets of Rage franchise for the past twenty years, but some marketing done remembered they put out a produced a mildy well-received Ikari Warriors clone back in 1987. Also, this is going to suck.

Escape from Bug Island (37%)

Supposedly, this game is supposed to come out this week. IGN says it's coming out this week, it's Wikipedia entry says it's coming out this week, and I'm sure that if it's own website were not an attempt to punish man for the crime of original sin, it too would say it's coming out this week. Gamestop, though? They've disavowed any knowledge of any game called "Escape From Bug Island" even existing, much less being available in their stores. Searching for the title reveals instead results for Escape from Monkey Island, and it's no longer showing up on Gamestop's Coming Soon page, despite being there as recently as last Tuesday. I mean, what do they have to be afraid o--

Holy shit.

360

NASCAR '08 (N/A)

Turning Left For Five Freaking Hours, $60 Edition.

Xbox Live Marketplace

Wing Commander Arena (SUCK).

EA continues it's grand tradition of squatting a big ol' fetid turd on Microsoft's Live service, this time dishing out hope-crushing fecal matter to Live Marketplace in the form of a 3rd-person-view Wing Commander that's not even really in 3d. Instead you sorta wander around in a 2-d plane between a couple of warring battleships while given the ability to performed a canned animation loop-de-loop to evade fire. Having managed to ruin space combat, EA's next project will be to wring the fun and enjoyment out of music itself with Boogie.

PS3

NASCAR '08 (N/A)

Turn left with the power of BLOOOO RAAAAAAAY. Also, apparently Lair was pushed back a week. Ride that wave, boys!

Dynasty Warriors (62%)

Things that Koie could have produced that are awesome: A Legends of the Five Rings strategy game making use of the unique touchscreen feature of the DS. Thing that Koie produced instead: A hybrid Dynasty Warriors/card game that apparently isn't aware the touch screen exists. Also, if you're one of the 12 remaining Koie fans in the world, do you look at Fatal Inertia and wonder if you're looking at two straight console generations worth of F-Zero knockoffs?

PSP

Alien Syndrome (N/A)

This will be the superior version of Alien Syndrome, as it will only be playable for 2 hours before the battery dies and you begin to question the course your life took to get you to the point where you've spent money on Alien Syndrome. A Wii owner will be stuck for a good thirty hours before the Wii remote craps out.

Final Fantasy II (73%)

All the good jokes about a game that appeared on a multipak with Final Fantasy 1 on the GBA have been done already, and I'll avoid mentioning that if you still own a PSP at this point and you wanted to play FFII, you could find a version for free and have it on your system with less than five minutes of work. However, I would point out that Squeenix keeps pumping out these reissued moldy "classics" and have completely forgotten stuff that would actually make sense on the PSP-- Say, for instance, Parasite Eve. Meanwhile Squeenix is putting out stuff like DQ9 on the DS,and you realize the term "PSP" and "Squeenix" and "Going through the motions" go together like "Peanut butter" "Jelly" and "cold milk".

Bigredcoat Summer Gaming Blowout Volume 1: The Gameining.

2007-07-19T03:53:00.001-05:00

I've noticed that while I'll often bitch about the gaming industry and make fun of upcoming games and generally piss and moan about any number of things that don't really matter when taken into the larger overall picture of the eventual entropic heat-death of the universe, I rarely if ever talk about the games I play. And while it's not unusual in the blogosphere for hacks to snipe about subjects they do not themselves take part in, I really do play videogames, and have a passion for them. To rectify this situation I before me a list of the games I have played this year and will over the next few weeks select three at random to expound over in a not-really-a-review sort of way. (And when I say random, I mean random. I'm sitting here with a pair of d10s and everything. This is the sort of hard hitting authentic journalism you'll never find at Joystiq!) Up this week, Crackdown, Valkyrie Profile II, and Pac-Man CE.

Crackdown: I rented this, as there was no way in hell I was paying sixty dollars for a five hour game (nevermind the whole Halo 3 beta thing), and I found myself pleasantly surprised that it wasn't totally awful. It's really nothing like sandbox games that have come before it, (what with a lack of side missions or anything resembling an over-arching storyline) and the nearest thing I can think to compare it to would be what would happen were a person to try and create a single-player City of Heroes. The game is free-form in how you choose to go about taking out it's compliment of gang bosses, each takedown offering a multitude of workable strategies for "apprehending" each gang leader(which usually works out as "send gang leader to a firey death piled underneath a pile of cars"), and there are fewer feelings of videogame badassery than breaking up a firefight between the police and Triad thugs by kicking an armored personnel carrier at the lot of them.

However, doing such also reveals Crackdown's biggest weakness (aside from being beaten in all of five hours, but more on that later). There are civilians and cops everywhere, and it's nearly impossible to let loose and wreck havoc without accidentally offing a dozen or two innocent women and children in a hail of rocket fire or a hurled Russian gangster. Which wouldn't be so bad, but you're reprimanded for doing this by slowed skill gain and the local cops turning their puny firearms your way. In effect, the game goes out of it's way to punish you for taking part in the activity that serves as it's trademark, reckless carnage. A lesser complaint would be the driving portions of the game, which are not worth taking part in save for the associated Achievements. This is largely due to the fact that hopping about Hulk-like from skyscraper to skyscraper is among the most enjoyable activities ever experienced in a videogame, and is about fifty thousand times faster than driving through the maze of city streets dodging civilians and Latino gangs firing rockets at you.

Then there's the other problem, which I mentioned before. Look, I'm bad at games. I rarely finish them, and when I do, I consider it a major accomplishment. I've never seen past the third level of Viewtiful Joe, it took me a week to get through the Alma fight in Ninja Gaiden, and to this day I have no idea what happens after you go into Zen in Half Life 1. Despite these and countless other emasculating gaming failures, I was able to finish the story mode of Crackdown in a single rental weekend. This for a game that is charging sixty dollars brand new. Admittedly, a large part of Crackdown's appeal lay in both 100% completion of all it's achievements (which I only scratched the surface of) and online play over Live Gold (which I do not subscribe to) but still, a five hour long main game is unacceptable, at least at the MSRP Microsoft is asking for. $40 I could stomach, but I'd still wonder if I wouldn't be happier spending $40 on a good meaty DS game instead.

Recommendation to avoid, at least until it reaches Greatest Hits status.

Valkyrie Profile II: I picked this up last year at TRU's annual Buy 2 Get 1 free sale, and to be honest most of it's purchase was an an attempt to justify the insane amount of money I spent adding Valk Profile I to my collection. Also, every once in a while I get the insane idea in my head that I may be able to enjoy JRPGs again and decide to give another title a chance. Last time was Final Fantasy 12, which lasted all of a week before I wandered off to another racing game. This didn't fare much better, serving to fill time for a couple weeks until Odin Sphere was released.

For a game that looks like a simple action RPG platformer on the outside, this game has too goddamned many commands. I mean, the platforming itself, the way you get around levels is fine, maybe even great. It's when you enter combat that things suddenly turn into the gaming equivalent of trying to land a wounded F-15 Strike Eagle on a flaming aircraft carrier during a hurricane while performing long division with your free hand. Upon encountering an enemy your are presented with a real-time 3d battlefield scattered with enemies, only one of which you really need to kill. Reaching that enemy in the shortest amount of time results in better rewards for your party, with enemy combat itself being a traditional turn-based affair. Now if it were a simple matter of wading through the enemies to get to the target mob, it wouldn't be that big of a deal-- but after a few hours of play the game expects you to be able to use an arcane method of splitting your party in half to get anything done on time, one party (presumably) defending from monsters while the rest goes about the task of targeting the central enemy. Usually you'll fumble about and split your party up entirely by accident, leaving your cloth-clad magic users to die painfully against flaming armored buzzard things while your tanks charge into battle against bipedal frog with an axe as large as a Buick.

In over 20 hours of messing around I had yet to figure out exactly how VP2 expects you to split your party up correctly in the heat of battle or even exactly what the game intends for you to do once you've split up. Usually I just had my entire party wade in as one angry sword-toting mob, fighting one enemy at a time as the opponents politely lined up for slaughter. Adding to this milieu of confusion is a tempo-based attack system that's supposed to up your offensive firepower if you hit the right party member attacks in sequence, but I found far more success just wildly wailing on the face buttons while coins and crystals and dark crystals and any manner of other inscrutable objects shake out of them. Then there's the super-buster attack thing which involves a long, very impressive cutscene, an attack that that I've yet to suss out exactly what the hell you're supposed to accomplish to achieve it's full effect. 99 times out of 100 it results in my main character pulling off a very spiffy looking special move then wailing helplessly as I fail to input the proper follow-up command.

On top of all that you have an alchemy/create-a-weapon system (something that's become commonplace in JRPGs) that's as least as obscure as the battle commands, something I was never able to take advantage of as it requires you to build up faction with merchants and sell them the proper items-- move onto a new area and you've lost all that time you spent selling and buying crap from a particular vendor only to restart again in a new area of the map, wherein you must then decide which of a handful of vendors you wish to frequent. I suppose it's there for when you feel the need to spend ten hours clearing out dungeons in one town, but even I find that superfluous, and I've spent much of the past two years playing WoW.

Still, a beautiful game, it's art bested only by Odin Sphere's intricate animations. The simple act of walking through a rain-slicked street is often breathtaking. I just wish Squeenix had let people other than diehard JRPG fans enjoy it.

Recommendation to avoid, but then I'm not the target audience anyway.

Pac-Man CE: Now this is the sort of shit that they shove have been putting on Live Marketplace instead of that abomination against god that was voided upon us and called "Double Dragon". It is easily the single greatest validation for the service since Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, and singlehandedly brings the calcified arcade franchise into relevance for today's audience. It was also criminally under advertised and sold less than 70,000 copies, but hey. Namco. It's probable that they spent more money providing PR for Ivy's new ham-sized breasts than they did in the entire production for this game.

Take your basic Pac-Man, get rid of the board, huff a can of Krylon paint to get the visuals right and then put on some trance music. Okay, now split the board in half, with a traditional Pac-Man bonus fruit appearing on the opposite side of the ghost house whenever you clear all the dots on one side. When you eat that bonus item, reset the other side to a different maze pattern then repeat for the next ten minutes or you run out of lives. Then instead of conserving power pellets until you absolutely need them, create a system where you can chain as long a power pellet sequence as you have power pellets to keep them alive, accruing an enormous bonus multiplier for each ghost consumed during the sequence.

The only problem with any of this is the 360's controller. It's horrible, and even when you switch to the thumb stick from the d-pad. It's not exactly game-breaking, but there's all too many times where you go the wrong way simply because the controller was never meant for the task of precise 2-d inputs. Microsoft badly needs to release an all-digital pad if they're going to keep releasing these things.

Strongest possible recommendation to buy. Why are you reading this? This is valuable time you could spent playing Pac Man CE, or at worst traveling to Wal-Mart to buy a 360.

Bastardized American fratboy gaming from Japan by way of France.

2007-07-17T01:35:00.001-05:00

Today I'm going to talk to you about Senko No Ronde, because dammit, someone needs to.

First, a logic puzzle. If you saw this on the shelf at the local StopGaming, what gaming wonders would you think lay within?

I'll tell you what you'd think, you'd think you were going to play some whacked-out Japanese game featuring anime girls with enormous hooters. In other words, unadulterated fun.

In contrast, what would you think when presented with... this?

You'd think the disc within contained some sort of vaguely sci-fi third person shooter, the sort of thing the Xbox 360 has done plenty of times before, only this time apparently based on Lego's Bionicle franchise.

The games above are both Senko No Ronde, and it is indeed some whacked-out Japanese awesomeness featuring a cast of anime chicks with enormous boobs, but you wouldn't know this thanks to Ubisoft's utter (and typical) cluelessness. It is a 2d fighter/Shump hybrid set within a lush 3d engine, the very definition of a niche Japanese okatu-targeted game, and Ubisoft has decided to ruin any chance at traction within the US. If you're the sort of gamer who would pick up a game called "WarTech" based on the above cover art, then a 2d Fighter/Shump isn't for you, and if you're the type of gamer who knew about Senko No Ronde beforehand, you find this cover confusing and the cost-- $60-- insulting. How very Ubisoft.

Thing is, had Ubisoft recognized what they had here-- a Japanese title on a system starved for reasons for gaming okatu to pick something up for it-- they'd have a nice little sleeper hit on their hands. As has been shown, there's money to be had in openly pandering to the okatu set. And at least the guys who ported over Earth Defense Force-- the title's only real competition until Trusty Bell and Blue Dragon are released-- had the common sense to realize that there's no way you should be charging the full sixty dollar MSRP for something that's obviously a niche title.

I'm not proud to say that I found a used copy at StopGaming for $40 used. Hypocritical of me, I admit but I'm sure that sting of pride will be much alleviated thanks to the vintage '97 Miata I'll be buying with it twenty years from now.

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Upcoming 7-17-07

2007-07-16T00:44:00.000-05:00

Upcoming 7-17-07

Another steaming pile o' mediocrity this week, as next-gen owners get to chose between two football franchises that aren't Madden (and thus doubly irrelevant) while Nintendo owners, who so totally are not in the middle of a summer drought, get to keep playing Super Paper Mario. There is something resembling a high spot for the PSP this week, if you squint at it hard enough and don't already have the PS1 original on your Memory Stick.

PS2:

NCAA Football '08 (n/a)

It's sorta like Madden, only without the pesky problem of paying the players for use of their likenesses.

Hot Shots Tennis (78%)

To put things in perspective, for console gamers who aren't of football games and don't subscribe to Live, this is the highlight of the week.

Wii:

Nada. Also, reports that the Bush administration has hired Reggie Fils-Aime to re-write the official dictionary definition for the word “drought” are wholly unconfirmed.

360:

All Pro Football 2k8 (n/a)

Now before you roll your eyes at the prospects of yet another goddamned Madden clone, I'd like to play devil's advocate and point out that this one actually has something resembling a unique hook-- instead of Madden's current NFL rosters (and licensed stadiums and licensed teams and licensed likenesses of current players and all a chance in hell of making a profit), APF 2k8 is based on the prospects of playing with the likes of Jerry Rice, Dick Butkus, Johnny Unitas and a slew of other dead/crippled/retired guys playing on fictional teams. If you can ignore the stuff about “football the way it was meant to be played” (you know, before the advent of modern body armor, rules against taunting or regular drug checks), it's a compelling concept. Of course, I say that as a football fan and not a fan of football games, and while I'd never play this myself, it's something I hope works out for 2k Sports, if for no other reason than to screw over the NFL proper for selling the exclusive rights to NFL games to EA. However, it begs the question... if you're basing your franchise on retired legends, what have you left on the table for '09, aside from the off chance Ladainian Tomlinson dies in a motorcycle wreck?

NCAA Football '08 (n/a)

This would be the Extra Evil Version, which features popup Old Spice advertisements in addition to it's $60 price tag. I only sound like I'm kidding.

Xbox Live Marketplace

Bomberman Live! (n/a)

Normally I don't do Live Marketplace or Nintendo's Virtual Console games as they're usually not announced more than a few hours ahead of their respective releases, but this is a rare instance of a Live Marketplace game being important enough to warrant Microsoft hyping it the week it comes out. As far as it being worth 800 Microsoft fun bucks-- It's Bomberman, over Live, and you can make your Bomberguy to be a bear or a pirate or put him in a little bee dress. If you're a Live subscriber and you're thinking of skipping this, you aren't just a bad gamer; you have no soul.

PS3:

All Pro Football 2k8 (n/a)

Wait, I know! In APF 2k9, they can have Pac-Man Jones featured in his own Grand Theft Auto 3-style game. Deliver mysterious packages to Brandon Merriweather from Balco! Hide Brian Urlacher from the cops as he ducks a domestic abuse warrant! Find a clean urine sample to sell to Ricky Williams!

NCAA Football '08 (n/a)

Look, I'm going to be honest here. I've not played a football game since the Madden the year after Caorlina went to the playoffs for the first time. I honestly don't see how the casual, mainstream Madden fans know what the hell they're doing with these games-- Not only do you have bare moments to pull off a simple passing play before some 350 pound humanoid truck snaps your femur like so much dry spaghetti, the menu system for selecting plays is as least as deep and obtuse as any strategy RPG I've ever played. If we can get your average mainstream neanderthal to understand Madden, why do Nippon Ichi games sell so poorly? I mean, Madden has sweaty guys performing violent acts of inhumanity upon each other-- Disgaea has lolis and horse wieners! How did things go so terribly wrong?

DS:

Zilch. In the meantime, place those pre-orders for Spelling Challenges!

PSP:

Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology (68%)

The only thing harder for me to do than feign interest in generic Madden clones is feigning interest in Generic PSP JRPG #347b. Something something magical tree something something-- Look, if you like JRPGs and have a PSP, just cut a picture out of this game along with the seventeen hundred X-Seed JPRGs coming out and throw a dart. In the meanwhile I'm going to look at some Ninja Gaiden DS screens and try to figure out what the hell is going on.

Parappa the Rapper (78%)

Now this is actually interesting. One of the few truly original and creative games to appear... well, just about anywhere, an argument could be made for the PS1 original of this game to have been the birth of the rhythm game genre, or at least a breakthrough moment in the nascent genre. The PS1 game was great , this is a more-or-less faithful conversion, and if you can ignore for a minute that if you have a PSP you probably already have full access to the original, it's a worthwhile purchase, even if the review scores (which are weighted against how well it's aged compared to the likes of Elite Beat Agents and Guitar Hero) are less than impressive. If I believed in the whole “buying a game to send a message” thing, I'd be saying that here, but I don't so-- yeah.

Next week:

Persona 3! Guitar Hero: Milking the 80's! The PS3 gets an exclusive!

All together now: LOL SONY

2007-07-13T07:56:00.000-05:00

At this point you have to figure the gaming journalism industry owes Sony some money. After the most boring E3 in the history of E3, where the biggest news to come out of the biggest industry convention of the year was G4's almost absurdly bad Microsoft conference coverage, here comes Sony with a double dose of the crazy, just like your meth-addled paint-huffing brother stumbling out of the garage in time for Thanksgiving dinner. At the start of E3, we had a hundred dollar price cut on the Playstation 3 in America. Well, not really a price cut, more like going through the motions of a price cut, but you get the idea. By the end of it not only did it turn out the price cut was a sham, it was a sham and a lie. There is no price cut, there never was a price cut. They're dropping the price on the old, Emotion Engine enabled models and once those run out-- which will be about a month-- the price goes back up as the new, more profitable 80gb PS3 goes online. For Sony, the honeymoon is over. No one's going to trust Sony anymore, not the developers who had already expressed disinterest at the prospects of Sony's trifling $100 price cut, not the hardcore community who feel used and made fools of, certainly not retailers who have been fed a line from Sony since the PS3 was released and promptly stalled. Any momentum, any good will, any trust Sony had built in the three days of mildly good news coming out of E3 has been sundered, never to be put in place again. If Microsoft had a pair of balls in it's entire corporate structure now would be the time to drop their own prices and put Sony away for good.

The PSP Vapid Blonde Chick Edition!

2007-07-12T01:37:00.000-05:00

You guys remember the PSP, right? Annoyingly long, black, big screen, lousy battery, good for emulating PS1 games, got stomped by the Nintendo DS because no one ever made games for it?

Well, Sony's got all that shit figured out. Behold the PSP...P?

See, they're going to counter the DS Lite because it's... it's...

...

White?

And that would appear to be it. It's white, and the D-Pad is supposedly improved, and it's now thinner (which is akin to Lindsey Lohan combating her image problem by losing more weight), but you can't pocket the stupid thing, nothing's been done to speed up game load times, and instead of including a rumored 4-8 gigs of internal flash ram in the thing to make it a proper iPod contender, they're including a 1 gig memory stick.

The only way for Sony to be any more out of touch is for them to jack the price back up to $250 and include a UMD of Norbert.

Profiles in Market Cannibalism

2007-07-11T05:24:00.000-05:00

So Microsoft had their E3 press conference tonight, and while it wasn't anything exciting (mainly a re-hash of PR material for games slated to come out later this year), I'm not going into NeoGAF-worthy histrionics and say it was on par with Sony's disastrous showing last year. It's only sin lay in being boring, a powerpoint presentation by stiff guys in stiff jokes telling stiff jokes to an audience that just wanted to see some game footage. It appeared that Microsoft was in fact afraid of replicating Sony's 2006 effort and held back on what they could have announced. However. There was this bit where they brought Cliffy B out to demo Gears of War... for the PC. Now, we 360 owners were sold on GoW as a console exclusive, the sort of killer app that you buy a system for. So seeing GoW on the Windows platform is disheartening enough for 360 owners-- But Cliffy B then proceeded to demostrate that the PC version of GoW would not only look better than it could ever on your 360, not only would it run -smoother-, but that it would also contain MORE CONTENT. So basically Microsoft spent a good chunk of their E3 exclusive press conference actively eroding confidence in the 360 platform. But hey, buy Mass Effect in November!

Upcoming 7-10-07

2007-07-09T03:58:00.000-05:00

All of the following are scheduled to ship 7/10/07. As before, game ship dates stolen from Gamestop, reviews (when possible) provided by Gamerankings. Before we go on,, a simple logic puzzle, for the publishing company CEOs out there. So you're in the business of publishing videogames, and as such you know that a good percentage of your customers are in high school or college and during Summer usually have nothing better to do than work at McDonald's or hang out at comic shops. Being the president of a videogame company and thus obviously an incredibly smart person, worth many millions of dollars and owner of at least one diamond-encrusted Lamborghini for each day of the week, you also know that the games industry has a tradition of blindly throwing top titles out during the Christmas rush, when these same people are 1: Gearing up for tests and 2: Flat broke. Why is it, Mister Smarty Pants Videogame Man, that you know these things and yet, year after year, decide to release jack all during the Summer months when your customers are both flush with cash and bored? This the same logic that killed Beyond Good and Evil, the same logic that forced people to chose between Metal Gear Solid 3 and Halo 2, and will be the same logic that's going to lead to development team behind Kane & Lynch: Dead Men being dragged from their homes at three in the morning one night in January and never heard from again. But hey, I'm just one of a thousand hacks with a Blogger account. Although if I were a PS3 owner, I'd like to have something to justify my fandom between here and November besides Lair. PS2: Zilch. But not to worry, you 90 some million or so who've yet to move to next-gen: In two weeks you'll be able to once again justify putting off your upgrade thanks to Guitar Hero's 80's Edition and Persona 3. Wii: Nothing this week, and nothing again next week. Although two weeks from now Wii owners will be able to slake their totally-not-a-drought with Alien Syndrome and... Escape From Bug Island. XB360: Project Sylpheed (67%) Ouch. Iwanted this to turn out at least decent. It's a 360 remake of a Sega CD shump, a title that could not be more relevant to my interests had the game come with a goth librarian girlfriend simulator minigame. As we've explored earlier though, anything scoring below a 75% is a pretty sure sign that you're dealing with certified crap printed on disc. I mean, I'll still wind up buying the stupid thing, I just won't admit it. PS3: So you're Jack Tretton, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America. It's the week of E3, you're about to announce a hundred dollar price drop on the PS3, and it looks like you may be gaining the nearest thing resembling momentum since last year's E3 disaster (an E3 that went so badly for you that you took E3 in a flaming wreck, Balrog vs Gandalf-like along with what remained of your communal goodwill). So you'd think that maybe you'd have a big title coming out this week to try and take advantage of this, right? Right? Not only is the PS3 not seeing anything released this week, it won't be seeing anything at all in the way of exclusive games until Lair, in the middle of August. Okay, ignoring the whole lack of worthwhile 3rd party exclusives-- was this abysmal dearth of 1st party titles in the first year really what Sony was planning for last year when the system was first announced? What was the plan here, to survive for an entire year based on the promise of Motorstorm? DS: Apparently Vegas: High Stakes was delayed a week and will instead come out this Tuesday. Those of you who were actually worried about this, please, go spend your $20 on video poker and stop ruining my hobby. PSP: Rivera: The Promised Land (N/A). You have to like what Atlus has going, what with their ability to treat the niche subject of hardcore traditional Japanese RPGs and bring them to North America, treating them with the reverence their okatu-driven customers demand, something Vic Ireland and his Working Designs crew were never able to accomplish. As for this game in particular, I'm not the one to be passing judgment upon it, as I haven't been able to enjoy a JRPG since Final Fantasy VII ten years ago. However, this looks competent enough, what with it's goth lolita girls in comically oversized hats and heroes wielding swords that look like everything swords just should not be. Atlus' target audience will no doubt be pleased, those of us just at the periphery of this audience will instead sit and watch Odin Sphere's animations.

New innovations in villainy

2007-07-06T07:29:00.000-05:00

There are times when you are presented with a villainy so insidious, so clever, so utterly vile that you can't even be angry or even particularly shocked, but you sit back and marvel at the subtle complexity inherent, much like a mouse trap being presented with the inner workings of a glue trap. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with Electronic Art's latest atrocity, courtesy of NCAA Football 2008: Good game, advertisement industry. Long have I wondered exactly how you'd go about making life an irredeemable chore. At first I thought you may borrow from Orwell and subject us all to digital cameras built into our television sets that wouldn't let us continue watching unless our eyes focused on an advertisement for a set amount of time, or that you guys would simply build a giant laser and burn iPod ads into the surface of the Moon, or maybe offer five bucks to anyone willing to carve Golden Palace inside the eyelids of their children. Instead, you decided to destroy gaming. First, a bit on what you're looking at above. All Xbox 360 games feature something called “gamerpoints”, represented in a “gamerscore” that itself doesn't represent anything particularly much to people who don't like to brag about arbitrary measurements of gaming skill. It's sort of like bragging about how much epic loot your World of Warcraft character has stored in the bank, only without as much of as much of a chance at getting you laid. These gamerpoints are accrued through attaining “achievements”, goals for the player set in advance by the developers of said game. Upon completion of that goal-- since we're talking a football game here, let's say the first time you intercept a pass for a touchdown-- you're presented with an otherwise unobtrusive five second popup notification of completion of said goal, along with how many points that goal is worth. Now, EA games are notorious for their ease of which a player can burn through a set of achievements. Indeed, it is standard practice in the gamerscore community (and yes, as frightening as the implications may be, there is indeed a “gamerscore community”) to rent an EA game and collect a quick couple thousand points or so over the course of an afternoon. Previously I thought that this was just another facet of EA's long penchant for lowest common denominator laziness; IE: never doing more work than is absolutely necessary, indeed most EA achievements can be collected through nothing more than a simple playthrough. There was never really any “achievement” part to their Achievements, you just sort of collected them as you played, which sort of defeated the entire point of the Achievements system, which was originally to add life to a game through the completion of non-mandatory goals. Realtime World's Crackdown, for instance, last maybe seven hours through an initial playthrough, but it's life is extended much longer through clever and challenging Achievement goals. But it turns out EA was preparing us for something else-- easily-accessed sponsored Achievements unlocked at regular intervals that double as popup advertisements for the companies “sponsoring” that particular Achievement. In short, EA has found a way to install a popup advertisement system into videogames and has, as a result, turned the Gamerscore system into the gaming equivalent of advertising malware. And as goes EA so goes the industry. You can be sure that this system will bleed into the rest of EA's lineup, only to be copied by Ubisoft and, by degrees, most games to appear on the 360. Today it's NCAA '08's Pontiac 4th Quarter Comeback, tomorrow it'll be Halo 3's Smith and Wesson Headshot Challenge, or Need For Speed's Southern Comfort Highway Rampage Disaster Multiplier Award. And as I've moaned about in the past (LINK!) we can't expect Microsoft to actually do anything about this. MS has a fine tradition of presenting it's corporate hindquarters to whatever ravages Electronic Arts deems fit, whether it be the total undermining of Xbox Live's integrated online multiplayer or constant microstransaction larceny or the fact that EA Xbox 360 games are $10 more expensive than the exact same game appearing on the Wii and PC. No, long ago Microsoft decided submitting to the whims of The Madden Company superseded any protection owed to the hardcore gamer community.

Upcoming Tuesday July 3rd 2007

2007-06-29T11:44:00.000-05:00

Shamelessly stolen from Gamestop's upcoming games web page- which of course means that should you actually try to buy any of these games, expect to be viciously mocked by a kid making minimum wage during his summer vacation.

The reviews are from Gamerankings whenever possible-- meaning that in one article I've managed to combine Gamestop's retail practices with the absolute worst of “gaming journalism”. Join me next week as I attempt to combine the smell of cooked cabbage with the sex appeal of Annie Lennox. PS2: Nothing! Next gen systems enjoy a two week respite until Guitar Hero 80's edition makes the intervening seven years of console development irrelevant again. Wii: Chicken Shoot. (Review average: N/A) Use your Wii remote to shoot chickens, who return fire using their own progeny. Miraculously, Jack of All Games managed to make a horrid game out of this. (That's not being entirely fair though, as I gathered that impression is from the PC version of the game, which averaged around a 50% from review sites. As far as the Wii version, no real evidence exists that it's going to be released outside of Gamestop. No reviews on Gamerankings or Metacritic, IGN doesn't believe it exits, even Wikipedia only includes the standard PR blurb. Here we have a case of a videogame so uninspiring it cannot even be proven to exist.)

XB360:

Vampire Rain (With Bonus!) (49%): Hopefully the bonus includes a refund for the purchase price of Vampire Rain, or perhaps they'll include a game you may actually want to play on your 360, such as Earth Defense Force.

(Checking Gamestop reveals, sadly, that the bonus is instead a Vampire Rain poster. Which is great if you're the sort of person that doesn't just have a lousy taste in games, but wishes to remind yourself and your loved ones of this on a daily basis. Gamestop! Gaming for the self loathing!)

PS3:

Ninja Gaiden Pan the Camera Around Rachel in 1040i Edition (89%) Or Sigma, if you who didn't play this this 2 years ago. Now feel the power of Blu-Ray as you're emasculated by Alma in True HD!

(The XB1 fanboy in me would be remiss if I didn't take this moment to mention that Ninja Gaiden Black received a 94% and sold for $30.)

PSP: Steel Horizon (N/A): At long last Konami addresses the slavering turn based naval battle simulator PSP market.

Hot Wheels Ultimate Racing (N/A): At long last DSI games addresses the slavering lousy arcade street racer PSP market

(In a stunning show of confidence in the PSP, no reviews for either game exist as of yet-- In fact, there's no page for Hot Wheels Ultimate Racing to be found on Gamerankings or Metacritic. In lieu of actual content for said game, I shall instead cite the enlightened prose of your very own gaming community:

“kyur” managed to snap himself out of his 20-hour-a-day-caffeine-seizure to put together: tis will be like fast and furios and need for speed put together and i have been watching a lot of hotwheels videos i whose to have the game but i don't this will be cool the graphics will be cool the cars stlying will be cool

But don't take his word for it! Witness the wit and wisdom of Fast and Furious himself!

Wow this game should be an awsome game because its like a mix of Need for Speed and Sonic and those are my two favorite games and in Hotweels you can use the cars special abilities and that makes it an even better game.

As for Steel Horizon, the DS version- a system tailored made for turn-based naval combat- received a 49%. Flee.)

Nintendo DS :

Platinum Soduku (N/A)

Vegas Casino High 5, (N/A)

Deal or No Deal (N/A)

(Continuing Nintendo's market stratagem of making gaming as exciting as an issue of The New Yorker. The fact that there's no rankings for these games does not suprise me, indeed I would find it more interesting should someone have bothered with a review for any of them-- sort of like a bottle of Wild Irish Rose, you know what you're getting into with “Vegas Casino High 5” the moment you read the label.)

Rather depressingly slow week, and it won't get any better next Tuesday, with all of two games (Project Slypheed and Rivera: The Promised Land) to talk about. We're officially in the Summer gaming doldrums, as the industry decides the very season when most of it's target audience have been booted from school and have nothing better to do for the next two months is when they should start racheting down game releases in anticipation of the holidays.

We shall call it the "Envyon".

2007-06-26T05:43:00.000-05:00

So the PS3 has managed to score exactly one point's worth of envy from me.

Evil ninjas on motorcycles.

Thus we shall know the power of Blu-Ray.

Oh yeah. Sometime between the launch of the PS3 and last week, Nintendo became worth more money than the entirety of Sony. Not Sony's game division, but the whole thing. Movies, televisions, alarm clocks. The whole damned thing.

Turns out Sony's plan to turn the PS3 into a trojan horse is working amazingly well.

Contrant

2007-06-21T04:30:00.000-05:00

So the community is all atwitter at Konami's latest attempt to haul the rotting husk of Contra franchise out of perdition and make it somewhat relevant Apparently we've blocked from memory the decade of industrial-grade dreck the franchise has given us ever since Treasure split away from Konami. But hey, maybe I'm being a cynic. After all, who's to say WayForward Technologies isn't fit for Treasure's mantle? What could be so hard about three way guns and riding atop flying missiles and blowing up giant pulsating alien zombie wasp queens? After all, WayForward, they're the guys who--

Oh lord.

Well you know, maybe that was a fluke, everyone has their bad games, I mean even Treasure put out Wario World--

Monsters! They're monsters! For the love of all that's holy, someone call Konami and tell them-

Well, that's not so bad.I mean sure, it was ages ago, and for the Gameboy Color of all things, but was one of the highlights of the system and is something of a cult favorite. If they can revive some of that magic--

Nope, they suck.

I could understand any level of enthusiasm about the return of Contra if there was anything worthwhile to come of the series once Treasure left. But since the heyday of the SNES, Contra has ranged at best from merely mediocre (Shattered Soldier) to insultingly bad (everything else). That's it. They couldn't even manage to keep the Live Arcade port of the original Arcade game from sucking. At least Konami figured out something to do with Castlevania, even if it was to remake Symphony of the Night every other year.

The best thing that could happen to Contra right now would be for Konami to hand SNK a moneyhat, a DVD full of Super Contra sprites and instructions to use them the next time they want to make a Metal Slug game. I doubt that handing over the reigns to the company responsible for Barbie and the Twelve Dancing Princesses is going to help matters.

The Voice of Gaming

2007-06-12T16:40:00.000-05:00

(submitted to The Platformers 6-11-07) You would not be reading this if it were not for Shigeru Miyamoto. You'd be reading a very different Platformers, perhaps instead called The Flight Sim Pilots, expounding on the genius of Microsoft Flight Simulator or some other dreadfully bland topic. No, this article and indeed this site could not exist if it were not for Miyamoto, for it is without hyperbole when I say his games saved console gaming from the Crash of '84 and as a result rescued the industry. Were it not for Shigeru Miyamoto's work on Donkey Kong, Nintendo would never have entered the home console market with the Nintendo Entertainment System, without the NES there would have been no recovery from the Crash of 1984, and with it likely no further videogame consoles. Console gaming, moribund and lacking Shigeru's spark of imagination, would have slipped under the waves, videogames shackled to the personal computer, lost in a soulless pit of flight simulations and grognard-obsessed wargames. He invented the platformer genre itself with Super Mario Brothers, the action RPG in Zelda, mentored the men who created Metroid and Pokemon, was named a Chevalier; time and again hailed as a genius by his peers. He is, if any one man can be called so, our hero. Meanwhile, Johnathan Wendell- Fatal1ty, as he'd preferred to be called- is very good at Quake. And that's pretty much the best you can say for him. I mean, we know he's good at Quake and Quake clones, he's won something along the lines of a half million dollars doing so. He has a reputation of something of a primadonna, throwing tantrums when bested. He likes to bill himself as the world's best-known professional video gamer, and between the money he's won at Quake clones and his line of “gaming” mice, motherboards and other branded PC parts and accessories, he's probably right. Shigero Miyamoto. Savior of Console Gaming. Johnathan Wendell. World's Best Advertised Quake Player. There's about as much in common in them as John Lennon would have to Fred Durst. Meanwhile, Time magazine in their recent Fifty Most Influential People issue, decided this connection connection, however tenuous, was enough to justify hiring Wendell to write an article on Shigeru Miyamoto's influence on the videogame industry. In Time's defense, they may have intended Johnathan Wendell as Shigero Miyamoto's spokesman for the sake of juxtaposition. In the same issue they pegged Conservative stalwart (and former House Speaker) Newt Gingrich to pen an article describing the impact of the thoroughly Liberal current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They pegged noted Intelligent Design proponent Micheal Behe to write an article on outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins; coac Lovie Smith, (the guy who coached the Chicago Bears into defeat in Super Bowl 41) to write the article on coach Tony Dungy (the man who would go on to lead the Indianapolis Colts into victory in that same game.). But truth is, we're talking about the mainstream media here, saying that they get the idea that Newt is to Nancy what Doom Marine is to Mario is giving them entirely too much credit. No, I think it's far more likely that in the view of Time magazine- and by proxy the mainstream media in general- Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendell isn't just very good at Quake. He is, in fact, representative of how the public at large view gamers and gaming. Thus, he is now our spokesman. Not that we should be surprised. The general public- you know, the guys who insist on calling your PSP a Gameboy- still view gaming as a children's diversion. The only real difference they've noticed is that somewhere in between the NES and the Xbox we stopped obsessing over toadstools and turtles and have become foul-mouthed Mountain Dew-fueled reprobates ogling the blue backsides of holographic women. They do not (and perhaps cannot) see gaming as a medium for subtle, sophisticated emotion. It's as if someone had wiped the public memory clean of Heat, Leon, The Constant Gardner and Blade Runner and left the movie spectrum represented entirely by Chicken Little and The Fast and The Furious. Now gamers, we know better, we know Johnathan Wendel is a bullshit fraud of a spokesman, that gaming has explored places he's likely never touched in his six-hours-a-day practice with a railgun. He never knew the joy of rebuilding the cosmos from gumdrops. He never wept as Agro carried him to the last Colossus. He never stood and cheered as he sank the Master Sword into Ganon's black, black, heart. He never sought his true name amid the streets of The City of Doors. As for Time, (and by proxy public), how can we expect them to understand the depths of Johnathan Wendell's duplicity? Ours is an industry fronted by space marines and malcontents with shotguns. The last thing the people in charge of our industry want is art. Art ruins the profit margins for the Madden roster updates. You can't sell Axe body spray billboards within art. And art makes for lousy sequels. In such an industry Johnathan Wendel, Voice of Gaming doesn't just make sense, he's damned near tailor made for the task. How did we get to the point where the general public honestly believes we are nothing more than a bunch of foul mouth reprobates with a fixation for high explosives and gravity-defying boobs? I contend the fault is our own. We should have demanded better. Not that some of us haven't been trying. There is Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik's Penny Arcade, long a voice of advocacy within the gamer community. There is Edge magazine, one of the last brave bastions left of good game writing. There's are select few quality gaming news and blog sites such as Four Color Rebellion, Next-Gen and The Escapist. But for the most part, gaming press is a reflection of the public's view of us: unprofessional, focused on hype, obsessed with sex and violence. Gaming journalism is nothing more than a tool for the industry itself, used to re-word and disseminate industry-approved PR literature. No real news is ever reported, only the information the industry wants revealed exactly when it wants revealed. Anything more would be breaking non-disclosure agreements. And we've seen first hand what happens when you allow the press free reign with actual reporting- a lobotomized, industry-friendly E3, free from any sort of community oversight. There's no attempt to raise the public discourse to something that may be worthy of Miyamto's legacy, or of the artists and dreamers who build games we love. There's no desire to expose the inadequacies of the industry, no journalistic fire to hold anyone involved accountable for anything that happens within it. There is no great desire, whether it be from gaming press or the retail establishment itself, to promote art over the mundane. We have sought no voice. As a result, we've been assigned one.

An average of 75%

2007-06-04T01:05:00.000-05:00

Friend of mine (mcc over on the Platformers board) whipped this up with about five minutes work over at Gamerankings and one of those fancy Apple Mac machines that let you make graphs and put colors in graphs and make out with cute Asian girls who represent USB technology.

What you're looking at are game review scores for every console made since the Dreamcast back in 1999. And while it's hard to tell what line from which console, that's not the important bit here that's not what I want to talk about, it's the numbers themselves that intrest me.

First, how game reviewers go about this sort of thing. The vast, vast majority of game review sites and magazines use a 10 point scale to hand out their reviews. As logic would have it, the higher on the scale the better the game. You see (or should see, rather) very few tens handed out (perhaps one or two a year per source), 8-9 would represent exceptional games that should not be missed if circumstances allow, 5 is (as you'd expect) average, anything below that generally not worth your time unless you're either desperate or an aficionado of the genre or developer.

Now, here's the important bit. Five should represent the average. As the industry average, most games- if not the vast majority- should fall somwhere close to five. But they don't. In fact, relatively few fives are being handed out, at least in comparison to scores further up the chain. Certianly there are fewer fives awarded than eights, eight being a notch away from a "must play" title.

So what's happening here? The cynic in me would suggest that this is a clear indication that game scores are being bought. But there are other explinations-- game reviewers being game fans themselves, they're more liable to like all games and be more prone to handing out an eight as a matter of course.

You can't have a system where the vast majority of anything is "above average" Average should be just that - the average. But the implication here is that most games are exceptional gaming experiences, and that simply can't work. Not only does that fly in the logic of the word average, it's also a befuddling thing to say to anyone who actually spends money on videogames- we know full well there are very few games out there actually worth spending money on.

What we have here is clear evidence that the review system, as it stands, simply cannot be trusted. This may not be an issue to most hardcore gamers, being the sort that can easily find sources of trusted opinions via messageboards and blogs, but for the layperson, the mainstream buyer that represents where most game buys are coming from, the review system is all they have- and it's failing them.

Edit: mcc Mac'ed up a couple more graphs that are even more telling. First:

Note how very few games exist around the 50% mark. Compare that to the mid 80's onward to about 93 or so, when the graph trais off at 97- There are at least as many games receiving 85-95 as there are 50-55%, if not more!

This last he created is quite damning.

Text his, not mine. There is no way the current review system can be said to be functional! None!

Skull Fucking the Golden Goose

2007-05-09T17:40:00.000-05:00

Submitted to The Platformers 5-9-07)

When you think about it, going to a store to buy a games at a store is pretty silly. I mean, it's all data. Ones and zeros laid out in pattern, embedded on optical desk or a magnetic memory matrix. The other stuff- the case, the manual, the other various tsockies publishers try to foist on us to justify a Collector's Edition box- they're all forgotten in the time between the the moment we place the game in the DVD tray and the moment we put the game away. At best, they're wall-rack trophies to impress your gaming geek friends; at worst they are staggering wastes of paper and plastic, and unleaded gasoline is a terrible way to move ones and zeros into your home. The music and TV industries are already understanding this in their stumbling, quaint old-media sort of way. At some point the gaming industry will embrace digital content distribution in earnest, possibly shortly after some bright kid realizes he just spent a week's worth of 30 hour workdays on a title that spent all of four weeks on display at Wal-Mart. Whatever company sells downloadable content (or, in industry parlance, DLC) to the public in the same way that Apple has sold the public on iTunes stands to pull in a staggering amount of money. It's a damned shame that company won't be Microsoft. Which is odd, for if any company should be able to get DLC right, it should be Microsoft. No other system has more riding on it's online fortunes than the 360. No other company has spent as much time and manpower on it's online service, and indeed Xbox Live shames Playstation Home and Nintendo's Virtual Console in terms of integration and ease of use. If anything, spending money on Xbox Arcade and Marketplace is all too easy. After all, it' s not like Microsoft Points are real money, right? So why is Microsoft hell bent on scaring the public shitless about the implications of downloadable content. The Guitar Hero II songpack situation is only the most recent example in Microsoft's history of DLC PR blunders. And while Activision's exploitative pricing is out of Microsoft's hands, their constant defense of this pricing- over twice what you'd pay for the original songs over iTunes- only serves to implicate Microsoft in Activision's rapacious scheming. Not that Microsoft isn't without blame for this situation, after all, higher DLC prices can only mean a higher cut for Microsoft itself. Indeed, it's not a great a leap in logic to conclude that it is the Redmond giant's insatiable lust for cash that's doing the most to hurt the public's confidence in the concept of DLC, and there's no better place to look for evidence of ther guiding hand in DLC pricing than Epic Game's blockbuster, Gears of War.

(One more bit about Guitar Hero II song pricing before we go on though, because it's so fucking insane- At $90 and 52 songs, the original song list for Guitar Hero II averages out to around $1.70 per song. Three song DLC packs over Live at $7 a pop, you're looking at $2.30 per song-- and that's not counting the free guitar Activision threw into the original game!)

Epic Games is primarily a PC publisher with a policy of disseminating content updates free of charge online. This strategy has extended the popularity of the Unreal Tournament games to the point where most rival FPS games have long vanished from store shelves. Epic expected to continue this practice with Gears of War, using free DLC to keep an already immensely popular game relevant up to (and possibly exceeding) the release of Halo 3. And you'd think three million copies of Gears of War sold- by a wide margin the best selling game for the 360- would be enough to convince Microsoft to give Epic a bit of leeway from Microsoft's own tradition of avarice, perhaps even foster a bit of good will between Microsoft, the three million people who already paid sixty dollars for Gears of War, and future companies who may wish to replicate Epic's success. You would be terribly, terribly wrong.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2007/04/10/microsoft_says_no_to_free_xbox_live_content.html

"With Gears of War we've gone through our own effort and expense to build additional maps, which are free to download. We've already released two and we have four more maps that we've built. We've been wanting to give them away for a long time, but actually Microsoft has been pushing back on us for that. They're trying to build this business model around selling additional content for games and it's a valid idea, but definitely we would like to release more stuff for free, and we haven't been able to do so yet. It's unfortunate as there are a lot of good business reasons for releasing free content for games... you want to increase the player base, you want to keep the game alive..."

To be fair, Microsoft and Epic have since agreed to release the Gears of War map pack for free after allowing the update a few months to gain revenue on Marketplace. Still, the situation has damaged gamer confidence in the concept of DLC, and the news that Microsoft was willing to shut down free content only serves to betray good will in a player base that's already being asked to pay fifty dollars a year for the privilege of playing 360 games online in the first place- something neither Sony nor Nintendo require their customers to do. Speaking of which, that fifty dollar Live Gold subscription fee brings up some awkward questions. Namely, if Live Gold customers are already paying for a premium service, why didn't Microsoft look out for those customers and politely remind Bethesda Softworks that asking the public to pay money for a horse texture map wasn't a great way to start off the whole DLC experiment? Where was Microsoft to advise Q Entertainment that charging the public seven dollars for a Lumnies Live demo was a ruinously bad idea? Why has Microsoft yet to discourage Electronic Arts from charging microtransaction fees to unlock content that exists for free on versions of the exact same games for other consoles? Why is it, every step of the way through the past eighteen months of Xbox Live DLC, Microsoft has seen fit to step in the way of companies wishing to reward their fans, but not to disabuse companies from using microtransactions to fleece its customers? Why has Microsoft shown nothing but cynical contempt for it's most ardent supporters, the users of Live? Now, I'm not saying we should expect DLC be provided for free. But when companies want to give us this data, why must Microsoft, time and again, refuse? Why isn't Microsoft as anywhere vigilant in protecting it's users against damaging (and downright insulting) pricing?

The answer is that Microsoft is a decidedly old-media company that somehow managed to stumble it's way onto the forefront of new media distribution. The have yet (and indeed, perhaps cannot) realize that we exist in an age of consumer empowerment, that you cannot have profitability without good will. Microsoft built much of the 360's image around the idea of online content distribution, and have failed to convince the public that bothering with DLC is worth the associated headaches. As a result, they are going to have a difficult time succeeding in this console generation, despite a yearlong head start and what's turning into a respectable game library. If Nintendo or Sony take Apple's lead and leverage the full potential of DLC, they'll have an even harder time next cycle.

Game; Stopped.

2007-04-17T02:14:00.000-05:00

(Submitted to The Platformers 4-17-07) Once upon a time, there was something called the "record store". In that place you could find a vast collection of music, from the most pedestrian pop to the most obscure regional new age gospel reggae acts. And these stores would hire knowledgeable, (if not always exactly friendly) people, enthusiastic about music, able to steer customers in the right direction of whatever they were looking for or new stuff that the customer may have not even been aware of. Record stores would have regular customers, they were places were fans could hang out and just enjoy music, they were a credit not only to their particular community, but to the industry in general. The RIAA decided to destroy all that one day, but that's another issue. As gamers, we deserve something similar. Small, independent stores staffed with people who have a love for games, shelves stocked with both popular and obscure titles. These stores could, like their music store brethren, be places were gamers could hang out and learn about new games, where neophytes and casual gamers could come in, purchase games, and perhaps even expand their tastes a bit beyond EA and Tom Clancy. Unfortunately, we have Gamestop. I wouldn't complain if Gamestop were a useful tool for the gamer community, a place where you could get your hands on niche titles not likely to be carried by the big box stores. But Gamestop isn't that place. I realized this last week while trying to hunt down a copy of Puzzle Quest. I was reminded that the game exists when I saw it on the shelves of the local Best Buy, amid rows of That's So Raven and Hannah Montana. I could have bought the game there, but I thought I'd do the responsible gamer thing and support the other billion dollar sales behemoth instead. Gamestop. I enjoy the luxury of having three Gamestops within five minutes of each other, and I felt sure one, if not all, should carry the title. After all, Puzzle Quest may be a tad niche, but if a big box store had it, surely the store dedicated to selling games would too. I was wrong. Instead I was met with shelves full of the the exact same movie tie-in crap at Best Buy, along with rows of preteen girl shovel-ware. No Puzzle Quest to be found, or pretty much anything remotely niche for that matter, save for the used section. EA, masters of mass-market pablum, had their own dedicated stand in the middle of the store-- just as large as the aisle dedicated entirely to used DVDs and strategy guides. PC games found themselves relegated to the back of a single EA-sand-sized aisle, and even that was shared with used console peripherals. The space dedicated to console games wasn't in much better shape. Sure, you could find a variety of titles in the used section, but the new sales area was the domain of Ubisoft, EA and more damned games based on children's movies. Indeed, looking around the three stores I felt that I wasn't in a dedicated games store as much as a Wal-Mart games section crammed alongside a yardsale and stuffed into a mall cubbyhole. And if that's the case, how is Gamestop any more useful to the community than Wal-Mart or Best Buy? How is it that the only dedicated games store left in America has abandoned the hardcore base in favor of soccer moms looking to sate Little Timmy's desire for the latest Madden roster update? In the age where virtually any videogame currently made is but an Amazon listing away, is Gamestop necessary anymore? Indeed, I believe that if we look more closely at Gamestop's corporate model, we may see that the chain is, in fact, harmful. Sure, Gamestop sells us used games at a discount, but isn't this practice hurting the industry? Consider. Gamestop pulled in 5.3 billion dollars in revenue last year. Analysts believe up to 25% of Gamestop's revenue comes directly from used sales. That's 1.3 billion dollars Gamestop pulled in last year that was never seen by the gaming industry, at least not after that initial new sale that lead to the cascade of used sales that followed, and there's no real way of being sure that the new game was purchased at Gamestop to begin with. Admittedly, not all of this money would have found it's way back to the publisher, there are cuts on top of what they pull in, but it's still 1.3 billion dollars directly into Gamestop's coffers that have been pulled out of the regular distribution channels. All of this made off the backs of the people who make our games, at a time when the average game developer salary is falling. Can Gamestop justify it's existence when it's very corporate model depends on money stolen from the industry? I could perhaps overlook this if it were not for Gamestop's abominable customer service. Whether it's the incessant pleas for pre-orders and trade-ins, the practice of selling gutted games as new, the actual act of shopping in a Gamestop is a repulsive, degrading experience, and that's not counting the outright larceny involved in the paltry trade-in values compared to how much the used games are then sold for. It's rare to find knowledgeable, enthusiastic staff at a Gamestop. Indeed it would seem that knowledge and enthusiasm about gaming is a detriment to employment, no true hardcore gamer is going to suggest with a straight face that a parent should purchase a copy of Kim Possible over a copy of Beyond Good and Evil. Gamestop managers don't want enthusiastic gamers working under them, they'd rather have someone enthusiastic about selling Driver 3 pre-orders. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Gamestop experience actively discourages casual gamers from the hobby. Gamestop relies on the conceit that they are providing the gamer community a valuable service despite the horrid customer service, outright fraud and the money syphoned directly from developer's pockets. But the truth is, that service is not there. There is nothing that Gamestop provides that cannot be found via other avenues, whether that be Wal-Mart, Ebay, or even direct download. It is time we admit that not only do we not need Gamestop, but we'd be better off without them.

Of Good Intentions

2007-04-12T03:16:00.000-05:00

(submitted to The Platformers 4-11-07) It has come to my attention that there exists a number of otherwise perfectly intelligent individuals who, for whatever reason, wish to destroy the gaming industry. I don't speak of Senators Clinton or Lieberman, or of software pirates. Nor do I speak of the infamous Jack Thompson- after all, I did say intelligent. I don't mean politicians seeking votes and attention on the backs of of legislation and censorship, nor those who flood the market with hundreds of thousands of copies of black-market Nintendo DS games. I speak of game developers who desire a standardized gaming platform. In the words of the most vociferous of these madmen, Denis Dyack, CEO and founder of Silicon Knights: (http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=15712) "I think in the long term, honestly, [I'd like] one hardware platform to rule them all. It's what happened in the movie industry. I think we're moving towards a homogeneous platform whether people like it or not. At the end of the day, I think it's in everyone's best interest that there be one hardware console, whether it be Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or whether all three of them got together and said, "Ok we're going to agree upon a standard for everyone to make." In the movie industry it helped tremendously because as a content creator, all we want to do is make games and entertain people. Don't get me wrong, I love the hardware platforms, like the Sony platform and I think the Wii's got some really unique things and Microsoft's platform we obviously love a lot. However, we'd rather spend time making the games than worrying about the hardware. And if everyone had the same hardware and when you made a game you knew you got 100% penetration because anyone who plays this game had to buy this hardware platform just like a DVD or whatever standard media format's going to be. I think that would ultimately be much better for gamers." "In everyone's best interest" applying to appropriately narrow definitions of the word "everyone". In this case "everyone" would read as "the company with the monopoly". For everyone else Denis Dyack desires nothing less than utter disaster. Dyack forgets that we've already had a standardized console platform. Twice, actually. First time, back in the bad old days of joysticks with number pads, the 2600 enjoyed effective market monopolization. We know where that lead us-- a flood of low quality games culminating in a concrete covered tomb somewhere in the New Mexico desert filled to the brim with crushed ET carts. After the Crash sorted things out again, we marched right into a second de facto standard, the Nintendo NES. That worked out well until it came to light that the entire time Nintendo restricted games from third party companies in favor of their own in-house brands. As far as industry-approved standardized platforms go, they've tried that as well. It was called the 3d0. You'll notice no one really pays all that much attention to Trip Hawkins anymore. Assured doom aside, there are practical problems that would doom any attempt at a standardized gaming platform. Even if the stars aligned and everyone at Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all drank the same LSD-laced kool-aide and we woke up one fine morn to find one platform to rule them all, it'd last about six hours before some middle management schlump at Samsung remembered that videogames games push more money out the door per year than the motion picture industry and that he could retire at 40. There is simply too much money in the games industry for any growth-hungry corporation to allow to flow around untouched. This logic served as the entire justification for the Xbox. And even if you could control the money, you could never control the talent. It would take all of one talented team to give the system the bird and develop elsewhere to irreparably wreck the faith behind standardized platform. Which brings us to the biggest problem in Dyack's ill-conceived fantasy. No matter how iron-clad a supposed industry standard platform may be, it cannot hope to cover all possible places games can and will trickle down to. How does the standardized platform deal with handheld consoles or games on PDAs? What of cell phones? Sure, the majority of cell games out today are Popcap-licensed novelties, but processor power only increases with time; at some point the cell phone will become a viable platform, worth far more money than any single home console could ever hope to pull in. Indeed, the fracturing of the gaming industry is only likely to get worse, provided Apple ever gets around to pushing games for the Mac, iPod and iPhone platforms. Then there's the PC, already in every one's home, full of development resources of varying degrees of accessibility and cost. Even worse for Dyack's whiskey-and-cocaine fueled utopia, the PC has several existing digital distribution services in place, allowing independent development teams to bypass the publisher-driven retail model entirely. All the tools are already in place to kill any viability or justification for the standardized gaming console. You can hardly blame Dyack and others like him for saying things though, what with game development in excess of eighteen months. Developers can only guess if the console they start production for will still be viable when the game actually reaches completion. One might imagine this represents a particularly sore spot for Dyack and Silicon Knights, who's magnum opus Too Human began development before Kid Rock was irrelevant. We are on the cusp of a brand new hardware cycle, which only serves to complicate predictions, especially with Sony's woeful PS3 performance and the extraordinary sales of Nintendo's Wii. Dyack says a homogeneous platform would prevent developers from chasing after nonviable platforms, but that rings hollow when you consider Silicon Knights has already committed to a single platform, Microsoft's 360. If the fortunes of the 360 worry him, why not just develop for the PC? If total install base among consoles is what concerns Dyack, Sony would be more than happy to sell him a Playstation 2 development license-- Hell, there's probably already some Too Human PS2 assets amid the Too Human N64 and 360 discs. So should gamers concern themselves with such insane rumblings from industry luminaries? Probably not, the standardized platform simply cannot work. But you can't like to hear this sort of talk from our developers. Even as someone who identifies himself as a "360 guy", I understand that there will be games and themes present on both the Wii and the next Playstation that I'll never see on my favored console, and due to this I fully expect t own all three before the next cycle starts, as I expect most other hardcore gamers ultimately will. This is a diversity we would not enjoy under the umbrella of a standardized gaming console. Meanwhile, casual gamers simply do not care, they just buy whatever system we tell them they'd have the most fun with and don't think much about what appears on other systems. The fantasy of a standardized console is the fever dream of people who simply ought to know better. Sort of like Communism. Or sex with goths.

The Fighter is Dead

2007-04-02T03:20:00.000-05:00

(Submitted to The Platformers 4-2-07)

This article started off as an examination of three traditional console genres and how developers and fans alike were responsible for their demise. But upon further research, I realized that two of these genres I had thought dead or dying- the shooter and the racing game- were still vital parts of the gaming dynamic, evolving new concepts and thus able to attract new fans. However, the third- the fighter- has not seen a major revision in gameplay mechanics since the first Virtua Fighter nearly fifteen years ago. How did the fighter, so recently a essential factor of the gaming universe and a driving force of console sales, collapse into irrelevance? And how have the shump and the racer, both far older than the fighter, managed to escape obsolescence? The Racer-- Mirror Course I know, it's hard to understand how I could think the racer was near the edge of relevance, especially when you consider how much marketing faith Microsoft placed in Project Gotham 3 or how important Mario Kart is to Nintendo. But as a devoted fan of the genre, I am hard pressed to find appreciable evolution as of late. Today we see racers split into two camps, with little leeway between. In one you have the over-the-top brainless arcade frenzy of Burnout, where catastrophic wrecks at 200 miles per hour with no discernible loss in position are common. On the other end of the spectrum you have Forza Motorsports and Grand Turismo 4 engaged in mortal combat over who can produce the most soulless Nurburgring experience, the joy of driving wrung dry amid a maze of menu screens set to a jazz fusion soundtrack. But something happened to racers, the subtle sort of shift you don't really notice until it's already passed by, and I believe the roots of this change lay in Grand Theft Auto 3. Free roaming gameplay has come to the racing genre, first seen in a full fledged game in Eden Game's Test Drive: Unlimited, and it represents a fundamental change in the philosophy of how racers are played and presented. Whereas practically every other racing game made gives you a list of racetracks to chose from with no transition whatsoever between, TD:U presents the player with a thousand miles of roadway modeled on Hawaii's Oahu island. The island is the racetrack, the player able to seek out races and events staged within. Further, TD:U has a fully integrated online component, one that melds seamlessly with the single-player game, the player often unable to tell the difference between the normal AI cars and other, flesh-and-blood drivers. As an actual racing game though, TD:U is a tad uninspiring. Cars are largely the same, with little other than acceleration and top speed differentiating them, and the racing physics lean toward the arcade end of the spectrum while still not able to approach the reckless joy of Burnout. However, it points a way forward, and the sort of idea I desperately want to see Polyphony Digital (the detail obsessive madmen behind Gran Turismo) copy whole cloth and place their own racing ethos within. The Shooter-- Smart Bomb By the end of the PlayStation 2 cycle Shumps had fallen into utter irrelevance. While the games remained fundamentally sound (after all, it's hard to screw up a something three steps removed from Space Invaders), they had become exercises in franchise self-abuse, with gameplay conventions carved in stone before the NES was set to silicon. If anything, the genre has actually devolved from previous generations that gave us Panzer Dragoon, Galaxy Force and Star Fox 64. Even Treasure, masters of the traditional 2-D shump, gave us the excellent, inventive puzzle shooter Bangai-O for the Dreamcast... barely a console generation later they returned to remaking Gradius. Shumps find themselves travelling quite the opposite path to redemption taken by the racer, their evolution represented by a return to the roots of the genre. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved hearkens back to the frenzy of the arcades shooters of yore, using the power of the 360 not to create high-rez polygons, but instead to throw a riot of lethal particle effects at the player, frantic action not seen since Berserk and Defender. Meanwhile the freely distributed Warning Forever literally evolves, constantly pitting the player in single-screen combat against a single, constantly changing enemy. This minimalist (and free-of-charge)ethic is also found in the work of Kenta Cho, creator of rRootage, Torus Trooper and GunRoar; any of which in another age would have easily qualified for franchise-worthy blockbusters.

The Fighter-- Ring Out I want you to try an experiment next time you're mooching coffee and magazines at the bookstore. Find a strategy guide for a 3d fighter, something relatively simple, say Dead or Alive 4. Now find a beginner's guide to C++. Open them side by side. Which seems more rewarding, learning the counters, command throws, string combos, alternate stances, step-baiting, ect of DoA, or programming your own videogame from scratch? It's going to take you a good couple of hundred hours of practice either way, at least one of the two will land you a degree somewhere down the line.

You see, instead of devolution or division, the fighter fell victim to its fans. Mired within arcane language and obtuse concepts, the fighter finds itself cursed with a hardcore fanbase struck with tunnel vision, a tunnel vision which the developers have embraced. excluding new fans for the demands of tiered tournament play. The hardcore fighter community does not want change, they want incremental improvements to the same basic strategies laid out in Virtua Fighter, and that's something Namco and Sega and Temco are more than prepared to dole out along with regularly scheduled graphics upgrades. There is simply no way for a newcomer to the genre to find a foothold, and without new fans any demand for new gameplay mechanics have fallen to the wayside.

Summary Stagnation of gameplay leads to stagnation within the playerbase. Once your market stops growing you're stuck with the same core group of people who will buy your sequels no matter how stale they are, and you wind up catering to those fans, forcing out new players. Within a short time you wind up with Virtua Fighter 5 selling all of fifty thousand copies in it's opening week. This is the trap the racing genre found itself on the precipice of, and the one the shump is currently trying to free itself from. I don't know if there's a way out for the fighter, perhaps we've seen everything interesting left to do with it. Nintendo fans tell me the Smash Brothers franchise remains uncompromisingly fun while still allowing a semblance of high-level play- I'll have to take their word for that, it's not the sort of game that appeals to me. Even Midway has admitted that the promise of fighting action itself isn't quite enough to sell Mortal Kombat anymore, having long ago decided to fill game discs out with kart racing and puzzle games, turning what was once a well-respected fighting franchise into something of a slipshod party game. Even Capcom, progenitors of the genre and renown for their willingness to squeeze the final penny from a franchise, realized there was no money left in the 2d fighter and vacated their crown.

Which leads us to the real crime of all this. We'll never see an updated Morganna sprite.

Radiant Silvergun Review

2007-03-09T19:53:00.000-05:00

(Submitted to The Platformers 3-9-07) All hobbies have their curiosities, conversation pieces that attract attention and desire for no other reason than being hard-to-find, collected for the sake of being collectible and worth nothing more that fleeting, undefined thing we call "bragging rights". There exists another level though, when something becomes both scare and of exceptional quality, wrapped in a mystique that transcends the item itself. For a car nut this may be a classic Porsche 911; Whiskey aficionados a bottle of Glenmorangie Tain L'Hermitage. As an off-and-on action figure collector, I've known well the irrational lust a Transformers Generation 1 Jetfire can produce. For gamers, this revered idol is often Radiant Silvergun. Although not exactly rare in it's home country of Japan, here in America, with it's heady blend of import exclusivity and Sega Saturn nostalgia, pristine examples of Radiant Silvergun can demand prices in excess of two hundred dollars. Fans of 2d shooters can be a fanatical lot, dedicated as they are to what perhaps remains as the purest definition of the art of the video game. They often pay wholly unreasonable prices for what others see as nothing more than evolutionary upgrades of Space Invaders. However, as as shump fan myself, I can attest that if Radiant Silvergun was just another incremental graphical improvement it would still not demand its high price, import mystique be damned. Indeed, many of us view Radiant Silvergun as the finest shooter ever crafted. Radiant Silvergun is a riotous show of excess. With seven weapons available at any given time, it demands the wherewithal to know which gun to use in any given situation. And make no mistake about it, each is called upon, often in quick succession, and nothing less than mastery of each is necessary to mastery of the game itself. Unlike most shooters, there are no power ups to collect. The guns instead level through use, and these increased levels stay with the player through death and saved game files. Thus, through skill or brute force, any gamer can one day complete Radiant Silvergun. But the skill needed for completion runs secondary the true crux of the gameplay, a combo system that multiplies as the player shoots strings of enemies of the same color. At the highest levels of skill, Radiant Silvergun becomes akin to a puzzle game, where the player must figure out how to weave the Silvergun's bullets through waves of enemies while leaving those of the wrong color unmolested. Add to this Treasure's patented reinvention of standard genre conventions. Even the seemingly trite navigation of a narrow cavern is rendered unique through devious enemy placement that forces the player to exploit the environment with the tools provided. The game is filled with memorable moments, from the simplest Galagla-like waves of enemy drones to the flamboyant boss battles, the game serving to showcase Treasure at their treacherous, underhanded, ingenious best. Now I'm not saying the game lacks flaws. Although played entirely on the 2d plane, the levels themselves are constructed of polygons, and while the graphics were decent enough by Saturn standards, they are today crude, at times downright ugly. Slowdown presents itself all too often, which only serves to exacerbate the already slow gameplay. The ship moves as if suck in syrup, a stark contrast to modern shooters, and at times the curtains of bullets become all but unsurvivable. Due to this, much of the strategy involves the search for safe spots between bullet patterns, and this leads to the sin of trial-and-error gameplay, all too often the player is presented with challenges that are impassable without prior knowledge of how to escape the situation unscathed. That said, I do not believe these criticisms are entirely fair. True, Radiant Silvergun lacks the wreckless fun and sophistication of modern shooters, but then a vintage Porsche will never have the speed or refinements of a brand new Corvette. I must admit however, that if you are not a hardcore fan of the genre, you will find the cost unjustified. But if you are a devoted shump fan and should one day find yourself with an extra two hundred dollars, then know you will not regret making the leap. For my money, Radiant Silvergun remains finest shump created and representative of Treasure at their creative peak. Besides, every collection needs its Jetfire.

Sony's Lazarus Pit

2007-02-21T04:24:00.000-05:00

(Submitted for approval to The Platformers on February 21st, 2007) And on the 95th day, Sony declared victory. Perhaps not in the manner they had wished- after all, subsiding $1200 high-definition movie players to wealthy A/V junkies doesn't exactly rake in the same cash as dominating the console gaming industry for two generations in a row, but at least it provides attention in the trade journals and serves a talking point for fans, something Sony's had a hard time providing. But asserting arbitrary victory in a largely unwanted media format is easy. However, that's not the real fight, it's not the battle Sony fans or shareholders care about. Instead, they want to know- is Sony still capable of winning this console generation? The PS3 has, three months into it's cycle, sold 1.7 million units worldwide, with systems readily available on shelves. Within the first ninety of the PS2's life, it had sold over 3.2 million consoles in Japan alone. Not that the PS3 is without company. It's handheld sister, the PlayStation Portable, has sold 20 million units compared to the Nintendo DS's 37 million, and is in steady supply. Indeed, one may find enough PS3 and PSP boxes at their local Best Buy to build a tiny, horrifically expensive fortress which to huddle inside and play wireless SOCOM 2. Meanwhile acquiring a Nintendo Wii or DS Lite involves waiting in a secluded alley for someone to sell you some merchandise that fell off the back of a truck. In many ways, the PS3 is starting to look a lot like Sony's PSP campaign. Only this time without Lumines. So perhaps worse. Complicating matters is that this time Sony faces not one competitor, but two, and Microsoft holds an advantage in price well as year's head start on sales. As an old Sega fan from back in the 16 bit Usenet wars myself, I admit a certain thrill to the prospects of seeing the PS3 become Sony's Waterloo. But still, we'd be remiss to forget that Sony is still entirely capable of pulling this one out. A lot of people are placing parallels to Sony of 2007 and Nintendo of 1997, shortly before the first PlayStation relegated Nintendo to also-ran status. I don't think this holds true. The failure of the N64 was a culmination of disparate events- long-held publisher dissatisfaction with Nintendo's business practices during the NES era, a stubborn refusal on Nintendo's part to switch to optical disc, Sony's ability to shift the gamer demographic from preteens to college-age kids with disposable income. Perhaps most damning was Nintendo's shrinking market-share from the NES to the SNES while the gaming market itself grew. Sony has only increased console sales over the past two generations as the market has continued to expand. They have dominated the console industry for for thirteen years. Surely this has bought the company more than three months worth of benefit of the doubt. So how can Sony pull this out? Hire some PR already. What's the most controversial thing you've heard from Nintendo lately? That no one was ever shot waiting in line for a Wii? Microsoft, for their part, spent most of the time after E3 convincing people they need to buy a Nintendo. Sony? They've got Phil Harrison saying:

[The] PlayStation 3 launch has been, objectively by any measure, more successful than PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2 or other competing system out previously.

Or Jack Trentton's recent gem:

If you can find a PS3 anywhere in North America that's been on shelves for more than five minutes, I'll give you 1,200 bucks for it.

These aren't even the worst of the quotes, merely the most recent. Since E3 of 2006, Sony's suffered from a crippling case of verbal diarrhea. It may seem silly to propose that Sony's biggest problem stems from their near total lack of PR oversight, after all, the mainstream public has no idea of Sony's continued and constant PR gaffes. But the hardcore public certainly does, and when you're trying to sell a $500 movie player on the prospects of being able to play Metal Gear Solid 4 at some vague, undefined point in the future, the hardcore market is all you honestly have. Hardcore games are quite aware of the consequences of owning a losing console, and right now Sony's CEO class' inability to stop talking out their collective ass just goes to show a level of disconnect from reality not seen since Marie Antoinette's attempts at social welfare. Give us a reason to spend that $500. Grand Theft Auto 4 will be appearing on the 360 before it reaches the PS3. Square/Enix is making bedroom eyes at Nintendo. Metal Gear Solid 4 won't be appearing for at least a year, possibly longer- and that's working under the conciet that Metal Gear Solid can still sell systems. Sony needs game you can't get on the 360 and Wii, and that requires the in-house developers to start delivering. These are the same devs that gave us Shadow of the Colossus, Jax and Dexter, Rachet and Clank, Sly Cooper, God of War, Wipeout and Gran Turismo. But where are they? Polyphony Digital won't have GT5 ready until early 2008 at the earliest. Incognito's remake of Warhawk hasn't been seen since concept renders were released 18 months ago, despite it's supposed "Summer 2007" release. Killzone 2 won't be appearing until the later half of 2007, pitting the underachiving series head-to-head against Halo 3. To be fair, Heavenly Sword, Lair and Motorstorm are coming up in the next couple months, and these games may indeed be worth buying a PS3 for. But compare Sony's proposed 2007 lineup to the 360's 2007: Crackdown, Forza 2, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Blue Dragon, Eternal Sonata, Guitar Hero II, Lost Planet, Shadowrun. For this year at least, Microsoft will be able to match Sony blow-for-blow with exclusive titles that at least match, if not exceed, the efforts of Sony's vaunted first party teams. At this point, Sony may be reduced to paying for 3rd party exclusive titles. Grand Theft Auto went a long way towards selling the public on the PS2 lo so many years ago, how much money would it take to convince Rockstar to return to the Sony fold? It couldn't take much to lure Team Ninja the superior graphical prowess of the PS3, something which would be an enormous talking point for Sony. Acquiring Dead Rising 2 as a PlayStation exclusive would be planting a dagger in Microsoft's spleen. Finally, do something about the price, even if it's trivial. $500 is hard to swallow, even if a 20 gig PS3 a greater value than the 360 Premium. But sacrifices could be made that would not directly touch the already negative price margin on PS3 hardware. Imagine if Sony included a copy of Resistance: Fall of Man with each sale- then you've effectively reduced the price difference between the 360 Premium and the 20 gig PS3 to $40. There are other options that don't involve Sony losing their one sure-fire sale though, perhaps a Ridge Racer 7 pack-in, or a voucher good for $60 worth of new games bought anytime in 2007. They perhaps offer a high-resolution directors cut version of an existing PS2 title, say Gran Turismo 4, even Metal Gear Solid 3. You wouldn't be closing the gap nearly as much price-wise as you would if you threw in a free PS3 game, but there would be added value vs the 360, an idea Sony has has a hard time getting across to consumers. In conclusion, I don't think it's time for Sony fans to start looking for ways off the ship just yet. Sure, Microsoft is going to to have an incredible 2007, but they're not leaving much left for 2008, and by then there will be worries that the 360 has but a year left in it's cycle. As far as the Wii, Nintendo has yet to prove they're capable of producing a steady stream of titles for one successful system, much less two at a time. This year isn't a complete waste, either. There's every chance Heavenly Sword and Lair will live up to the promises of their screenshots, and Motorstorm is already well-received in demo kiosks. That said- if the spring trade shows roll around and the public is given no reason to stop holding out on a 360 or Wii, it may be time to start carting out Marie to her date with the Guillotine.

Graphics vs Gameplay

2007-02-12T23:38:00.000-05:00

(Originally submitted to The Platformers) There are a great many acts of mental deception console fanboys subject themselves to, and few fascinate me more than that of "graphics vs gameplay." Simply put, proponents believe superior graphics inhibit gameplay; that through some arcane process developers without access to transparency filters or Mode Seven or 1080p resolution add Extra Gameplay Magic, making their games superior to games appearing on the most powerful system. They deride graphics as nothing more than "eye candy". You'd almost wonder why these people don't toss out their current hardware and live a life of perfect zen gameplay mastery with a Vectrix. Of course, spending much of my gaming life as a Sega fanboy, I would be remiss if I didn't admit to using the argument myself, Blast Processing be damned. And of course, there is a bit of merit to these concerns, what with Castlevania's dalliances in the 3d realm being forgotten, and poor Sonic's not been the same since he moved to the Dreamcast. But there is no need for graphics to get in the way of good gameplay. Indeed I think it can be shown that advancements in technology only serve to enhance gameplay and open up new gameplay genres. A walk through the past 25 years of graphical progress between hardware cycles illustrates this. Consider the move from the 2600 to the NES- before, the most complex platformer was Pitfall, we had not seen scrolling platform games anywhere near as complex as Mario. These games were confined to a handful of sprites on screen, making shooters such as R-Type impossible. The most compelling story the 2600 ever told was that of a humble dot endlessly pursued by a vicious, key-hating duck. We'd have to wait on new hardware before we would see stories on the level of Dragon Warrior and Phantasy Star. The move to 16-bit hardware presented a refinement of existing genres, but new gameplay avenues were still opened. Games like Pilotwings would have been impossible without the smooth scaling at the SNES's disposal. Eight-bit systems gave us compelling RPGs, but one can hardly argue Final Fantasy 6 would have been the same without the SNES color pallet. Similarly, Lunar: Silver Star Story would not have been the same without full-motion video. And while the NES could approximate Street Fighter II, it's hard to imagine that anyone not heavy into psychotropic drugs would prefer it over the SNES version. The PS1 era marked the latest great graphical leap between hardware generations, and gameplay took a leap as well. Finally we could see truly cinematic experiences on consoles, expressed in Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil. Indeed, the entire Survival Horror genre relies on atmosphere that would have been impossible on previous hardware. The racing genre, long confined to crude 2D sprites, finally flourished. After years of playing second fiddle to the arcade, consoles saw arcade ports that looked and played better at home, contributing to the marginalization of the arcade industry. True 3D FPS games on the consoles became possible, and we even saw first-glass FPG games appearing exclusively on consoles. The following cycle gave us no revolutionary leap in the way graphics were presented, but the new hardware still allowed for larger worlds, giving rise to the sandbox genre made popular by GTA3. For the first time devs had the ability to do some truly remarkable work in terms of the scale in which worlds were presented, best seen in Shadow of the Colossus. Dynamic lighting not only made games look better, but it made stealth games such as Splinter Cell possible. Existing genres could be presented as a more compelling gaming experience. Sure, it may have been feasible to play God of War on the N64, but would you have really wanted to? It could be argued that the current console generation exhibits only another cursory polish, but I don't think that's fair. We haven't seen what the PS3 is capable of, and already the 360 boasts Dead Rising, a game that could at best be approximated on the Xbox 1. Meanwhile, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved would not be the same without its riot of particle effects and screen-warping explosions. The false dichotomy of graphics over gameplay isn't just a flawed argument, it is indeed a total and complete falsehood, if anything, the direct opposite is true. Every new advancement in graphics have opened up more freedom of design, more possibilities, even more size in each subsequent generation of games. There will always be disappointing games, even games with multi million dollar CGI budgets, but their being bad games is not the fault of the system they're presented on. Graphics are more than eye candy. The progression in graphics have pushed gameplay farther than new controllers and online multiplayer gaming could ever hope. Sadly, just as crappy games will never go away, neither will Graphics vs Gameplay. But hey, if anyone wants, I'm willing to trade my Genesis for your Wii.

Gradius V Review

2007-02-02T02:27:00.000-05:00

Gradius V is a modern-day relic, a throwback to the salad days of the NES, and an obvious work of love from Treasure. The problem is, when you start with a game entrenched firmly in the mid 80's Japanese arcade ethos and try to build a modern representation of it's genre, you wind up with something that feels very much like a mid 80's arcade game wrapped up in a neon blue polygon bow. There's a lot of things in Gradius V that a neophyte shump fan is simply ill-adjusted to deal with or even enjoy. The central conceit of Gradius V--and it's central flaw-- is it's power up system, and indeed this powerup system defines Gradius as a whole. This system relies on collecting pods which are used to buy a sequence of power-ups shown as a segmented bar across the bottom edge of your screen. The problem with this system (and indeed with most shumps featuring a power-up system and why they've been phased out as of late) is that the game is balanced against a fully-powered Vic Viper. It has to be, otherwise a boss encounter-- and there are many boss encounters-- will result in all of a moment's challenge if you come ready to bear with a full compliment of laser drones and missile pods. So once you get hit your survival strategy revolves around a war of attrition between the boss's weak point and the number of credits you have left. In fact, once hit, the game changes from one of pattern memorization to one of a war of attrition between the boss's weak points and the number of credits you have in reserve. Chances are, unless you've loaded up a wholly unreasonable number of extra lives and are playing on anything above Easy, they won't be enough. As a result you wind up with an inherently frustrating game, one based not exactly on skill, but on trial and error and the ability to memorize patterns, on being in the right place at the right time at all times. Most modern shooters eliminates pattern memorization (and thus create a game about skill and guile) simply by eliminating the powerup process completely, or at least allowing a player to keep their powerups after being destroyed. The one hit kill nature of Gradius V allows for very little imagination on the part of the player. There is the pattern, this pattern is paramount, learning the pattern is the only way to live. I'm not saying Gradius V is a bad game-- far from it, it's a quality shump and Treasure's pride and craftsmanship are evident in every detail-- but it is a very difficult game to fully enjoy, especially if you already own Ikaruga or R-Type final or Mars Matrix, or any number of inherently less frustrating, more sophisticated shumps. The Catch 22 here being that if you don't already own a shump, getting into the genre via Gradius V is akin to a layman learning about string theory by picking up a college-level physics textbook. As such it's a hard game to fully recommend. Yes, it's a good game, but it's one that's really only meant to be appreciated by aficionados of the genre. For it's part, Treasure makes no apologies for this, outright insulting a player on his poor performance while at the same time teasing for one more playthrough to see the imaginative level designs and uniquely Treasure boss encounters. It's deserving of a spot in the shooter vet's wall unit, but just be aware before going in that only the most dedicated of shump elite will ever get the full value inherent in this title. Luckily, Gradius V is cheap, having not yet succumb to the particular madness of shooter fans that result in newcomers having to pay upwards of $40 just to enjoy Ikaruga. So by default it becomes one of the best easy-to-obtain shooters made in the past 5 years. In any case, the $20 spent will not go to waste, Gradius V is a fine game, albeit a fine game that is deeply flawed. If you have a low threshold for frustration, however there are any number of quality PlayStation 2 action games to be had for the same price, most of which will not lead the player to fits of controller-twisting rage.

Long tail, sort changed.

2007-01-26T05:12:00.000-05:00

There is nothing that has me more excited about the next hardware generation than the possibilities of downloading full, licensed games over the internet. Not only will digital distribution allow small-time publishers to circumvent the entire soul-crushing publishing system currently in place, it will one day ensure I'll never have to listen to another Gamestop register biscuit beg me to trade in all my material wealth in exchange for a pre-order of Madden '08. All three systems have a digital download service in place, and with PC services such as Steam and Gametap, soon we'll never have any real need to waddle into the daylight again. My current console of choice for next-gen content is the Xbox 360, and it's online distribution system is the most cohesive and well-conceptualized of them all, Xbox Live Arcade. Live Arcade updates Wednesday, and we're allowed exactly one (1) game per week to show itself. Now, one (1) game per week doesn't sound especially exciting, but there's some quality stuff coming down the pipe, from freshly-minted indy developers proving themselves to the world to established big guns like EA to classic arcade and console games of yore. Just a sample of what we've been told to look forward to:

(Space Giraffe has me interested the most of these. It's basically Jeff Minter's return to Tempest 2000, only this time on Red Bull and crack, which was itself the original arcade Tempest on LSD and crystal meth. it's the sort of game Tyler Durden would have played, if he weren't too busy plotting the destruction of consumerism while making soap out of fat women.) So with visions of Alucard Tepes swinging the Crissaegrim through Lord Dracula's black, immortal heart, I booted my 360 Wednesday morning to discover... ... Well, nothing. I think there may have been updated content to already existing 360 games, and a demo that as a Silver subscriber I won't have access to in a week, but as far as an actual game-- Nada. It's frustrating on many different levels-- as a consumer, I want to give Microsoft my money in exchange for goods and services, goods and services Microsoft seems disinterested in providing. The new stuff like Space Giraffe and Castle Crashers aside-- Symphony of the Night has been finished for ten years. I know, I had the buy the damned thing twice for my original Playstation. It's not like Konami is going to be able to add online deathmatch to a Castlevania, and any changes to the arts would be nothing less than an outright insult-- So what's the holdup? Why can't I get this game? Metal Slug is the same way, as is Streets of Rage or Alien Hominid. These are all finished games. We're only allowed one a week-- why not push through something, especially if there's no need for graphical gloss or online features? A person might conclude that Microsoft is worried about the supply drying up, that they want to space out their titles so that there's a constant flow of titles every week-- but this Wednesday's disappointment was no isolated occurrence. Here's what we've had since Christmas: *12-27: New Rally X. Yes Microsoft, that's why I bought this $400 chunk of silicon and white plastic, so I could play the early 80's Namco arcade titles that I always ignore whenever I buy the comp discs only to play Xevious instead. Fucking brilliant. By the way, where the hell is Xevious? I'd actually play Xevious. *1-3: Zilch. I believe there were some map updates to Gears of War that week. Note that Gears of War is quite demonstrably not Symphony of the Night. *1-10: Ms Pac-Man. Again with the moldy Namco arcade titles. What's worse, Ms Pac-Man was the very first title ever released on the original Xbox Live Arcade service, back on the XB1. One might conclude that the purpose of XBLA is for Namco to sell their comp discs piecemeal, charging more money per game. One might also note that New Rally-X is essentially Ms Pac-Man, with cars. One might also note that neither Ms Pac-Man nor New Rally-X are Symphony of the Night. *1-17: Heavy Weapon. Now this may appear interesting on the surface, a side-scrolling, top-down shooter in the style of Moon Patrol, you might be tricked into thinking this was a daring, indy-developed title put to Live by a group of garage developers intent on sticking it to The Man with thier in-your-face ideas and Mister Enfuego, their wacky mascot lemur. Nope, it's a Pop-Cap title, released in 2005 and available for free for the past two years. Popcap. You know. The guys who made Alchemy. You know the only game of Popcap's that I've ever wanted to play? Alchemy. You know the one Popcap game I can't find on Live Arcade? Alchemy. *1-24: New levels for Lumnies Live! Which, you know. No one ever bought because Lumnies (previously appearing on the PSP) was broken up and sold by piece by piece over Live Arcade instead of as one solid block. So I guess in a way what Microsoft was selling, in lieu of Symphony of the Night, was failure. Failure and broken promises. Like a firefighter who accidentally kills little Suzy's kitten instead of saving her. Only the fireman is Microsoft. And the kitten is Symphony of the Night. And I am little Suzy. So the problem here isn't the fear of drying up the supply pipe-- that pipe is as dry and sandy as Ann Coulter's reproductive organs. Save for compatibility testing over new hardware, many of these games are already finished, and if they were made available, they could sell systems. It costs practically nothing to put data on a hard disc drive, and will cost no more to keep it on the severs five years than it will four an a half years. Right now though, that data isn't making Microsoft any money or selling any systems-- the Long Tail only works if the data is available. Contrast this with what Nintendo is serving up on their own distribution service, the Virtual Console. When we get New Rally-X they get ToeJam & Earl. We get Ms Pac-Man, they get R-Type 3, for chrissake. We get Lumnies levels, they get Zelda: Link to the Past! We get levels for Gears of War, they get... well, they get Urban Champion. Guess they can't all be winners. But the point is, Nintendo is leveraging what they have rights to to sell systems. Next week they're probably going to get Super Mario Brothers 3-- while we Live users will be lucky if we receive a Kameo deck for online Uno.

Now, if they sold this to Neverhood, that'd have been neat..

2007-01-23T01:40:00.000-05:00

Those of you keeping up with this sort of thing already know about Harmonix selling off the rights to the Guitar Hero franchise to Neversoft, and the possible implications. Those of you who don't know about this already fall into two camps-- one, those who don't know what Guitar Hero is, and those of you who are fans of Guitar Hero are wondering who Neversoft if they need to go ahead and crack open a bottle of Royal Crown. For the former, I implore you to go find someone (preferably someone who knows what they are doing) playing Guitar Hero, It's one of those games you really need to see played to tell if younullre a fan of it or not. Personally, I'm a big fan of it even though I'm utterly incompetent at playing it. For the latter-- Neversoft are the guys who make Tony Hawk games. Well, now Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero. If I knew anything about music, I'd feel compelled to make some pithy comparison about The Sex Pistols selling their back catalog to Green Day. Since I know nothing about music, instead I'll make a lame comparison about The Sex Pistols selling their back catalog to Green Day. Now I'm not going to say this is going to lead to something terrible, after all it's not fair to judge Neversoft's vision of Guitar Hero before they've even typed up any code, but reading the Game Daily Interview with Red Octane's Dusty Welch, a Guitar Hero fan can't help but be... well, scared for his life, really.

Internalizing development allows for more control of the creative elements of the game and, in this instance, provides for a much more robust and feature laden franchise. We believe that having the talented group at Neversoft, with their unprecedented string of market success with the billion dollar Tony Hawk franchise, develop the next Guitar Hero game will allow us to vastly enrich the consumer experience. We are excited to further the music and rhythm-based videogame genre, and Neversoft has the full experience, knowledge, and talent to do this.

Okay. Some buzz-speak, but he is management. Not too bad.

"We have tremendous respect for, and greatly appreciate, everything that Harmonix has done for the Guitar Hero franchise. Their vision has always aligned with ours from the start. In looking toward the future, we believe it was a natural and neutral decision for us to look at other opportunities. We look forward to partnering with Neversoft's development team, and can't wait to show our fans what we have in store for them."

Wow, that's... that's a lot of buzz-speak. Guitar Hero fans are probably squirming in their seats right about now...

"Neversoft has a long-standing and trusted reputation for developing great games that appeal to our core target demographic, and we're definitely excited they're on board!"

Those of you remembering Tony Hawk's Underground-- which extensively incorporated Bam fucking Margera-- are probably grinding their plastic fretboards between their teeth right now. Save your teeth, it's about to get far, far worse.

"Neversoft's talents and extensive experience working within the skateboarding and music culture are already adding tremendous value to Guitar Hero's core tenet of fulfilling the fantasy of becoming a rock star."

The blurred vision you may be experiencing right now is a direct result of spending the past five minutes slamming your head into the nearest wall. For the sake of your long term memory, please don't re-read the above. Now, I'm not saying this automatically going to be a Bad Thing-- after all, Neversoft could just keep pumping out Guitar Hero iterations the same way Capcom did Street Fighter II and the fans would be happy and we'd still be getting enjoyable games. And hey, it's not like Neversoft is a bad publisher, the Tony Hawk stuff is (generally) well-received. Problem is, after hearing Dusty Welch use more buzz-speak than a meeting of Applebee's middle management, you can't help but imagine "stay the course" is the best possible outcome for Guitar Hero at this point. At this point you start to wonder if we'll ever see 80's Guitar Hero or Johnny Cash Guitar Hero, you start to seriously expect to see Creed Guitar Hero and Kidz Bop Guitar Hero and Kevin Federline Guitar Hero. At least Harmonix didn't sell to EA, the thoughts of a Guitar Hero using EA Trax would be an act of sin so strong as to turn the rivers red with blood. In fact, it'd be an act so evil you sort of wonder why EA hasn't already tried to build a GH clone. I can't blame Harmonix, though. You have to figure after two wildly successful iterations of of Guitar Hero (and a fully Live-connected Guitar Hero II for the 360 coming up) that they've done pretty much everything they ever wanted to with the game-- sure, they can go around the next ten years making Guitar Hero sequels, but if you're going to do that, why not sell the rights to someone else? These are developers, they're artists, they have an innate need to create, they will want to see if they can do better than Guitar Hero. You sort of have to commend the ability to discard your gravy train in order to pursue the muse. Indeed, one can think of no less an attitude for a development studio dedicated to fusing music and games. You just sort of hope the next game they try stays in the garage for a little bit longer.