LEGO Indiana Jones: It's Not the Years, It's the Mileage

I was not, with apologies to pulp buffs and George Lucas apostles, a fan of the latest Indy flick. Hey, I tried. Honest. I mean, I grew up with this stuff, collected the trading cards, owned the movie books with the color pictures in the middle, searched in vain for years to snag a passable Indy fedora, even took a shot at cobbling together a na?ve wannabe's quarter-baked sequel to the second movie (that second film was so much better through 12-year-old goggles). I even had a friend who somehow managed to get his hands on an honest-to-goodness bullwhip (he had either the coolest or dumbest parents on the block). Ever heard an authentic bullwhip up close? Let's just say the sound effect in the films is like a handful of poppers on concrete compared to the real thing.

What bugged me: The world's first nuke-proof Frigidaire? The way a creakier, grizzlier Harrison Ford managed to not merely bend but outright ignore centrifugal force inside? The whole rolling away unscathed shtick? Or how about the scene where Shia LeBeouf dangles like James Dean of the Jungle in what is now, for me, the topmost eye-clenching head-smacking ear-smoking moment of "Doh!" in any Lucas film ever?

Alright, enough about Indy, what's new with LEGO Indy? I jotted down some reactions to the PC demo a few weeks ago, and now that I've had some time with the full version, I can say it's shaping up to be classic Traveller's Tales, for better as well as occasionally less than great.

The good: It's Indy! It's John Williams! It's the first three films! It has bullwhips! More puzzles! More collectibles! More desperate(ly cute) feats of blockheaded derring-do!

The bad: Some of the static camera angles make navigating tricky 3D puzzles unnecessarily difficult; a few annoyingly abstruse, totally counterintuitive logic puzzles; poor edge delineation, making it easy to slip off into explosive blocky oblivion.

So just like LEGO Star Wars except with all the Indy source material. Actually that's only half true -- the humor here feels less snappy, the wit a sliver less accessible. Maybe that's because the Star Wars films are better known moment-for-moment, whereas the less parodied Indy films are remembered more for their pulpy glow than much (beyond the bit about snakes) that's quotable. In the LEGO-fied retelling, you have a few too many sequences that depend on goofy, dopy "slap-punch" jokes that fail to match the cannier winks and nods the Star Wars games had.

But whatever, it's an Indy game, and if you loved the LEGO Star Wars stuff, you'll probably love this when it ships next Tuesday.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Do Game Companies Pay For Higher Scores?

Low scoring game reviews cost game makers money, claims MTV Multiplayer. No surprise, it's something we've been yammering about for several years now. The thinking, cobbled together informally from anonymous sources and despite MTV's allegation that the practice is "common but not widespread," virtually impossible to realistically quantify, is that game publishers pay development studios "incentives" based on how well a game performs with a score aggregator like Metacritic. See your game rise above a certain integer-dot-integer and the money flows -- fall a decimal point short and you can kiss that holiday bonus goodbye.

Though MTV doesn't mention it, the practice also allegedly extends occasionally to public relations representatives. After all, PR -- not game makers -- have to deal directly with the number-givers. Some call that benign "competitive persuasiveness." I call it "unethical," to the extent it's ever occurred, or continues to.

But this is well-covered terrain, and the only reason I mention it here is the less mentioned, more insidious implication: Paying bonuses for aggregator scores is inherently elitist. It cuts consumers entirely out of the picture. It unduly elevates game critics' opinions over yours.

So while I'm already riled up about the possibility that dubiously valid aggregator "scores" could be driving payola to hard-up developers based on shady publisher incentives, I have an even bigger problem with what it implies game makers think -- or don't -- of the very people who ultimately buy their products.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Former Sony Boss Says Single-Player Games Are Doomed

Would you care if single-player games like BioShock and Oblivion suddenly became extinct? Former Sony exec and current Infogrames honcho Phil Harrison thinks that's where we're headed. Imagine: Grand Theft Auto IV bereft of its single-player story mode, Halo without its epic solo campaign, Mario without?well, whatever you want to call the single-player business Mario gets up to butt-stomping Goombas and whipping fireballs at Koopa Troopas across spinning, tilting fantasy-scapes.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Harrison said the following:

I don't think the industry is going to make many more of those. I just don't think consumers want to be playing games that don't have some kind of network connectivity to them, or some kind of community embedded in them, or some kind of extension available through downloadable content.

Now, that's not to criticise Alone in the Dark - it's just to recognise the industry is changing, and the role we play as creators and publishers has to reflect those changes. I don't think I'm alone in having those views, either.

And indeed he isn't. Former Ultima Online lead designer and Star Wars Galaxies creative director Raph Koster took some flak (from me and plenty others) for claiming as much a couple years ago. Said Koster:

Single-player gaming is doomed, because already today, the large crowd playing Solitaire is doing it online, whilst chatting in a chat room, because they can; because the RPG player is doing it whilst chatting with friends about the plot in a chat room, because they can; because fundamentally, the vast majority of humans want human contact even if only fleeting. We want to know where we stand compared to everyone else, whether what we like matches what the world likes, and whether or not others care that we are there.

I don't know. I intuitively get what Koster's saying about single-player gamers being introverts and how all that's changed with multiplayer pulling in a totally new crowd. I get what a lot of people keep saying about the "millennial" generation being inherently connected and hive-minded. And I get what Harrison's implying between the lines about single-player games being costly, increasingly risky endeavors.

But I think it's important to bear in mind that these guys aren't track-record visionaries, and particularly in Harrison's case, more like businessmen with microphones. Entrepreneurs with vested financial imperatives. Their job isn't to tell you how it ought to be in some pure philosophical space, it's to tell you how they'd prefer it to be, and it should come as no surprise that both are working like mad on major multiplayer initiatives. If multiplayer gaming were doomed, just to play devil's advocate, they'd each be out of a job, in other words.

So the question, fellow gamers, is what's your pleasure? Do you still want companies like Bethsoft and Rockstar to be making games you at least have the option to play without the participation of others? Or do you see a transition to games you only play with others as the inevitable terminus for this industry?

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

EU Surpasses US as Second Largest Gaming Territory

Nielsen Games reports that the European Union is now officially the second largest videogaming territory in the world. Second to whom? Try Asia by a hair with 11.5 billion in revenue compared to the EU's 11.4 billion (a 25 percent increase over 2006 figures). The US finished third with 10.7 billion.

Nielsen released additional polling data:

- The research surveyed 6000 active gamers aged 16-49 in 15 markets.

- The average age of UK gamers is 33.

- 42 percent of UK gamers have kids

- 81 percent of parents across Europe say they enjoy playing games with their children; over half of gamer parents monitor what their kids buy and play.

- 40 percent of all respondents said they play games between 6 and 14 hours a week, along with surfing the net, visiting family and friends, and watching TV.

- Non-gamers didn't appear to harbor negative thoughts toward gamers or about gaming, with 48 percent citing lack of time as their reason for not gaming.

- 93 percent of Europeans recognize the PEGI rating labels. PEGI, which stands for Pan European Game Information, is the standard celebrity psychologist Tanya Byron took issue with in her report to the British government earlier this year.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Guitar Hero: On Tour Gonna Teach You How to Rock Out

And it'll teach you to wiggle-wiggle-wiggle with "a whole lotta great stuff." I'm sick as dog today, so I'll get out of the way and let this video, which displays in detail how Guitar Hero for the DS works, represent what words would only make weirder.

You are the master connector PER-son!

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Ninja Gaiden 2: No One Knows Where a Ninja Goes

So there's this new slash-em-up on the block you've maybe heard of called Ninja Gaiden II shipping next week, and by the way, show of hands please, anyone know what a 'gaiden' is anyway? Thank you Wikipedia, I'm no longer clueless. Try "a Japanese-language word often translated as 'side-story' or 'tale')."

Some tale, Ninja Gaiden II's:

"Man in black headdress purees thousands with scythes, staffs, and swords. Cue credits."

That's it. You wanted more? So did I. (From The Mummy 2 and The Matrix 3 and Indiana Jones 4, too.) And if you want to pillory Ninja Gaiden II for being thematically sub-dimensional, go for it. I won't argue. Why would I? After all, there's a cutscene that speaks for all the rest at the end of the opening chapter, where super-hero-ific protagonist Ryu Hayabusa -- after catching a girl dropped a couple hundred feet off the side of a helicopter -- deadpans "I see the agency's broadened its horizons," as the girl's entire front wags in the wind without apologies. Hey, even media pi?ata GTA IV with its crude, frequently puerile humor has its subtler, somewhat darker side as Shameless American Satire to fall back on.

Still, I loved it, and since that puts me on the record, I'd like to comment on a few nits being lobbed at the game:

1. Enemies pop into existence right on top of you. I never experienced this. Not once, the game entire. What I did experience, on the other hand, was meeting enemies who'd occasionally appear to blink into existence on my tail, but who, after paying closer attention during replays, were in fact appearing at a distance before sprinting headlong toward me.

2. Long range attacks can't be blocked. As in arrows or other projectiles, and of course they can't. Neither can yours, by the way, which isn't an error, it's a design choice, and one in this case which simply says "On your mark, get set to kill the stuff right next to you before the distance shooters smoke you, GO!" Now if that happened all the time, I'd call it cheap, but it doesn't, so it's not.

3. The frame rate's choppy at 1080p. Could be. I reviewed it on a 480p NTSC TV, where it ran without a single dropped frame. Since my 1080p TV is presently boxed for moving, I wasn't able to test the game at its theoretical maximum. If it really, truly stutters at 1920x1080 -- a resolution that's hardly mainstream -- I wouldn't nick the score, but I'd certainly share a few choice words with Team Ninja for not topping at something less taxing like 720p.

4. The game's enemies feel unbalanced. This one I kind of agree with if I'm wearing my "games must be as games always were" cap. But I'm not, so I'm going to call "not necessarily" on the assumption that a game's difficulty should only scale one-way. I liked the fact that over the course of dozens of boss fights I'd occasionally meet one that was easier to beat (especially in a single-level lineup of three or four). On balance though, I'd rate most of the bosses a pain in the butt, and unless you're playing on the easiest "acolyte" setting, you'll be tapping "try again" plenty.

5. The visuals aren't much improved over Ninja Gaiden Sigma for the PS3. True...and the point is? Ninja Gaiden II looks terrific, and that's good enough for me. If you think a game that looks like this deserves marks up or down because of your technology fetish, do not pass go, and do not socialize with anyone who owns a Wii.

6. The camera sucks. I don't agree, and I've already explained why that's the case for me here.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Ninja Gaiden 2: You Can't Handle the Camera!

But really, you're meant to be trying to, and that's where I disconnect from the imminent deluge of reviewers about to penalize director Tomonobu Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden 2 for daring to up its own ante. I'm talking about a media myth that assumes the freeform camera in this series is fatally compromised, that it ought to be intelligent or clever or quick enough to anticipate then get in front of your every gymnastic maneuver on a finite 2D screen you can practically teleport across against dozens of enemies capable of doing the same. Telepathy and clairvoyance rolled into one, in other words.

Put another way, there's technically no way to perfectly track continuous, uncut action unfolding this fast. The world's best filmmakers couldn't do it without breaking up the shots. The conventional way to work around this in contemporary videogames involves sticking the camera somewhere high up with a wide-angle "lens" -- often some distance from the action -- then introducing exploitable compromises, like AI that won't wander outside the camera's field of view, or spots in ostensibly "open" 3D environments blocked by invisible barriers.

A freeform camera works around this problem by putting gamers in the director's seat, but introduces others, most contentious of all: directorial responsibility. Tradition stipulates that the camera should be the design team's responsibility, not the player's. I've always had a problem with that view. I see it as just one more place gaming consciously (or unconsciously) borrows too liberally from film. After all, in a movie, what's presented to you on a fixed swathe of wall space at 24 frames per second is 100% the director's responsibility.

Not so in games, and I submit to you that the camera in Ninja Gaiden 2 is in fact an improvement over the perched-in-place version found in its original Xbox predecessor. That's right, I said it, probably in contravention of everything you're about to read from every other critic who's going to tell you it's a spasmodic mess, that it gets lost behind walls or trapped in tight corners, and that it fixates on being precisely where you least need it in desperately frenetic situations.

I respectfully disagree. I think it's right where it's meant to be nearly all of the time. Why? Because that's exactly where I managed to keep it, and while I can't speak for anyone but myself, my theory's that the freely rotatable camera in Ninja Gaiden 2 is simply part of the overarching control mechanic you're intended to master. When you're in a plaza-sized area circled by enemies, you're meant to be working double-time to finesse the right thumbstick into place or keep it moving in sync with what your other thumb's up to sending Ryu twirling like the blade in a Cuisinart. Likewise, when you're in tight corridors, you have to set up Ryu's attacks (or manage his defense tactics) by fighting up or down the corridor (and using the right-trigger to instantly 180 the view) -- fighting "into the sides of the corridor" or leaping into corners is simply the wrong way to play things out.

Your job is to control both the layout and flow, in other words, not wait for the design team to lay things out for you like road stripes down some invisible highway. No Z-trigger gimmicks with easy lock-on cameras, no cheaply hamstrung AI that won't attack from any angle. Ninja Gaiden 2 isn't just about chaining buttons and timing countermoves and learning to read each enemy's telltale combo signs, it's also about directing yourself in a way that best suits your own unique play style.

Does that sound like a chore? Then you don't get what Team Ninja's up to, or maybe you do and you reject it, which is totally cool. But don't mistakenly assume Ninja Gaiden 2 works the way it works because of some wonky design accident, or that the requirement that you babysit the camera to manage the blizzard of activity you're unleashing onscreen at any given moment isn't unapologetically intentional.

Some games are exceptionally challenging, and I don't just mean the electronic kind. Anyone out there who can't ski? Can't snowboard? Can't pull a gazelle flip on a skateboard? Welcome to my world. But I can keep the camera in the right place in Ninja Gaiden 2, and I take full responsibility for all the hours spent practicing to keep it satisfyingly on the money every time.

Happy day-away-from-work-day, and I'll be back with plenty more to say about Team Ninja's in my opinion pretty darned fantastic slash-em-up when it hits stores tomorrow tomorrow (my bad mixing up the embargo and release dates -- Ninja Gaiden 2 actually ships next Tuesday, June 3).

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Atari Founder Claims Chip Already In PCs Will End Game Piracy

If I told you the answer to PC game piracy involved planting a "stealth encryption chip" in your PC that would really-really-no-kidding-this-time-really slam the door on hackers and dodgy file sharing outlets, what would you say? That's actually more or less what Atari founder Nolan Bushnell told conference attendees at Wedbush Morgan Securities' annual Management Access Conference, reports Gameindustry.biz.

According to Bushnell:

There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that are coming out now? What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world -- which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords -- which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem.

In Bushnell's view, the primary reason it'll work is because games are logistically completely different animals compared to movies and music "because games are so integrated with the code."

Color me skeptical, of course, as I know most or all of you'll be. We've seen scheme after scheme tried year after year, but nothing ever sticks, be it lack of standardization among key publishers or virus-like "rootkits" or compatibility-breaking, performance-throttling disc-based debacles like SafeDisc, SecuROM, and StarForce.

Even assuming (a) consumers accept this the way they "accepted" Microsoft's online activation process and subsequent validation tools for Windows, and (b) the chip's encrypted authentication algorithms are somehow threaded through the code, what's to stop people from creating "mod" chips or setting up mod shops? I don't know schnitzel about this TPM solution, but I do know that one of the biggest problems with securing encrypted data is that once it's decrypted, you can do anything with it. When was the last time you actually read the encrypted version of an email sent with PGP?

That's right -- around the same time you last played a game using only 1s and 0s.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Missing the Point: Games Are Narratives, Get Over It

There's a lot of talk on the inside these days about what it means to write about games with anything approaching insight and clarity. Most of this talk you don't hear about (or probably don't care to) because it comes off as overly personal, maybe even a little incestuous, sort of like the little water cooler chats you have at your place of business about what's right and wrong with the local universe. Talking about it in public, in any case, can seem a little like waving dirty laundry on the end of a stick.

Case in point, Newsweek's N'Gai Croal has a bone to pick with The New York Times, USA Today, The Associated Press, and more, when he opines on his games blog that

?games are not a fundamentally narrative medium; we all "see" games with our hands; we videogame journalists need to develop a critical vocabulary that will enable us to better explain the unique qualities of this art form.

And again, slightly later, where he says:

Mainstream critics must sum up an experience that's anywhere from six to 100 hours long-one that's fundamentally non-narrative, as we keep insisting--in the same amount of space or less that's devoted to 90-120-minute movie.

Now -- excuse me for a moment, I'm going to wave some of that laundry around -- I don't disagree for a nanosecond that game writers face a Sisyphean task trying to condense hundreds of hours of potential gameplay into something that conveys a helpful sense of what it's like to actually play a given game to readers in search of (a) purchasing advice, (b) insight, or (c) both. On this point, at least, Croal and I are in complete accord.

But we're less so on the issue of "space," and at complete loggerheads over the question of a game experience as non-narrative.

As any writer worth a dime knows (as well as readers who made it gasping and sputtering through IGN's word-soaked seven page review of GTA IV) word counts are our friends. Word counts hold us accountable. Anyone can blather on for a thousand (or ten thousand) words, but it takes exceptional talent to get the hook out in less than five- or three-hundred. Railing against the crass commercialism of a media that puts its print-to-news ratio at something like 60-40 or 70-30 is totally cool, but intimating that games writing needs more space than reviews of "90-120-minute" movies is just wrong. Give Seth Schiesel (New York Times) two, three -- ten times the amount of space to somehow "convey the gameplay experience" in that hallowed paper's print version and you only pander to an increasingly small group of propellerheads, i.e. the less-than-five-percent of you who care enough to come out and raise a ruckus.

Hey, I count myself in the latter group, and I can't stand to read chapter-length missives on blogs by writers whose lame attempts at conveying "gameplay (but which reads like "first-person-meta-fiction") sound like they're more interested in foisting introspective blather on their audiences than simply getting their insights out. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it'd all be okay if only we had better writers. I'm saying our entertainments come in all shapes and sizes and chronometric lengths, and that the most sophisticated games we play in virtual spheres today aren't so different from the ones we played as kids throwing footballs, hiding behind trees, or toting plastic guns around backyards we'd re-imagined into distant otherworldly landscapes.

While word counts can certainly be abused by editors who can't see the difference between Tetris and Oblivion, having space constraints for games that correspond to wildly diverse mediums like film, books, and music, is only the enemy of lazy or just plain bad writing.

As for the other point about games as non-narrative, let's go with Dictionary.com's rendition of "narrative" as "a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious." And let me just jump in, both feet in the water, and state unequivocally that I think games are as purely narrative-driven as any entertainment medium in the history of human civilization. Just, you know, so there's no doubt about where I stand. And the reason I say so is pretty elementary: I subscribe to the theory which posits that on a fundamental level, each one of us "re-reads" the experience we're having, on-the-fly, no two ways about it. And in that crucially important sense, that we therefore create a narrative every time we play a game that describes our journey.

Test the theory. Tell me about Grand Theft Auto IV. I'll probably get one of two responses. Either you'll describe the game's technical merits (or shortcomings) as in visuals, controls, list of things you can do or places you can go, etc., or you'll tell me, as in narrate, what you actually did while playing. Did you think you weren't narrating to yourself on-the-fly while playing? Did you think that narration only happens in retrospect? Think again.

I like the way an old mentor puts it here best, when he writes:

Everyone's a storyteller. Walk past a group of kids, and you'll almost always hear one of them telling the others a story ("And he's there...and she's there..."). Jokes are stories. Telling someone about your day is a story. Recalling the details of a traffic accident is a story. Evidence suggests even prehistoric people told stories. There seems to be a neverending need for people to exchange stories, to define our world and our selves with narrative.

Sure, games aren't merely movie. They're more than just sequentially deterministic images projected against the back of our retinas in deliberate sequence. But there's a false sense out there coming from those who've never picked up a theory book, for instance, or who think theory's just a fetish for academic elitists, that we need to somehow create a new language that accommodates games, despite the fact that we already largely have one, even if it's "distinctiveness" is more technical than theoretical.

What's more, games borrow hugely and increasingly from other mediums. The reason Grand Theft Auto IV is what it is today has more to do with a design aesthetic that privileges those other so-called "narrative" mediums over plotless puzzle-like gameplay. Travel back with me to 1997: The original GTA was basically a driving-based, level-shackled, crude economic simulation, i.e. no story to speak of. GTA IV's story, by contrast -- even the story you make up as you run around and poke the world in a thousand different ways -- still owes more to Georges Melies and the Lumiere brothers and even something as seemingly trivial as "Who Killed Harlowe Thromby?" than some magical, mystical paradigm shift that occurs when you pick up a game controller.

I'm not saying games aren't different in important ways from books and film and music and painted/drawn/photographic art, or that we don't need to identify the differences and ambiguous spaces between games and other mediums. Sure we do. Those difference matter. We also deserve to have the conversation about games as an art form without old-media elitists dismissing the possibility on the one side and easily worn-out pundits caviling about having the discussion in the first place on the other. But painting with a broad brush about "space" and "narrative" isn't how we're going to get there, because in the end, words do matter, and those two hinder more than help to clarify the debate.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Guy Rigs Limited Edition GTA IV Case as Mini-ITX PC

Toilets, water bongs, teddy bears, old cassette players, pyramids, even stacks of LEGO blocks = just a few of the things you've used to "extreme" mod your PC gear over the years. Add a GTA IV limited edition metal "safety deposit" box converted into a mini-ITX PC the size of a thick hardcover book to the party.

Mark Harris cobbled it together during downtempo bits at work, according to game site CVG noting that he wound up with a limited edition box because he neglected to pre-order the game.

No longer safe to stash cash in, but probably worth a bundle if/when this guy opts to sell the thing on Ebay?

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Nintendo: Wii Thumps PS2's Software Sales Record

Dissecting sales figures can be a little like making sense of a gyrating Rubik's Cube. Case in point: Nintendo 's just claimed it beat Sony's 18 month sales record after tipping past 50 million games sold on or around May 19, 2008. By comparison, claims Nintendo, Sony only sold around 42 million its first 18 month at bat.

While that may be true, it misleadingly suggests the Wii's winning the software war, which it isn't. In fact, Microsoft's Xbox 360 continues to outsell the Wii in year over year totals. That's the case even if you count the 11.2 million "sales" of the system's bundled Wii Sports game, which Nintendo keeps claiming (somewhat disingenuously, I say) as part of the deal.

In 2007 in the U.S., Microsoft undershot Nintendo by around 2.1 million in consoles sales, but in fact outsold Nintendo by a whopping 10.6 million in software sales. In 2008, Microsoft's under Nintendo by about 1.2 million consoles, but still ahead (though less assuredly) by around a million in software units. We've yet to see the full extent of the impact Grand Theft Auto IV's going to have on 2008's numbers, but weekly sales have the 360 version alone handily beating Mario Kart Wii and Wii Sports as we roll through May. Add the Wii Fit and Ninja Gaiden 2 for the 360 to the mix and you've got an interesting summer looming.

On the other hand, you have to hand it to Nintendo for closing the distance with Microsoft so far this year, especially in the U.S. where Microsoft still retains the hardware install base edge, something it bragged about misleadingly last week. I guess turnabout's fair play.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Guitar Hero World Tour Readies Rock Band Salvo

Flex your fingers and strap on your mini-Gibsons, and while you're at it, how about some vocals and drums on the side? Tip your fingerpicks, lighters, and rattails to Guitar Hero World Tour, technically fifth in the series, though not adding bass, contrary to reports written by people who apparently missed the last few.

Check the new promotional video:

What do you get? "The Guitar Hero experience reinvented!" screams the unintentionally silly video, which amounts to a mic (just a mic, nothing special about it) along with "the most realistic drums" in the universe...or at least the universe according to music conjured with toys and the aid of tender-loving tech. Actually that last bit's modestly less true of Guitar Hero World Tour, which adds the option to "record and release your own singles." What that exactly means isn't entirely clear yet, but assume it entails more than just karaoke-style MP3s.

The drums are actually starting to look a little intimidating. Cool, but you know, maybe a little too realistic. We're talking pedal bass, snare, toms, and two, count them two crash cymbals. I think one user on the boards summed up my reaction with:

"Great, even harder drums to learn how to play."

Looks like five on top (could be six, it's hard to see) as opposed to Rock Band's four, which shouldn't be terrible if you're willing to cook a beat on easy. I just hope they're sturdier than the flimsy tubes that support the Rock Band set.

You can almost hear the competition at MTV/Harmonix (Rock Band) and Konami (Rock Revolution) responding in raspy Ron-Perlman-ese: "War, war never changes." War it is, and the battle for best band-in-a-box continues when Konami and RedOctane drop their salvos this fall.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Free Radical's Haze: A Hazy Shade of Blah

At the very end of Free Radical's PlayStation 3 shooter Haze, there's a moment where you're given to think for fleeting seconds that part of the team responsible for Nintendo's GoldenEye 007 may yet pop the lid off your boxed expectations. But then it's gone, the credits roll, and you're left sourly shaking your fist at the screen. It's a moment that stands on the shoulders of dozens, places in the story where the writers delve a spade's length deeper than Halo's Master Chief's or Crysis's Nomad have the capacity to. But all for naught, since your ability to express your will within the game is reduced to dotting i's and crossing t's, slinging unimaginative weapons and checking "run-here, push-that" objectives off spoon-fed lists.

Haze launches like a frat-house wingding with firearms, a boo-yah bash that momentarily recalls the Huey assault beach scene in Apocalypse Now (if you linger on the deck of your "land-carrer" long enough, you'll even spot a couple yahoos mucking up the "napalm" line). But then it crawls behind the curtains of guerilla aphorisms and improbable rebel military prowess (rebels with inferior numbers and technology) teasing autonomy, then reseating your shackles. It's a design theme exemplified by moments where the game grabs your head and packs your weapon away so it can drag you through increasingly flimsy story exposition, or to simply ensure -- vexingly -- that opponents you're pursuing always manage to slip away.

That's not to say Haze's problems are merely concept-level. As a straight-up shooter, it exhibits all the hallmarks of a design team aiming for the bottom of the yardstick. If someone pulled together a lexicon of shooter cliches, Haze could be the visual companion piece. Race a vehicle through a minefield, wend linearly through a listing ship until you've exhausted all possible design space, raze a village, escort a missile carrier, and drag gatling crosshairs around 90 degrees of open air to pick off ground targets and punish a dim-bulb pursuing gunship. After you battle across an enormous steel bridge, you're tasked with crawling along its underbelly -- all the way to the side you came in on -- to trip explosives. Doesn't matter if you've already cleared the bridge of enemies, top-to-bottom, either, because they'll "teleport" right back in droves to patch the game's crippled design philosophy.

The mechanics feel flipped around, too. The least interesting one -- Shane?s temporary ability as a corporate merc to inject himself with a drug called Nectar that helps him power through areas -- dovetails with the introductory tactics. But when the more inventive stuff shows up after he defects to a rebel insurgency and gains the ability to play dead, set traps, scavenge ammo, and make grenades, it's crippled by lazy level design and dumb AI. It?s possible to booby-trap areas, for instance, but since the AI never pokes around suspiciously, there's never reason to bother.

And so it goes, for about seven or eight hours. Multiplayer turns in six joyless maps with three parochial deathmatch/team-assault modes. Even the gunplay's drab. Enemies on both sides aim like they've never held a weapon in their lives. Most of the time you can power along by charging right through enfilade fire and popping out in front of bad guys and gun-butting them to the ground. And Haze won't even let you fight in close quarters with your squad-mates until the very end, because they seem to find their way into your line of fire like moths to a bug zapper. Tanks and enemy airships are fodder too, since they have no apparent segmentation or functional detail to target, meaning you can just lob rockets in their general direction and pound away until they buckle under.

"They don't make 'em like they used to" is usually said with a certain amount of nostalgic justification in any medium save gaming. Haze plays like something even less capable than the kind of shooter they used to make over a decade ago.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

AMD Got Game? New Initiative Too Murky to Tell

Yesterday AMD announced the next phase in its ploy to throw mainstream PC gaming a life preserver by righting all the wrongs foisted on us courtesy the PC's propellerhead legacy of enthusiast widgets, flexible standards, and fuzzy math. Branding it a "consumer information scheme" designed to make buying a PC as easy as picking up an HDTV (anything but easy, incidentally) AMD's planning to slap yet another sticker on computers that have been right and properly optimized "with the right graphic and processor components" for "cutting-edge" gaming. The logo will reputedly validate the PC's ability to play all tested games "the way they were intended -- all out."

Bold words. The implication based on the press release is that someone buying an AMD Game! branded PC will be able to pop a game like Crysis or Unreal Tournament III into their rig, fire it up at "developer intended" settings, then have a smooth average 30 fps+ play experience.

How's AMD pull that off? For starters, they divide their branding scheme into two sets of system requirements:

AMD Game! Ultra

- AMD Phenom X4 9650 processor
- 2GB DDR2 system memory
- ATI Radeon HS 3870 graphics
- AMD 770 chipset

AMD Game!

- AMD Athlon X2 processor 5600+
- 2GB DDR2 system memory
- ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics
- AMD 770 chipset or NVIDIA nForce 500 series chipset

According to Anandtech, AMD came up with those requirements by running various internal benchmarks on Quake Wars, Half Life 2 Episode 2, World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, Sins of a Solar Empire, Command & Conquer 3, The Sims 2, and Zoo Tycoon 2 with the following minimum stipulations:

AMD GAME! Ultra

Runs at 1600 x 1200, default settings, above 30 fps (average frame rate)

AMD GAME!

Runs at 1280 x 1024, default settings, above 30 fps (average frame rate)

My thoughts...

1. Turns out "developer-intended" and "AMD-defined" are -- surprise! -- not necessarily the same thing. A game's "default" settings are nowadays established dynamically at the time a game is first run. One rig's "default" shadows-water-sky-on is another rig's "default" everything-off-or-bust. Crysis defaults to mostly "low" settings on my Macbook Pro in Boot Camp, but all "high" settings on my tower with an Intel 3 Ghz quad-core processor and SLI GeForce 8800 GTXs. I probably don't need to point out to enthusiasts how much Crytek's sandbox-shooter changes, visuals-to-physics-to-gameplay-mechanics, when you monkey with those settings. Playing Crysis on "low" or even "medium" detail settings is starkly different from playing it at "high" or "maximum." So right off the plate, we have a serious semantics snafu.

2. The AMD Game! Ultra specs are decent -- not enthusiast-caliber decent -- but arguably mainstream decent. I can see a Phenom X4 9650 with an ATI Radeon HD 3870 pulling its weight with...well, say games that aren't Crysis, and certainly World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online with DX10 disabled. But the Athlon X2 5600+ and Radeon HD 3650 are kind of performance-crippled for mainstream use, if by mainstream we mean someone with enthusiast-level performance demands but without enthusiast-level knowledge and/or research patience.

3. Tying industry benchmarks to a single company as a means of simplifying the buyer experience is riddled with political as well as logistical problems. You don't let one football team define the rules for the rest of the league. Moreover, Intel and NVIDIA aren't going to stand idly by and let AMD hog all the rules. And when NVIDIA and Intel grow their own "simplification" initiatives, we'll be in an even bigger mess of logos, acronyms, and dubious standards. Which brings me to...

4. Without a truly independent standard that all the key players including developers agree and stick to, there's simply no way to predict game performance and marry that appreciably to general consumer demographics. It's frankly delusional to think otherwise (though I recognize "delusional" and "marketing campaign" often go hand in hand). Exacerbating the disconnect, developers are still trying zealously to crack blackboards instead of simply making interesting, broadly appealing games. PC game developers today are still largely adolescent in scope, bragging about George-Lucas-like special effects and physics and A.I. metrics designed to punish the bejesus out of contemporaneously bleeding edge kit and make a few lizard-brain enthusiasts exhale a collective "Whoa!" without a thought to the other 95% of PC gaming's increasingly sophisticated (socially, politically, etc.) audience. Getting everyone involved in this industry to play nice together is still virtually impossible, and that problematizes every aspect of these "meta" metric initiatives.

5. I thought the idea was to strip away layers of complexity, not create new ones. How does dividing everything into two tiers (AMD Game! and AMD Game! Ultra) help? Enthusiasts won't pay attention, they'll just look at the specs and do their own research, while casual gamers won't know and could probably care less about the difference between "AMD" and "Intel," so I guess that leaves AMD's estimated 53 million "mainstreamers" (20% of the PCGA's estimated 263 million total PC gamers) to carry the water. But will they?

A mainstream players is loosely defined (by AMD) as someone whose "demand" for higher-end games has outpaced his or her "awareness" of what's necessary to make it happen. Mainstreamers aren't as savvy as enthusiasts, but they're not incapable of spotting the subtler differences between different game settings. They want the same experience their DIY buddy's having playing Crysis on a homebrew monster without the time-gobbling research.

6. What happens when the existing specs for AMD Game! or AMD Game! Ultra are obsolete? Where's the timescale? The upgrade plan?

7. AMD's official web presence for AMD Game! reads like a cookbook without quantities. We're told AMD "regularly tests AMD and third-party hardware and software in 'real-world' game scenarios," but offered little more than a handful of sunny, vapid quotes from "industry supporters" some AMD PR rep presumably requested each company provide for the site's official launch. (Just the logos would have done fine here, AMD.) The "tested components" page is particularly onerous, a contextless laundry list of PC parts from cases to power supplies to game controllers that reads like a sales catalog, and nothing even vaguely approaching a "here's what you get if you combine this and this and this" checklist. Put another way, if I hit AMD's site with only passing PC component knowledge, but wanting to play Lord of the Rings Online pimped out, I wouldn't have the first clue where to begin or what to buy.

Verdict: Another lame pseudo-marketing bid by a widget (CPUs, GPUs) manufacturer to reposition itself as a primary player in an increasingly amorphous and competitively unpredictable space (PC gaming) by boxing out meaningless system configurations that don't really tell anyone in any of AMD's three user tiers anything bankable.

My proposal: Drop the pandering industry quotes, burn the meaningless online vendor catalog, excise the vacuous lofty rhetoric, then re-label the whole thing AMD Game! Mainstream and AMD Game! Casual (just forget about fiercely independent enthusiasts, they'll only balk if you try to create a category that includes them).

AMD Game! Mainstream = specifications for AMD Game! Ultra

AMD Game! Casual = all integrated components, a slight downgrade from the AMD Game! specs

And since this isn't really an attempt to create an objective industry standard, drop that pretense altogether and pitch this as AMD's attempt to battle back against the price/performance tidal wave NVIDIA and Intel have been punching up since the debut of the Core 2 Duo and 7800/8800 graphics series respectively.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Monday Gamewatch Redux

Technically Age of Conan was released in the not-quite-weekly nether space otherwise known as "the week-end" to a handful of customers who pre-ordered the game. The general retail launch actually lands tomorrow, extending Funcom's Hyborian MMORPG with "Real Combat" and DX10 support (not in the shipping version, apparently) to the unexpectedly keen multitudes.

You've probably read about this game somewhere along the way, another combat-heavy medieval-fantasy milieu with notable differences in its combat mechanics and player content creation in the guise of erectable cities and city-versus-city warmongering. Funcom calls its combat system "Real Combat," or marketing-speak for its allegedly more fleshed out tactical melee that eschews D&D's round-based approach in favor of branching, targeted swings and button-driven combos, a setup that sounds a smidgen like what CD Projekt was up to in The Witcher, only with a six-directional (six ways to swing your weapon) angle.

Fore!!!

Age of Conan also counters the stereotype of static vistas by allowing players to cooperatively construct gigantic cities rung round by walls, towers, and catapults to protect player-owned locales like pubs and shops. Protect from other players? Not just your friends and strangers, but AI-controlled groups too. That's right, the AI in Age of Conan will reputedly build its own cities and attack yours if the stars and planets (and algorithmic mathematics) so align.

For more, have a look 'round the game's official site, or keep an eyeball trained on the official forums for the incoming flurry of first impressions.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Monday Gamewatch

This week: Sink your pearly whites into a Gothic vampire adventure, a global domination strategy puzzler, or a souped-up retread of Capcom's grimly glacial bug-busting shooter. Dates listed are ship-to-store.

Tuesday

Dracula: Origin. A-vamping you will go in this Gothic reconsideration of everyone's second favorite vampire (you know, after Buffy, and yes I hope you're reading Season Eight). Credit the adventure genre for slinking along durably if invisibly since seeming swan songs like Ragnar Tornquist's The Longest Journey and Benoit Sokal's Syberia. And credit international development studio Frogwares for helping the genre maintain a pulse with games like Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, and now Dracula: Origin. In Origin, you control Dracula as well as his nemesis Van Helsing in a tale that sprawls from London to Egypt, Austria to Transylvania (which, by the way, is still a word and a historical region even if it's no longer an autonomous principality, Dear Apple-Macbook-Pro-spell-checker). Sure, Origin's another 3D-characters-against-2D-backdrops point-and-clicker, but there's something about hand-drawn art that still looks better than the slickest 360-degree 3D renders.

Supreme Ruler 2020. The original Supreme Ruler was a text-based economic strategy game reaching back a quarter-centennial, i.e. my highfalutin check-your-mileage way of saying 1983. In 2005, developer Battlegoat Studios released Supreme Ruler 2010, a "military, economic, and diplomatic" hybrid real-time / turn-based strategy game most critics seemed to like with a few caveats about poor A.I. and piles of visual blah. Supreme Ruler 2020 updates the audio-visuals and tweaks the AI and interface, theoretically addressing the two biggest complaints about 2010.

Friday

Lost Planet Extreme Colonies Edition. Did you ever see the ads they ran for Lost Planet on TV at the tail end of 2006? Forbes reported that publisher Capcom spent $20 million to make this thing plus another $20 million to market it. Maybe that explains the company's attempt to foist a "gold" version of this middling shooter on the masses. The "Colonies Edition" adds new solo-play scoring modes, new multiplayer maps, a Human vs. Akrid (the bugs) multiplayer mode, new creatures and weapons, and the option to play as one of the original's secondary characters. The only reason I'd consider picking this one up, and it's actually a pretty good one: Cross-platform support, finally allowing Xbox 360 and PC owners to square off in glare-lit ice fields with grappling hooks and plasma grenades.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

6 Things April's Gaming Numbers Won't Tell You

For starters, consider that (1) Sony's PS2 may have outsold its PS3 by a whopping 4 million units in part because Nintendo's Wii kept the candle burning, officially rejecting the cultural conviction that legacy processing power is necessarily "lesser." To the extent that's true, Sony may owe Nintendo a few karmic lunches.

(2) Or perhaps Nintendo owes Sony. Would we even have the Wii Remote without the Eye Toy? I know there's no hard causal link between the development of one or the other, but the Eye Toy was the first time we saw pictures of kids up on their feet and flailing around in front of TV screens en masse. No one talks about that, but it's true. And important for the same reasons it's worth remembering that fully textured first-person games like Origin's Ultima Underworld came well before id's Doom, as well as Looking Glass's System Shock before id's Quake.

(3) Sony sold 13.73 million PS2s versus 9.24 million PS3s for the annual sales period ending March 31, 2008. Which is perhaps what you get for trying to foist a $400-$500 hardware brick on consumers used to paying less than half that for a game system (Blu-ray or no). But never mind that -- who bought all those PS2s? As in who (what demographic, kids to tweens to parents) and where, as in where in the world? How many PS2 sales occurred in the U.S., Europe, and Japan versus countries with less developed economies?

(4) Does anyone doubt the DS and PSP are "consoles"? I mean in the sense that the tag "handheld" can be misleading, carrying with it a sense that you're somehow "compromising" in quality and substance. Think about it. The DS is roughly on par with the Nintendo 64 in terms of processing power (no slouch of a game system, that) and the PSP is analogous to Sony's PS2, a system that just outsold its considerably brawnier new sibling by over 4 million units. The DS costs $130, which is what systems like the SNES and Sega Genesis used to sell for at their height and with bundled games when I managed a Software Etc. in the mid 1990s. And the PSP without a game goes for $170, $40 more than the PS2 (They even sell component video hookups that let you run your PSP through a TV.) You can hold these little powerhouses in your hand, sure, but more and more, we're toting miniature "consoles" around in our pockets.

The power of a Nintendo 64 in your palm, with dual-screen and touchable stylus-driven innovations.

(5) Another way to look at that last one. Instead of assuming the DS and PSP are merely complementary game systems (to a Wii or 360 or PS3), how about asking how many PS3 and Xbox 360 sales are in fact lost entirely to booming sales of Nintendo and Sony's "handhelds"? In other words, how many of you bought a DS or PSP and decided "That's it, that's all I need"?

(6) Sony's software numbers in April, which the company claims represents "year-over-year growth of 410%," were finally in line with its hardware sales, suggesting that the system finally had a month where gaming -- not for-use-as-a-Blu-ray-player sales -- carried much of the water. Expect that trend to continue through May into the summer between Grand Theft Auto IV and upcoming exclusives like Metal Gear Solid 4. Exclusive or no, GTA IV may go on the books as the game that finally "launched" the PS3.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

NPD: GTA IV Fastest Selling Game Ever, Nintendo Still Bulldozes Competition

April can be the cruelest month, but not if you're Nintendo, which managed to sell 714,000 Wiis bolstered by hot-ticket games like Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros Brawl, and Wii Play. Also not if you're Rockstar, whose Grand Theft Auto IV rocked the slots to become the fastest selling video game in history.

On the whole, the video game market hauled in a whopping $1.23 billion, a 47 percent increase over the same period last year.

"The industry continues to set a blistering sales pace, and now shows a year-to-date increase of 31% over last year's record-setting revenues," commented NPD analyst Anita Frazier. "This is the first month in many that we've seen a decrease in portable hardware and software sales, but it's important to remember that this year, the Easter holiday fell in March as compared to April in 2007." Frazier added that April 2007 and March 2008 saw portable sales rise in part due to the holiday timing.

The numbers...

Hardware

714k - Wii
415k - DS
193k - PSP
188k - Xbox 360
187k - PlayStation 3
124k - PlayStation 2

What's important:

- NPD's Frazier expressed surprise that the 360 and PS3 sales of GTA IV weren't even higher. "It was surprising not to see bigger hardware sales for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 given the release of GTA IV," she said. "However, since the game was only in the market for 5 days during this reporting period, that sales lift could very well be evident in May data."

- Nintendo, Nintendo, Nintendo. Have you heard about these guys? Get ready to hear even more, with Rock Band and Wii Fit around the corner. "As retail supplies become more plentiful we're seeing continued sales strength of Wii hardware," said NPD's Frazier. "With a couple of blockbuster games already in the market this year, and with Wii Fit and Rock Band still to come in the next two months, the pipeline of content to continue to drive hardware acquisition looks very good."

Software

1.85m - GTA IV (360)
1.12m - Mario Kart (Wii)
1.00m - GTA IV (PS3)
360k - Wii Play (Wii)
326k - Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
224k - Gran Turismo 5: Prologue (PS3)
202k - Pokemon MD: Explorers of Darkness (DS)
202k - Pokemon MD: Explorers of Time (DS)
152k - Guitar Hero III (Wii)
141k - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (360)

What's important:

- Sony finally has two titles in the top ten, Gran Turismo 5 and GTA IV, making April the first month in as long as I can remember that you can say Sony's hardware sales were probably predominantly software (as opposed to Blu-ray) driven

- We won't really know the full GTA IV story until next month, since the game went on sale April 29, and NPD's numbers only reflect two days worth of sales. But in just 48 hours, "GTA IV captured two of the three top game spots, realizing an attach rate of 20% to the combined Xbox 360 and PS3 install bases," said NPD's Frazier. "With only 5 days at retail during the reporting month, GTA IV is one of the fastest-selling titles in video games history." Clearly the 360 version soared out of the gate, and crucial retailers like GameStop have claimed something like 64 percent of GTA IV sales went to the 360 during the game's first week at bat. My guess is we'll see a 60/40 split, but -- importantly -- it may be a 60/40 split the other way when we look back at sales of the game to existing owners and sales to first time console buyers.

- Did you hear Nintendo released a new version of Mario Kart for the Wii? I know, the press pretty much ignored Nintendo's latest banana-peel-lobbing racer, but you certainly didn't. All 1.12 million of you, anyway, who helped Mario Kart go on to outsell GTA IV on the PS3. (How's "by 120,000" banana peels spin you, Sony?) Said NPD's Frazier: "In a classic example of counter-programming, Mario Kart for the Wii captured the second-highest game sales for the month."

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Sony: 4Q Profits Surge, PlayStation 3 Losses Dwindle

Shrugging off losses a year ago, Sony capped its Blu-ray sales driven PS3 comeback in recent months by posting a $277 million profit for its fourth fiscal quarter on Wednesday. Full year profits tripled to a company record $3.5 billion, and the company pulled in 29 billion yen ($276 million) for the January-March period, a strong reversal of its 67.6 billion yen ($647 million) losses during the same period a year ago.

Interestingly, while sales were solid in LCDs, digital cameras, and Vaio computers, they declined in mobile phones, CRTs, and -- surprise! -- sales of the PS2. Surprise, I say, because even though it's outlived and outsold every other console I can think of pretty much ever, NPD's still been reporting U.S. sales of around 200k units a month. That's down from a year ago, and there's no arresting the PS2's descent from orbit, but you really have to hand it to Sony's eight-year-old scrapper. I remember playing SSX, Dynasty Warriors 2, Kessen, Eternal Ring, Madden NFL 2001, Summoner, and TimeSplitters back in November 2000 and with the exception of SSX, which played great, and Madden, which at least looked as much, wondering "That's it Sony? That all you got?" And here we are, nearly eight years later, staring at over 127 million PS2s sold worldwide.

Chances of the PS3 replicating that success? I'd say today almost zero. The PS3's chugging along at 12.6 million units worldwide since its late 2006 launch. It'll be lucky to sell half as many systems by the time the PS4 shows up (as early as 2010, by the way). Sony predicts it'll sell another 10 million PS3s for the fiscal year through March 2009. That would make around 23 million. Compare that to the Xbox 360's 19 million and Wii's 26 million already today.

The good news (for Sony) is that the company seems to have its operating costs in hand. Operating losses were improved, from 113 billion yen ($1.1 billion) a year ago to just 4.7 billion yen ($44.7 million) this quarter. That's largely the result of Sony getting its PS3 losses under control.

Speaking of PS3 losses, The Guardian's Jack Schofield speculates Sony may be losing $260 per PS3 based on reverse engineering Sony's figures in the context of its quarterly earnings report:

On Sony's own figures, the games division made a loss of $130 for each PlayStation 3 shipped. Let's assume that it's making pots of money on the PSP and the PlayStation 2: the PS2 is now hugely profitable and still sells more games than anything else. These two platforms could easily have made a profit of $1.2bn in the year. In that case, the total PS3 loss would have been $2.4bn shared between 9.24m PS3 consoles, or $260 per PS3 -- including any attached Sony games. Hm, is that a reasonable guess or not?

Of course we already speculated as much back in November 2006, though Nikko Citigroup suggested in January this year that Sony may have halved its production costs, from $800 down to $400 per unit (and who knows, perhaps less than that five month later).

Note that Sony's openly warning it'll actually take a 20 percent spill later this year due partially to the strengthening yen. As the yen gets stronger, export costs are likely to brutalize international Japanese manufacturers.

What's it all mean for you at the sales counter? According to Lazard Capital analyst Colin Sebastian (by way of Next Generation) Sony management is now considerably less enthused about a PS3 price cut in 2008.

During its earnings call, Sony management indicated the company is now more focused on achieving profitability in the PlayStation segment and rolling out online services (e.g., PlayStation Home) rather than chasing unit market share vs. Microsoft and Nintendo.

Importantly, management comments also suggest that a price cut is less likely on the PS3 this year, at least in the near term.

$400 for the entry-level PS3 for the next seven months? Don't bet on it. Speculation about price cuts on a in-no-way-cheap $400 piece of hardware can put buyers into standby mode, so of course Sony's going to ix-nay an ut-cay at the analyst / media level. Sony may in fact be thinking it can rest on its Blu-ray laurels and hit that "10 million sold" number based on video sales alone. That would be a mistake, especially with game sales poised to bypass video sales (it's already blown past film) in the near future.

That said, I don't think there's much chance the price on at least one of the models won't drop in time for the holiday season 2008. A $300 or even $350 40GB PS3 could put Sony past Microsoft at a point where coming in second (to Nintendo's Wii) is just as important as finishing first.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

EA Springs "Spring Break" Games, Posts $454 Million Loss

You know how E3's dead (long live E3!) and all the game publishers were supposed to veer off and stage their own annual "personalized" media events? Well EA held its annual "Spring Break" games showcase on Monday night in San Francisco, then followed with a modestly celebratory fourth quarterly earnings call last night.

First up, the games...

BattleForge (PC, RTS/CCG). Take an online PC real-time strategy game and mash it with a collectible card mechanic you use to build your own personal army. Everyone's calling it "Warcraft meets Magic: The Gathering" which makes it sound derivative, but you'll note that developer EA Phenomic were the guys who did the whole SpellForce hybrid RPG/RTS series, something that especially in SpellForce 2's case came off pretty impressively as far as I was concerned. With BattleForge, resource management is out, building a deck of 20 tradable cards by playing through a campaign is in. Stir with up to 12 players cooperatively (or not) pimping their decks by walloping Big Bads in battle. ETA: Q4 2008

Dead Space (PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Third-Person Shooter). Think Ridley Scott's Alien meets John Carpenter's The Thing with a dusting of Doom and a dash of Resident Evil to make Dead Space EA's shot at a "next-gen survival horror" game. Take a space engineer named after two of our greatest legacy sci-fi writers (Clarke, Asimov) and send him after the oldest hook in the book: An interstellar freighter issuing a distress call. What do you get? Space Hulk, I'm betting, which if you sabe "Warhammer 40k" means corridor crawl with lots of icky aliens-ate-my-companion's-brain moments and requisite plot shockers to keep things fresh. ETA: October 2008

Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360, PC, Survival Horror). It's -- gasp! -- another Zombie survival horror shooter! This one makes me think Gauntlet meets 28 Days Later through a Counter-Strike fishbowl (darkly, if also humorously). Gauntlet? Only in the sense that four human players cooperatively muscle through Mongolian throngs of Infected undead with splatter-ific zeal. Four additional players can pop in to control Infected "bosses" with special abilities, for up to eight-way neck-gnawing, bullet-clawing brawls. An "AI director" generates the population dynamically each time you play through the game to thwart predictability. It also scales the difficulty based on how well (or poorly) you're doing. According to Valve's Doug Lombardi, Left 4 Dead is the developer's attempt to do for cooperative gaming what Counter-Strike did for online multiplayer back in 1999. ETA: Q3 2008

Skate It (DS, Wii, "Extreme" Sports). Not a new game or a sequel, but rather an old one (2007's Skate, in fact) ported to the DS and repackaged for the Wii. The Wii version adds Wii Balance Board as well as 480p and widescreen support. The board won't be required, of course, and you can get by just fine using the Wii Remote to push forward, tilt left and right, or quickly "flick" your wrist to pull off a tricksy "extreme" move without buckling on a single elbow- or knee-pad. ETA: September 2008

Also...

Battlefield: Bad Company. The Battlefield series gets a "Commandos" style team-play world you can blow to smithereens, buildings to vehicles to vegetation (and more). Also, Battlefield Heroes, a cartoony action shooter that dishes out tickets and flags and pits two teams (national army, royal army) against each other in what looks to be classic Battlefield-style multiplayer done light.

- Warhammer Online. Or "World of Warhammer," as it's being politely referred to by some of us. Looks very pretty. Also monotonously combat-centric, which would make it, well, like any other MMORPG, just with Games Workshop's IP slathered everywhere. I'm a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay fan, so I'll probably play it whatever its genre cliches.

- Rock Band for Wii. Soon to be the bestselling version of MTV/Harmonix's game forever and ever amen. I mean, duh, right?

- Roy Taylor, the refreshingly forthright Nvidia VP of Content Relations I interviewed in January speechified about the importance of PC gaming at the show. While I sympathize with his position, tell it to gamers who prefer parking their keisters in living room comfy chairs with groups of friends bathed in the electroluminescent flicker of giganto-flatscreens rung round by Dolby 5.1 surround sound. That's "prefers" over sitting in front of a much smaller desktop monitor in a hard-edged chair pushed up against a hard-edged desk in much the same not-so-comfy slumped-forward position too many of us enjoy for 10 or 12 hours a day playing the game of life called "Our Day Jobs." (Never mind Vista quirks and audio-video driver inconsistencies.) No, PC gaming isn't dead, but I don't know that we'll ever see it become what Nvidia's after, i.e. a staging ground for the 189 million GPUs Nvidia counts as its install base. Sure, that's a ton of untapped potential, but convince the 188 million who barely blinked when the ostensibly heaven-and-earth-moving Crysis shipped last year. We'll always have our World of Warcrafts and The Sims, but there's a reason developers are hopping mad to get their stuff onto consoles, and it has nothing at all to do with recent media sourness about PCs and gaming.

As for EA's earnings call, EA boss John Riccitiello had several mouthfuls to share, including:

In fiscal 2009, we expect to add $1 billion in non-GAAP revenue. In achieving this target, we will have added $2 billion to EA?s revenues between fiscal ?08 and fiscal ?09. This would be the most aggressive growth in EA?s history.

What's non-GAAP? Stands for "Non-Generally Accepted Account Principles." Something bean counters hate and CEOs like Riccitiello love, because it circumvents straightforward asset representation and attempts to "recognize the future value of new contracts." Yeah, I know, more creative repackaging. Or voodoo. You pick. Anyway, Riccitiello followed that with:

What gives me confidence in these targets? Simply put, my belief in our teams and the quality of the products we will be introducing in fiscal year ?09. Our label structure and newly energized publishing teams will be introducing the strongest title line-up in EA?s history, including: for EA Sports, Madden, our 20th anniversary edition, stepping forward with an entirely new way to play and learn the game involving a new holographic interface.

Holographic interface? Yeah, beats me too. Hey, at least it sounds like more than another boring roster update.

The "everyone's-talking-about-it" news? EA's $454 million loss on revenue increases up 19% to $3.7 billion. You can explain that number in part off EA's recent acquisition of Pandemic and BioWare (for $620 million), and overall, the company seems to be making money where it matters, so.

Me, I'm all eyes on Spore, the litmus test for PC gaming in 2008, as far as I'm concerned.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Impressions: LEGO Indiana Jones Demo for PC

I'm just back from leaping, rolling, tumbling, building, battling, and bullwhipping my way through the first level of Traveller's Tales' just-released LEGO Indiana Jones demo. The demo lets you play through the opening scene from the first movie, the sequence where Indy goes spelunking in a booby-trapped cave for a gold idol, goofs, then has to outrun a tunnel-sized boulder in what's arguably the most iconic scene of the series.

Roll-roll-roll your boulder gently down the cavern...

For better or worse (I say for better) LEGO Indy looks like it'll owe pretty much everything to LEGO Star Wars, and aside from the milieus, jokes, and a few of the special abilities, you'd swear you were playing the latter with whips and swords instead of lightsabers and grappling hooks. The first level gives you time to get reacquainted with the basics by roaming around outside the cave at leisure, swinging on vines, beating on plants and idols for LEGO bits, digging up chests, probing for sequestered collectibles, and of course building random stuff like bridges and boats. The humor's just as goofy, and while it's obviously skewed toward younger players, it's smart enough to elicit a chuckle or two from even this elder cynic, in particular a segment near the end where Belloq motions for the idol and Indy pulls something completely unexpected out of his bag.

"If only you'd attached my legs, I wouldn't be in this ridiculous position!"

Of course the demo exhibits a few of the problems that plagued the Star Wars games as well, namely places where the edges of areas aren't clearly delineated, making it easy to slip off into (literal) piecemeal oblivion. The fixed camera angles that sometimes sit punishingly low (skull-platform-dart sequence anyone?) don't help, though in the end they're probably the smarter compromise over a freely controllable camera, since the idea's to move fast and not preen over positioning.

Overall: At least one, leaning toward two thumbs up. Especially if you're looking for a breezy 30 minutes to kill, or want to try a few of the free mode characters (Henry Jones pulls out a briefcase, "Thuggie" throws swords, Jock whips out a wrench, Willie screams, etc.).

The "Dangerous Times" trailer that runs at the beginning of the demo.

I guess my only other criticism -- not of the demo, but the imminent full version -- would be the pointless political editing. Pulling the Nazis just seems like a mistake, and if anything, only reinforces their boogeymen mystique. Raiders of the Lost Ark is half as scary a film without them, and while kids under 10 probably won't care or notice either way, older gamers are just going to scratch their heads and wonder what led to replacing Nazis in the game with "an anonymous genocidal, occultist, trenchcoat-wearing master race." (Can you say six of one, half a dozen of the other?) Spielberg had no qualms poking fun at the Nazis, why should Traveller's Tales?

They were racist, fascist, cabalistic fist-waving lunatics, sure, but what better opportunity to lampoon than LEGO-fication?

The full version subtitled "The Original Adventures" ships in early June and lets you play through all three of the first films, as in only the first three. Meaning of course that a Crystal Skull sequel (and how about some Young Indiana Jones episodic content?) could be little more than a giant-killer-booby-trapped-boulder-roll away.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Dell Quashes U.S. Game PCs, Launches New Models in India

A little deceptively gloomy news this morning about Dell discontinuing four of its high-end XPS game PCs. Travis Hudson has a note in Today @ PC World about Dell's latest seemingly retrograde move, pointing out I think rightly that it was probably in some sense inevitable given redundancy in the company's high-end lineup with the acquisition of boutique PC manufacturer Alienware two years ago. Alienware, by contrast, recently debuted its Area-51 m17x 17" widescreen gaming notebook packing an Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU, 4GB DDR2 memory, dual SLI GeForce 8800M GTX GPUs, and up to a 1.5 terabyte (yes, terabyte) hard drive.

But wait a minute, did you know Dell literally just launched the XPS 730 H2C Edition gaming desktop and XPS M1730 notebook (AGEIA PhysX plus Logitech GamePanel LCD) in India? While the U.S. PC sales market has cooled in recent years, sales are actually up sharply in developing markets like India and the Asia-Pacific region. India's PC shipments alone shot up 20% in 2007 to 6.5 million, and sales of notebook PCs specifically were up by 81%, according to market researcher IDC. IDC in fact predicts a compounded annual growth rate in India PC sales of 20% over the next five years.

With all the negative speculation about consumer spending in the U.S. driven by flagging consumer confidence indices, it's only logical that Dell would clean house, so I wouldn't read too terribly much into the high-end model nixing. And watch what happens with Alienware next (at least on this side of the pond) for the rest of the story. If Alienware starts slashing and burning, then it's maybe time to get nervous. (Or, you know, move to India.)

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

PS3 Outsells 360 in April, GTA IV Sells 3.3 Million in Six Days, Predicts Analyst

Add to that US sales prediction overall game sales soaring 113 percent to $830 million for April courtesy Grand Theft Auto IV, Mario Kart Wii, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. An amazing April, in other words.

Riding high: Nintendo's Wii and DS cream the competition in Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter's figures with 600k and 550k in hardware sales respectively. Compare that to the PS3 (290k), Xbox 360 (275k), PSP (235k) and PS2 (160k). Ah yes, the tireless PS2. You can almost imagine the PS3 with its shamefully inconsistent PS2 backward compatibility features coming and going as the PS2 trundles on in the background to usher in the PS4.

Look at Pachter's numbers by brand, and you've got Nintendo on top by nearly half (1,150k), Sony in strong second place (685k), and Microsoft bringing up rears with a comparably anemic 275k. Would it behoove Microsoft to finally get in on the dedicated handheld game? I don't see why not. It's clear that market's nowhere close to saturated given DS and PSP sales trends in conjunction with general thoughts on consumer mobilization. I don't know about you, but I'm certainly playing more on the go than at any other point in my formerly-desk-locked-life. Whether Microsoft has the right stuff to fashion the coolest software, of course, is and probably will forever be the principal variable in that equation.

Following GTA IV's numbers can be a bit of a chore. After Variety reported that industry analysts were thinking the game would do $400 million in its first week off some 6 million units sold, Rockstar claimed GTA IV sold 3.6 million units worldwide on its first day of sales, generating revenue of $310 million. Pachter estimates U.S. numbers alone were 3.3 million units in the first six days, but the way that figures into worldwide revenue gets tricky because of the weak dollar, which made the retail price for GTA IV in Europe notably higher and inflated the $500 million worldwide number Take 2's claiming off 6 million copies sold in the seven days since the game was released on April 29.

According to Pachter, "The first week sell-through doesn?t change my view that lifetime sales [of GTA IV] will be approximately 18 million units, and doesn?t change my valuation of the company - still below $20 - meaning that EA?s offer still represents a premium to the intrinsic value of Take-Two." And according to Media By Numbers analyst Paul Dergarabedian (by way of Mercury News), GTA IV dovetailed with Iron Man (the film) to create in dollars spent "what may have been the biggest entertainment week ever." That's astonishing if it turns out to be true, buildup to or no. We'll know more after NPD drops its official numbers this Thursday.

What we do know: Halo 3's record was $300 million off 5 million units sold in a week. Any way you shake it, Take 2's epic crime opus easily muscled past Halo 3 by a million units and change to spare. The only thing as impressive, in my opinion: The Gran Turismo franchise, which broke 50 million units sold at the close of April 2008.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Monday Gamewatch

This week: Race 18 of Ford and Land Rover's toughest off-road trucks, 4x4s, and SUVs, or break out your armchair baseball caps and spittoons. Welcome to middle-May, PC gamers, where it's a great time to be outdoors and away from your computer as much as possible, as confirmed by this week's soporific lineup.

Tuesday

Ford Racing Offroad. The screenshots look a little 1995 Sega Rally for a contemporary racer, but maybe you've got a thing for off-road Ford and Land Rover trucks, 4X4s, and SUVs (or maybe Strategy First just needs a new screen-capture tech). You get 12 race types, three off road environments divvied into 24 tracks, a bunch of hidden routes, "pick up and play handling" (whatever that means), realtime damage and repair, rollovers like repair pods, time extensions, artifacts, and cash, and multiplayer split-screen racing (But not online? Who seriously plays two-chair PC split-screen anymore?). Also: I'm not sure how it's a special feature, but power-sliding to "throw powerful trucks around the tracks." Hey, it may not be Gran Turismo 5, but it's only twenty bucks.

Tardy:

Baseball Mogul 2008. Should have shipped Tuesday April 29th; now shipping Tuesday May 13th.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Xbox 360's New GPU: Jasper the Friendly Not-A-Ghost

Let's talk what's annoying about Microsoft's four-layer Intel-rific pee-cee-in-a-box. But first, fuggedabout all that "red ring of death" rumpus. After all, if your 360 croaks, you get a new one. Free. In a week, or at most, two. I'm double down and swinging steady with fixer-upper number three and believe it or not, pretty unruffled about the time I went empty handed. Hey, the replacements cost me nada, and you can't be too grumpy with a company that stands by its product with over a billion and change in warranty extensions and repair guarantees.

No, my beef with my 360 is currently that it's a roaring, blowing racket, like a smog-coughing city bus powering by outside an open window facing the street and cut into the side of a curbside flat. I'm talking leaf-blower, vacuum cleaner, answer-the-phone-in-the-other-room noisy. It makes my PC with dual Nvidia 8800 GTX video cards and an air-overclocked Intel "Penryn" QX9650 sound like the triple 120mm fans are whispering sweet lullabies. Once a game's good and running, my 360's vrooming like a surly Hoover you'll only tick off more with a pillow for a muzzle. I've tried sequestering it behind closed doors, but then I'm more or less cooking wood (or the rest of my A/V kit) and fretting about fire hazards. If you have a 360 -- especially if it's sitting inside an entertainment center, which, you know, is supposed to be what an entertainment center's for -- I know you know what I'm talking about.

Since the 360 debuted in late 2005, it's already enjoyed a CPU die shrink to 65nm (codenamed "Falcon") and while most pundits agree that shrink probably saved its bacon, the GPU's still been smoking along at 90 sizzling nanometers. Anyone with a smidgen of PC know-how knows it's the GPU that routinely muscles past 80C during gameplay, as opposed to an overclocked Intel CPU which, rigged properly, rarely pushes 60.

The incredible shrinking Xbox 360! Give it two or three more years and it'll finally be as cool and quiet and maybe even as tiny as a Nintendo Wii.

Meet Jasper. He's a 65nm GPU, coming this August to a 360 near you. His name means "treasurer" in Persian, which -- let's be honest -- squares a little weirdly when you figure the codename for the new version of the 360 in which he'll ship is "Valhalla," i.e. Odin's crib, i.e. the battle hall "for those slain gloriously in battle." Slain gloriously in battle? I dunno about you, but considering the 360's engaged in the holy-holy of console fracas, is it really smart to be naming your baby-bet-the-farm-on after a mythic version of the afterlife? I'm just sayin'...

Back to Jasper. In conjunction with Falcon, the theory goes that we'll not only put the red-ring-o'-death to bed in totem, we'll finally get a version of the 360 that doesn't chug like an air compressor. Great to hear, if true.

The only thing I'll miss? Using the thing as a foot-warmer-cum-space-heater when it's wintertime and my wife's in better-living-through-thermostat-plunging mode.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

BioShock the Movie: Sister, Can You Spare a Mutagen?

Joy of joys, and I mean that in every sense of the double entendre, it looks like BioShock's set to receive the silver screen treatment. Variety reports Universal and director Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring, and that daffy Home-Alone-with-mice Nathan Lane comedy) are shortly to embark on production of a movie version of Ken Levine's brilliantly disturbing underwater opus with a possible screenplay nod to Sweeney Todd scribe John Logan.

Verbinski claims the mechanical Big Daddies (pictured here) in particular allowed him to see the game as a film.

Variety says Take-Two is getting a ton of scratch up front in what's supposed to be the biggest videogame-to-movie handoff since Universal and Fox passed Microsoft $5 million for Halo in 2005. About the Halo movie... You probably heard it train wrecked a while back and that it's currently with Microsoft looking for a new distributor? The Take-Two cash infusion = designed to prevent that.

"The reason I structured it the way I did is to make sure it gets made," said Take-Two executive chairman Strauss Zelnick.

Amen, as long as Universal and Verbinski don't screw it up. And there's plenty of reason to think they might. No one's yet done a decent job translating a video game to film. No one. You can almost make a case for Final Fantasy: Advent Children, but that's a totally niche creature. And let's be honest, it's only been recently that games have started delivering stories written and produced in a way that's (almost) up to filmic and literary snuff quality-wise. Speaking about games as cinematic, anyway. I love games, love them quite appropriately for reasons that have nothing to do with their cinematic qualities, and once I do start thinking about them in filmic terms, have no illusions about their general puerility.

But it doesn't have to be that way, and it's plain as the nose on anyone's face. Like I said yesterday, all it takes to keep a good thing down is a real determination to fund the crappiest directors and screenwriters on the planet. If you want video-games-as-films to languish, keep buying tickets or even just renting Uwe Boll's Resident Evil and Bloodrayne and Alone in the Dark sequels. I guarantee you'll get more of the same, just like all of us who went to see Roland Emmerich's Independence Day in droves pretty much ensured there'd be a Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 BC. Was anyone really surprised by how bad those were? Broom off your nostalgia cobwebs. Now does anyone think Independence Day was really any better?

"Dude. Popcorn flick. Clue. As in get one." Don't I know it. And to be totally fair, don't I know it'd be nice to have a video game movie at least as good as a Roland Emmerich dramedy.

"A man chooses, a slave obeys," opines the game's hyper-capitalist morals-monger. When it comes to writing, casting, filming, and editing this thing, let's hope Verbinski and Universal opt to choose wisely, now would they kindly?

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Stop Uwe Boll By Reading This

I hesitate to weigh in on the inimitable Uwe Boll because his quirks, foibles, and outright gaffes are so paint-blisteringly palpable, but this site's kind of fun, so what the hey. Here's a guy with a doctorate in literature from a German science institute who's made some of the worst films known to humankind, which I guess just goes to show how much an academic degree counts for anything these days.

Just a few of the mockeries made in Boll's illustrious career...

Alone in the Dark - 2005 flick based on the Infogrames survival horror PC game that started it all and somewhat improbably starring the otherwise talented Christian Slater, this movie was named worst film of 2005 by the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards. Oh, and apparently Boll had a decent script in the bag, but blew $10 million on special effects, chopping background and requiring Boll to slap a text scroll at the beginning just to help viewers figure out what's going on. (Kind of, you know, like those Star Wars prequels...)

BloodRayne - Boll's other 2005 action flick about a half-human Romanian vampire with all the usual "For vengeance!" tropes but none of the editing or acting chops to carry them off. Poor Kristanna Loken. Because she was so good in Terminator 3. You know, where she just had to look kind of prickly (well, a Cosmo cover model glacial-beige-blonde kind of prickly, anyway) for 109 minutes until the ineluctable Stan Winston-begat denouement. I only fiddled with the original Bloodrayne game, but everyone else told me it was only a half cut above average. A sliver up from "unforgivable," Boll's filmic translation is currently sitting at 2.6 out of 10 stars courtesy 14,536 discerning IMDb voters. Incidentally, the prostitutes in the scene with Meat Loaf (yes, that Meat Loaf) are the real deal. Boll apparently boasted that it was cheaper to hire real prostitutes than employ actresses.

You want the rest? Here you go...

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007) - IMDb 3.8/10 (10,120 votes)

Postal (2007) - IMDb 3.9/10 (3,999 votes)

BloodRayne II: Deliverance (2007) - IMDb 2.5/10 (3,253 votes)

And coming soon...

Far Cry (2008)

BloodRayne 3 (2009)

Zombie Massacre (2010)

Considering there's never really been a video game made into a movie that's worth a hoot, and considering that Uwe Boll has done more in the past few years to encourage the public perception that video games are aesthetic junk, I think I'm going to have to raise both thumbs to Stop Uwe Boll (warning: shot of Uwe Boll flipping you the bird) as well as their petition advising Boll to cease and desist making feature films.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

FTC Survey: 20% Success Rate for Kids Buying Mature Games

Covert government-recruited shoppers prowled 253 stores to buy Mature-rated games and were turned down a remarkable 80% of the time according to a just-released FTC survey. That's up dramatically from a 58% turn-away rate in the FTC's 2007 "undercover shopper" survey, according to game trade site Gamasutra. Apparently the rate was as low as 16% in 2000. That's a 64% improvement with zero formal federal involvement in less than a decade. I'd say a round of applause for independent self-regulation is in order, wouldn't you?

I hardly need to add that all the industry trade groups including the ESRB are trumpeting the results of the survey (well they are), I'll just let that number and its source speak for itself.

Now give yourself a respectable clap on the back, independent games industry, but don't dally. We hit lows like 16% because we didn't take ourselves seriously enough eight years ago, and it shouldn't take the threat of government imposed sanctions and/or criminal prosecution laws to live up to self-imposed standards. Put another way, our game's improved at least 64% since we started playing (1994 if you want to gauge by the establishment of the ESRB), but we're still 20% shy of par for the course.

And par is what pushes marginal types like Jack Thompson off the page altogether.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Doom 4 No Longer Tease, Team Confirmed

I guess we're supposed to jump for cacodemonic joy now that id Software's confirmed what we've known since last August -- that Doom 4's in the offing. Today's emailed news-bomb courtesy Karina Tang confirms Doom 4 finally has a dedicated team, and hey, they're hiring! (I think you have to drag race Carmack for the benefits package.)

"DOOM is part of the id Software DNA and demands the greatest talent and brightest minds in the industry to bring the next installment of our flagship franchise to Earth," said Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software. "It?s critical for id Software to have the best creative minds in-house to develop games that meet the standards synonymous with our titles."

While nothing's announced yet, expect versions for the PC, Xbox 360, PS3, and probably the Mac.

id's last in-house game (not counting Rage, it's current project) was Doom 3, which was really just a Doom remake to let Carmack and Co. pour rivers of shellacked pixels over our eyeballs. (Oh, and stare down some of the creepiest human facial renders this side of Rob Zemeckis' spooky The Polar Express.) I remember being pretty impressed after the part where you actually go to hell in Doom 3, then being equal parts depressed about the prolonged snapping off the lights and going "boo!" and monsters popping out of closets like a bunch of dopey snarling marionettes. (You know, "Rrrrrrr! I've been waiting here just to go Rrrrrrr!" and stuff.) Doom 3 was impressive for the first couple minutes ogling each level, then it was more like rock-rolling.

Was Doom ever really meant to be a game anyway? I know we all dutifully popped those 3.5" disks in our pre-CDROM PCs and cooked through the two-and-a-half-dee shareware version back when shareware was still a neologism hot off the griddle. I know we couldn't get past how cool it was to be able to move around in 3D and shoot stuff and dodge fireballs flung by leering, strafing sprites. I know not even Half Life's managed to capture the nostalgia I have wandering into gloomy rooms glowing the original's peculiar shade of ectoplasmic green. Man, I still remember trying to get an IPX/SPX game going over dial-up with a guy down the hall in my college dorm. Good times.

But ever since Doom 3, the whole series has felt more like a tech demo, a geek-fest for Carmack to roll the ball a little further down a field that's been getting smaller and narrower and aesthetically blinder with every play. id knows where its base lies, but imagine if the Beatles had just cloned "Love Me Do" for 10 years straight.

I'm not saying Doom 4 won't rock the Casbah, just that I'm ready for less Please Please Me, more Abbey Road this round.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Mass Effect and Spore to Require Online Authentication Every 10 Days

No joke, according to BioWare's technical producer Derek French, who posted as much to BioWare's forums last Saturday. You may have heard that the PC version of Mass Effect uses SecuROM and requires online activation to run. But what you may not have heard is that it additionally requires you to validate your copy online every 10 days, else the game ceases to function entirely. That's 36 (point-five) mandatory authentications per year in order to keep playing, and French claims EA's Spore "will use the same system."

After the first activation, SecuROM requires that it re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez'd and gets banned). Just so that the 10 day thing doesn't become abrupt, SecuROM tries its first re-check with 5 days remaining in the 10 day window. If it can't contact the server before the 10 days are up, nothing bad happens and the game still runs. After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run.

Upsides? According to French, you won't need the disc in the drive to play. Also: The game will have labeling that clearly stipulates you'll need an internet connection and the ability to multi-authenticate to play the game, so for those who actually bother to read the fine print, it won't come as a total surprise.

But. And you knew there'd be a but.

I like the idea that the games industry still makes solo-play games. I hope games from Solitaire to Bethesda's Oblivion never require a second player to enjoy. I like the fact that I can take a laptop on the road, be out of internet coverage, and play a single-player game without having to launch an online client and authenticate against a server and occasionally fuss with ISP (local provider or node-based) port filtering. In short, I like the fact that as a consumer, I have choices, and that to date, those choices have included being able to use single-player software without multiplayer's constant connection requirements. And I'd like to think that until we're globally wireless-and-broadband-literally-anywhere, publishers would see fit to let us keep playing solo games in dead zones.

To wave that all away, publishers like BioWare will claim the only reason for multi-authentication is to combat piracy. Now aside from the fact that no one's ever been able to independently verify that the piracy claim is legitimate in each individual case, or that part of the rationale isn't to get cost-free use demographics on consumers, companies like Stardock with hit games like Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire vocally eschew copy protection altogether in favor of positive customer rapport and manage to sell bundles anyway. Brad Wardell, Stardock CEO, gets it exactly right when he writes in this journal entry:

The reason why we don't put CD copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor - we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.

Read that again: "Like every other industry outside the PC game industry."

I'll try to come at this from another angle. Do I need to show my movie stub every 10 minutes during a show to prove I bought a ticket? (Plenty of people sneak into films.) How about my receipt to read a book? (Plenty of books are pirated online -- take last summer's debacle with Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows.) Listen to a song? (iTunes only requires I authenticate a machine once, and Amazon's dropped DRM entirely, despite rampant music piracy.) Wear a piece of clothing? (Shrinkage has always been a problem for plenty of retail stores.) Is the future relationship of buyers to sellers in this country becoming "Prove to me and keep on proving to me, oh, say indefinitely that you're really truly the owner of this thing you already gave me a bundle of dough for"?

Now what happens if, on the 10th day you've been playing, your internet connection dies or you're somewhere (say traveling) that you can't authenticate? What if you happen to leave for a two week vacation, nine days into Mass Effect, and your "vacation paradise" doesn't have convenient (or at all) internet access?

Since when did the burden of proof fall on customers who've already fulfilled their financial obligations by purchasing the product outright?

By the way: Don't confuse what happens when you authenticate to play an online game with what's reasonable to expect about playing an offline one. Just because you can implement a given policy, doesn't mean you necessarily should.

And what about the fact that this may in the minds of many create truly, ethically legitimate reasons to pirate a game, if for no reason other than to circumvent intrusive copy protection schemes? What part of "way to reward pirates and punish legitimate payers" do publishers not get?

Weigh the evidence and make up your own mind, of course. I'm just passing along the opinion of someone who'd like to see the internet remain (in at least some cases) an optional tool, and not a continuous, mandatory shackle.

[Thanks, Shacknews]

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Deep Silver Publishing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky This August

The haunting Ukrainian first-person shooter with the World's Most Annoying Acronym-For-A-Name has a prequel, a release date, and (finally) a publisher. You remember S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? I wrote about the prequel back in July 2007, and the original all the way back when this blog launched in April last year.

In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (which stands somewhat ridiculously for "Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, and Robbers") you played a guy scavenging around the Chernobyl Power Plant in the wake of the 1986 reactor meltdown, rubbing elbows (and guns) with mercenaries, other scavengers, a panoply of bizarre creatures, and a paranormal undercurrent that dovetails with a series of identity twists during the latter third of the game.

Clear Sky drops the scavenger angle and bring you in as a mercenary whose actions essentially create "The Zone" -- an area around Chernobyl where most of the spookiest stuff in the original went down. You're apparently after the protagonist from the original, but since you obviously can't kill him, the plot vectors more toward a freeform faction war. In the prior game, factionalism was just a superficial narrative gloss. In Clear Sky, you can join whoever you like in a war between nine (eight confirmed) S.T.A.L.K.E.R. factions, then battle across a 50-50 landscape -- 50% terrain regurgitated from the original, 50% completely new. We're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 square kilometers comprised of nearly two dozen quilted area maps.

What's got my curiosity piqued most? Probably the new AI stuff. Apparently the AI's supposed to dynamically dictate the terms of the entire faction war, can now throw grenades (I know, whoop-whoop), coordinates and works better in groups, runs day and night routines, and interacts more realistically with the physical world.

Coming to a Windows PC near you -- retail or digital download via Steam -- August 29, 2008.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

The Witcher: Hexing a PS3 Near You?

Someone posting to N4G's news aggregator noticed that CD Projekt has a listing for a PS3 programmer up on its official The Witcher website, fueling speculation that the Poland-based publisher has a console version of its award-winning RPG in the kettle.

I contacted CD Projekt RED about a console port and received this response:

The Witcher was developed entirely with the PC audience in mind, and it was CD Projekt RED?s goal to create a top-quality role-playing game for that audience. If we do a console version, it will be optimized for console gaming; we won?t simply do a straight port. We want any version of the game to be a top-quality RPG at the time it's released, and not just a port of a game that came out a year ago.

Maybe, maybe not then, but no easy-bake forklifting if it happens. I know that's a somewhat obvious and easy to make claim, but we're talking about a publisher already willing to brave potential PC version saturation by going back to the original and refashioning much more than just another "gold" grab bag. I'm talking of course about the incoming "enhanced edition" for the PC, originally slated for May 2008 but delayed slightly until August/September for much more than a little fine tuning. According to Maciej Szczesnik, Project Manager for CD Projekt RED, the changes in the enhanced edition will in fact be manifold and comprehensive:

First and foremost, the English-language version will, for the most part, be completely re-done. The amount of text in that version was reduced compared to other language versions and that was said to cause a significant decrease in immersion and atmosphere. Now the English version will be as polished and atmospheric as the other language versions. Speaking of other language versions, most of them will be improved in some way. Significant changes will also be made in the German version, where we are planning to re-record the voices for many of the characters.

The most important improvements concern those elements of the game that players criticized the most. For example, over 50 new supporting character models will be added, so that the player won't run into the same person too often. The inventory panel will be re-designed and improved, and some elements of the main game screen will be polished. However, one of the biggest changes that will greatly increase the player's immersion in the game world will be improvements concerning dialogue scenes. Both Geralt and non-player characters will get over 100 new animated gestures which will make their body language during conversations much more natural. Additionally, the facial animation and lip-sync system will be re-created, making the faces of the speakers now even more natural, as well.

As some of you know, The Witcher was my RPG of 2007, and that it kind of grabbed me out of the blue when I initially took it for a spin last November.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Glenn Beck: We're Training Our Kids to Be Killers

Glenn Beck craves attention like any pop-media celeb, so naturally he couldn't help but point his wagging finger at Grand Theft Auto IV last week. "We're training our kids to be killers," opined Beck during the slickly produced portion of his nightly CNN primetime broadcast called The Point. "And we are training our sons to treat women like whores."

Here's how Beck claims he "got there," quoted from the above clip:

If you think that video games are just harmless fun, which everybody always says, you should know that our military, our leaders at the Pentagon, have never seen it that way. It started back in World War One. Young soldiers, we sent Americans out to the front lines over in Europe, and they wouldn't pull the trigger, even there on the front lines with people charging them, they would not pull the trigger. It seems hard to believe in today's world, but killing each other is actually not a natural human instinct. Senior officers found if they trained the soldiers by putting a human silhouette on the bullseye during target practice, they could actually condition men to shoot more easily.

The technology progressed. So did the training techniques. Paper targets evolved into electronic simulations, and welcome to the great great grandfather of the video game developed by the Pentagon. The method proved so successful, that the military's firing rate, first time you had to shoot a human being, went from 15% in World War 2 to 55% in the Korean War, to over 90% in Vietnam, and now that number is almost 100. I want to make one thing clear before we go any further. I am not blaming all of society's problems on video games. That would be stupid to do. It is the entire pop culture. It's music, it's movies, it's radio, it's television, it's all of it. According to the Journal of American Medical Association, just television, the introduction of television in the 1950s caused a doubling of the homicide rate in America. These are all just small pieces of the same small nightmarish puzzle.

Let's take a closer look at Beck's screed.

What Beck cites about wars and firing rates comes from "research" conducted by the highly controversial Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, author of the 1996 book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, and someone who claims to be a specialist in "killology," a self-coined neologism purported to be "the study of the psychology of killing." Grossman calls first-person shooters "murder simulators" and believes there's an analogue between training soldiers to actually kill and playing video games, particularly first-person shooters.

The problem with Grossman's allegations about video games is that soldiers know they may actually have to kill someone, someday, that they're being explicitly trained to be capable of doing so. Whereas someone playing a video game clearly isn't playing that game for the explicit purpose of picking up a weapon -- any weapon -- and committing an act of violence -- any act of violence -- against another human being. Intentionality is the essence of the psychological difference, and completely alters the neurological relationship between stimulus, training, reaction, and sensitivity. If you don't view what you're doing as training to actually kill someone, it's not (training). Could it by the way make you a sharper shooter? Perhaps. But since when did being able to fire a gun more accurately become a bad thing? I'm personally a fan of neither the NRA nor guns in general, but since when did this become an indirect indictment of guns employed in a recreational capacity? What's next, skeet shooters as dormant criminal minds? Shooting clay pigeons for sport as training to harm (as opposed to hunt -- note the crucially important distinction) the real thing?

I can't find good data on the JAMA article, but I'm researching it now. What Beck claims the article says appears to be what it actually says, but that study was published in 1992, and the latest media studies research appears to say quite the opposite, i.e. exposure to violent programming may actually reduce one's proclivity for violent activity.

Moreover, Beck fails to mention the fact that the rise of electronic gaming -- now bigger than the film industry -- has in fact paralleled the decline of violent crimes in this country over the past two decades.

Read that again: Some of the most violent games ever produced have steadily increased in popularity at the same time as violent crime has declined in the U.S., across the board. Explain that, Beck (and Grossman).

Beck's piece is so misrepresentative -- and I haven't even gotten to the clip where he interviews Jack Thompson -- that I'm embarrassed for serious researchers like Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner, who according to GamePolitics.com, will be appearing on Beck's CNN program tonight to promote their new "violence in games" myth-busting book, Grand Theft Childhood.

You can contact Glenn Beck (at CNN) here.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

Monday Gamewatch

This week: A whole lotta hotkeys for your favorite brawny Cimmerian, gnat-sized robots roughhousing in neon terrariums, a goateed playboy in red and gold micro-weave 3D alloy, and an RPG (as in rule-playing game) for D&D diehards only.

Monday

Age of Conan Zboard Key Set: If you're really-really-really smitten with whatever you're playing, the Zboards are like adding all the aftermarket bling to your economy class ride. Sure, it's a little 1980s keyboard overlay geeky, but so is buying a quilted metallic Italian lambskin coat with Swarovski crystals for Fido. The only worry I've ever had about custom keyboards with dedicated buttons for stuff like inventory, quests, chat commands, feats, spells, and GUI tweaks is that the game's developers patch and potentially change key-maps when and where they want to -- Ideazon compensates by shipping a standard keyboard into which you simply plug (or unplug) swappable key sets. The Age of Conan model comes with over 70 game-specific commands, two emote layers (12 emote keys a piece), group and chat keys, and game graphics in the overlay that "immerse you into the action."

Supreme Commander: Gold Edition: It's Chris Taylor's macro-micro RTS with its less-exciting followup (Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance) in a box for forty bucks. I loved GPG's idea and admired the heck out of the lovely interface, but snored through all three absurdly generic campaigns. Echoing Total Annihilation, Taylor seems to think giving everyone two resources and identical starter units can be offset by slicking up the look and feel of the game with an admittedly cool continuous-zoom overlay. It can't. And after thoroughly trouncing the UEF, Cybran Nation, and Aeon Illuminate, I said goodbye to this series along with any vestigial tolerance for boring, lookalike sides with broadly indistinguishable units.

Tuesday

Iron Man: Could it finally be? A movie tie-in that actually lives up to the critical promise of an acclaimed popcorn flick? Bzzzt, try again. I haven't played it, but with a GamePro score (for the Xbox 360 version) in the 40s and OPM's review of the PS3 version lower still, you're probably better saving your sixty bucks for extra viewings of the movie instead of rolling the dice on the PC version. Hey, you can always smuggle in your wireless gamepad and, you know, pretend.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Gold Edition I've revisited Neverwinter Nights 2 twice since I reviewed it, had that review pulled, then reviewed it again for the fanboy-proof SCIFI Channel. Both times have felt like balancing chemistry equations. Other reviewers mostly carped about the game's bugs (if they chose to carp about anything at all). I groused that the game played less like an RPG than a macro-riddled spreadsheet. I love that in a wargame, say SSG's Korsun Pocket or AGEOD's Napoleon's Campaigns. But I hate it in RPGs, especially when the whole point of playing with a computer is that you don't need to see all the naked algorithms and exotic formulae (which were only introduced to shore up do-it-yourself pen and paper abstraction anyway). Still: D&D'ers can just ignore me, while the rest of you will have to decide how much dogged literalism you can stand in the all-in-one version (original plus Mask of the Betrayer expansion) of Obsidian's otherwise averagely plotted elf-human-dwarf-orc simulator.

Tardy:

Great War Nations: The Spartans. Should have shipped Thursday May 1st; now shipping Monday May 5th.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.

TGIF: And Thank Rockstar For Grand Theft Auto IV

I've been in something of a chronometric funk this week, from roving around Budapest to the wildest ride back through a lightning storm since Billy Shatner spotted Nick Cravat leering at him from the wing of a plane in flight. From that, to diving wide-eyed, i.e. eyes taped wide-open, into Grand Theft Auto IV to play nonstop through coffee-kept nights. Or are they days? Hey, it's 8 am...who's ready for a steak?

My rhapsodic review of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Close my eyes and I see brownstones and bypasses cascading by in inky, eerie parallax. I've driven a thousand miles (and as Charlie and Craig Reid of the Proclaimers might sing it, walked 500 more). I've seen a million faces, and while I haven't rocked them all, I've certainly shot (or been shot at by) my fair share of strung out carpet patrollers in search of cookies, biscuits, and boulders. I'm scum too, by the way, likable as I am compared to Claude "the kid" Fido (or whatever the heck his name was) in Grand Theft Auto III. I've been shot at, run over, pistol-whipped, and burned out of my rathole flat. I've shot at, run over, baseball-bat-pummeled, and torched half this city, and despite my near-deaths and incarcerations, all I've got to show is a clean bill of health and a pile of cash the hospital bill can't make a dent in. I haven't actually cheated on my girl Michelle yet, but I have personal solicits out at the local internet dive (called TW@ and just look at all the sites) and my friends keep phoning me to party at the local strip joint over by St. Mark's (filled, I'm sure, with liquor soused, depressed, naked single moms).

I love this life. Sure, it's a fiction, but like the shrewdest satire, it has a gusty, angry, mocking undercurrent that's cathartic gold for someone like me -- just an average, ordinary guy who sees all the best and worst this country has on loan. The American Dream? You'd think a game like Grand Theft Auto IV wouldn't get it, but it's there, schizoid as all get out, but there nevertheless, lurking anywhere you care to linger, reminding us we are what we're up to, even if it's nothing like what we aspire to be.

Enjoy your next 48 hours with GTA IV, and as David Lynch might say, keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.