Rock Band 2 Exclusive to Xbox 360 this September

Score one, or two, or maybe even ten for Microsoft, as Harmonix and MTV just announced that Rock Band 2 will debut exclusively on the Xbox 360 this September. Well sort of exclusively. Temporarily exclusively, i.e. for a month or two, probably tops. That's right, PS3 and Wii owners, you'll still get your own versions, just a little bit later this year.

Uh, wow? That was certainly fast. Rock Band just came out, didn't it? Oh wait, my bad, forgot it's an EA game. So...does that mean Rock Band's about to join the ranks of Madden and NCAA and NASCAR and FIFA as a perennial habitue? Is everyone ready to drop $180 (or thereabouts) every year just to get all the new-and-improved peripherals?

Alright, bite your tongue, me, and here's the nitty gritty from the press release:

Rock Band 2 builds upon its foundation as the first music game to introduce co-operative band gameplay, multiple instruments, a robust online multiplayer experience, an unrivaled offering of downloadable content and raises the bar by delivering an entirely new level of depth, connectivity, authenticity and features including:

- And much more.

The pretty-darned-exciting bits:

- You get to keep all your existing Rock band songs? Really? Can you say "coolest idea ever"? (So...Activision will be offering something similar in Guitar Hero when exactly?)

- "Comprised entirely of master recordings." 'Nuff said.

The really-really-hoped-for bits:

- Getting to keep all your Rock Band tracks, not just the ones you downloaded. Wouldn't that be cool? I gather when they say "previously purchased tracks" they probably don't mean the ones you paid for out of the box.

- A better drum kit, and by better, I mean stabler. The adjustable pipe clamps on my copy are starting to give after half a year, occasionally causing the pads to drop unceremoniously in the middle of a living room gig. Not cool. Incidentally: I once saw this happen to Chip Davis at an actual Mannheim Steamroller concert (don't ask, and no, I wasn't there by choice). Somehow he managed to recover and battle his way to the end of the tune on just two toms. (Well that, or the play-along mix they've always been rumored to use picked up the slack).

- A hugely improved detectably deterministic strum-bar on the plastic guitar. The one on the faux Fender Strat that currently ships with Rock Band is absolutely abysmal. It feels like there's gauze stuck in the mechanism, making rapid passages or tight repetitive strumming an absolute nightmare. Give me Guitar Hero III's Les Paul. You can feel that baby clicking when you're jamming hard without a hint of give or slackness.

- A Rock Band didgeridoo. Come on, you know you want one.

Forecast: Video Game Market Will Soar to $57 Billion by 2009

Buckle up for another study concluding that while the general US economy may be slumping, the video games market is virtually bulletproof. According to DFC, the worldwide interactive entertainment industry is on track to achieve revenues of $57 billion as early as next year. For the record, global video game industry revenue is thought to have approached $40 billion in 2007.

But wait, didn't we see predictions a couple years ago that the global industry would be worth $58.4 billion by 2007?

What's the deal?

Well first of all, different research companies are naturally going to come to different conclusions based on different probability algorithms and whatever distinguishing factors a firm's analysts emphasize. That's a good thing. Consensus in forecasting ought to be rare. It keeps everyone on their toes, and stagnation from entering the equation.

It's also a given that no matter how you look at it, the global games market has been absolutely booming the last several years. Between 2000 and 2001, the U.S. games industry grew from $6.6 billion to $9.4 billion. In 2007, that figure was up to a record-shattering $17.94 billion (and it doesn't even include PC game sales or online revenue).

Still, the Informa report seems in hindsight to have been a smidgen optimistic. The DFC report may be skewing more conservative, too, given the dollar slump, reflecting a sense that while the games market will definitely keep growing, it may not grow as fast as it would have in a cheerier market climate.

A couple additional points of interest:

Hewing to a trend that's seen analysts tripping over themselves to apologize for initially pessimistic predictions about the Wii, DFC analyst David Cole says "The Wii does not appear to be a fad and it has the chance to be one of the best selling systems of all-time." Read that again: the best selling system of all time. Does anyone doubt the probability of that happening at this point?

There's also refreshingly good news for PC gamers in this report. According to DFC, the PC was the number one platform for games in 2007. PC online game revenue alone surpassed $7 billion in 2007 (that's not including retail sales) and total PC game revenue is expected to reach $19 billion by 2013.

Ergo: PC gaming is dead...long live online PC gaming!

Hell Unfreezes Over: Blizzard Confirms Diablo 3

The ice sheath splash has finally melted, it's now official, and while I'm not exactly barreled over by the announcement because I've always felt a trifle conflicted about the merits of the Diablo series, I'm definitely intrigued.

What I (and plenty of others) speculated might happen came to pass at approximately 12:18 p.m. on June 28th at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Paris, France, where Blizzard finally confirmed that yes, Diablo 3 is in the works, eight prolonged years after Diablo 2, and over a decade after the original gave oceans of relentless finger-tappers a conduit for their compulsion.

Don't believe me? Peep the the Blizzard homepage Flash splash (if you can get it to come up once folks on this side of the pond start to rise and shine).

What else do we know so far? Not much, but Blizzard says it's going to be the biggest Diablo yet, that it's going to retain the series focus on cooperative play, and that it'll feature the return of Deckard Cain (the old dude from the last two who crooned "Stay a while, and listen!" when you clicked him). You'll also get a new class called the Witch Doctor who'll have access to jungle magic and be able to summon animals and insects, inflict diseases, and mind-control enemies.

As the game is now finally fully 3D, you'll be able to zoom in or out on the fly. The interface has been unsurprisingly tweaked with onscreen hotbars for skills as well as the option to swap between them quickly with the tab key or your mousewheel. Instead of quaffing potions like Professor Snape on a bender, you'll roll over red orbs to replenish your health. Environments can be pretty thoroughly pulverized, as well as utilized to effect the destruction of enemies. Certain enemies will be considerably larger, finally filling the screen like proper boss monsters. Armor now relates to class and renders uniquely depending on the character wearing it. And girls, you'll finally have the option to pick female versions of character classes, including the Barbarian and Witch Doctor.

Check out the new official page which has slightly more info, and some of the official story details and features below:

Two decades have passed since the demonic denizens, Diablo, Mephisto, and Baal, wandered the world of Sanctuary in a vicious rampage to shackle humanity into unholy slavery. Yet for those who battled the Prime Evils directly, the memory fades slowly and the wounds of the soul still burn.

- Experience the intensity of multiplayer Diablo III over an all-new, wickedly-enhanced Battle.net platform with numerous enhancements to make connecting with your friends easier--and cooperative gameplay more fun.

And finally, a few screenshots culled from the 30 or so Blizzard just posted:

Review: Guitar Hero On Tour, Part Two

If you can stand the pain your hands are in for trying to play your DS like a fretboard the size of a small book, Guitar Hero On Tour is the closest you'll get to swinging a plastic axe on the go. The bigger issue than finding a painless grip, though, is the game's criminal pithiness. It's entirely possible to blaze through On Tour (playing on "hard" without repeats) in three, maybe four hours. Add another three or four for the guitar duels which repeat the song lists and you're still talking a ridiculously short game. Factor in the four-button limit (the home console versions have five) and it's just not challenging enough to keep you coming back for more.

Here's what you get:

- The Guitar Grip, stylus pick, two pages of stickers.

- 26 tracks, 20 exclusive to On Tour, six performed by cover bands.

- A single-player career mode plus two-player cooperative and competitive play modes.

- Six playable characters (two new, four from prior GH games) plus the usual assortment of clothing and instrument upgrades.

Now if you crank the difficulty up to "extreme," you're in for a challenge. In part because you'll have to perform hammer-ons and pull-offs at blistering velocities, but also because there's a whole-lotta-shakin-goin'-on. You're whopping the heck out of your DS with both hands, after all, making the screens juke and jive and frenetic passages that much more frenzied. You can compensate somewhat by tensing up your grip, but then you're exacerbating the wrist pain issue.

I'm aware the DS has a much broader, younger, casual-oriented audience. I have to imagine a lot of DS owners have never played a Guitar Hero. For that group, On Tour captures most of the Guitar Hero experience and should be challenging as well as novel enough to rate buyable. Once you've worked out how all the finger tricks work and played through "easy" and "medium" modes there's always the first-timer thrill of going back and beating your own high scores, or daring finger-breakers like Lynyrd Skynyrd's "I Know a Little" on "expert" to take yourself down a peg or two. The DS competitive two-player mode can be reasonably entertaining, too, since it includes distractions that riff off the unique aspects of the DS, like forcing the other player to autograph his or her name, flipping the screens, or setting your opponent's guitar on fire (you have to blow vigorously into the DS's mic to put it out).

For GH vets, however, On Tour feels like a very clever toy with a much less shred-tastic set list. It reasonably novel for the first set or two, but after that, it starts to feel too easy, too short, a little too pop-centric, and much too ergonomically awkward for extended play. Especially after you've experienced the freedom to be had posing in front of a big screen and hammering away on a comparably lithe plastic electric.

Which isn't to say it couldn't be polished up and ergonomically improved in time for a sequel. If, perhaps more importantly, someone can get around the DS's cartridge constraints. IBM was making gigabyte disks the size of quarter back in 2001, after all.

Review: Guitar Hero On Tour, Part One

It's saying something when the worst you can yammer about a virtually intact mobile version of Guitar Hero is that you'll have to give your string-strummin' hand a breather every five songs or so. I've been playing Vicarious Visions' improbably-in-existence-at-all handheld rhythm game, and yes, it feels easier, yes it's less comfortable, yes it's way too short, and no it's definitely not as cool as swinging a plastic axe and pretending to shake a headful of sweaty hair-extensions. But what seemed utterly preposterous, nigh absurd to me a month ago, turns out to be pretty darned habit-forming.

On Tour costs $50 and comes with a plastic Guitar Grip that plugs into your DS Lite's Game Boy Advance slot (if you're gaming on an original DS, On Tour includes a simple plastic adapter). Sliding your left hand (or right -- there's a "lefty flip" mode) into the adjustable wrist strap, you curl your fingers around the grip, let them rest on the grip's four colored fret buttons, open the DS sideways so the top-bottom screens run left-right, and cradle it like a tiny book. Using a stylus shaped like a guitar pick with a slight tip on the tapered end, you strum a picture of a guitar on the right screen as colored markers scroll down the note highway. When you want to whammy, you rub the pick back and forth quickly on the screen, and when you want to trigger score-multiplying modifiers like "star power," you simply click a button, tap the Star Meter on the touchscreen, or with perilous social abandon (if you're playing in public, like I was when I tested this earlier) yell "Rock Out!" into the DS's mic.

Just like the actual plastic axe-picker with lots of goofy little DS perks, in other words. The only thing that's missing is the fifth button, and I'm guessing it wasn't including because the screen simply wasn't wide enough to squeeze in a fifth string without making it hard to see. The grip certainly seems like it could have fit a fifth button, though the one-size-fits-all strap can feel cramping if you have it "secure" like the manual suggests.

Secure to me means snug. Not tight, but touching all around. And that's where On Tour gets into trouble. First, the Guitar Grip itself sits a bit too loosely in the Game Boy Advance slot. By loose, I mean it tends to bend out slightly from the back of the DS (a good hard pull could easily wreck the slot for good) and has a tendency to want to push slightly out of the GBA slot as you play. It's not a serious problem, but I wish they could have come up with a means to secure it more rigidly somehow. Can't see how they could've, so I guess this is as good as it gets after a reported 20 prototypes to get things just right.

The other issue's that the guitar strap has to cinch up around the tendons just behind your knuckles. Tighten it even a little and you compromise your finger dexterity (I have medium length fine-boned piano-player's fingers, if that's any sort of reference point). I ended up pulling the strap off altogether, at which point everything felt just right. Even then, you'll want to rest your hand after a five-song set. My hands are in pretty good musical shape from daily Hanon drills (mind-numbingly repetitive piano exercises) and my left note-tapping hand was feeling the strain after about 20-30 minutes of sustained jamming.

A minor aside would be that the headphones jack is technically above the GBA slot, and can get tangled in your fingers if you don't find some means of securing it out of the way (if the strap doesn't bother you, you can accomplish this by tethering it to the strap's velcro clasp). The audio quality through the DS's speaker is predictably poor, while the headphones get you much closer to tune-age that sounds like a slightly lower than 128 kbps quality MP3.

That's the ergonomic skinny. I'd give Vicarious Visions an A+ for effort and maybe an A-minus/B-plus for execution. And I'll be back tomorrow with part two of the review covering the ins and outs of the gameplay itself, once I polish the whole thing off (I'm about halfway through the venues and duels playing on "hard" after only a couple hours).

Lights, Camera, Action! PlayStation 3 Getting Downloadable Movies

In a move sure to annoy Microsoft but really surprise no one, Sony today confirmed it's planning to offer downloadable movies on the PlayStation 3 sometime this summer. Japan and Europe will follow suit at a later date, and we'll get the official rollout schedule sometime next month.

Make that two feathers in Sony's as-you-like-it digital cap, since the PS3 will now be capable of offering both Blu-ray as well as downloadable shows, clips, and flicks. Microsoft's repeatedly denied rumors it might offer an external Blu-ray drive, thus the new service gives Sony the decided edge in terms of media-playback versatility.

Downloadable video still seems more like gee-whiz novelty than something to replace or even much supplement optical media. If I'm going to watch Lost on my PS3 or Xbox 360, I want it at 1080p, end of discussion. (Since I can buy a pristine transfer that'll output at 1080p, why should I compromise?) I don't want to sink my broadband connection downloading half a terabyte just to accommodate a single season of a TV show. I don't want to forfeit an arm and a leg to buy terabyte-sized hard drives just to store two or three of those seasons (which only take up as much space as a couple of books on a movie shelf). And I don't want to have to worry about losing my entire collection because consoles don't really support large scale data backup and the actuator arm decided to freeze up and park the head for good.

Offering downloadable movies is great for quick clips and throwaway episodes or comedy shorts. But video connoisseurs -- and let's face it, that's nearly all of you with the means to invest in an Xbox 360 and/or PS3 -- still value durability and longevity over what I'll call "impulsive accessibility."

So yeah, bravo Sony, bravo Microsoft for being first (though boo Microsoft for making us wait for an add-on Blu-ray part). But as we roll merrily along, level with your customers. Don't pretend the Xbox 360 and PS3 downloadable movie services are going to supplant or even much impact the high-definition optical media industry. Not until the U.S. broadband penetration rate jumps up dramatically from about 70 million users and the FCC stops poisoning that figure by classifying anything above 200 Kbps as "broadband."

16 Games For Windows Coming to a PC Near You

I'm torn. Do I gallop around the room like a madman making wacky clucking cries of support for my favorite platform? Or do I poke fun at all the mediocre-sounding titles on this list of upcoming Games For Windows titles Microsoft just released in San Francisco today?

Here's the list, per GamePro, of Microsoft's GFW "games to be released in the coming months."

Battlestations: Midway (Eidos)
Battlestations: Pacific (Eidos)
Borderlands (2K Games)
Call of Duty: World at War (Activision)
Crysis Warhead (Crytek/EA)
Dawn of War 2 (THQ)
Devil May Cry 4 (Capcom)
Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Sierra)
Quantum of Solace (Activision)
LEGO Batman: The Videogame (Warner Bros.)
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Video Game (Activision)
Mafia II (2K Games)
Project Origin Warner Bros.)
Red Faction: Guerilla (THQ)
Saints Row 2 (THQ)
Zoo Tycoon 2: Ultimate Collection (Microsoft)

Battlestations: Midway, hmm, never heard of it. Let's see. Didn't this come out already in January 2007? Huh? It's reportedly coming out for the Mac this summer, but the only new news for PC is actually number two on that list, Battlestations: Pacific, a sequel with twice as many missions and some kind of mechanism for interacting with island troops. Okay, so the PC version scored decently across a reasonably broad critical demographic. Looks like I need to give the original a gander?

You can read what Darren Gladstone and I had to quip about Borderlands and LEGO Batman in our 15 Hottest Games of Summer feature.

I'm pumped about Crysis Warhead, because aside from the original's wasted, derivative latter third, I loved the stuffin' out of Crysis. Only problem is, I'm moving to the UK, desktop-less by design, and stuck gaming on a Macbook Pro (Vista, Boot Camp). So unless Apple releases an updated slab of sexy aluminum hardware with something like a 9600M class GPU soon, I'm going to be running the game at 1024x768 with all the detail set to low (which anyone who's played Crysis on "high" settings knows totally defeats the point).

Call of Duty: World at War? Let's just hope it's better than Treyarch's fair-to-middling Call of Duty 3. After Infinity Ward's awesome Call of Duty 4, I don't think we're allowed to expect anything less.

Warhammer may go down as the single best and worst translated RPG/wargaming franchise in computer game history. The Dawn of War games pretty much own all the "single best" slots. Considering Relic followed with the virtuosic Company of Heroes, I'd wager this could be the RTS of 2009.

Loved Devil May Cry 4 on the PS3 and 360, but I just can't see this one selling well on PCs. Prove me wrong PC-fighter-fans, because nothing would make me happier.

The rest are all kind of ho-hum. Zoo Tycoon 2 and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa? Okay, for kids. Got it. But Quantum of Solace? I know it's the 22nd Bond film, but come on, could they pick a goofier title? Oh, and it's Treyarch again, a developer that's still struggling to distinguish itself. The original Mafia did nothing for me after getting through the first couple missions, so Mafia 2 isn't really ringing my bell. Project Origin's the sequel to a game I thought was ridiculously overhyped by the gaming press (the better-than-average A.I. in that game was also incredibly inconsistent, and the story just plain hokey). Red Faction was never a great game, a problem that Red Faction 2 only exacerbated, so Red Faction: Guerilla has its work cut out for it. Saints Row was a decent enough GTA-wannabe, but Saints Row 2 has to stand in the wake of GTA IV. And Ghostbusters? Could be cool, but mostly just has me chewing my nails at this point.

Avast Ye Bootleggers: Three Strikes and You're Out!

If you're French and fancy yourself a freebooting connoisseur of ill-gotten interactive entertainment, you'd best change your wicked ways, lest you wind up blacklisted from the internet. According to The Times Online, that's exactly what a controversial new law in France will entail when it goes into effect next January. Under the law, anyone who persists in downloading illegal material after being warned would be banned from accessing a broadband connection for up to a year.

Three strikes and you're offline, or you might as well be, since broadband typically refers to anything over 56,000 bits per second, i.e. ISDN 128 Kbps and up. If you've tried browsing the media-swollen web on dial-up lately, you know how pointless it is.

Sound dumb? It is. Dumb because it's a blind alley, an all-encompassing strategy with a carelessly punitive tactic, a "solution" that's like slapping flies with a city-block-sized flyswatter.

Think about all the clueless (or just plain stupid) kids about to get their parents censured from not only internet but television and phone services that also depend on broadband access. Imagine entire families booted for 12 months because a dopey kid downloaded the last three episodes of Lost, maybe even managed to circumvent lockdown parameters using surreptitious tools like keystroke grabbers. When you throttle a connection, you're often punishing a range of users, not just the individual perpetrator. I'm all for lighting a fire and getting parents to take responsibility here, but the sorry truth is that today's millennial generation so dramatically outreaches the last three or four in terms of general tech know-how that it's almost sadistic to expect that parents keep pace.

(What's Bittorrent? What's a tracker? A seed? A swarm? What's a TCP socket? PHE? A symmetrical cipher? An HTTP GET request? An SHA1 hashing algorithm? What are Mininova, Monova, BTJunkie, Torrentz, and isoHunt? Limewire, Azureus, and Transmission? How do Newsgroups work? What's Warez? Zero-day? FTP?)

Where's the government's educational initiative to help parents better understand and monitor their broadband connections? What about ISPs offering easy-to-use web tools that let parents see what's sort of traffic's passing their connection without having to learn how to use specialty tools like packet sniffers? (If you think that's a privacy issue, ISPs already do this anyway.) Who's explaining to wireless users that they (just for starters) ought to change their router's default ESSID, filter IP access by MAC address, and enable security protocols like WPA2 with AES or TKIP (or both) encryption to thwart wardrivers and piggybackers?

What about public wireless locations, say T-Mobile or Boingo hotspots? Free wireless in coffee shops and hotels? I'm composing this on a laptop connected to an open-access wireless access point in a public library. Think about the crazy bureaucracy this sort of blunt blanket legal reaction might create if all those spots suddenly went into lockdown.

I'm sorry, I get that piracy's a huge issue, that it may very well be throttling the PC games industry, and that we need to do something. But I'm not sure it's anywhere near the point that I'd willing to trade privacy for government regulation of private ISP protocols and "solutions" like this one where you're basically carpet-bombing groups to thwart individuals, who'll just cruise down the street and abuse someone else's connection.

Blizzard Teasing Diablo 3 Splash Art?

It's blue, it's crystalline, it looks like someone cracked the inside of a geode with a fluorescent lamp. Am I seeing things? Is that a face peeking out of the left side of the drawing with an inward spiral bored into the forehead? Faint reddish quasi-runic lines just below the ice-like veneer?

The source code for the page refers to the picture as "icefield," suggesting Blizzard may be planning to "melt" away sections of the splash over coming days.

See the full-sized picture for yourself. It's what you hit when you type www.blizzard.com into a browser, and it's up mere days before the 2008 Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational, where StarCraft 2 was announced last year. This year, the rumor mill's been hard at the business of proclaiming the imminent arrival of Diablo 3.

I don't know. The already announced WoW expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King seems more likely. Hit that link and check out the ice design on the Lich King's sword.

Update: Looks like an eagle-eyed reader figured it out. Well probably, anyway. You know, it could always be some sort of Diablo/World of Warcraft crossover. How incredibly weird/cool/offensive/amazing would that be?

Survey: Europeans Still Prefer PC Gaming

Playing games on a PC is still the most popular choice for online Europeans, of whom roughly three-quarters say they play games on PCs, consoles, and/or mobile devices. That's according to Forrester Research, which adds that "the PC continues to be the most popular choice, although its devotees? spending on games lags significantly when compared with that of console owners."

Could that spending lag be due to price disparity between console and PC games? Or is it because PC gamers are playing more of less?

Other revelations of note:

- Twice as many PC-partial gamers play games on a desktop than a laptop.

- 43% of those polled say they play games on more than one platform.

- A third of Europeans play games on consoles, but 41% report owning a console, implying a disparity between ownership and activity and/or the age of primary gamers per household.

- 20% of online Europeans game on a Sony PSP or Nintendo DS, while 27% report using their phones for gaming, a combined total of nearly half the market (47%), second only to desktop PC gamers (49%).

- The PS2 is still the statistical favorite, with 60% of those surveyed reporting they still own one.

- The original PlayStation still beats the PS3, 14% to 7%.

- The Xbox beats the Xbox 360 by inches, 12% to 11%.

- Nintendo slots second after the PS2 with the DS (26%) followed by the Game Boy (17%) and the current generation dominant Wii (16%).

In related news, GameZine UK reports that Forbes has said Europe lags behind other regions and is "less mature" than other gaming markets. Citing IDC research, Forbes claims the European games market generated about $14 billion in 2007, closing on the U.S. market which produced about $14.7 billion. Why "lags"? Because the population of Europe (estimated 728 million in 2005) is well over twice that of the U.S. (estimated 301 million in 2007).

Is the European game market "immature" as well? At one point, PC gaming dominated in the U.S. These days, though, it's bringing up the revenue caboose, sustained largely by a handful of online-only games like World of Warcraft and franchise perennials like EA's The Sims.

Microsoft thinks Europe will be the major battleground for the Xbox 360, and Nintendo's been releasing games for its Wii like Wii Play and Wii Fit in Europe before the U.S. You can attribute some of that to the weak dollar, but the question remains whether a "mature" European market is going to eventually consist of more console and handheld revenue, and less from PCs.

Who's the Greatest Gaming Icon of All?

Results from a recent public opinion poll says it's -- drumroll please -- everyone's favorite handlebar-mustachioed handyman, Mario. He managed to stiff-arm competitive bids from Master Chief, Solid Snake, Lara Croft, and Sonic the Hedgehog in GAME.co.uk's "Greatest Games of All Time" vote, and secure a hefty 11 percent of the overall top 100.

Anyone really surprised?

Things that make me go "hmm..."

- The PlayStation 2 won the console crown (it came in at #1). It's certainly sold more than any other console in history, but I wouldn't necessarily call it the most historically significant. I've always been partial in that regard to the Nintendo 64. Mario 64 landed at #5 on the "top games "list, but I've always thought of Miyamoto's platform opus as the 3D game that launched a thousand clones: aside from predictable visual upgrades, no one's yet really trumped it gameplay-wise. And Zelda: Ocarina of Time? 'Nuff said.

- Is Sonic really still a contender (he charted #19)? Guess so. Too bad Sega hasn't done anything to capitalize on the franchise since the Dreamcast. Could Sonic Unleashed be the antidote to years of Sonic Blah? Check out this trailer and speculate for yourself.

Things that make me go "mm-hmm."

- Final Fantasy voted "the greatest gaming series of all time." Because it is. Seriously. Forget the stereotype about the melodrama, how many other games vigorously and consistently reinvent their entire game (if not narrative) mechanic from the ground up?

- The highest rated PS2 game is Resident Evil 4. I reviewed it on the GameCube, and nothing since in the survival horror genre's come close (though Dead Rising made some notable strides of its own). All eyes are on Resident Evil 5, every bit as significant and anticipated as Halo 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Metal Gear Solid 4, when it finally ships sometime next year.

As for my take on the "greatest gaming icon," I vote Conker (of Conker's Bad Fur Day) all the way.

Are Games Too In Love With Movies?

Here's a scary thought: Imagine a future where games and film become aesthetically one and the same. Where game publishers bid for franchise licenses and aim squarely for the lowest hanging fruit to ensure sales are consistently high by reaching the broadest possible audience. Where, as film producer Todd Eckert (Control) suggests, the games industry becomes "little more than a marketing tool."

Would that be because the games industry is still overly smitten with the film industry? Or is it because of that age old adage about commercial art needing to appeal to everyone but thoroughly satisfy no one?

See the catch-22?

Games by design theoretically trump every other form of artistic expression for one simple reason: They're mutable. They can change. And in ways virtually no other artistic medium can.

Music can't. Books don't. Films won't. I don't mean there's only one way or level on which to interpret that stuff, or that you won't get 10 totally unique reactions to something like Schindler's List, but you can't make Prince's "Purple Rain" sound like Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride." Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows has exactly the same number of words every time you read it. And Shia LeBeouf is going to grab hold of that stupid vine and swing on it every single time you watch Indiana Jones 4.

In a game, not only can you swap what you're listening too (like the iPod Snake totes around in MGS4), the soundtrack typically changes dynamically depending on what you're up to. In games like Oblivion, which auto-log your adventure, the sequence of events which shape the outline of your story change depending on the order you choose to engage them, completely altering the narrative flow. Do I even need to point out all the ways games diverge from cinema in terms of your ability to pretty much direct your own show, from the flow of events to the camera angle chronicling everything?

Sure, games have structural limits too. You can find them pretty quick. But think about all the different ways gamers work through a game like Grand Theft Auto IV. Is your cousin too chatty? Ignore him. Michelle too needy? Lose her. Feel like botching a couple missions? Go for it. Explore the city at your leisure. Tick off the cops. Watch some TV. Listen to the radio. Head over to the local watering hole and throw darts for a couple hours.

On the other hand, it's throwing the baby out with the bath water to cram the film industry into a single dismissive column. Metal Gear Solid 4 borrows more heavily from film than any game I've ever played, and because of the nature of the experience, I say it's better for it. Even with my distaste for most of what slithers out of Hollywood these days, I'm still pretty happy when stuff like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly come along. Let's not forget about all the movies that don't sell their souls, even if it means most people have never heard of them.

I see a future for games that's pretty much analogous to that split between commercial ("blandized" to appeal to everyone) and stuff that's more artsy, even though it (sadly) means we're on the cusp of a fracture that's going to ignore for purely commercial reasons what Stephen King addressed so poignantly in his National Book Award speech in 2003.

In any case, Eckert would fare even better, says me, if he extended the analogy by talking about the things Hollywood (as a metaphor for the entire film industry) gets right (aesthetically, not commercially) and applying those lessons as well.

Goodbye Hundred Hour Games, Says Warren Spector

When industry luminaries conspire to censure decades of game design, you can't help but lean in and pay attention. Especially when you're part of the alleged minority that still prefers the sort of monster-sized single-player game model being rebuked.

For the record, there's never been a game that really truly requires 100 hours (or anything like that) to finish. Particularly if by finish, we mean "play on the straight and narrow through to the principal ending." So when Junction Point's Warren Spector says "one-hundred hour games are on the way out," I think he's really talking about single-player games with maybe 15 to 20 hours of principal story, but that also dole out dozens of hours of side quests and mini-games and miscellaneous poke-with-a-stick particulars. Say the in-game TV shows and radio programs and leisure activities like bowling, playing darts, and shooting pool in Grand Theft Auto IV. Those games are rocketing toward $100 million budgets, and the slide into financial ruin for publishers and development studios if they don't sell well is virtually instantaneous.

Spector's the guy younger gamers think of as Mr. Deus-Ex-System-Shock-Thief-The-Dark-Project. I'm a fraction older, and think of him more as the guy who knocked the lid off "first-person" with the Ultima Underworld games (pictured above). Also: the guy who made the fabric-covered wooden frame of a Sopwith Pup creak pretty hair-raisingly in my favorite World War I flight simulator ever (Wings of Glory, 1993).

So I'm all ears when Gamasutra quotes him speaking truth-to-assumption like:

Game costs are going to be $35-40 million, even $100 million, and the expectations are huge. You have to differentiate yourselves. One-hundred hour games are on the way out? How many of you have finished GTA? Two percent, probably. If we're spending $100 million on a game, we want you to see the last level!

Fair point. Think about all the games you've played the last couple years. How many did you really finish? How many did you thoroughly exhaust in terms of all they had to offer? How many of you really did get to the very last main plot point in Grand Theft Auto IV, where Niko has it out with [bleep]? And where [bleep] shows up at a [bleep] and asks [bleep] if he'll [bleep]?

Don't worry if you didn't. There'll be an even bigger, woolier Grand Theft Auto V. Bethesda's going to make another The Elder Scrolls RPG. Konami's going to be back sooner than later with Metal Gear The-Next. Rumors of the death of "one-hundred hour games" have been exaggerated. Rockstar's going to make record bundles on Grand Theft Auto IV, and so will Konami with Metal Gear Solid 4. Both of those games fit squarely in Spector's "one-hundred hour games" box, incidentally, and they're simply too profitable, with all their upfront overhead, not to make.

I think we'll see fewer of those as the years go by, but they'll never entirely disappear, and even if outfits like Rockstar succumb to the Hollywood axiom that "blandizes" everything to appeal to the lowest common denominator, you'll still have independent "4-the-luv" studios figuring out how to make the next Ultima or Grand Theft Auto, even if they have to trade down the production value ladder to make that happen. Have a look at the relatively booming (if incredibly niche) wargames market if you think I'm full of it.

Like Spector says, "It used to be that you could trade off gameplay for graphics, but you can't do that anymore."

Absolutely correct, and because that removes a lot of the burden on independent developers to throw thousands of hours into state-of-the-art game engines, it's ironically a huge part of the reason "one-hundred hour games" are going to be alive and well in the coming decades.

US Army Testing Game Centers to Lure New Recruits

Forget Disney World, in the near future you may be able to trot on down to your local recruitment center and engage in state of the art simulations piloting Apache or Blackhawk helicopters in virtual battle zones. According to Brand Week by way of GamePolitics, the US Army plans to test a concept recruitment center in which stop-ins can engage sophisticated virtual simulations and other experience-driven pitches.

Says Edward Walters, CMO of the U.S. Army:

In the past we've focused on traditional media vehicles. [But] the millennial generation is used to engaging in interactive assets and we need to adapt to them.

The move was also spurred by Apple's highly successful retail stores, according to Walters, as well as hands-on stuff like ESPN Zone.

The first new recruitment center is designed to be less intimidating and more "like walking into a NASA center," said Walters. "It will consist of three large simulators with full-scale mock-ups of Army equipment and wrap-around 270-degree video screens."

Regarding the actual simulation mechanics, Brand Week reports:

The Apache simulator allows a pilot and co-pilot to experience the aircraft and its weapons systems. The Black Hawk helicopter simulator provides four door gunner positions. And, the armored HMMWV vehicle simulator has positions for a driver and several gunners. The centers also will include an area where visitors can compete in America's Army, a videogame released in 2002.

What do you think? I mean, it does makes a certain amount of sense, and the Army has every right if not an obligation to avail itself of all the latest technologies and tools. It's also right to recognize that the millennial generation expects more than just a handshake and a paper brochure. But will increased association of video gaming with actual military recruitment and training further complicate public perceptions about the "games and violence" debate?

Hands On: Spore Creature Creator

Spool up EA's lightweight Spore Creature Creator and you're greeted by a swirling galactic nexus accompanied by celestial chimes and brooding strings, teasing the many places you'll eventually have the chance to visit once your stalk-eyed, six-handed, single-legged baby's all grown up.

The trial version of the Creature Creator -- about 200MB and available now for either PC or Mac -- only lets you fiddle a few body parts (mouths, eyes, arms, legs, weapons) and upload them to a MySpace-like template called MySpore Page. At last check, there were some 30,453 total creatures in the database, 26,847 people joined up since yesterday, and 18,678 creature uploaded in the last 24 hours (that's probably in part because the tool leaked a day or two early).

After rolling a few creatures, contorting vertebrae into bizarre configurations, and slapping claws on appendages grafted to places that'd probably make Darwinians balk, I can say it's definitely showing potential. Every choice you make has physical and statistical repercussions. Pick one kind of leg to boost speed, another kind of mandible to increase your bite, toothy versus gummy to dictate whether you're into meat or veggies or both. The theoretical micro-to-macro complexity (in the final version, you'll have to chaperone your Franken-critter through tribal, civilization, and space phases) practically boggles the mind.

Visit the Sporepedia and you can even download someone else's daft little stab at a critter. Unfortunately you can't sync your creations without manually downloading them from EA if you accidentally wipe them out. (Or if, like me, you've been switching between the PC and Mac versions.)

Good news: The trial version runs super-smooth on a Macbook Pro with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB in either OSX or Boot Camp (Vista) mode. But then all you can really do here is test drive your creature in a tiny cylindrical arena, so no promises the final version's not going to hammer the dickens out of your CPU and GPU. For the record, the system requirements for the Creature Creator are identical to the ones EA debuted for Spore a week ago.

If you want the full-featured Creator Creator, which should have all the blank spots populated with hundreds of additional body parts and who knows what other wacky miscellany, you'll have to pay EA $10 when it goes live tomorrow.

Review: Metal Gear Solid 4

At the outset of Metal Gear Solid 4, director Hideo Kojima can't help but respond to the aphorism that launched Tim Cain's legendary Fallout. "War...war never changes," growls Ron Perlman as the latter?s ironic intro rolls. But in Metal Gear Solid 4, the opening line runs exactly the opposite: "War...? rasps Snake as he crouches in the back of a transport motoring onto a desiccated battlefield. ?War...has changed."

Boy has it. In MGS4's dystopian rendition of our near-future, a cabal of synthetic intellects purveys war as a series of proxy battles to sustain a global algorithm that enhances battlefield predictability at the expense of free will. Humans are colonized by nano-machines and weapons are biometrically keyed to each soldier's DNA, relegating the ability to fire guns and launch rockets to remote-control overlords. Private military contractors or PMCs fight proxy wars without ideological liabilities and dictate the world economy. The world economy becomes a war economy, and war becomes pitilessly routine.

Everyone get all that?

Of course this series has always been a tad highfalutin. Even its protagonist tends to focus more on his personal demons than the ones lining the other sides of walls with guns and rocket launchers. Speaking of Solid Snake, in MGS4 you actually play as the prematurely grizzled ?Old? Snake, a reference to the mystery condition that's accelerated our hero?s aging process and rendered him precipitously frail, save for the use of a muscle-suit that allows him to channel combat skills without the limitations imposed by senescence.

Not to worry. When he?s under your command, he's spry as the icon he's modeled after (that?d be Snake Plissken from John Carpenter's Escape From New York). He hunkers and crawls with ease across deadly free-fire battlefields, slides flush along walls or through cramped spaces, leaps onto crates and over windowsills and rails, and dangles from ledges to avoid being spotted as ably as Matt Damon in the first of the Bourne flicks. He even gets a snazzy new OctoCamo body suit that lets him blend chameleon-like with any surface he presses against, adding "blending" to a list of stealth tactics that includes his stance, proximity to enemies, noise, motion, and line of sight. Oh, and it looks pretty cool too.

When you?re not skulking, the new over-the-shoulder shooting view is nearly as liberating here as when Shinji Mikami added it to Resident Evil 4. You?ll probably want to kick up the tracking sensitivity (the defaults felt a little sluggish to me), otherwise it?s competent enough to let you battle with precision, if you opt to battle at all. The only trouble is that your standard third-person view?s typically out of whack with the shoulder-cam, resulting in a second or two of adjustment when you trigger into position. That means you?ll typically want to find cover during firefights first, then stick behind it, and stay in shoulder-cam mode to mitigate the disorientation you?ll experience if you try to run and roll and circle-strafe. This was never intended to be a shooter, and you?ll only get frustrated if you try to play it like one.

The most controversial new mechanic involves a weapons launderer named Drebin who shows up early on and offers access to just about any projectile or incendiary weapon in the game from the START menu. As in anywhere, anytime, including right in the middle of major battles. Realistic? Of course not. But what else is about this series? It?s simply Kojima?s way of giving you what you need, when you need it, to avoid interruptions and keep the narrative flowing. It?s also an invitation to sneak rather than shoot your way through an anti-gun, anti-war, anti-violence polemic. Oh yeah, steer clear if a game that takes issue with everything from PMCs to WMDs rubs you wrong.

But let?s get to the question you?re really wondering about: Is it a movie or is it a game?

Both, of course, just like the last three, and while you're allowed the freedom to sneak and gunfight as you like between cut scene triggers in modestly branching areas, this story was never entirely ours to tell. It's the final movement of a faintly postmodern tetralogy suffused with themes ranging from fratricide and patricide to social fractiousness, existentialism, eugenics, and the validity of old saws like free will. A remarkable third of MGS4 is in fact spent not playing at all, but simply watching those themes resolve. For all the game's sermonizing about self-determination, MGS4 is a largely predetermined study in the harrowing physical and psychological dissolution of a guy who?s been horribly misused.

There's also no getting around the fact that Kojima's final thundering opus assumes you know a lot about its characters and their byzantine backgrounds. Call it ponderous, call it insular, just don?t call it much of a surprise. No one?s ever accused Hideo Kojima of being pithy, and after all, this is the final chapter in a decade-old saga, so the stops have been pulled out so far they've snapped off entirely.

That doesn?t mean MGS4 ever lumbers into chaotic or aimless territory, and the good news is that Kojima and team have managed to fashion one of the most socio-politically nuanced narratives this side of BioShock. The bad is that you?ll miss a lot of the depth layered in if this is your first tango with a Metal Gear Solid. If that?s the case, consider picking up the first three MGS games and playing through them beforehand. They're available right now in a budget-priced "essentials" collection. You'll need a PS2-compatible PS3 (or an actual PS2) but as long as that's not an obstacle and you can look past the first game's primitive visuals, you're in for a treat.

When you do finally get to MGS4, don't let the way it looks seduce you, though it does comes close to pulling off in real-time what Square Enix only managed a few years ago through advanced pre-rendering in the CGI film Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Never mind the cool effects, like bombs that periodically heat-scramble your radar or debris clouds that eerily choke off the sunlight and dissipate gradually. And don?t get too caught up fiddling with the metric ton of Bond-like tech or the large militia's worth of projectile and incendiary weaponry Snake somehow carts around like a two-legged TARDIS.

Instead, pay attention to the way Kojima manufactures a kind of queasy anxiety throughout with the camera, moments like the intro where it prowls the battlefield like a paranoid scavenger, lingering over corpses with the crows as trucks filled with PMC reinforcements roar onto the battlefield. Keep an eye on indices like the psyche and stress meters that adjoin Snake's health, compromising his aim when they drop, and dropping when he's under all sorts of duress (including, tellingly, when he?s standing near dead bodies). And think about what Kojima?s really up to when he shows you a knot of soldiers hashing out tactics and nervously pep-talking each other into action, about to charge a sniper lined corridor, only to get picked off, one at a time, lunging and flailing and scared witless.

Monday Gamewatch

This week: The world's most advanced political sim, chunky aliens back in vogue with groovy new moves, and cross country rally racing goes wacky-time. (Note: Days listed are ship-to-store.)

Monday

The Political Machine 2008 (PC). The Political Machine designer Brad Wardell is actually the guru behind some of the best 4X space strategy games money can buy (Galactic Civilizations 1 & 2) so don't mistake this game for a shallow parallel to all the current facile media coverage of candidates playing CYA and dodging straight answers to questions as simple as "What's your favorite food?" ("You can't handle the food!") In fact, The Political Machine bills itself as a serious sim, where you take on the role of a campaign manager for candidates like Obama, Clinton, and McCain, other historical figures, or your own personal pulpit-pounder built from scratch.

Tuesday

Space Invaders Extreme (DS, PSP). 30 years of Space Invaders and who says shooting neat rows of blockheaded aliens can't be just as fun now as it was in 1978? Space Invaders Extreme attempts to spruce up the legendary 2D shooter with new music, sound, and visual effects. All that background psychedelia seems like it'd be a little distracting to me, though, so have a look at this gameplay video (click on "PV") and decide for yourself whether "brand-new" equals streamlined and hip or colossally cluttered.

Wacky Races: Crash and Dash (Wii, DS). Hey, it's Penelope Pitstop and The Compact Pussycat! Peter Perfect and The Turbo Terrific! (I have no idea who those are, but ain't alliteration fun?) Race on 24 tracks as any of the characters from the cross-country rally cartoon and try to win the title of World's Wackiest Racer. Hanna-Barbera fans, eat your heart out.

Metal Gear Solid 4 Impressions: What's That Noise?

So this senior with a silver mustache and matching mullet walks into a bar. Or actually it's like a 747 with a bar. Or come to think of it, maybe you'd just call it a kitchenette with wings? Who knows (Martha Stewart?) but it looks pretty posh for mile-high food prep, sort of like the inside of the flying condo-in-the-sky the philanthropist in the Carl Sagan SETI flick uses to impress Jodi Foster (hey, it worked, didn't it?). Posh, and apparently impregnable, too. How else do you defend a game where a bunch of guys involve a six-year-old kid on a top secret sortie into treacherous territory?

Part of Metal Gear Solid 4's charm: It knows precisely when it's being ridiculous, and it makes sure you know it knows. The opening eight-minute install, annoying only because installs are still atypical in console-dom, ends with Snake cracking something wisenheimer like "Made you wait, did I?" The G.I. joshing -- that's G.I. as in gastrointestinal -- is back and explosively gross. I mean literally. And at one point during a mission briefing on our hero's aerial Taj Mahal, Snake turns down a plate of burnt eggs cooked sunny side up by a kid named...wait for it...Sunny! (Yuk-yuk, Mr. Kojima!)

Even during those breezier moments, the game never entirely relinquishes its sense of seriousness. Snake chain smokes like it's going out of style (which it has) during the install and according to my wife, he looks like hell (except the adjective she used was harsher). When Montezuma's Revenge grabs hold of one of Snake's battlefield companions in the middle of a major skirmish with frog-men that stick to walls, it's really because the guy's scared out of his wits. And the sequences with Sunny, the daughter of a woman killed by one of Snake's genetic "siblings" in Metal Gear Solid 2, reveal a skittish, oversensitive child desperately seeking approval from an embittered adult incapable of offering it to anyone, most of all himself.

Terrible things have happened to Old Snake, aka Solid Snake, aka Iroquois Pliskin, aka "David." Terrible things have happened because of him. The original Metal Gear Solid conveyed that at the B-movie level of the 1981 film that inspired it (Escape From New York), while the second game in the series upped the tenor and political subtext to something nearer Phillip Noyce's somber action flick, Patriot Games.

But MGS4 feels like a completely different game, thanks to Kojima raising his own cinematic bar and (so far, anyway) deftly vaulting right over it. Think epic and heartbreaking and creepy, like Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly meets Coppola's Apocalypse Now by way of Michael Crichton. The beautiful, terrible scene that loops behind the startup menu alone is stomach-dropping. (What's he doing? Why's he kneeling down? What's he doing with that?)

That won't reassure half-hearted fans who play these games for their sneak sequences, yet who reach for the "skip" button any time a cutscene plays and actors wax philosophical. Fortunately MGS4 mitigates even that complaint by working in a highly sophisticated cutscene engine that feeds you information like a series of portal-ized internet webcams threaded with informational feeds and you-choose multi-angle viewing controls. Sure, you can skip the cutscenes outright, but if you want the whole story and feel your fingers getting fidgety, having the option to watch what other people are doing in other areas of the plane during mission briefings or tally up all your accomplishments courtesy a scrolling ticker almost makes up for the gameplay interruptions.

My save file claims I've spent about eight hours prowling around the city in the first act alone. You can probably sprint through it in two or three with cutscenes, but you'll miss most of what makes MGS4's expanded tactical sandbox logistics worth tinkering with.

Take the OctoCamo camouflage, which lets Snake's suit blend with any adjacent texture. It adds just enough nuance to sneaking around soldier-clogged battlefields to keep tactical planning interesting and varied. Since it rates your "camo" coverage on a percentile scale that occasionally goes negative, you have to think in terms of gradients of coverage as opposed to other stealth games' far more binary "in" or "out of." Splinter Cell has gradients of light and darkness as well as sound, but MGS4 forces you to relate yourself to every opposable surface, and then relate that back to every nearby threat (shown as smaller or larger "bumps" on a silvery ring that shrinks or expands around you). The game doesn't say precisely how far away from an enemy or how much coverage is sufficient: you have to figure that out on your own.

You'll also have to plan around both static and dynamic tactical situations. In some areas, you'll move past a point and trigger a behavior, e.g. soldiers running down an alley or preparing to charge a sniper's nest. In others, the AI appears to follow loop routines but with enough variance that you'd have to sit for an uncomfortably long time to see the entire sequence. And the reactive enemy AI is considerably more aggressive and thorough than in any of the last few MGS games, pausing to pull open dumpsters and locker doors, climb ladders, and generally probe out-of-sorts evidence all the way to termination points.

Okay, time to sign this one off. I have notes enough already to fill a dozen more posts, but it's Friday night, I have a game to play. And so, I suspect, do you.

One last thing: Care to see the softer side of MGS4? Check out this week's Casual Friday, where PC World's Darren Gladstone plays Connect Four with Metal Gear Solid 4, The Incredible Hulk, Spore, and Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3.

NPD: May 2008 Game Sales Herald Bumper Year

Grand Theft Auto IV sold well in May, but not well enough to conjure significant hardware sales for Sony and Microsoft, and Nintendo locked up the top two spots in hardware sales for the fourth month in a row. The really big news: The U.S. video games industry kicked out $6.6 billion the first five months of 2008, more than all of 1997's revenues. "The industry is on pace to achieve revenues in the $21-$23 billion range for 2008," reports NPD's Anita Frazier.

And the numbers...

Hardware

675k - Wii
453k - DS
209k - PlayStation 3
187k - Xbox 360
182k - PSP

- Hardware sales barely budged from last month. Nintendo's Wii sales dipped 5 percent, but the company maintains a considerable lead over Sony and Microsoft, beating both the 360 and PS3 numbers combined by a margin only 100k units short of 2 to 1. From where I'm sitting, that's pretty incredible. Even if those numbers start to dip for whatever reason down the road, Nintendo's now ahead of everyone in every major market, and with mega-franchises like Grand Theft Auto IV failing to even moderately change that, I see diminishing reason to put stock in claims that Sony or Microsoft are going to "eventually pull ahead" in the months and/or years to come.

- The DS's sales actually increased by about 8 percentage points, possibly on strong sales of its two Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, but also (speculatively on my part) because of seasonal incentives and/or structural demands that kids spend more time on the go and less parked in front of a TV set.

- Microsoft and Sony's numbers were virtually flat from April, with Sony up a meager six points over Microsoft's negligible 1,000 unit drop. NPD's Anita Frazier says the continued success of GTA IV isn't translating into big hardware sales for either the PS3 or 360, but adds "there may yet be a lift in June due to gift-giving for Father's Day and Graduations." I think not. Since when have Father's Day gift givers ever spent $300-$400 on Dad en masse, except for those rare cases when the family gangs up and pools the cash? And again, with games in the hotseat these days, especially that particular game, I don't see parents spending big money on a video game system as a reward for completing whatever level of an education. The idea that gaming and "education" are opposing forces may be changing, but not enough to rock Microsoft and Sony's numbers in June.

Software

871k - Grand Theft Auto IV (360)
787k - Mario Kart (Wii)
688k - Wii Fit (Wii)
443k - Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3)
295k - Wii Play (Wii)
171k - Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
131k - Iron Man (PS2)
117k - Guitar Hero III (Wii)
107k - Pokemon MD: Explorers of Darkness (DS)
102k - Pokemon MD: Explorers of Time (DS)

- Microsoft nearly doubled Sony's GTA IV sales grab, which makes sense if you look at the roughly 2 to 1 install base in static terms (about 11.6 million U.S. 360s against 5 million PS3s), but it tells us relatively little about either system's growth potential. When a game as important and popular and media-saturated as Grand Theft Auto IV fails to drive either console up the elevator, it suggests gamers don't yet see enough of a difference between either system. Coupled with Nintendo's hardware and software spoils, it also suggests price is still the deciding factor when it comes to new system purchases.

- Nintendo absolutely dominated May, claiming 7 of the top 10 slots. Interestingly, while sales of GTA IV sales plummeted 53 and 56 percentage points from April to May for the 360 and PS3 versions respectively, Mario Kart for the Wii was only down 30 sales points, while Wii Play only dropped 18 points.

- According to NPD's Frazier, "GTA IV has now generated combined sales of 4.2 million units, making it the top-selling title of the year." I'm sure both Microsoft and Sony are wishing they could've somehow locked that one up as exclusive even temporarily. Rockstar wins in the short term by capitalizing on the Sony and Microsoft's combined install base, but will unquestionably take longer to achieve Grand Theft Auto III for the PS2's 11.6 million sales crown.

- "A lot of folks are interested in the battle of the bands," says Frazier. "Year-to-date, Guitar Hero III has sold 2.5 million units compared to Rock Band's 1.3 million which lands them both in the top 10 titles for the year so far." Again, the lesson I'm taking away from Guitar Hero 3 holding off Rock Band is that Price Is King, no matter how cool your gear or compelling your game mechanic.

- I know what you're thinking. How the heck did Iron Man for the PS2 make the top 10? Multiply well over a hundred million unit install base by the popularity of that particular movie and the apparently highly forgiving standards of much of the gaming public (Iron Man the game on all platforms fared mediocrely with critics) and I wouldn't be surprised to see the PS2 version of The Incredible Hulk charting this month with that film in theaters today. Bad news for gamers who care about quality gaming, but great news for the "business first, quality and/or substance second" crowd.

This is Not a Metal Gear Solid 4 Review

The five or six hours I've been able to spend with Metal Gear Solid 4 have been strictly A-plus, in stark opposition to my experience with publisher Konami, which sadly rates a disgraceful F. That's because despite due-diligently requesting a reviewable copy of the game months ago, Konami has so far managed not to send Game On anything whatsoever.

This, in spite of many polite phone calls and emails asking (imploring, entreating) Konami for at least a day or two with the game before pulling together something sufficiently competent to call a "review." I finally went out this morning and bought the game at the local Walmart. (Walmart would've had them to sell at midnight, but my local store weirdly happened to be running a full blown inventory, so they were mercifully spared a Wednesday shipment.)

Employing an equation that makes about as much sense as some of Hideo Kojima's plots (and ironically reflecting much of the shallow commercial and/or information-control partiality Kojima himself mocks during the opening sequence of MGS4) Konami didn't send out review copies to most journalists until yesterday and today. That's send, as in receivable today or tomorrow.

Who waits to send out review copies until a day or two before retail street?

Games aren't books or movies. I can finish a pretty sizable book in eight or nine hours reading at a normal pace, and watch a movie two or threes times over in about the same span.

But a game?

How much time is time enough, when today's games are so vastly, time-devouringly multi-dimensional?

Did you see this story on 11th hour reviews by Simon Parkin for Gamasutra? Rockstar pulled something similar with Grand Theft Auto IV, resulting in who knows how many journalists rushing to publish reviews having only played fractional aspects of the total game. Grand Theft Auto IV is quite obviously not a game you review in a day or two. Not even if you're sleeplessly jacked on Jolt and popping caffeine pills.

Think about sleep deprivation's effects on a person's judgment. Think about the way you've felt right after seeing a movie or reading a book, compared with your thoughts and feelings a day or two later.

Even the most experienced critics need time to muse and reboot. It's just the way human brains are wired.

I've had to rush-review games before. It's not a happy experience. Even with the ones I've felt I played sufficiently, it's always emotionally tricky landing confidently on a final grade, knowing I might feel better or worse if I had a sliver more time -- just a day or two -- to let the experience mellow and reflect.

After all, this whole operation is about passing along reliable information to you, the reader. It's about offering opinions that -- whether you agree or disagree with them -- you can at least depend on, in terms of their insight and authenticity.

The whole enterprise conspires against that, when publishers start pushing reviewers flush against hard deadlines. The result is not provably, but very probably, a spate of mechanically thorough but insightfully vapid reactions, signed, sealed, and immutable. No critic (except for the commendably candid Simon Parkin, that is) shackled to a publication with its reputation on the line is going to come back days or weeks later and rescind a review on the basis of minds changed by continued play.

You don't review a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 overnight, or even after a couple of days. It's simply too massive. I've spent the last three or four hours alone just exploring the war-torn starting area and trying out Snake's panoply of enhanced abilities while enjoying the way all the old ones feel totally new. Not to mention the fact that everything's harder (in all the right ways). The tactical AI which now pokes its head into every hiding place may be some of the best I've ever encountered in a stealth game. No blatantly cheap tricks or workarounds. If you're not paying attention to every inch of space between you and the other guy, you're screwed.

And I love that.

Or that's my knee-jerk reaction, anyway.

You know how you've been hearing more about game journalists and payola lately? The enemy of competent, reliable opinion journalism isn't money so much as time. And by proxy, therefore, companies who treat ours cheaply.

I know there's nothing you can do about that. That's my job. But since I'm not going to rush my Metal Gear Solid 4 review -- it'll be up this weekend or early next week -- I just wanted you to know why.

Son of Metal Gear Solid

Popping in a copy of MGS2 after playing through the original PlayStation version of Metal Gear Solid is like flipping from crackling AM signal over to crisp digital satellite. What surprises me most about MGS2 as I'm polishing off the pithy Snake-on-a-Tanker opener is that it still looks as good on a regular TV, if not better than, games as recent as Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV. Less textured maybe, less stuff realistically cluttering up the crooks and corners of the the world, but still sleeker somehow.

Take the characters. Snake glides along catwalks and weaves effortlessly between metal pylons, looking like something drawn, rendered, and time-machined back from some future timeline that hasn't happened yet. Have you seen character design this good anywhere else since MGS2 came out seven years ago? Okay, Heavenly Sword comes to mind, as well as Shadow of the Colossus, but honestly not much else. Crysis maybe for sheer brute force render power. But not Doom 3. Not Oblivion. Not even Grand Theft Auto IV. Those games just throw muscle at the problem, and it shows. Hideo Kojima and character designers like Yoji Shinkawa get that you don't need the world's burliest 3D processor to make a game look distinctively amazing. Everything looks like GrandDoomOblivion. Nothing else looks quite like Metal Gear Solid 2.

Otherwise it's really something moving from MGS to MGS2 without the nostalgia three years casts over things shelved. I remember feeling a little tepid toward MGS2's controls in 2001, but they're a godsend emerging fresh from MGS. Even the camera left to its own devices offers about the right amount of perspective to let you deal effectively with trouble when the klaxons are blaring. I felt like the vortex of a blind enemy-sucking tornado in MGS. I feel decidedly more like a tactical demigod here, someone capable of making tactical choices instead of reacting to someone else's. One thing: The punch-punch-kick melee still sucks, especially the gamey way you'll often miss despite making clear physical contact with an enemy, who'll immediately reciprocate by not missing you.

What else. Snake's definitely a lot more assertive here, and the writing's miles better too. No answering questions with questions and considerably less cereal box philosophy. I'll weigh in on the much more controversial latter two-thirds starring you-know-who later tonight.

Metal Gear Solid: Facile, Vexing, Great Cutscenes

I'm sniffing around the last battle or two in the original Metal Gear Solid and I have to admit, maybe EA's John Riccitiello is right when he says that games today "are harder and harder to play." Because honestly, I'm barely trying and I pretty much blazed through this thing. Sure, my latest aphorism-soused communique with perky data analyst Mei Ling shows about 10 hours and change, but that's a straight 10, not the literal 10 plus 4 or 5 "soft" hours unlogged replaying and backtracking to pull off a perfect sweep. The only battles worth a hoot were Cyborg Ninja (probably the toughest) and Vulcan Raven where he's lugging the gatling gun around and a total you-know-what to sneak up on from behind with a Nikita rocket.

Something I wasn't paying attention to a decade ago: Kojima was probably ahead of his time in 1998 in terms of what he's up to with the camera during cutscenes. There's the one, for instance, after Snake defeats Cyborg Ninja where he's considering letting the lab nerd (Hal Emmerich) tag along: The camera rises slowly behind Emmerich, like it's sizing him up along with Snake (Spielberg uses this same technique in the latest Indy movie -- think the scene where the jeeps pull into the base and the camera pans up behind the American flag). The camera may be a train wreck when you're actually playing the game, and that's a serious problem, but when Kojima's spooling cutscenes -- and let's face it, that's like a full third of game time here -- it's not the half-cooked dialogue that's interesting, it's what he's doing with the camera you ought to be paying attention to.

Otherwise, for all the years of hype, Metal Gear Solid is riddled with issues, and for all its "game that launched the stealth genre" cred, filled with false starts. Top of the list: Enemies re-spawn endlessly when you trigger alerts, and your reaction time's a joke (especially when the radar's jammed) since you're stuck looking down at Snake's head and can't see what he sees. Ergo enemies just pop into existence from any angle, and you end up with the nose of your automatic weapon plunged into an enemy's gullet, firing at point blank range. Because that's fun (not to mention tactic-less).

Or how about the part midway through where you have no choice but to backtrack to get a sniper rifle to take out a mini-boss, and you spend at least half an hour putting everything together, only to be arbitrarily captured courtesy a shackling cutscene as you leisurely approach a security door (cue freaky Kojima-Nelson hybrid cackling "HAH-hah!").

And who can forget the irritating wrangling between plausible science fiction and uncommon idiocy? Like when Otacon/Emmerich mentions the four invisibility suits he was going back for so he could nick one for you. (And the guy didn't think I would've wanted one of those when we were still there together?) Even after you kill the four guys wearing the suits in the elevator, no suit for you. Kinda lame.

What I'm really itching to know: If Psycho Mantis can telekinetically make my controller move, how come Hideo Kojima can't tell whether I buckled on Ocelot's torture rack in terms of a certain someone's finale-nullifying "return" in Metal Gear Solid 4?

That Metal Gear Solid 90's Show

My body's full of nanobots and antifreeze. I stink like adrenaline, saltwater, nootropics, the cold. I'm spun up on Benzedrine and propaganda. The topper? I just figured out that riding an elevator up the spine of this Alaskan island that time forgot then back down again magically re-spawns C4 in the basement like it's going out of style.

Which either means I'm reading a sloppy "continuity optional" Tom Clancy knockoff, or I'm playing Metal Gear Solid and getting my kicks ("out of," but also occasionally as well "to the head") rediscovering all the cheap tricks and gimmicks I'd forgotten years ago.

Take the first boss battle with Revolver Ocelot in the squarish subsurface room with the guy tied to the C4. You're only able to see about two-thirds of the screen courtesy a trenchant top-down camera, and yet you're supposed to maneuver Snake in circles around that room's booby-trapped center, taking shots at a villain you mostly can't see or track, guessing where he'll be, given no practical aiming mechanism, and taking .45 Colt cartridges to the gut, six a go, fired at you from random anywhere. What's more: Ocelot's bullets ricochet off walls at perfect 90-degree angles to double their chance of hitting you. (Because that's fair!) And you have just enough in rations and spare boxes of bullets to whittle Ocelot down to the ol' obligatory photo finish.

So yeah, kind of 1998 then, where the plausibility of the mechanics of a game often ranked second or third in the rush to capitalize on head-grabbers like "cinematic cutscenes" and "full voice acting" and "fully 3D" vistas on consoles struggling to keep up with Glide-powered PCs.

Don't worry, I know MGS is a decade old, hindsight's overrated, etc. I dig it anyway. There's so much this game did first, after all: The shift from 2D to 3D stealth mechanics, the politically-charged narrative with plausibly broader implications, the byzantine social network, and the way the camera did stuff like dive to shoulder level, auto-peeking around corners when you press against a wall and melding player input with stylized directorial controls. Needless to say, MGS is the stealth game pretty much everything hence owes a debt to.

What's more, I'm surprised by how under the top the writing plays in 2008. For some reason Snake and crew seemed goofier to me a decade ago. They feel...I don't know, somehow tamer reframed, even with the cheap flirting ("Well, if you come back in one piece, maybe I'll let you do a strip search on me") and fruit-loop science:

Snake: By the way, sorry to disappoint you but I did manage to smuggle out my smokes

Snake: In my stomach.

Science which, by the way, gives entirely new meaning to that timeless phrase "this tastes like..." Mm-hmm.

(Back with more shortly.)

Metal Gear Solid DLC Coming to Xbox Live?

Who says PlayStation 3 owners have all the fun? If Ripten's not smoking something we'd all like a hit of in any event, it looks like Metal Gear Solid may be coming to the Xbox 360 courtesy Xbox Live Arcade in the very near future. Which would also make it the first second Metal Gear running on Microsoft hardware (if we're not counting the fact that Microsoft Game Studios actually published the original MGS for the PC, i.e. the version no one remembers playing).

About the MGS/XBLA rumor, Ripten's Patrick Steen writes:

I expect you?re asking how we know, or who our source is. Lets just say a reliable individual tapped into our codec frequency after spying the game on a certain pre-release network. We shall say no more - nudge nudge, wink wink - except this; there are problems in bringing Kojima?s masterpiece to this new playing field.

Problems? I can't imagine what problems there'd be, especially if we're talking a port of the PC version, as opposed to something pseudo-bleem!-ified via PS emulation. Unless we really are talking the original PS version and the problem has to do with emulating Sony hardware, whether literally or legally, on Xbox 360 turf. Color me clueless either way, and treat this as hearsay until Microsoft says it all official-like.

In the meantime, I just picked up the Metal Gear Solid Essential Collection to give Hideo Kojima's storied series a second pass while I wait for my belated review copy to arrive (darn you broken Konami manufacturing logistics). I'll pass along any insights that leap out, including mercilessly contemporaneous reactions to the game's infamous control scheme, which has always been pretty controversial, even with the people who totally worship these games.

Monday Gamewatch

This week: Big-haired boxing, high-speed stock cars go merrily round, and some raspy old dude in a bandana can still tiptoe like a ninja. (Note: Days listed are ship-to-store.)

Monday

Don King Presents Prize Fighter (Xbox 360, Wii). Think simulation meets docu-drama meets guy with out of control hair. This one "takes place both inside and outside the ring," but claims it doesn't skimp on the crosses, hooks and uppercuts. Of course the overview of the game says nothing whatsoever about what legendary boxing promoter Don King brings to the table. Coupon for a free can of Aqua Net?

Tuesday

Backyard Baseball '09 (Wii). Billed however improbably as "the most fun you can have outside the ball park," Backyard Baseball '09 is another out-of-nowhere Wii game that could be good (but applying the law of averages and reactions to earlier games in the series, probably won't). Still, if you want to play hardball with David ?Big Papi? Ortiz and other MLB superstars like A-Rod, Jeter, Ichiro, Griffey, and Pujols as kids, it's your only-stop shop. The 2009 version adds a new All Star Game and tournament mode along with season and single game options, create-a-player, and a Homerun Derby mini-game.

NASCAR 09 (Xbox 360, PS3, PS2). I despise NASCAR (the actual sport). There, I said it. Sue me. No other sport (short of Olympic nonsense like speed walking and synchronized swimming) seems as pathologically brainless. Still, if wearing a beanie with a spinning car mobil attached doesn't tickle your dizzy-bone, you can apparently drive in some of the prettiest circles going with EA's NASCAR 09, which includes four-time champ Jeff Gordon on the mic, an all-new career mode, "forgiving" vs. "realistic" driving models, and one-on-one Sprint Driver battles against the sport's biggest stars.

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit (Xbox 360, PS3). All I know about Dragon Ball Z is it's a really-really-really long-running Japanese anime about a bunch of kids defending the planet from super-powered bad guys. Never seen it, probably never will. Whether you actually play a game-within-the-game called "Dragon Ball"? No idea. If you on the other hand knows what's what with this stuff, and liked the whole Dragon Ball Z: Budokai series of games for the PS2, this one's a new fighter from the same developer.

Blast Works: Build, Trade & Destroy (Wii). Okay, who's paying indie developer Cactus Games royalties for nicking Clean Asia's idea to use the debris from stuff you blow up to pimp your fighter? Sidescrolling 2D shooter Blast Works lets you do just that with 15 campaign missions played with either the Wii Remote and Nunchuk or Wii Classic Controller.

Thursday

Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3). Anyone else think Snake looks silly with a mustache? Whatever, right? You'd probably play this game if he put on mouse ears and a tutu and danced the fandango. So here we go, and it's the final chapter of everyone's favorite Kurt Russell knockoff on the prowl for his daffily named arch-nemesis Liquid Ocelot. No one's ever going to charge this series with subtlety, even with deceptively jingoistic tags like "Guns of the Patriots," but what the heck, it's got cool toys, an apparently much improved control scheme, and where else are you going to find a game with brass enough to suggest (however wrongly) that smoking a cigarette has benefits? My only hang-up at this point: Konami's refusing to slip review copies to online reviewers until the game ships to stores this Thursday. Which, you know, pretty much defeats the purpose of bothering to review a game -- especially one with rumored 90 minute cutscenes -- in the first place.

John Mayer Suggests Guitar Hero "Effortless"

John Mayer is not only a more successful musician than I'll ever be, he can slap titles like "Your Body Is a Wonderland" on songs and actually get away with it. I guess he can also get away with taking silly jabs at five-button plastic axe strummers, because I don't think anyone really cares when he opines "Guitar Hero was devised to bring the guitar-playing experience to the masses without them having to put anything into it."

Well sure, John. Kinda like Madden Football was devised to bring dozens of massively overbuilt guys lunging and tackling and smacking into each other to the masses without the masses having to, you know, end up in traction or worse.

Mayer went on to say:

And having done both, there's nothing like really playing guitar. I mean, what would you rather drive, a Ferrari or one of those amusement-park cars on a track?

I dunno. I kind of like amusement-park cars, actually, and with all respect to real-instrument musicians (hey, I'm one too!) I dare anyone to make an actual Ferrari do what an actual roller coaster car can.

Back to your plastic five-button axes, people, and no apologies.

Devil May Cry 4 PC Demo Rains Demons (Hallelujah)

What a totally not obvious choice of games to port to PC, but here it is in spite of my incredulousness, and now you can give it a shake courtesy this 805 MB demo.

I think I called Devil May Cry 4 "like watching teppanyaki on fast forward" somewhere. It is, and I love that about this kind of macho amped up sword porn. Sure, it's ridiculous, but ridiculous never looked better or let you cathartically eviscerate as many gibbering demons in five second sweeps. If you're a PC player who missed this on console and love brawlers where you walk emo-cut dudes costumed like understudies for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band into rooms literally boiling over with ridiculously cool bad guys, I'd advise you give it a shot.

And just make sure you have a decent gamepad...unless you're some kind of freaky keyboard ninja.

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John Carmack Says Crysis Not That Exciting, Suggests Quake Could Grow PC Market

We all have that certain special first-person shooter in our lives. You know, the one you played with a null modem cable plugged into your friend's PC, or where you stomped on your pals after zapping them with a ray that turned them into mewling pygmies. Mine was Quake, though I'd long since slashed through Ultima Underworld and shot up Wolfenstein 3D and dabbled with all those other Doom-and-a-half knockoffs mostly with a great big frown on my face (the most promising was an Origin Systems fantasy game that let you turn into stuff like cats, dragons, and beholders called Shadowcaster by the guys who went on to do Hexen, Jedi Knight 2, and Quake 4 of all things).

Why Quake and not Quake 2 or Quake 3 Arena? I don't know. I never took to Quake Arena, honestly because I've never been wholly at ease with the "multiplayer-only" bag. Blame where I live. (Head out from the cities to the farms here and it's like The Land the Internet Forgot.) And after hundreds of hours with Quake, I only gave Quake 2 a shake because I was still into whatever John Carmack and id Software were pulling out of hats visually over and above the technology du jour. Needless to say, nothing else about Quake 2 really moved me.

And Quake was first. 3D ballistics and "giblets" first. Mouselook first. Bunny-hopping, strafe-leaping, rocket-jumping first. Nine Inch Nails on FX first. Explosive headache-catalyzing mayhem for eight hours a pop on a (then) blazing-fast dial-up modem, miraculously without lag and low sub-100-millisecond ping times, for not a penny more than you paid for the game up front and your dial-up connection first. It was gloriously mip-mapped and z-buffered and all that other mid-1990s 3D geekery that went with owning a Diamond Monster 3D plug-in card and downloading special executables like Quake3D to invoke the mystery of "Glide."

Heck, I got sick and had to stop playing for the first time with Quake. Not much of an endorsement, I know, but it's like remembering your first bout with food poisoning. Getting nauseated in front of a CRT?let's just say you don't forget the first game that made you (almost) hurl.

So I'll always listen to what John Carmack has to say, even if I haven't been all that pleased with id's output in over a decade. And I'm paying close attention when he's saying Crysis ain't all that, compared to his plans to spin Quake 3 Arena into a PC market grower.

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Game Intelligence for Tuesday, June 3rd

Today: Ninja Gaiden 2 director quits, PS3 hungrier than a fridge, online sales about to beat retail, weak dollar throttles US Wii Fit sales, PS3 40GB backward compatibility coming.

Ninja Gaiden 2 Director Quits

It seems the ever excitable Tomonobu Itagaki has resigned from Japanese publisher/developer Tecmo, and let's just say the parting appears not to have been very sweet (and plenty sorrowful). Itagaki's PR team was first off the ropes, swinging with news Itagaki had filed a complaint in the Tokyo District Court against Tecmo president Yoshimi Yasuda for "such unlawful acts as unreasonable and disingenuous statements made towards me." Damages claimed? 148 million yen or around $1.42 million USD. What, Yasuda couldn't handle the camera either?

PS3 Hungier Than a Fridge?

According to a study conducted by the Australian consumer group Choice, video game consoles like the Playstation 3 consume five times more energy than a medium sized refrigerator. Cost to power the latter? $50 a year. Cost to power your PS3 even if it's not in use but turned on? Try $250 a year. Yikes.

Online Sales About to Beat Retail?

So said Valve's president Gabe Newell at a conference in Bellevue, Washington, claiming that while the company's traditional retail sales were below 10%, online growth was stratospherically higher at close to 200%. "There have been a bunch of stories written recently, both by the gaming press and the industry business press that PC gaming is dead," said Newell. "There's a perception problem. A lot of the stories written recently aren't what's actually happening."

Perhaps, but these kinds of claims and intimations wrapped in vague percentiles are so much sound and fury until someone independently gets their hands around comprehensive online sales and subscription numbers. And I don't think we'd be hearing luminaries like Peter Molyneux decrying the demise of traditional PC gaming if there wasn't something more than just an online switcheroo going on.

Weak Dollar Throttles U.S. Wii Fit Sales

Trouble finding a copy of Wii Fit lately? Could it be because Nintendo shipped a trifling 500,000 copies to North America and saved its main stash -- some 2 million units -- for higher-paying Euro-gamers? A single USD is currently worth roughly two-third of one EUR.

PS3 40GB Backward Compatibility Coming?

Landing courtesy a free firmware flash for your 40GB PS3 this October, reports German games site InPlayStation.de after speaking to a German Sony importer. Sony hinted in February that it might offer downloadable PS2 games through its PlayStation Network, a feature that would dovetail perfectly with the long overdue compatibility update.

The original German link. The Google translated version.

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Nvidia Launches GeForce 9M Series Mobile GPUs

Promising up to 40% better performance over its last generation and Hybrid SLI support, Nvidia added seven new mobile GPUs to its notebook lineup this morning. Launching at Computex 2008 in Taipei, the 65nm GeForce 9M series puts the following seven processors at the peak of Nvidia's burgeoning mobile GPU family:

Performance

GeForce 9600M GT (32 Compute Cores, 120 Gigaflops)
GeForce 9600M GS (32 Compute Cores, 103 Gigaflops)
GeForce 9500M G (16 Compute Cores, 60 Gigaflops)

Mainstream

GeForce 9400M
GeForce 9300M GS (8 Compute Cores, 34 Gigaflops)
GeForce 9200M GS (8 Compute Cores, 31 Gigaflops)

Value

GeForce 9100M G (8 Compute Cores, 26 Gigaflops)

Said Nvidia senior vice president Jeff Fisher:

Beginning this summer, GeForce 9M GPUs and Hybrid SLI, paired with AMD and Intel CPUs, will enable a new breed of notebooks. These new notebooks will be optimized to deliver a visual experience and raw computing performance that traditional cookie-cutter notebooks with integrated graphics simply can't touch.

Okay, so he's not saying much at all, is he. The press release goes on to claim "10x faster performance," as if that's going to surprise anyone who's tried to play Oblivion or Half Life 2 on an integrated-GPU laptop. But let's look at some of the other things in the press release:

- The GeForce 9M GPUs will enable the world's first notebooks with Hybrid SLI. What's Hybrid SLI? Nvidia claims it allows two Nvidia GPUs -- one low-power, one high-performance -- to work cooperatively in the same PC to deliver what it calls "GeForce Boost" and "HybridPower." Think of these features as flip sides of a coin that's always trying to help you get the most out of your battery with the least compromise in visual performance.

- New PureVideo HD processing for improved color and contrast. Bear in mind a great deal of this is still dependent on physical issues beyond Nvidia's control, like screen types (matte, glossy) and backlighting solutions.

- Full support for the latest Blu-ray Profile 2.0 and Blu-ray Live.

- DVI, HDMI 1.3, Display Port 1.1, and VGA support.

- MXM 3.0 graphics module specification support.

Nvidia's general manager of notebooks business Rene Haas adds:

With the recent addition of advanced features to Blu-ray Live and complexity of DirectX 10 games like Crysis, PC users need more graphics processing performance than today's generic integrated graphics can deliver. The new GeForce 9M series meets this need while also delivering processing muscle beyond gaming and graphics.

Aha, someone said Crysis, i.e. the Holy Grail for 3D performance wonks. Don't get your hopes up just yet, enthusiasts. The 9600M GT -- even the unannounced but bet-yer-bottom-dollar forthcoming 9800M GTX -- probably won't be capable of smoothly handling Crysis at maximum detail under Vista and DX10 at native resolutions of 1440 x 900 on up to 1920 x 1200 while maintaining average frame rates of 30 fps or higher. I'd wager a 9600M GT is probably on par with (or slightly inferior to) the 8800M GTX in raw performance benchmarks, just like the 8600M GT (3316 3DMark06) was in baseline relation to the old GeForce Go 7800 GTX (4000 3DMark06). Somewhere in here's an important point about thermal improvements, but since both chips are manufactured on a 65nm process, it's hard to see where and how much without actual vendor products.

Nvidia says the new GeForce 9M GPUs will be available in over a hundred notebook models beginning this summer.

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Game Intelligence for Monday, June 2nd

Today: Guy shreds 7 lbs on Wii Fit, GameStop throttling games industry, movies less rule-y than sports in game adaptations, EGM refuses to review MGS4, Microsoft and Netflix deal cinched.

Guy Shreds 7 lbs on Wii Fit

Is Wii Fit a fitness center gateway platform? Who knows, but this guy claims he lost 7 lbs after 30 minutes a day playing for a week.

GameStop Throttling Games Industry?

GameStop makes 50 cents on the dollar for used games, compared to just 21 cents for new ones. Man, that's about 7 cents more for new games than we used to make when I managed one. Anyway. Gamasutra's Brandon Sheffield takes aim at the largest games retailer in the U.S., calling for a push toward online distribution to "get content into the hands of consumers without giving a third party a big piece of the pie."

Movies Less Rule-y Than Sports in Game Adaptations?

Games theorist Ian Bogost and I share an interest in game adaptation, though I'm more into boardgames-to-wargames than Bogost's focus on coin-ops to consoles. In any case, Bogost considered the issue last Wednesday as it relates to translating sports (you know, real sports, as in the kind typically played outdoors) to home consoles. The only quibble I have is his attempt to distinguish film from sports and suggestion that the latter's based less on rules than narrative. In fact, they're both generated from complex rulesets which process reflectively as narrative. Sports games (again, the non-electronic kind) just seem "rule-ier" because the high-level mechanics are more immediately identifiable by the audience (the actually important difference is that the outcome of a game is constantly in "play," or at least we hope that's the case). But even movies require viewers to be aware of and submissive to certain high-level rules. Pick up a copy of Film Theory: An Introduction and see if you agree with me or Bogost after putting it down again.

EGM Refuses to Review MGS4

Did you hear EGM scrapped its review of MGS4? I know! I guess they had a good reason. You know, little thing about Konami putting shackles on what they could and couldn't cover? I'm reviewing it for PC World and have been handed no such ultimatum (though I've also been handed no review copy). But if what EGM's saying is true for all the print guys?I mean seriously Konami?

Microsoft and Netflix Deal Cinched?

Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter claims a Microsoft/Netflix deal is done. I guess we'll see how Microsoft plans to sneak terabyte-sized hard drives (or larger) into our Xbox 360s to accommodate all that high-def content shortly?

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Monday Gamewatch

This week: Fat panda knows kung-fu, some guy with a bullwhip gets LEGO-fied, a new racing game muscles in on Gran Turismo's turf, Robert Ludlum re-Bourne, and you wouldn't like this game when it's angry. (Note: Days listed are ship-to-store.)

Tuesday

Kung Fu Panda (Multiplatform). The upcoming animated flick (June 6) about a panda with kung fu moxie received sustained applause at its Cannes premiere earlier this month. The PC version, on the other hand, is developed by Beenox, whose Bee Movie Game was just a microwaved movie knockoff with too little of the actual movie clipped in and too much of its menial activities foisted on players as "gameplay." The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions were handled by Luxoflux (the mediocre True Crime series guys), the Wii and PS2 versions are with XPEC (Taiwanese developer behind the magnanimous Hello Kitty: Rescue Mission). The one developer with a halfway decent track record in the bunch? Vicarious Visions, handling the Nintendo DS version.

LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (Multiplatform). Build or build not, there is no try in this literally cobbled together Lego-mash of the first three Indiana Jones movies. Explore underground caverns, outmaneuver snakes, pummel bad guys until they shatter into plastic bits and pieces: Lara Croft may have trumped her stubbly fedora-loving inspiration as a pulp adventure videogame icon, but Traveller's Tales still has the corner on ironic escapades skewed toward kids and franchise buffs--perfect grist for a diet-Indy escapade or two. Only problems include: Cheaper humor, stubbornly poor-angled camera, unintuitive logic puzzles, and visually ambiguous edges on everything, inviting slips, trips, tumbles, and explosive blocky spills.

GRID (Multiplatform). Developer Codemasters' last TOCA Touring racer DiRT evolved out of its award-winning Colin McRae Rally series. GRID, or Race Driver: GRID as it's called abroad, one-ups the DiRT engine with enhancements throughout including completely rewritten damage modeling. The AI's also supposed to be personalized enough that you can size up your competition in races, then hire on opponents whose driving style best dovetails with your own. Is it a Gran Turismo 5 killer? Check out this clever comparison vid and decide for yourself.

Robert Ludlum's: The Bourne Conspiracy (Xbox 360, PS3). "You are the perfect weapon," claims the game. Actually you're Ludlum's super-duper Jason Bourne in a tactical action game that cribs from the books but only lays claim to "the aggressive style and frenetic action" of the films. High Moon Studios last almost high-profile game was Darkwatch, a solid if routine first-person shooter that mashed vampires and Wild West motifs into a cannon it proceeded to fire you from repeatedly. As for Bourne, if you're wondering why the guy in the shot looks eerily like Alexis Denisof, sorry Matt Damon fans, he sat this one out.

Oh yeah, can't forget Ninja Gaiden 2 (Xbox 360) which I've already talked about here and here. You know I dug it, so now I'm just curious to see how the press's hatred of the camera plays with all the different strata of NG2 fans who'll finally get a chance tomorrow or Wednesday to see for themselves.

Thursday

The Incredible Hulk (Multiplatform). Is it just me or dear god almighty does the CG look awful in the trailers for the upcoming Hulk flick? The game based on the movie (in which the CG behemoth look a little more in his element) has Edge of Reality (developed Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games for the Nintendo 64) on console duties and Amaze Entertainment covering handhelds. The console versions reportedly offer free-roam bash-em-up gameplay with enemies like the Abomination, Bi-Beast, U-Foes, The Enclave, and of course, the U.S. Army.

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