So the Dow Jones pancaked yesterday, dropping a record 778 points, or just shy of 7 percent, while the NASDAQ composite index took an over 9 percent spill, down nearly 200 points, after the House scuttled a $700 billion bailout plan. Stocks are "surging" in early trading today after Monday's practically vertical sell-off, but even the games industry couldn't sidestep the sting of yesterday's tumble.
- Electronic Arts Inc. fell $2.76 -- 7 percent -- to $36.87, after recovering from a 52-week low of $36.60 earlier.
- Activision Blizzard Inc. fell $1.88 -- 11 percent -- to $14.50
- Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. fell $1.07 -- 6.6 percent -- to $15.09.
- THQ fell 90 cents -- 7.3 percent -- to $11.45.
- Gamestop Corp. fell $2.13 -- 5.9 percent -- to $34.03.
Those stocks are all up in midday trading so far today: Activision Blizzard's at $14.57, Take-Two's at $16.10, THQ's at $11.72, and Gamestop's at $34.66. Like just about any business that isn't a bank at the moment, the games industry is basically healthy and solvent, and I'm not hearing anything particularly doom-and-gloomsy coming from any of the key prognosticators.
Even if we finally slip into a full-blown recession, I think we're still looking at a bumper year for gaming, though it's almost certainly going to be a lower final figure than it might have been had this been put off into 2009 or sidestepped altogether. "Consumer confidence" is almost preposterously resilient, but only so bulletproof.
Makes you a trifle nervous about 2009, though, doesn't it.
It looks like Sony Computer Entertainment may have sent rough and definitely not ready PlayStation 3 specs to third-party developers to solicit feedback. According to Impress (links to Google translation from Japanese), preliminary ideas being kicked around for the PS4 have it taking a page from Nintendo's Wii by focusing on lowering manufacturing costs and "merely" doubling in power, though by my yardstick, doubling the power of the PS3 would still be a pretty grandiose leap.
What else. Nothing you wouldn't have been able to intuit on your own, if we assume tomorrow's play book looks like today's "lessons learned."
For one, Sony wants to get out ahead of the Xbox 3 -- or 720, or whatever the heck Microsoft opts to call it -- by 2011, according to Impress. True or educated speculation, you can almost assume that Sony recognizes the now status-quo criticality of getting silicon to market first for simple, practical developmental reasons. The idea that "brand loyalty" trumps scheduling seems a lot less attractive after the laggard success of the PS3. If your favored publisher's "concept-to-gold-final" trajectory runs 12 to 16 months (the average, unless you're Will Wright with funding pockets deeper than the Marianas Trench) getting crowd-pleasing, deal-making games to market that show off your system's "va-voom" is all about timing, marketing and horsepower be damned.
The PS4 will also continue to utilize the existing CELL architecture, rather than launch something brand new. Bravo, says me, because forcing developers to effectively pick up and move from their established country to Timbuktu every half a decade is a surefire way to cripple launch cycles and leave "un-anointed" third-party developers out in the cold. What's more, a twice-powerful PS3 would almost certainly offer enough "oomph" to keep the plaudits coming from the hardcore faithful, while allowing Sony to more vigorously reach out to the Nintendo "casual" market with a steady stream of cheap-to-develop titles. The idea by 2011, presumably, would be to have a pinched and tweaked CELL SDK that absolutely purrs.
According to British tabloid The Sun, nearly $1-point-1 million worth of PS3 games have been stolen, not once, but twice! The first time, cops in the UK spotted fake plates on a blue Renault lorry (a British term for a motor truck) with seven pallets of games including Grand Theft Auto IV and a staggering 16,000 copies of Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway. The police seized the truck in Leeds, then moved it to a "secure" compound.
Just hours later, before the cops had a chance to check the vehicle for fingerprints or DNA, the depot where the truck was being held was broken into and the vehicle driven off. The truck was found a few days later, but the games were gone.
Some of the games may have since appeared on eBay, resulting in at least a few preliminary arrests, according to the police.
Publisher Ubisoft (Brothers in Arms) was quick to react, reassuring fans that "more stock is being parachuted in."
Nuts.
Ever lost your video feed from your game system to your TV and been left puzzling over an error message like "out of range" without a clue what it means or how to fix it? I had this trouble plugging my Xbox 360 (by way of Microsoft's official VGA cable) into my new Sony 20" LCD TV last week and, bereft of internet access, it nearly stumped me.
All summer long, I'd been basking in glorious full 1080p @ 1920 x 1080 on a 37" LG (which if you're HDTV-illiterate, is just the technical way of saying "really, really gorgeous picture quality"). When I landed in the UK and got all my gear plugged in, however, the display resolution was set too high for my 20" Sony's meager 1280 x 720 maximum.
On a PlayStation 3, that's easily gotten around by keeping your finger on the power button as the system boots up until you hear a fast double-beep. This resets the PS3's video feed and performs an auto-output detect that I'm reasonably certain defaults to the highest-quality connection, e.g. HDMI if you have HDMI and component cables simultaneously connected. You can then go in and fiddle the resolution and audio around to whatever you like.
On the 360, it's a bit less obvious. In fact I spent the first few days without internet access unsuccessfully guesstimating the button combos and/or cable tricks, worrying that I might have a PAL compatibility issue...or worse.
Turns out all you need to do is Google something like "video display reset xbox 360" to land on Microsoft Support Article 911059, revised to version 3.0 and updated July 23, 2008. Scan down a few paragraphs on this page and you'll find that pressing and holding the Y button on your 360's controller, then pulling the right trigger at the same time as the console starts up does the trick.
Something else I learned: The difference between the PS3's "full" and "limited" HDMI settings. According to Sony's PS3 user guide, "limited" RGB signal runs from 16 to 235, while "full" hits everything from 0 to 255. My 37" LCD worked great on "full," but the blacks looked seriously washed out on the 20" Sony. Set to "limited" and the problem cleared up. How to tell if a TV supports this before you buy it? Good question. All I know is that "limited" looks as rich to my subjective eye on the Sony, maybe even a touch better, than "full" did on the larger LG.
Did I mention everything looks even better on a smaller LCD? I'll vote with the size-counts-for-something crowd, but you certainly lose a lot of the "jaggies" (the stair-step jaggedness that plagues the edges of objects in 3D games, even with current-gen anti-aliasing enabled) when you drop down to smaller screen estate. I wouldn't want to argue with someone desperately in love with their $160,000 Sharp 108" LCD TV, but there's an argument for living with smaller and getting a smoother looking picture in the bargain.
While the economy's imploding around us like a balloon the feds keep inflating and shareholders keep skittishly needling, have a look at this survey by Weekly Reader Research listing what it claims "nearly all tweens and teens" are asking for this year.
Among other things, the survey -- conducted on behalf of national retailer Game Crazy -- revealed that 90 percent of "tweens and teens" plan to ask for a video game this year, which is faintly reassuring from a momentum standpoint, though I'd like to see the survey conducted today, then again in a month or two. The games industry still ought to finish up, but with current events playing out, I can't imagine it'll be by as much as we thought it'd be even a month or two ago.
Check out the rest of Weekly Reader's numbers broken down by gender and age demographics.
Most-Wanted Games (8 to 17 Year Old Boys and Girls)
17% - Guitar Hero World Tour
15% - Rock Band 2
12% - Mario Kart
11% - Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party 2
Girls
8-10 Years-Old
18% - Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party 2
14% - Guitar Hero World Tour
11% - Rock Band 2
11-13 Years-Old
24% - Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party 2
16% - Guitar Hero World Tour
15% - Mario Kart
14-17 Years-Old
20% - Guitar Hero World Tour
17% - Rock Band II
15% - Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party 2
Boys
8-10 Years-Old
18% - Guitar Hero World Tour
14% - Mario Kart
11% - Rock Band 2
11-13 Years-Old
17% - Rock Band 2
15% - Guitar Hero World Tour
14% - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
14-17 Years-Old
15% - Guitar Hero World Tour
14% - Rock Band 2
13% - Mario Kart
Rather predictably, video game publishers are clubbing the notion of recirculated games like sullen cavemen ejected from the municipal fireside powwow. The latest grumbler: Marty O'Donnell, Bungie's audio director, who says that smaller studios are in for bumpy financials given the thriving market for pre-owned games. You can almost imagine the follow-on posters reading something like: "Buy Used, and God Kills a Kitten."
Let's summarize what's got O'Donnell agitated. Say you snap up a copy of Halo 3 brand new for sixty and change. You play the game, you maybe finish it (or maybe not) then pop back down to your local games reseller, who offers a trade-in program for credit. Halo 3 becomes a simple down-payment toward whatever's next in your want bin. The reseller takes the game and pops it back on the shelf for about $5 to $10 less than a brand new copy. The next budget conscious consumer that drops in opts for your $55 "used" copy of Halo 3 instead of the glistening, crinkly shrink-wrapped $60 version.
That's a serious problem, claim some, due to ballooning development budgets. If the preowned games market keeps siphoning off profits that ought to be lining studio pockets, goes this line of thinking, games will eventually be made by just two or three mega-studios, while everyone else is relegated to barely-for-profit indie pet projects.
The trouble with this view is that it assumes people paying used prices for games would have bought new in the first place. It also assumes we should just trust game studios won't squander a certain percentage of their bulging multimillion development budgets on trade show booths and ostentatious launch parties alongside shameful press junkets and then point the finger somewhere else when market realities come a cropper.
Of course the problem's more nuanced than any of that, and talk to anyone involved and you'll get a slightly different tale. Companies are quick to criticize, but slow to share private studies and sales numbers to bolster their claims. In the absence of evidence, you're left to fall back on that old legal standby: precedent.
So given precedent, do "the folks who create and publish a game" really deserve to receive income from "further sales"?
It's tempting to see the internet as a paradigm shifter here, but it's not really. People have been bartering privately for eons. The internet merely amplifies their ability to connect up beyond their local municipalities. That's on balance an incredibly positive thing.
There's also nothing unique about used sales coalescing around a single point of exchange. Used bookstores have been around forever. Used car lots are internationally ubiquitous. Used music (vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD) and video (VHS, DVD) stores, too. Are the creators, much less the publishers, of any of those products sold "used" receiving income from those "further sales"? Of course not.
So why should it be any different for games? The only answer is, it shouldn't, and just because the games industry might go to hell in a hand basket because of retail market capitalization, or what some might describe as "blithe consumption practices" isn't on us, it's on publishers. And by "on," I don't mean "to figure out how to clamp down on the exchange of aftermarket goods," but to innovate their way out of what they'll call a spend-money-to-make-money Catch 22.
To studios: Think of it a bit like a game the market's designed, and which you get to play, except without cheat codes.
Not that it's absolutely earth-shattering news given the lack of recent major PS3 releases, but the Xbox 360 managed to snub the PS3 for the second week in a row in Japan. If you missed my coverage of this last week, you're probably wondering why that's significant. Easy: The Xbox 360's barely had a pulse in the Land of the Rising Sun, so two weeks of up-sales is like NCIS or Criminal Minds suddenly vaulting up the Nielsen ladder to knock House or NBC Sunday Night Football down a peg or two.
To torture that analogy further, the industry's American Idol, i.e. Nintendo's Wii, beat both the 360 and PS3 combined, which is starting to sound like Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" given the probability you're likely to hear it reported each time you tune in a sales update.
Japan Hardware Sales, 9/15 - 9/21
61,242 - Nntendo DS
29,921 - Wii
28,674 - PSP
13,777 - Xbox 360
8,156 - PS3
7,720 - PS2
Source: Media Create Sales, translated by NeoGAF
By the time you read this, I'll be packed away like a sardine, or at least a sardine with blanket, pillow, eye mask, socks, and plastic-wrapped headphones on my jaunt across the pond to become a US-in-the-UK expat. My better half landed a job teaching at Oxford University, so I'm tagging along with my laptop, books, clothes, miscellaneous personal essentials, and four TSA-flagging video game systems in tow.
Count them four, which is the price of playing games for a living, I suppose. (Don't everyone fiddle at once!)
So while I'm waiting for British Telecom to light up my life and plug me back into the info-bahn, I thought I'd scribble a bit from the local Coffee Republic about what it's like to move around the world when you've become debilitatingly dependent on 10 pound slabs of technology.
Let's talk about power, just for starters. As you may know, the standard power socket in the UK supplies 220 volts, which is roughly double the US standard of 110. Plug a non-switching power supply into the wrong socket with a prong adapter and you'll either get a lovely teeth-clenching whine (too little) or a nice fat snap and a bracing whiff of ozone oblivion (too much).
To head off catastrophe, you either need the correct switching power supply or a step-down (or up) converter. A step-down converter works as it sounds, taking 220V and dropping it down to 110V. It's a little less simple than that in practice, however, and everything I've read suggests you have to be aware of power conditioning technicalities, especially if you have super-sensitive equipment.
I went the theoretically safer route and simply picked up actual UK power supplies for the game systems that needed them, e.g. the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. I happen to be using one of the original 60GB PlayStation 3's, which includes an internal switching power supply. It very specifically reads '110V' on the casing, but a little research indicates that the 60GB model's door swings both ways. I can't vouch for the rest of the fleet, and I've seen a few people suggesting Sony dropped the switching supply in later models.
The 360 and Wii both use 110V non-switching power supplies, but all you need to make them work in a 220V location is the unit's regional power supply. The end that plugs into each of those systems is the same internationally, and you secure the added benefit of not having to worry about a prong adapter.
How do you know if your electronic kit has a switching power supply? Read the fine print. If it's internal, the specs are on the unit itself. If it's external, the specs are on the "brick" or blocky portion. Nearly all modern laptops have switching power supplies, as do mobile gaming handhelds. You can almost always take these specs to the bank, though occasionally (like with the 60GB PS3) you'll have more under the hood than the body implies.
Things get tricker when it comes to hooking game systems up to display units, because the UK and US have unique broadcast standards. Much of the world including the UK and Europe uses PAL, or "phase-alternating line," while North and parts of South America use NTSC, or "National Television System Committee."
PAL is of course nothing like your pal if your gaming gear's all NTSC (like mine). Fortunately the more recent high-definition standards like HDMI are nigh universal when it comes to plugging into an LCD TV. To get around the signal issue, all you need do is pick up an LCD TV that supports NTSC 3.58/4.43 video in. I have a humble Sony 20-incher on its way to me now that'll take component, HDMI, and analog VGA inputs, perfect for my Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360 respectively.
The best way to move electronic equipment around, as far as I'm concerned, is to bubble-wrap it into a carry-on that meets your carrier's size requirements (which you can of course expect to be punitively stingy in this travel climate). I managed to stow the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii in a medium-sized roller-board that topped out at about 33 pounds and easily slid into the overhead compartments of the Boeing 737, Airbus 330, and Airbus 319 planes I'm flying over. I also managed to slip about half the cables into the case's pouches without visible bulges. I strongly recommend carrying you electronics with you and not checking them through if you can. You can get away with TSA-certified locks on your check-through luggage, but that still won't stop a determined TSA employee from nicking your gear and letting you stick the airline with the reimbursement costs.
And that's all he wrote for today. More frontline updates shortly, once I'm settled and the broadband spigot's on.
Shuffling through my news crawls this morning, I noticed Sony's PlayStation 3 just launched in Malaysia today for 1,599 Malaysian Ringgits, or about $463 USD. The launch took place at the 1 Utama Shopping Centre (pictured above) located in the heart of Selangor, one of the country's 13 states.
To promote the launch, Sony planned to sell 150 PS3's bundled with copies of Soul Calibur IV, a Soul Calibur IV disc holder, and a limited edition PS3 tote bag.
The 80GB model arrives two years after the PS3's worldwide launch in Japan and the United States, and a year and a half after launching in Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Africa, Singapore, and New Zealand. The initial launch is just the console, though Sony says it'll light up the Malaysian version of its online PlayStation Network until the end of the year.
No word yet whether that'll include (or eventually include) movie downloads as well. Malaysia remains a top offender in PC software, video game, and movie piracy losses worldwide, though those numbers have dropped in recent years.
"Dubious at best," remarks one of the commenters on a bit of Register-spawned tittle-tattle suggesting the Xbox 360 is about to slim up, but could a "leaked" Microsoft memo be the Real Deal?
That memo, which UK geek-tech gossip site The Register purports to have a snap of, reveals blurry bullet points suggesting Microsoft's been working toward a "final name decision" on a new revision of its Xbox 360, that "metal plates have been disregarded," and that "code name XBOX - Lean" and "XBOX - Granite" have given way to "XBOX Pure."
If it's legit, the "lean" moniker certainly hints at a move toward something skinnier. It would also jibe with 2007 rumors that the Xbox 360 processor -- originally produced at 90nm and currently manufactured at 65nm -- is set to drop to an even cooler 45nm in late 2008 or early 2009.
Sony's PlayStation 2 underwent a pretty extreme makeover in November 2004 with the release of the 'Slimline' model -- less than half the size of the original version. The 360's nearly three years old, and while the PS3's a glossy monstrosity by comparison, Microsoft's mini-PC case could certainly stand to lose a few pounds.
Question is, would a slenderized 360 be any quieter than its rumbly elder sibling?
UPDATE: As suspected, the letter was probably a hoax (and in fact a not terribly original stunt). But like any good hoax, the underlying question it raises stands: Would a slimline 360 be a deal-maker, or does anyone really care?
Flush with interactive videos of sinister ticket-taking robots and portable nukes blasting radscorpions into puffs of mushroom smoke, Bethesda's official Fallout 3 tie-in media site PrepareForTheFuture[dot]com is now officially live. Park your browsers on the Flash-tastic site and you'll find a dilapidated TV set aka "Radiation King" perched in the grungy rubble of a bleakly lit Washingtonian city.
Punch the keypad on the right of the set and you can cycle through nine deliciously sardonic clips (button number '7' appears to be missing) rendered in crackly black and white. Tim Cain's beloved Fallout series of PC roleplaying games brilliantly built on all those blithe government-produced 1950s "duck and cover" jingles, then juxtaposed them with incredibly violent scenes, like people on their knees getting their heads blown off by chummy "peacekeeping" soldiers.
Bethesda's done a terrific job capturing the feel of those clips, while catapulting the whole thing into the 21st century (can you believe the last two Fallout RPGs arrived in 1997 and 1998?). Take "The Story of Too Much," where a sugary narrator reassures us that "some things are good in small quantities, like cookies, candy, and puppies...as you may know, much of our electricity comes from nuclear energy...in small quantities, this fantastic friends keeps us safe, clean, and happy!" Cut to an alphabetical rundown of some of Fallout 3's bestiary, from Bloatflies to Mirelurks to Radscorpions.
Other videos let you sample aspects of the gameplay, answer sample questions from a G.O.A.T. (General Occupational Aptitude Test) and even poke around the V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) interface. Just make sure you wait until the intro video plays, because the interfaces load afterward.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, an expression that both captures and slightly misses the point of Sony's new "Life With PlayStation" globetrotting information service, available today worldwide. How to get it? Hop into Folding@home, the PS3's protein-folding simulation located in the XrossMediaBar interface, then follow the on-screen instructions to pull down the update. It needs about 500 MB of available hard disk space when all's said and done.
The idea's straightforward enough: Give PlayStation 3 owners who'd rather watch their PS3's whirring away in the background than the latest House or NCIS marathon an actual reason to.
That reason -- dubbed "Live Channel" -- arrives in the form of free, dynamic info streams feeding a photographic world map that tracks things like cloud imagery, weather info, news headlines, and live camera images from some 60 cities around the globe.
Like a prettier version of Nintendo's Wii News and Weather channels, in other words.
Content providers include Google, The Weather Channel, earthTV.com, and Webcams.travel.
At just 60 cities worldwide, the camera views are pretty limited. No doubt Sony plans to offer content updates as we roll along.
Sony's calling Live Channel their "new lifestyle service," which has ups and downs as marketing phrases go. The company's clearly hoping you'll view this as a value-add extension of its PlayStation Home driven initiative to create "extracurricular" interaction hooks. But it's also an attempt to warm up the system's public persona. "Don't just play with our console, live with it" and "The PS3's more than just a games machine, it's a lifestyle choice," reads the public relations subtext.
Okay. Fine. So long as it never becomes a lifestyle choice in the sense Microsoft Bob was, I'm cool with it.
On a gratifying technical note, while you're browsing Live Channel, Folding@home is crunching away in the background, analyzing protein folding and misfolding, and ultimately "helping Stanford researchers cure diseases like Alzheimer's and various types of cancer."
Now that's something I can wholeheartedly get behind.
Buoyed by a new Square Enix roleplaying game and flagging Wii sales, the Xbox 360 outsold both the PlayStation 3 and Wii in Japan last week, according to data provided by publisher and market tracker Enterbain via Famitsu, as translated by games site Andriasang.com.
Japan Hardware Sales, September 8 - 14
28,681 - Xbox 360
27,057 - Wii
8,050 - PS3
(Interestingly, the Xbox 360 sold just 843 units the week prior.)
September's surge was due to three key factors:
1. Microsoft debuted its new 60GB Xbox 360 on September 11th, dropping the price 5,000 yen ($48) to 29,800 yen ($285). The Arcade and Elite models also dropped to 19,800 ($189) and 39,800 ($380) yen respectively. Price drops are always easy dealmakers.
2. Final Fantasy publisher Square Enix's Infinite Undiscovery, which debuted on September 11th, sold a healthy 86,708 units during its first week, dovetailing with the 60GB 360's introduction. (The Japanese love RPGs about as much as we love first-person shooters.)
3. Sales of the 360 rose sharply in August when Namco Bandai released its critically acclaimed 360-exclusive roleplaying game Tales of Vesperia. Microsoft allowed supplies of the 360 to dry up in its wake, probably to clear the channel in anticipation of its new 60GB model.
The Xbox 360 has been virtually ignored by the Japanese to date, selling just under 700,000 units since debuting in the Land of the Rising Sun on December 10, 2005. By comparison, the PlayStation 3, which debuted worldwide on November 11, 2006, has sold around 2.36 million in Japan, while Nintendo's Wii, which debuted on November 19, 2006 worldwide, has sold around 6.76 million in Japan.
So a round of applause for Microsoft-Japan, but don't call it a comeback just yet. The 360 now sits at domestic sales of 717,275 -- about 7 percent of the current-gen Japanese market. It'll take sustained, wide-margin, first place sales of both Microsoft hardware and software for the beleaguered company to make inroads on Nintendo and Sony's turf.
In the meantime, look no further for proof that (a) price, and (b) software exclusivity are still bottom line toward winning hearts and wallets.
A survey out today from the Pew Internet & American Lift Project suggests that teens with "frequent civic gaming experiences" are more likely to go online to get information about politics and current events, give or raise money for charity, and persuade others how to vote in an election. In research that probed (refreshingly) beyond stereotypical studies focused on conjectural parallels between video gaming and social behavior (like aggression), the Pew study instead delved into the relationship between games and civic or political outcomes.
How to define a "civic outcome"? Generally speaking: "An increase in one's engagement of public and/or political life."
The Pew study found that there are, in fact, civic dimensions to video game play, that "the characteristics of game play and the contexts in which teens play games" strongly correlate with teens' interest and engagement in civic and political activities, and that civic gaming experiences are "more equally distributed than many other civic learning opportunities."
Importantly: The quantity of gameplay didn't strongly relate to teens' interest or engagement in civic and political activity (sorry World of Warcraft zombies, another potential play-excuse bites the dust). Also, playing games with others online was not related to civic and political outcomes, though playing with others in person was, suggesting that physical social cues play a role in shaping civic and political interconnectedness. On the other hand, teens who took part in social interaction related to the game, like commenting on websites or posting on message boards, were more engaged civically and politically.
I wonder if the Pew researchers stopped to consider whether posting on websites and message boards, with all the semantic shenanigans and snarky one-upping, might be construed as a kind of game in and of itself.
If playing games with aloof netizens has you reaching for a steaming cup of joe, it may be more than mere coincidence. According to a study led by psychologists at the University of Toronto highlighted by the New York Times, people who feel socially excluded may perceive a room as thermally colder than others who feel included.
In the second of two experiments testing the impact of the brain on temperature perceptions, researchers invited 52 students into a lab to play a computer game, one at a time. In the game, each student was asked to toss a ball back and forth with three figures onscreen. The students were told these figures were other students playing remotely, when in fact the computer was running the entire show. While the computer initially threw the ball to all of the students, it eventually ignored half of them.
Afterward, students were asked to rate their preference for different types of food and drink. The results: Students who felt ignored displayed a pronounced preference for hot coffee and soup, while students who felt included exhibited no such preference.
I hate to raise the ads-in-games issue here, but the first thing that popped into my head reading this was: How long before Starbucks and Activision-Blizzard figure out how to tie in-game ads for Espresso Macchiatos and Skinny Lattes to World of Warcraft neophytes who blithely aggro grueling swarms of mobs and invite group-kicks after monopolizing 'assists', or who can never get questions like "Which Star Wars character would you want to date?" answered in the chat channels?
Before we get to tallying up all that's good, meh, and just plain crummy about LucasArts' milieu-mashing Star Wars The Force Unleashed, let's recap a couple of interesting did-ya-know developments. First, the novelization of the game by Sean Williams debuted spectacularly at #1 on the New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Didn't realize there was a novelization? Neither did I, so there you go.
Second, I was in a bookstore yesterday browsing the endcaps (the hip retailer term for the merchandize highlighted on the row ends) and ran headfirst into (a) the graphic novel adaptation, (b) the official game guide, (c) a slew of other Star Wars paraphernalia, and (d) the art-and-making-of coffee table companion. 'D' is amazing, incidentally, packed with concept art and heaps of background material that make this feel less like a game than Star Wars Episode 3.5 (where it fall, chronologically speaking). There's even a forward by Hayden Christensen, for those of you who enjoyed his performance in the prequels (i.e. under a certain age and female). "If the game is as good as this book, we're all in for a treat," reads the subject line of one Amazon review. Well the game isn't -- more on that in a moment -- but the book's pretty stunning, and if you're intrigued by the story about Darth Vaders super-secret apprentice, possible worth the $20 it's asking on sale.
Google shop 'The Force Unleashed' and you'll unearth specialty action figures, a deluxe lightsaber (thank you Hasbro), the audiobook adaptation, a supplemental campaign guide for the official Star Wars Roleplaying Game, and a booster for the Star Wars CMG (collectible miniatures game). Factor in a massive multi-platform launch that includes versions for the Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, Nintendo DS (and if the rumor mill's right, eventually the PC). Couple that with a mobile push for the iPhone, N-Gage, and various unspecified java-equipped others.
Then realize, therefore, that Star Wars The Force Unleashed is not a video game so much as a force of nature. If it were a hurricane, probably a Category 5.
How's the actual game then?
In two words, "not bad."
In ten, "initially dull, eventually much better, and cumulatively, a trifle disappointing."
If you've played the downloadable demo, you know that The Force Unleashed is a third-person action game in which you play as Darth Vader's apprentice (unsubtly dubbed 'Starkiller') and get to blast the bejesus out of your surroundings using "dark side" force powers. For the Star Wars uninitiated (all two or three of you) that means lightning bolts, choke holds, grabs and throws, and all sorts of other telekinetic kung fu. If the last few Star Wars flicks felt a little Wachowski-influenced in terms of the fancy footwork and wire-enabled acrobatics, The Force Unleashed is like the apotheosis of Yuen Woo Ping and Firestarter. Think Neo meets Palpatine meets power levels on the order of Galactus (or near enough). If you've always wondered what it might be like to suck a miles-long star destroyer out of the stratosphere with clenched fists and some good-ol'-fashioned grimacing, for instance, here's your game.
Otherwise The Force Unleashed is a surprisingly brief jaunt through a dozen just as surprisingly short levels where you're knocking around Star Wars standbys who tend to charge you like metal fillings sucked toward a lodestone. Special powers you'll piece together along the way increase the number of force moves you can use to dispatch enemies who run the gamut from wookies and jawas to rancors and stormtroopers. Those power also occasionally factor toward solving light logic puzzles, e.g. recharge three generators, sabotage seven pylons, and so on. It's the same old "find the red key, then the blue key" gameplay, of course, swathed in telekinetic trickery that lets you nominally interact with your target points. At the end of each level, you'll fight something big or flashy, be it a rogue jedi or AT-ST or spiny bull rancor.
All the Star Wars tropes are present and accounted for. The grumpy anti-hero, the comic relief droid (this time a droll tagalong whose prime directive is trying to kill you repeatedly). There's the male-female sexual tension with the girl who went bad thanks to dodgy parenting, the traveling to seedy backwater planets to find elusive zen masters, the bad-guy-grows-a-conscience arc, and most importantly, the sense that what you're up to is The Most Important Thing That's Ever Happened (but no one knew about!) in The Franchise's History. Call it the price of "zero to hero" gameplay -- consistency notwithstanding -- I guess.
The opening level (also the only time you'll play as Darth Vader) establishes the fact that you're destined to be The Baddest Sith On The Block, with bridge-blasting, rock-slinging powers that encourage you to sit back and hammer out force combos and watch things crumble magnificently around you. The game looks great, for what it's worth, melding high-resolution environments with a kind of "color-pencilled" concept art look to backdrops and intermediary cutscenes that's refreshingly original. The junk planet you get to visit twice is particularly striking, with its eerie multitudes of debris floating and swirling against a sky cast in flickering pumpkin-orange hues.
The ballyhooed physics are pretty impressive as well. They're not as interwoven or comprehensive as those found in Crysis, but then you couldn't hurl boulders or sweep apart entire buildings with a single wave of your hand in that game either. You're baited with a taste of the pandemonium you'll get to unleash during the tutorial, playing as Darth Vader and strutting down swaying treetop bridges and rippling their planks while snatching wookies and hurling them howling into oblivion. That's also more or less what you do for the remainder of the game once you get control of Starkiller. That is, "grab and toss."
It's a problem, then, that the "grabbing" interface is so dismally implemented. To target something, you "aim" at it with the camera, but since you don't have a pointing reticule or a way to tell what you're zeroed on, you're always winging it. It's hard enough honing in on rocks or bits of debris you want to bounce off a single opponent, but it's a total disaster when the enemies and objects pile up, which happens to be most of the time. You'll often reach for an object in a pinch and come up with nothing, or try to grab some stormtrooper behind a cannon but snag an innocuous piece of nearby debris instead. This ratchets up from annoying to infuriating in the game's later levels, like the one in which you're trying to pull down the star destroyer: You're firing lightning bolts and grabbing blindly to scuttle swooping tie fighters between intervals in which you have to twist the destroyer out of the sky -- if you can't knock them down fast enough, you can't make inroads on the star destroyer before another wave comes a-shootin', snarling you in an exasperating Catch-22.
Other minor issues accumulate to hobble the experience. The jump controls are too sensitive and animate too quickly, making it difficult to control where you land (and easy to land badly). The analog panning speed feels sluggish by default but can't be adjusted. The load times (on the PS3 version, anyway) are simply atrocious, and not just that, you have to sit through a loading screen for nearly every single menu option -- yes, the game has databanks of data to plumb and oodles of force abilities to tweak, but you'll be discouraged from dawdling for all the time it takes to navigate around. And the game inexplicably crashed on me twice -- once while in the middle of a timed-button sequence (hit the right button as it pops up onscreen to polish off major one-on-one battles) and once again while loading between levels. Chalk the first up to entropy, but twice is disturbing.
The two most disappointing elements? The levels dwindle in size and complexity as you progress, and since there's no multiplayer mode, the game's replay value is limited to replaying levels to complete bonus objectives, like scrounging up jedi holocrons that help you raise your remaining force powers. Toward the end, you're effectively tossed into huge rooms thronged with enemies like storm-troopers + super-storm-troopers + AT-STs all attacking simultaneously in an orgy of pyrotechnics. Star Wars WWF, in other words, which is well and good as long as you don't mind dying a lot, and -- since the targeting and jumping controls are so wishy-washy -- only winning through by the skin of your teeth.
Now if you count yourself among the Star Wars faithful -- even if you're clear-headed enough to acknowledge that Episodes 1 through 3 were a mess -- you'll probably have a better than average time with The Force Unleashed. It's a little out there in terms of its gonzo interpretation of The Force, but it feels a lot more like old-school Lucas than new-school kid-in-a-CGI-candy-store. There's definitely a wish-fulfillment factor to a Star Wars game that lets you grab metal pylons and twist them into protective umbrellas against molten rain on a gorgeously wrought junk planet populated by weird creatures spawned from rubbish, or where you can charge your lightsaber with crackling force-lightning before wading into a sea of enemies who can be bowled over like tenpins by a well-aimed boulder.
I guess the bottom line for me, with all the game's small but cumulative blemishes, is that it's difficult for many of the wrong reasons, as well as too brief to earn the sixty bucks LucasArts is asking if you're looking at the 360 or PS3 versions. I hesitate to say wait for early adopters to flood the used market, but unless you're really into the Star Wars thing, it's not quite the breakout game experience LucasArts trumpeted, and which its parallel product blitz suggests it should have been.
The controversy bubbling around Spore's digital rights management "solution" is keeping blogs roiling and boards rocking as we near the one week anniversary of Spore's US sales debut. At issue: Spore, Will Wright's "universe in a box" computer game which I reviewed last week, can be installed a maximum of three times. After that, it's "everyone out of the pool," and you're at least a support phone call away from persuading an EA representative to spring the locks on your account and give you a new code to install the game again. (I'm assuming it resets your "three" count, but I haven't tried and confirmed it myself.)
(For an interesting technical angle on the issue, see Darren Gladstone's "Why Spore Won't Work" in this week's Casual Friday.)
Okay, let's get the activation specifics clear, because they're important. EA allows you to install Spore three times, but three times only. By comparison, Microsoft allows you to install Windows XP and Vista as many times as you like, so long as the hardware in your computer doesn't change too radically. You could therefore argue that Microsoft Windows is more consumer-friendly than Spore when it comes to using (and reusing) the product.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
Stick with me, it gets even zone-ier. Since Spore came out, reviewers have been flocking to the game's Amazon.com page in droves and venting their frustration with EA's copy protection scheme by slapping the game with a one-star rating. "Surely not that many," you're probably thinking. "Maybe a third? A half?"
How's 2,016 out of 2,216, or over 90 percent hit you?
"This basically means that you are actually RENTING the game, instead of owning it," opined one reviewer.
"The only practical purpose of the DRM, therefore, is forcing honest people to pay for the game again if they decide to upgrade their hardware, or get a new computer, more than twice," wrote another.
"No Way, No How, No DRM," reads the subject line of a third.
And so on, though to be fair, a certain number of the one-star reviews don't mention DRM at all, and instead lambast the game for being too easy or simplistic.
EA's response? "EA has not changed our basic DRM copy protection system," says corporate communications manager Mariam Sughayer. "We simply changed the copy protection method from using the physical media, which requires authentication every time you play the game by requiring a disc in the drive, to one which uses a one-time online authentication."
Okay. But wait. For all the grousing, isn't the DRM at least preventing rampant piracy of the game?
Turns out nope, it's not, and in fact -- according to Forbes, citing peer-to-peer research firm Big Champagne -- Spore's DRM may be spurring pirates on.
Writes Forbes:
On several top file-sharing sites, "Spore"'s most downloaded BitTorrent "tracker"--a file that maps which users had the game available for downloading--also included step-by-step instructions for how to disassemble the copy protections, along with a set of numerical keys for breaking the software's encryption. For many users, that made the pirated version more appealing than the legitimate one.
So the game's as pirated as ever, customers who legitimately paid for the game are more frustrated than ever, and EA's reputation (possibly along with Will Wright's, simply by association) is being tarnished by what certainly looks like a botched anti-piracy stratagem.
I'm personally up a creek without a paddle, because I routinely rebuild my Macbook Pro once every month or two, just because that's how we obsessive-compulsive nut-jobs roll.
Of course there's a simple fix for all of this, and plenty of precedent: EA can simply remove the activation limit on its back end servers. No potentially huge or invasive patch to download, nothing to test on their end, just a simple toggle on the server.
No fuss, no muss.
What say you, EA?
If you want to do serious political satire, you'd better have all your i's dotted and t's crossed. You'd better know the difference between sensationalism and burlesque, between "look at me!" hand-flapping and "look if you can stand to" tongue-in-cheek. And if you want to interpret something as political satire or parody, you'd better have more in your quiver than a few feeble lines about metaphors and stereotypes.
Take Sam and Dan Houser's Grand Theft Auto IV, either a grand game of "chase-me" threaded with puerile humor or a shrewd, mocking commentary on American culture. Clever commentary or adolescent comedy? I vote 'clever'. You may vote differently.
The latest case in question: Muslim Massacre, the self-styled "game of modern religious genocide," is a small freeware PC action game that lets you "take control of the American hero and wipe out the Muslim race with an arsenal of the world's most destructive weapons."
Satire or screw-brained? Parody or preposterous? Ironic or just indefensible? Curious, I downloaded the game and gave it a go.
It launches with a chirpy 1980s synth-style tune and a montage of images backgrounded by ostensibly nipped and tucked audio clips of George W. Bush seeming to denigrate Islam and excoriate the religion's prophetic central figure, Mohammed. (For the record, here's the White House's official collection of quotes on "respecting Islam.") The images are pictures of apparent terrorists, wearing hoods or holding guns, bookended by blocky abstractions of American flags tacked atop multi-hued skyscrapers.
Then the game begins, you're airlifted into the middle of a desolate landscape, and little black-robed and crudely bearded figures blindly charge you, chipping away at your health. How's it play? Sort of like Atari's old multidirectional arcade shooter Berzerk without the maze stuff. Using the mouse to fire a gun or lob grenades, you point and aim in a flat 360-degree arc, slaughtering as many of these figures as possible in "60 to 90 seconds per round." Finish a round and the game launches a new one, eventually ratcheting up the difficulty level by trotting out Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the Muslim prophet Mohammed, and even Allah (the Arabic word for 'God').
British Muslims are not surprisingly condemning the game, calling it "deeply offensive" according to London AFP this morning. "The makers of this 'game' and the ISPs (Internet service providers) who are hosting it should be quite ashamed of themselves," said Inayat Bunglawala, spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Britain.
The game's creator who goes by the name Sigvatr describes it simply as "fun and funny." Some online have been trying to read it as parody, but even Sigvatr himself says the original goal was just to make a game "where you blow the gently caress [slang for a common offensive word] out of arabs."
How you frame something invariably affects how it's received. Everyone's susceptible to persuasion, particularly when it's issuing from the author. If Sigvatr were shrewder, he'd be calling it something like what he nonchalantly tosses out at the end of the Times piece as an "if I had to" comment, i.e. "something along the lines of metaphorically destroying the stereotypical depiction of a Muslim." But since he's not, it's hard to be sympathetic to what as a parody feels utterly devoid of anything remotely Swiftian, and which viewed at the mechanical level is pretty weak, monotonous sauce.
Should it be banned? I don't think so, but then I'm no fan of bans in general (if you want to "ban" something, boycott it, and if you want to prevent your kids from accessing it, supervise them). Should it be viewed as tasteless? I think so, because in the end, all it's saying is "made you look!" And when it comes to poking fun at the morbid seriousness of various hot-button issues, we could use a little more Jonathan Swift in our satire, and a bit less Bart Simpson.
Muslims are the new N-word of America and therefore shooting them up in video games and Hollywood blockbuster films is perfectly fine and will not raise much of an outcry. In comparison, doing the same for blacks, Hispanics, women and other groups is not socially or culturally acceptable and happens less often, although unfortunately, it still does.
Check this article on racism in video games for more details:
http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/326267.html
I would not at all be surprised to find out that those who torture Iraqis like we saw in the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004 and American and other soldiers who shoot and kill innocent civilians and children in Iraq play games or watch movies "where you blow the gently caress [slang for a common offensive word] out of arabs."
In hardware sales, the Xbox 360 inched past the PlayStation by 10,000 units, according to sales predictions by market analyst NPD Group, while Wii hardware sales plummeted by 102,000 units from July's figures. August sales were down in general -- the first single-digit percentage growth in 27 months, according to NPD's Anita Frazier -- though sales were up over the same period last year by 9 percent.
"Despite smaller growth this month, the industry is up 32% year-to-date and remains on target to achieve annual revenues in the range of $22 to $24 billion," said Frazier. And while the Wii was down from 555,000 unit sales in July to just 453,000 in August, Frazier says that "across hardware, software and accessories, products for the Wii platform contributed 28% of total industry dollar sales for the month of August."
August Hardware
518k - Nintendo DS
453k - Nintendo Wii
253k - PlayStation Portable
195k - Xbox 360
185k - PlayStation 3
144k - PlayStation 2
- "The PSP and PS3 had the greatest percentage gain of all now-gen systems," said Frazier, adding that sales acceleration combined with the recent Xbox 360's price cuts should keep this category growing as sales roll forward.
- According to Sony, more than 2 million PS3s have been sold in the U.S. since January 2008, representing a year-to-date hardware sales growth of over 92 percent.
- Microsoft says U.S. consumers have life-to-date spent $10.7 billion on Xbox 360 hardware and software, culminating in a U.S. install base of 10.9 million units.
- Why is Nintendo down so sharply over July? Hard to say. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter was predicting sales of 555,000 for August, and he qualified that by suggesting Wii supplies were flat for the month (that is, Wii sales could have been even higher). According to Dan DeMatteo (speaking to GameDaily) Nintendo may have ramped up production 20 percent recently, but as he puts it, supplies are "still evaporating."
August Software
1m - Madden NFL 09 (360)
643k - Madden NFL 09 (PS3)
425k - Madden NFL 09 (PS2)
395k - Wii Fit (Wii)
329k - Wii Mario Kart (Wii)
200k - Wii Play (Wii)
174k - Soul Calibur IV (360)
168k - Too Human (360)
116k - Madden NFL 09 (Wii)
111k - Guitar Hero: On Tour (DS)
- Does Xbox 360 "own sports" as Microsoft claims? If you look at the numbers up front, it's hard to argue with a million copies of Madden NFL 09 against the PS3's 643k. But what about Sony as a brand? PS3 + PS2 sales = 1,068,000. And while it didn't chart in the top 10, the PSP version's sales would certainly bolster that number. Of course Microsoft can counter by pointing out it sold 56,000 copies of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 in the five days it was on the market, "more than on any other platform." They're also quick to point out they've sold more copies of NCAA Football 09 since it launched than the PS3 and Wii versions combined.
- Sony has a higher attach rate with Madden NFL 09 -- Sony claims it's as much as 33% higher than the Xbox 360.
- It's telling that Madden NFL 09 for the Wii sold so poorly compared to Madden NFL 09 for the 360, PS3, and PS2. The Wii's U.S. install base is over 14 million, compared with the Xbox 360's (around 12 million) and PS3's (about 7 million).
Now this doesn't have anything to do with August's sales data, but it's worth adding that Microsoft is claiming its console sales were up 100% between Friday September 5th and Sunday September 7th, attributing this to the September 3rd price drop announcement. The 360 Arcade has shown the biggest lift, says Microsoft, selling at six times the rate it was the previous weekend.
Should make September's numbers very interesting.
According to pollster John Zogby in his new book The Way We'll Be, the bull**** era is over and people want to be leveled with, not propagandized to. "They want choice, not imposition, and they are demanding to be treated as individuals," he writes. Polling reveals that today's public craves truth over hype, says Zogby, and that we're more than ever eager to grapple with complex issues free from old-guard orthodoxies.
Over half of Americans polled say they don't trust the press. They're tired of being pandered to and misled, and with computers and broadband access, they're taking personal responsibility. Breaking information about anything is increasingly as likely to emerge on a blog or a message board or off of a handheld cell phone as from a cable news network or a print newspaper. People are assuming more control of the information they ingest, one web portal and RSS feed at a time. If the old-media filters were like taking your car through a car wash, the new "citizen media" is like submerging it in an ocean.
Mind you, it's not all roses and puppy dogs. Unfiltered information can flow too fast, and like the adage about "first impressions," complicate receptivity to subsequent clarification (how many people, to cite a recent example, still believe the blog-led rumor that Sarah Palin faked her own pregnancy?). It's also easier than ever for outspoken minority groups to clog message boards and comments fields and create a false sense of consensus around an issue.
Still, on balance, putting information through broader, more vigorously debated litmus tests seems to be bringing us closer to what we like to refer to as "a functional democracy."
What's this have to do with gaming?
Bottom line, the games industry is like any other big business. (Surprise!) It also happens to be one of the fastest growing segments inside the entertainment biz, a multi-billion monster-money-maker that's actually accelerating into the curves economic naysayers keep throwing up in terms of oil barrel spikes and general mortgage/lender despondency.
As they say, you want to make money, prepare to burn through it in piles. Games now cost multi-millions just to get started. The price of failure for even the most solvent game publishers (to say nothing of individual design teams) can be catastrophic. Imagine what might've happened had Grand Theft Auto IV -- which cost Rockstar an estimated $100 million -- been met with critical scorn and the public had generally agreed and stayed away.
Covering any industry with complex risk-management revenue models is always tricky business. Add tabloid blogs and a whole slew of writers who think "journalism" is a dirty or highfalutin word and it can start to resemble the Wild West.
In a charged environment that bizarrely admonishes self-scrutiny, ethically scurrilous practices flourish. I've had public relations agents unabashedly implore me not to give a game an unfavorable review (by their definition, this includes calling something "average") because I might earn them a cardboard box and a visit from a rent-a-cop. I've had others threaten to blacklist me for attempting to contact a developer directly in lieu of allowing my questions (and the developer's answers) to pass through a PR "fluff" machine. I've actually been blacklisted for giving games undesirable scores and told that this was because I might drag down the game's Metacritic rating. We've heard stories about PR factories that keep files on writers and track their so-called "likes and dislikes," and of PR agents that pitch editors to have specific people cover something because they want to ensure it gets positive coverage.
So when I see one of my old editors, Dan Hsu venting about consumers accusing games writers of being bought off, or acknowledging that the opportunities to actually be bought off are indeed plentiful, I can't help but relate. I can also relate to the notion that the line between never ever accepting anything from a vendor, e.g. a meal, free review copies of games, and occasional travel expenses, is big and amorphous and definitively gray. What consumers often don't understand is that journalism is first and foremost about access. We need to touch the things we're covering. We need to be able to play the games we're talking about. We need to be able to engage the people whose products we're heralding to readers. To do that, we often have to attend vendor-sponsored events on vendor terms, endure phone calls with designers monitored by PR "handlers," even travel to vendor campuses to play final builds of games to ensure our coverage is timely and competitive.
Remember, game publishers are under no obligation whatsoever to provide a single member of the media with reviewable product. They frankly don't have to acknowledge we exist. They provide access to their products and personnel because its customary, and because they in turn want access to our readership.
Complicating matters, we have our share of inside name-callers, people who love to quip and snark when someone in the industry dares to mention the words "ethics" and "journalism" in the same sentence. You're not supposed to eat where you answer nature's call, goes this line of thinking. You're not supposed to talk about how the sausage is made. It's anathema. You either get how to be a good reporter or you don't. It "goes without saying."
Except when it doesn't, and I doubt I'll have to protest very loudly given the polling data I cite above for that to resonate with readers. So I have to strongly disagree with this fellow, whose bizarrely hostile response to Dan Hsu's "Behind the Scenes: Gaming Journalism (Part 1)" is to write "Do us all a favor...shut up."
You see, Dan's eating where he answers nature's call. He's talking about how the sausage is made. And while that sort of hand-wringing can occasionally sound like a broken record and bore the dickens out of readers who just want to know when the next Halo or Mario or Metal Gear Solid's due out, I think it's essential that we keep this channel open and the discussion lively. Telling someone to "shut up" is antithetical to democratic discourse. And it's most certainly not in the spirit of the movement a highly respected pollster like John Zogby claims is coming in the form of increasing -- not cynically dismissing or shrugging off -- the level of scrutiny we bring to bear on the informational practices our media engage in.
Infinite Undiscovery's dithering protagonist resembles the sort of reluctant hero you'd love to slap. He absorbs insults like a punching bag but never punches back. He can't keep his neck straight or his fingers out of his hair, like a guy who's always reaching for a paper sack to pull over his face. He's able to skewer enemies with more aplomb than any of his battle-seasoned companions, but crumples under the withering warmth of a compliment. He's a hit with the ladies, but tactless on the small talk. It's a joke that goes on and on and finally peters out about halfway through tri-Ace's disarmingly winsome and fascinating tale about a madman who's somehow shackled the moon with sky-scraping chains and the band of heroes crisscrossing the planet to sunder them.
That's okay. It's an easy cliche to shake off. After all, these games are full of them. The diffident outsider turned hesitating leader. The "everyone's under 17" and saving the world thing. Potions and herbs and scrolls (oh my!). Chatting up people twice who'll just repeat the second phrase forever. The 50-50 chance one of your teammates will turn out to be Really Really Evil (a corollary to this involves sprouting gigantic batwings and orating like Tim Curry in Legend). Walking into houses and rifling through people's stuff. Getting rescued by an outlaw band in a forest. Checking off stops on a climatological tour, from grassy tundras and snow fields to desert dunes and verdant jungles (all, of course, an easy day's walk from each other). And of course, the gracelessly gonging "absolute power corrupts absolutely" theme.
How's the actual game fare? Not too shabby. It skews action-heavy, with real-time battles and button-tapping combos that render encounters with enemies mostly boisterous FX-laden light shows (some have grumbled about slowdown here, but it's rarely noticeable). One button triggers quick attacks, another power attacks, and you can tap either a few times to pull of combos. While your basic "quick" and "power" attacks stay the same throughout, you can unleash battle skills by holding down A or B to launch enemies into the air or hurl them to the ground. Oh yeah, it's one of those games where the characters shout their moves during execution, so you'll hear stuff like "Crescendo Spike!" and "Diminuendo Drive!" every bloomin' time the hero pulls off his or her signature ability. Some people love that stuff, others can't stand it. Notice served.
You tend to pinball between towns or cities separated by vast monster-filled tracts, either fighting sparingly or going for broke and gathering miscellaneous flora by mapping every last nook and cranny. Ritual fantasy fare like giant birds and wolves or harpies and goblins sit around waiting for you to engage them, then re-spawn moments after you've slaughtered them, so if you're looking for grind time, you can do laps in these areas to snag loot and level up. Pretty conventional, I know.
The game attempts to distinguish itself by introducing a "connect" tool that lets you partner with a party member and enable their combos to dovetail with yours. The upside occurs when you change the game quick-tactics mediator from "free" independent actions to "combo" and simply wail on opponents in focused formations. The downside (that should have been an upside, because the underlying logic's smart enough) involves using "connect skills" -- special abilities unique to each character you can personally assume control of. It works well enough when an ability's automatic, say a magic spell that targets and executes without special control tactics. But when it comes to aiming at targets with a party member's ranged weapon, something you'll occasionally have to do on a timer, you're dropped into a first-person crosshairs view that feels awkward and jumpy because you're spending 99 percent of the game in third-person mode. Worse, the protagonist simply freezes until you've dropped out of a "connect" mode action, making him a zombie patsy for enemy attacks (why doesn't the game assume control and keep him at least defensively swinging?).
Fighting would get old in a hurry if tri-Ace didn't keep you guessing. Instead of front-loading all its to-dos, Infinite Undiscovery spreads tactical party functionality and several types of mini-games across the entire experience. Early on, for instance, you're taught a few basic stealth mechanics (the artificial intelligence is capable of discerning both directional and decibel-varied noises). Sneak up on an enemy and you get a temporary attack bonus, or, conversely, take a surprise knife in the back and the enemy gets an interim edge over you. As you travel you'll gather dozens of nondescript items you can build into foodstuff, weapons, and armor (so long as you have the proper "item creator" in your party). The protagonist wields a flute that increases party stats or lets him "perceive" hidden nooks. It's eventually possible to imbue party members with temporary stat boosts by bestowing item-based enchantments. You can form up to three independent parties with the game's considerable cast of characters) and even fight alongside them during certain sequences (though, sadly, you can't tactically interact with them). A party-based mini-game crops up halfway through that grades your performance after certain battles.
So what's an Infinite Undiscovery? Beats me. Another poorly translated Japanese title? Probably. I know tri-Ace wanted to make a game that rewarded unscripted probing. The manual has a section near the end that reads "discover the undiscoverable" and encourages you to "mix it up." Does it succeed? Sort of. There's certainly plenty to tease out, even if all the "discoveries" taken individually feel a little shallow. And the titular mechanic -- using using the "connect" menu to walk every single party member around town and chat up every denizen to earn different responses -- is also the single most annoying. Who wants to play "tell me something different" for hours on end just to get a handful of side quests that amount to tedious item errands?
Still, I want to keep playing this game. Where's the next chain battle going to be? Why does the protagonist look just like the game's legendary hero? How'd this Dread Knight dude manage to enslave the moon? Why do some people receive power-wielding lunar glyphs while others (the "unblessed") don't? And just what the heck's under that great big ball of twine in the sky, anyway? With questions like those and more, Infinite Undiscovery's held me captive, shortcomings and all. Am I just starving for a decent JRPG since Final Fantasy XIII keeps getting pushed back?
Maybe. But I can say I feel as generally affectionate toward Infinite Undiscovery as I did Lost Odyssey and Folklore and Eternal Sonata, all three games I'd rank "above average." Don't buy it expecting Final Fantasy, in other words, and it'll probably tide you over.
NPD's official August 2008 sales numbers hit later this week, but for today, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has some intriguing prognostications about the PS3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii.
For starters, Pachter's August 2008 predictions claim Sony's PlayStation 3 (225,000) inched past the Xbox 360 (200,000) for the second month in a row by about 25,000 units. Last month's NPD numbers for July 2008 showed the PS3 with 20,000 more units sold than the Xbox 360, 225,000 versus 205,000 respectively.
Why the continued slow 360 sales? "Tempered Xbox 360 demand...in anticipation of the September price cuts," says Pachter.
And while Pachter estimates the Wii moved a respectable 550,000 units in August, he says the "console sell-through forecasts reflect our belief that supplies for Wii hardware were flat this month.
Software sales growth has been "extraordinary" according to Pachter, who lists sales up across the board on a monthly basis...
+12% in January (with one less week)
+48% in February
+64% in March
+69% in April
+41% in May
+61% in June
+41% in July
With all the economic scaremongering, "are-we or aren't-we in a recession" talk, and today's news about the stunning government (read: taxpayer) bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it's nice to see Pachter acknowledging that "the video game software sector remains highly recession-resistant."
Overall video game console sales for August 2008? $600 million, predicts Pachter, up 23% over last year's $489 million for the same period.
Spore was never meant to be all things to all people, and it's a hoot reading the mea culpas marching in from the folks who did the game such a disservice by hyping it so unreasonably. They're now calling Spore "different from what they expected." Well, what did they expect? The Sims meets Master of Orion? Dawn of War meets Impossible Creatures? Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking and Shigeru Miyamoto in a box? Will Wright (the game's creator) was never coy about his intentions here, calling Spore a casual game for casual players right from the start.
That said, and much as it's a pleasure for me to say I get it (see for yourself in my PC World review), the game's still a few chromosomes short of a genome. So I've pulled together the following list of eight mildly irritating imperfections. None were even close to deal-breakers (okay, point #1 was a three-time teeth-gnasher, but with PCs it's always a toughie to say whether crash-bugs are the game or your system) and a few probably reveal my own shortcomings as a traditional (read: not casual) PC gamer. But they're at least the kinds of things Maxis needs to be thinking about as the game's sixth and uncredited "Patch Stage" gets underway.
1. No autosave. That's right, the game doesn't automatically save your progress, which causes mass panic each time Spore crashes. Crashes? Not often. But in all of two weeks playing through multiple worlds and stages, it did crash three times, at one point dragging me back from the beginning of the Civilization Stage (after a very successful and pleasing run through Tribal) to the end of Creature -- from fourth to second, in other words. Fortunately you can restart from any stage you've already visited and import your creature, but you'll sacrifice your history timeline in the process.
2. No labels on already-assigned creature body parts. Mouse over the body parts currently attached to your cell or creature (or building, or vehicle) and all you can do it change their size or positioning. No labels, no pop-up info windows, no attribute reminders, nothing. A lot of parts like horns and bony protrusions, hands and feet, often look a lot alike. Or wildly different from their original form after you've done some creative geometric tweaking. Several of the pieces and appendages you're slapping on your weird-eyed wonders or funky strobing love shacks have performance ratings. Being able to compare what you have equipped therefore matters when you get new, more complex, more expensive options. A mouse over pop-up label or level-up indicator showing the attribute going up (green) or down (red) would shore up this info-deficiency.
3. Most of the adornments in Tribal Phase clash wildly with the creature anatomy. My creatures all ended up with face masks clapped to their backsides and loin-skirts dangling from their spindly legs or arms because the parts don't jibe with your creature's physiology. I realize there's no easy way to make one-size-fits-all regalia for such a potentially multifarious range of critters, which is why skirts and shields and masks ought to go, and smaller bits like a whole range of shamanic jewelry would work better here.
4. I can select and CTRL-assign numbers to mini-squads for easy selection in the Civilization Stage, so why not the Tribal one? Don't say it's part of the management criteria in Tribal, either, because Will Wright knows better than anyone that gaming an interface (making the interface its own challenge in lieu of something more clever) isn't really a game at all.
5. Pathfinding seems (emphasize seems) broken in the Tribal Stage, where your creatures have to wrestle around each other to access structures that let them select weapons or musical instruments. Why "seems"? Because when I interviewed her, Spore's executive producer Lucy Bradshaw suggested that creatures might fare better or worse in this regard based on their evolutionary traits. Pathfinding as an evolutionary matter sounds intriguing, but it's not really clear how -- there's no index to gauge this -- rendering the whole edifice suspect. Players will simply see creatures battling to get around in-the-way siblings and wonder why that last icon in the vertical selection stack (on the right side of the screen) isn't, for instance, switching from "food collector" to "didgeridoo player."
6. Spore has Grand Theft Auto IV's "phone" problem. In GTA4, the protagonist has friendship ratings that soar or plummet based on his proclivity to answer the phone and pick up pals he then has to cart around to watch shows or play mini-games like darts or pool. These chew up a lot of time, repeat themselves frequently, and tend to feel obligatory if you're obsessively completist. Spore's version of this during its final Space Stage involves distress calls about alien invasions, pirate raids, timer-based planetary safaris, and all sort of other wild and wooly activities constantly vying for your attention while you're simply trying to pay the bills by muling around spices or terraforming planets to inaugurate new colonies. An option to reduce the frequency of "help me" nagging would be helpful, especially when your "empire" start to grow into the planetary dozens.
7. Spore's planetary trees are a disaster in the Space Stage. You'll often have to park your UFO around a planet at treetop level -- you can't land or hover near the ground -- and hunt for ant-sized creatures who love to hang out in little otherworldly red and purple glades. Good luck. Trees obfuscate or outright block your view every time you get near a cluster, and the only sort-of workaround -- sucking them into you cargo hold -- chews up too much time. How about an infrared option to see (and shoot accurately) through the trees, and to spare us the misery of floating blindly through bulky branches, trying to tease our miserable victims (while inadvertently and penally slaughtering dozens of others) out into the open?
8. In the later stages, over half the editor parts and pieces lean toward the superficially cosmetic. They let you visually distinguish your creation, in other words, but no matter how dramatically they change its physical appearance, serve no broader function. In fact, Spore's "evolutionary" bits hinge less on procedural physics than a handful of inalterable physical traits mapped statically to this or that body part. Build the least likely creature imaginable and while it may look like an unnaturally selected monstrosity incapable of surviving, it'll move or fight or socialize just as well as a streamlined Newtonian maven, so long as you manage to slap the right trait-parts on. All the extra pieces? Vanity nubs. Consequently Spore ends up with lots of wildly different looking creatures that ultimately perform counter-evolutionarily, i.e. "the same." Can Spore "evolve" to accommodate substantive procedural physics in future iterations? Who knows, but its longevity probably hinges on adding more consequential functionality to its shallower dollhouse parts.
My major complaint actually comes from the camera and movement controls. They are really really really bad.
Each stage makes the camera move differently than it did before and applies new rules. Instead of building on an existing system. BAD design, BAD.
Using W,A,S,D for movement and Q and E for rotation across all modes would have been great. Or better yet, letting the user configure the keys themselves for how they want to control the camera.
Click and Hold left and right mouse buttons at the same time and drag? How is that a good system?
Funny, you nailed all my peeves exactly. I only played one day, but I already hate the Space stage distress calls. And the lack of labels is really bad.
Check out this final extended slice of my interview with Spore executive producer Lucy Bradshaw, in which Lucy talks editing cosmetics, why asexual reproduction was dropped, whether Spore's a game or a toy, and plugging Spore into The Sims.
PC World: One of the great debates you'll hear when a game like this comes along is "Is it a game or is it a toy?" When you came onto the project, where was it at, where did you take it, and in terms of the final product, how do you feel it holds up as a game as opposed to something that's more novelty?
Lucy Bradshaw: When I came on the project we had the editors and there'd been some user testing. And it was really funny, because we'd bring people in and let them play with the Creature Creator, and you could tell they were having a hard time working with it, they didn't quite get it. They'd toy around with it, but you could tell they weren't all that happy with their results. At that time, the team came together and had this idea of putting the spine in the torso and making that almost the central element you work with and then start putting parts on.
When we made that change, we brought players back through to play with it, and they just had a riot. They immediately interacted with it as if it was a creature. Even though it was a blob with a spine in it, they understood exactly how they would begin to form their creature. It was also the first time players named and saved their creature, and the naming itself was ridiculous, everyone coming up with silly, crazy names. I think that was the spark, the driving creative aspect that really became the center of the entire game.
The creator tools are such a central part, and figuring out how the game ultimately took advantage of those thing, that the creators end up playing a very strategic role in the tactics of the gameplay, was something that was part of that initial vision. It really shaped up at that time, along with how much creative breadth we wanted to give the player in that space.
So you asked is it a toy or a game. Players come in with a lot of different motivations, and I think Spore has a very strong toy-like quality to it. But most people, myself included, when I get a toy, I want to play with it. Getting that environment to really put it into a space, play with it, challenge it in different ways, destroy it, make it succeed, really is that kind of loop. And I think if that game wasn't in there, and there wasn't pressure to achieve and acknowledgement when you do, if the toy didn't come to life, it wouldn't be as fun. It's a balancing act, and just as important to Spore to have that, as well as that very toy-like, very tactile kind of quality that we get you in the editors.
PCW: My sense of the game so far is that the editors in the cell phase have attributes that impact gameplay, but some of the later stage editors, which have dozens more pieces and parts, seem almost cosmetic.
LB: That's again another part of the balancing act. Each time that you take and evolve your species during the physical evolution, that's where we emphasize the really deliberate meaning and abilities to each one of the parts that you add. Are you going to take sort of a sneaky and social approach. Are you going to be very aggressive and large and so on. So you really have a opportunity to play different strategies out based on the parts that you get.
When you move on to Tribal Stage, while we still bring in advantages to the different outfits that you might get, they really emphasizing that you're already a physical developed species. There you start to diversify and look more to the cultural evolution, which is represented by the tools we give you. So yeah, it moves to different emphases as you move through the game. With the Vehicle Creator, the vehicle stats are actually quite meaningful in the game in terms of how fast can you maneuver to a different position. Are you going to favor power or speed. So they really do play a role, particularly as you play on the harder difficulty levels. If you're playing "Easy" and to some degree even "Normal," they're not as emphasized.
Once you get to space the emphasis really is about terraforming. It's about guiding your spacecraft and using the tools you acquire through interacting with other alien races. What we wanted to do was make the emphasis "How are you manipulating the planets?" as opposed to just some of the individual assets. And yet we still want you to play with those other creations. So for instance, one of the tools you can get in space is one that allows you to "epic-ize" any of the other creatures that you see on land, say giant Godzilla-like creatures. You can beam one into an "epic" and you can sick it on a city or a colony and take it out, which plays to those kind of cinematic space opera stories that you might be familiar with. So really in that way you can still play with the toys you've created throughout the game.
PCW: The five stages you move through in Spore are Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space. What was the hardest to work on and why?
LB: I've got to pick two, and here's why. Tribe, because it sat right between two game stages that needed to be a natural evolution from Creature and set up what we were doing with the Civilization phase. That one took a lot of maneuvering in terms of where we were going to take the controls, how we were going to evolve that Tribal Stage. So that was hard because of where it sat in the context of the overall game, particularly transitioning from more avatar style to controlling a group.
The other stage would be Space, not so much because it was harder, but because that's where the game becomes extremely open-ended. Early on we kind of checked off the box that, you know, space is vast. It's pretty awe-inspiring, but at the same time, it's like "Uh, what do I do?" So bringing in some structure and backbone and some guidance to players, whether they want to be more exploratory or colonizing or terraforming, sort of aggressive or empire-building, we wanted to build in enough structure so players could really grapple with what to do there. It can be kind of daunting to stare at a million stars with a million planets to journey to. In that sense it was a really big bookend we needed to nail and give that kind of context to.
PCW: In early previews, it looked like cell-phase reproduction would be asexual, but now it's sexual. In the tribal phase, it looked like you'd be able to teach your tribe different kinds of dances or songs, but now that seems limited to pre-built music and city anthems. Any reason these were changed or scaled back?
LB: Originally you actually did just lay an egg without going through the little mating ceremony. I think the reason we made that change is that you want to build upon what a player has learned and you don't want to change the game roles, and because we were having mating happen in the Creature Stage, players had learned something differently, and we were watching as players, they were like, "Well I'm at my nest, why am I not laying my egg?" It created confusion and frustration, so rather than allow that to happen, what we did was say "Hey, let's teach this in the Cell Stage."
And you know, quite frankly, we did move it to a slightly developed cell rather than just a molecule. Originally, in Will's very, very original vision, there was a Microbial Stage. It would have been natural to have mitosis there. It just felt like this was more fitting, and resolved an issue where the player had to unlearn and relearn something.
PCW: Spore was originally called Sim Everything. Have you discussed the possibility of plugging Spore into The Sims?
LB: It is one of the things we're actually looking at, and our engineers because we know a lot of the engineering team on The Sims, we just goof around and stuff, and we do know that we could actually have one of our skeletons walk around in their game and everything. It's these kind of mash-ups that maybe we'll play around with. I mean, who knows, I can't speak to that, I wouldn't be able to promise anything. But I do know that our guys are constantly toying with stuff. If there's something that we thought could be a fun little one-off, we probably wouldn't make a product out of it, but it might make an interesting little toy.
It's similar to what we're doing releasing the early prototypes of the game. Will and the very small group of engineers that were on the project did a lot of exploration about how to for instance let a player navigate space, you know, that sort of time and space continuum. The other areas that you can tell were being explored were "How do you make it tactile?" Do we want to have players forming planets, and is that going to be an activity in the game. Long ago when Will did his original pitch for Spore I remember him talking to me about Neumannic evolution, and there's even a sense that there's an exploration in a cellular automata prototype of that. But those are things we're releasing on our website so that players can kind of script them and play with them themselves. That's where we have fun and experiment, and I think revealing that to the player base and particularly some of the fans who've followed Maxis games as long as they have, it's interesting to see where they take those things.
LB: That's not something we've announced or anything I can talk to specifically. The things that we have been doing is that we have a partnership with Zazzle where you can take your creature images and incorporate them into t-shirts and lunch boxes. We have a tool in the game where you can take pictures on a high resolution black background, which means you can integrate it with other media easily. So there's a Spore Zazzle store. We've got the Comic Book Creator, the YouTube partnership, and we're working with the group to potentially make little collectibles where you could get a 3D printout of your creature spaceship or whatever. That's what's in the works right now.
PCW: Will confirmed there were plans to do a Wii version of Spore, but are you any closer to green-lighting Xbox 360 or PS3 versions?
LB: Nothing we're talking about now.
PCW: What's Lucy Bradshaw playing these days when she isn't working on Spore?
LB: We're still pretty busy, but I've been playing around with the Warhammer Online beta, which is awesome. They just took it leaps and bounds in the last month, and I'm pretty excited for that team because it's such a big undertaking, and they've captured the Warhammer world so well. Beyond that, I play just a ton of Nintendo DS games. I'm constantly on the move, so I take it with me. And Rock Band. Definitely Rock Band.
If you enjoyed my interview with Spore executive producer Lucy Bradshaw, check out these extended cuts, in which Lucy talks about science, religion, procedural audio, and patrolling the universe in her UFO posse.
PCW: You've lived with this project for something like three years, right?
LB: Yeah, I've been on the project about three, and that's funny, because I was working on The Sims 2 while Will Wright [Spore's lead designer] was putting some scope and sense around his vision. I worked with him to build out the very early stuff he had, which was just to explore different prototyping stages. The next wave was hiring in key technical staff who were testing the ground for whether we could achieve Will's vision, which was part of the early stage exploring stuff like procedural animation.
So we brought Chris Hecker on, Ocean Quigley who kind of pushed and experimented with the ways in which we could do procedural texturing. A little bit later, a guy that I'd worked with on Sim City and The Sims and whom I was working with on The Sims 2 at the time, Andrew Wilmott, came over to work on the core engine capabilities. These people were helping Spore get off the ground during its concept stages, but when I came on it was really more asking questions like "What have we learned?" and "How do we allow this to take shape?" and move it from this inkling of an idea that Will has into something we can say, you know, here's where we're going.
PCW: Players have had access to the Spore Creature Creator for about a month now, but after playing the game, the building and vehicle creators seem even more intricate.
LB: Yeah, I've just been amazed by what people can do. The advantage you have when you're on the development team, is that I can even take creatures people are making using the Creature Creator and play with them in my game. So just being able to experience them as you kind of go over the creature game and see some of those things where, you know, you buddied a certain player and added stuff to the Sporepedia and you get to see their content and play with it.
The vehicles and particular spaceships, when you ally with somebody in space and that alien race then sends their UFO to fly with you in this sort of posse...that's one of my favorite things, kind of building that up and scooting around space with my little posse of UFOs that are all ridiculously different in terms of the direction that players took them. I mean, I've flown around with a football and a four poster bed.
PCW: Bedknobs and broomsticks.
LB: Yeah, there's even a witch on a broomstick and all kinds of other crazy stuff.
PCW: Let's talk about Spore in terms its Darwinian connotations. The game models some of the basic tenets of evolution in terms of inherited traits, gene toolkits, and species adaptability over time. Has there been any negative reaction from anti-evolutionary groups?
LB: We honestly haven't heard much from those groups. It was interesting, you know, while we were making the game, the way the team reacted at times to some of the directions we took, because not only do you have evolution, but you also have the religious cultural approach in the civilization stage. And our team became a little bit of a bellwether when we weren't striking the right chord in terms of treating these things in a more humorous fashion.
I think Will mentioned recently that we've actually heard more back from the sort of atheistic cadre than the religious groups. So it's kind of interesting when you do things like this that provoke those types of questions, and really I think that's where Spore shines. It's implementation is a game. It's fun. The dynamics you get into in terms of strategy and tactics are treated humorously. We really do leave it up to the player to interpret where in that space their "hand" takes a role. Are they God? Are they intelligent designer? Are they evolutionist? The mere fact that the game gets that question out there and provokes that kind of thinking, I think that's a good thing. The same can be said for the kind of undercurrent of science that's in the game. It's not heavy handed in terms of its educational value or anything, but I think it provokes those kinds of questions, like "What about evolutionary science?" "What about the atmosphere?" "What about how planets form?"
PCW: Aren't people who'd decry religion's presence in this game sort of missing the point? I mean, the game doesn't take a position on whether it's good or bad, just that it's a factor, right?. Wouldn't the game be less realistic without it in terms of the way societies and civilizations actually look?
LB: Yeah, that was our attitude. We wanted to provide the context and strategies that best lent themselves to the narrative. A lot of the games Will's worked on like The Sims and Sim City are about that kind of creative experience, that sense of ownership you have over your experience: making a city, creating a Sim household, and now with Spore, sort of evolving this species. Not just the "what" it is, but also the "who." We wanted to provide those key dynamics that allowed you to pour your own narrative into the game. And then we brought that a little more to the surface by adding a personal history with a timeline that helps you grasp what you've created over time.
We keep a lineage of your character that you'll be able to see on the website after the product goes live. We want to showcase stuff like the lineages that have been the most successful plus some of the telemetry that we've put in, like who's the most subscribed-to SporeCast or the most pollinated creature. Things that'll allow us to give achievements to players in the community space that are different from the achievements you can get just playing the game.
PCW: It's interesting, because with the timeline you really get a contextual sense of where natural selection has its say in terms of dying and dead end creature traits.
LB: It was really fun when we put that in, because it really did bring things into perspective. All of a sudden you're saying "Oh my gosh, that's what I did to get to this point?" And then the consequence abilities, which you get based on the choices you make in the game, they're part of the reason the Tribe stage became my personal favorite. The abilities you get during Tribe are just so funny and expressive. The audio team in particular brought so much humor and flair to all the various areas.
PCW: What about the game's implementation of music that "evolves" as you play?
LB: You've got to give the kudos to Kent Jolly and our collaboration with Brian Eno, because we listened to a lot of generative music, and I'm sorry to say, most of it doesn't sound like anything I'd want to listen to for any period of time. It was Kent and Brian who came together and rethought where we were going. We were really pushing it generative, and instead, they came up with a way of mixing pre-authored musical components that ultimately derived from something that changes all the time, but which can respond to the actions of the player and at the same time sound really good. They really one-upped themselves in the city-planner, where there's a national anthem tool you use to create your own melody, which then becomes your own anthem and follows you off into space. Brian was concerned that we were going to let the player be creative in everything but music, so they were insistent that we actually put that feature in.
The rumor mill's barking again that we'll see another Nintendo DS in early 2009 with slightly larger screens and each one touchable, but what do we really want from a new Nintendo handheld? Swappable storage? Custom media playback? A better, sleeker, user-friendlier operating system? High-speed cellular wireless support? iPhone-like capabilities?
Well, what's the competition up to? Sony's PlayStation Portable obviously tops the DS in the "oomph" department, and it's hard to argue with Sony's widescreen 480 x 272 resolution 16.77 million color screen compared to the DS's grainier 256 x 192. It's also rather dramatically more customizable, with its award-winning XrossMediaBar (XMB) allowing you to fiddle everything from photo slideshows and video files to RSS channels, streaming TV, an embedded microbrowser, and a Skype WiFi phone.
The DS, by comparison, only plays games, disregarding a handful of negligible accessories (remember the Rumble Pak?) and oddities I've never personally found a use for like PictoChat. You can add a media-crippled (but otherwise reasonably elegant) browser to the DS courtesy Opera, but it'll set you back thirty bucks (the PSP's browser is inbuilt).
Going off the assumption that mobile users want more from less without that "more" kludging up the interface, size, or overall weight of a totable games console, what should the next Nintendo DS include?
1. Larger, wider, brighter, higher-resolution screens capable of millions of colors are an absolute must. I just spent several dozen hours squinting my way through Final Fantasy IV for the DS after several dozen prior barely crinkling my crow's feet playing Crisis Core on the PSP. I love my DS and the fact that it still plays games going on two decade old, but it's definitely harder on my eyes than the PSP.
2. In support of #1, a more powerful engine under the hood. I don't care how they do it, whether it's dual processor or all-in-one-chip or whether it involves snappier mobile memory. Just make it possible to render Wii-quality 3D to both screens at once without a performance hit and scuttle point texture filtering once and for all to sharpen things up.
3. Slimmer, but not too slim. As noted back in April, game controllers -- and the DS is essentially a game controller that happens to have a couple screens built in -- need to have heft. Render the already wispy DS Lite any less substantial and it'll be like playing games on a paper gamepad. The DS weighs 275 grams and the newer PSP "Slim and Lite" weighs just 189g, and a PS3 Sixaxis wireless controller drops to 138g. I wouldn't want to play on something lighter than a PS3 Sixaxis controller, not to mention the potential safety issues in terms of protecting higher-quality dual-screens surrounded by even less ABS plastic (anyone for a titanium-magnesium composite shell?).
4. Expandable storage in support of full video playback. Actually, I'm just kidding. Really. Have you tried to watch a movie on a PSP? An iPod? A phone? Do you do it often? Really? Your mileage may vary, but I think David Lynch has it exactly right when he says this about people who watch (or think they've watched) movies on mobile devices. Short YouTube style clips? Sure. Maybe even short TV episodes (my brother, who works in Boston, says half the people on his morning train commute watch sitcoms on their iPhones). But feature-length films? No thanks.
5. Improved wireless support. No big deal, just a bump from 802.11b WEP up to 802.11n and WPA2 and of course, better signal range.
6. Some sort of extensible hardware and/or software architecture for upgrades and add-ons that could range from first-party downloadable improvements through firmware updates to third-party plugins like a Skype WiFi phone.
7. From #6, an online library of purchasable and downloadable Game Boy and DS games, mobile applications, etc. And I guess that means I wasn't kidding about at least the "expandable storage" part of point #4.
8. Improved battery life. Why not? I mean, sure, we already get 10 hours out of the old DS, but why not 15 or even 20? (What would be really cool? How about slipping a pair of photo-voltaic solar cells behind the LCD screens to allow the DS to charge by exposing it to sunlight?)
9. Better speakers, better audio. Compressed music can't match true CD-quality tunes, but it can get awfully close. Even the best current-generation DS games sound a little last-century in terms of the musical bloops and bleeps. Give us at least MP3-quality music and stereo speakers that can dynamically keep up.
10. An overhauled operating system plus a few "hard" on-off switches. Make a change in the current DS OS and you get that infuriating "the system will restart now" message. Lose that, make changes hot-applicable, and come up with a navigation system that uses actual words and not just pixellated images. Also: Give us a simple slider to flip the wireless chip on or off (like the PSP) so we can conserve battery life.
11. An analog control nub (or two) in that nice big empty space below the d-pad. I realize this says more about my fondness for more traditional controls, but then you've probably never played Star Fox Command, either. Not a single button more, mind you. Four buttons plus the shoulder bumpers is already tops, thank you very much.
Of course what we want and what we get from a company that's currently breaking every demographic rule and cynical media axiom has as much chance of meshing as John Hodgman and Justin Long. Did I say "expect"? Should have said "really geek-tastically hope for." I'd only expect two or three of the above points to actually materialize (if the rumors of a new DS are even true) early next year.
All those things feel good 2 me ,even the solar cell which I'm sure could be worked into a game. I'm still looking for the fluke that they allow roms of games we already have to work on the ds (gb color...) we shall see.
Anyone noticed the recent dearth of intriguing, headline-grabbing games for the Nintendo Wii? Some 555,000 little white boxes leapt off store shelves in July U.S. sales, according to NPD data, and Nintendo certainly did brisk top 10 software sales with Wii Play, Mario Kart, and Wii Fit. But look a little closer -- those three games came out in February, April, and May, respectively. Scan July's top software SKUs and the 360 and PS3 snatched five spots between NCAA Football 09, Soul Calibur IV, and Civilization Revolution -- all July releases.
While that speaks well of Nintendo's ability to sell more of less, is it setting the company up for a saturation crash, when the demographic lode its cracked wide open eventually taps out?
Check out Gamestop online. The front page is a great big love letter to PC, 360, and P3 gamers. Other than the multi-platform Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, there's not a Wii game in sight. Click on Gamestop's Wii-specific link and it's like falling into a vat of vanilla. Mario Super Sluggers, victim of lackluster reviews, headlines the portal. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 and Guitar Hero: World Tour are ports. The only "bestselling" portal-splashed game is currently Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility.
Still awake?
The 360 has Gears of War 2 and Fable 2. The PS3 has Resistance 2 and Little Big Planet. Lord of the Rings: Mines of Moria and Red Alert 3 and Wrath of the Lich King are incoming for PC gamers. Multi-platform majors include Crysis: Warhead (PC), Silent Hill: Homecoming (360, PS3), Dead Space (PC, 360, PS3), Far Cry 2 (PC, 360, PS3), Fallout 3 (PC, 360, PS3), Mirror's Edge (PC, 360, PS3), Tom Clancy's Endwar (PC, 360, PS3, PSP, DS), and Left 4 Dead (PC, 360). And that's just plucking from the pre-holiday lineup.
The Wii? Try de Blob, Samba de Amigo, Wario Land: Shake It!, Cooking Mama World Kitchen, and Wii Music. Wii Music? According to Shigeru Miyamoto, it's "more interesting than a video game." Maybe because it isn't a video game?
I can't wait to see how stuff like Fracture (360, PS3) and Rise of the Argonauts (PC, 360, PS3) and the new Prince of Persia (PC, 360, PS3, DS) game pan out. NBA 09: The Inside (PS3, PSP, PS2) and Lord of the Rings: Conquest (PC, 360, PS3, DS) and The Last Remnant (360) certainly have my curiosity halfway piqued.
But Twin Strike: Operation Thunder or Pitfall: The Big Adventure or Margot's Word Brain? Not so much.
The autor of this article seems to be a bit misinformed. Ok he like shooters. So lets see the shooter games for the wii for the rest of 2008: Call of Duty 5, Quantum of Solace, Brothers in Arms:Double Time and Disaster:Day of Crisis. The last for now only in europe it seems.
Other games: Force Unleashed, Dead Rising, Clone Wars, Sam&Max, Ferrari Challenge, Monster Lab, Crash Bandicoot:Mind over mutants, Sim City creator, Wario Land, Mushroom Men and de Blob ... etc.
The last two games have already received rave critics from tests of demo-versions. By the way where are decent jump&runs for xbox or ps3 this year? None? What a pity.
Since Nintendo suddenly announced Disaster:Day of Crisis in Europe, only two month before release, perhaps there will be more surprises on the way. And the next year will be obviously the biggest Wii-Year with many AAA 1th and 3rd-party titles on the way.
can't for the moment the wii is obsolete. all those people... hehehe.
almost had me buy one...
I have a feeling that Nintendo is gonna just spring games on us, that way it keeps speculators from hassling them and allows the consumer to decide for themselves, if we all listened to reviewers, we would be stuck with the same old games, and no one would ever try anything different. If Nintendo wants to spring games on us, I am all for that, especially because I was not a sucker who went out and bought a Wii in the first place...
