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You guys remember the PSP, right? Annoyingly long, black, big screen, lousy battery, good for emulating PS1 games, got stomped by the Nintendo DS because no one ever made games for it?
Well, Sony's got all that shit figured out. Behold the PSP...P?
See, they're going to counter the DS Lite because it's... it's...
...
White?
And that would appear to be it. It's white, and the D-Pad is supposedly improved, and it's now thinner (which is akin to Lindsey Lohan combating her image problem by losing more weight), but you ...
So Microsoft had their E3 press conference tonight, and while it wasn't anything exciting (mainly a re-hash of PR material for games slated to come out later this year), I'm not going into NeoGAF-worthy histrionics and say it was on par with Sony's disastrous showing last year. It's only sin lay in being boring, a powerpoint presentation by stiff guys in stiff jokes telling stiff jokes to an audience that just wanted to see some game footage. It appeared that Microsoft was in fact afraid of replicating Sony's 2006 effort and held back on what they could have announced.
However.
There was this bit where they brought Cliffy B out to demo Gears of War... for the PC. Now, we 360 owners were sold on GoW as a console exclusive, the sort of killer app that you buy a system for. So seeing GoW on the Windows platform is disheartening enough for 360 owners-- But Cliffy B then proceeded to demostrate that the PC version of GoW would not only look better than it could ever on your 360, not only would it run -smoother-, but that it would also contain MORE CONTENT.
So basically Microsoft spent a good chunk of their E3 exclusive press conference actively eroding confidence in the 360 platform.
But hey, buy Mass Effect in November!
All of the following are scheduled to ship 7/10/07. As before, game ship dates stolen from Gamestop, reviews (when possible) provided by Gamerankings.
Before we go on,, a simple logic puzzle, for the publishing company CEOs out there.
So you're in the business of publishing videogames, and as such you know that a good percentage of your customers are in high school or college and during Summer usually have nothing better to do than work at McDonald's or hang out at comic shops. Being the president of a videogame company and thus obviously an incredibly smart person, worth many millions of dollars and owner of at least one diamond-encrusted Lamborghini for each day of the week, you also know that the games industry has a tradition of blindly throwing top titles out during the Christmas rush, when these same people are 1: Gearing up for tests and 2: Flat broke.
Why is it, Mister Smarty Pants Videogame Man, that you know these things and yet, year after year, decide to release jack all during the Summer months when your customers are both flush with cash and bored? This the same logic that killed Beyond Good and Evil, the same logic that forced people to chose between Metal Gear Solid 3 and Halo 2, and will be the same logic that's going to lead to development team behind Kane & Lynch: Dead Men being dragged from their homes at three in the morning one night in January and never heard from...
There are times when you are presented with a villainy so insidious, so clever, so utterly vile that you can't even be angry or even particularly shocked, but you sit back and marvel at the subtle complexity inherent, much like a mouse trap being presented with the inner workings of a glue trap.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with Electronic Art's latest atrocity, courtesy of NCAA Football 2008:
Good game, advertisement industry. Long have I wondered exactly how you'd go about making life an irredeemable chore. At first I thought you may borrow from Orwell and subject us all to digital cameras built into our television sets that wouldn't let us continue watching unless our eyes focused on an advertisement for a set amount of time, or that you guys would simply build a giant laser and burn iPod ads into the surface of the Moon, or maybe offer five bucks to anyone willing to carve Golden Palace inside the eyelids of their children. Instead, you decided to destroy gaming.
First, a bit on what you're looking at above. All Xbox 360 games feature something called “gamerpoints�, represented in a “gamerscore� that itself doesn't represent anything particularly much to people who don't like to brag about arbitrary measurements of gaming skill. It's sort of like bragging about...
Shamelessly stolen from Gamestop's upcoming games web page- which of course means that should you actually try to buy any of these games, expect to be viciously mocked by a kid making minimum wage during his summer vacation.
The reviews are from Gamerankings whenever possible-- meaning that in one article I've managed to combine Gamestop's retail practices with the absolute worst of “gaming journalism�. Join me next week as I attempt to combine the smell of cooked cabbage with the sex appeal of Annie Lennox.
PS2:
Nothing! Next gen systems enjoy a two week respite until Guitar Hero 80's edition makes the intervening seven years of console development irrelevant again.
Wii:
Chicken Shoot. (Review average: N/A) Use your Wii remote to shoot chickens, who return fire using their own progeny. Miraculously, Jack of All Games managed to make a horrid game out of this.
(That's not being entirely fair though, as I gathered that impression is from the PC version of the game, which averaged around a 50% from review sites. As far as the Wii version, no real evidence exists that it's going to be released outside of Gamestop. No reviews on Gamerankings or Metacritic, IGN doesn't believe it exits, even Wikipedia only includes the standard PR blurb. Here we have a case of a videogame so uninspiring...
So the community is all atwitter at Konami's latest attempt to haul the rotting husk of Contra franchise out of perdition and make it somewhat relevant Apparently we've blocked from memory the decade of industrial-grade dreck the franchise has given us ever since Treasure split away from Konami.
But hey, maybe I'm being a cynic. After all, who's to say WayForward Technologies isn't fit for Treasure's mantle? What could be so hard about three way guns and riding atop flying missiles and blowing up giant pulsating alien zombie wasp queens? After all, WayForward, they're the guys who--
Oh lord.
Well you know, maybe that was a fluke, everyone has their bad games, I mean even Treasure put out Wario World--
Monsters! They're monsters! For the love of all that's holy, someone call Konami and tell them-
Well, that's not so...
(submitted to The Platformers 6-11-07)
You would not be reading this if it were not for Shigeru Miyamoto.
You'd be reading a very different Platformers, perhaps instead called The Flight Sim Pilots, expounding on the genius of Microsoft Flight Simulator or some other dreadfully bland topic. No, this article and indeed this site could not exist if it were not for Miyamoto, for it is without hyperbole when I say his games saved console gaming from the Crash of '84 and as a result rescued the industry.
Were it not for Shigeru Miyamoto's work on Donkey Kong, Nintendo would never have entered the home console market with the Nintendo Entertainment System, without the NES there would have been no recovery from the Crash of 1984, and with it likely no further videogame consoles. Console gaming, moribund and lacking Shigeru's spark of imagination, would have slipped under the waves, videogames shackled to the personal computer, lost in a soulless pit of flight simulations and grognard-obsessed wargames.
He invented the platformer genre itself with Super Mario Brothers, the action RPG in Zelda, mentored the men who created Metroid and Pokemon, was named a Chevalier; time and again hailed as a...
Friend of mine (mcc over on the Platformers board) whipped this up with about five minutes work over at metacritic and one of those fancy Apple Mac machines that let you make graphs and put colors in graphs and make out with cute Asian girls who represent USB technology.
What you're looking at are game review scores for every console made since the Dreamcast back in 1999. And while it's hard to tell what line from which console, that's not the important bit here that's not what I want to talk about, it's the numbers themselves that intrest me.
First, how game reviewers go about this sort of thing. The vast, vast majority of game review sites and magazines use a 10 point scale to hand out their reviews. As logic would have it, the higher on the scale the better the game. You see (or should see, rather) very few tens handed out (perhaps one or two a year per source), 8-9 would represent exceptional games that should not be missed if circumstances allow, 5 is (as you'd expect) average, anything below that generally not worth your time unless you're either desperate or an aficionado of the genre or...
Submitted to The Platformers 5-9-07)
When you think about it, going to a store to buy a games at a store is pretty silly.
I mean, it's all data. Ones and zeros laid out in pattern, embedded on optical desk or a magnetic memory matrix. The other stuff- the case, the manual, the other various tsockies publishers try to foist on us to justify a Collector's Edition box- they're all forgotten in the time between the the moment we place the game in the DVD tray and the moment we put the game away. At best, they're wall-rack trophies to impress your gaming geek friends; at worst they are staggering wastes of paper and plastic, and unleaded gasoline is a terrible way to move ones and zeros into your home. The music and TV industries are already understanding this in their stumbling, quaint old-media sort of way. At some point the gaming industry will embrace digital content distribution in earnest, possibly shortly after some bright kid realizes he just spent a week's worth of 30 hour workdays on a title that spent all of four weeks on display at Wal-Mart. Whatever company sells downloadable content (or, in industry parlance, DLC) to the public in the same way that Apple has sold the public on iTunes stands to pull in a staggering amount of...
(Submitted to The Platformers 4-17-07)
Once upon a time, there was something called the "record store".
In that place you could find a vast collection of music, from the most pedestrian pop to the most obscure regional new age gospel reggae acts. And these stores would hire knowledgeable, (if not always exactly friendly) people, enthusiastic about music, able to steer customers in the right direction of whatever they were looking for or new stuff that the customer may have not even been aware of. Record stores would have regular customers, they were places were fans could hang out and just enjoy music, they were a credit not only to their particular community, but to the industry in general. The RIAA decided to destroy all that one day, but that's another issue.
As gamers, we deserve something similar. Small, independent stores staffed with people who have a love for games, shelves stocked with both popular and obscure titles. These stores could, like their music store brethren, be places were gamers could hang out and learn about new games, where neophytes and casual...
(submitted to The Platformers 4-11-07)
It has come to my attention that there exists a number of otherwise perfectly intelligent individuals who, for whatever reason, wish to destroy the gaming industry.
I don't speak of Senators Clinton or Lieberman, or of software pirates. Nor do I speak of the infamous Jack Thompson- after all, I did say intelligent.
I don't mean politicians seeking votes and attention on the backs of of legislation and censorship, nor those who flood the market with hundreds of thousands of copies of black-market Nintendo DS games. I speak of game developers who desire a standardized gaming platform. In the words of the most vociferous of these madmen, Denis Dyack, CEO and founder of Silicon Knights:
(http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=15712)
"I think in the long term, honestly, [I'd like] one hardware platform to rule them all...
(Submitted to The Platformers 4-2-07)
This article started off as an examination of three
traditional console genres and how developers and fans alike were
responsible for their demise. But upon further research, I realized that
two of these genres I had thought dead or dying- the shooter and the racing
game- were still vital parts of the gaming dynamic, evolving new concepts and
thus able to attract new fans. However, the third- the fighter-
has not seen a major revision in gameplay mechanics since the first Virtua
Fighter nearly fifteen years ago. How did the fighter, so recently a
essential factor of the gaming universe and a driving force of console sales,
collapse into irrelevance? And how have the shump and the racer, both
far older than the fighter, managed to escape obsolescence?
The Racer-- Mirror Course
I know, it's hard to understand how I could think the racer was near the
edge of relevance, especially when you consider how much marketing
faith Microsoft placed in Project Gotham 3 or how important Mario
Kart is to Nintendo. But as...
(Submitted to The Platformers 3-9-07)
All hobbies have their curiosities, conversation pieces that attract attention and desire for no other reason than being hard-to-find, collected for the sake of being collectible and worth nothing more that fleeting, undefined thing we call "bragging rights". There exists another level though, when something becomes both scare and of exceptional quality, wrapped in a mystique that transcends the item itself. For a car nut this may be a classic Porsche 911; Whiskey aficionados a bottle of Glenmorangie Tain L'Hermitage. As an off-and-on action figure collector, I've known well the irrational lust a Transformers Generation 1 Jetfire can produce. For gamers, this revered idol is often Radiant Silvergun.
Although not exactly rare in it's home country of Japan, here in America, with it's heady blend of import exclusivity and Sega Saturn nostalgia...
(Submitted for approval to The Platformers on February 21st, 2007)
And on the 95th day, Sony declared victory.
Perhaps not in the manner they had wished- after all, subsiding $1200 high-definition movie players to wealthy A/V junkies doesn't exactly rake in the same cash as dominating the console gaming industry for two generations in a row, but at least it provides attention in the trade journals and serves a talking point for fans, something Sony's had a hard time providing. But asserting arbitrary victory in a largely unwanted media format is easy. However, that's not the real fight, it's not the battle Sony fans or shareholders care about. Instead, they want to know- is Sony still capable of winning this console generation?
The PS3 has, three months into it's cycle, sold 1.7 million units worldwide, with systems readily available on shelves. Within the first ninety of the PS2's life, it had sold over 3.2 million consoles in Japan alone. Not that the PS3 is without company. It's handheld sister, the PlayStation Portable, has sold 20 million units compared to the Nintendo DS's 37 million, and is in steady supply. Indeed, one may find enough PS3 and PSP boxes at their local Best Buy to build a tiny...
(Originally submitted to The Platformers)
There are a great many acts of mental deception console fanboys subject themselves to, and few fascinate me more than that of "graphics vs gameplay."
Simply put, proponents believe superior graphics inhibit gameplay; that through some arcane process developers without access to transparency filters or Mode Seven or 1080p resolution add Extra Gameplay Magic, making their games superior to games appearing on the most powerful system. They deride graphics as nothing more than "eye candy". You'd almost wonder why these people don't toss out their current hardware and live a life of perfect zen gameplay mastery with a Vectrix. Of course, spending much of my gaming life as a Sega fanboy, I would be remiss if I didn't admit to using the argument myself, Blast Processing be damned. And of course, there is a bit of merit to these concerns, what with Castlevania's dalliances in the 3d realm being forgotten, and poor Sonic's not been the same since he moved to the Dreamcast.
But there is no need for graphics to get in the way of good gameplay. Indeed I think it can be shown that advancements in technology only serve to enhance gameplay and open up new gameplay genres. A walk through the past 25 years of graphical progress between hardware cycles illustrates this.
Consider the move from...
Gradius V is a modern-day relic, a throwback to the salad days of the NES, and an obvious work of love from Treasure. The problem is, when you start with a game entrenched firmly in the mid 80's Japanese arcade ethos and try to build a modern representation of it's genre, you wind up with something that feels very much like a mid 80's arcade game wrapped up in a neon blue polygon bow. There's a lot of things in Gradius V that a neophyte shump fan is simply ill-adjusted to deal with or even enjoy.
The central conceit of Gradius V--and it's central flaw-- is it's power up system, and indeed this powerup system defines Gradius as a whole. This system relies on collecting pods which are used to buy a sequence of power-ups shown as a segmented bar across the bottom edge of your screen. The problem with this system (and indeed with most shumps featuring a power-up system and why they've been phased out as of late) is that the game is balanced against a fully-powered Vic Viper. It has to be, otherwise a boss encounter-- and there are many boss encounters-- will result in all of a moment's challenge if you come ready to bear with a full compliment of laser drones and missile pods. So once you get hit your survival strategy revolves around a war of attrition between the boss's weak point and the number of credits you have left. In fact, once hit, the game changes from one of pattern memorization to one of a ...
There is nothing that has me more excited about the next hardware generation than the possibilities of downloading full, licensed games over the internet. Not only will digital distribution allow small-time publishers to circumvent the entire soul-crushing publishing system currently in place, it will one day ensure I'll never have to listen to another Gamestop register biscuit beg me to trade in all my material wealth in exchange for a pre-order of Madden '08. All three systems have a digital download service in place, and with PC services such as Steam and Gametap, soon we'll never have any real need to waddle into the daylight again.
My current console of choice for next-gen content is the Xbox 360, and it's online distribution system is the most cohesive and well-conceptualized of them all, Xbox Live Arcade. Live Arcade updates Wednesday, and we're allowed exactly one (1) game per week to show itself.
Now, one (1) game per week doesn't sound especially exciting, but there's some quality stuff coming down the pipe, from freshly-minted indy developers proving themselves to the world to established big guns like EA to classic arcade and console games of yore. Just a sample of what we've been told to look forward to:
Those of you keeping up with this sort of thing already know about Harmonix selling off the rights to the Guitar Hero franchise to Neversoft, and the possible implications. Those of you who don't know about this already fall into two camps-- one, those who don't know what Guitar Hero is, and those of you who are fans of Guitar Hero are wondering who Neversoft if they need to go ahead and crack open a bottle of Royal Crown. For the former, I implore you to go find someone (preferably someone who knows what they are doing) playing Guitar Hero, It's one of those games you really need to see played to tell if younullre a fan of it or not. Personally, I'm a big fan of it even though I'm utterly incompetent at playing it. For the latter-- Neversoft are the guys who make Tony Hawk games. Well, now Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero.
If I knew anything about music, I'd feel compelled to make some pithy comparison about The Sex Pistols selling their back catalog to Green Day. Since I know nothing about music, instead I'll make a lame comparison about The Sex Pistols selling their back catalog to Green Day.
Now I'm not going to say this is going to lead to something terrible, after all it's not fair to judge Neversoft's vision of Guitar Hero before they've even typed up any code, but reading the