The Big Scene

Well, I finally understand how Nick Callaway felt when attending a party over at the late, great Jay Gatsby’s house on Long Island. On Friday morning, I traveled down to the Nintendo World Store to attend the Q&A session that a few of the IGN editors were going to have there, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

I got to the store at around 10:45 a.m., completely exhausted from the anxiousness I had the night before. This would be the first time I’d ever met anyone from the journalism side of the video game industry, and I have to say I was nervous. These people are my celebrities; I’ve read their articles every day for the last 6 years. I know these guys probably think of themselves as regular people, so my enthusiasm may seem a bit unwarranted, but I can’t help it. →  But the future refused to change.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.15.06

All that Nintendo jazz
So the Wii will cost $250 and debut November 17th. Nintendo knows how to deliver as little as possible without breaking a promise. The system will come with Wii Sports (in NA, but not Japan) as a pack in. This makes a lot of sense; consumers will be worried about the new control interface being new and strange, including an easily accessible fun title that makes full use of the controller is a great way to usher in the Wii.

Only they decided to include one controller, not two. This is a very stupid move precisely because it limits the strategy I just outlined. With two controllers and a simple game right out of the box, couples, fathers and daughters, johns and prostitutes, Lavern and Shirley or any other combination of two people could be having a ball with the Wii from the minute they plug it in. →  Do the math.

I demand the following Virtual Console games

Nintendo has announced that 24 publishers will be supporting their Wii Virtual Console. I have taken the initiative of compiling a list of the most of the publishers I recognized (at least one of their names was entirely in Japanese) and then decided on one specific game I hope each makes available. Enjoy.

KonamiCastlevania X: Rondo of Blood: The PC Engine only pinnacle of the series, or so they say, goes for a shitload of money these days.

Atlus — Some old Shin Megami Tensei games would really be appreciated. I’ve wanted to get into the series for a long time but the number of games I’ve missed make me feel a little overwhelmed.

MasayaLangriser…2 through 5 sounds good.

CapcomSweet Home: The sort of prequel to the Resident Evil series that never made it out of Japan. →  Postgaea 2: Cursed Memories

Review – Half-Life 2: Episode One

Right now in the world of console gaming, everyone’s favorite buzz term is “HD era”. In PC gaming, it’s all about “episodic content.” Everyone is talking about the concept of delivering smaller chunks of gaming more quickly and possibly with customized content based on user reactions. Unfortunately, the talk is mostly hot air. For one, very few developers have released anything episodic for us to judge, and those that are out there are either a little too indy (Bone) or not quite up to snuff (Sin). Fortunately, the biggest supporters of the idea, Valve Software, have finally given us Half Life 2: Episode 1, the first of many sequel stories to their smash hit. Maybe now we can finally see what this episodic content stuff is all about.

I can think of at least one issue with episodic content; even when we have something to review, how do we review it? →  Are you ready for some readball?

Where to sell your classic games

Today while looking for a deal to trade in my old DS for a new pink one (it matches my nail polish) I came across the tremendous SellVideoGames.com. The site is run by BRE Software and is an amazing deal for anyone interested in trading in their old classics. And by amazing, I mean they are taking advantage of anyone stupid enough to take them seriously.

Looking through their trade in prices for Saturn games left me speechless. $6 for Bomberman when on eBay you could get five times that price. $7.10 for Dragon Force instead of around $50 on eBay and $8.20 for Guardian Heroes instead of about $60 on eBay. Surprisingly, Suikoden 2 nets you $48.11 from BRE Software. This is a tad shy of the over $100 eBay would yield, but I expected worse. →  Reading. Reading never changes.

Review – Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga

Games often try to do everything. Some have multiple engines to handle their different systems; platformers have driving bits, and RPGs have action minigames. This is despite the fact that the best known designers — Wright, Crawford, Meiers – say it’s better to make a deep game by the simple interaction of a few parts than to try to do everything. The adage is it’s better to do a few things well than a lot of things poorly.

There are, though, some designers who seem not only content with not sticking to only a few things but who go on record declaring such. David Jaffe has said that he wants to make games that are entirely one offs. He means he doesn’t want to go the traditional route of making an engine, creating some environments and some puzzles to solve/enemies to kill. →  Virtua Poster 4: Evolution

Wii Sports: Bundle or Stand-Alone?

This question has plagued my brain for the last few days. Should Nintendo bundle Wii Sports with the actual system, or sell it as a stand-alone product?

You can come up with several reasons for both sides of the argument, but the real crux of the argument is what Nintendo will do. Bundling the game would essentially define the Wii as Wii Sports. If people think they will get it in the bundle, then their immediate experience of the Wii will be formed around the experience they have with Wii Sports.

This is exactly what Nintendo needs to do if they want to justify their route they took with the Wii and its controller. This will show the public that the controller is indeed a worthy way of handling gameplay for video games. →  All the lonely gamers, where do they all belong?

Weekend Spotlight

What will I be playing this weekend, you ask? Why, only the great Indigo Prophecy, of course. I do thank you for asking.

I played the demo on the PC around the time of the game’s release, and simply loved how the game unfolded. I never purchased it, due to constraining circumstances (no money), but a friend at work let me borrow his Xbox edition.

Right from the moment you start the game, you’ll notice that Indigo Prophecy is heavily story-based. Think Metal Gear Solid. Actually, Konami’s spy game actually has more “game” to it than Indigo Prophecy does, if that’s hard to believe. You seriously are just watching this game with a few bits of gameplay thrown in for variety.

But don’t get me wrong, the game is great to play. →  Europa Universalis IV: Articles of War

Next-gen.biz apparently reads videolamer

Is it me, or does Next-gen.biz report on everything that I’ve said, only later?

Exhibit A

This is an interview of Raph Koster of Star Wars Galaxies fame at the Austin Game Conference where he talks about how much better life in PC development would be without publishers. He apparently read my second episode on game testing where I said the same thing. He’s definitely right, though.

Exhibit B

This second article was an interview with Charles Deenen at the same conference where he talks about how powerful sound and music are to a video game and the pursuit of emotional response. I think I read something like that on videolamer somewhere. Oh wait, it’s here! We’ve got some eerie similarities in our arguments, too.

Exhibit C

This last article delves into our inner psyche and asks: “What is the deal with video games?” →  [link only works on even seconds]

Sony will have the last laugh…all the way to the bank…or something

Sony has gotten a lot of crap from gamers recently. Most of it is entirely deserved. They are forcing consumers to buy a Blu Ray player if they want a PS3, charging $600 for their new console and games are anticipated to sell for $60 or $70 a piece. PR statements from Kutaragi and Hirai have made Sony seem more arrogant than ever. More recently, there have been reports of delays in production and now Sony has announced that the PS3 will launch next year in Europe and the launches in North America and Japan will be limited. To top it all off, the new Sony slogan for European territories sucks total ass – Now this is living.

All of these factors combined with how promising the 360 and the Wii are looking have led many to attack Sony, some going so far as to “break up” with them (funniest article in the world – he acts like Sony is a girl, not a company, get it?). →  Reading. Reading never changes.

Life as a Game Tester: Episode 2

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the crazy, but always interesting world of video game development. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks for me, as we’ve delivered a few of our builds to Nintendo to be approved for manufacturing.

If you are developing anything for Nintendo, be it console or handheld, you need to submit your game to them when you believe it is completely finished (more on this later). They will then go through the game and see if they can find any problems with it. They have their own standards of what should and shouldn’t be in a game, and they even check stuff like how you reference the buttons on the controller.

If the A button onscreen didn’t look just like the A button on my controller, I’d be COMPLETELY lost.

 →  Read or die.

PS3 delay

Okay, so by now I’m sure we’ve all heard the news about the delay of the PS3 in Europe until 2007. If not, now you know. Of course this has led to the usual commentary, as well as editors pulling out the best of cliches. I want to talk about something else in this space, namely how much longer Europe will keep Sony on its golden thrown. There’s no question that the company has absolutely dominated the European market, thanks to some slick marketing and a curious sense of loyalty (or something).

But how long can this last? With the PSP, the console was delayed for quite some time (compared to the Japanese and U.S. launches), sold for a good chunk of change (over $300 in most regions), and still managed to do incredibly well. →  Welcome to read zone!

Bad Design 4

Today I’ll be complaining about the excellent KoToR, the ancient Heroes III and the crappy Samurai Western. As usual, I lied last time when I said this entry would be looking at an issue in Final Fantasy X. Maybe next time.

Hit A. HIT A!

Knights of the Old Republic: Bad Immersion — The characters in KoToR (for the Xbox) make reference to your controller. This makes no sense whatsoever and derails any believability. It is the equivalent to an actor in a movie showing the script to the camera and asking the audience to take a look at line 36. Some comedies do this and even pull it off (Mel Brooks writes excellent jokes about the characters being aware that they’re not real) but in serious drama it should probably be avoided. →  All the lonely gamers, where do they all come from?

Review – Sword of the Stars

I’m still not writing to say that MOO2 has been unseated from it’s throne as best 4X space game ever, but Sword of the Stars may be the closest thing to bastard upstart rival capable of causing a genre wide (or at least, Golden Jew wide) civil war. The full game builds upon the demo, showing that the guys at Kerebros know what they’re doing and have created an extremely entertaining, robust game with a great deal of replayability.

This review will be written assuming you read my demo review. If you haven’t, you should go read it. Let me touch upon some high level items first. The one personal pet peeve I have about SOTS is they decided to go the route of “you should discover the intricacies of the game by playing it.” →  Arc the Post: Twilight of the Spirits

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.1.06

The better graphics only make it abundantly clear that football players have dead eyes.

Double Fine finds a new publisher to bring their flops to market
Tim at Double Fine is working on another game. Rumors suggest it may be Psychonauts 2: Straight to Bargain Bins. The good news for us perpetual whiners is that if it’s as creative and fun as the first game and does as poorly, there will be plenty of hell to raise.

EA predicts you’ll buy 18 copies of the new Madden
Good news, tons of people still buy new Maddens despite the fact that they are basically the same game. The proportion of internet whining I mentioned is directly proportional to how many times Maddens sales quadruple the new Double Fine game. My estimate is 32. →  Ask not what this post can do for you - ask what you can do for this post.

Circuit City’s newest scam

Circuit City is known for being a shitty store with shitty customer support and shitty business practices. I have had problems there myself, so from experience I can agree on all counts about the store’s shittiness. Their newest shitty deal is that for only $28.99, they will make your Xbox 360 backwards compatible.

Wow, what a steal! Those who think the role of the market is to screw ignorant people out of money any way possible have been defending Circuit City on the interwebs. How they find time to argue between scamming the elderly and emailing people about millions of dollars in African bank accounts is anyone’s guess.

At first inspection, the “deal” almost sounds legitimate for people who can’t connect to Xbox Live to download the backwards compatability updates for free. →  [do not click]

What counts as cheating?

A few days ago, the Washington Post ran a short article on cheating in video games. Because people tend to prefer things to be simplified rather than made more complex, the piece doesn’t attempt to define cheating. But because people also tend to prefer exciting hyperbole, the article proclaims, “Here’s the ugly, sometimes dirty, often-overlooked truth in games: Everyone cheats.”

The guy the Post interviews says things like, “I don’t play games to necessarily play the game, I play it for the story line. I play it for the mechanics. I play it for the graphics.” Profound. I don’t listen to music to listen to the music, I listen to hear the melody, the harmony, the rhythm, and the timbre. The article also reports that games of yore are easier to beat than modern games. →  Article Hominid

Howard Stringer and the Sony Machine

So Wired.com has an article discussing Sony and how much they are betting on the Playstation 3 and it really got me thinking. The press, as well as gamers themselves, love to fling insults at Kaz Hirai, Phil Harrison, and Ken Kutaragi (many well deserved). However, there’s one name that is rarely dropped, though this man is arguably even more detrimental to Sony. I’m talking about Howard Stringer.

If you don’t know, Stringer is the current head honcho over at Sony. He also happens to come from the content side of the company. This is dangerous. Sony made their name on great hardware made by talented, motivated engineers. That same spirit is what led Kutaragi to make the Playstation in the first place. With Stringer at the helm, we’ve got a PS3 that insists on Blu Ray and insists on being an even bigger all-in-one media machine. →  Read it your way.

Games that shed a tear

The issue of whether or not a video game can make us cry has been tackled several times in the past, but the issue has still not been given its due. Can video games truly impact a player with a fury of emotion, causing them to cry? Depending on the game, I say yes.

Many people say that games are wholly incapable of causing emotion in people, as seen in Margaret Robertson’s speech at this year’s Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival. She cites games that made her feel a lot of emotion, but states that video games as a whole are not emotional. They’re just ones and zeroes. The players are the source of the emotion, and that you have to tap into their emotion to get a response. She seems to paint a picture that designers are not adept at doing this just yet. →  Please sir, can I have some more?

Bugs!!!

However horrendous they may be, bugs and glitches are generally accepted in PC games. This is both because computers vary so drastically that consumers understand making everything work properly with all hardware configurations would be a Herculean task, and also because we have learned to bend over and take it. “Here’s my $50, can I have a game that won’t work for a month until you patch it? Thanks.” So I may still be slightly bitter about bugs in PC games, but nothing prepared me for game breaking bugs in current console games.

I read that Champions of Norrath was rushed and that it was slightly buggy but I didn’t foresee game ending problems. When my roommate and I somehow managed to allow a solid wall to come between us (by my teleportation through rock), the game seemed lost. →  You had me at read more.