Next game suggestions

Now that I've finished God of War, I'm keen to get knee-deep in another game. Here's my short list of candidates, if you have an opinion:

• Resident Evil 4 (PS2)
• Beyond Good & Evil (PS2)
• Killer7 (PS2)
• P.N. 03 (GameCube)
  
• Final Fantasy III DS (NDS)
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (NDS)
• Monster Hunter Freedom (PSP)

I'm not buying anything new for a while, so clearing out this backlog would be productive.

--jvm at 20:36

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Where is GNU/Viva Pinata when you need it?

On Sunday while out shopping with the family, my four-year-old son and I stopped in a nearby GameStop. I skimmed through the used PlayStation 2 and PSP games and he found his way to the Xbox 360 kiosk which was running a demo of Viva Pinata. He stayed glued to that for about five minutes, and as I was finishing up a peek at the GameCube games he came over to ask me to start "the pinata demo" again for him. We fired it up, to his visible elation, but he was soon bored with the series of chatty cinemas that run before you can play.

I looked at the time and realized we would need to leave soon, so after a few more minutes I prompted him that we needed to head next door and find his mother and brother. He dropped the controller and off we went.

As I was leaving, I realized I had glimpsed a bit of my future.

I don't provide rigid rules about which books he can get when we go to a bookstore, which movie we can watch together on Friday nights, or which friends he plays with at school. I do make suggestions, and the books and movies are for kids his age, but within reason he has mostly been free to pursue his interests.

So what happens in the next five years when he asks for a game console of his own? And what if he asks for an Xbox 360, hardware that I don't intend to own for myself until it has ceased production, at the earliest? Or Microsoft's next system? Or some future Microsoft handheld system?

In short, what if he wants to play Viva Pinata, or some other game that can only be had on a system that I refuse to buy for myself?

Labels: microsoft, parenting, xbox, xbox360

--jvm at 09:05

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Response to Next-Gen editorial on PS3 BC

Colin Campbell gives a spirited defense of Sony's decision to drop the hardware in the PlayStation 3 that provided near complete backward compatibility with PSOne and PlayStation 2 software. I'm a fan of such compatibility, and I'm of course distressed that we may see compatibility diminish from what we've come to expect from the original. Campbell's editorial has a link soliciting responses and here's how I replied.

Two key points are glossed over in your piece.

1. True, Nintendo is not providing backward compatibility to all its previous consoles. However, this misses the important point that Nintendo is providing GameCube compatibility in the Wii. While it does not necessarily imply that Nintendo sees great value in backward compatibility, if it felt that it weren't worth the effort it would not have spent the time and money to make it polished enough for consumers to use in the finished hardware.
   
   
2. Sony knows that its most important PlayStation 3 software will not arrive until later in 2007. In fact, the most important software for Sony's console business in the next six months will probably be on the PlayStation 2: Guitar Hero II and God of War 2, among others.
   
   Consequently, it would be foolish to limit PlayStation 2 backward compatibility on the PlayStation 3. Doing so would provide one more hurdle to the consumer considering a PlayStation 3.
   
   While I can grant that PSOne compatibility is not critical, I cannot discount the importance of PlayStation 2 software as the PlayStation 3 gets up to speed.
   

In defense of your position, I would add:

1. A frugal shopper can get full PlayStation 2 and PSOne compatibility for under $100. It's called a PlayStation 2, and they're on store shelves now. It's a minor price to pay for hardware that plays some of the best games from the past 12 years.
   
   
2. Moreover a point I thought you might have made in your defense of Sony is that no one knows the extent of the compatibility offered yet. Perhaps they're playing it safe and it'll be higher than the pessimists expect. And, at the very least, there is the potential for it to significantly improve over time.

Labels: business, nextgen, ps2, ps3, sony

--jvm at 11:43

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Review: God of War (PS2)

God of War for the PlayStation 2 does almost everything right. It tells the epic and memorable tale of Kratos, a Spartan, and his quest to kill Ares, the Greek god of war. The entertaining combat system is receptive to frantic button-mashing but rewards skilled, rhythmic tapping. It's about as graphically seamless as any game I've seen anywhere.

I enjoyed it immensely and recommend it for those who are willing to endure the unblinkingly violent images and occasional partial nudity.

That said, I still have some complaints. There is a section late in the game which overwhelmed me with a bunch of cheap tricks: conveyor belts, flame jets, archers, and harpies by the dozen. Even after I figured out the best way to optimize my limited resources in that battle, I had to endure several attempts before I got lucky and survived to the end. Even the last three battles, the climax of the game, were easy by comparison.

For a man broken up missing his wife and child, Kratos sure didn't mind hopping in the sack with a couple of pneumatic floozies at the beginning of the game. That bit strikes me as an exploitative stunt which mars an otherwise well-written story. It's particularly noticeable because of the two teenage fantasies the game glorifies, violence and sex, only the bloodshed persists beyond the first third of the game.

Labels: ps2, reviews

--jvm at 20:44

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Liquid Snake sings Christmas songs

So I just finished God of War which starred Paul Eiding as the voice talent for Zeus and the gravedigger. As the voice of Colonel Roy Campbell from the Metal Gear Solid games or the narrator for Diablo, he's instantly recognizable. All this made me think of my favorite voice actor, Cam Clarke. In addition to voicing Liquid Snake in the MGS games and various characters in dozens of other games, Cam Clarke also voices Mac in Clifford, The Big Red Dog (which I watch with my older son) and Die Fledermaus in The Tick (the animated series from years ago).

Anyway, turns out Clarke has his own website, which has some great clips of his work on this page, including samples from his two singing albums. On one album he sings pop music, like Son of a Preacher Man, and on the other he sings Christmas songs. There is something utterly surreal about Liquid Snake singing Little Road to Bethlehem.

--jvm at 01:21

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I don't think that means what you think it means

On the topic of Chulip (PS2) again, it appears that GameSpot reviewed it last night. Here's their introduction:

There's something to be said for Chulip's abject weirdness and purposefully awkward structure, but they don't translate into a rewarding game experience.

The problem is that abject always has a negative connotation. Abject poverty and utter poverty mean similar things, but abject joy is an oxymoron while utter joy makes sense. I can see the author meaning utter in the above, but not abject.

One might translate GameSpot's summary as:

There is something to be said for Chulip's negative qualities, but they don't translate into a rewarding game experience.

Then again, maybe they meant it to be so witty?

Labels: media, ps2

--jvm at 01:02

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Why, yes, the GameStop/EB Games merger was a bad idea...

Chulip is a quirky PlayStation 2 title I've been watching and considering buying. It can currently only be bought in the United States through EB Games/GameStop. That is both surprising and dismaying.

Maybe the only way it could have been published was to secure a distribution deal with a huge retailer ahead of time, and EB Games/GameStop fits that description. However, it is precisely this kind of exclusivity crap that I fear will get out of control and lead to an even more consumer-hostile environment.

And Chulip isn't the only game. Settlers DS is getting the same treatment.

Labels: business, ds, game stores, ps2

--jvm at 22:11

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Exclusives for the new generation

Platform exclusive features will be the replacement for platform exclusive games. The latest case is Spider-Man 3 for the PlayStation 3 which will have a special New Goblin mini-game.

We saw the beginnings of this trend last generation: Splinter Cell (exclusives map on PS2, GBA connection on GameCube), Soul Calibur II (platform-exclusive characters), and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (original Prince of Persia emulated on the PlayStation 2, the sequel Prince of Persia 2 on the Xbox). It will only get worse this generation.

It used to be that you could buy all three platforms and the exclusive games for each. Now, to get access to everything you not only need all three platforms but also all three versions of a particular game. Lovely.

And, yes, I did buy both versions of Pinball Hall of Fame, one for my PlayStation 2 and one for my PSP.

Labels: business, gamecube, ps2, ps3, wii, xbox, xbox360

--jvm at 21:28

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The recent past is already lost (or: Tomb Raider Anniversary news)

Today there is new information on Tomb Raider: Anniversary, in the form of an official site and a trailer. When Zakk tossed me the link to Kotaku's post about it, was I a bit taken aback by what Michael Fahey, the post's author, had written. If it's meant to be irony, then it's a bit too straight-faced for me.

While the title is supposed to be inspired by the original Tomb Raider game, I can't help but think Prince of Persia every time I watch this. Even the music fits. Not that that's neccisarily a bad thing, mind you. They could do a whole lot worse than creating a female Prince of Persia clone.

I had assumed it was fairly well understood that the original Tomb Raider had copied shamlessly from the original (2D) Prince of Persia, although the move to 3D was itself a significant innovation. Then when Prince of Persia: Sands of Time successfully moved that series into 3D (after the abhorrent first attempt, here reviewed with unintentional humor by IGN), it copied many ideas from Tomb Raider, but also added the time rewinding and fluid controls that Tomb Raider had lacked. Already Tomb Raider: Legend has been stealing ideas from Sands of Time, but that's precisely what it should do.

But now people think that Tomb Raider Anniversary is a clone of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time? I mean, it is in a way, but that statement seems to miss the whole history behind the two games.

Labels: media, tomb raider

--jvm at 13:29

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The first PS3 hardware revision shipping next month?

Reports this morning like this one at Next-Gen.biz and this one at Reuters indicate that something has happened to the PlayStation 3 hardware. The result is reduced PlayStation 2 compatibility. If the Reuters report is to be believed then, it looks like an internal change (my emphasis):

Software will take over some of the functionality that was originally taken care of by dedicated chips, which means far fewer PlayStation 2 (PS2) games can be played on a European PS3 compared with the Japanese and American PS3 models which play 98 percent of old games.

So the first hardware revision of the PlayStation 3 may be to remove the PS2 chips that were inside to provide compatibility? I have no idea how much that costs, but perhaps it will save some dough. Then later this year there will be the move to a 65nm chip fabrication process for the Cell which will, supposedly, cut costs for Sony even more.

If the hardware has changed, I wonder when we'll see those systems on American shelves. As I've said before, initial console hardware often has its own bugs, but also has features that get cut from later revisions. Not that is was a particularly bold prediction, but I did say at the time:

If/when they move to a software emulator I think it highly unlikely that they'll achieve the same compatibility they can with hardware. Then again, the mighty Cell is magick, so anything's possible.

Looks like that's coming true.

Even these cost-cutting measures may not mean a cut in price for the PlayStation 3. As indicated in this Next-Gen.biz report, Sony may look at adding cheap bits to the package to make the current prices more acceptable. That didn't work for the PSP and it won't work for the PlayStation 3 either.

I think Sony is missing the point. The $500 and $600 prices are simply too high for most people, regardless of what kind of bonus junk you pack in the box. There's a mental barrier around $300 beyond which most people will simply stop paying attention. Sony needs a basic system at $400 to be on the periphery of consumer consciousness.

Labels: business, nextgen, ps2, ps3, sony

--jvm at 08:39

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Ritual irony: Do Not Play With Valve

Years ago I wrote a review of SiN for LinuxGames. (I haven't read it in years, so no snickering if it's awful.) One of my favorite screenshots was this one in which Ritual, developer of SiN, sniped at Valve, developer of Half-life:
The story is that both SiN and Half-life were releasing almost simultaneously at the end of 1998. To beat Half-life to market Activision shipped an unfinished, buggy version of SiN. This naturally explains the 20Mb patch that I had to download over dialup in January 1999 and it gives context to the sign in the screenshot:


So it is amusing to note the irony that all these many years later the original SiN and an episodic sequel utilizing Valve's Source engine were both released on Valve's online delivery system, Steam. How'd that work out for Ritual? They're now going to make casual games and the SiN episodic game experiment appears to be shelved, if not outright dead.

One wonders if Ritual ought to have taken its own advice.

Labels: steam, valve

--jvm at 15:25

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How not to go to Hell

Remember going to Hell? In DooM that is. I thought it was kind of cool, fun, and unique that first time. It was just like the space marine base only more twisted and difficult.

Then I played Half-life and went to Xen. Sure, it was supposed to be an alien world, but it was really like going to Hell. Like everyone else, I hated the jumping puzzles, the annoying physics, the crazy evil fetus.

In God of War on the PlayStation 2 you also go to Hell, or rather Hades. Regrettably, it is less like DooM and more like Half-life. There are annoying jumping puzzle sections. There are ridiculously frustrating climbing sections. There's even a decent bit of horrible collision detection. Add in a complete inability to change the camera angle to mitigate the problems and I nearly put the game back on the library shelf. For a game that does many things quite well, it's a disappointing finale.

There's more to complain about, but you'll just have to wait.

Labels: design, ps2, sony

--jvm at 22:19

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Gamespot Virtually Reviews Virtual Console game

Gamespot's review of last week's foremost Virtual Console release, Kirby's Adventure, is deficient in a surprising way. In particular, I'm not sure they played the game. The result is that they say something clearly false, something that a reviewer should know after playing the game.

After taking pains to tell us that the game's major fault is its short length, that it can "be beaten in a single evening" (possible, if you do nothing else for several hours) it tells us that the game has a bit of replay value since, by finding all the hidden switches, the player can get a better ending.

This is not true. More recent Kirby games have instituted this as the incentive for finding all the secrets, but the ones directed by Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai (the Smash Bros. guy), which includes Kirby's Adventure, use new game modes as their super-lockables. In Kirby's Adventure, this is the challenging "Extra Game," which is the answer to Gamespot's other problem with Kirby's Adventure, that it is too easy.

But let's stick with the true problem, why Gamespot's review is wrong:

There is no better ending. They did not play the game through.

Maybe someone relied on a faint memory of the game from the NES era, but considering that they say the game is short, there is really no excuse for them not having played through it again. The reviewer should have known there was no better ending to be had.

It also casts doubt on the validity of their score of 7.3, for what is one of the best games on the NES.

Labels: gamespot, media, nintendo, virtual console

--JohnH at 15:45

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The dream, or nightmare, of a videogame standards commission

Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh is has a commentary on Next-Gen.biz today which starts from David Jaffe's recent comment that in ten years there will be a single console and goes from there to propose a videogame standards commission. Here's the critical bit, I think:
Comments:

• Board members nominated by whom? By the initial board? And who will make up the initial board? While such a system could evolve into a workable system, I can easily see it devolving into an insiders group.
• Businesses are not going to give away details about what their future plans are. If such a commission had existed before the Wii and its controller became public, would Nintendo have wanted to talk about their newest advance? Or the Nintendo DS and its touch screen? Sure, they could talk about encouraging new concepts in user input and feedback, but they're still giving away some of what they consider ground they want to stake out before others do.
• That instinct by businesses to protect their advantages is addressed later by saying that the visionaries would need to take the lead and push from within each organization. I don't work in the private sector, but rather in a public institution. If anyone has ideals, it is some of my colleagues (and myself, occasionally). Yet, I have enough experience to see that even those with the power who also have ideals are very rarely able to achieve them. The best we can hope for in much of life is to have striven for ideals and accepted what tiny progress reality affords us.
  
• I'm not convinced that there can be a practical constitution of irrefutable primary standards and ideals for videogames. If someone made a proposal, I'd be happy to consider it, but my gut tells me that it will be either too specific (and rule out things that later turn out to be important) or too vague (and thus difficult to promote in any concrete manner).
  
• I naturally mistrust bureaucracy. Adding a layer here strikes me as ill-suited to the problems it seeks to solve. I suspect it will be fraught with competition from factions on the board and any progress made will be glacial. (See: OpenGL ARB.)
  
• Requiring unanimous consent gives every member a veto on every other one. The United States Congress will move like a cheetah compared to such a board.

I think the OpenGL Architecture Review Board provides an instructive example. Whereas OpenGL was favored by John Carmack in the mid-1990s, we are now in a situation where id Software's primary development is on the Xbox 360 using what I presume is a form of Direct3D, Microsoft's competing interface. By gathering ideas from hardware vendors and then making benevolent dictatorial decisions, it would seem that Microsoft's standard (so to speak) has grown far faster and better than OpenGL could through the OpenGL ARB (which consisted of much the same hardware vendors). Although it may strain the analogy, I think the Linux kernel is another example of how a benevolent dictator, here Linus Torvalds, is key to keeping a system coherent and on course.

Which is to say, I think a commission like the one Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh proposes is unlikely to happen, and if it were to happen it would probably not lead the industry anywhere.

Labels: business, nextgen

--jvm at 11:42

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Time to bring Star Wars: The Arcade Game to the Wii

If I understand correctly, the Wii controller can detect rotational motion. Perhaps that makes it the perfect console for a port of Star Wars: The Arcade Game. Each previous port, along with the disappointing official emulation on the GameCube, suffered from inadequate approximation of the original game's control yoke.I'm guessing the PS3's SIXAXIS controller might be capable of doing something similar, but since Nintendo has traditionally gotten these types of Star Wars games, I figure it's the obvious candidate.

Labels: wii

--jvm at 21:34

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Another view of sales by genre and publisher, plus spreadsheet

This is my last post on this data, but I was a bit dismayed to see that the graphs in Next-Gen.biz's huge article yesterday (previous post) only counted titles in each genre and from each publisher, not taking into account the sales of each. That's sort of like the Senate version of the data. Here is the House of Representatives version where I've taken publishers and genres and totalled the unit sales for each.

First, unit sales by genre. As always, click for the larger version.
Compare to the original Next-Gen.biz graph here.

Notes:

• Sports games pull a bit ahead of licensed (non-sports) games.
• Shooters jump ahead of Action games by a hair.
• RPGs move way up to parity with Action games and Shooters. (This is largely Square-Enix, although also some Pokemon.)
• Finally, the Other column shrinks relative to the others.

Next, we look at unit sales by publisher:
Compare to the original Next-Gen.biz graph here.

Notes:

• EA pulls even further out ahead of everyone else. Much of that is just Madden NFL 07.
• THQ jumps to third place with its licensed game sales.
• Activision jumps to fourth on the strength of Call of Duty 3 and Guitar Hero 2.
• Take Two drops to fifth because they have more titles but none are huge sellers. (No GTA on consoles aside from the Liberty City Stories port from the PSP.)
• Square leaps from the bottom of the pack to the middle thanks to its small number of huge-selling RPGs.
• Microsoft jumps ahead of Sony primarily on sales of Gears of War.

As promised, here is my spreadsheet. If you add anything else to it, like release dates, please drop me a copy and I'll upload it here.

• OpenOffice 2.0 ODS format (showing formulas and charts)
  
• CSV of just the game data

Enjoy.

Labels: business, data, graphs, nextgen

--jvm at 12:58

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Shadow of the Colossus figurine

While I was picking up replacement UMD cases from Play-Asia, I also happened across these Shadow of the Colossus figurines and picked one up. As far as I can tell you just get whatever random one is stuck in the box, since there is no indication on the outside about the contents. I got Colossus #16.

Anyway, I wondered how big it would really be when it arrived. In case anyone else was wondering, I put it up next to a CD case and took some photos so you could see the size in context.

And, as usual, no, I am not offering up an Intelligent Qube ISO.

Labels: playasia

--jvm at 20:40

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Correlation between Sales and Review Scores

There is a wealth of data in the Next-Gen.biz post today. Regrettably, I did not see a spreadsheet of data to play with. I have made one which I will upload later. Using my copy of the data I made a scatter plot of sales versus review scores. I excluded Madden since it is an aberration, an outlier. It would be at 6500 on the horizontal axis and 85% on the vertical one, so you can see how far out it would be. (Click for a larger version.)
The correlation coefficient shows whether there is a correlation between two sets of data. The closer it is to 1.0, the more closely correlated the data are. The closer to 0.0, the less a correlation. The correlation between unit sales and revenue, for example, is 0.97, which shows that higher sales is closely correlated with higher revenue.

According to OpenOffice, the correlation coefficient between unit sales and score is 0.29. I think we can speak of 0.29 as being a bit low. There is a closer correlation between revenue and review score at a 0.38 correlation coefficient.

Interestingly, Madden skews the numbers a great deal. Taking it out of the data, the correlation coefficient between unit sales and data is 0.34 and the correlation coefficient between revenue and review score is 0.46.

Which leads me to think that there is more than just my intuition to tell me that "consumers know quality when they see it" isn't quite the real picture. They may know quality, but that doesn't mean they want to spend their money on it.

Labels: business, data, graphs, nextgen

--jvm at 18:55

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A new generation of fear mongering

From NPR's Morning Edition, we get this nugget from Kelly McBride:

The Wii is to physical fitness what grade inflation is to academic achievement.

The idea, of course, is that kids will not want to get out and play real sports when they can excel at virtual sports. As an example, McBride's son is impressed with his A+B button power serve. Not that this is new -- my dad kicked me out of my room more than once telling me to get outdoors and stop clacking away on my Commodore 64 -- but Wii Sports adds something new to the mix: virtual exercise.

Murder simulators? Those are so 2004. Exercise simulators are the future. Jack Thompson, call your office.

Labels: media, wii

--jvm at 08:30

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15% crap or 38% crap?

I hope to get more time going over the stats later today, but at first glance I was bothered by this statement in Next-Gen.biz's latest entry in the TOP 100 TOP 100 LISTS OF ALL TIME.

It also shows that consumers know quality when they see it. Only three games in the top 20 scored an average of less than 75%.

Ok, so that's 15% are below average. What about the whole list of 100 games? Well, 38 games (i.e. 38%) are below average. That's a big difference and a far bit from convincing me that consumers know quality when they see it.

Labels: business, graphs, nextgen

--jvm at 08:25

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A.W.F.U.L.

Videogame names have two problems: the overuse of colons and the creation of ridiculous acronyms. Here are a few of the worst cases of the latter type:

• B.O.B.
• F.E.A.R.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
• Project H.A.M.M.E.R.
• Rengoku II: The Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: Operation V.I.D.E.O.G.A.M.E.

And of course there was R.O.B. Others?

--jvm at 20:54

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The best selling game systems of all time

In a business whose headlines are dominated by the hardware and software sales of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, it helps to have a little perspective. In this case, the needed context is probably in your pocket right now.

Let's review some numbers. In the last two generations, Sony has sold over 230 million PlayStation-branded game machines. Nintendo has sold nearly 400 million from its home consoles -- NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and GameCube -- to its long-dominant handheld systems -- Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS. While it has only had a console on shelves since 2001, Microsoft has already racked up combined sales of over 30 million of its two Xbox systems.

Yet these are not the game systems most people own. Their game systems don't say Nintendo or Microsoft or Sony. They say Nokia or Motorola or Samsung. (Ok, some of them actually do say Sony: Sony Erricsson. But they're still relatively small.) Even the cheapest phones can play some form of Tetris nowadays and many are far, far more capable.

According to Strategy Analytics, over one billion mobile phones shipped during all of 2006. In all of 2006, the leading vendor, Nokia, shipped almost 350 million phones. Those numbers are just staggering when compared to the sales of dedicated game systems. For example, if we consider all the systems shipped by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo since 1983 and compare to just the mobile phone shipments in 2006 we get the following:
In fact, if we combine the numbers for Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo and stack that up against the mobile phone shipments, it's still not much of a contest.
According to NPD, the dedicated videogame market made an estimated $6.5 billion on software last year alone. With over a billion phones shipped in 2006, is it any surprise that analysts regularly predict that the mobile game market will eventually hit $10 billion a year in the near future?

Labels: business, graphs, microsoft, mobile, nintendo, sony

--jvm at 14:46

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Valve's console trojan horse

I'm very pleased to see official word on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of Half-life 2. The package will include the original Half-life 2, Episodes 1 & 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. The real question now becomes how will networking be handled, and will all platforms be able to play against each other.

I'd like to put two quotes together that I think indicate that we'll see the Steam service on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 relatively soon. First, GameSpot's report from yesterday:

The Orange Box will be released for the PC, 360, and PS3, but EA confirmed to GameSpot that it will be the only Half-Life 2 product offered for the two consoles at retail.

That's my emphasis. Maybe it's just extra verbiage from the GameSpot writer, but I bet that means what it implies: there will be other offerings through network downloads.

But it's more than just downloadable extras, it's the entire Steam platform. I think that's the implication of the above report and the "no comment" in a recent CVG interview (found via Steam Review):

CVG: One question on our mind is whether your forthcoming Half-Life 2 releases on Xbox 360 and PS3 will be tied in with Steam - what's the score here?

Lombardi: Nothing to report today.

Together I think those indicate the real news behind the Half-life 2 packages: they're Valve's trojan horse to get Steam's storefront out on the big consoles.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Valve try it. Like the rest of us, they like money, and actually have the means to make this kind of thing happen.

Labels: business, hl2, ps3, valve, xbox360

--jvm at 10:05

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Team Fortress 2 box art (from 1998)

Thanks to Dustin for pointing me to these images from the original Team Fortress 2 box art voting site. Pretty neat stuff from 1998, almost nine years ago.

I like the second one quite a bit. Reminds me of the theme on LinuxGames a while back.

Labels: tf2

--jvm at 09:35

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Why Manhunt 2 may not appear on PS3 and Xbox 360

Today Rockstar announced that Manhunt 2, sequel to the sadistic original game from 2003, will be published for the PlayStation 2, Sony PSP, and Nintendo Wii. While I am dismayed that another sadistic piece of garbage will be published, the choice of platforms is very interesting. If Rockstar were to simply port the version from the PlayStation 2 to the more powerful Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, they would be skewered for the lazy effort. They may avoid a full version of Manhunt 2 for those newer platforms, one that takes full advantage of the next generation hardware, because the end result would tread a little too close to real not just for the likes of Jack Thompson or even the ESRB but for the general public.

The passing generation of console hardware can do some amazing things. One has merely to look at Halo 2 and God of War 2 to see what the hardware can accomplish in capable hands. Yet those games fall measurably short of photorealistic. Most average people can still tell that the images on the screen aren't real.

For the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, however, the gap has narrowed. Moreover, this is Rockstar, creators of Table Tennis for the Xbox 360, a game lauded for its realism. On these newer platforms, the expectation of photorealism -- or some close approximation -- will be intense. Were Rockstar to make a photorealistic Manhunt, they'd need to show all the gore that had previously been chunky and blurry in the lower polygon, muddy textured PlayStation 2 game.

Manhunt is the kind of game that celebrates the image of a man's vain attempt to stuff his entrails back into his lacerated gut. No doubt there is a segment of the market that not only wants to see such sights, but in fact to cause them to happen. But the segment that stomached low resolution approximations of that scene on a PlayStation 2 is probably a good bit larger than the segment that wants to see a high resolution version, complete with pulsing, steaming, veiny intestines.

And Rockstar aren't alone in avoiding the bleeding edge of graphics. One of the most savvy moves I saw in the market last year was Valve's re-invention of Team Fortress. Imagine applying today's graphics to this original vision of TF2:
You would not come up with the form of TF2 that Valve has settled on:

So Rockstar has chosen to hit the platforms on which it can get away with this kind of game without crossing a virtual boundary. Beyond that boundary lies a whole new reality, the likes of which we have only begun to understand. I don't begrudge Rockstar's decision to avoid applying the full power of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 to the kind of game that would force us to ask some uncomfortable questions. I wish them luck and I'll be watching as always, an interested observer. However, the questions are still there: How real is too real? Which virtual activity will we, as a society, be willing to tolerate?

Labels: ps2, ps3, psp, violence, wii, xbox, xbox360

--jvm at 18:53

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Next-Gen's take on retail policies

Colin Campbell has published a Next-Gen.biz commentary on DVD Empire's departure from online game retail. In addition to writing a whole two pages without using the term price point*, here are a few other bits I thought interesting.

First up:

All large retail accounts and distributors are offered price protection of varying degrees of 'generosity' on products. As publishers 'mark down' a game, refunds are passed down the channel according to a game's strength at retail. Even small retailers should be able to negotiate some protection with their distributors on prices that come down.

[snip]

The best way to avoid this problem is to not stock bad games, which generally drop in price faster than good games, or to manage stock in such a way that it becomes less of an issue.

I'm not comfortable with a retailer -- large or small -- deciding a priori which are the good games and which are not. For example, most people would hate Tecmo's Deception, but I thought it was devilishly charming and inventive. I was willing to look past the chunky graphics and terrible translation to the entertaining mechanics. It sold enough to get a sequel, but if some high level decisions are made to undersell niche games, then we're one step closer to prime time TV homogenization than we were before.

Colin has previously argued for this kind of pricing:

This site has long argued for more fluidity in the market for games, based on their popularity. Clearly, some games are worth a good deal more than others; a fact that becomes clear very soon after a game is released. Games that sell well ought to remain at a higher price for as long as possible, while games that review badly and track poorly via online search mechanics, ought to be released at a lower price. The relative shares of these price fluctuations ought to be borne by different sectors of the market appropriately.

As I understand it, make prices proportional with demand. If millions want Halo 3, then it should command a high price. Applied to, say, the PlayStation 3 this would have permitted Sony to reap the rewards that went to eBay scalpers.

While I'm uncomfortable with the idea, I cannot give a solid reason -- other than my own wallet -- to argue against it. Anyone else have that vague sense of unease?

This seems to miss something:

The 'long tail' has never been so much of an issue with games, which are super hit-driven, and rely heavily on new technology and the latest look.

It's true that the leading edge of the industry is currently driven this way, but the long tail is becoming more important with every Wii virtual console release, every PSOne game on the PlayStation Network, and every classic game retrofitted for Xbox Live Arcade. Retailers will move the used game horizon forward faster as the back catalogs get shifted to download services. And if we move to a completely online distribution system, the tail will grow longer as older media can stock the virtual shelves as long as the publisher wants to provide a means to purchase. Just look at GameTap -- as long as it can make money, it has no reason to remove any titles from its catalog, whether they're niche or not.

The "Finally Finally" section at the end of the column does address this as a future issue. When all three major consoles have these kinds of download services, I think you can consider it a current issue, not a future one.

Which brings me to:

Consumers do not browse games stores as they might some other form of media.

I don't think this is true of services like GameTap. I think it's entirely possible, in fact probable, that most people who use GameTap will buy in for a few games they know and hang around to try games they know a little about or have never seen before. I'm no GameTap fan, but that's precisely the kind of thing I enjoyed about having older games stocking the Rhino shelves.

On the topic of used games:

There is something unpleasant about these creations being sold on again and again without any reward going to the makers but the pros of this practise may well outweigh the cons.

I find nothing unpleasant about used bookstores, garage sales, or thrift stores (aside from the occasional funky aroma). Selling used games is the same idea. As it is, this industry is always pushing gamers to upgrade from, dispose of, or drop older products. It is that attitude that I find unpleasant, not that consumers live up to the expectations set for them.

* On the other hand, the podcast a couple of weeks back did use the term "price point" eighteen times in about 10 minutes. Yes, I counted.

Labels: business, nextgen

--jvm at 12:06

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YES!

Finally, a Castlevania for PSP and on top of it, it's a remake of Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. Sony's not completely asleep at the switch, it would appear. Video here.

A year ago, the PSP scene felt like a wasteland to me. It's not saturated with games I want to play, like the PlayStation 2, but it is very respectable.

Labels: castlevania, psp, sony

--jvm at 21:58

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DMs make the best teachers

--Bob at 01:02

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