GTA4 lockups: what did reviewers play?

I let my 60Gb PS3 install GTA4 tonight while I fixed dinner. When I checked on it later, it had run through the intro and locked up after giving control over to the player. (I wasn't there, so I didn't see it happen.) Apparently lockups are happening with some regularity to a lot of players and not just on PS3.

The whole situation reminds me of how Champions of Norrath on the PS2 locked up for a fair number of consumers, but no reviewers mentioned it. Seemed odd to me at the time and I did some asking around to find out why.

Turns out reviewers didn't review the same kind of disc sold in stores. One reviewer told me he reviewed Champs o' Norrath on two single-layer DVDs as opposed to the dual-layer DVDs sold to us commoners.

Makes me wonder if the same thing happened here. The reviews are pretty much all pegging the 10 on the review-o-meter, but I haven't heard about the reviews talking about lockups like folks are seeing on normal systems. If I had the time, I'd start asking around -- someone should.

Meanwhile, I hard reset my PS3 and played about 15 minutes up to the first save point. So far so good. Now if I only had time to play more, but real life has me elsewhere. Ah well.

Labels: bugs, gta, media, ps2, ps3

--jvm at 21:21

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A Macworld Expo report from Ars Technica claims:

It turns out 2008 will likely be the best year ever for gaming and Apple. Who knew?

I'm having a hard time thinking there's ever going to be a better year than when Tomb Raider 2 was ported, Madden came to the Mac, and, most impressively, Quake 3 Test was Mac-first. I recall some mainstream mag with a cover of a blue & white (iirc) tower asking if that'd be everyone's next gaming box.

Hopefully the move to Intel does mean good things, long term, for Mac-specific gaming. Boot Camp is still a significant barrier to entry for most Mac users. Look, folk, we're mainly talking about one-button mouse, iApp lovers, even if we include Mighty Mouse's hidden right button, MacBook Air's gestures, and FileMaker Pro. I'm happy to see more positive Mac gaming press, but until DirectX is Mac-native, I'll continue not holding my breath.

Which makes me wonder... Why doesn't Microsoft buy out Transgaming and put them down? I can't recall Matt's stance on Transgaming; it seems like something seedy was going on with what they'd "borrowed" from WINE without giving back what common courtesy, if not the letter of the license, says they should. If Transgaming has done enough in-house work to make Cider, wouldn't buying them effectively kill the gaming resurgence on Mac? And we're back to Blizzard and Ambrosia...

(Technically, Mr. Jade said it's "the best year ever for gaming and Apple", which hardly precludes Apple and gaming having great years having nothing to do with one another. What with a recession coming, I'm not sure that's true on at least one count, but it's always good to have a quality fall-back position. And hyperbole sells! Always! It's the best sales tactic EVER!)

Labels: mac, media, ports

--ruffin at 09:26

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Avatars go mainstream

In my copy of The New Yorker dated 7 January 2007, I ran across this cartoon. Slowly but surely videogames are embedding themselves amongst the other media.

Labels: cartoons, media

--jvm at 21:23

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What will the normals think?

How do normal people even begin to understand videogame titles? I just saw that there is going to be a new Rainbow Six game from Ubisoft and the title is this:

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2

I'm sure there are worse names, but this one struck me this morning as ridiculous. The only thing recognizable to an average person there is Tom Clancy. Most will have no idea what Rainbow Six means. (My recollection of the original PC game was that Rainbow referred to the nationalities of the team members.) The connection to Las Vegas isn't much of a help. And it's a sequel. Yuck.

Anyway, all this makes me wonder what soccer moms think when a kid says they want a game whose title seems so random.

Then again, over 20 years ago Mom did buy me Zork II and Zork III without really asking many questions.

Labels: business, marketing, media

--jvm at 12:51

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Croal nails it

You have to read N'Gai Croal's take on the enthusiast press and the CNet/GameSpot/Eidos/Gerstmann episode. For background and ongoing coverage, Kyle is tearing it up at Joystiq. Here's Tuesday's update as a starting point.

Added: Comparison of the original and edited text review of Kane & Lynch.

Labels: gamespot, media

--jvm at 09:14

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We need videogame history yesterday

I'm too tired to go through it in detail right now, but the headline on this piece convinces me that most people writing about videogame companies haven't spent enough time reading their history.

Labels: business, history, media

--jvm at 21:28

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Even small gifts buy influence, says JAMA

This article in the Journal of the American Medical Association about relationships between academics and industry in medicine has some points that I think carry over to the videogame media and industry. (Update: Also read Kyle Orland's Media Coverage post from yesterday about gifts.) It's not a perfect, analogy, but consider this from the conclusions, with my emphasis:

These findings illustrate the common misconceptions that small gifts are less influential than larger gifts and that unrestricted gifts are less influential than restricted gifts. However, research in human behavior has shown that even small gifts and ones without restrictions can influence actions without being tied to explicit demands. The belief that the benefits of unrestricted and/or small gifts tend to outweigh the detriments may unintentionally make medical school leaders less vigilant about ensuring independent unbiased curricula and research. For instance, one of the most frequent forms of IAIRs [Institutional academic-industry relationships] involved clinical departments receiving discretionary funds to purchase food and beverages. Increasingly, medical educators have recognized that even these small gifts come at the expense of real or perceived independence from industry influence. The finding that more than half of department chairs with relationships between their department as an administrative entity and industry felt that these relationships had no effect on their departmental finances, their ability to recruit or retain faculty, or to secure resources from their institution is puzzling. If the majority of IAIRs have no effect on these important functions of departments, then why do they exist? It is possible that these IAIRs have effects that we did not measure or that chairs may be unwilling to admit that industry funding exerts any effect that could be construed as influence.

Again, let me stress: I know it's not a perfect analogy. Still, given what this says I think that the relationships that game companies develop with the videogame media should be examined and viewed with a skeptical eye.

Certainly journalists receive small gifts, and also larger gifts like the boxes of Halo 3 materials shown in recent videos. Are journalists somehow free of influence? How does that work?

In the Media Coverage column, Kyle says (again, my emphasis):

There's no hard and fast rule for the incidental freebies that get given out at trade shows and packaged along with review copies, but a $10 to $20 value limit is probably a good rule of thumb. So the Fallout bobble head is OK but the HDTV is not. The Assassin's Creed letter opener is OK but the World Series tickets probably are not.

Maybe time to reconsider?

Labels: media

--jvm at 11:43

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New media for the new gamers

When people discuss the effect that the Wii is having on the market, they say things like "bringing non-gamers to games" and "reaching the casual gamer" and "growing the market". Let's assume that at least some of that is happening.

What media outlets will cater to those new people? Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud, but I have a hard time believing it will be sites that think it's appropriate to use the words "sloppy seconds" in a headline.

Will the older set of nontraditional gamers really want that kind of sophomoric humor when all they want is news about new Wii games? How about all the younger kids who might be attracted to the Wii because it's easier to control than a standard gamepad? (Yeah, they shouldn't be on the internets unattended anyway...)

It's not uncommon to read about developers having to rethink how they develop games because of the Wii and the audience it attracts. Maybe that new audience will also bring some changes in the media that serve us.

Labels: media

--jvm at 08:44

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Media Summit A-Go-Go

The big sites have mentioned they've been under another of those news embargos for the duration of Nintendo's big E3 replacement show. (I've registered my disdain for the news embargo system before.)

So, what was the big news that was so R0XX0RZ MEGAT0N that Nintendo would forcibly gag a legion of game press until the moment of midnight to release it?

THAT THERE WAS NO NEWS.

In the words of Joel Robinson, "Oh god! The joke's on us!"

Labels: e3, fanboys, hype, kotaku, media, nintendo

--JohnH at 15:33

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Try not to be so obvious, Mr. Previewer

A new God of War: Chains of Olympus (PSP) preview says:

As has become standard for the God of War series, this means players will find all kinds of ties between the story and previous God of War tales, from subtle references to out and out reveals.

I can believe there were lots of connections between God of War and God of War II. It's only natural. Does does that establish a standard for storytelling in the series?

No.

End fanboy writing now.

Labels: fanboys, media, psp, sony

--jvm at 21:57

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The hyped get hypeder: Invitation policy for the New E3

Joystiq said a few weeks ago that lots of journalists are being snubbed concerning getting invited for the forthcoming E3 2.0. A recent Kotaku post confirms that the game companies are fully in charge this time out concerning who gets invited and who does not.

Under the old system, one generally applied to attend, then supplied press credentials, and if they checked out: wham, you're in. Those credentials could be as simple as being loosely affiliated with a website. With the help of the (great) guys at N-Sider, for whom I've done all of one article, I was able to obtain entry credentials two years running. (I wasn't able to attend either time, but I still have my pass for last year. I would scan it and put it on the web, but the picture is from my driver's license. Ugh.)

It is understood that recent years have seen E3 become quite a rancorous display, an annual geek festival akin to DragonCon but sprayed with a light sheen of professionalism--very light, judging from all the booth babe photo collections that popped up every year. And it didn't help when they started holding public access days.

But the new system is just as bad in the opposite direction. According to Joystiq:

The ESA told Hill, "It is entirely up to participating companies to decide whom to invite to the event. Thus, if anyone calls ESA to ask for 'tickets' to the event, that's what they will be told."

Hill did receive an invitation after publicly saying aloud how nice it'd be to get one. (Further reading indicates that reason may also have something to do with E3 receiving more of a North American focus and Hill being in Australia, but the above quote seems to counter that.)

The result, to my eyes, is another intensifier of the tremendous influence that big game companies already wield over game journalists. Under the new scheme it's possible that, if you displease the Great Ones, you could mysteriously fail to receive your invite next time.

The ultimate result? Less insightful commentary out of the big-site attendees, meaning more of its reverse: more blather, more mindless teenager chasing, more pseudo-hipster posing, and more hype, if that's possible.

The purpose of this, really? It is an attempt by Big Console's PR departments to more accurately micro-manage the essential First Impression, that point where the general public outside the NDA firewall first finds out about a new product. Recently, Sony was all about cutting off the flow of precious, life-giving hype to Kotaku when they broke early about Playstation Home, and that was only a couple of days early! Why would they throw such a fit over 48 hours?

It's because the big companies recognize that, what with the fickle and faddish nature of game press hype, given that its main consumers are notoriously fickle and faddish teenage boys, it can fall to a single malicious word to banish a promising game or feature to Teh Suckland. (Exhibit A: "Celda.") These are people who dismiss with ease, and are rarely willing to rethink their first impressions. By controlling the message (telling the world through specially-chosen people exposed to a big unveiling show), they attempt to make the hype-happy gaming world do their bidding, instead of trading snarky little jokes about Giant Enemy Crabs.

Does my premise sound unlikely to you? Well, think of it this way. Sit for a moment and imagine if someone had broken news of Nintendo's controller early, and instead of receiving a wave of mostly uniform appreciation for the device, using phrases like "It really does look like Nintendo is reach out to non-traditional gamers," they said more things like "It remains to be seen if Wii will become anything more than Gamecube 2.0"? Then all those cheering echo posts from second-tier sites, instead of being enthusiastic celebrations of Nintendo's bold direction, become, instead, responses to grave concerns. Features about Nintendo's bold new direction will instead chart the company's downward spiral, and probably include a good number of Wii jokes along the way.

What is that I hear? Do you think I paint an overly grim picture of the enthusiast press? Well cheer up Bunky. At least, in the end, all that's at stake here are silly little video games. If you want to get a look at this debate framing, echo chamber process on a much larger and sadder scale, well, you really don't have to look very hard to find it.

Labels: e3, echochamber, fanboys, firstimpressions, hype, joystiq, media

--JohnH at 02:30

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Please tell me the childish crap will end someday

JohnH pointed me to the video earlier, but I only now saw the abstract about Jeff Minter's talk via Simon at GameSetWatch. I haven't watched the video, but the abstract has hit one of my buttons at a time when I'm short of patience.

As with anything having to do with the Atari Jaguar, the abstract (not written by Simon or JohnH) takes time out to insult the platform:

If you were one of the 30 people to buy an Atari Jaguar, you probably bought his "Tempest 2000" and "Defender 2000" cartridges.

Isn't that funny? It is, right? Side-splittingly, fall of the floor and roll around funny! In fact, it gets funnier every time someone uses it.

You know why it's funny? Let me tell you! Because most of the people writing that kind of crap are just repeating what they've heard others say and seen others write. They've never actually played Tempest 2000 or Defender 2000 or Power Drive Rally or Club Drive. They've probably never held the Jaguar controller that apparently ranks #1 on a list of the worst controllers ever. They just repeat the Conventional Wisdom, even if they have no basis on which to judge that wisdom.

I really don't get it.

Again, this is an industry struggling to take itself seriously, and most writers for IGN, GameSpy, and GameSpot probably can't say a single intelligent thing about the Jaguar. Not that their ignorance will stop them from writing.

And this kind of juvenile, uninformed tripe isn't limited to the Jaguar. The Sega Saturn is similarly maligned for things as stupid as its ability to do transparency effects. For the love of all that's good and wholesome, people, you didn't even know what transparency effects were before someone did them on the PlayStation and suddenly they're an important point in deciding which console has games worth playing?

Remember the size of the original Xbox? Or its original controller? Also good for a laugh, right? Because those two qualities defined how good the games would be. Like Halo.

At least when people bring up Pac-man for the Atari 2600, many who have actually played it can agree that -- similarity to the arcade original aside-- it just wasn't a very fun game.

If you haven't played Tempest 2000 then, let me tell you: you missed out. It was -- and still is -- a fantastic game. And Defender 2000 is capable of inducing a deep, trancelike gaming state that I wish I could find in more games. The definitive versions of those games are only on the Jaguar

Let's just say you get a Jaguar and those games and you play. When you get hooked on them, you won't notice the Jaguar or Atari logos on the machine. It won't matter that someone saw you playing an old system that people like to ridicule. Even the controller will feel natural in your hands. All of that manhood measuring that people like to do will seem awfully stupid while you're doing what we all want to do in the first place -- have fun playing games.

Labels: atari, jaguar, media

--jvm at 01:27

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Things Changing, Staying Same, Re: Kotaku

So as the blog world found out last week, Sony tried to play hardball with Kotaku to keep them from posting a rumor (which in the process became all but substantiated) that they were working on a new PS3 system feature, the "Playstation Home," to combine X-box Live's popular obsessive-compulsive Achievements feature with the Wii's Charlie Brown-creator tool. The mixture will, in the end, allow people to create a virtual, anthropomorphic personification of their PS3, which will live in a little virtual house, and collect little virtual game-related trinkets that represent your game accomplishments. Perhaps a future update will let the little guy live in the virtual basement rent-free beneath his virtual mother's home.

But let's set the Playstation Home thing aside, although there is certainly a lot of comedy there to be mined. Instead, let's talk about the attitude that prompted Sony's little do-our-bidding letter to Kotaku. For assuredly, it is far from being a exclusive to them. The assumptions that lie beneath that odd missive get to the heart of why the game journalism world in general, let us not mince words here, sucks.

The big sites, the ones who get the big news first (leaving the dozens of second-tier sites to lap up their used news and reprint in the great echo chamber of the internet) usually get that news by making a Faustian bargain. The contract reads "Our PR guys will spoon-feed you news, on the condition that you present it the way we want, and when we want it." An organization that obeys that kind of edict doesn't sound, to me, like something that can be called a press. But what can a site do but play the game, or be banished to the abyss of the second-tier?

Kotaku could buck the trend because, really, people don't go there, or to Joystiq, or Insert Credit, or Penny Arcade, or (yo homies) GameSetWatch, or here, for breaking news. They go/come (t)here for commentary. That's what blogs are best at.

Of course Kotaku isn't innocent either. One of the things that Sony requested of them in their ball-collection note is their debug PS3, something that Kotaku could not have acquired without agreeing, on an unspoken level at least, to the deal. And THIS week, they did pull information gained at GDC off the site because it had actually been "embargoed," and Kotaku had received a letter from Microsoft saying, in essence, "Who's your daddy?"

Most of the top-tier game news sites, the Gamespots and the Gamespies and the Gamewhosits, do this, but of all those that have used the Red Pen to ink their names on the contract, IGN would seem to be the ones who hide it the worst.

IGN, the guys who set up a subscription plan so that one can pay for untainted access to the PR spigots of major game companies. A recent blog post from IGN Wii editor Matt Casamassina said:

Labels: ethics, ign, kotaku, media, sony

--JohnH at 01:39

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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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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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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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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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