Curmudgeon Gamer

Madden 12 for PS2 "Review" -- First Impressions

2011-08-30T21:49:00.005-04:00

It's been nearly impossible to learn anything about Madden 12 on the PS2 other than it was going to be released and would cost $49.99. I mean, heck, ps2.ign.com had nothing on it, no preview, nothing. Most 'coverage' you did find was links to current gen console stuff, and the Wii hasn't been getting much press either.

Copy of Madden 12 PS2 in hand, I believe I now know why.

I haven't played Madden on my PS2 since 2005, having switched to the PC until that platform's series ended in 2008. I flirted with the Wii version of Madden 2011 by renting from a now-closed Blockbuster when I couldn't find any reviews of it either. It stunk. It was clearly for young kids, and there was too much emphasis on your maintenance of the goofy cartoon city in franchise mode.

Well, Madden 12 for the PS2 is exactly like Madden 2005 for the PS2. The controls are the same. The plays are the same. The graphics, if the same, strike me as less impressive. If you told me Madden 12 is Madden 2005 with updated rosters, well, I couldn't find a good reason to argue, except that, in 12, there's more shaking. Yes, shaking. The camera shakes more on "big hits" and the controller does its best to rumble me into submission.

If you want to split hairs, some of the "hints via HUD" are different and, now that I think of it, there are no obvious Old Spice Red Zone style advertisements when you get into, well, the red zone. I recall NCAA (and I thought Madden) going full-on with sponsors, and, strangely, it made the game more interesting. There's nothing like that here.

Oh, and 2005 had online gameplay, didn't it? Madden 12 on PS2 doesn't. And 2005 still had an NCAA football game partnered with it that let you import "real" college draft classes. No luck in 12.

So you're not paying $40 for updated gameplay, online matchups, or new features and minigames. It must be for updated rosters, right? Unfortunately, no. I don't care when this "went gold". EA decided that rosters current at the start of the NFL labor lockout were good enough, and the result of that decision stinks. If your users aren't going to be able to update the roster, take your time and get them right.

Exhibit A:

I'm a Redskins fan. I know them inside and out. Madden 12 has Albert Haynesworth, Donovan McNabb, Carlos Rogers, and Ma'ake Kemoeatu on the roster. Kemo, McNabb, and Haynesworth were cut, traded, and traded, respectively, on or near July 28th. Rogers was a free agent, not a Redskins player, after the end of last year, and signed with San Francisco on August 3rd. Ryan Torrain starts at running back for the Skins in Madden 12. Tim Hightower starts for the Redskins today. Hightower was added July 31st. He's not on the Madden 12 Skins roster.

Worse, one of the biggest changes when Mike Shanahan become the Redskins coach in 2010 (so when he appears in Madden 2011) was that the team hired Jim Haslett as their defensive coordinator to swap from the team's 4-3 in 2009 to a 3-4 defensive scheme last season. Madden 11 for the Wii still had the Skins in a 4-3. I thought that was slack enough, what with all the coverage the swap got on ESPN and local media.

It's been over a year now, and The Washington Post won't stop talking about how, this year, Haslett and Shanahan finally have the right personnel to run the 3-4. The two biggest additions to the personnel? Brian Cofield from the Giants and Stephen Bowen from the Cowboys, neither of whom, I don't believe, is on the Madden 12 for PS2 Redskins roster. The default Redskins defensive playbook? Still 4-3. It's like virtual Greg Blache and Vinny Cerrato never left. (That's an inside joke, I'm afraid. Blache was the d-coordinator for the 4-3 until 2009, and Cerrato's the lunkhead manager that brought in Haynesworth.)

Enough of that Exhibit. You get the point. In Madden 12 for PS2, the two biggest off-season stories of 2011 for the Redskins, McNabb and Haynesworth finally being traded, have been ignored. The default defensive scheme of the team? Also ignored, now for over a year. Personnel moves after the end of the NFL's lockout? Yep. Ignored. You essentially get 2010 rosters with a few rookies sprinkled in.

So after a quick look, it appears that the game hasn't noticeably changed from Madden 2005, except that it's lost a major feature in online play. The rosters, the only other obvious reason to buy, are essentially a year old. What are we paying $40 for again? In seven years, the game's gotten worse in several major areas. Unforgivable.

IGN's review of Madden 2005 started with the following: "Madden NFL 2005 is still Madden. That is to say, it's another superb game of football that continues Madden's long legacy as one of the best in the business." Wow, how things change. I know, if I really want to play Madden, I need to finally move to a current console where I'll find constantly updated rosters, online play, and graphics from this century. And the PS2 version is $20 less than those for the PS3 and Xbox 360. But even this knowledge doesn't excuse the cheap cash-grab Madden 12 for the PS2 seems to be.

I'll update once I get a new memory card and run through both the features and franchise mode for a while -- see if there's a poor man's Tony Bruno in there somewhere -- I'll crack out the old disc and compare to 2005, and come to better informed conclusions. But right now, I'm not optimistic.

EDIT: /sigh The disc got scratched in some game room roughhousing, so I haven't been able to update much. Why would you buy Madden 12? I think the bottom line is for the minigames, because it sure isn't the season mode. The fantasy draft into a fantasy league, Speedball style as you win your way from Newbie league up through four or five others, is neat, but a little too gamey. That is, after each win, you get points to add to your players' overall ranking, which quickly turns the game from anything approaching a simulation to, well, Speedball Deluxe. There are apparently completely made up teams with fake, super-hero like players in the later leagues.

It's worth a play or two. Without online or enough attention paid to the current season, though, Madden 12 on PS2 simply isn't what made Madden such a great game on the Genesis through, well, through the PS2. This particular bloodline is obviously headed for extinction. People who want what they've learned to expect as a game of Madden need to finally shell out for a new system.

The ASUS XG Station Finally Arrives! But, um, it's Sony, not Asus, that delivers.

2011-06-28T15:17:00.003-04:00

I've been posting about the ASUS XG station on here for a while. It's a [vaporware] device that allows you to hook your supra-1337-phat output port on your laptop to an externally enclosed video card so that you can, among other things, game with a video card limited laptop. I don't know why, but I've always thought giving your laptop unexpected power like this was awesome. I suppose it's because the video card is the item I most often want to upgrade on my tower, and I'd like to pour more of my money into upgrading my CPU by buying new laptops instead. I don't know.

Anyhow, remember when I said that since we have MacBooks with "Thunderbolt" -- Can I get my Asus XG Station now? It's happened.

The notebook itself only contains an Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU, while the external dock contains an AMD Radeon HD 6650M with 1GB of Video RAM.

Still, my rational brain says you should just throw $700 at an Alienware m11x, game wherever the heck you want, and be done with it. Or, better yet, fork over $150 to upgrade the card in your tower and pocket the change.

Meet your individual seeking: DS Phat Shell Replacement Part 1

2011-06-20T13:43:00.021-04:00

Note: I hate first-person, payoff-delayed, story-mode columns that appear on gaming sites that are so heavy on the autobiography that you'd think it was Mark Twain doing the writing. Tell me about the game, dang it! But then this is a first-person blog post, so it's okay. More of a first-person, overly extended blog rant. Okay? I don't have anyone around the house that appreciates this sort of thing, so you're stuck with it. Continue.

My initial impression of the Nintendo DS was a poor one, based completely on the irrational opinion that every Game Boy should be backwards compatible with original Game Boy games until the end of time, you know, like Nikon F-mount lenses are with Nikon cameras. The GBA plays everything and had gotten pretty cheap to make; why would the DS have to drop backwards compatibility? I won't stand for it, Mr. Iwata! I can't recall if it was playing Elite Beat Agents and Brain Age on Matt's DS or just hearing him drone on about how awesome the games were that changed my mind. I think it was the former. Either way, Matt's PR campaign worked. I wanted my own DS. The question was finding the best way to buy one.

Matt and I have joked about wanting to start a racket that involves us offering folks in line money for systems that they're about to trade in at Gamestop for us to later sell ourselves. There's such a blamed large gap between what Gamestop pays you and what they're going to charge the guy behind you in line who buys your old stuff that they should all but be labeled predatory lenders. Right now, you can pay $70 for a "refurbished" DS Phat, $80 for a "refurb" DS Lite OR for a "recharged refurbished" DS Phat, $90 for a "recharged refurbished" DS Lite, or $100 for a new DS Lite, pick you color. A DSi is $120 used (unrefurbished), and $150 new. I'm sure the folks who traded those in got at least $20-30.

So sure, thirty bucks off of the new price is nice, but if I'm only shelling out $20 less than new if I want a new battery or $10 less if I want a new battery and a system that's not older than the kid I'm buying the DS for, I'm not sure that's a deal. I don't recall the prices in 2005 or 2006 when I was buying, but they were similarly predatory. I'm a cheapskate and didn't feel like paying the Gamestop price. And there's nobody who goes to greater lengths to save a buck when it comes to electronics. Though it often leaves me penny-wise and pound-foolish, I was going to be creative, again.

In this case, being miserly had me hitting eBay, where I found that DSes with cracked hinges were pretty cheap, relatively speaking. I bought a heavily used DS with a cracked hinge and an awesome threaded "9" sticker on it, though I didn't find out about that last aesthetic benefit until after the system arrived. Nor did it have a stylus, which I borrowed from my Palm 3. The DS didn't even have a charger, but used USB DS chargers were about $5. The DS was still insanely expensive for what I was getting, but the hinge-cracked DS with Palm stylus and USB charger was by far the cheapest way in the door to playing DS games. It was fun. Matt lent us EBA and I picked up a few more games. The hinge, however, kept me worried.

Look, the DS Phat hinge system stinks. It's essentially a set of three quarter-inch wide plastic loops that hold the top screen and speakers to the rest of the unit. That sort of connection is fine if we're putting together a scale model Oldsmobile or B-25 bomber that'll sit on a shelf for 40 years. It's not so good if 12 year-olds are supposed to own it and take it with them in the car, in their backpack, and on the playground

Once a hinge goes, you're immediately pretty obviously in trouble. I could play DS games, but the screen would slide out a good half-inch or more if I wasn't careful, threatening to pull the screen off. Nor would it really hold the top up easily, and only really worked completely open. Games that required putting the DS on its side, like Brain Age, were right out. Put sidewise, the screen pulled itself down enough to make me really nervous. So "Number 9" didn't see much play for years. My family would add two DS Lites and my 9 would mostly sit in the drawer, used for an occasional game of EBA or Pac Pix. I'm guessing the folks that eBayed it were happy to get my kaishe.

This past Christmas, used DS Phats were down to some insanely low price, I vaguely recall (I can't seem to Google or Archive.org that price back up), assumedly to push old inventory and sell some new games. I nearly picked one up. I really wish I could convince someone interested in retail sales numbers to also track prices of used systems, but I just don't know who to ask. I'd swear they were below $60, maybe even $40 or less, but I don't recall. In any event, I didn't bite. I already had a DS, right?

Well, to make a long story longer, this month, I again performed my bimonthly "Nintendo hinge repair" search, and again ended up with The Nintendo Repair Shop, Inc., out of Raleigh, NC, as the best option for parts. It takes about three or four random searches landing on the same spot before I'll actually pull the trigger on anything this wacky, and I'd finally become familiar enough with this site to be brave. It's a good-looking site. Here, "good looking" means that it's content rich and recently updated. It's also domestic, which makes me feel a little better about getting what I order.

Full repair runs a steep $55 plus shipping to their office, but they claim to cover almost anything at that price. That's too expensive for me for a DS that technically works, but they also have replacement DS Phat shells for $9.87, which seems pretty fairly priced. More importantly, they have a 27-minute how-to YouTube video on the page showing how to fix hinges in slow, careful steps. They even make the video in one single take, pulling Martha Stewart's "here's one we already pulled out of the oven," trick just once. This isn't a video made to sell shells so that you'll tear your DS down and later have to send it in anyway. This is a video displaying a realistic repair.

Unfortunately, they are replacing a DS whose bottom two woefully inadequate hinge loops are broken, not the top's like mine, but the video is exceptionally well done. I'm in. They jab me by adding a triwing (triforce?) screwdriver for $5.76 (?!!), but it's a very reasonable $3.24 for shipping, and we're up to $18.87 total. If I pretend I'll successfully fix the danged thing and that my time is free (apparently it is; I'm compulsively writing TWO blog posts about this), that's not a bad deal at all.

My fine Ninetudo DS [sic] shell came in last week, bright red so that I can't misplace the thing nearly so easily as I tend to do in silver. It was my plan (hello, foreshadowing) just to replace the top half of the shell with the broken hinge and then reattach to the silver original bottom. I really don't care how it looks, just that it works. I've been brave enough to upgrade an old iBook G4's hard drive, build a few Windows towers from scratch, and even make pretty serious repairs to my Jeep. A DS shell should be child's play, right?

To be honest, it was the FAQ at the Nintendo Repair Shop that finally goaded me into purchasing with its claim that, "And finally, be patient! We had one careful young mom do a DS Lite hinge repair in a little over an hour." Oh, it's ON NOW. It's time to meet my individual seeking (see #3, above).

(My DS is done, btw. I mean, that's almost obvious, right? Any serious ordeal demands blog-ige. I'll update with whether it's "done for" or "done fixed" in a second rambling, painful blog post later, penciled in for sometime in 2014.)

MacBooks with "Thunderbolt" -- Can I get my Asus XG Station now?

2011-02-24T09:14:00.000-05:00

From Apple's propaganda page about "Thunderbolt":

Performance and expansion never seen on a notebook before.
With 10 Gbps of throughput in both directions, Thunderbolt I/O technology lets you move data to and from peripherals up to 20 times faster than with USB 2.0 and more than 12 times faster than with FireWire 800. Two 10-Gbps channels on the same connector mean you can daisy-chain multiple high-speed devices and a display, without using a hub — and without reducing performance.

So, I can finally stop waiting on the Asus XG Station now? If this isn't enough throughput, I don't know when we're going to get it.

Ah, forget it. I should just shaddup and get an Alienware m11x already.

Merry Xmas to me: How I learned to hate Steam

2010-12-23T13:07:00.015-05:00

When Steam come out for the Mac and brought with it Team Fortress 2, I was excited. Getting Portal (and some TF2 earbuds) for free made for a nice bonus. Figuring out that I've got a gaming store in my office (along the lines of the music store Apple put in my pocket) has me more worried.

It really is a heroin situation. The first hit (Portal) sure enough was free. The micropayments for games on sale drives me crazy. That I came out of a game of MLB 2k10 and saw a bulletin board filling the middle of my monitor full of games I'd like to buy for 50% off (see above picture), all only a few clicks away, is unsettlingly effective. It's a continual vortex. Play game you bought for $2, enjoy, quit, see six more games that you're only a micropayment away from, and buy two more. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's Herculean labor.

Perhaps a better parallel would be World of Warcraft's quests with their perfectly timely partial reinforcement. (Which reminds me, I need to go click my cow.) It's not that I've spent hundreds, but I've purchased more PC (Win and Mac) games in the last year than probably the two previous combined. Again, not that much cash. Significant, and some was unavoidable, like Civ IV, but the lack of barriers to entry into the games marketplace scares me.

I'm also a little concerned about the shift in my gaming dollars away from the local Play N Trade, which has used games from the 2600 [sic] on up, to Steam, which ain't hurting, I don't think. And I think some of these games must be played online -- AC2 said as much in the description, requiring a "permanent" internet connection.

Here, I'll come clean. You can see that I need to stop the Xmas bleeding before it becomes significant. The first three games I wanted. The next three, not so much. AC2 was on the "to get" list, but not this quickly.

23-Dec	Assassin's Creed II	14.99 USD
21-Dec	Prince of Persia: Sands of Time	2.49 USD
21-Dec	Lara Croft GOL	5.10 USD
1-Nov	MLB 2k10	1.99 USD
3-Sep	Braid	9.99 USD
4-Jul	Sid Meier's Civilization IV: The Complete Edition	9.99 USD
27-May	The Orange Box	20.99 USD

Note also that Mass Effect 1 and 2 are on sale now, one minute after I bought Assassin's Creed 2, for 50% off. See what I mean? Collect X of Y and then see me for more XP and faction rewards.

It's like the iTunes Music Store, but even more WoW questy. And I don't see Genius recommendations taking up my entire field of view after using my iPod. Steam encourages you to "rent" games. It makes me wonder how much serving these bytes is costing them.

And none of this would be a big deal if I didn't already have...

D
Driver
Doom 3
GTA: SA (two missions away)
GTA IV
GTA 3 (one mission, but I can't finish it for the life of, well, Tony)
Metal Gear Solid 3
The Temple of Elemental Evil
Railroad Tycoon 2
BloodRayne (finished 2 on PS2, but not 1 on Mac)
Halo
Tomb Raider Chronicles
Sin
Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
The Fallen: DS9

... and plenty of others I can't recall off of the top of my head sitting around waiting for me to finish them.

You feel my pain.

Two knock-down, drag-out FreeCiv replay maps

2010-11-17T15:32:00.008-05:00

Ah, there was never anything quite as rewarding as watching a Civ reply map after you'd won. Just ran into these two, the second from The Huffington Post.

There used to be a YouTube video here:
http://www.youtube.com/v/DrZvn1qckIs?fs=1&hl=en_US
But it looks like it's become another example of overzealous copyright protection. The vid is, indeed, down.

Here's a link to the video on their site.

And here's a very hastily constructed picture to tide you over....

Are "heady" games just another niche?

2010-09-06T16:00:00.006-04:00

From Jonathan Blow's blog for his next project, The Witness:

For all three days of PAX 2010, The Witness was publicly playable by anyone who came by the booth. However, it was unmarked and unattended, so it was easy to miss (as many people did).
...
I had several reasons for wanting to show the game this way. Firstly: At a show full of companies trying to capture your attention and sell you things, I wanted to do something that is subtle, and a surprise — if you notice it, and decide to investigate, you find something unexpected.

This weekend, I played and finished Braid, Blow's exceptionally impressive platformer of a few years back. It was the first game that forced me to finish it since, well, ignoring something in the Civ series, since, if I remember correctly, Metal Gear Solid. That it only took about seven hours to finish didn't hurt...

What I find myself wondering, though, after reading of a "stunt" like the one he describes, above, (stunt if only in its being unconventional, though combining it with a blog post questions the unconventionality a bit), is if gaming is so large now that there's simply a market for thoughtfully designed games. That is, is Blow creating the new, I don't know, "free-range video game," with all the cachet that implies?

I think Braid hit the nail squarely on the head. It was thoughtful, buoyed by an engaging, if not particularly deep plot (at least in a conventional sense of narrative; more poetic than having great narrative depth), and, dang it, the puzzles were just challenging enough to be fun without being anything close to impossible. I also wonder what sort of mind is needed to make the puzzles as easy as they were -- excepting. admittedly, the stars; I only had the vaguest notion of their existence on two of the levels that contained them. That is, would your typical 12 year-old SMB player have done as well as I did? Better? Or does the ability to play with time qua logic in these puzzles work in part b/c of Blow's [and my] programmatic mind, training, and skills? That is, I worked as a database admin for years and still program on the side while I'm teaching a 400-level course on games. Why wouldn't I like Blow's games? Something similar must go for those who review games. Blow's made a game that appeals to the finer sensibilities found within that/my subset of gamers.

Take, for instance, the number of people who say not to use online FAQs and cheats when playing Braid. If anything, Braid is not tougher than your average game. It's much, much easier. It's played by those who normally DO depend on walk-throughs and hints. As a friend of mine said in high school after cheating on a chemistry test, "I didn't cheat on the whole test. I took it first, and only cheated on the ones I missed." I wonder if that's usually enough for most gamers; we only cheat on those puzzles we can't quickly solve. Braid was special because we could solve it (in part because we, as a community, parroting Blow on his site, told each other we could), we knew we were watching something thoughtful and different [and like us?] as we did so, and we ultimately didn't want to ruin its relatively quaint intentions. A wine to savor rather than two liters of Coke to blast through. [Or, less appropriately, a keg to keg stand and funnel through.]

Ultimately, I'm not sure if Blow has created the equivalent of video gaming literature that stands out of the pulp, or if his "movement" with Braid and now The Witness is something that captures our shared moment better than the sea of alternatives. In fact, I'm still tempted to give Rockstar's and Hideo Kojima's games the leg up as true masterpieces of the medium. Blow seems to have done a better job building the sorts of games Ian Bogost would like to believe he's been building, ones that force a few of us to take a new look at our decisions and society, but, even with the attention Braid's gotten, I still wonder if its press isn't because it's, perhaps unwittingly, still doing no more than shooting for a very specialized sub-market.

Another, "I'm thinking while I type" post, brought to you by...

Removing Features from Used Games Is "Cheating"

2010-08-29T10:00:00.003-04:00

THQ: Buying Used Games Is "Cheating":

THQ's Cory Ledesma has delivered a blunt message to consumers buying used copies of his company's games: they're cheating the publisher out of money.

When THQ (and EA, etc) make an end run around first sale doctrine, disallowing their customers to sell used games feature-complete, THQ is cheating the customer out of value.

It would probably be worth rereading "Jeff Bezos' open letter on used book sales" from 2002, where he responds to the Authors' Guild suit against Amazon's practice of selling used books on the same page as the new ones.

And let's also add that the folks who published the used games and books are the same companies that published the originals. Publishers are competing against themselves. If they don't want to compete against used games, make fewer prints of the original. And make games good enough over a long period of time that gamers don't want to sell them!

Now admittedly, there are all sorts of ways that the game/printed book analogy is already well past its prime, as I've written about a bit under the trope of the virtual rare book room. Steam, the Wii store, and (ironically) even the Kindle have all killed the concept of game/book-as-encapsulated-commodity, and all shift power and value from consumer to producer just as THQ is doing here.

As Matt's pointed out about the Wii virtual store, "If our Wii dies, I'll have to buy it all over again or hassle customer support to move our games over in some way." Steam's not as bad in a sense, and I can always lend my Kindle library to someone else just by loaning them my Kindle (in some ways more useful than loaning a single book), but the point is clear. Commodities have changed in ways that the producer has designed to increase their hold on copyright.

Embarrassingly, I've purchased at least twice from each of those three outlets. At least Matt has started voting with dollars. "Until there is some sort of portability for these purchases -- at least to the same hardware or new Nintendo systems -- we're not buying anything else in Nintendo's virtual storefront." I'm still trading my rights for convenience. Well, starting now, I'll never buy another THQ wrestling game new! I wish the other compromises were as easily avoided.

No Wii Madden 11 Reviews?

2010-08-11T12:52:00.003-04:00

Why can't I find a review of Madden 11 for the Wii? And, on the other hand, why can I find a review for HoopWorld, whatever that is, with nearly top billing when I check out Wii at IGN?

(Nothing at their PS2 site on Madden either. What gives?)

Sweet Game Propaganda Calendar

2010-07-28T19:54:00.003-04:00

Yes, this is awesome.

Get one here. Seen on GameSetWatch.

A new challenger

2010-07-28T14:24:00.001-04:00

While running an errand today I noticed a new video game store along the way. I stopped in and there was a fairly modest selection of games from the PS1 era up through the current generation. The place had a scent of new paint, so I asked the proprietor how long he'd been around. Answer: Two months.

I mentioned that I enjoyed finding and browsing independent shops and he offered his motivations for opening his own store. "GameStop bought a used game from my son for $14 and then sold it for $47. That's just wrong."

Amusing, and I didn't even bother to point out that one could see that story and come to the same conclusion (i.e. open your own store) for perfectly rational capitalistic reasons.

He did mention that he had come across some Atari 2600 games and would bring them to the store, so I'll stop by again in a week or two and see what he's got.

The glorious future of games

2010-07-15T14:26:00.001-04:00

Kinsley would call this a gaffe, perhaps?

The video games industry has to learn to operate in a different way. My answer is for us as publishers is to actually sell unfinished games - and to offer the consumer multiple micro-payments to buy elements of the full experience.

Emphasis mine. Well, someone finally said it out loud. This is, of course, the natural progression from releasing beta games as final.

Remind me not to buy any CodeMasters games.

GTA4 (PC): FImp

2010-07-04T14:06:00.006-04:00

Been playing GTA4, even though I've got God of War 2 in the PS2 and Team Fortress 2 sitting on the Mac. (And, admittedly, Golden Axe 3 on the Wii.) Quick notes.

* I've gotten just past (potential very minor spoiler here) where Roman and Niko have to move.

* The game is very good.

* That said, it's nothing like its reviews. It doesn't really feel "more realistic" than GTA3:SA. Too many reviews talked about how you had to earn your weapons and that you started with no money, etc. Forgive me here, but I remember starting out with a bike in SA, and, in GTA3, it seems I recall running around with a bat for a really long time. Nor does the city feel (operative word is "feel" here) that much larger than the cities of SA. That is, it's not that horribly much more immersive.

That is to say, GTA4 is ultimately very much like GTA:SA and GTA3. Cars with hoods flying off, bad driving ignored by cops, easier to run mobs over than shoot them, lots of ammo available at the Ammu-Nation equivalency, radio is as snide as ever, etc. There're slightly fewer over-the-top locations and I don't yet own an airstrip, but when the nearby restaurant waitress routinely & sarcastically asks me if I want a "meal and a h**d job," I'm guessing we're not exactly toeing the realism line here either.

I mean, though I do miss its gang wars, I don't miss SA's arcade-style jetpacks and the "chase the koosh" missions straight from Power Drive Rally. Still, other than a slightly harder, slightly more realistic/less arcade-ish edge to some missions, it seems, it's the same game as SA. That there's no real shift in game mechanics is a shame -- Niko started off sounding like he wanted to have some ethics, and at one point can choose to wax or release a guy he'd been sent to kill. I'd hoped for a little more character development and influence between in-game choices and the story you play out, and that promise goes out the window shortly afterward the choice to spare (or not) that earlier mark. After the missions he does solely for money soon after, Niko strikes me as the hardest criminal of the series now.

* Perhaps it's because I'm dual booting into Vista instead of living there, but the Games for Windows requirements and phoning home bothers me not at all. As long as I can play indefinitely and Rockstar provides a single-player enabling patch once their servers are down, I'm fine.

I'm also fine with the Xbox 360 controller requirement. At first not being able to use my Logitech rumble pad (and I tried the dll hacks) riled me, but after eBaying a used Xbox controller for $6 shipped, I've got to say I like the feel of it. Why not make Windows more console-like? And I do find myself wondering how often the Xbox phones home too.

* I enjoy the characters. Little Jacob, Michelle, Malorie, Vlad, Faustin, Dmitri, Roman, Brucie -- this is probably the first GTA where I remember nearly every NPC's name. Most memorable story so far for me for some reason. This isn't to say Caesar, Tenpenny, and James Woods' character aren't memorable. And Big Smoke. And Ryder. And the blind dude who owns the casino. I guess the pot selling dude was memorable too.

Okay, perhaps it's not so much "memorable" as "engaging." These characters in GTA4 are much more engaging so far. So far, they seem a little less foils to set up the possibility of missions than characters I'd like to know more about.

* Running GTA4 on a 2.26 Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook with two gigs of RAM is actually quite playable. It's burning itself up, but plays well. I'm sure it'd wow the crud out of me if I had real hardware, but I don't find myself complaining in my ignorance.

* The game is hella cheap. I got it for about $6, iirc, from NewEgg a while back. Steam has it on sale for $5 through today. Again, this is for WinPC.

If you're looking for a brand new experience, this isn't it. Probably the most notable change so far for me is the inclusion of talking GPS in cars. But if you were addicted to a previous GTA3+ and want more of the same with a better plot, now's the time to pull the trigger for your Windows box. If you have one -- and an Xbox controller you can borrow -- that is. The console version is still pretty steep.

Oh, and note to Matt: Did you play Vice City Stories on PS2? Horrible, horrible plot, at least to start. Voice acting, dialog, plot all atrocious. I'll stipulate that for $5 I owe it the chance to get better, but I'm pretty sure I'll be well through GTA4 before I return to VCS. I'm interested, but I'm not sure I trust Rockstar Leeds at this point.

Activision tries to stand out

2010-06-25T17:37:00.001-04:00

I was passing through a GameStop earlier today and there was a fairly large shipping box at the front of the store, clearly labeled as "From: Activision". I asked the clerk about it, and was told that Activision was going to have its own metal stand in the store, just for Activision games.

That's expensive, you can be sure. Especially if it's being done across the hundreds of GameStop stores in the U.S.

But, I can kind of understand it. I consider myself a fairly savvy game shopper, but even I was bewildered by the huge wall of games available in GameStop. If there were an attractive kiosk with Activision games somewhere in the store, I might be more likely to see those few games than I would many others on the big wall.

It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Someone else in the store -- I don't think it was an employee -- made the comment that Activision was "worse than EA" even when EA was at its peak. Frankly, I have little interest in either company's games, but I think it's amusing that this opinion (which I've seen tossed around on NeoGAF, where I hang out) has become mainstream enough to get mentioned in videogame store chatter.

Retail PS3 games on PS3: Finally!

2010-06-25T16:49:00.001-04:00

I would never have finished* Burnout Paradise if it hadn't been available as a full-game download on the PlayStation Store. Simply having a game available to play all the time makes it much more likely to get played. Had I stuck with the Blu-Ray version of Burnout Paradise, I'd likely never have enjoyed it as much.

(In a similar way, I really love having two dozen games or so on my PSP Go. That plus the game save-state feature makes the PSP Go one of my favorite handhelds of all time. Regrettably, if I like a handheld, it's probably going to be a loser. See also: Atari Lynx.)

There are only two other important games on the PlayStation Store that are also sold on Blu-Ray disc: Warhawk and Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. I've often wondered why this was the case, but it now appears that Sony is going to start putting more full PS3 games on the PS Store.

According to the details of the EU PSN+ program, early adopters will get a downloadable version of LittleBigPlanet as a bonus and will soon have access to a trial version of inFamous which can be converted to the full version with the purchase of a key.

Sony should have been doing this a long time ago. The three existing games on the service showed that the concept can work, and the PSN+ service certainly isn't required to promote full game downloads. Now we just need Sony to make games available online the same day as they're available at retail, and they'll have a real advantage over their competitors.

* For my own ego's sake, achieving the Burnout Paradise License is finishing. I won't ever get the Burnout Elite License, especially since my Burnout Paradise License was lost when my original PS3 60GB died and took the save games with it.

Make Online Game Storefronts Suck Less, Please

2010-06-20T23:36:00.001-04:00

The three big hardware manufacturers all have relatively robust online software distribution systems now. I'm just about to the point that I could live without retail games at all. However, it is clear that this space is still not taken seriously enough by the platform stakeholders or the third-party publishers.

Sony was able to give a complete line-up of Move games but we still have practically no idea what PSN games we can expect in the next 12 months. Heck, even the next six months. The PSN+ plan is an incremental step, and should help lay the foundation for a robust, long-term service offering, but Sony is not setting out a clear vision for consumers. Sure, subscribers can expect free access to games but which games will be available and when? If Sony doesn't make it clear that some truly ace games are going to be on the PSN+ list, the plan will likely languish and only attract the truly hardcore PSN junkies.

Sony (and Microsoft and Nintendo) need long-term lists of software release dates for their services. If we can get release dates for titles coming to retail stores, we should be able to get the same for online services. Here's a sample of just how FUBAR Sony's system is: on 27 May they announced the 1 June release of a game, then on 1 June had to apologize that someone screwed up and it didn't get released. This is not an isolated incident, and isn't just a scheduling problem. Sony also releases broken software and then has to pull the releases. Just in the past few months, Sony also uploaded a broken version of After Burner for the PSP and a version of Dark Forces (PS1) that works on the PSP but hangs on the PS3. The bugs are obvious to anyone who downloads and uses these files for just five minutes -- yet Sony can't even be bothered to do even this much for its users.

For this, and many other reasons, I expect PSN+ to be a debacle at launch.

At E3 2010 Microsoft seemed so distracted by Kinect that it did little to promote what I consider its crown jewel, the Xbox Live Service. Yes, its Netflix client may be getting a search function (the PS3 and Wii versions need this too, please) and the new 2D Castlevania game is a coup, but I haven't heard much beyond those tidbits that seemed significant. Maybe I just missed it, so feel free to me. From what I can tell, Microsoft at least has its software quality and scheduling pretty well done, even if a long-term release schedule is still unavailable. (I don't own an Xbox 360. So I'm not as fully-informed in this area.)

I believe Nintendo has a similar problem providing information on its online software releases, but it also lacks the facility to tie purchased games to an account for portability. When my PS3 died (I have a Slim now) it was a matter of setting up an overnight download/install process to install all of my favorite PSN purchases. In the morning the system had cut itself off and my games were ready to play. Similarly, I can put the same games on my two PSP systems without any trouble. Purchases from Xbox Live are tied to an account as well, and are portable in a similar way (although there are slightly different rules).

That copy of Kirby (NES) that I bought for my son on the Wii store? If our Wii dies, I'll have to buy it all over again or hassle customer support to move our games over in some way. Same for Super Mario Bros. (NES) that Collin wanted. But that's as far as we go. Until there is some sort of portability for these purchases -- at least to the same hardware or new Nintendo systems -- we're not buying anything else in Nintendo's virtual storefront. The launch of WiiWare and DSiWare and (presumably) 3DSWare makes the problem all the more acute.

I had hoped Nintendo would use E3 2010 and the showcase of its new handheld to announce that it will finally deal with this problem, but that hasn't happened. While I think the 3DS looks like a nice piece of hardware, my appetite for it is diminished by the lack of parity with the features that Sony -- of all companies! -- has offered for the past four years.

Microsoft, by far, is doing the best work and I hope the other companies will work to surpass that standard. Still, each company can do better. For example, which company will be the first to offer me a storefront that is as useful as the one Amazon has?

E3 2010: The interesting bits

2010-06-18T22:45:00.002-04:00

This week the videogame industry met in Los Angeles to hold E3 2010. I am already way behind in playing several videogames I've collected since late 2009, but I couldn't help getting excited about several things I saw this week.

PS3/PSP

Sony's PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable will finally get a version of Pac-man Championship Edition, similar to the game available on the Xbox 360 for years. Also, it appears that the PS3 version of Portal 2 might have been intentionally left out of that game's official announcement earlier this year, just so it could make a big splash on Sony's E3 stage. Sony is also giving Sly Cooper the HD-retread treatment. The source material is not as rich as the God of War 1 & 2 Collection, but the very existence of this collection keeps my hopes alive that we'll eventually get an Ico/Colossus Collection, preferably right before The Last Guardian arrives.

That's the excellent stuff I can think of off the top of my head. The perfunctory updates to existing games include inFamous 2 (PS3) , Killzone 3 (PS3), and God of War: Ghost of Sparta (PSP). These kinds of things are expected.

I was disappointed that Sony didn't at least show off their PSP-upgrade plans. I love the platform and regularly buy full games and minis through the PlayStation Store onto my PSP Go (which can only play downloaded games), but the platform is really aging quickly. God of War and Pac-man CE might keep me somewhat happy, but it won't suffice for another year...

As for PlayStation Move, Sony's motion control scheme ... I'm interested. I've already got the camera, so I'll get a primary and secondary controller to test the waters. However, Sony's going to have to make some pretty compelling software to move the wider public into their camp. Also, the $100 bundle price (camera, primary controller, game) is kind of steep for the mass market.

Xbox 360

Microsoft is going all-out with Kinect, their camera-driven motion control system. This looks like a great idea for some games, like Dance Central from Harmonix. I'm less than confident that this will work for driving or shooting games. There have also been some technical questions that have to be answered: will it work while sitting and is it easily distracted? The key advantage I see for Microsoft is that the price (rumored to be $150) will cover more than one person (provided that the technical issues above don't interfere).

The exclusive deal Microsoft has for Call of Duty DLC frustrates me. Contractual third-party exclusivity frustrates me more each day, and I don't even care about CoD DLC. Let's just get the games on all the viable platforms and call it a day. First-party exclusives are, of course, perfectly fine.

Wii, NDS, 3DS

Nintendo put out a very impressive show of software and hardware. They've got a new Zelda, Donkey Kong, Metroid, and Kirby in the pipeline for the Wii ... they'll be making money hand over fist from those games. Go watch the Kirby trailer and be amazed at how impressive 2D games can be in an age where most console players appear to worship high-definition 3D shooters. The message was clear: we've got software taken care of, for at least another one or two years.

I'm still waiting on the pricing for the new 3DS handheld, but it sounds very cool. I'm particularly interested in the Metal Gear Solid 3 game. That was the best game in the series, at least in my book, and if the 3DS provides a compelling platform on which to play a suitably modified and improved/expanded version of the game, then I'm going to be on board. However, I'm not nearly convinced that this system can come to retail under $200, and that will put a damper on sales. Yes, glasses-free 3D is a sweet feature, but it may not be sweet enough for parents whose kids already have a Wii and/or Nintendo DS...

Oh, hey, here's the site logo. I'll fix the broken one in the header now...

Test Post

2010-06-17T23:24:00.005-04:00

Yo. Is this thing on?

Answer: Yes.

More answer: Yes, images are broken. I'll get to that eventually.

Hrm, makes you wish you could s/[each img src tag]/[valid new src tags]/g somehow. What's the plan there?

Simple, beautiful pixel/vector art

2009-05-13T11:30:00.002-04:00

If you're a Commodore 64 fan (shame on you otherwise), you'll appreciate these derived works. Found on Daily Rodent via GSW.
Click for giant image.

Pixel art to vectorized image. Simple concept, beautifully executed.

Gamer Labor: City of Heroes

2009-04-28T11:18:00.004-04:00

City of Heroes recently allowed gamers to create their own questlines. I've only played CoH briefly, and my impression apparently was, "Tired engine, bland missions, and large headaches means they likely won't be getting my dough."

Having gamers pay for the privilege of providing free labor has always fascinated me. I've got AWB (Another WoW Blog) myself, and have posted a bit on Thottbot and WoWWiki. I guess you'd have to add Player vs. Player as another sort of gamer labor.

But CoH has taken this free labor to another level by letting players create in-game quest lines. It can't be that hard; heavens knows the quests in WoW and my recollection of CoH are usually pretty boring. "Kill X of Y and get Z from their corpse" just about sums up the typical quest experience, somewhat reminiscent of Matt's and my critiques of a number of games being little more than variations on the "find key, eliminate enemies, exit level" theme.

Which is why a comment like this one from the City of Heroes' news site seems self-deflationary:

We did some data mining of our own, and 3,800 surpasses the amount of content that we, the developers, have made for all of City of Heroes and City of Villains combined. In just one day our users did more than we could in almost five years.

What does such a comment tell us? I understood why I'd buy Quake -- for the engine -- and then play mods released for free. I'm not so sure why I'd spend a monthly fee to play user created content. More interesting, though, is figuring out why players would give this content to CoH so freely and why CoH would say it's the equivalent to years of their own work. I wonder why Second Life or an equivalent doesn't play engine to these sorts of adventure construction set games. We've obviously gotten to the point where quest creation is a franchiseable process, easy to reproduce by almost any french frying knucklehead.

Fallujah? No.

2009-04-07T09:29:00.003-04:00

Konami is making a game about the 2004 battle in Fallujah, Iraq. From Joystiq's article (emphasis added):

Unfortunately, for all the realism touted by the game's developer, Konami's VP of marketing, Anthony Crouts, gives the impression that the publisher's still playing it safe, saying, "We're not trying to make social commentary. We're not pro-war. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience. At the end of the day, it's just a game."

I just finished listening to Fiasco by Thomas Ricks. It covers the first few years of the second U.S.-Iraq war* as well as some 1990s background of some of the principals. Frankly, you can't come away from the facts of the second war, and that Fallujah battle in general, without feeling a sense of profound dismay. It is one of the culminations of many critical botched actions that preceded it. (It's at this point that I usually come back to the picture of the 3-year-old Iraqi boy whose leg was blown off completely. Thanks, Mike. I'll never forget that one.)

Fallujah is a fat, nasty reminder of how screwed up things were -- and still are -- and I have a hard time believing that it will be treated appropriately. Compelling entertainment? No. Not at all.

* Ricks concludes that historians may eventually consider what we see as two U.S.-Iraq wars as a single longer one: hot war in 1991, followed by containment, then another hot war starting in 2003, followed by more containment.

Another week, another typo

2009-03-31T16:45:00.004-04:00

Sony really needs someone watching what they type. This week it's Samurai Shodown Anthology. Yes, that's right "Shodown". No, I don't know why, but that's how it's spelled.

Unless you're the Sony PlayStation page showing the game:
I know it's a weird name and all, but come on!

Now we'll see if it takes a few hours and Sony magically fixes this. (As happened last time.)

Finally, registering Nintendo products is good for something

2009-03-16T23:58:00.000-04:00

Well lookee here, Nintendo sent me an invite to try out some "DSi" doohicky they're releasing soon. Seems like it was due to registerin' a whole mess-load of products!

Well shucks howdy! By huckleberry! Gee whilikers! Wang-dang-doodle! ...

They even say we can bring in our DS Lites, I suppose to drive home to the poor things how numbered are their days. Maybe I can shame them into doing something about the busted hinge on mine.

Reminds me of Tempest 2000

2009-03-05T20:35:00.002-05:00

I'm not really sure what the heck this is, but I liked it.

A hacker discusses the Wii's limitations

2009-03-05T04:27:00.004-05:00

Is it not beyond strange that Wii homebrew is able to do so much more on the Wii than even the official software?

Homebrew hackers have found ways to play DVD movies, fully access SD cards over 2GB in size, use USB storage in the form of both flash memory and physical hard drives, access Samba shares over the wireless network and connect to Bluetooth devices for storage and using cell phones as a remote control. In their hands the Wii has become both a powerful media player and an emulation haven; add Virtual Console to the homebrew emulators and, excepting PCs, it is by far the system capable of playing the most games, able to play those of the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, TG16, NeoGeo, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, NeoGeo Pocket, Atari Lynx, Atari 800/XL/5200, Commodore 64, Apple II, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 2600, Sinclair and ColecoVision.

Since Nintendo makes money selling Virtual Console games I could perhaps understand why they haven't made available any good general-purpose emulatiors. And it's not like the other manufacturers are keen to develop such software. But those hardware limitations are maddening. While Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles have only become more feature-rich over time, the Wii's feature set is nearly the same as it was on launch day. When they announce some great new feature to get everyone to update their firmware, it turns out to be something like (gasp!) using a USB keyboard in the message center. In the most recent update they (bigger gasp!) even let people use it in the Mii Channel, where it's useful for entering names and nothing else.

For a long while I've seen this as the result of Nintendo having a uniquely tech-unfriendly culture. People joke about how Nintendo is like a toy company more than a software company. While I do like their games and think, in terms of game design, they're the #1 company in the world, I have to admit that this is largely true. Their system software design is woefully nearsighted. The departure of Yamaguchi has done nothing to make the company more technology-savvy.

Nintendo would never themselves admit that their system is limited, especially when the Wii is exploding sales records, so the best person to ask about why this is so would be one of the hackers who has found out how to work around so many of Nintendo's stupid limitations, marcan of Team Twiizer, one of the people behind the super-awesome Homebrew Channel.

Here are his thoughts on the subject. In summary, all Wii software features have to be implemented by the games themselves. Other than the TCP/IP stack, the Wii's IOS system software very little in the way of features at all to Wii software! Presumably they have some libraries that they distribute to developers that implement the basic stuff like returning to the menu and the Home screen.

Those features that it does provide are tied to the version of IOS it was developed for. This is possible because all Wii system updates, with one exception, add an entire new copy of the IOS software to the Wii's built-in flash memory! So a game that was written for IOS 9, the earliest version that can run games, will always use IOS 9, completely ignoring any later system features Nintendo could add. This makes a kind of sense if one imagines Nintendo as being super-cautious about breaking older games, but come on, Sony doesn't seem to have any problems with it, and even Microsoft, which is infamous for just this kind of bug in Windows, has had no problems making new 360 features work with launch games.

While it could be argued that the mindset behind this approach has been the source of the Wii's appeal to most of its audience (most of whom are probably just as non-tech-savvy), that doesn't mean that the system's workings need be dominated by this thinking. C'mon Nintendo, the world doesn't run on NES hardware any more.