Category: Gaming

E3 ’08: Round 2: Nintendo

Posted on by Nimgimli

Wow, I’m already falling so far behind! By the time I got home and watched all of yesterday’s press conference recordings (via G4), there was no time left to write posts!

Luckily Nintendo announced very little for hardcore gamers, so there’s not a whole lot to say. You can’t really blame Nintendo: they’re making money hand over fist with no sign of that ending. Why rock the boat? Cammie Dunaway, who replaced Perrin Kalpan, played up the ‘soccer mom’ schtick to a point of creepiness, with a pasted on smile that rivaled The Joker’s. She even declared that no one was going to remove that smile from her face.

Lots of number and figures, lots of emphasis on the DS and how Nintendo (and 3rd parties, honestly) is pushing it beyond gaming. I guess there’s a ball park in Seattle where you can use your DS to check scores of other games, data on the game you’re currently playing and so forth. They’re trying to extent that kind of PDA/internet tablet to airports and other places. Trying to get you to carry your DS everywhere.

On the games front, they had Shaun White demo (a bit, Dunaway actually played more than White did) Shaun White Snowboarding, which uses the Balance Board. They announced Animal Crossing Wii for this holiday season, complete with a microphone which sits on the Sensor Bar and picks up everyone in the room talking, so your room full of players can talk to other rooms full of players.

They announced Wii Music which uses the WiiMote, Nunchuk and Balance Board to let you play air guitar, as well as air drums, air saxaphone, air piano, etc, etc. It was really hard to get a sense of what was going on with this, but at first glance it didn’t look very compelling. But we’ve got a while before it gets into our hands yet, so we’ll see.

The MotionPlus attachment, revealed Monday, will come with (or without) a game pack-in. Wii Sports Resort brings all the fun of a day at the beach to the Wii. Stuff like playing frisbee with your dog, jet skiing and…uh, sword fighting. Sounds like a smart way to get us all to buy one, though. Who didn’t love Wii Sports?

The only big surprise for hardcore gamers was Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, for the Nintendo DS. No gameplay was shown, just a logo. Still, that one came out of nowhere, and was another blow for Sony, who no longer will have the only handheld with a GTA game on it.

All in all, Nintendo’s Press Conference felt like it was more for the bean counters and less for the gamers. But again, they’re selling hardware as fast as they can manufacture it. Why would they mess with that? Clearly hard core gamers aren’t a big concern of theirs.

XBox 360: Do you trust the hardware?

Posted on by Nimgimli

My friend at work came to me and said “Y’know, I was really disappointed that there were no hardware announcements yesterday [at the Microsoft E3 Press Conference]. I really hoped to hear something about the new 60 gig 360, that they’d ironed out the hardware problems or that they were using a smaller die or something.”

Just some background… a while back he had to send his 360 in for repairs. He got really hooked on GTA4 earlier this summer/spring, and was playing it like mad. Then he started to get lockups. 2 red lights. Now he’s afraid to play his 360 because he doesn’t want to totally break it and lose access to all his saved data.

He, like me, would be willing to go out and spend the $350 on a new XBox 360 if he had some sign that the new hardware was more reliable than what he has. He wants to keep his current system running until such time as he can get a new, reliable 360 so he can transfer data from one drive to the other (which he isn’t sure how to do).

But Microsoft has given no indication that the 60 gig 360 is anything more than the old crap-pile 360 hardware with a new, bigger, hard drive.

Hell, I’d buy an Elite if I knew it was going to be more reliable… Microsoft is winning this gaming generation but man, their hardware so far is just garbage. It gets to be a hassle (and expensive, if you’re not blessed with a RROD) sending these things back for repair all the time.

Harmonix can kiss my behind

Posted on by Nimgimli

A long while back I wrote a series of posts comparing Guitar Hero 3 to Rock Band as a newcomer to this style of game. I ended up coming down in favor of Rock Band.

Well now I’m kicking myself. You see, I purchased the games for the PS3 since, y’know, every other time I turn on my XBox 360 the stupid thing breaks. And now Harmonix is repaying my loyalty (and the loyalty of all PS3 owners) by having Rock Band 2 come out as a time-limited XBox 360 Exclusive. Talk about a kick in the teeth.

So now I’ll stop buying add-on songs, and start waiting for Guitar Hero World Tour. I’m pretty interested in its ‘create a song’ feature anyway.

I know its incredibly naive of me, but I always thought of Harmonix as being a company with higher moral values than this. But nope, Microsoft came with a money hat and Harmonix sold PS3 owners out without an apparent second thought.

E3 ’08: Round 1: Microsoft

Posted on by Nimgimli

Microsoft’s Press Conference didn’t have a lot of new announcements for hardcore gamers who spend much time surfing around, but what news they did break really busted Sony in the chops.

First, Fallout 3 will have “exclusive downloadable content” for the XBox 360 and Games For Windows version of the game. PS3 owners will have to do without, same as they’re going to have to do without when the GTA IV DLC comes along.

But the huge news was that Final Fantasy XIII, long assumed to be a PS3 exclusive and a major system seller, will come out for the XBox 360 on the same day as the PS3 version in English-speaking areas (the Japanese version remains a PS3 exclusive).

There are lots of other announcements made of course. Fable 2 is finished. Netflix’s “Watch Now” is coming to XBox Live (for Gold Members). Incredibly cheesy looking avatars are being added because, presumably, of Mii-envy. Lots of “We really want to get some of that casual market that Nintendo is printing cash from” announcements.

Sony needs to pull off a miracle with its press conference tomorrow. As it stands now, as amazing as Little Big Planet looks, I don’t think it, Resistance 2, and Killzone 2 are enough to keep momentum going. And the XBox 720 is only a couple years away.

New XBox 360 SKU, price drop on 20 gig

Posted on by Nimgimli

It’s been posted everywhere else but just for the sake of completeness I may as well say it too.

Microsoft has made official the price drop on the 20 gig XBox 360, which will sell for $299 while supplies last. A new, 60 gig SKU will hit store shelves in August, going for $349. From what I’m reading its identical to the 20 gig except for, y’know, 40 more gigs. This means the Elite remains the only 360 with an HDMI port.

Flagship Studios, RIP?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Voodoo Extreme has a pretty convincing post up saying that [Flagship Studios’ Closure Confirmed, All Staff Fired, All I.P. Lost] Flagship Studios is dead. Nothing official yet, but apparently (now-former) Flagship employees are updating their Linked-In accounts to indicate the end of their employment (fodder for another post, that).

And I’m going to go against the grain and say its a damned shame. Yes, Hellgate: London shipped half-broken and never seems to have really become what it could have become (I say that as a lifetime subscriber). It certainly got better than it was at launch, but overcoming so much bad will is nigh on impossible.

But I grieve for Mythos (and, of course, for the employees). It was a darned fun game, and I was really surprised they held it in beta for so long. Hindsight is always 20-20, but I wonder if things might have turned out differently if they’d launched the game rather then starting the ‘overworld’ retrofit. It was a fine “Diablo-clone” with its instanced combat fields and massively MP towns and I think it could’ve generated some revenue.

Now (according to the Voodoo Extreme article) Korean developer HanbitSoft owns the rights to the game. Maybe they’ll save it, but color me skeptical that they’ll do so in any kind of way the really resonates with Western audiences. I’d love to be proven wrong.

A sad day for both gamers and Flagship employees. It’s easy to hate on the company for Hellgate, but if you never got a chance to try Mythos, trust me. You’ve just missed out on a fun hack & slash RPG.

Song Summoner iPod game controls

Posted on by Nimgimli

The other day I bought Square-Enix’s Song Summoner: The Unsung Heroes, for the iPod (not the Touch or iPhone, the standard iPod). Mostly I was curious about how it would play. If you’re curious too, this post is for you.

Note this is NOT a review in any way, shape or form. I’ve only put 10-15 minutes into the game. This post is just about how to use the iPod input buttons to control a grid-based, turn-based, strategyRPG game.

Basically, everything boils down to spinning the outer wheel and pressing the center select button.

So to move a character into position and attack:

  • Spin the wheel to select one of your characters, hit the center button.
  • Spin the wheel to select Move from available actions (Move/Attack/Inventory/Status/etc) hit the center button
  • The map lights up with possible places to move to.
  • Spin the wheel and a highlight runs down each row of possible move spots. Get to the one you want to move to, and hit the center button to get the character to move.
  • Spin the wheel to select the Attack function, hit the center button
  • Spin the wheel to pick the enemy you want to attack, and finally hit the center button to perform the attack.

It all works pretty well aside from the actual picking a square to move to, which is a wee bit cumbersome. I’m not sure how they could’ve done it better, though.

I have fat thumbs and constantly move that outer wheel 1 ‘click’ when I hit the center button. I have this problem when selecting music, and have it when playing this game, so I get frustrated pretty quickly at the moment. Maybe with practice I’ll get better at it.

The premise is kind of fun. You create generate troops based on songs on your iPod through some mysterious algorithm (like the old Monster Rancher games that generated a creature based on a cd). As long as these troops are in your active party, they gain experience whenever you play the song they’re based on.

Unfortunately I almost never use my iPod to listen to music. I use it for podcasts mostly, and you can’t generate a troop from a podcast.

I personally don’t see myself playing this one much, but from a ‘gee whiz’ point of view, I find it pretty impressive that Square Enix could cram this much game into an iPod.

I’d love to hear from someone who both listens to a lot of music on their iPod, and who is playing this game seriously. I’d love to know how the gameplay holds up over time.

Farewell for now, Age of Conan

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night I finally canceled my Age of Conan subscription. I’ve been on the verge of doing so since mid-June, but I kept waiting, hoping something would change. And the only thing that really changed was I found myself playing for shorter and less-frequent sessions. A pattern became evident. I’d boot the game, have fun for a while, then get bored and quit to go do something else. And as the days past, that “a while” period grew smaller and smaller.

I finally realized what was missing from my enjoyment of Age of Conan: a sense of progress. The gear my character was wearing looked pretty much the same at level 30 as it did at level 5. The stats on that gear were essentially meaningless (+0.2 defense, woot!). So getting better gear didn’t make any difference to either immersion (the visuals) or gameplay (the stats).

At level 1 I was fighting men and beasts such as crocodiles, which at the time seemed like a great idea. Too many MMOs have you fighting small snakes and insects at low levels. But at level 30, I was still fighting men and crocodiles (and bears and wolves) with very few ‘monstrous’ foes. Sure they were higher level, but so was I, so the fights felt about the same.

From level 1-20 I fought in jungles, on desert islands and in ancient crypts. Since then I’ve fought in…jungles and ancient crypts. While there are 3 zones to hit after you leave Tortage, they don’t really feel all that much different.

It boils down to the fact that whether I played a character that was level 32 (the max I got to, and to be fair that isn’t even half-way to cap, maybe things get better if you push past these doldrums) and then switched to a character that was level 12, the game didn’t really feel any different. So what’s the point of playing an rpg with progression levels if the levels all feel the same?

What’s worse, there are no ‘extras’ to help prop up the gameplay. I do enjoy crafting in these games, but here you have to be level 20 to start harvesting, level 40 to start crafting, and level 50 to harvest tier 2 materials. So you spend 20 levels gathering ore and wood to either donate to your guild (which will quickly bypass the need for low-tier materials) or try to sell them on the broker. Yawn.

There are guild cities, but no personal housing. The guild buildings just kind of sit there. Eventually they’re supposed to give buffs but those aren’t in the game yet. I guess right now they’re just good for bragging rights. There are no ‘hobby’ activities like fishing, or gambling mini-games, or any of the other little ‘time-waster’ things to do that make a world feel more real.

Last item is a personal one, and not a problem with the game per se. Apparently the crux of the high-end game play is guild vs guild PVP, besieging player-built battle keeps and so forth. Which sounds fun, but which really require a fairly substantial guild. I’m generally the kind of MMO player that joins a small, intimate guild, or no guild at all. This time I joined a huge guild (400 characters, I think at one point 135 or so players). This meant we got to build a guild city really quickly and all that but…I never really got to know anyone in it. It was such a large guild that the chat channel might as well have been a public channel. My contributions to the guild city consisted of handing over materials and gold to someone who handed them up the chain to someone who did the actual building. Essentially I was just a cog in the wheel. And ya know, I’m a cog in the wheel in the real world. When I’m playing a game I want to matter.

And yet a small guild won’t have the resources to do all the fun PVP stuff that is supposed to exist in the end game. This is a design decision on the part of Funcom and it isn’t wrong, its just wrong for me. I know other folk that love being part of something huge like this.

So, farewell Age of Conan. I’ll probably come back to visit now and then, because I had a blast for the first few weeks. I’m sure I’ll have a blast for another few weeks after I give the game 6 months to ‘rest’ and the combat stops feeling so familiar.

The guild stuff, though…now I’m worried about Warhammer Online, which seems to be equally large-guild oriented. Hmmm….

Lively Launches

Posted on by Nimgimli

For quite some time we’ve heard rumors that Google was working on some kind of virtual world project.

Today, they launched Lively (I’m still trying to figure out if there’s any relation between this project and Sun’s Lively Kernel project, but I think not), a web-based virtual world product that, frankly, I’m still trying to figure out.

Of course they didn’t stop me from creating a Room. It’s quite fancy, don’t you think? /sarcasm

[EDIT: Well it seems like you can’t create new content at this point, just drag and drop stuff others have made. Which makes the whole exercise a lot less interesting to me at this point.]

Presumably, you’ll need to install Lively before you can see anything.

Turbine headed north, and to console land

Posted on by Nimgimli

Turbine Entertainment is looking for new headquarters in the Boston area (they’re currently south of Boston in Westwood, MA) and is adding staff. Among the jobs listed:

  • Senior Console Engineer (PS3 or Xbox 360)
  • QA Lead – Console (Xbox 360/PS3)

To the best of my knowledge, they don’t have any ‘officially announced’ console games at this point. Maybe we’ll hear something at E3?