Overheard at a local EB: talk of a $50 price cut for game consoles at E3 next week. Can you imagine? $150 for a PS2 or an XBox, and $100 for a Gamecube? Sweet!

If the rumor is true, I’d love to know who is driving the cuts. Sony seems mighty comfortable in first place, so I see no competitive reason for them to make a cut. MS is bleeding red ink every time it sells an XBox now and it seems like a price cut would be a real economic hardship for them. So maybe Nintendo? It’s in 3rd place and struggling…but you can really imagine Gamecube sales picking up when the little boxes are only $100. But then the question becomes, would MS and Sony bother following Nintendo down right away?

Eh, it’ll probably be just a rumor, but it was a store manager talking in a corner to one of his clerks. Good thing I have keen ears!

Very early impressions are that Return to Castle Wolfenstein for the XBox is a winner. It feels real polished and it looks like XBL support is good. Controls are fine and nicely customizable, and there’s some new content for the XBox version. Now granted, I’ve only played it solo so far (but I could spy on my friends and see their ratings in Live, even without actually playing against them)!

Return to Castle Wolfenstein for the XBox (supposed to have very solid XBL play)
dotHack: Mutation for the PS2 (Part 2 of the ongoing saga!)

Here’s an article from Reuters about new enhancements coming to XBox Live! service. Specifically some interesting enhancements to the lobby experience.
Microsoft set to debut Xbox Live upgrade-sources

The latest Dragon Empires Newsletter just hit my in-box, and there’s been a big change to the game. They’ve opted to implement a class system! This is a real shame, in my opinion. I love the freedom that skill bases character systems give.

They do have their reasons, though:

Firstly, in considering a classless system we decided it would be too easy with our skills system (a total of 30 skills split between primary and secondary categories) to have players produce ineffective ‘gimped’ characters. Looking at the problem we saw we could stop that by heavily limiting player choice or through slowing progression so most character choices were made late when the player was more experienced. Neither of those options particularly appealed to us as they clearly have drawbacks.

The second problem was we felt players would tend towards a best-fit skills template, so called ‘min-maxing’ that would see maybe 3 or 4 different types of characters dominate with many skills and character templates left ignored. The only way of avoiding this would be through the finest balancing of skills to ensure all skills were totally equal and as we know this is almost impossible!

So instead we have devised a system whereby your character chooses a class which provides you with a selection of skills you can chose to level to varying degrees. Which skills (of three) you chose as a primary (you get the others as back-ups as your character develops) and to what rank you take each of the secondary skills is up to you, providing you with your own unique character while still having a character of a certain style.

Follow the more link for the full (tentative) list of classes Continue reading “Dragon Empires”

So I’m trying out a new service, after being horribly scarred by my Star Wars: The Clone Wars experience. The service, which I can’t name since its still in kindof limited ‘beta’ release, is an XBox exclusive mail-order game rental deal. You pay $20/month (which seems a bit steep to me) and can have 2 games rented at any time. Basically the NetFlix model, only for games. There are no late fees…you can keep a game as long as you want.

For a hardcore XBox gamer, $20/month is probably fine. But I go weeks without turning on my XBox while I’m wrapped up in a PC, PS2 or GameCube game. On the other hand, if it keep me from buying a Clone Wars every 2 months, it’ll save me money.

I got an email that my first two titles (Apex and TimeSplitters 2) shipped today, so we’ll see how long it takes for them to arrive.

Just stumbled onto the Rubies of Eventide site. It’s an online RPG now in open beta. There used to be a pay-to-play MUD with the same name, but this one is graphical and from a brief glance, looks good! No clue how it plays, but I mean to find out!

This is old news, but I’m way behind in my gaming reading. At the DICE Summit there was a panel of game developers talking about doing sequels. Check out this excerpt:

…the panel was asked how the designers go about building a sequel; if they follow their own vision or if they try to cater to fans. Interestingly, most of the panel admitted that it’s hard to actually gauge the likes and dislikes of the fans, because focus group testing isn’t always efficient and the opinion of the vocal minority that tend to dominate message boards may not necessarily represent all the fans of the game…

Read the whole article

My heart sang when I read the bit I’ve put in bold. The idea that the screaming arses that populate most busy gaming boards aren’t being taken at face value…maybe gaming has a prayer of growing up, after all.

Anarchy Online got a patch today, re-invigorating the in-game mission system. From the patch notes:

The auto-generated mission areas have received a major upgrade in looks and layout, and should now be both more varied, challenging and visually pleasing.

New dangers in missions include proximity mines, cameras and gun turrets. The “Map Reader Upgrade – Machines” will help somewhat against some of these hazards, and you might be able to locate a central control unit for them. In addition, more variation has been added to creatures found in missions. In fact, some completely new creature variants will only be found in missions. Watch out!

Some other changes with missions Continue reading “Anarchy Online Update”

I’m dividing my “review” of Star Wars: The Clone Wars for the XBox into 2 parts, one covering offline, the other online. Here’s the smack on the offline mode. Rather than rewrite stuff, I’m just going to post a couple of rants I left on an XBox message board.

The solo game is, to me, more annoying than fun. It’s very much a “you against the world” twitch fest. I thought it’d be slightly more simulator-ish with a bit more strategy to it. But its really a straight forward thumb-numbing shooter. Now, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but I was just expecting something slightly less arcade-style. I also hate games with whiney wingmen. 🙂 And ones where, if your wingman gets his or her self killed, its game over for you. And enemies spawn behind you. OK, enough grumping… 🙂

On the plus side, Continue reading “Clone Wars review, pt 1”