We Are ODST

Wow.

As if the Halo 3 commercials (especially the one with the old soldier talking about how Master Chief gave the UNSC marines hope as he gazes tearfully at the now-famous diorama) weren’t enough to get you right there, Bungie/Microsoft go and pull this on us.

The academic in me also sees how this ad is a great way to reflect on the life of a real-world soldier. The first third of this ad, you would think you were watching a documentary about real-life special forces.  The second act might be fictional soldiers fighting aliens, but it is no less intense of a battle–and not that dissimilar from the kind of confusion and danger experienced in an actual combat scenario.  And the final third of the ad–well, the tone that a funeral scene conveys is never anything less than humbling and bleak, when said scene is done well.

And then at the end, the ODST put their helmets back on and run off to battle, ever-vigilant even in the face of grief.

So come on, college professors, let’s get Halo in the class room and get students talking about how it’s an examination of duty, courage, and sacrifice!

Star Wars: The Old Republic–The trailer that will make you weep for joy like a broken and humbled man.

I don’t care that it doesn’t show any game play.  I don’t care that it uses tired slow-down/speed-up tricks.  I don’t care that there is no release date for this game.  All I care is that it’s on the horizon, and there is no way that it will be anything but pure sweet nuggets of joy.  This game is going to be like bacon-wrapped Twinkies–dipped in chocolate.

Seriously, the Star Wars faithful have had to go through a lot this past decade.  It’s time we had something to shine over.

Microsoft E3 Keynote

For us video gamers, E3 is like a sports draft, election night, and a hot date all rolled into one.  Massive amounts of speculation to be confirmed or denied (in real time, thanks to the Internet: you crazy kids who never had to wait for your EGM features don’t know how good it is nowadays), a few surprises, and–if all goes right–a great feeling when it’s all over with.

Microsoft popped out their keynote today, and I’ve got to say that my previous “meh” attitude about the rest of the year has reached nearly debilitating amounts of joy.  It’s gonna be a good twelve months for 360 and PC gamers.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I was there.  I would have love to have been there, but I’m not there.  I’m not a well-traveled video game journalist.  I’m just a fat dude with a laptop and a reliable Interent connection.  So if you want professional, in-depth coverage and commentary, check out Kotaku and Joystiq.

If you want my opinion on the big news items from today, read below.

• Halo: Reach is indeed in the works. Microsoft rolled out a teaser that would make Michael Bay stand up and clap, and it ended with a Spartan saying “We’re not going anywhere.”  The Halo games may be the finest recruitment tool that the US military never realized it had.  The trailer implies that Spartans, not Marines or ODST, will be the main player-characters, and I am using the pluarl because I see this as a squad-based shooter.  Maybe even third-person.  After all, also revealed was the “Firefight” mode for Halo 3: ODST (think Horde mode), and 3rd-person shooter Gears of War did kinda-sorta steal the thunder of the Halo series.  If this game ends up being a 3rd-person tactical shooter, remember: you heard it here first folks.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic will have full-voice acting. I’m cool with this, so long as you can skip the dialogue and get to the freakin’ quest.  In even bigger news, the first cinematic trailer is out and it is beautiful–really beautiful.  This is what the prequel trilogy should have been, but no: we’ve got Jar Jar Binks and Darth Vader giving a slack-jawed “Noooo!!!” at the end of it all.  I will be picking this game up, and if any game can kill WoW it is this one.  I don’t think it will, due to economics of both time and money (that’s a whole new post), but last time I checked there are more people who don’t play WoW than do; this game could bring in those who would have never picked up an MMO otherwise.
• Summer of Arcade is back, or: more reasons to stay broke. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and a re-imagined TMNT: Turtles in Time won’t be hard sells.  Shadow Complex from Epic Games looks pretty sweet, for Contra fans, but it damn sure better have co-op.
• Metal Gear Solid: Rising is coming to the Xbox 360. Awesome.  Five hours of cut scenes punctuated by a few seconds of game play here and there.  I loved every part of Metal Gear Solid 3 except for the cinemas and the original Metal Gear Solid truly captured my imagination, but am I the only person in the world who thinks that Metal Gear Solid 2 was the world’s biggest vanity project?  Am I also the only person in the world who has not played Metal Gear Solid 4–and is perfectly fine with it?  In short: life was fine without a new Metal Gear Solid, life will continue to be fine.  Doesn’t mean I won’t buy it, doesn’t mean I will.
• Ozzy Osbourne is in Brutal Legend. \m/
• Project Natal is going to eliminate the need for the controller…supposedly. I’m sure this will be awesome for at first, but I see too much potential for gimmickry.  That, and so many games require complex body motions: can you imagine playing Gears of War with your body?  Yeah, I’d have a coronary.  Peter Molyneaux, who gave us the Fable series, is involved so we’ll have at least one innovative game, but I see this quickly becoming Wii Remote for the 360.
• Left 4 Dead 2 will be released this year. Too soon.  Way, way too soon.  It will apparently bring lots of cool stuff to the table–more melee weapons and an advanced AI Director–but Valve, would it have hurt you to sit on this thing for a year so I’d feel like I had gotten my money’s worth from buying the first game?  Are times that tough?  Oh, and this game will be set in the South.  Get your stereotypes ready, boys!  EE-HAW!  Break out the Beam and put your arm ’round your cousin’s waist–we gwine to a shindig!
• Nintendo continues to betray its once longtime fans and focus entirely on bringing in new gamers who may or may not stick with the hobby. Okay, we don’t know that for sure.  Their keynote is later this week.  I’m pretty sure I’m right however.  I’ll bet this year they’ll announce Wii Music 2: this time, all you do is put the disc in the machine and dance.  It’s like a CD player with Miis!  What fun!

YOU NO BUY POTIONZ YOU CAN NOT HAS WINZ!

I was so excited to finally get my hands on The Witcher, a PC RPG that I had been wanting to get into ever since it released but only recently had a gaming PC on which to play it.  I bought the game before I even finished buying the parts for the computer, knowing that it was going to be a favorite of mine.  Until today, it has been.

You see, at the end of the first act of the game there is this boss.  Earlier in the game, you had the option of buying a potion from a witch that would make killing this boss easier.  I forgot to get the potion and…well, come to find out when the developers said “easy” they really meant “possible.”

That is the problem with any kind of RPG except for the MMO variety: you are punished for not doing things just so.  Unless you are either a pre-cog or an OCD gamer that must gather all possible pick-ups, you will get ganked by the Big Bad.  It happens in every game that Square/Square-Enix has ever made (I swear they get a rise out of knowing that somewhere they have made a gamer cry), and it even happens with games that have RPG elements but are not themselves RPGs (I’m looking at you, Ninja Gaiden).

Isn’t this a bit unfair to gamers?  I mean, I didn’t expect to breeze throug the boss fight; I expected it to be challenging, especially since I wasn’t pimped out with all of the requisite power-ups, but I didn’t expect the AI to slap their “I Win” button just because I made an honest mistake.  I forgot the potion!  Big deal!  Let me load a game save right before the fight, run back to the witch, buy said potion, lay the hurt down and–Bob’s your uncle–I get to progress in the game that I paid for.

No.  Instead, I’ve got to reload a game save from way the deuce back and buy the potion, then re-do a whole bunch of quests leading up to climatic moment. It’s poor design in what is otherwise so far a good game.  No, it’s not poor design.  It’s sloppy design.  Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

That’s okay though; in a fit of frustration, I just started clean over; I even scaled the difficulty back to “Easy” for good measure.  While I love overcoming a challenge and find more intense games more rewarding than cake walks (re: anything for the Wii), I get plenty of challenge playing competitively and/or working as a team in games with better balance.

Sure, I could uninstall and trade the game in, but I would lose money on that.  Besides, I did inherently like the game: the lead character Geralt is cool, I enjoyed the short stories from which the game was inspired (look up The Last Wish if you want a good read; Blood of Elves comes out April 28th and I cannot wait), and it’s a beautiful game with some deep mechanics.

I just doubt I’m going to like it as much now.

Paying for Resident Evil 5 Versus Mode is stupid.

First they made us pay for costumes in Street Fighter IV; now, Capcom is making us fork over some dough for competitive multiplayer in Resident Evil 5.  They have multitudes and multitudes of excuses defenses for this: the time spent programming this mode, the extra burden on the servers, delivering it to the consumers–all of those things cost money, so they’re kindly passing the costs on to us.

Funny how Gears of War 2, Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty 5, Halo 3, Halo Wars, Killzone 2, Resistance 2, and a whole SLEW of other games come packaged with full online and offline offerings for both competitive and cooperative play.  It’s also funny how the publishers of those games don’t think that we should pay extra to make use of those modes, and it’s hilarious how the extra strain on their servers aren’t so overwhelming that the gamers have to shell out another $5 to play these modes.

Seriously Capcom: do you think that we’re all stupid?

I wasn’t excited about RE5 at all to begin with.  Judging from the demo, it seems to be a game that has a severe identity crisis.  Now it’s yet another way to rip gamers off.  Five bucks for a feature that the game could have easily shipped with?  Seriously?  This isn’t an expansion we’re talking about.  This isn’t extra levels or characters: this is versus mode.

While not as big a rip as the extra costumes for Street Fighter IV (I’m thoroughly convinced that crap is just paying to have an on-disc feature unlocked), it’s still a pretty big rip-off.  It’s like paying to play Slayer in Halo 3, or having to pay an additional subscription fee to access PvP realsm (or even instanced PvP) in World of Warcraft. Both of those sounds ridiculous; about as ridiculous as Capcom’s pyramid scheme.

Prince of Persia: I Think I’ll Be Sitting This One Out

Heralded as the last big game of this year (after two months of escalating debt!), Prince of Persia dropped Tuesday.  I was going to get it, because, you know, I don’t really need money; however, after reading the reviews from Kotaku and Wired, I think I’ll be waiting for this one to hit the bargain shelf.  Essentially, it seems to be a pretty, pretty game with a great narrative experience, but it doesn’t offer a degree of challenge that makes any game seem rewarding.

In other words, it’s like another one of Ubisoft’ recent releases: fun to study and examine as a humanities work, but not that great when it comes to mechanics.   Assassin’s Creed was a beautiful display of graphics and an interesting case study of multi-layered story-telling, but the game play was so canned I just couldn’t be made to care.  I do want to play Prince of Persia mind you, and I’m not a fan of renting games, so maybe next summer when I just want something fresh and new, I’ll pick it up.

I did pick up The Orange Box last night.  Yes, yes: I know that I am a shame to my God, my Country, and my Mama for not getting it before now.  I know that it was folly to pay $15 for Portal: Still Alive from Live Arcade when I could have dropped the same amount of money on a used copy of the five-in-one package at my local Gamestop.  However, I–please don’t hurt me–never was big fan of Half-Life.  I still don’t think it will be my favorite series ever, but as I’ve played more games I’ve paid more attention to design and development and have a new appreciation for the classics.  So chalk it up to a more mature taste in games now, but after playing Portal and Left 4 Dead, I want to go back and experience all of Valve’s work.  First thing I’m doing when I get my PC is buy the original Half-Life from Steam.

Four day weekend coming up, so I will be gaming until my eyes bleed–and watching movies as well, and I’m launching on the ambitious goal of reading R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Do’Urden saga from start to finish–not all in one weekend mind you, but I will be reading those books exclusively until I’m done with the whole story.  Then I will wish once again that I had a real, honest to goodness Drizzt game on my hands–maybe one where he joins Batman in saving Gotham City from zombies!

Nintendo Holds Press Conference, Continues to Disappoint

Today, Nintendo held a pretty big press conference, possibly to apologize for saying “screw you” to their core audience at E3.  I would have loved for them to unveil a new Zelda game, an updated re-imagining of Kid Icarus, or a Wii hard drive–even though I no longer have a Wii, I’d go out and buy another one next week if Nintendo finally unleashed all of that console’s potential (or just hit up my little brother, who I kind of gave my Wii to).

Unfortunately, what we got was even more…stuff that…well, it does all kinds of stuff is what it does.  Nothing particularly useful or enjoyable, nothing that moves the industry forward, but it’s…well, let’s look at the highlights.

• The New DS. The Nintendo DSi will be slimmer (no backwards compatibility), have a digital camera, and support SD cards.  You can load MP3s onto that SD card and play it back over the console.  It’s not a bad piece of hardware, if you don’t already own a Nintendo DS…and a digital camera…and an MP3 player.  I don’t know what Nintendo’s thing is for re-releasing their portables a hundred times (Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color followed by Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Advance SP finally to be wrapped up with DS and DS Lite), but it’s getting old.  Real old.  I understand that the Big N has to constantly draw in a new consumer base, but I’d much rather they spend more time developing hardware and let it loose when it’s at its peak.
• The Wii Speak channel. Wow, a place where you can talk with your friends online–after exchanging 97-digit friend codes and buying a $30 peripheral.  Cutting edge that is.  It’s called Skype, Nintendo.  You might have heard of it.
• Club Nintendo. You get free stuff for spending money; you earn points when you buy stuff, and you can trade those points in for swag.  Unless that free swag is more games or really sweet collectibles, I just don’t see how it would be worth the effort–not to mention that it’s quite obvious that this is just another way for Nintendo to print more money, not to reward their loyal fan base who has kept them afloat when they were the laughing stock of mainstream gaming (the Gamecube years).
• The “Play for Wii” collection. These will be Gamecube games revamped for game play on the Wii and re-released for the white box.  I have to say, if Nintendo uses this as a way to get some obscure Gamecube titles back on the market, I can’t complain.  Pikmin is the first game scheduled to come off the line.  I can’t hate too harshly on this, other than Nintendo has done this before (Game Boy Advance Classics Series), and I’d rather have dev teams coming up with all new titles–considering that the Wii plays Gamecube games just fine.
• Finally, the biggest joke from the whole thing was that Nintendo is now allowing downloading of games to and uploading games from SD cards. Seriously?  This is their solution to a constrained hard drive on the Wii?  Not a USB hard drive, which would have made a whole lot of hot, steaming sense?  Talk about screwing over your consumers.  The Wii only works with 2 GB or less SD cards; the MSRP on a 2 GB SanDisk card is $39.99, while a Microsoft 120 GB HD costs $180.  You would have to buy 60 of those cards–at forty bucks a pop–to get the same amount of storage space.  Mind=blown.  The only comfort we can take in is that there is probably not 120 GB of content worth paying for on the Wii Shop channel.

So, there’s Nintendo’s big press conference.  There were a few announcements about games–a release date of March 2009 for MadWorld and Nintendo is going to be the publisher of The Conduit–but that’s your big news.  Terribly underwhelming I know.

Apple Throws the Gauntlet: Steve Jobs calls the iPod Touch the best portable gaming device.

I love Apple products.  It’s easy to get mad at the company for coming across as a conglomerate of self-absorbed posers, but it’s hard to argue against the iPod as being your best bet for a portable digital music player (for now, at least…I hear the new Zunes are going to be awesome).  Once one uses the Mac OS, it’s really easy to hate Windows for being a clunky, jumbled mess; the Mac OS is clean, streamlined, and can handle some pretty sturdy multitasking.  Love the “cult of Mac” or not, Apple puts out some fine merchandise  well worth its hefty price tag (again, for now; costs are climbing, and I’m sure there is some economic theory that states people will sacrifice quality for cost–that theory is probably called something such as “common sense” or “fundamental money management”).

Gaming, however, is not what one thinks of when they think of those shiny white laptops with the oh-so-cheerful apple all lit-up on the back.  This fact always struck me as odd, considering that Apple computers are marketed as being more fun and lighthearted than the corporate world PCs; that’s true if your idea of fun is Garage Band and iMovie.  My idea of fun, however, is video games, and Apple computers just are not hitting in that area of the market.  While EA is happy to port their titles over to the Mac–and all of Blizzard’s discs pull double-duty–a gamer is hard pressed to find AAA titles such as Crysis, BioShock, or any of the MMOs (except for WoW, Everquest, and EVE Online) on Apple hardware; for those games, you need to use dual-booting software (such as Boot Camp) or invest in a gaming PC rig (such as myself–the next paycheck starts the countdown!).

Which is why I’m so surprised–and rolling with laughter–about Steve Jobs saying that the iPod Touch is the best portable device for gaming.

Well, to that, I have one thing to say:

Now, I don’t have an iPod Touch (yet), but I have played around with one.  Yes, the touch screen is a level of ease and intuition that I have never experienced.  Yes, there are a bunch of fun apps for the machine (there is an AWESOME Star Wars lightsaber app that shouldn’t be as entertaining as it is).  Yes, it looks as sexy as a girl wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses talking at length about her level 53 Night Elf Druid while frying up a pan of bacon and popping open a can of Bawls, but the best portable device for gaming?

Steve, you do realize that, while you have some interesting games for your device, the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP are built from the ground up for gaming?  You do realize that while your device has that really cool touch screen, the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP have dedicated face buttons capable of performing multiple functions–and the DS has a touch screen as well?  You do realize that since the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP are engineered for gaming that developers will be making the deep, complex games for those platforms and sending the mini-games and coffee-break puzzles your way, right?

I could agree with Jobs’ statement had he added something like “for the casual gamer” or “for people constantly on the go.”  After all, just like not everybody that likes playing video games wants to play World of Warcraft or reach the top of the leaderboards in Call of Duty 4, not everybody who wants something fun to do on the subway or at the airport will want to pull out their Sony PSP for some God of War:Chains of Olympus; they might just want a game that will help them take their mind off of their boredom and not tax their mind even more so than it already is–a game to relax them, not pump them up.

However, to call the iPod Touch the best portable device for gaming is folly, much like calling the Macbook the best computer for gaming.  The iPod Touch is a great piece of multi-functional hardware, but a gaming device it is not; gaming is just one of the many things it can do, and when it comes to gaming–portable or otherwise–I’ll go with the masters, not the jack-of-all-trades.

I will say, though, that since Steven has labelled his device with such greatness, he better deliver.  Gamers are a harsh and unforgiving lot, and if one does not exceed their promises in this industry then one is crushed and shamed for all time in the eyes of the consumer.  Jobs says that the iPod Touch is the best portable gaming device one can own?  Prove it.

He can start by bringing in an iPod Touch port of Ninja Gaiden II.

Nintendo Wii A Disappointment

After reading the E3 report in September’s Game Informer, I have to say that the Nintendo Wii could end up being a critical failure/commercial success.

I won’t go into details about Game Informer’s coverage (I do encourage you to go out and buy the magazine), but I will say that the biggest disappointment was the lack of announcing a Zelda, Mario, or Metroid title for next year.  At every major gaming convention and conference in years past, Nintendo has always unveiled a new entry for their big three; not so this time–not even a Pokemon game.

Instead, the big news was Animal Crossing: City Folk and Wii Music.  Animal Crossing looks to be Second Life for the Wii, with an almost-exclusive focus on online social interaction, and Wii Music could be the most pathetic concept for a piece of software I have ever seen: up to four players use their Wii Remotes to make music (and by music, I mean noise), and nobody has to keep rhythm or play correct notes; you just sort of bang around and see what comes out.  Yes, it does encourage creativity and exploration, but it has no element of challenge, and I find it really hard to call something a game if there is not an element of challenge; and I find it hard to praise a software’s capacity for creation when there is no sense of design or precision about it.

Also, Nintendo has effectively shut-out third part developers, keeping them in the dark about new peripherals that could have made for some really awesome games: Wii Motion Plus (an attachment to the remote that makes for better motion detecting) and Wii Speak (a powerful microphone that allows for online chat).

At this point, its obvious that Nintendo is interested in one market and one market only: the casual gamers.  There is nothing wrong with this, but there is something wrong with abandoning all the potential that your console has in favor of pandering to people who have never held a controller when it is the dedicated fans that have kept you in business during the darkest of times (the Gamecube years anyone?).  Yes, please bring in new gamers to the fold.  Yes, please make games that appeal to everybody.  However, don’t do so at the expense of making rich and rewarding experiences for those gamers who want something with some meat to it–or for those casual gamers who want something more once they are done with playing cooking simulators and mini-game compilations.

Twenty years ago, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda attracted people to video games.  They were simple in their design, but had a complexity to them that was not apparent at first, a complexity that made for satisfaction and excitement, a complexity that built a sense of exploration and discovery.  The Nintendo Wii had so much potential to change the way we think about and play games while renewing the fun we all had playing those early titles; unfortunately, the Big N seems disinterested in anything but producing instant gratification.

Thank goodness we still have the Nintendo DS; at least that console has some quality game play.