New Horizions

Well, today I'm heading to a job interview. I'm excited and nervous. Should be fun to break the old routine. Wish me luck.

Grabbag and Potpouri

Well a couple of topics to cover today. I already got my rant out of the way. Time for some gaming news. We are now post-TGS. All kinds of Wii music announcements and Nintendo shit was made public last week. Nothing too spectacular to talk about there unless you like all the import RPGs.

It looks like "Good Old Games" has gone live with a public beta. You can get access to all the cool games of the late 1990's such as MDK and Citizen Kabuto and newer games like Colin McCre Rally 2005. It looks like its a game tap type setup, except no monthly fee, looks like you pay per game. $5-10 is a reasonable price for an older PC game when a NES game is going for $5 dollars on Wii's Virtual Console.

Rumors abound that Legendary Pictures is looking to purchase Epic Games. Epic's Mark Reign is trying to quell the rumors saying that the speculation is all false. This comes on the heals of the public announcement that Legendary and Epic are teaming up for the Gears of War movie. Reports say CliffyB is looking for a "Clive Owen" type to play the lead roll. Interesting.

MMO news out of LucasArts this week. It seems EA and LucasArts are departing on a MMO adventure of the StarWars kind. The Old Republic looking to be the next step from Bioware's Knight of the Old Republic standard RPG released a few years back. Could be good, could be bad, the recent rash of StarWars licenced games have sucked. (I'll make an exception for Lego StarWars.) The MMO space has a lot to chew on with WoW's 10 million users and growing.

Lord of the Rings Online's new expansion "The Mines of Moria" is due out November 18.

Valve's zombie-survival coop game "Left 4 Dead lands Nov. 18 as well. L4D is looking to be the multiplayer game of the year if it can make it on time.

Finally! Little Big Planet? Anyone play this yet? Looks kinda neat.

Can You Tell Me How this can be true.

Ok, so I'm reading an article on Bigdownload and it just so happens to be an interview with one of the designers of Battlefield Heroes. It seems to be your standard interview. What gets me here is that once again, folks at EA are telling us that the game is "out" and "released." James Salt along with several other key EA execs feel that when a game is in beta stage and people in the public are playing it consitutes a release of a game.

Hold the presses!!!! Wait, what? OK, DICE project lead James Salt says that "So, basically, Heroes is already out and we are adding new players every day." So by randomly selecting players to play your video game is the same as a finished product ready for everyone to play? He says they are taking a similar approace to Gmail, where they add users little at a time for stress testing. Does that mean the game "out" and "being played."

Some how I think not.

I will not fault DICE and EA for trying to actually do some testing on their product. By no means do I want them to rush, and even when the game is released since it is free to play we may still see some bugs, but we gladly accept that risk. Just don't tell me it's out when the game still can't be freely downloaded. Stop telling half-truths!!!

TGS on the Roll

Well, this week is the start of TGS, for the uninitiated Tokyo Game Show. It's held in Japan! Anyways, this week usually signifies alot of weird ass games and shit will be on display on your favorite gaming website. Most items will probably never reach these shores, but you can rest assured that you will get to see a huge stream of endless garbage and pictures of half-naked Japanese babes.

Is Retro Really Better?

My last entry was touting the wonders of days long passed. There is something to say for a nostalgic look into the past. However, one should not remain there and dwell upon what has happened. However, this seems to be a more and more popular trend among movie studios and video game developers.

I can understand that it is a very expensive undertaking to make new games. Ideas, designs, engines, marketing, etc. In a shaky economy with a fickle market, not every game is a sure bet.

This in mind, not taking risks can also be a bad proposition. Sticking to the safe bet can also lead your fan base to rise against you for desecrating something sacred. What brings me here today is the new Punch-Out trailer that was released. You can check it out here. Not only is Nintendo re-selling you your gaming past, but they are repackaging old ideas in new boxes. Along with this revelation, we also hear that they plan to release Pikmin and Metroid on the Wii. From what it sounds, they will be Wii ports of the original games. ( Wii consoles let you play Game Cube games) On the Xbox 360 we have an example of this. Bionic Comando: Rearmed. A 2D game made with 3D graphics in a 2D perspective. Sigh. I guess the same could be said for my baby TF2, but somehow I don't think it fits well into this paradigm. Not to unfairly pick on nintendo, but the 300 Mario Games. Paper Mario series, Pokemon, only to name a few.

I think what is happening is that developers, probably more so publishers want to have every game hit it bigtime. So, inorder to have success, they have to bank on ideas that were successful before. I think if this trend continues, devs are going to have to start giving us something else to chew on. Spice up the same-old same-old with new gameplay elements, I don't just mean adding RPG elements to shooters. I think the EA Sports franchises suffer from this quite a bit. But then again, how do you make the yearly purchase of Madden worthwhile? I sure as heck don't want to spend another 60 dollars to see Bret Farve on the Jets instead of the Packers. Then again, I'm not a crazy fantasy football jock either. (Go Niners)

Use your brains, think of some creative ways to incorporate neat little minigames or quirks into the old gameplay. Paper Mario on the gamecube had retarded turnbased action, where in Super Paper Mario they added a 3D sidescrolling (if you can call it that) platforming element. Better yet, do what Valve does and really critically look at what game you want to make, and move to a cycle of constant improvement. This is where strong business leaders can make a difference. Implement kaisen or the like philosphy into your teams, let them try and try again. If it worked for Honda and Toyota, I'm pretty sure it can work for game developers.

We like our old games, but we also like new and interesting ideas. I think as the majority of gamers grow older, they are looking for more visceral games. Gone are the days of the mindless shoot-em-up. Shooters today have stories, characters, and (to me) some emotional attachment (HL2). You can only use gimmicks so many times before the vail of pretty graphics is lifted. I think story telling will be the next big leap for video games in the next 3-5 years. If devs and publishers spent more time thinking about what they want to make and how to innovate rather than just pushing out garbage as fast as possible; people would buy your new ideas, and quite possibly, like them.

Battlefield WTF

This post was originally from my 1up.com blog. Thought it would fit well here.

As a long time player of the Battlefield franchise from DICE, I've always wondered what has been going on behind closed doors.What kind of wacky people work there, and do they have drunk beta testers?

Before I dig in, let me tell a short story. Back in the day (1999), the LAN Party Crew and I would always partake in prolonged sessions of Codename: Eagle. For those of you who don't know, it was the grandfather of Battlefield 1942. It had all the cool features that BF does, planes (zeppelins), tanks, buggies, and crappy physics. It was always pretty awesome to jump in a zeppelin and ram it into your pal who was trying to ride his motorcycle through "No Man's Land," or try to load a tank into the back of it. After many, many hours of playing you discover that there are obvious flaws in the game. After a while, we all migrated to Counter-Strike, and Codename:Eagle slowly faded into distant memory.

Fast forward to 2002. We came back for a big helping of Battlefield 1942 when it appeared on the scene. Devoting hours to online play, driving the carriers, submarines, and tanks was pretty much all we did for a year or so. Desert Combat Mod took over our play list once that was released. BF1942 shared that same wacky game play style it inherited from Codename:Eagle. The game never took itself too seriously. Mixing the right amount of "arcadey-ness" with history/quasi-realism. So, we were able to over look its shortcomings. Some of the same physics glitches CE suffered from. If you parked your car, even on the slightest of hills, the car would slide down sideways like it was on rolling casters or ball bearings. Or the fact that If you tried to stand on a moving boat, you'd eventually shuffle off without even hitting W, A, S, or D. Apparently, relativity doesn't apply to this video game.

Some time in 2003 maybe early 2004, the news of Battlefield 2 hit the streets. Offering a new mix of modern combat weapons, squad warfare and RTS-like battlefield commanders. We were excited to say the least. A chance for nerdlets to exercise their M1-Abrams driving skills and fly choppers in the quasi-real middle east environment. BF2 was released into open arms, wholly accepting the game play changes. Again, we played hours of this shit. Running over pesky snipers with the FAV was our favorite thing to do. However, if you tried to shoot down a chopper while parked on a hill, Good luck! Your car would eventually slide down the hill out of cover until it reached flat ground. How obnoxious.

Now, for most games this would have been a happy "end-of-story." The game is released to a loving community. Waste hours flying, bombing, driving, and hiking around these maps. However it wasn't. Here comes my questions for DICE. "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?"

I will admit, while DICE was still a separate entity, they were dedicated to patching the game, trying to make it better. Subsequent patches to the game tweaked game balance. As Shawn Elliot pointed out in his posting DICE had some trouble to say the least. This could be overlooked because of the fact that patches were out on a monthly basis. That is, until they were acquired by EA. Then BF2 became the red-headed stepchild, and was dropped like a rock. They took BF2, slapped some candy on it, and called it BF2142. In my opinion, this game was a mod sold at full price with their expansion-happy overlords pushing crap on gamers daily. Like any other BF fan, I bought into the propaganda and picked it up anyways.

I think DICE released one BF2 patch after 2142 came out, and pretty much let it die just about a year and a half after release. With 1942, the game's longevity came from its modding community. People played 1942 even past the launch of BF2. BF2 was left to rot in the online pit of hackers and cheaters, while 2142 suffered from "beta patches" and horrible testing problems.

Now, what the hell was DICE thinking? Why would you abandon one of the most popular online shooters in the world, almost over night. Why would you release patches for a game that break online play, that cause gamers to have to reinstall the entire game. What drugs do you have that we don't? I can't answer those questions. I can only speculate that EA's corporate culture contributed to the pollution. Pressing the devs to push out games to meet a quota of "cha-chang" and bilk gamers out of their hard earned money. But I really want to know is why, after almost 10 years, is there still the damn glitch from Codename:Eagle in BF2. Why can i park my car on a hill and it slides sideways? In my circle of friends, we always joke that DICE never actually made a new game engine. They just kept piecemealing shit over the top of C:E and slapped a new name on it. The physics always feel kind of clunky compared to other games. I can't back that up, but I would really like to know what is under the hood of BF2/2142.

I don't own an Xbox360, but I would guess that if you park a car on a hill in Bad Company, that it rolls sideways. I'm praying to a deity that DICE is actually making improvements to BF:Heroes while in beta phase. Hopefully, this isn't just some marketing strategy to show advertisers that they have a willing base of sheep players to subject to their new business model. Time will tell and lets hope history doesn't repeat in the Battlefield universe.