As a fun rebuttal to the Angsty Gaijin’s take on the “wisening” up of game companies, I am afraid that the industry has shown that they haven’t wised up, in fact they pull the same old pony tricks.
Now, and this is hardly sentimental, I look at games with a very particular lense of my adolescence. I believe that the greatest period of games began with the coin clink at the beginning of Super Mario World and ended with Halo 2’s credits.
That’s a hell of a period, but I’ll explain why.
There were games of varying quality in this period, but I think you could point to any game of any merit (including Spyro, Final Fantasy 8, and even Super Mario World) and you could single out the faults. Looking back at the developer diaries and making of the games, you can definitely see that games had some cuts. You could see the rush.
Super Mario World has been considered rushed by its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto. But it is a fantastic game. Its color palate is still unbeaten, and you can see the tiny points where rushing may or may not have occurred. It’s not a game without its flaws, but in truth it was a semi-rushed release game that withstood any evident criticism. It also displayed Mode 7, in some very rudimentary forms at the end. But Mode 7 was the beginning of mature 3D console gaming. It showed an imperfect solution to a huge gaming problem…
great minds can overcome hardware limitations.
Steven Hawking would agree with that.
And if you look at most games from that era, be they on the Nintendo 64 with Star Wars: Pod Racer, or Final Fantasy 7’s numerous discs, there were few problems that couldn’t be solved with a little bit of spitshine and polish.
With the Xbox’ storage and horsepower, a lot went out the window. Gone were the ideas that you couldn’t have a massive game, gone were the ideas that online gaming on a console wasn’t a mere diversion, but a serious competition for the PC.
Also, with that game, it marked the first time that a well-made game would be considered irrevocably flawed. The criticism of game decisions was never louder, the flaws of the experiments never more glaring.
Now, if you have to change discs, it’s a crime (RE4). Or don’t have progressive scan. Or use and ship with a ridiculously expensive and poorly assembled controller (DDR). You can’t have a shitty camera (Ninja Gaiden II) the way you could with Ninja Gaiden. Even the big lads can’t escape. Since Halo 2, no Mario, nor Metal Gear, nor Final Fantasy, nor Smash Brothers, nor Zelda has been considered half as good as what came before.
Take it another way. Ico is a fucking brilliant game. Shadows of the Colossus is better in many ways. But most gamers harp on about Colossus’ length and pant heavily at the thought of more Ico.
Criticism… has changed.
There are things about Halo 2 that unleashed a different wave and mentality in the internet, the way no semi-perfect game had before. It raised the bar and made gamers more aware of a game’s flaws. Suddenly, the experience of a great game was jarred by deadlines. Choices were made that weren’t vetted properly. And it affected the game every single step of the way.
Spyro couldn’t cut it in this climate. The great early games of the Gamecube, the charm if imperfect world of the Prince of Persia remake. All those games of PS2 and PSX origin that you can smile about now (Ehrgheiz)… ah. Those were the days. Tony Hawk used to make great games. You wouldn’t know it now. In a post Halo 2 world, no Tony Hawk game has come close to the hype or plaudits of the original.
That’s not to say there aren’t great games. That would be a lie. It’s just to say that there’s a remarkable difference in the way a game’s flaws are perceived by the buying public that has made anything short of perfection forgivable.
Mirror’s Edge, as a hasty 3D Playstation 2 concept, would be forgiven for its poor mechanics 6 years ago. Banjo and Kazooie Nuts and Bolts would be forgiven for spending too much time not having fun. Metal Gear would be forgiven for its lengthy prose, and the Wii Codes wouldn’t be such a pain if we didn’t know any better.
But Halo 2 was the shifting point.
Now flaws are unforgivable, and concepts have to be perfectly executed. This falls in contrary to the publisher’s main goal of making money. They need to make shortcuts, but nothing ever captured the cheesy and acceptable charm of Bowser floating around in bad, pixely Mode 7.
Now games like Superman 64 existed before Halo 2; this is not an argument about bad games or the like. Bad games are bad. Flawed games are now bad, when before they were damn neat and maybe a ton of fun.
Part of the problem is that, yes, the economy changed. But gaming opinion took a more negative slant on itself faster than the financial markets. Games still sold, but suddenly store like Gamestop were considered a prime threat. Why would you ever want to sell our neat game?
The other part of the problem is that games in 3D, with such elevated graphics and story, cannot settle for anything short of perfection. Is marketing finally loosening its grip on the consumer?
No such luck, I’m afraid. Hype floats the Wii in many forms, and Motor Storm still sold a ton. If you took any of the recent Sonic games and push Spyro in his place, you wouldn’t sell half as many of the same game.
Marketing still works. Games will always have flaws and rushed cuts and deadlines, but until our mindset changes, it will be game over for more good ideas. Will it change? No clue, but I do know what Mario did. It began with a clink, opened a colorful world, and began a time where anything, truly, was possible. Even if it wasn’t perfect, it sure was fun. I hope we can go back there someday. That’s a fight we should finish.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Saturday, October 4, 2008
DS Sigh
Color me underwhelmed, but Nintendo has done a significant brush-off (again) to its loyal fanbase.
See, what Nintendo fails to realize is that some point in its illustrious history, many of its fans grew up. They bought big TV’s, and sound systems that handle fiber optic cables. They became jaded gamers who loved the retro lovin. I mean… LOVE IT. Mega Man 9 as a theory is what gaming is about.
The DSi is not about the evolution of gaming. None of its new elements (3 megapixel camera, SD compatibility) really do it for me. What they’ve managed to do with this device is create the perfect Christmas present for a young kid.
Imagine you’re a parent and your kid asks for several things for Christmas. A DS, and Ipod, and a camera…
Well, Nintendo’s got you covered, babycakes! As a retail worker, the DS age group ABSOLUTELY ASKS for those items every Christmas and birthday season. And for the low low price of 180 bucks (plus the cost of an SD card) you can give them everything they want!
And these aren’t kids who want Game Boy Advance compatibility! No! They don’t want/need that. Their Pokemon was never Red, nor was it Leaf! This new DS is everything that my generation doesn’t want or need.
And well, that’s a bit insulting. I really can’t blame this move on their part, but I can’t help wishing for more. The precipitous drop in battery life makes me sigh; I know how the original portable wars were won, and it wasn’t via color or speed, but how long the damn Game Boy lasted.
The lack of a graphic upgrade also makes me sigh. Arguably, if they want to put the PSP to bed, they should to it soundly. If the Wii is destined to be shovelware, then the DS should be known for quality. Sigh.
The camera… I have a camera on my cell phone. It’s used in those extreme situations, like a really funny license plate or when Cloverfield shows up. Other than that, it’s not a great camera and I don’t ever use it. I know what 3 megapixels looks like, and it’s not pretty.
The SD card reader… I’m really mixed on this one. I could write an entire essay on the effects of the SD card. It is the first near-ubiquitous memory card, the most adaptive and also the most inexpensive. Its potential is so insane that only the humble USB 2.0 spec carries more gravitas. The USB 2.0 spec changed the world, and I think SD cards can do the same.
Its inclusion on the DS begs… no… taunts pirates to abuse it. I furtively believe that Nintendo wouldn’t be presenting so suggestively if they didn’t see dollars, and I assume they see dollars in the way of Virtual Console. The changing of Wii Points to Nintendo Points is the greatest indicator of this. They see dollar bills, y’all, and they are going to make hits of their back catalogue work for them.
Sigh. But it’s not enough to get me excited. It doesn’t answer any glaring issues with the DS Lite, and it doesn’t add to the experience in a meaningful way for core gamers. If that’s not the point, then Nintendo is continuing its long snub of is core fans who dared to grow up.
If Nintendo sticks to its game release habits, we’re done with Mario, Link, and Samus in this generation. The new games were good, but the public likes to see what’s coming. If nothing’s coming, then either A. they don’t get how insane people are for these games or B. It’s not coming to the Wii.
And considering how many more games came out for the Gamecube in its life time (2 Links, and two adventures for Samus), this is more than a little disappointing. I have no doubt that Punch Out! will be fun, and Sin and Punishment begs someone to care. Nintendo takes a long time to showcase games, and I don’t think Punch Out or Sin and Punishment 2 can moves systems. Their progenitors sure didn’t.
See, what Nintendo fails to realize is that some point in its illustrious history, many of its fans grew up. They bought big TV’s, and sound systems that handle fiber optic cables. They became jaded gamers who loved the retro lovin. I mean… LOVE IT. Mega Man 9 as a theory is what gaming is about.
The DSi is not about the evolution of gaming. None of its new elements (3 megapixel camera, SD compatibility) really do it for me. What they’ve managed to do with this device is create the perfect Christmas present for a young kid.
Imagine you’re a parent and your kid asks for several things for Christmas. A DS, and Ipod, and a camera…
Well, Nintendo’s got you covered, babycakes! As a retail worker, the DS age group ABSOLUTELY ASKS for those items every Christmas and birthday season. And for the low low price of 180 bucks (plus the cost of an SD card) you can give them everything they want!
And these aren’t kids who want Game Boy Advance compatibility! No! They don’t want/need that. Their Pokemon was never Red, nor was it Leaf! This new DS is everything that my generation doesn’t want or need.
And well, that’s a bit insulting. I really can’t blame this move on their part, but I can’t help wishing for more. The precipitous drop in battery life makes me sigh; I know how the original portable wars were won, and it wasn’t via color or speed, but how long the damn Game Boy lasted.
The lack of a graphic upgrade also makes me sigh. Arguably, if they want to put the PSP to bed, they should to it soundly. If the Wii is destined to be shovelware, then the DS should be known for quality. Sigh.
The camera… I have a camera on my cell phone. It’s used in those extreme situations, like a really funny license plate or when Cloverfield shows up. Other than that, it’s not a great camera and I don’t ever use it. I know what 3 megapixels looks like, and it’s not pretty.
The SD card reader… I’m really mixed on this one. I could write an entire essay on the effects of the SD card. It is the first near-ubiquitous memory card, the most adaptive and also the most inexpensive. Its potential is so insane that only the humble USB 2.0 spec carries more gravitas. The USB 2.0 spec changed the world, and I think SD cards can do the same.
Its inclusion on the DS begs… no… taunts pirates to abuse it. I furtively believe that Nintendo wouldn’t be presenting so suggestively if they didn’t see dollars, and I assume they see dollars in the way of Virtual Console. The changing of Wii Points to Nintendo Points is the greatest indicator of this. They see dollar bills, y’all, and they are going to make hits of their back catalogue work for them.
Sigh. But it’s not enough to get me excited. It doesn’t answer any glaring issues with the DS Lite, and it doesn’t add to the experience in a meaningful way for core gamers. If that’s not the point, then Nintendo is continuing its long snub of is core fans who dared to grow up.
If Nintendo sticks to its game release habits, we’re done with Mario, Link, and Samus in this generation. The new games were good, but the public likes to see what’s coming. If nothing’s coming, then either A. they don’t get how insane people are for these games or B. It’s not coming to the Wii.
And considering how many more games came out for the Gamecube in its life time (2 Links, and two adventures for Samus), this is more than a little disappointing. I have no doubt that Punch Out! will be fun, and Sin and Punishment begs someone to care. Nintendo takes a long time to showcase games, and I don’t think Punch Out or Sin and Punishment 2 can moves systems. Their progenitors sure didn’t.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
The Force Unfinished
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: A Tale of Two Video Games.
When it’s firing on all cylinders, this game is one of the best Star Wars games ever. When it’s not, it’s one of the worst.
Story
This is an odd juxtaposition. A story game in an adventure game. It REALLY plays like God of War in its mechanics, and its story is duly similar. The interesting thing about Star
Wars canon is that things only happen once. And the story that ties together the prequels and the original trilogy has this as a gap. It’s not always a sane one, it’s a book one. As insane as the movies are (and boy howdy on that note) the books are really batty. This is a decent bridge, but due to its role as being A STAR WARS video game it mirrors the two protagonists of each trilogy. For a video game, this isn’t bad. In fact, it’s one of the better told stories I’ve seen. As a piece that’s supposed to be (thus far) the definitive gap filler, it’s kind of a letdown. It’s interesting to people who care about Star Wars more than a little.
Design
The levels are fairly straightforward and uninteresting, but when they are big they aren’t varied. Critiques leveled are that the graphics are too simplistic or that the path is too linear. First off, few are the adventure games where the path isn’t linear. Sandbox style game play in a supposedly linear story doesn’t work either. It’s a platform adventure hack n’ slash. This is a rather solid genre. When games like Assassin’s Creed or a Spider Man game ARE open ended, the critique is that they are not straightforward enough.
It’s the most detailed Star Wars game on any console, and the best implementation of Force Powers. The practical considerations like not amputating opponents when you slash with your saber are a shame, but it’s a practical shame. While a lot of the levels are very… similar. There is a good deal more detail and nuance than your average game. Some of the levels are practically inspired design, others feel very average. Some of the levels feel too busy, but I’m fine with that. Star Wars can be messy, and I’m not sorry for that feeling.
Gameplay
This is one of the games that are geared towards the “Core” gamer. Its gameplay utilizes every button on the controller for combos and various moves. This is at times disorienting. This approach is necessary given all the choices the character has, but I can’t help but feel bad for the newly minted gamers who are going to be excited by this, but are frustrated by overly complex controls. They did the best with what they have, but it doesn’t change the fact that this game is sharply for the experienced hand.
Sound
It’s Star Wars. Greatest soundtrack ever. The sound effects are dead on (they even get in the Wilhelm, for goodness sake’s). My complaint here is the lack of more variety. Star Wars is a deep canal, and there’s plenty of music to go with, yet it seems the mixes here are smaller. Given that John Williams wrote specific themes for characters, their lack leaves the game an exhaustive mood. Everything is mood music or The March of the Empire. It didn’t work in the prequels.
Glitches and Bad Choices
Sometimes, the game takes a good idea and ruins it, and that does a lot of damage to its reputation. This is a game that many can be proud of, but the lack of polish or discretion in certain instances offer a counterpoint to the developer layoffs. It pains me to say, but some of the decisions and quality checks that failed really do warrant termination. Not an entire team, per se, but these are revenue-costing mistakes, and punitive actions are due.
This game is unforgivably insipid at times. It’s embarrassing, and it makes this a rental, not a buy. The Star Destroyer scene is really as terrible as you’ve heard. It’s embarrassingly glitchy, it’s unreliable and it hurts to do. For such a centerpiece of the game, it’s really awful. Took me over an hour and a half. How this ever got past testing, I’ll never know or understand. When you use the force so effortlessly (that’s kind of the point of the game) this section feels awful.
Boss fights are also poorly implemented. Imagine that you spend an entire game with a certain viewpoint and move reactions. Which you do in The Force Unleashed. Until a boss fight. Then you get these wide shots that are really hard to control in. It’s not what you’re doing 90% of the time, and while it does offer a wider venue, it throws you out of the game and your character’s health suffers for it.
That most enemies need a lightning bolt in order to inflict significant damage is also kind of sad. The environmental damage is minimal and takes too long to pull off. For a game built around the havoc engine, there’s a lot you can’t do. Penny Arcade’s comic tells a more interesting combo than any available in the game.
Glitch-wise, the most egregious errors are in general combat. At one point, my character froze up and couldn’t move. Got seriously owned. It took about 15 minutes to get to that same point in the level. Argh. Enemies would randomly spawn. Sometimes, my Nerf lightsaber wouldn’t even make contact on stormtroopers. It’s ghastly. Targeting is a damn joke in this game. It’s as bad as some of the Playstation 1 Star Wars games. It’s sad, because the enemies will kill you, lots.
I don’t know what kind of demands this game is to the hardware of this generation, but their menu system is the worst I have ever seen. Every menu needs to load up. If you need to add experience points or learn new skills midbattle, you will wait a while. Switching lightsaber colors, that’s a load. The menus and submenus are poorly arranged and use the top right-left triggers for switching purposes. It’s not an effective design. The wait times are unpleasant. Too many games have shown me it doesn’t have to be like this.
Releasing this game now is a curious move. There is no Teen rated mega-game for the holiday season other than the Rock Band/Guitar Hero stuff for the holiday season. This game could have used another month or two of troubleshooting. Core gamers, the kind most likely to buy this game, do read reviews and these errors will translate poorly in sales figures. Kids do not deserve a game that is hard to play not because the game itself is difficult but because the game design is poor. This game needed to bake a little longer.
Final Analysis
For everything this game does right, it does wrong. I recommend playing it, because going to the Star Wars Universe is always compelling. It’s really a wonderful, sometimes delightfully unpretentious world. There’s a lot to be said for craftsmanship, however, and this game makes mistakes that are inexcusable. This apprentice isn’t a Jedi, yet.
When it’s firing on all cylinders, this game is one of the best Star Wars games ever. When it’s not, it’s one of the worst.
Story
This is an odd juxtaposition. A story game in an adventure game. It REALLY plays like God of War in its mechanics, and its story is duly similar. The interesting thing about Star
Wars canon is that things only happen once. And the story that ties together the prequels and the original trilogy has this as a gap. It’s not always a sane one, it’s a book one. As insane as the movies are (and boy howdy on that note) the books are really batty. This is a decent bridge, but due to its role as being A STAR WARS video game it mirrors the two protagonists of each trilogy. For a video game, this isn’t bad. In fact, it’s one of the better told stories I’ve seen. As a piece that’s supposed to be (thus far) the definitive gap filler, it’s kind of a letdown. It’s interesting to people who care about Star Wars more than a little.
Design
The levels are fairly straightforward and uninteresting, but when they are big they aren’t varied. Critiques leveled are that the graphics are too simplistic or that the path is too linear. First off, few are the adventure games where the path isn’t linear. Sandbox style game play in a supposedly linear story doesn’t work either. It’s a platform adventure hack n’ slash. This is a rather solid genre. When games like Assassin’s Creed or a Spider Man game ARE open ended, the critique is that they are not straightforward enough.
It’s the most detailed Star Wars game on any console, and the best implementation of Force Powers. The practical considerations like not amputating opponents when you slash with your saber are a shame, but it’s a practical shame. While a lot of the levels are very… similar. There is a good deal more detail and nuance than your average game. Some of the levels are practically inspired design, others feel very average. Some of the levels feel too busy, but I’m fine with that. Star Wars can be messy, and I’m not sorry for that feeling.
Gameplay
This is one of the games that are geared towards the “Core” gamer. Its gameplay utilizes every button on the controller for combos and various moves. This is at times disorienting. This approach is necessary given all the choices the character has, but I can’t help but feel bad for the newly minted gamers who are going to be excited by this, but are frustrated by overly complex controls. They did the best with what they have, but it doesn’t change the fact that this game is sharply for the experienced hand.
Sound
It’s Star Wars. Greatest soundtrack ever. The sound effects are dead on (they even get in the Wilhelm, for goodness sake’s). My complaint here is the lack of more variety. Star Wars is a deep canal, and there’s plenty of music to go with, yet it seems the mixes here are smaller. Given that John Williams wrote specific themes for characters, their lack leaves the game an exhaustive mood. Everything is mood music or The March of the Empire. It didn’t work in the prequels.
Glitches and Bad Choices
Sometimes, the game takes a good idea and ruins it, and that does a lot of damage to its reputation. This is a game that many can be proud of, but the lack of polish or discretion in certain instances offer a counterpoint to the developer layoffs. It pains me to say, but some of the decisions and quality checks that failed really do warrant termination. Not an entire team, per se, but these are revenue-costing mistakes, and punitive actions are due.
This game is unforgivably insipid at times. It’s embarrassing, and it makes this a rental, not a buy. The Star Destroyer scene is really as terrible as you’ve heard. It’s embarrassingly glitchy, it’s unreliable and it hurts to do. For such a centerpiece of the game, it’s really awful. Took me over an hour and a half. How this ever got past testing, I’ll never know or understand. When you use the force so effortlessly (that’s kind of the point of the game) this section feels awful.
Boss fights are also poorly implemented. Imagine that you spend an entire game with a certain viewpoint and move reactions. Which you do in The Force Unleashed. Until a boss fight. Then you get these wide shots that are really hard to control in. It’s not what you’re doing 90% of the time, and while it does offer a wider venue, it throws you out of the game and your character’s health suffers for it.
That most enemies need a lightning bolt in order to inflict significant damage is also kind of sad. The environmental damage is minimal and takes too long to pull off. For a game built around the havoc engine, there’s a lot you can’t do. Penny Arcade’s comic tells a more interesting combo than any available in the game.
Glitch-wise, the most egregious errors are in general combat. At one point, my character froze up and couldn’t move. Got seriously owned. It took about 15 minutes to get to that same point in the level. Argh. Enemies would randomly spawn. Sometimes, my Nerf lightsaber wouldn’t even make contact on stormtroopers. It’s ghastly. Targeting is a damn joke in this game. It’s as bad as some of the Playstation 1 Star Wars games. It’s sad, because the enemies will kill you, lots.
I don’t know what kind of demands this game is to the hardware of this generation, but their menu system is the worst I have ever seen. Every menu needs to load up. If you need to add experience points or learn new skills midbattle, you will wait a while. Switching lightsaber colors, that’s a load. The menus and submenus are poorly arranged and use the top right-left triggers for switching purposes. It’s not an effective design. The wait times are unpleasant. Too many games have shown me it doesn’t have to be like this.
Releasing this game now is a curious move. There is no Teen rated mega-game for the holiday season other than the Rock Band/Guitar Hero stuff for the holiday season. This game could have used another month or two of troubleshooting. Core gamers, the kind most likely to buy this game, do read reviews and these errors will translate poorly in sales figures. Kids do not deserve a game that is hard to play not because the game itself is difficult but because the game design is poor. This game needed to bake a little longer.
Final Analysis
For everything this game does right, it does wrong. I recommend playing it, because going to the Star Wars Universe is always compelling. It’s really a wonderful, sometimes delightfully unpretentious world. There’s a lot to be said for craftsmanship, however, and this game makes mistakes that are inexcusable. This apprentice isn’t a Jedi, yet.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Oh won't somebody please think of the children?
Delivering delight to a child, however small a wonder, is popular and profitable. Nintendo made a fortune and a near monopoly by utilizing older technology in new and innovative ways to make something new. The world sorely needs more of those kinds of ideas.
One thing that Nintendo has missed the boat on, as far as I’m concerned, is philanthropy. And this is frustrating because of their profits. It is a far cry from Folding@home, the Sony program which voluntarily utilizes PS3 horsepower to tackle real world problems. Microsoft’s creator has been most benevolent in his actions. Yet Nintendo always profits on their machines, and it's important to remember how hard it is for companies to make money on consoles themselves.
Literally, the actions by these companies can save lives, and has saved lives. These are not idle entertainment cogs, money invested in these machines has saved lives. Whether it is another cog in terms of publicity (and thus more money) is irrelevant. The point of the matter is that Nintendo has made the Wii.
The Wii is profitable. It sips power like a supermodel. It is rugged in comparison to its fellow systems.
And friends, it costs Nintendo next to nothing to make. What IBM (holla!) has done is created a chipset that can handle if not impressive gaming, then at least versatile programming from a variety of inputs. Nintendo has shown that a microcomputer can be profitable, because in essence they have a microcomputer.
The holy grail of today’s computer manufacturer is a computer that can be sold to countries where companies like Merril Lynch and Lehman represent more than the total combined income of all its citizens. It is these markets and these children for whom education is a survival mechanism. From Chicago to Haiti to Venezuela, information helps.
And then there’s one Laptop per Child. What a mess that thing is. Without going into too much detail, a bunch of Linux nerds build a computer on the cheap with the intention of selling it around the world. It has not approached profitability or reliability by any stretch of the definitions. It is a catastrophic failure.
Flash memory has decreased dramatically in price. Solid state hard drives for larger storage are still unfeasible, but the prices of storage needed to run the global standard efficiently (approx 10 gb of storage, and 512 RAM) with a decent bus speed are found in playthings!
I am not saying the Wii is the computer that could get into the hands of every child. It just baffles me when I see companies like HP and Dell and OLPC attack this market that IBM and Nintendo have built a working model of a quality.mini-computer and made more than a dime on it.
We have a unique opportunity. In the late 80’s and early 90’s Nintendo made a fortune buying off Sharp’s over-production of LCD’s, utilizing Gunpei Yokoi’s model for using existing technology in new and innovative ways. Today, we face a global market where demand for larger, clearer LCD’s is the technology standard, with production prices skyrocketing downwards. Companies such as Sony and Toshiba now outsource their screens to Samsung and Sharp, respectively. The cost of business has become so low for certain companies that it makes less sense for some of the biggest names in the industry to run their own screen production.
So when I hear about One Laptop Per Child, I look over at my Wii, as underpowered as it is compared to its competitors, and realize that for many children all over the world, we could use a little Gunpei Yokoi. Impressive amounts of tech stare me in the face, horsepower at the ready. It pains me to see Nintendo follow Apple into the realm of profitable bilking, compromising features for style, compassion for cool, and limited third party support. That’s less a revolution, and more just a game cube.
One thing that Nintendo has missed the boat on, as far as I’m concerned, is philanthropy. And this is frustrating because of their profits. It is a far cry from Folding@home, the Sony program which voluntarily utilizes PS3 horsepower to tackle real world problems. Microsoft’s creator has been most benevolent in his actions. Yet Nintendo always profits on their machines, and it's important to remember how hard it is for companies to make money on consoles themselves.
Literally, the actions by these companies can save lives, and has saved lives. These are not idle entertainment cogs, money invested in these machines has saved lives. Whether it is another cog in terms of publicity (and thus more money) is irrelevant. The point of the matter is that Nintendo has made the Wii.
The Wii is profitable. It sips power like a supermodel. It is rugged in comparison to its fellow systems.
And friends, it costs Nintendo next to nothing to make. What IBM (holla!) has done is created a chipset that can handle if not impressive gaming, then at least versatile programming from a variety of inputs. Nintendo has shown that a microcomputer can be profitable, because in essence they have a microcomputer.
The holy grail of today’s computer manufacturer is a computer that can be sold to countries where companies like Merril Lynch and Lehman represent more than the total combined income of all its citizens. It is these markets and these children for whom education is a survival mechanism. From Chicago to Haiti to Venezuela, information helps.
And then there’s one Laptop per Child. What a mess that thing is. Without going into too much detail, a bunch of Linux nerds build a computer on the cheap with the intention of selling it around the world. It has not approached profitability or reliability by any stretch of the definitions. It is a catastrophic failure.
Flash memory has decreased dramatically in price. Solid state hard drives for larger storage are still unfeasible, but the prices of storage needed to run the global standard efficiently (approx 10 gb of storage, and 512 RAM) with a decent bus speed are found in playthings!
I am not saying the Wii is the computer that could get into the hands of every child. It just baffles me when I see companies like HP and Dell and OLPC attack this market that IBM and Nintendo have built a working model of a quality.mini-computer and made more than a dime on it.
We have a unique opportunity. In the late 80’s and early 90’s Nintendo made a fortune buying off Sharp’s over-production of LCD’s, utilizing Gunpei Yokoi’s model for using existing technology in new and innovative ways. Today, we face a global market where demand for larger, clearer LCD’s is the technology standard, with production prices skyrocketing downwards. Companies such as Sony and Toshiba now outsource their screens to Samsung and Sharp, respectively. The cost of business has become so low for certain companies that it makes less sense for some of the biggest names in the industry to run their own screen production.
So when I hear about One Laptop Per Child, I look over at my Wii, as underpowered as it is compared to its competitors, and realize that for many children all over the world, we could use a little Gunpei Yokoi. Impressive amounts of tech stare me in the face, horsepower at the ready. It pains me to see Nintendo follow Apple into the realm of profitable bilking, compromising features for style, compassion for cool, and limited third party support. That’s less a revolution, and more just a game cube.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Rock the Castle
It amazes me that most of the games I spend time playing are gorgeous games that take basic gameplay principles and apply them in HD. I have gotten more playing time out of more 15 dollar games than I have in 60 dollar games.
What’s more, I have had the distincy privilege of not just playing an obscenely violent and expensive sci-fi shooter across the country with my friends. No. I have had my chance to go back to the basements of our collective youth, to the days when we sat around and played something silly that Capcom or Tecmo or Acclaim used to make: a beat-em up side-scrolling brawler game.
It’s a miracle to accomplish this across such great distances. Such magic is usually reserved for time machines and teleporters. And here I was, tonight, playing a video game like I would have over ten, maybe even 15 years ago. With friends. Happily slaying throngs of enemies, laughing and joking and planning.
It wasn’t until tonight that I realized how utterly detached Nintendo was from its core audience. They may not release as many “core games”. They may have their reasoning for friend codes and other parental placations, but that an Xbox 360 has literally delivered me to the basement TV of my youth has showed how little Super there is left in Nintendo. That an entire system cannot do it, on the system that delivered such things. This isn’t Wii Bowling. This is STAYING POWER. No mere nostalgia; this is the stuff companies were made of.
Castle Crashers isn’t perfect, but it delivers the perfect experience. There are many hosannahs in the Live Arcade catalogue: Braid, (Portal to come), Geometry Wars, Lumines, and now Castle Crashers. These games show creativity, pushing games’ boundaries in ways that many of the big leaguers forget. The level of fun and attention to detail is born straight from the same purple and gray oven that baked my gaming experiences.
We are the better for it. Friendships are stronger for it. In gaming, you truly can win sometimes. I love Castle Crashers, if only because I felt like a kid again.
What’s more, I have had the distincy privilege of not just playing an obscenely violent and expensive sci-fi shooter across the country with my friends. No. I have had my chance to go back to the basements of our collective youth, to the days when we sat around and played something silly that Capcom or Tecmo or Acclaim used to make: a beat-em up side-scrolling brawler game.
It’s a miracle to accomplish this across such great distances. Such magic is usually reserved for time machines and teleporters. And here I was, tonight, playing a video game like I would have over ten, maybe even 15 years ago. With friends. Happily slaying throngs of enemies, laughing and joking and planning.
It wasn’t until tonight that I realized how utterly detached Nintendo was from its core audience. They may not release as many “core games”. They may have their reasoning for friend codes and other parental placations, but that an Xbox 360 has literally delivered me to the basement TV of my youth has showed how little Super there is left in Nintendo. That an entire system cannot do it, on the system that delivered such things. This isn’t Wii Bowling. This is STAYING POWER. No mere nostalgia; this is the stuff companies were made of.
Castle Crashers isn’t perfect, but it delivers the perfect experience. There are many hosannahs in the Live Arcade catalogue: Braid, (Portal to come), Geometry Wars, Lumines, and now Castle Crashers. These games show creativity, pushing games’ boundaries in ways that many of the big leaguers forget. The level of fun and attention to detail is born straight from the same purple and gray oven that baked my gaming experiences.
We are the better for it. Friendships are stronger for it. In gaming, you truly can win sometimes. I love Castle Crashers, if only because I felt like a kid again.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
On Braid
Braid is perhaps the most thoughtful game I’ve ever played. It easily has the most nuanced story. It is artful in what it does and what it doesn’t do. It’s also a maddening puzzler that drives your emotions. If this game has a spiritual cousin, it is Portal, another game about madness and puzzles and the meshing of interesting takes on traditional mechanics.
It is, in my opinion, also a reasonably adult treatise on villainy, and with its allusions to castles and the Super Mario Brothers series… that it’s really about Bowser. Why would a monster want a princess? Why would he build huge castles, engage in villainy, all for a princess?
This is one theme of many very good themes in the game, but it bears mentioning as I have seen nothing about it on Google. The allusions of the oft-posted Donkey Kong level shows an origin, a passing by on the way to something else. It feels almost chronological. When you see the green flag raised at the end I was reminded of when a green flag was lowered. Repeatedly, at the end of every level. By a plumber. I don’t think this is an accident.
They also reference the creation of the atomic bomb, throwing in a line that is actually a line of history. That quote was the summation of sane individuals who built the ultimate tool of self-annihilation. And I do think this is about redemption and deconstructing one’s fantasies to see the real reason a human can fail. These are heady, heady themes. Most books about redemption don’t touch the dirt. There’s scrappy, seldom blunt references to a person’s past in ways other than flashbacks. They don’t share the level of self pity and vice that can leave a man alone. By confronting as bluntly and yet artfully, they have successfully shown that games like Final Fantasy 5,7,8, and Legend of Zelda, and others have been unambitious as storytellers. I’ve thought this often; Braid’s the treatise. The new crop of American storytellers, creating games like GTA4, Portal, and Braid show that this medium has been irrevocably one-upped, and it will be to the detriment of studios looking to check-mark their way into a story. That’s bad news for companies like Nintendo and Square Enix, which do check-mark their stories. The proposition of Final Fantasy 13’s main protagonist being described proudly as “Cloud… but a girl!!” does little to allay my concerns, for one simple reason.
I’ve already played that game.
Braid offers something new, and we are the better for it.
It is, in my opinion, also a reasonably adult treatise on villainy, and with its allusions to castles and the Super Mario Brothers series… that it’s really about Bowser. Why would a monster want a princess? Why would he build huge castles, engage in villainy, all for a princess?
This is one theme of many very good themes in the game, but it bears mentioning as I have seen nothing about it on Google. The allusions of the oft-posted Donkey Kong level shows an origin, a passing by on the way to something else. It feels almost chronological. When you see the green flag raised at the end I was reminded of when a green flag was lowered. Repeatedly, at the end of every level. By a plumber. I don’t think this is an accident.
They also reference the creation of the atomic bomb, throwing in a line that is actually a line of history. That quote was the summation of sane individuals who built the ultimate tool of self-annihilation. And I do think this is about redemption and deconstructing one’s fantasies to see the real reason a human can fail. These are heady, heady themes. Most books about redemption don’t touch the dirt. There’s scrappy, seldom blunt references to a person’s past in ways other than flashbacks. They don’t share the level of self pity and vice that can leave a man alone. By confronting as bluntly and yet artfully, they have successfully shown that games like Final Fantasy 5,7,8, and Legend of Zelda, and others have been unambitious as storytellers. I’ve thought this often; Braid’s the treatise. The new crop of American storytellers, creating games like GTA4, Portal, and Braid show that this medium has been irrevocably one-upped, and it will be to the detriment of studios looking to check-mark their way into a story. That’s bad news for companies like Nintendo and Square Enix, which do check-mark their stories. The proposition of Final Fantasy 13’s main protagonist being described proudly as “Cloud… but a girl!!” does little to allay my concerns, for one simple reason.
I’ve already played that game.
Braid offers something new, and we are the better for it.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Regarding Zelda
I recently read a book by Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor who, when told he would soon die of pancreatic cancer, had made the decision to host a lecture, entitled the Last Lecture (also the name of his book) that goes away from his specialty of virtual worlds and into the infinitely more complex one of reality.
There is a line from the book, and anyone as downtrodden as I get will appreciate the quote that I think is rather good. It actually reminded me of the Legend of Zelda series:
Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
Of course, there’s the implied romance part of it. But nowhere in the annals of game lore is there anyone so chronically cockblocked as Link. Only in the truest non-sequel does he get with the princess. The fat bastard Italian gets more lovin’. Link, whether he is explicitly interested or not, it’s a remarkable silent chivalry. How many games typify chivalry without the payoff?
In chivalry, the payoff simply isn’t the point.
Now this past summer I sat down with Grand Theft Auto 4, a magnificent game. It’s not for everyone, but the one thing that game got was scale. It got physics, and beauty. And when Nintendo finally drags itself into the HD era, I think what I saw was a true potential era for Mario. The gaming canvas was made larger by that game. No longer can you use the excuse of space, no longer can we argue that largesse sacrifices detail. To be blunt, GTA4 broke a lot of rules about how a big game is supposed to act.
SCALE
In that one game, they proved that Final Fantasy needn’t now be afraid of actual airships, of scalable land, rather than their current games modus operandi of linked-pre-renders representing less than 10% of the world the game inhabits. I always believed that was a poor choice for the series. Indeed, the game that has effectively de-throned Final Fantasy as RPG of the masses is World of Warcraft. And that game never lost its sense of scale. There isn’t an inch of impossibility in that game, just scale, awe, and immersion.
Zelda games have always had an impressive and expanding idea of scale, but really the kingdom of Hyrule has always been a bit on the small side. A fully HD Zelda, with far off venues that you can see and later touch, would return the game to the sort of epic scale not seen in its fullest since A Link To The Past.
And we know it can be done. Imagine a forest of that much detail. Link’s quest would feel all the more epic.
PHYSICS.
GTA4 has what I call “Thick rubber band physics”. Apply a small amount of force, and there’s nothing. Apply steady force, and you get one hell of a twang. Link should be hit so hard he gets knocked down despite his shield. Bomb blasts should devastate. Don’t cut away from the Dodongo cave opening; make me run like hell from it. By applying a bit more bounce in the world, the enemies become a bit more fun. It would be a bit more cartoonish in a way, but this has never been a studio to remand such ideas. The thick resistance on the low end of the two series is very similar; jumps are small, and speed carries a lot of nonfatal velocity. But the more violent entry understands that payoff, and infuses the situation with a bit more fun. There isn’t a need for cut scenes to show big events, you’re witnessing them. What could be more adventurous in an adventure game?
SPEED
First Person Shooters and others have taught us that enemies can shoot as fast as you can, and you can still win. It is time, I think, for the majority of Link’s enemies to be able to shoot as fast as he can. There will be an element of danger that has been missing from the series. Link got faster, his enemies have stayed the same speed. By increasing their speed, the game becomes slightly deadlier. But not, as has been proven, fatal. There would be a faster pace to this game.
THE CASUAL QUESTION
Of course, the logic-minded will argue, they could never try this. And indeed I have my doubts, too, that they will. Nintendo has shown that they are committed to the casual audience, and these suggestions (which are unabashedly gamer-centric) do not do that.
Until you look at the numbers. Let me explain. Grand Theft Auto 4 was bought by more than core gamers, it was bought by many. World of Warcraft isn’t merely played by hardcore addicts; there are people on there who rarely have the time to play the game. The numbers that these games support are staggering. In 2 years, World of Warcraft can generate over 2 billion dollars in revenue. In a single week, GTA 4 made more money than any of the summer blockbusters. Think about that. GTA 4 made more money than Indiana Jones, than Iron Man, than the goddamn Batman.
There is an audience with huge dividends, and it exists at the weird merging point between the casual gamer and the hardcore. Indeed, that has been where Nintendo has typically found a great deal of success. Look at any of their successful console or portable console portfolios. With their industry leading successes, it wasn’t just the hardcore. And even with the Wii, it certainly isn’t just the casual market. That’s the balance, and aping some of the physics and ideas of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, GTA4, and others would push this series into a new renaissance. It would discourage the continued use of the 3 then Master Sword then 5/6/7 other level model encouraged since A Link To the Past. It would mean more, and these small adjustments may inspire. And being inspired, being motivated, is what this series, at least in its early form, has always been about.
Even if you don’t get the princess.
There is a line from the book, and anyone as downtrodden as I get will appreciate the quote that I think is rather good. It actually reminded me of the Legend of Zelda series:
Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
Of course, there’s the implied romance part of it. But nowhere in the annals of game lore is there anyone so chronically cockblocked as Link. Only in the truest non-sequel does he get with the princess. The fat bastard Italian gets more lovin’. Link, whether he is explicitly interested or not, it’s a remarkable silent chivalry. How many games typify chivalry without the payoff?
In chivalry, the payoff simply isn’t the point.
Now this past summer I sat down with Grand Theft Auto 4, a magnificent game. It’s not for everyone, but the one thing that game got was scale. It got physics, and beauty. And when Nintendo finally drags itself into the HD era, I think what I saw was a true potential era for Mario. The gaming canvas was made larger by that game. No longer can you use the excuse of space, no longer can we argue that largesse sacrifices detail. To be blunt, GTA4 broke a lot of rules about how a big game is supposed to act.
SCALE
In that one game, they proved that Final Fantasy needn’t now be afraid of actual airships, of scalable land, rather than their current games modus operandi of linked-pre-renders representing less than 10% of the world the game inhabits. I always believed that was a poor choice for the series. Indeed, the game that has effectively de-throned Final Fantasy as RPG of the masses is World of Warcraft. And that game never lost its sense of scale. There isn’t an inch of impossibility in that game, just scale, awe, and immersion.
Zelda games have always had an impressive and expanding idea of scale, but really the kingdom of Hyrule has always been a bit on the small side. A fully HD Zelda, with far off venues that you can see and later touch, would return the game to the sort of epic scale not seen in its fullest since A Link To The Past.
And we know it can be done. Imagine a forest of that much detail. Link’s quest would feel all the more epic.
PHYSICS.
GTA4 has what I call “Thick rubber band physics”. Apply a small amount of force, and there’s nothing. Apply steady force, and you get one hell of a twang. Link should be hit so hard he gets knocked down despite his shield. Bomb blasts should devastate. Don’t cut away from the Dodongo cave opening; make me run like hell from it. By applying a bit more bounce in the world, the enemies become a bit more fun. It would be a bit more cartoonish in a way, but this has never been a studio to remand such ideas. The thick resistance on the low end of the two series is very similar; jumps are small, and speed carries a lot of nonfatal velocity. But the more violent entry understands that payoff, and infuses the situation with a bit more fun. There isn’t a need for cut scenes to show big events, you’re witnessing them. What could be more adventurous in an adventure game?
SPEED
First Person Shooters and others have taught us that enemies can shoot as fast as you can, and you can still win. It is time, I think, for the majority of Link’s enemies to be able to shoot as fast as he can. There will be an element of danger that has been missing from the series. Link got faster, his enemies have stayed the same speed. By increasing their speed, the game becomes slightly deadlier. But not, as has been proven, fatal. There would be a faster pace to this game.
THE CASUAL QUESTION
Of course, the logic-minded will argue, they could never try this. And indeed I have my doubts, too, that they will. Nintendo has shown that they are committed to the casual audience, and these suggestions (which are unabashedly gamer-centric) do not do that.
Until you look at the numbers. Let me explain. Grand Theft Auto 4 was bought by more than core gamers, it was bought by many. World of Warcraft isn’t merely played by hardcore addicts; there are people on there who rarely have the time to play the game. The numbers that these games support are staggering. In 2 years, World of Warcraft can generate over 2 billion dollars in revenue. In a single week, GTA 4 made more money than any of the summer blockbusters. Think about that. GTA 4 made more money than Indiana Jones, than Iron Man, than the goddamn Batman.
There is an audience with huge dividends, and it exists at the weird merging point between the casual gamer and the hardcore. Indeed, that has been where Nintendo has typically found a great deal of success. Look at any of their successful console or portable console portfolios. With their industry leading successes, it wasn’t just the hardcore. And even with the Wii, it certainly isn’t just the casual market. That’s the balance, and aping some of the physics and ideas of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, GTA4, and others would push this series into a new renaissance. It would discourage the continued use of the 3 then Master Sword then 5/6/7 other level model encouraged since A Link To the Past. It would mean more, and these small adjustments may inspire. And being inspired, being motivated, is what this series, at least in its early form, has always been about.
Even if you don’t get the princess.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
A Girl’s Gotta Do What a Girl’s Gotta Do.
Anyone who is shocked at Squenix move to release on the Xbox 360 with their marquis title is operating under the lovesick notion that business and loyalty are two intertwined things, and that Sony was caught off-guard by the notion that their title was going to go.
I’d disagree. I think they knew, but importantly they knew and kept quiet about it. As delays go, Square has given up on all methods of timeliness. They have grown beasts, with budgets and stomachs to match. They knew the options, and they knew that their chances of financial stability are hindered by exclusivity. Sony has merely to be quiet during the whole preceding. If Sony, in fact, got owned, it was something they were quite aware of, and their E3 showing of tight, game-centric focused announcements gives ample argument that they knew they would be embarrassed. If they want solace, they merely look at the Wii’s sophomoric offerings.
No, the real group that got owned were fanboys. Sony fanboys. FF Fanboys. Chocotards. Cloudtards.
As all fanboys must come to grips before slavishly planning out purchases years ahead of an actual release date, videogames are ultimately commissioned artists. You may love the art, you may love what it does, but ultimately the art exists as a medium by which to make money. And if you do not account for the economic side every step of the way, you will find no end of surprises and disappointment.
While the greatest success of Square resided on the Playstation, they have been no strangers to multiple releases. Final Fantasy 11, for example, was on the Xbox 360, and maintained a longer and more flexible shelf life. Every older Final Fantasy has gravitated, in some form, to the Nintendo DS. Final Fantasy 7 was released on the PC, back when that was a viable medium.
Exclusives, such as Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, and My Life As a King… Square Enix is not a Sony company. You associated it with Sony because of your experience, but this company has never shied from the quick, shrewd dollar. They would partner with anyone and everyone. Be it an American film studio, to a friend-turned-adversary, they simply do not say no. If they were
And with their bad bookkeeping and design philosophy, you can’t really blame them. Japanese studios seem notoriously bad at keeping robust portfolios and books. Capcom’s stock is an option for an American takeover, to give you an idea how bad it must suck if our fail-centric dollar can buy them out. Square seems constantly sidelined with debt and delays. Team Ninja is inadequately ran, and will suffer extreme consequences by result. Sega … well there’s a reason they don’t make anything other than Sonic and fanboy requests anymore.
Fanboys tend to overlook the financial side of things to their own detriment. They tend to overlook these statistics because they see the side of their goal that produced a ray of light in their entertainment experiences. This is not bad business or improper Japanese etiquette, it is simply how Japanese game companies rationalize spiraling development costs. It was when they took a sequel for FF6 and turned that into FF7. It will happen again.
There are no reasons to be surprised by the coup of non-exclusivity. It is standard, and has been the industry’s direction for the past 8 years.
I will let you fanboys in on the secret of how games stay exclusive. With this in hand, you can keep your favorite developer with you on your controller and logo of choice for all eternity. It is the one factor that ensures fanboyism, and the continuation of your particular poison in your preferred medium.
Long Term Financial stability
This is the sole, and I do mean sole factor in staying with a particular gaming system for an extended period of time. A few contrasting cases-
Nintendo has
A. A long history of continued console profitability, game license fees, and even in its missteps manages levels of profitability that are difficult for their competition to match. When all else fails, they own the handheld market with a near-iron fist.
B. A large wealth of games that turn a profit and have a longer than average shelf life.
C. Nintendo seldom loses money.
D. Nintendo only plays on Nintendo.
Bungie has
A. A long history of continued profitability, licensing, and even in its missteps manages levels of profitability that are difficult for their competition to match. When all else fails, their franchise’s marketing produces enough hype and enough quality to gloss any shortcomings.
B. A consistent lineup of best-selling games that turn a profit and have a longer than average shelf life.
C. Bungie seldom loses money
D. Bungie hasn’t made a non-Xbox game in over a decade.
Blizzard has
A. A VERY long history of continued profitability, licensing, and even in their missteps… scratch that. This is the company that made Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft. They invented and reinvented the idea of gaming crack addict. They have more money than any company has any right to, and their quality control, even to non-fans, is unparalleled.
B. THE consistent lineups of best-selling games that turn a profit and have an obscenely longer shelf life than is average.
C. Blizzard prints money.
D. Blizzard IS pc gaming.
Now compare the fortunes of those three with 3 fanboy-favorite companies: Capcom, Squenix, and Sega. The top 3 companies, and the bottom three companies, both have had games whose budget has ran amok. But whatever the reason, it is my argument that continued success and financial management has more to do with gamer and medium loyalty than any bit of Japanese etiquette or fan outcry.
Which makes fanboys, in their current state, completely useless internet twaddle.
Want to know the future of fanboyism, fanboys? Look at Trekkies today. They have absolutely zero say in the last 4 movies and 2 TV series. Only a hiatus, and an edgy reinterpretation are its only hopes, and Trekkies keep a machine afloat that for all intents and purposes has been diuretic for the past decade.
The Fanboy Revolution.
As much as I deride the fanboy, not all of their traits are bad. Indeed, their slavish attention to detail, company loyalty, and internet-addiction are all a strange brew that could be utilized towards better companies, more stream-lined management and a savvier economy.
Ultimately, fanboyism blunts the razor’s edge of failure from dancing along the throat of companies who deserve the scarlet neck fountain treatment. I think, long-term, it can work in reverse.
1. Boycott all gaming movies.
Why: Gaming movies are about taking a brand that is in the public eye and expanding on it. It’s Chex Mix: The Movie. Take something anyone is vaguely familiar with, and market it to death. But fanboys, don’t give in. Instead, ignore its existence. Don’t even compare it to the game. Don’t even talk about it. Let it slide off of you. Does that mean you won’t get to see Mila Jovovitch in all her ass-kicking glory?
End Result: Rent the Fifth Element and Super Mario Brothers: The Movie, and learn how movies are fun and how movies laugh at you and your steal your wallet. At the end of the night, you’ll have some perspective about the value of ideas over branding.
2. Buy Final Fantasy 13 for the Xbox 360.
Why: Sony made a system that is famously hard to program, on a controller that needs some reworking to be more modern, at a price which is unfeasible. Microsoft made a system that is a lot easier to program and adapt, has similar horsepower, and runs at a higher resolution than most PS3 games.
End Result- An embarrassed Sony would be a marvelous thing. Gone is their marquis franchise, with higher numbers. The money handlers would have an incentive to push for easier dev kits, and developer support, lowering the cost of game development and encouraging a rebirth. Buy now on the PS3, and you support an idea that really hurt game developers, artists, and gamers alike. There is no incentive to the PS3 game other than fanboyism, and Squenix will hurt as a result of your slavish decision.
3. Skew the demographics on Party Games.
How: I am going to describe two Gamer parties: The first has booze, Mario Kart, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Dance Revolution. Sounds fun, right?
The second party has lights rigged to the dance machine, other lights to the floor, a giant game projector that plays techno-themed music to the game of the moment, be it Tetris, Asteroids, DDR, Rez, or some random Japanese fighter. The small TV by the bathroom has Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES by the men’s, Puyo Puyo Pop by the ladies.
Now I can assure you, with utter certaintly, that you can tell which one kicks more ass. Too often do we let shiny, new, and populist take over the wealth of imagination and…well, wealth that our generation possesses. If we’re going to kick ass, we need to kick ass differently.
End Result: Companies with a vested interest in your continued purchase of peripherals have to up their game, not their microtransactions.
4. Put your money where your mouth is.
How: This has little to do with games and more to do with investments. The quickest and most effective way to have input in a decision is to own a piece of the company. If you believe in a company’s continued success enough to fag out for its every release, you should at least get a return on that love. If you feel your company has set itself adrift on a bad idea, your refined sense of quality gaming will allow you to detect trouble before the suits do, and you can get out while the getting is good and invest otherwise.
End Result: The executives answer to YOU. Ya know what’s more revealing than E3? A shareholder meeting.
5. Avoid Special Edition Gaming Boxes
How: Buy the regular edition. This strategy is working phenomenally with the movie industry. There will be less and less of a divide between the two, and with Blu Ray’s eventual succession, very little difference. Collecting them is a matter of oddness: As of this writing there are two unopened N64 Gold editions of Ocarina of Time going for above $200. The other hundred Gold Ocarinas? 99 cents. These are not investments so much as they are static versions of Warcraft armor or Xbox Live Achievement points. In other words, they matter to nobody that matters. The sixty some dollars, properly invested, would not have yielded a $333% return of the top two items, but certainly gained more than the -.01666% return yielded by the hundreds left over. Nothing “collector’s” is ever valued by collectors. They value the obscure, the broken, the woops.
End Result: More features at a lower price. Zero incentive for limiting supplies. More shelf space for more video games, not space taken up by a “making of” DVD that you watched half of once.
6. Let them fail… from a distance.
How: Mario Sunshine sucked. It made a lot of money, but not the usual megaton of money that Mario is usually known for. Result? A return to fundamentals and innovation, the cessation of the backpack and the freaky Jell-O creatures. Enough people stayed away. Imagine what Galaxy would have looked like if no one had bought Sunshine. It wouldn’t have ceased Mario, not with his brand strength. But THAT. GAME. WOULD. OWN. YOU. Now imagine if enough people had the courage to ignore Sonic… oh wait. You bought almost every recent Sonic game! Enjoy your knighthood!
End Result: Only the best survive. The bad will live on, but in ironic T Shirt form. You play better games, are less disappointed, and are stylin’. How do you not win???
None of the above suggestions take away from the essential love of (insert here) that makes a fanboy. But it is savvier fanboyism that leaves its mark upon the company, the series, and the industry. I purposefully avoided the typical fanboy suggestions while giving full in to one of them.
I avoided…
Suggesting you work for a video game company.
Cutting all ties with a company.
Buy small-budget games with the same fervor you buy the AAA games.
I could not avoid…
Blogging about it.
Still, avoiding 75% of the clichés will have to be sufficient. The only question is when/if will a real change take place. It will be a lot harder for your favorite company to ignore you. The world begins with you.
I’d disagree. I think they knew, but importantly they knew and kept quiet about it. As delays go, Square has given up on all methods of timeliness. They have grown beasts, with budgets and stomachs to match. They knew the options, and they knew that their chances of financial stability are hindered by exclusivity. Sony has merely to be quiet during the whole preceding. If Sony, in fact, got owned, it was something they were quite aware of, and their E3 showing of tight, game-centric focused announcements gives ample argument that they knew they would be embarrassed. If they want solace, they merely look at the Wii’s sophomoric offerings.
No, the real group that got owned were fanboys. Sony fanboys. FF Fanboys. Chocotards. Cloudtards.
As all fanboys must come to grips before slavishly planning out purchases years ahead of an actual release date, videogames are ultimately commissioned artists. You may love the art, you may love what it does, but ultimately the art exists as a medium by which to make money. And if you do not account for the economic side every step of the way, you will find no end of surprises and disappointment.
While the greatest success of Square resided on the Playstation, they have been no strangers to multiple releases. Final Fantasy 11, for example, was on the Xbox 360, and maintained a longer and more flexible shelf life. Every older Final Fantasy has gravitated, in some form, to the Nintendo DS. Final Fantasy 7 was released on the PC, back when that was a viable medium.
Exclusives, such as Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, and My Life As a King… Square Enix is not a Sony company. You associated it with Sony because of your experience, but this company has never shied from the quick, shrewd dollar. They would partner with anyone and everyone. Be it an American film studio, to a friend-turned-adversary, they simply do not say no. If they were
And with their bad bookkeeping and design philosophy, you can’t really blame them. Japanese studios seem notoriously bad at keeping robust portfolios and books. Capcom’s stock is an option for an American takeover, to give you an idea how bad it must suck if our fail-centric dollar can buy them out. Square seems constantly sidelined with debt and delays. Team Ninja is inadequately ran, and will suffer extreme consequences by result. Sega … well there’s a reason they don’t make anything other than Sonic and fanboy requests anymore.
Fanboys tend to overlook the financial side of things to their own detriment. They tend to overlook these statistics because they see the side of their goal that produced a ray of light in their entertainment experiences. This is not bad business or improper Japanese etiquette, it is simply how Japanese game companies rationalize spiraling development costs. It was when they took a sequel for FF6 and turned that into FF7. It will happen again.
There are no reasons to be surprised by the coup of non-exclusivity. It is standard, and has been the industry’s direction for the past 8 years.
I will let you fanboys in on the secret of how games stay exclusive. With this in hand, you can keep your favorite developer with you on your controller and logo of choice for all eternity. It is the one factor that ensures fanboyism, and the continuation of your particular poison in your preferred medium.
Long Term Financial stability
This is the sole, and I do mean sole factor in staying with a particular gaming system for an extended period of time. A few contrasting cases-
Nintendo has
A. A long history of continued console profitability, game license fees, and even in its missteps manages levels of profitability that are difficult for their competition to match. When all else fails, they own the handheld market with a near-iron fist.
B. A large wealth of games that turn a profit and have a longer than average shelf life.
C. Nintendo seldom loses money.
D. Nintendo only plays on Nintendo.
Bungie has
A. A long history of continued profitability, licensing, and even in its missteps manages levels of profitability that are difficult for their competition to match. When all else fails, their franchise’s marketing produces enough hype and enough quality to gloss any shortcomings.
B. A consistent lineup of best-selling games that turn a profit and have a longer than average shelf life.
C. Bungie seldom loses money
D. Bungie hasn’t made a non-Xbox game in over a decade.
Blizzard has
A. A VERY long history of continued profitability, licensing, and even in their missteps… scratch that. This is the company that made Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft. They invented and reinvented the idea of gaming crack addict. They have more money than any company has any right to, and their quality control, even to non-fans, is unparalleled.
B. THE consistent lineups of best-selling games that turn a profit and have an obscenely longer shelf life than is average.
C. Blizzard prints money.
D. Blizzard IS pc gaming.
Now compare the fortunes of those three with 3 fanboy-favorite companies: Capcom, Squenix, and Sega. The top 3 companies, and the bottom three companies, both have had games whose budget has ran amok. But whatever the reason, it is my argument that continued success and financial management has more to do with gamer and medium loyalty than any bit of Japanese etiquette or fan outcry.
Which makes fanboys, in their current state, completely useless internet twaddle.
Want to know the future of fanboyism, fanboys? Look at Trekkies today. They have absolutely zero say in the last 4 movies and 2 TV series. Only a hiatus, and an edgy reinterpretation are its only hopes, and Trekkies keep a machine afloat that for all intents and purposes has been diuretic for the past decade.
The Fanboy Revolution.
As much as I deride the fanboy, not all of their traits are bad. Indeed, their slavish attention to detail, company loyalty, and internet-addiction are all a strange brew that could be utilized towards better companies, more stream-lined management and a savvier economy.
Ultimately, fanboyism blunts the razor’s edge of failure from dancing along the throat of companies who deserve the scarlet neck fountain treatment. I think, long-term, it can work in reverse.
1. Boycott all gaming movies.
Why: Gaming movies are about taking a brand that is in the public eye and expanding on it. It’s Chex Mix: The Movie. Take something anyone is vaguely familiar with, and market it to death. But fanboys, don’t give in. Instead, ignore its existence. Don’t even compare it to the game. Don’t even talk about it. Let it slide off of you. Does that mean you won’t get to see Mila Jovovitch in all her ass-kicking glory?
End Result: Rent the Fifth Element and Super Mario Brothers: The Movie, and learn how movies are fun and how movies laugh at you and your steal your wallet. At the end of the night, you’ll have some perspective about the value of ideas over branding.
2. Buy Final Fantasy 13 for the Xbox 360.
Why: Sony made a system that is famously hard to program, on a controller that needs some reworking to be more modern, at a price which is unfeasible. Microsoft made a system that is a lot easier to program and adapt, has similar horsepower, and runs at a higher resolution than most PS3 games.
End Result- An embarrassed Sony would be a marvelous thing. Gone is their marquis franchise, with higher numbers. The money handlers would have an incentive to push for easier dev kits, and developer support, lowering the cost of game development and encouraging a rebirth. Buy now on the PS3, and you support an idea that really hurt game developers, artists, and gamers alike. There is no incentive to the PS3 game other than fanboyism, and Squenix will hurt as a result of your slavish decision.
3. Skew the demographics on Party Games.
How: I am going to describe two Gamer parties: The first has booze, Mario Kart, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Dance Revolution. Sounds fun, right?
The second party has lights rigged to the dance machine, other lights to the floor, a giant game projector that plays techno-themed music to the game of the moment, be it Tetris, Asteroids, DDR, Rez, or some random Japanese fighter. The small TV by the bathroom has Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES by the men’s, Puyo Puyo Pop by the ladies.
Now I can assure you, with utter certaintly, that you can tell which one kicks more ass. Too often do we let shiny, new, and populist take over the wealth of imagination and…well, wealth that our generation possesses. If we’re going to kick ass, we need to kick ass differently.
End Result: Companies with a vested interest in your continued purchase of peripherals have to up their game, not their microtransactions.
4. Put your money where your mouth is.
How: This has little to do with games and more to do with investments. The quickest and most effective way to have input in a decision is to own a piece of the company. If you believe in a company’s continued success enough to fag out for its every release, you should at least get a return on that love. If you feel your company has set itself adrift on a bad idea, your refined sense of quality gaming will allow you to detect trouble before the suits do, and you can get out while the getting is good and invest otherwise.
End Result: The executives answer to YOU. Ya know what’s more revealing than E3? A shareholder meeting.
5. Avoid Special Edition Gaming Boxes
How: Buy the regular edition. This strategy is working phenomenally with the movie industry. There will be less and less of a divide between the two, and with Blu Ray’s eventual succession, very little difference. Collecting them is a matter of oddness: As of this writing there are two unopened N64 Gold editions of Ocarina of Time going for above $200. The other hundred Gold Ocarinas? 99 cents. These are not investments so much as they are static versions of Warcraft armor or Xbox Live Achievement points. In other words, they matter to nobody that matters. The sixty some dollars, properly invested, would not have yielded a $333% return of the top two items, but certainly gained more than the -.01666% return yielded by the hundreds left over. Nothing “collector’s” is ever valued by collectors. They value the obscure, the broken, the woops.
End Result: More features at a lower price. Zero incentive for limiting supplies. More shelf space for more video games, not space taken up by a “making of” DVD that you watched half of once.
6. Let them fail… from a distance.
How: Mario Sunshine sucked. It made a lot of money, but not the usual megaton of money that Mario is usually known for. Result? A return to fundamentals and innovation, the cessation of the backpack and the freaky Jell-O creatures. Enough people stayed away. Imagine what Galaxy would have looked like if no one had bought Sunshine. It wouldn’t have ceased Mario, not with his brand strength. But THAT. GAME. WOULD. OWN. YOU. Now imagine if enough people had the courage to ignore Sonic… oh wait. You bought almost every recent Sonic game! Enjoy your knighthood!
End Result: Only the best survive. The bad will live on, but in ironic T Shirt form. You play better games, are less disappointed, and are stylin’. How do you not win???
None of the above suggestions take away from the essential love of (insert here) that makes a fanboy. But it is savvier fanboyism that leaves its mark upon the company, the series, and the industry. I purposefully avoided the typical fanboy suggestions while giving full in to one of them.
I avoided…
Suggesting you work for a video game company.
Cutting all ties with a company.
Buy small-budget games with the same fervor you buy the AAA games.
I could not avoid…
Blogging about it.
Still, avoiding 75% of the clichés will have to be sufficient. The only question is when/if will a real change take place. It will be a lot harder for your favorite company to ignore you. The world begins with you.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Another Futile Internet Letter
Dear Nintendo,
This is a hard letter for me to write. We’ve been through so much together. But honey, darling, you need to seek help.
Let me open by saying I’m so, so proud of how far you’ve come. You have a hot console, a deliriously successful portable device, but your ego has spun out of control. I can’t imagine the sacrifices that it took to deliver such innovation to the market place. But you’re frankly looking a bit burnt out. In a moment I can only imagine was exhilarating, you changed your life for the better. There was a twinkle I haven’t seen in your eye since… well, since 2D.
I missed you.
But we never talk. You release Zelda after Zelda with no innovation in a decade. Sure, the games are prettier and the enemies bigger, but you’ve never retained the scope. And Mario? He’s good, but there was such an intensity in games like Mario World, in Mario 3, that spoke of absolute, impossible peril. He’s… cutesy wootsy, now, and it’s hard to look at him for very long. The edges are softened, and the giant realm of Mario has conflated to theme games. Galaxy’s theme was range controlling, and flying in an “open realm”. Sunshine’s theme was that damn backpack. Now look at Super Mario World; it gave you frenetic flight, a dinosaur, swarms of new enemies. But let’s not dwell on the past.
The point is, I think you forget what loyalty is. Loyalty is exciting. It does mean sequels. But sequels, and new things, are good! We love Mario, we love Link, we LOVE sequels. It’s important to have variety, too, but you should never forget your roots. It’s what made the Gamecube profitable.
I was there, Nintendo. I was there when the Xbox, the frigging XBOX!, was kicking your butt graphically. I held out when Square left you for lying to Sony, for when your games cost 20 dollars more than the others on the market for what was actually a worse graphics processor. I stuck with you when you unveiled a controller that looked, with no trace of subtlety, a woman’s uterus. I stuck with you. Not Sony, not Xbox. You. Not even Sega, whom I admit was cute, could draw my attention away from your pill-shaped logo, your charming fantasies.
But at E3, you embarrassed me. You brought out Shawn White. Shawn White! I don’t think there’s anyone left in this generation who considers Shawn White as anything but our happy go lucky ambassador to the suits to make them appear edgy. The rest of us? He reminds us of Carrot Top. Not his fault I know, but the fact is that if you exchanged goofy props for goofy endorsements, you’re just left with a creepy redheaded stickboy who really, really shouldn’t get as much work as he does.
Wii Music’s a cute idea, but see, this is the problem with consequences. Watching people play something? It’s not that fun. It’s not even close to fun, we see people acting like retards holding Nintendo products. And it’s not the bulwark of innovation. Games like Rez and Samba De Amigo were doing this before anyone made a Hero out of a Guitar.
I think I knew this conversation would happen when I took a look at Microsoft. There it is, it forced its way into the market, and has a product that the Japanese are A. Belligerent, and B. Indifferent towards. But here they are, the hot system, the best selling system, the system that can run anything, and releases (and steals) games that tickle gamer’s fancy. I took a look at the proud, gleaming (it gibes off a lot of heat) system, and wondered, where had our magic gone?
It’s not with Shawn White. Is he going to take you out and play with you when Square Enix won’t play with you and the new Game of the Year isn’t on you? What’s that? Shawn’s going to be on Halo, Nintendo, teabagging some son of a bitch that got between his base and his flag some 20 game yards away. You might not like to think about it, but that’s just who Shawn is.
Or maybe you’ll enjoy your little downloadable teensy Final Fantasy castle game. Would you like that? I admit I’m not the biggest fan, but I’ll be damned if I have to spend 35 dollars to play a game whereas I have not one but two choices on where to play the prettiest bit of render this side of Crysis. Which you cannot and will never run.
Oh, think the graphics joke was a cheap shot? Well let me tell you, Nintendo. I grew up. I grew up like the world grew up and we gained money. I don’t rely on my parents to give me money. I make my own, and I wasn’t content to watch you on a 27 inch tv with no right sound channel. No, Nintendo, I bought something pretty. It makes games beautiful again. And you? You pout on it. The writing was on the wall, and you couldn’t be bothered to do even a little upconversion.
Would it have killed you to put on a little HD? It would make you look a lot prettier, and I, I just don’t know what to say. Looks aren’t everything, but you just seem to only care what everyone else thinks about you. You attract your casual gamers and yes you’re making a lot of money. But you know what? Someday little Billy Wii Music’s going to grow up and make a ton of money. And he’s going to buy an Xbox because he wants to shoot some bastard upside his head and save the world? And you, Nintendo?
YOU’RE GOING TO BE AT HOME, COOKING. AND DOING YOGA, AND PLAYING RACE CARS WITH THE GODDAMN MARSHMALLOW STAR FROM MARIO GALAXY THAT NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT! Why won’t you grow up, Nintendo!?!? GROW UP AND LET’S GROW OLD TOGETHER!!!!
I shouldn’t have yelled. I just want a commitment, Nintendo. And today, on that stage, I think I found out where your heart lies. I think it’d be best if we distance ourselves. Maybe, we could be friends, and someday we’ll laugh about this.
But where I stand, it just can’t be the same way. You’ve changed. I’ve changed. This has been a hard letter for me to write. I want you to love me for me, not me for Mii.
This is a hard letter for me to write. We’ve been through so much together. But honey, darling, you need to seek help.
Let me open by saying I’m so, so proud of how far you’ve come. You have a hot console, a deliriously successful portable device, but your ego has spun out of control. I can’t imagine the sacrifices that it took to deliver such innovation to the market place. But you’re frankly looking a bit burnt out. In a moment I can only imagine was exhilarating, you changed your life for the better. There was a twinkle I haven’t seen in your eye since… well, since 2D.
I missed you.
But we never talk. You release Zelda after Zelda with no innovation in a decade. Sure, the games are prettier and the enemies bigger, but you’ve never retained the scope. And Mario? He’s good, but there was such an intensity in games like Mario World, in Mario 3, that spoke of absolute, impossible peril. He’s… cutesy wootsy, now, and it’s hard to look at him for very long. The edges are softened, and the giant realm of Mario has conflated to theme games. Galaxy’s theme was range controlling, and flying in an “open realm”. Sunshine’s theme was that damn backpack. Now look at Super Mario World; it gave you frenetic flight, a dinosaur, swarms of new enemies. But let’s not dwell on the past.
The point is, I think you forget what loyalty is. Loyalty is exciting. It does mean sequels. But sequels, and new things, are good! We love Mario, we love Link, we LOVE sequels. It’s important to have variety, too, but you should never forget your roots. It’s what made the Gamecube profitable.
I was there, Nintendo. I was there when the Xbox, the frigging XBOX!, was kicking your butt graphically. I held out when Square left you for lying to Sony, for when your games cost 20 dollars more than the others on the market for what was actually a worse graphics processor. I stuck with you when you unveiled a controller that looked, with no trace of subtlety, a woman’s uterus. I stuck with you. Not Sony, not Xbox. You. Not even Sega, whom I admit was cute, could draw my attention away from your pill-shaped logo, your charming fantasies.
But at E3, you embarrassed me. You brought out Shawn White. Shawn White! I don’t think there’s anyone left in this generation who considers Shawn White as anything but our happy go lucky ambassador to the suits to make them appear edgy. The rest of us? He reminds us of Carrot Top. Not his fault I know, but the fact is that if you exchanged goofy props for goofy endorsements, you’re just left with a creepy redheaded stickboy who really, really shouldn’t get as much work as he does.
Wii Music’s a cute idea, but see, this is the problem with consequences. Watching people play something? It’s not that fun. It’s not even close to fun, we see people acting like retards holding Nintendo products. And it’s not the bulwark of innovation. Games like Rez and Samba De Amigo were doing this before anyone made a Hero out of a Guitar.
I think I knew this conversation would happen when I took a look at Microsoft. There it is, it forced its way into the market, and has a product that the Japanese are A. Belligerent, and B. Indifferent towards. But here they are, the hot system, the best selling system, the system that can run anything, and releases (and steals) games that tickle gamer’s fancy. I took a look at the proud, gleaming (it gibes off a lot of heat) system, and wondered, where had our magic gone?
It’s not with Shawn White. Is he going to take you out and play with you when Square Enix won’t play with you and the new Game of the Year isn’t on you? What’s that? Shawn’s going to be on Halo, Nintendo, teabagging some son of a bitch that got between his base and his flag some 20 game yards away. You might not like to think about it, but that’s just who Shawn is.
Or maybe you’ll enjoy your little downloadable teensy Final Fantasy castle game. Would you like that? I admit I’m not the biggest fan, but I’ll be damned if I have to spend 35 dollars to play a game whereas I have not one but two choices on where to play the prettiest bit of render this side of Crysis. Which you cannot and will never run.
Oh, think the graphics joke was a cheap shot? Well let me tell you, Nintendo. I grew up. I grew up like the world grew up and we gained money. I don’t rely on my parents to give me money. I make my own, and I wasn’t content to watch you on a 27 inch tv with no right sound channel. No, Nintendo, I bought something pretty. It makes games beautiful again. And you? You pout on it. The writing was on the wall, and you couldn’t be bothered to do even a little upconversion.
Would it have killed you to put on a little HD? It would make you look a lot prettier, and I, I just don’t know what to say. Looks aren’t everything, but you just seem to only care what everyone else thinks about you. You attract your casual gamers and yes you’re making a lot of money. But you know what? Someday little Billy Wii Music’s going to grow up and make a ton of money. And he’s going to buy an Xbox because he wants to shoot some bastard upside his head and save the world? And you, Nintendo?
YOU’RE GOING TO BE AT HOME, COOKING. AND DOING YOGA, AND PLAYING RACE CARS WITH THE GODDAMN MARSHMALLOW STAR FROM MARIO GALAXY THAT NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT! Why won’t you grow up, Nintendo!?!? GROW UP AND LET’S GROW OLD TOGETHER!!!!
I shouldn’t have yelled. I just want a commitment, Nintendo. And today, on that stage, I think I found out where your heart lies. I think it’d be best if we distance ourselves. Maybe, we could be friends, and someday we’ll laugh about this.
But where I stand, it just can’t be the same way. You’ve changed. I’ve changed. This has been a hard letter for me to write. I want you to love me for me, not me for Mii.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Cheeseburger Logic
Cheeseburger Logic
So earlier this month, I had the rare (get it) opportunity to have a Kobe beef burger. Now I’m not sure if it was beef just from the region of Kobe , or if it was simply beer-fed and butt-massaged cow from somewhere in the Union (probably the latter, due to FDA regulations). But this doesn’t matter, what matters is that it was perhaps the most delicious cheeseburger, transcendent on so many, many levels. It didn’t need ketchup, the natural aroma and flavors and juices were sufficient to tickle my senses and delight my palate.
So let’s think of a moment of cheeseburgers. There are these rare (get it now) burgers which are fairly expensive, and then let’s look at the McDonald’s cheeseburger. Both contain similar ingredients with remarkably different results. One costs a lot of money and is very good. The other one costs very little and isn’t so good.
The simple fact of the matter with video games is that casual games are selling better than hardcore games. Quantity is winning out over quality, which causes many in the speculative internets to decry the value of leaving the core gamer behind. This, as I am hungry for a cheeseburger, got me thinking about the mutual existence of the McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger and the Kobe Beef Burger.
The first and most obvious fact is that both exist. The other simple fact is that the double cheeseburger finds its way to many more mouths. There is an argument amongst food elites (aka the French/snobs/yuppies) that hot wax would be preferable to the taste of McDonalds’ offering, and that everyone should imbibe only the finest cattle when placating their palate.
They are wrong on so many levels, as are the doomsayers about video games.
The simple fact is that casual games, like McDonald’s Double Cheeseburgers, are initiates to the wider world of burgerdom/ gamedom. There is a marked gap in quality, but in a busy market (and it is very, VERY busy) not everyone can afford the Kobe Beef, the Playstation 3 80 gb with Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle. It is simply not in the budget!
Now to further complicate matters, gamers are reacting lividly to the current direction of the market by companies such as Nintendo. To the food snob this is akin to your favorite local bistro being razed for a Wendy’s. The quiet air, modern salt shakers, and keen lighting to be replaced by fluorescents, grease, and the squeals of children getting their Kids’ Meal.
But unlike the razing of the restaurant, Nintendo is finding the money, and is finding it in droves. McDonald’s has a core audience of regular customers who genuinely love the quality, texture, and taste of their offerings, but they also have a stable of people who just need a quick and cheap meal, and why not wash that down with some high margin Diet Coke?
In the world of food, we call this a success story.
What gamers fail to consider is that the cost of producing games is higher than ever. There is a lot of bloat, and not a lot of cost control. Games that should take on a medium role are given a much larger marketing budget, eroding profits and quality in the sake of deadlines. This is not a new phenomenon, it has happened in many businesses and will happen before. Game companies that could rely on one or two marquee titles to prop up their entire fiscal solvency will find themselves on the ropes should one of their products languish.
This is, to be quite honest, dumb. There is more money in a McDonald’s than in a custom eatery. The market is going to have to learn flexibility.
High end game companies such as Square and Blizzard produce products with longer than average shelf lives, and the key for them is to control costs comparable to returns. What they will find is that they, much like the chef who dreams of gourmands extolling the virtues of his/her kitchen, will have to have a level playing field of tools, product, and labor, and above all a higher but acceptable price point, in order to get people to spend money on their cheeseburger.
On the flip side, companies that produce a middling product (Ubisoft, Ubisoft, and Ubisoft) are going to concentrate on the more casual market because they, whether you like them or not, have many mouths to feed. They have more labor, and the high cost route has burned them. Granted, this is in no small part due to heinous marketing decisions, but the mold will fit their company better. More mouths to feed on aggressive schedules.
But No Pants Kid, the gamers are fickle and will tire of these games! They have no loyalty! Flash in the pan, one and done!
Except they do make games, and they make them cheap, and they continue to make money. These are not fun games, but they exist in the same craposphere (love that word) that filled the coffers of the Nintendo and Sega systems. If you had to show, to play those games, how many would you play? Probably no more than 20, because a lot of them are crap. They’re managing their costs and their budgets in a profitable manner.
Now for the jaded gamer, the market is rapidly shifting and they will, too, have to tailor their model with an efficient, lean, but high quality burger. And there will be fewer great games, but that’s fine. There weren’t that many to begin with. They are not system sellers; the current cost of product (ie: the console) has meant that the number of system moving games are going to diminish. Gamers are going to look for the longer term investment. If the restaurant was shit, the service was shit, the service rude, the margaritas room temperature, would your favorite burger joint be as great an appeal?
I would venture, no. Gamers, as in food lovers, will look towards the whole package to decide where to spend their money. The value of the cumulative portfolio of top tier games (Halo, Gears of War, Blue Dragon, Ninja Gaiden) is going to out weigh slighter portfolios.
Game companies are going to go through a rough transition of change, the rough, error-prone middle ground of the Playstation 1 and 2 era is going to end. Companies that can carve a niche in this rough ground will find their profits, and companies that do not will languish.
Judging on the sales figures for almost every game company to make this divide, they know what kind of cheeseburgers they’re making.
So earlier this month, I had the rare (get it) opportunity to have a Kobe beef burger. Now I’m not sure if it was beef just from the region of Kobe , or if it was simply beer-fed and butt-massaged cow from somewhere in the Union (probably the latter, due to FDA regulations). But this doesn’t matter, what matters is that it was perhaps the most delicious cheeseburger, transcendent on so many, many levels. It didn’t need ketchup, the natural aroma and flavors and juices were sufficient to tickle my senses and delight my palate.
So let’s think of a moment of cheeseburgers. There are these rare (get it now) burgers which are fairly expensive, and then let’s look at the McDonald’s cheeseburger. Both contain similar ingredients with remarkably different results. One costs a lot of money and is very good. The other one costs very little and isn’t so good.
The simple fact of the matter with video games is that casual games are selling better than hardcore games. Quantity is winning out over quality, which causes many in the speculative internets to decry the value of leaving the core gamer behind. This, as I am hungry for a cheeseburger, got me thinking about the mutual existence of the McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger and the Kobe Beef Burger.
The first and most obvious fact is that both exist. The other simple fact is that the double cheeseburger finds its way to many more mouths. There is an argument amongst food elites (aka the French/snobs/yuppies) that hot wax would be preferable to the taste of McDonalds’ offering, and that everyone should imbibe only the finest cattle when placating their palate.
They are wrong on so many levels, as are the doomsayers about video games.
The simple fact is that casual games, like McDonald’s Double Cheeseburgers, are initiates to the wider world of burgerdom/ gamedom. There is a marked gap in quality, but in a busy market (and it is very, VERY busy) not everyone can afford the Kobe Beef, the Playstation 3 80 gb with Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle. It is simply not in the budget!
Now to further complicate matters, gamers are reacting lividly to the current direction of the market by companies such as Nintendo. To the food snob this is akin to your favorite local bistro being razed for a Wendy’s. The quiet air, modern salt shakers, and keen lighting to be replaced by fluorescents, grease, and the squeals of children getting their Kids’ Meal.
But unlike the razing of the restaurant, Nintendo is finding the money, and is finding it in droves. McDonald’s has a core audience of regular customers who genuinely love the quality, texture, and taste of their offerings, but they also have a stable of people who just need a quick and cheap meal, and why not wash that down with some high margin Diet Coke?
In the world of food, we call this a success story.
What gamers fail to consider is that the cost of producing games is higher than ever. There is a lot of bloat, and not a lot of cost control. Games that should take on a medium role are given a much larger marketing budget, eroding profits and quality in the sake of deadlines. This is not a new phenomenon, it has happened in many businesses and will happen before. Game companies that could rely on one or two marquee titles to prop up their entire fiscal solvency will find themselves on the ropes should one of their products languish.
This is, to be quite honest, dumb. There is more money in a McDonald’s than in a custom eatery. The market is going to have to learn flexibility.
High end game companies such as Square and Blizzard produce products with longer than average shelf lives, and the key for them is to control costs comparable to returns. What they will find is that they, much like the chef who dreams of gourmands extolling the virtues of his/her kitchen, will have to have a level playing field of tools, product, and labor, and above all a higher but acceptable price point, in order to get people to spend money on their cheeseburger.
On the flip side, companies that produce a middling product (Ubisoft, Ubisoft, and Ubisoft) are going to concentrate on the more casual market because they, whether you like them or not, have many mouths to feed. They have more labor, and the high cost route has burned them. Granted, this is in no small part due to heinous marketing decisions, but the mold will fit their company better. More mouths to feed on aggressive schedules.
But No Pants Kid, the gamers are fickle and will tire of these games! They have no loyalty! Flash in the pan, one and done!
Except they do make games, and they make them cheap, and they continue to make money. These are not fun games, but they exist in the same craposphere (love that word) that filled the coffers of the Nintendo and Sega systems. If you had to show, to play those games, how many would you play? Probably no more than 20, because a lot of them are crap. They’re managing their costs and their budgets in a profitable manner.
Now for the jaded gamer, the market is rapidly shifting and they will, too, have to tailor their model with an efficient, lean, but high quality burger. And there will be fewer great games, but that’s fine. There weren’t that many to begin with. They are not system sellers; the current cost of product (ie: the console) has meant that the number of system moving games are going to diminish. Gamers are going to look for the longer term investment. If the restaurant was shit, the service was shit, the service rude, the margaritas room temperature, would your favorite burger joint be as great an appeal?
I would venture, no. Gamers, as in food lovers, will look towards the whole package to decide where to spend their money. The value of the cumulative portfolio of top tier games (Halo, Gears of War, Blue Dragon, Ninja Gaiden) is going to out weigh slighter portfolios.
Game companies are going to go through a rough transition of change, the rough, error-prone middle ground of the Playstation 1 and 2 era is going to end. Companies that can carve a niche in this rough ground will find their profits, and companies that do not will languish.
Judging on the sales figures for almost every game company to make this divide, they know what kind of cheeseburgers they’re making.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Nothings Perfect, but why not try?
Metal Gear Solid and GTA: The fourth time is the charm
Let’s talk cinema. Gone with the Wind was filmed in Technicolor, on an inferior grade of film. Its sets and backdrops couldn’t hold water with even the simplest of Mel Brooks comedy. Now Casablanca? No color, there’s grain all over the place, the soundtrack is in mono, and there’s no blood when someone gets shot.
My point?
A perfect score does not equal perfection. It equals as close to perfect as anything can be, a pinnacle worthy of some hyperbole, the mark by which other movies may be judged. These aren’t perfect movies, it’s that in spite of their flaws they manage to transcend their banal medium of celluloid and glitz. That’s what sets them apart. When works of transcendency and wonder do occur, there tends to be a lot of hyperbole about how great a game is. People can and always will find a flaw, and proclamations of perfection is just that. Gamers are not the same group who all owned Super Mario 3 and fell in love with sidescrolling perfection. There’s too many games, too many choices, and too many nuances to ever achieve such universal acclaim. It’s naïve, but not a sin, for people who play video games to extol the virtues of games they consider near perfect. Time will stand up to the critics and the naysayers.
Metal Gear is a game that’s as cinematic as a movie, with engaging characters and enough humor to know when to just be a video game. It’s deep and nuanced for replayability if you have the patience for it (most people don’t). It’s long, but it’s merciful. The load times are amusing AND practical. If you don’t take breaks during the course of this game, well, your eyes or sex life are not long for this world.
Grand Theft Auto is a game that I always assumed as an exercise in anarchy. This game is an exercise in being a thick rubber band. It’s thick and hard to move, but with enough tension things explode and there’s a magnificent twang. There is no voice acting this good in any video game. There are few games that decide to create this kind of world. This game shows where Nintendo goes wrong. It’s not about the maturity level, it’s about the detail. It’s a hell of a ride.
Of the games that come out this year, when you train a designer what to appreciate from this era, when you need to play something that defines an era, this is what they’ll look at.
And that’s as close to perfect as we can get.
And that’s always a 10.
Let’s talk cinema. Gone with the Wind was filmed in Technicolor, on an inferior grade of film. Its sets and backdrops couldn’t hold water with even the simplest of Mel Brooks comedy. Now Casablanca? No color, there’s grain all over the place, the soundtrack is in mono, and there’s no blood when someone gets shot.
My point?
A perfect score does not equal perfection. It equals as close to perfect as anything can be, a pinnacle worthy of some hyperbole, the mark by which other movies may be judged. These aren’t perfect movies, it’s that in spite of their flaws they manage to transcend their banal medium of celluloid and glitz. That’s what sets them apart. When works of transcendency and wonder do occur, there tends to be a lot of hyperbole about how great a game is. People can and always will find a flaw, and proclamations of perfection is just that. Gamers are not the same group who all owned Super Mario 3 and fell in love with sidescrolling perfection. There’s too many games, too many choices, and too many nuances to ever achieve such universal acclaim. It’s naïve, but not a sin, for people who play video games to extol the virtues of games they consider near perfect. Time will stand up to the critics and the naysayers.
Metal Gear is a game that’s as cinematic as a movie, with engaging characters and enough humor to know when to just be a video game. It’s deep and nuanced for replayability if you have the patience for it (most people don’t). It’s long, but it’s merciful. The load times are amusing AND practical. If you don’t take breaks during the course of this game, well, your eyes or sex life are not long for this world.
Grand Theft Auto is a game that I always assumed as an exercise in anarchy. This game is an exercise in being a thick rubber band. It’s thick and hard to move, but with enough tension things explode and there’s a magnificent twang. There is no voice acting this good in any video game. There are few games that decide to create this kind of world. This game shows where Nintendo goes wrong. It’s not about the maturity level, it’s about the detail. It’s a hell of a ride.
Of the games that come out this year, when you train a designer what to appreciate from this era, when you need to play something that defines an era, this is what they’ll look at.
And that’s as close to perfect as we can get.
And that’s always a 10.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Iron Man
Tony Stark is a dick.
You don’t hear much about that anymore, but it’s actually quite the American past time. When I saw Batman Begins, I thought I saw the perfect incarnation of page to screen. How wrong I was.
Nerds have a love/hate with the two big other superhero series, Xmen and Spiderman. You can see the movie choices overriding the judgement and character of people some people liked.
Now growing up, I never cared for Iron Man. Never owned an Iron Man comic, never had the action figure. Kind of a non-entity to me. He belonged to an older generation.
But what fun, this Iron Man is.
The movie may just be the one of the best examples of obsession, redemption, and raw talent. There are demons, there is baggage, but there is also a method. I was a comic book nerd who could play basketball better than someone of my height, and my ability to think hone by repetition. The constant thunk thunk of the basketball, the imperfect arc on the way to the hoop. These are all things. There is method. It is slow and frustrating. Eventually, you look a seven foot defender in the eye, post up on him, and drop it in the bucket. The first time you get beaten, and you look up and grin, for all the extra thinking, all the thunk thunk thinking and work that has gone in to it. That’s what Iron Man shows. It’s very easy to dig.
The best thing I can say for this movie is that the big final climactic scene is the worst scene. As others have pointed out, it’s too cheesy, too much like a comic book!
And so we have come that the movie is so good, so suave, and methodical that a Transformer’s-like showdown is made of pure camp. Of last year’s villains. It didn’t need a final showdown, because the things about the comic books that we grew up with were not the big victories over the grand schemes.
Because Magneto would be back, Doctor Octopus would be back, the bad explosive times come back. It’s in the smaller moments, those moments of discovering, enhancing, of overcoming one’s problems that often make very meek men dream of might. And that’s what this movie captures. It’s also a joy. It’s a movie that doesn’t skirt death, it shows that nice isn’t always right. And how cathartic in this time to find a movie where the government isn’t a complete choad. It’s not that it’s always the case in either direction, but it’s a refreshing angle in a world loaded with distrust. It’s also odd to see a movie where terrorists get their shit handed to them. We don’t always win, but we do hand over some shit. It’s important to remember that sometimes. It’s nice to see innovation,
The best movies in the Superhero genre are at their best without the official suit. Think about it.
The moment in Spider Man when he picked up Mary Jane, and her lunch tray, and her milk, as she slips.
Wolverine, in a fighers cage, circling and smoking and stalking. In the next movie, pinning a soldier to a refrigerator, nerves set to kill, the hyperventilated realization that the red haze is descending.
In Superman, having to be a clutz when every part of you is the best of you, and this is all just a show so that he doesn’t wake up to tanks or questions or both.
In Batman Begins, stripped of his suit, the anguish is clear at the beginning. Here is a fighter, relentless and anguished, the soul ragged and abused, cocky and arrogant. Nothing can stop him.
It’s to Iron Man’s credit how little there is of suit, and how much of superhero there is
You don’t hear much about that anymore, but it’s actually quite the American past time. When I saw Batman Begins, I thought I saw the perfect incarnation of page to screen. How wrong I was.
Nerds have a love/hate with the two big other superhero series, Xmen and Spiderman. You can see the movie choices overriding the judgement and character of people some people liked.
Now growing up, I never cared for Iron Man. Never owned an Iron Man comic, never had the action figure. Kind of a non-entity to me. He belonged to an older generation.
But what fun, this Iron Man is.
The movie may just be the one of the best examples of obsession, redemption, and raw talent. There are demons, there is baggage, but there is also a method. I was a comic book nerd who could play basketball better than someone of my height, and my ability to think hone by repetition. The constant thunk thunk of the basketball, the imperfect arc on the way to the hoop. These are all things. There is method. It is slow and frustrating. Eventually, you look a seven foot defender in the eye, post up on him, and drop it in the bucket. The first time you get beaten, and you look up and grin, for all the extra thinking, all the thunk thunk thinking and work that has gone in to it. That’s what Iron Man shows. It’s very easy to dig.
The best thing I can say for this movie is that the big final climactic scene is the worst scene. As others have pointed out, it’s too cheesy, too much like a comic book!
And so we have come that the movie is so good, so suave, and methodical that a Transformer’s-like showdown is made of pure camp. Of last year’s villains. It didn’t need a final showdown, because the things about the comic books that we grew up with were not the big victories over the grand schemes.
Because Magneto would be back, Doctor Octopus would be back, the bad explosive times come back. It’s in the smaller moments, those moments of discovering, enhancing, of overcoming one’s problems that often make very meek men dream of might. And that’s what this movie captures. It’s also a joy. It’s a movie that doesn’t skirt death, it shows that nice isn’t always right. And how cathartic in this time to find a movie where the government isn’t a complete choad. It’s not that it’s always the case in either direction, but it’s a refreshing angle in a world loaded with distrust. It’s also odd to see a movie where terrorists get their shit handed to them. We don’t always win, but we do hand over some shit. It’s important to remember that sometimes. It’s nice to see innovation,
The best movies in the Superhero genre are at their best without the official suit. Think about it.
The moment in Spider Man when he picked up Mary Jane, and her lunch tray, and her milk, as she slips.
Wolverine, in a fighers cage, circling and smoking and stalking. In the next movie, pinning a soldier to a refrigerator, nerves set to kill, the hyperventilated realization that the red haze is descending.
In Superman, having to be a clutz when every part of you is the best of you, and this is all just a show so that he doesn’t wake up to tanks or questions or both.
In Batman Begins, stripped of his suit, the anguish is clear at the beginning. Here is a fighter, relentless and anguished, the soul ragged and abused, cocky and arrogant. Nothing can stop him.
It’s to Iron Man’s credit how little there is of suit, and how much of superhero there is
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Take Two Examples
The more distracted your company is with creating a video game, the better the game will be. The more distracted your company is with money and shareholders, even your quality with be diminished.
I feel, with utter certainty, that this is a rule that is seldom seen. When shareholders are kept at arm’s length in defense of the artist, you begin to see true art take form in the way of perfection.
Take 2 cases.
The first is the Nintendo 64. The big N’s decision to remain cartridge-based has been called stunning, and perhaps their largest failure. 3rd party companies fled en masse towards larger disc space and admittedly better 3 dimensional implementation and support.
And what did Nintendo’s core teams crank out? Masterpieces.
Ones like Mario 64, which sets a benchmark for quality that, despite all efforts including their own, is brought up in every comparison.
Another was Ocarina of Time, which was a world as fully formed as you could get, and few which any game has the chutzpah or design qualities to be as subtly beautiful. Every game before and since is compared to this one by the legitimate press.
It took a long time to make that game, and the release date always seemed out of reach. But quality, gameplay quality, that’s what they wanted and would only deliver. Nothing else.
It took an IGN 10.00 rating.
Next we have Grand Theft Auto IV. For the uninformed, Take Two is a spectacularly retarded business. Their core revenue streams are few and far between, and their gaming experiments flawed both financially and in execution.
The heads of Take Two are resisting an attempt by Electronic Arts to buy it, which is an important thing to its major investors. EA is offering more for Take Two than it is worth, according to essentially every major analysis.
But they want to discuss if after the game. Whether that’s protracted arrogance, the fiscal insolvency of parent Take Two pales in comparison to the IGN 10 rating that Rockstar’s gem has just received.
Obsession wins in game design. Sacrifice of common business practice wins in game design.
It’s an important lesson, one Sega doesn’t learn, that Squenix and Sony and sometimes Nintendo refuse to learn. But it produces the bulk of critical and financial success.
The real question is when will the industry realize that.
I feel, with utter certainty, that this is a rule that is seldom seen. When shareholders are kept at arm’s length in defense of the artist, you begin to see true art take form in the way of perfection.
Take 2 cases.
The first is the Nintendo 64. The big N’s decision to remain cartridge-based has been called stunning, and perhaps their largest failure. 3rd party companies fled en masse towards larger disc space and admittedly better 3 dimensional implementation and support.
And what did Nintendo’s core teams crank out? Masterpieces.
Ones like Mario 64, which sets a benchmark for quality that, despite all efforts including their own, is brought up in every comparison.
Another was Ocarina of Time, which was a world as fully formed as you could get, and few which any game has the chutzpah or design qualities to be as subtly beautiful. Every game before and since is compared to this one by the legitimate press.
It took a long time to make that game, and the release date always seemed out of reach. But quality, gameplay quality, that’s what they wanted and would only deliver. Nothing else.
It took an IGN 10.00 rating.
Next we have Grand Theft Auto IV. For the uninformed, Take Two is a spectacularly retarded business. Their core revenue streams are few and far between, and their gaming experiments flawed both financially and in execution.
The heads of Take Two are resisting an attempt by Electronic Arts to buy it, which is an important thing to its major investors. EA is offering more for Take Two than it is worth, according to essentially every major analysis.
But they want to discuss if after the game. Whether that’s protracted arrogance, the fiscal insolvency of parent Take Two pales in comparison to the IGN 10 rating that Rockstar’s gem has just received.
Obsession wins in game design. Sacrifice of common business practice wins in game design.
It’s an important lesson, one Sega doesn’t learn, that Squenix and Sony and sometimes Nintendo refuse to learn. But it produces the bulk of critical and financial success.
The real question is when will the industry realize that.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Because people spend money on stupid stuff
he next 20 years, look for a company that can produce content-specific (meaning game or movie-themed) pinball tables to be a niche market catering to affluent, aging gamers. They will run in the thousands, and the person who figures out this market will make more money than Coach makes on ridiculous purses. What motorcycles are to baby boomers, pinball tables are to Gen Xers.
Baby Boomers (the majority of them, at least) didn’t really enjoy motorcycles as a youth, but they’ll spend a ridiculous amount of monies on them because they are, ultimately, really cool and a symbol of their lost youth. While I believe there is a market for vintage arcade cabinets, the ready accessibility of those same games to be played on a multimedia box is here (also on a vastly superior screen) and will not go away. Truly digital mediums transfer easier and carry less niche appeal (examples: even your grandma has an iPod.) An experience you cannot transfer digitally to another medium carries both a fashion cache, as well as a market that likes niche products and is unafraid of spending money. A similar market admittedly exists for record players, but there are fewer opportunities for licensing and promotion.
I feel that this pinball company would have to make them better than Midway ever did, but if that's the greatest challenge then I'd hope I'm not the only one excited by it. A business like this can also act promotional vendor: why win a Batman 4 t shirt when you can play a Batman themed pinball game?
The market for gamers is wide open, and I don't think that's even partially understood by any company outside of Nintendo.
Baby Boomers (the majority of them, at least) didn’t really enjoy motorcycles as a youth, but they’ll spend a ridiculous amount of monies on them because they are, ultimately, really cool and a symbol of their lost youth. While I believe there is a market for vintage arcade cabinets, the ready accessibility of those same games to be played on a multimedia box is here (also on a vastly superior screen) and will not go away. Truly digital mediums transfer easier and carry less niche appeal (examples: even your grandma has an iPod.) An experience you cannot transfer digitally to another medium carries both a fashion cache, as well as a market that likes niche products and is unafraid of spending money. A similar market admittedly exists for record players, but there are fewer opportunities for licensing and promotion.
I feel that this pinball company would have to make them better than Midway ever did, but if that's the greatest challenge then I'd hope I'm not the only one excited by it. A business like this can also act promotional vendor: why win a Batman 4 t shirt when you can play a Batman themed pinball game?
The market for gamers is wide open, and I don't think that's even partially understood by any company outside of Nintendo.
Friday, April 11, 2008
It's this or the Terminators...
Some ideas aren’t meant to make money. That’s the problem with Facebook and Myspace and now Yahoo, apparently. Some ideas do not produce the profit margins that are sustainable in the old world economy. But instead of adjusting the map, the companies adjusted, largely for the worse.
And if disappointing profit doesn’t point to the end games, the exponential increase in computer storage will. While a 10 gigabyte hard drive wasn’t cutting edge in 2000, it was certainly huge. Now a 1 terabyte hard drive is not considered cutting edge, but it’s considered a good chunk of space.
What will the next 10 years bring? I think it will bring a new version to the web. As server bandwidth and storage increases, we’re going to be in for such a shock.
Because some smartass is going to put ten grand into a server. And he or she is going to put basic networking code in, exactly as Facebook does, exactly as Myspace does, to help you blog and sort and catalog your many friends, passer byes, and pity friends.
And he or she won’t accept money for it.
I know, I know, it sounds like herecy, but think about it. Everything that drove Facebook’s or YouTube’s mass appeal was done on the cheap. And there will come a point where the operating costs of the necessary server will creep closer to zero. As that happens, and I believe it will, that next generation will find itself drawn to the moth to the flame. Look how easily and readily we have embraced email, texting, online conversations and blogs. As the hurdles in bandwidth are slowly overcome, the lasting thought of a megacorporation holding the keys to your favorite entertainment is going to be less and less appealing. Indeed, that’s precisely what happened with the internet recently. There simply won’t need to be a justification for the upkeep of large corporations, or stock holders who care more about their dividends than the product. That way of business is not sustainable on the internet. Hell, it’s not very sustainable outside of the internet, really, but that’s another story.
The point of the matter is the concept of the world on a single server (or collection of linked servers) is fast approaching, and when the costs are later driven down the attempts of Facebook and YouTube to capitalize in the multi-billions will seem laughable.
This current generation sees the bloat of the music industry, how their expectations for profits are not realistic. We see that there is profit for the musicians and various media types to make money, but I can’t think of a single person who thinks that the sheer size of the music industry can carry its own weight any longer. Storage and bandwidth outpaced their sales models.
Websites carry that same potential, and businesses that find themselves working against comsumer interests with things like advertising clutter, obtrusive data tracking, and the cessation of appealing services will find themselves doomed by the next rond of technology. The talents of Silicon Valley and beyond have the talent to take the reins and pave a road for the next generation of talent. But here’s the thing. All those innovators are working on how to make shareholders happy, how to make advertising more effective. That’s what makes the news now. Unless there’s a paradigm shift in how they do business, efficiency will doom them. It doomed AOL, and it’s been a problem for Yahoo of late. There’s no reason it won’t happen again.
And if disappointing profit doesn’t point to the end games, the exponential increase in computer storage will. While a 10 gigabyte hard drive wasn’t cutting edge in 2000, it was certainly huge. Now a 1 terabyte hard drive is not considered cutting edge, but it’s considered a good chunk of space.
What will the next 10 years bring? I think it will bring a new version to the web. As server bandwidth and storage increases, we’re going to be in for such a shock.
Because some smartass is going to put ten grand into a server. And he or she is going to put basic networking code in, exactly as Facebook does, exactly as Myspace does, to help you blog and sort and catalog your many friends, passer byes, and pity friends.
And he or she won’t accept money for it.
I know, I know, it sounds like herecy, but think about it. Everything that drove Facebook’s or YouTube’s mass appeal was done on the cheap. And there will come a point where the operating costs of the necessary server will creep closer to zero. As that happens, and I believe it will, that next generation will find itself drawn to the moth to the flame. Look how easily and readily we have embraced email, texting, online conversations and blogs. As the hurdles in bandwidth are slowly overcome, the lasting thought of a megacorporation holding the keys to your favorite entertainment is going to be less and less appealing. Indeed, that’s precisely what happened with the internet recently. There simply won’t need to be a justification for the upkeep of large corporations, or stock holders who care more about their dividends than the product. That way of business is not sustainable on the internet. Hell, it’s not very sustainable outside of the internet, really, but that’s another story.
The point of the matter is the concept of the world on a single server (or collection of linked servers) is fast approaching, and when the costs are later driven down the attempts of Facebook and YouTube to capitalize in the multi-billions will seem laughable.
This current generation sees the bloat of the music industry, how their expectations for profits are not realistic. We see that there is profit for the musicians and various media types to make money, but I can’t think of a single person who thinks that the sheer size of the music industry can carry its own weight any longer. Storage and bandwidth outpaced their sales models.
Websites carry that same potential, and businesses that find themselves working against comsumer interests with things like advertising clutter, obtrusive data tracking, and the cessation of appealing services will find themselves doomed by the next rond of technology. The talents of Silicon Valley and beyond have the talent to take the reins and pave a road for the next generation of talent. But here’s the thing. All those innovators are working on how to make shareholders happy, how to make advertising more effective. That’s what makes the news now. Unless there’s a paradigm shift in how they do business, efficiency will doom them. It doomed AOL, and it’s been a problem for Yahoo of late. There’s no reason it won’t happen again.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
2.0 failed.
The sad thing is that Youtube, or rather, the Youtube of such monumental power as to be swallowed by Google for hundreds of millions of dollars, is dead.
You see, Youtube has had some major hits with user-generated content. But you see a producer’s dilemma in sifting through Youtube. For everything worth watching, there was an almost unlimited supply of crap. Tribute videos, for example. You ever wondered what if they did a montage of Gilmore Girls clips to Linkin Park? Then have we got the website for you! Also, guys getting kicked in the nuts, which is always funny. And the “Leave Britney Alone” kid, who I’m sure the gay community is proud to have as a prominent celebrity. A few years prior, an excellent homosexual actor Ian McKellan thrilled the world as XMen’s Magneto and inspired magic in viewers as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings series.
This goes to show two things. The first is that there is a lot of crap. The second thing is that, by and large, the entertainment industry largely does it better.
The problem with current YouTube is that it’s not the old Youtube, which was filled with Daily Show clips and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that lost episode from that television show you watched as a kid. In the genesis of the high definition age, people were tuning in to watch a shoddy bitrate.
But then all the industry players got ligitation-happy, and the whole party went to crap. It’s a lot harder to get content. And they pointed out, quite furiously, that DVD sales dropped during this timeframe. While this is true, they have not recovered despite much stricter copy write enforcement since the lawsuits. It hasn’t worked.
On Demand Programming is said to be a nexus, but I do realize that much of what I enjoyed on YouTube will never be free again. It’s a shame, really, as quality entertainment pushes and exceeds boundaries, freeing people to take on new and challenging works that they denied themselves, but were now instantly accessible for the low, low price of free. The sad thing the industries never understood was how much free publicity a low quality feed was. Now the website is left with “Chocolate Rain” and “2 Girls 1 Cup reactions”. That is very disheartening.
I am a believer that people gravitate towards quality. The problem with entirely user-generated content is that, after a while, you create a culture of performers who do not watch other people perform. The problem with online journalism is also this: everyone wants to write, nobody wants to read.
I believe sites like the one being developed in Rochester, Minnesota put power both in the user’s hands, but also in the hands of the creators of content. Because they are separated and one in the same, just like old Youtube. The reviews and opinions are the users, and the scores are the users, but the content being viewed is by the big boys. It doesn’t make the pairing equal, but it does derive entertainment for the viewer and perspective, eyeballs, and consumer data to the content creators. It’s something akin to performance theater, which the internet is exceedingly good at.
Here’s a show, now the audience is involved. They can see where they sit, see the stage, and react solely from their seat. They feel their opinions and output matter, and game creators are forced into a position where they know, deep down, they ought to be. Whether in comments such as the ones by EA’s Vice President about the deteriorating scores of EA Games, or in the Gerstmann-gate debacle, it’s quite clear that the extent of marketing is understood, even if they don’t always like to admit it.
Back to YouTube, its best days, as the great content equalizer, are now behind us. Internet 2.0 websites are fascinating, because they are usually best in their initial incarnations. Once sites like YouTube and Facebook and Google have to become profitable rather than revolutionary, their edge (and a great deal of their appeal is lost). How they could ever maintain their stratospheric sales projections is beyond me. It may even be beyond a dramatic gopher.
You see, Youtube has had some major hits with user-generated content. But you see a producer’s dilemma in sifting through Youtube. For everything worth watching, there was an almost unlimited supply of crap. Tribute videos, for example. You ever wondered what if they did a montage of Gilmore Girls clips to Linkin Park? Then have we got the website for you! Also, guys getting kicked in the nuts, which is always funny. And the “Leave Britney Alone” kid, who I’m sure the gay community is proud to have as a prominent celebrity. A few years prior, an excellent homosexual actor Ian McKellan thrilled the world as XMen’s Magneto and inspired magic in viewers as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings series.
This goes to show two things. The first is that there is a lot of crap. The second thing is that, by and large, the entertainment industry largely does it better.
The problem with current YouTube is that it’s not the old Youtube, which was filled with Daily Show clips and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that lost episode from that television show you watched as a kid. In the genesis of the high definition age, people were tuning in to watch a shoddy bitrate.
But then all the industry players got ligitation-happy, and the whole party went to crap. It’s a lot harder to get content. And they pointed out, quite furiously, that DVD sales dropped during this timeframe. While this is true, they have not recovered despite much stricter copy write enforcement since the lawsuits. It hasn’t worked.
On Demand Programming is said to be a nexus, but I do realize that much of what I enjoyed on YouTube will never be free again. It’s a shame, really, as quality entertainment pushes and exceeds boundaries, freeing people to take on new and challenging works that they denied themselves, but were now instantly accessible for the low, low price of free. The sad thing the industries never understood was how much free publicity a low quality feed was. Now the website is left with “Chocolate Rain” and “2 Girls 1 Cup reactions”. That is very disheartening.
I am a believer that people gravitate towards quality. The problem with entirely user-generated content is that, after a while, you create a culture of performers who do not watch other people perform. The problem with online journalism is also this: everyone wants to write, nobody wants to read.
I believe sites like the one being developed in Rochester, Minnesota put power both in the user’s hands, but also in the hands of the creators of content. Because they are separated and one in the same, just like old Youtube. The reviews and opinions are the users, and the scores are the users, but the content being viewed is by the big boys. It doesn’t make the pairing equal, but it does derive entertainment for the viewer and perspective, eyeballs, and consumer data to the content creators. It’s something akin to performance theater, which the internet is exceedingly good at.
Here’s a show, now the audience is involved. They can see where they sit, see the stage, and react solely from their seat. They feel their opinions and output matter, and game creators are forced into a position where they know, deep down, they ought to be. Whether in comments such as the ones by EA’s Vice President about the deteriorating scores of EA Games, or in the Gerstmann-gate debacle, it’s quite clear that the extent of marketing is understood, even if they don’t always like to admit it.
Back to YouTube, its best days, as the great content equalizer, are now behind us. Internet 2.0 websites are fascinating, because they are usually best in their initial incarnations. Once sites like YouTube and Facebook and Google have to become profitable rather than revolutionary, their edge (and a great deal of their appeal is lost). How they could ever maintain their stratospheric sales projections is beyond me. It may even be beyond a dramatic gopher.
Friday, April 4, 2008
3 Rants and a Confession
First off, I want to say that I am insanely, intensely jealous of Angsty Gaijin and his wonderful vacation right now. Like so much, I could cry. It has me speaking like a Zelda NPC, to the point where I hope he doesn't forget that special item from the far Eastern land.
Cocaine and Waitresses
It’s a real shame when one of your favorite restaurants drop the ball. It’s like you know of a friend who, by chance, did a line of coke at a party once. It’s not habitual, so you don’t have to worry about good old Eric, for example. But when you hear that he was missing, or off by over five minutes to a party, it comes back to “I can’t believe that bastard is back on the blow, man” and “He’s really letting us all down” and “Eric, man! He was doing so effing well, too!”.
So now it goes with a favored restaurant served up a very unpleasant meal. Whenever I go back now, I wait for it to let me down. And they were doing so effing well, too!
Coffee.
The fact of the matter is, Starbucks doesn’t exactly suck. Their coffee doesn’t rock by any means, but you know what you’re going to get. This becomes apparent when you frequent an area that doesn’t have a Starbucks, where quality control and consistency is maybe, not as controlled.
Take for example, this example. Sometimes when visiting friends in a town, somebody (by which I mean all of us) get a sudden urge for some of the caffeinated stuff.
My initial reaction when traveling is “Where is the Starbucks?”
In certain towns and in certain circles, the reply sometimes goes like this “Starbucks?! Man, fuck that burnt bean shit. You have to try this place we have down here! It’s so awesome! Their macchiato?? Man, it’s the bomb. They percolate their coffee just right! This shit’s so good, it’ll make your d--- bigger. No lie.
Excited (how could I not be?!?) we drive to this local establishment. And I order a large drink. I put the drink to my lips/ It’s muddy, unflavorful, and the taste of this brew contains none of the exotic, almost fruity bouquet that I’ve come to expect from a $5 cup of coffee. Instead it has the liquidity of sludge, the grounds are unpleasant, and I grow sadder and a bit irritated. I’m too polite to say anything, but my expression works its magic.
The friend says, “Man, they’re a bit off tonight.” Now I’ve visited enough local establishments to say, maybe they’re not off tonight, but that a bit of the magic has worn off. Maybe my expression broke the spell of “being different” long enough for their tongues to think what their brains could not and judged the coffee on the grounds of flavor.
They recover their zeal by the next time I visit. Similar line about how awesome it is. Same line about how evil Starbucks is (Starsucks? How clever and original). I know one thing hasn’t changed: Somewhere, there is a thick iced coffee and full of rich aroma and more than a hint of dark chocolate. And here I am again, playing Columbian Roulette with my tastebuds.
Friend of a Friend of a Friend
Sometimes I don’t think weddings make sense. Not in the whole “two people being together and loving each other for their lives and beyond” but I sometimes think people spend way too much time worried about who to invite or who to uninvited that sometimes the incomprehensible happens. Sometimes, you end up at a wedding for people you never met, buying kitchen implements and carefully wrapping them for people you never met, and watch them stand before their maker for what has statistically become a coin toss whether they will still be paired up when they meet their maker.
I think weddings should be inflicted on as few people as possible. To the carefully selected, they are privileged to watch a beautiful union between people they love. When it’s a friend of a friend of a friend, you wonder about the food.
How beautiful.
Cocaine and Waitresses
It’s a real shame when one of your favorite restaurants drop the ball. It’s like you know of a friend who, by chance, did a line of coke at a party once. It’s not habitual, so you don’t have to worry about good old Eric, for example. But when you hear that he was missing, or off by over five minutes to a party, it comes back to “I can’t believe that bastard is back on the blow, man” and “He’s really letting us all down” and “Eric, man! He was doing so effing well, too!”.
So now it goes with a favored restaurant served up a very unpleasant meal. Whenever I go back now, I wait for it to let me down. And they were doing so effing well, too!
Coffee.
The fact of the matter is, Starbucks doesn’t exactly suck. Their coffee doesn’t rock by any means, but you know what you’re going to get. This becomes apparent when you frequent an area that doesn’t have a Starbucks, where quality control and consistency is maybe, not as controlled.
Take for example, this example. Sometimes when visiting friends in a town, somebody (by which I mean all of us) get a sudden urge for some of the caffeinated stuff.
My initial reaction when traveling is “Where is the Starbucks?”
In certain towns and in certain circles, the reply sometimes goes like this “Starbucks?! Man, fuck that burnt bean shit. You have to try this place we have down here! It’s so awesome! Their macchiato?? Man, it’s the bomb. They percolate their coffee just right! This shit’s so good, it’ll make your d--- bigger. No lie.
Excited (how could I not be?!?) we drive to this local establishment. And I order a large drink. I put the drink to my lips/ It’s muddy, unflavorful, and the taste of this brew contains none of the exotic, almost fruity bouquet that I’ve come to expect from a $5 cup of coffee. Instead it has the liquidity of sludge, the grounds are unpleasant, and I grow sadder and a bit irritated. I’m too polite to say anything, but my expression works its magic.
The friend says, “Man, they’re a bit off tonight.” Now I’ve visited enough local establishments to say, maybe they’re not off tonight, but that a bit of the magic has worn off. Maybe my expression broke the spell of “being different” long enough for their tongues to think what their brains could not and judged the coffee on the grounds of flavor.
They recover their zeal by the next time I visit. Similar line about how awesome it is. Same line about how evil Starbucks is (Starsucks? How clever and original). I know one thing hasn’t changed: Somewhere, there is a thick iced coffee and full of rich aroma and more than a hint of dark chocolate. And here I am again, playing Columbian Roulette with my tastebuds.
Friend of a Friend of a Friend
Sometimes I don’t think weddings make sense. Not in the whole “two people being together and loving each other for their lives and beyond” but I sometimes think people spend way too much time worried about who to invite or who to uninvited that sometimes the incomprehensible happens. Sometimes, you end up at a wedding for people you never met, buying kitchen implements and carefully wrapping them for people you never met, and watch them stand before their maker for what has statistically become a coin toss whether they will still be paired up when they meet their maker.
I think weddings should be inflicted on as few people as possible. To the carefully selected, they are privileged to watch a beautiful union between people they love. When it’s a friend of a friend of a friend, you wonder about the food.
How beautiful.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Money Idea of the Day- The casual RPG
Let’s get this out of the way now, because it needs to be said. Storage limits are no longer a major consideration. That doesn’t mean they don’t have to be contended with, but if you have the game, odds are you can probably swing it. That’s not always true, of course, but it’s worth noting that storage sizes are so large that we have a real opportunity right now to reinvent a few wheels.
Grinding drives a lot of people towards RPGs, and it also drives a lot away. As a market, the grinding, arduous, 60-hour plus RPG has done exceedingly well. And the 100+ hour RPG, has also done exceedingly well.
I spend a lot of time talking about World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy, mainly because I truly think they do a lot right and a lot that is deplorable. I think that neither Blizzard nor Final Fantasy could reinvent the wheel, because of how much they have loaded on to their cart. Make no mistake, if Square doesn’t feel it is pushing an envelope, you are likely looking at a sequel or spin-off. This means that any space considerations are always going to be a prescient concern as they will always run out of it. So right there, I have little faith that the big dawg would come after me. And Blizzard? Too big and successful to care.
Bioware gets it. They keep their grinding short, and I would argue that many future RPG’s need to keep it shorter? How do they do it? Content, content, content.
The traditional RPG was meant for a Japanese audience, and audience that loved leveling up, either by traditional methods or over the long slog of many hours on a tactile grid, exchanging various experience points, using items, and casting various versions of fire.
That audience is shrinking in its overall profitability, probably for a multitude of reasons. But the point remains.
A shorter RPG, could be epic. It would be an event. Make leveling not a goal, let the events be what gains you something. A Zelda strength model for RPG! Does this put the game and skills more on a rail? To an extent, but it also means that, if you make the world large enough, that you are rewarded more for your ingénue than for how long you spend on a couch.
And SPACE is less a factor than ever. Imagine if you could create a game 5x the size of a big game, without the leveling to get in the way? Take graphics down a notch; the best games do. Counterstrike never looked cutting edge. World of Warcraft looks antiquated. Starcraft 2 is meant to run on even simple systems. Size matters, but the potential right now is smearing on the gameplay, on the addiction, . You would attract gamers who feel jaded by the new RPG’s, who are bored with current ones, or who simply don’t have the time or dedication they once did.
So when thinking about RPG’s and video games, what else do people do? More to the point: are there people who watch movies every day? Of course, but there’s also a lot of people who only watch movies on a Friday night.
Aha.
There’s also people who play Dungeons and Dragons once or twice a week, and a considerably smaller number who play every night.
A-ha!
Event gaming.
Take a big draw of World of Warcraft such as seasonal or sponsored events, and make that a game! Make a giant world that you can only see once! Keep it simple, maybe use a template or software, but tell an entire story arc in one night.
Just don’t make it an episode! People love episodes, but this ain’t Tivo! Make it an event, make it challenging enough for real gamers, but make it accessible! Charge pennies, but make millions. Put in-game advertising in on billboards, in witty ways to subsidize development costs, not as an add-on. This would let people in on a world, or a couple worlds. Make playing the game the reward, not persistently leveling up until 3 am the cost. Episodic gaming means that people have to be in a certain time, at a certain place. Have multiple servers? How about multiple start times? If movie theaters can do it, why can’t game companies? There is none of the overhead and a fraction of the investment- people bring their own seats! Hell, you can even charge more for off-peak gaming. Matinee servers! Smaller companies could offset larger costs during peak hours by diverting traffic to other hours, and create a significant margin overage during those peak hours and invest that balance into better servers! IF you have a real story to tell, you can get people excited. Keep them hungry! Everyone, from release schedules, from Blizzard to Bungie to Squenix, to Disney to Dreamworks to McDonald’s to Nintendo KNOWS THIS WORKS. But for video games, no one has ever tried it quite like this.
Then, you collect, say, a season’s worth of content, sell it as an anthology, and reap more profits! This is entirely possible with today’s technology. It would be fun gaming, renegade creativity. There’s a place for Pixar, but there’s also a place for Daffy Duck cartoons. Before Toy Story, remember, there was a DVD worth of animated shorts.
There’s gold in them thar hills, and the only limit is when people say “no”.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
On pwning
The internet doesn’t forget. That’s the dangerous thing about it. You either control all of the information, or you control nothing.
As Microsoft and Sony find, as Apple wonks find, as the world finds out about
Recently, a European has filed a trademark for the phrase Pwnage. They did not create this euphemism for the truly eclectic and jubilant moments of gamedom. Rather, they suffused this mighty slogan for their own good. And the internet will choke their rivers with fervent antagonism. They have the worst kind of marketing now, contending with having to simultaneously live up to the name, as well as putting out the product that they had originally intended. On a sub-major development budget, it is unlikely that they can succeed. Not impossible, but the stakes have been raised.
So this European developer must contend not only with releasing a new product, but also in defending their taking for themselves a phrase that is very public, and certainly not of their origination. Even via the courts, or even an impressive game, can they suppress the fact that they subjugated and stamped on something the public sees as a gimmick.
After all, if Apple and
Saturday, March 15, 2008
A Brave New World, 20 years ago.
I am on my 25th hour of Smash Brothers Brawl. The really scary part now is not the content, which is egregious in its effects on my time management. The producer says this will be the final one, but we all know that’s shenanigans. But what on earth could they put in the next generation, a fully HD release? I shudder to think what Nintendo could fit on a Blu Ray disc… mere sunlight may not be a sufficient alternative.
Now the Wii has a problem, and that problem is pricing. The 360 and the PS3 have this to a lesser extent, but the greatest problem is that anything outside of a highly marketed game doesn’t do too well in this day and age. The Wii’s numbers are … mixed.
The success of the Virtual Arcade, Xbox Live Arcade, and the Playstation 2 Greatest Hits packages shows that value can be drawn from nostalgia, but value also arises from value. Games that couldn’t sell well at full regular price are marked down. And this is what the Wii shall do. We all know that Zack and Wiki (and I know what I’m getting into) won’t sell as many copies as Metroid Prime 3, so why not sell it at a lower cost?
Well, they did, and it still didn’t do so hot. But at the lower price, you can bet they moved more copies than they would if the MSRP was 50. And in the interest of the gaming companies, they may have to re-examine some of their figures. Most games on the systems that are less anticipated or hyped could be offered at a lower price. Said console company raises their certification and licensing marginally to offset any loss, and the manufacturers get a bigger piece of cake by way of gross sales.
Some would say this is already happening with the Wii, that many “lower” titles take up shelf space. This is true, but the quality there is lacking. The difference may be that we need to show companies a greater potential in margin. It makes no mistake that nominal budgeting for a girl’s horse game will make a return even on the largely mistaken customers.
It is important to remember Atari at this moment, and it’s also important to remember the Game Boy. The Game Boy has games that are Classics with a capital C, but it also has shit that you couldn’t give away. It didn’t destroy the gaming business. On the contrary, it grew by leaps and bounds, and preserved a handheld monopoly where competition is only a recent phenomenon. The Wii model isn’t broken; it’s been used for years to the tune of tidier profit than any competitor.
Independent developers will find themselves drawn to the relative cost-effectiveness on the Wii, and big time players may find themselves allocating more resources. What’s working against Nintendo is that production costs (unless your name is Squenix) is going down as companies learn the ins and outs of the high definition consoles.
So the solution? A much lower price point on capital games. Give away a Mega Man, practically. Show that a top tier game can be bnought at the Wii (and ensure a lower MSRP to make it tempting) and you’ll see the difference. No More Heroes, for example, is not a fifty dollar game. But a 25 dollar game? I’d wager even
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Wow
Without any reservation, the game of the year is Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Nothing can come close in terms of content. No game has made me feel like a kid again quite like this.
The closest I can come to this game is the HeMan Christmas Special. It’s a largely forgettable piece of schlock, but it was basically how all the rules come apart, and suddenly Skeletor is trying to save Christmas. That doesn’t make sense, but it does because it’s CHRISTMAS. That’s how Smash Brothers works, in an exuberant role where sense is made simply on youthful wonder. The pieces fit because our brain makes it so, and the writers make sure all the right moves are there. Suddenly, you cheer for HeMan and Skeletor.
Nintendo is on a role, and I realize how this game was made, really, for kids my age. My first Mario was Super Mario Brothers. My first Zelda game was The Legend of Zelda. We are well past the point where a seasoned gamer doesn’t necessarily have the same pedigree, but for them, this cake known as SSBB is no less dense, with no less topping. It is an exuberant love letter to gamers and especially those who can tolerate Nintendo. I say tolerate because, quite simply, there are those who don’t think these games matter.
Nintendo games are about pure joy. Immersive fun, the unexpected moments, and scope. Between this and Super Mario Galaxy, I feel I have two of the best games for gamers ever made.
I can’t get over how it felt when I fired up my Gamecube, and against all reason plugged in my Gamecube controller. The reason for this is simple- rumble. I want to rumble. I want to feel the game, as that’s a big part of what made melee so immersive. It works, it works like an old friend. A couple hours in, I discovered the game demos for old school classics. When I found myself, on a 1080p plasma, gliding and soaring and jumping through the first level of Super Mario Bros. demo, I felt like a kid again. A stupid, hurt kid who likes to imagine.
I don’t want this game to bore me. I never want to find every secret, find its missions borderline on the tedious. I want this game to excite me. And the best part? The game seems so full, so rich and so ready, that I can honestly say it never wants me to feel that way either. How many studios ever, ever aim for that? Not even Nintendo, not even Bungie, not even Blizzard. It’s so big.
I feel like I’ve been given a towering cake, loaded with candles and frosting for my birthday. I feel like any sort of review structure would hinder what I feel is a totally visceral game. I can find very few faults.
Reviewers fault the friend codes, the lack of online messaging, and a structured tournament. The fools… this game is about fun. The ire and languages and consequences of the regular online gaming community are not here. Nintendo has made too many inroads with families to risk the kind of language and people that Halo abides by. It makes perfect business sense, and the hassles are short-lived. Connecting online tonight was hard, but no system is perfect. Slowly, I started vs one other person. Then two, then four. Suddenly it was a friend’s basement again. A girl’s bed. The glow of the Christmas tree in the next room, the smell of forgotten pizza. It triggers emotions and memories. It’s the Yankee Candle of gaming.
If I have any complaint, it’s that the graphics have become too detailed in this game. Normally, that’s not a bad thing, but Nintendo characters have always had a bit of a singular color pop. By adding shading and graphics, it tends to make the character design look busy. It’s an odd point, but I do believe that many sort of games need simplicity. Pikachu looks especially terrifying: the added lighting and effects have made it look less like a cartoon and more like a possessed stuffed animal. Which is sad, because if you look at the Pikachu in Melee, you see the cartoon electric rat in all its bouncy happiness. I wish they had gone for a simpler, cleaner look with more polish, instead of more detail. The more real something becomes, the more fake it feels. Advent Children feels a lot more static than the Iron Giant, for example, despite the vastly superior visuals of AC.
But back to the game. I am so, so glad I bought this. I’m so, so glad I can literally play anyone in the world who has this game in the entire world (something not even XBL could fathom). I’m so, so glad I can share this with friends. What game could dare live up to that?
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