Microsoft Gains First Strike and Scores a Critical Hit!

You’ve probably heard by now that one of Sony’s biggest theoretical exclusives, Final Fantasy XIII, is coming to the 360.  To be honest, even before I owned a PS3, this was never a huge concern of mine.  To begin with, I knew the game was basically never coming out.  And as much as I liked Final Fantasy IV, VI and VII, I never really got too into any of the other ones (got close to the end in VIII, barely started IX, played a little bit of X… X-2 and XII are on my shelf unplayed).

But, yeah… I know there are a lot of Final Fantasy fans out there and this will make probably half of them ecstatic, a quarter furious, and a quarter who don’t care.  Either way, this is, at the very least, a major psychological blow to Sony and a big coup for Microsoft.  A friend of mine was literally trying to sell his 360 to pick up a PS3 MGS4 package because he figured he could play MGS4 and (what he most wanted) Final Fantasy XIII whenever it finally came out.  Based on this news, that is no longer going to happen and he is keeping his 360.

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New Quantum of Solace game video does nothing for me

Joystiq seems incredibly enthusiastic about this new footage, but after watching it I’m not even sure why.

I’ll stipulate that I played quite a bit of Goldeneye back in high school, and was also a big fan of Casino Royale, and even the new movie trailer for Quantum of Solace looks great. I also know that the CoD4 engine is quite capable, but most of what we see in the trailer looks, and sounds, rather typical to me.

The first thing I noticed is how poor the sound effect was for the automatic weapon that’s used in the trailer.  It sounds like a typewriter, honestly.  Obviously, this is something that can change easily, so hopefully it will.

Other problems include some jerky animations, a Daniel Craig model that looks sort of plain and lifeless, and the fact that it sort of looks like they’re making Call of Duty: Bond Edition. Just because you’re using the CoD4 engine does not mean that they should be making the game exactly like CoD4.  There are some, potentially, nice additions like a cover system and some 3rd-person camera switches, but the first person stuff looks straight out of CoD.

The game is set to release around the time of the movie, which means they still have a few months to go to polish things up.  Hopefully the game will turn out to be as good as Joystiq seems to think it looks right now.

Rock Band 2 is already a good deal…

There is a bit more information that’s coming out regarding Rock Band 2 now, and while everything is mostly positive, I guess most people are thinking that it may not be quite as big an update to warrant a “2″.  Instead, 1up, for instance, is wondering why, outside of the obvious instrument improvements, a lot of the new features couldn’t have been released in a title update.

Now, if you’ve been reading our site for awhile, I think you know how often I like to complain about how things are priced.  But I’m just really not sure what the problem is here.  Most Madden games are basically roster updates, yet people continue to shell out $50-$60 every year for them. Regarding Rock Band 2, let me break it down as simply as possible for people:

For $60, you get 70 new songs.

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Men Are From Mars

Multiplayer Blog asks an interesting question: should female characters and male characters be treated differently, if those differences are reflected in real life?  For example, should men be stronger than women?  The responses are interesting but, largely because the readers fail to state the question they’re answering, inconclusive.

To me, this is really three different and related questions:

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Sci-Fi Shooter’s R’ Us

A new rumor popped up regarding Call of Duty 6 (yes, the one after the next one that’s going to take place in both the Pacific and Europe) that states that rather than returning to the “modern combat” of Call of Duty 4, it will instead be transplanted to a futuristic sci-fi setting.

Now, I like sci-fi as much as the next guy, but if there’s one setting we’ve seen more of than World War II, it’s sci-fi.  Not that I think Infinity Ward couldn’t make a great game with a sci-fi setting, but do we really need even more of these? And I’m not even including 3rd-person games or sci-fi set games that don’t use some version of a space marine on my list (yet).

It’s possible that, if the rumor is true, they could go in a more GRAW-like direction and simply use a slightly post-present setting.  This could work fairly well within the “Call of Duty” formula without substantially changing the setting that most gamers found so engrossing in CoD4.  Perhaps a more futuristic setting would also still work, but as a lot of gamers just got their first taste of “Modern Combat”, I wonder whether shifting to something else so quickly will upset them (particularly when they’ve already gotten such a generous filling of WWII shooters).

How much is too much?

With Guitar Hero: Aerosmith coming out in just a few weeks and Guitar Hero IV/World Tour expected later this year, you’d think Activision would be happy with their current Guitar Hero slate for the year.  Apparently not, as Kotaku points out that Guitar Hero: Metallica is slated to hit before the end of Activision’s fiscal year, (by March 31, 2009).

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, whether Guitar Hero: Metallica is a good idea or not.  Does this seem like a bit much to anyone else?  Not only is that going to be 3 Guitar Hero games within a year (4 in roughly 1.5 years), but with Rock Band continuing to offer weekly content, a likely full-fledged Rock Band sequel almost definitely going to be announced sometime soon (no inside info, just a hunch), and even a THIRD Guitar/Band franchise coming from Konami, is anyone worried about over-saturating this market?

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GTA who?

If you thought the GTA IV Hyperbole was great, you haven’t seen anything yet.  Now that it’s been about a month since GTA IV’s release, we can safely put that game in the rear view mirror.  The hot new ticket is here in the form of Metal Gear Solid 4.  Are you ready to be blown away?

First out of the gate, and therefore the most important review ever, is this leaked Gamepro review that says “It is, without a doubt, one of the greatest games of all time” as it awards it a 5/5. It also says, “This is videogame storytelling at its absolute best, and represents a new high watermark for the craft, easily surpassing the superb BioShock and the subversive Grand Theft Auto IV.” It must be those feature-length movies that really must represent the great advance in “interactive” storytelling.

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Color Me Skeptical

Nolan Bushnell says that a new computer chip will “absolutely stop piracy of gameplay.”

Really? Just like the XBox 360, eh?

Is it just me, or do these people constantly forget the golden-rule of software security: claiming your software is unhackable will only motivate hackers to hack it even faster.

New security steps like this one will certainly slow down some piracy for awhile, but it’s only a matter of time before it’s broken. When it is, expect the “next big thing” in software security to also be “unhackable” until it is, of course, hacked as well.

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GTA IV’s Blueprint for Cross-Platform Titles

Destructoid points to a Eurogamer analysis that somehow determines that GTA IV runs at roughly 33 FPS on the XBox 360 and 28 FPS on the PS3. Like Destructoid, I don’t see this making much, if any, appreciable difference to the experience. Despite this difference, as well as the PS3’s slightly worse resolution, most people who have played both versions seem to think that the PS3 looks slightly better than the 360 version due to some extra filtering that’s done on the PS3 version. My guess is that this extra filtering can be done on the PS3 because of it’s extra CPU power. With this new information, though, the strategy for successfully creating apparent visual parity between the 360 and PS3 versions of the game becomes apparent:

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Videogames as Simon

When I read that the top-rated Ikaruga player said that the “XBLA version is horrible“, I figured that perhaps there was a problem with the graphics or the controls were somehow less responsive than they should be.

Instead, it turns out that the reason he believes it’s so bad is because of some slight tweaks made to some of the levels:

“I can confirm they screwed up Shigi. They swapped the colours of the initial position of the lasers and inverted the direction in which they rotate. The best strategy seems to start from the bottom left (which is now red), stay to the right of the laser as blue and release as red when you have no room left.

Unluckily, because Shigi initially moves to the left and the lasers rotate to the right, the laser trail is much more “vertical” and it’s a lot more difficult to shoot it as blue without freaking die.

This whole thing is SO SO SO annoying.

I also noticed some changes in the delay with which the ships come in in 4-1 and possibly the timing is more strict to make enemies coming from the background locked by our homing laser…”

Wow, that sounds pretty serious. How could the developers make these crucial and amazingly damaging changes to the game? It’d be like Nintendo changing the Super Mario Bros. 7-4 Castle pattern in a remake of that game, which would just be tragic.

In all seriousness, I can understand the player’s frustrations. Obviously, when you play a game and get really good at it, it’s annoying when something changes that suddenly makes you WORSE at the game. But it also brings up an interesting point about what we want in our games.

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