Worst. Excuse. Ever.

So, Bungie’s new project was supposedly going to be unveiled this week and was called off at the last minute.  Why?

Bungie wasn’t really saying except that their “publisher” was responsible for it.  Said publisher turned out to be, unsurprisingly, Microsoft, as the LA Times discovered.  What was their excuse?

Don Mattrick, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Xbox games business, said the company decided to pull Halo …

… to help trim its E3 presentation to under 90 minutes, from 2 1/2 hours, to accommodate attention-challenged reporters. “We had an embarrassment of riches,” Mattrick said. “We felt we could do this game more justice with a more dedicated event.”

This has to be one of the lamest excuses I’ve ever heard, and is not believable at all.  If this is true, then Microsoft is being ridiculously stupid here.  Bungie had been hyping a big reveal for weeks on their website, so the stage was already set for them to make a big splash.  And when you have an “embarrassment” of riches to show, you don’t hold back on your biggest franchise from your most successful developer at the biggest (or one of the biggest now) industry-specific events just because you think you already have so much great stuff to show (which something like “You’re in the Movies” would seem to disprove).

Some have theorized that they didn’t want to take away from their Final Fantasy XIII announcement, but that honestly doesn’t make much sense to me.  Do they really believe that people couldn’t get excited for more than one thing at a time? Instead of just “Wow, FFXIII coming out to the 360!” it’d be “Wow, FFXIII coming to the 360 AND this awesome new Halo game!  I’m sure happy to be a 360 gamer now!”  No, I’m sorry… if you have something good to show, you show it at what is arguably the most important trade show in the industry (or at least, it used to be).

Which brings up what may be the more likely reason it wasn’t shown yet: it wasn’t good, or, at least, it wasn’t ready.  Based on how one bad E3 experience can potentially (unfairly) shape the future of your game (ahem), maybe Microsoft just didn’t think the game was in a good enough state to show yet.  I don’t really have a problem with this, but it’s strange that they would give such a weird excuse rather than just tell the truth.  If Bungie ends up revealing their game in just a week or so and it looks amazing, I’ll admit I was wrong, but right now I don’t believe their excuse for a second.

Get Lives, People

Who are these people who care enough about an errant watermark to request a new cover to their Wii games?  As far as I’m concerned, the only one who should be remotely interested is IGN, whose image was misappropriated for Capcom’s use; everyone else is, frankly, insane.

Plagiarists do Oblivion

Allanon just sent along this story where Game Plasma’s eagle-eyed PC reviewer noticed some striking similarities between Oblivion and a new game from a smaller PC studio titled “Limbo of the Lost.” Well, maybe not so much “striking similarities” as entire environments, lighting, and furniture placement in the exact same place as in Oblivion.

When this was first pointed out to me, I wondered whether these were just temporary placeholders for a game as of yet unreleased. Given the fact that he is reviewing the game, and a quick scan of Amazon suggests that this is not the case. I have a feeling we’re about to see some legal action here, as, unlike the S.T.A.L.K.E.R/Doom 3 fiasco, it’s hard to imagine that these entire environments are part of a 3rd party package.

You know what they say… imitation is the sincerest form of… ah, never mind. This is ridiculous. Sample pictures after the jump:

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Sunlight, Disinfectant, Etc.

I don’t know that we need to touch off another round of hallelujahs on this, but I’ll throw out my bafflement with the MGS review debacle, just the latest journalistic controversy in gaming.  I can’t think of a single reputable journalist that would accept the type of restrictions that were clearly imposed on MGS reviewers - disclosure or no disclosure.  And sure, I recognize the pressure to be first to market, &c., but seriously, people.  Leaving aside the ethical implications of reviewing a game you had to rush through or had no more than a handful of hours to actually experience, if you don’t like these rules, don’t play the game.  If everyone refused to give publishers what is essentially no more than free publicity to these games, companies would damn well make time to give you reviewable copies with the notice you need to actually play through them.  Get together with your friends, agree not to cheat each other, and tough it out.

I’ll give EGM some credit here, but a lengthy “discussion” is the same publicity that was hoped for from the beginning.  Not attaching a numeric ranking is weak tea.  And seeing game reviewers become coopted into essentially extensions of publishers’ marketing arms is really unpleasant for all concerned. 

Some Days I Just Don’t Know Why I Get Out Of Bed

Good: They’re making Beyond Good & Evil 2!

Bad: Beyond Good & Evil 2 won’t remotely resemble Beyond Good & Evil 1.

Look, it doesn’t really surprise me that Ubisoft isn’t interested in creating a new version of a game that was by all accounts a complete commercial failure.  I didn’t even like the game that much in the first place, although I suspect I’m in the minority.  But what on earth makes a company decide to create a sequel that completely eviscerates the characteristics that people enjoyed in the first case?

Here’s the thing.  People who liked Beyond Good and Evil would really love a game that revisits what they liked so much about it.  People who didn’t play it couldn’t care less.  So if you’re going to make a sequel that caters to casual gamers, you’re going to 1) piss off potential fans who enjoyed #1, and 2) do absolutely nothing to interest everyone else, who might even be turned off by the fact that the game is a sequel to something they’re completely unfamiliar with.  I can’t see the logic here in the slightest.

The Dumbest Thing I Read Today

You know, I realize that people feel the need to hyperbolize in order to make a point, but at some point you’re just destroying your own credibility.  Today’s example is Phil Harrison, who has made a number of comments that might fall into this category during his tenure at Sony.  Harrison states:

“I think the single-player, disconnected console game is probably in its dotage.  Now, that doesn’t mean that those games aren’t relevant going forwards, but they will be enhanced by community features being embedded in them, or downloadable content becoming an inherent part of the experience, or some kind of user-generated content will be part of the experience.”

I see two possible ways of reading this.  First, Harrison can be read broadly enough to include the possibility that he simply thinks that offline games that offer no online component whatsoever (co-op, deathmatch, some combination) are no longer viable at a corporate level.  But that seems so obvious as to be not worth the breath it would take to say.  Games have routinely featured some basic online connectivity for at least a decade, maybe longer, on PCs, and they’ve been increasing in frequency on consoles ever since the Dreamcast began offering it - and maybe earlier.  Plenty of games that include, say, an online leaderboard, but nothing else, would qualify by Harrison’s criterion.  In short, since it’s been technically feasible, online connectivity has been incorporated wherever possible.  The second and less charitable possibility is simply that Harrison is arguing that primarily offline games are doomed, which is absurd.

But neither of these observations negates the basic fact that offline gameplay is still extremely important, and that online play represents only one facet of an extremely diverse gaming landscape.  I still buy single-player only games, and I’ll continue to do so in the future.  I play online sometimes, but there are a lot of benefits to offline play, leaving aside offline multiplayer entirely. Unfortunately, the industry seems compelled to label new trends “the next big thing,” even when there’s little of merit to be observed.

Worst DRM EVER

Wow.  I have nothing else to say but that this must not stand.

Ask And Ye Shall Receive

Faithful commenter laesperanzapaz has requested some discussion of this Gamasutra commentary on the issue of whether or not GTA IV unfairly plays up stereotypes of (Balkan) immigrants in their protagonist, Niko Bellic.  I’m not sure how distinct my perspective is from that of the author, Simon Parkin.  I do think, though, that there’s a less oblique way to dispense with the criticism.

As far as I can tell, the only criticism alleged by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) is that making the protagonist an Eastern European criminal is unfair because Eastern Europeans aren’t disproportionately responsible for crimes.  The most obvious answer to this complaint, of course, is that the protagonist has to be someone, from somewhere.  So without any further evidence of anti-Balkan sentiment besides the mere fact of a character’s generic accent, it’s a pretty absurd allegation.  QED.

(By the way, if anyone you know gets their worldview on other ethnicities from Grand Theft Auto, they really shouldn’t be allowed out of their room.)

Gamestop “Overbooking” Pre-sales?

Via Kotaku comes the sad (perhaps already suspected) news that Gamestop will take your money to reserve a game, and not only will they not necessarily keep it reserved for you, but they actually are actively ENCOURAGING stores to break a calculated amount of pre-orders for “walk-in” customers:

“Your walk-in goals are calculated by multiplying your anticipated reservations by your historical Reservation Pick-up % on like titles. This amount is subtracted from your launch allocation to yield the amount of product that you can have set aside for walk-in customers. See below for the walk-in goals that have been set for your market. The number one district manager in each region in actual walk-in sales vs. goal will receive a $500 cash prize. The number one store in each region in walk-in sales vs. goal will be rewarded with a free copy of GTA IV regular edition for every associate on that store team.”

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Caveat Emptor, Analysts

I enjoyed this Kotaku piece, partially because it’s a vindication of what I’ve previously written.  Basically, it analyzes 10 predictions from 10 analysts and finds that even the best analysts are correct in their predictions only 60% of the time.  I’m not sure yet what the predictions were about, and 10 predictions is hardly a decent sample size, but it should be concerning that analysts are essentially no better than raw chance at making estimates about the future… since it’s what they get paid to spend all their time doing.  Amusingly, the worst analysts - e.g., Billy Pidgeon - are so wrong that you’d be better off assuming the opposite of what they tell you.

Not that I really pay attention to them in the first place… but caveat emptor.