Weekly Column 7/24/08

Our new column is up here.  It talks about E3 and whether or not it’s actually “dead” as many want us to believe.

And just to point out, I actually wrote this before this news came out.

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.

We’ll Do it Live!

It seems the “in” thing to do in survival horror games now is to make accessing your inventory occur in real-time.  That is, when you access your inventory, the game is still “live” and you are open to take hits.  This was the case in the recently released Alone in the Dark game, it is apparently going to be the case in Resident Evil 5, and the Dead Space Producer is bragging that you can’t even pause his game (which I have to imagine, or at least hope he means that you handle your inventory “live”, and not that there’s literally not a pause function in the game, as that may be the one single feature that no publisher in their right mind would ever ship a game without).

I’ll keep this relatively short, but my question is, is this really a good thing?  I like keeping the action moving and having the ability to “quick swap” weapons as you’re now able to in RE5, but I do know that it was helpful in RE4 to sometimes take a look at what’s in your inventory (even in the middle of a fight) and consider what your options might be.  According to the Dead Space Producer, this is exactly what they want me to avoid now, though.  Certainly, this probably creates more tension, but does it also decrease the usability of the game at the same time?  Is the trade-off worth it?

Prince of Persia’s Stunning Trailer

I have to say that if the game is as good as this trailer is beautiful, Ubisoft has a big winner on its hands.  The inclusion of a Sigur Rós song for this trailer was a good choice, although their music always has such a powerful meloncholic affect on me.  I wonder if the game will actually evoke this same mood.  Hopefully, the trailer is not deceptive in this sense, but the artistic style is certainly appropriate for it.

You’ll love it, we swear

Note to Nintendo: when you show a new peripheral, in this case the WiiMotionPlus, make sure we understand what it’s good for and why we need it.  It looks like they demoed just Wii Sports Resort with it, but no other announcements with it or what it really allows developers to do with it.

Incidentally, Wii Sports Resort would be even better if they put the original Wii Sports on the disc as well, sort of creating a “platform” as Rock Band is doing.  They could even add in support for the “WiiMotionPlus” to make the original games even better (if it actually does anything, since they didn’t really make the advantages very clear).

As for Nintendo’s conference overall… it was a bit of a bore.  I didn’t expect it to compete with Microsoft’s because Nintendo and Microsoft are quite honestly playing different games at this point. But I was hoping to at least see an interesting new franchise (for the “core” gamers they supposedly still care about) or at least an update to one of their popular franchises (and Wii Music and Animal Crossing don’t really count).  I really thought we’d at least see a teaser for a new Zelda, or didn’t they announce or strongly hint at a new Kid Icarus game at some point? Instead it seemed to be mostly numbers with a few games that I didn’t really care for, and then telling me that I should “disrupt my thinking” and escape the Matrix so that I care.  As with seemingly everything they produce, though, I’m sure they’ll sell a trillion copies.

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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E3 Sneaks Up Next Week

Kotaku was nice enough to point out that E3 was coming up next week and while I’m sure we’ll hear more about games like Gears of War 2, Resistance 2, Far Cry 2, Rock Band 2, and Killzone 2 (that’s a lot of 2’s), I’m actually more interested in seeing if we’ll get more information about games that we DON’T already have some decent information about.  So, here’s my list of things, divided by platform, that I’d like to see next week (and that I have no clue if they’ll be shown or even exist):

• God of War 3 (PS3)
• New Ico/Shadow of the Collosus team game (PS3)
• Heavy Rain (PS3)
• New Zelda (Wii)
• New Nintendo IP (Wii)
• Peter Jackson Halo collaboration (360)
• Amplitude 2 (Non-Rock Band Harmonix game, perhaps the name “Wavelength” would be more appropriate) (Multi)

Admittedly, there are other games I’d still like to see more about (including the ones listed before, and others such as Resident Evil 5), but these are ones that we basically have hardly any information on, or don’t even know if they exist, and would make great surprises for E3.  What does everyone else think?

Looks like somebody’s listening to me

Or, I get lucky sometimes.

Bungie has announced that there will be a free map download for Halo 3 available on Monday. But, not only that, the Legendary Map pack will be reduced in price from $10 to $7.50 a few months after its mid-April release.

Hmm, I believe somebody recommended step-down in price every few months back in November.  Strange how that works out sometimes.