The 360 Needs a Good Kart Racer

Look, I’m a big Mario Kart fan, and the latest is no exception.  They’re a lot of fun to play even in single player, and a blast in multiplayer.  But as the console world evolves, so must Mario Kart.  The latest in the series, of course, has online multiplayer, and while it’s still fun to race online, it could be a hell of a lot better.  In short, as far as online multiplayer games go, Mario Kart Wii fails to do some of the most basic things right, things that have been done (well) since the last generation.  To give you an idea of how stupid the online implementation of Mario Kart Wii is, here are a few snippets of IM conversation between Geoff and I while playing our first “Friend” game:

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Open Thread and Mini-Posts

Just thought I’d comment on a few news pieces from the last few days:

• Is it a little strange to anyone else that there is new downloadable content for Guitar Hero II (yes, 2)? It would make slightly more sense to me if it were cross-compatible with or at least simultaneously released with similar Guitar Hero III content, but for now this seems to be the same to me as if Bungie were to release downloadable content for Halo 2 now. What’s sort of interesting is that I can’t seem to find any information on who actually developed the new content, since Harmonix was the original creator of Guitar Hero II, but Activision now owns the property. Was this new content developed by Neversoft, or perhaps it was completed long ago by Harmonix and they are simply releasing the rest of the GHII content under some contract? Either way, it seems a bit strange to me.
• Gametap is losing 70 games due to expiring contracts with EA, Interplay, Atari and a few other publishers. It actually seems more significant to me that they are actually losing a contract with the publishers (EA in particular) than just the fact that they’re losing 70 of their games, since that means the loss of several future games as well. Strangely enough, Gametap just celebrated their 1000th game making it onto their network, and they will now have less than 1000 again. Their Editorial Director says they weren’t aware that the games would expire when they made the big announcement that they had hit 1000 games, but he also explains that the contracts with the publishers had a “beginning and an end.” If that was true before, why didn’t they see this coming? Did they simply forget about it, misunderstand their contract, or is there something we’re not hearing yet?
• Joystiq has obtained an “exclusive“interview of sorts with Jeff Gerstmann, which manages to add actually very little to the current knowledge of the event. Gerstmann says that he “stands by” his Kane and Lynch review, which I think should be a given by now, considering that he was allegedly fired over it. Other then that, he denies the irrelevant rumor that he didn’t complete Kane and Lynch, and basically just says he doesn’t know what he’s going to do just yet.
• Bioshock finally gets its widescreen “fix” this week, along with some supposedly free DLC containing new Plasmids. While I loved Bioshock, this actually doesn’t interest me much at all. While having the widescreen “fix” is sort of nice, I don’t think the original widescreen mode really ended up impacting the game at all. As for the DLC, playing through the story mode of Bioshock again just to play with some new Plasmids doesn’t seem like much motivation. Maybe if there were some kind of “arena” mode where you could basically just outfit your character anyway you wanted and you basically had to survive waves of attacks from enemies I could find some use for it… but I can’t imagine the plasmids will be interesting enough to make me want to play through the game again so soon. Since it’s going to be free, it almost makes me wonder what the point of even bringing it out is. Since it’s not a multiplayer game, it seems like the people to get the most use out of this pack would be people that haven’t played the game yet, but I highly doubt it’ll really sell any more copies either.

Hellgate: Lacking?

I’ve had a chance over the last few weeks to give the highly anticipated Hellgate: London beta a shot. As much as I hate to say it, I’m finding the game a bit lacking so far. Granted, I haven’t really dug that deep into it yet, but after progressing about 10 levels in with one class and dabbling with another, I’m not all that impressed.

I was really hoping to have something that played like a much-needed update to Diablo, but it only partially succeeds. Perhaps the closest Hellgate comes to Diablo is in its fast-paced combat. You can take on literally dozens of monsters at once and, in classic Diablo fashion, take them out about as fast as they come at you. It’s a fun formula, if not a bit repetitive.

Unfortunately, I think Flagship may have gone too far in the “MMO” direction with the game. There are countless random quests to pickup in the “towns”, marked with the now familiar exclamation point and question marks, spanning all of your classic MMO quest types: collection quests, kill X enemies quests, kill generic mini-boss quests, etc. I don’t remember the Diablo’s being quite this side-quest heavy, and I don’t feel like they really serve that much of a purpose in a game like this.

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Portal in a Flash

Just in case you didn’t have a beefy enough machine to play Portal or you simply want some brain-bending puzzles you can try during your free time, We Create Stuff has developed a 2d Flash version of the game that’s actually remarkably fun to play.  Check it out here.

Online Gamer ID Exchange

I figured it was about time I shared my Gamertag and such with our readers, so here are all of my numbers from the 3 consoles:

XBox Live Gamertag: Leshrac55

Nintendo Wii Friend Code: 7159 9720 8631 9953

PSN ID: Leshrac55 (I think, but who honestly knows)

Feel free to drop your own Gamertags and such in the comments if you like.  I’ll add everyone who responds.

Smash Bros. Purchase Confirmed for December, Friend Code Bitching to Start Now

As Laesperanzapaz has pointed out in the comments, Super Smash Bros. Brawl 4-player online battles have been confirmed. As expected, Smash Bros. will use Nintendo’s universally despised Friend system.

While simply taking the game online is a big selling point for me, I can’t help but feel at least slightly disappointed in what the online modes will feature. With friends, which of course you will have to laboriously enter in (and ensure all your friends have entered you in), you can send pre-made text “taunts”, have each match outcome recorded, and of course, check each other’s records. While you can play anyone worldwide as well, no stats are recorded, no “taunts” can be used, and apparently you can’t even see a player’s name. Neither mode will support any kind of voice chatting.

And once again, this basically shows why Nintendo just doesn’t “get” what online support means. Sure, playing against other people is great, but without voice, “taunts”, stats, or even the ability to possibly invite a person to be a friend within the game, the “Worldwide” mode basically becomes a glorified single player game with better (or worse) AI. No record keeping or names means you can never end up playing a player you know you’ve met before, or some player “renowned” for being great. It will probably also mean lots of unevenly matched games as there will be no matchmaking pitting you against people with similar records.

Mixing it up with friends will obviously be more fun, but there is still a lot of unrealized potential without voice chat. What makes these games so much fun to play multiplayer is not just the fast-paced gameplay, but the competitive and social aspect.

Imagine for a moment if you went to someone’s place to play some Smash Bros. and everyone was just silent while you played. After the round was over, no one talks or boasts or complains or anything. No trash talking, no shouting, nothing… just the sound of the game and maybe people’s text “taunts” appear on the screen. That would really make the multiplayer a lot less fun, no? While the online experience obviously can’t completely replicate the superior in-person experience, voice chat at least goes a long way to help mimic the fun that you have when playing people face to face. Bomberman Live is a great example. Without the chat there would be basically no difference between playing it online or playing it yourself against the computer.

Nintendo should do a couple things to enhance their online:

1) Keep Friend codes, but make them OPTIONAL. Nintendo could easily add them in as a function of “Parental Controls” in the Wii Menu. Hell, make them default to “on” for all I care, just stop assuming your entire audience are babies (aren’t you the one touting the fact that you’ve been expanding the market to even OLDER people?) and give mature players the option of not using Friends codes. At the very least, give us the option of letting us create new Friends on the fly and having “Friend Request” notifications, rather than the strange “Black Hole” of Friends now where, maybe they’ll add me, maybe they won’t… I’ll have to call/e-mail/IM them to make sure they add me… They forgot, oh, they wrote my friend code down wrong, ok, now it’s right… just a few hours until it “registers”… you get the picture.

2) Add in Voice Support. I know a lot of people don’t like listening to others… fine, it’s easy enough to have the option to Mute all incoming voices. But some of us actually really like talking to others, ESPECIALLY when we’re playing with friends. Again, don’t assume we’re all babies and are too delicate to handle voice chat. It will actually enhance both your games and your fan base.

One more Halo 3 Thought

I just wanted to add that if I somehow stumbled across a copy of Halo 3 before its release date that, given the absolutely ridiculous punishments Bungie is doling out to make sure people don’t play it, I would probably just refrain from playing it until the 25th anyway. Admittedly, the guys that downloaded “Halo 3 Epsilon” basically stole someone’s account in order to play it, but I still don’t trust Bungie or Microsoft not to do the same for me if I obtained it through more “legitimate” means. Why not just disconnect from XBox Live and play the single player?   One word:  Achievements.

Even if I were to disconnect XBox Live until 9/25 and play the single player I’m not confident that Microsoft wouldn’t actually search out people who had achievements pre-9/25 and actually ban their accounts and consoles from XBox Live.  Perhaps I could change the 360’s clock and disconnect and blah blah blah… it’s a big hassle and even then I don’t know what’s actually being recorded into the “Achievement”.  It’s extremely ridiculous, but I suppose we don’t even necessarily have the right to play legitimately purchased games (from the consumer’s end anyway) on our legitimately purchased consoles any more without fear of losing access to their online service.

Sometimes I miss the good ol’ days of online-unaware consoles.

Call of Duty 4 calls to too many

Last week it was announced that CoD4 would be taking beta applicants “First Come First Serve” basis starting at 12:00 PM PDT today.  As soon as I read it, I remarked to a friend “This seems like an immensely bad idea.”

See, playing a really big game before its release for free is very alluring to a lot of people. The 6 million people who own a 360 in the US might possibly be interested.  If you tell these people to go to a web page at a very specific time you’re going to need a lot of bandwidth and CPU power to respond to those requests.  The only way that you can have a system that’s first come first serve for something like this is if you either make sure you have the needed bandwidth and servers or you maybe open it up at a random time during the day so the lucky people who happen to look at that time can get in (although this could cause your site to be down all day).

So of course today I, along with probably millions of other people, skeptically tried refreshing the CoD4 website starting a few minutes before over and over again trying to get a token for the beta.  One time I made it to the “beta” page, clicked on the “Enter Beta” button which unfortunately had to load yet another page.  That, of course, failed and then I had to try and refresh THAT page a 100 times.  Finally about 20 minutes later I got to the page and it had a message saying they had already given out all the tokens.  Fantastic.

Just like console launches, why don’t these companies realize the disaster of these things?  It seems Infinity Ward has figured out the problem with “first come first serve” now and has a 24-hour sign-up session where they’ll randomly pick people who registered for it.  If you want in, you can go there now and sign up before 7 PM PDT today.

New Feature: Weekly “Chatcast”

We’re proud to introduce our “Chatcast”, a new weekly feature.  Every week we will take some games or topics that are on our minds and chat about it online, and then share our chat for all the world to see.  This week we discuss Metroid Prime 3, Mass Effect, Halo 3’s “Forge” Editor, and Multiplayer vs. Single Player games.  It came out a bit longer than I anticipated for our first Chatcast, but please feel free to give us your feedback and suggestions.  Our first Chatcast after the break:

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What I Want in Downloadable Games

With all of the platforms now offering some form of downloadable games and the PC and PS3 actually offering full games in online stores, I thought I should put up my wish-list for what I want in my downloadable games. This is NOT a list of what kind of game I want to play, but rather what kind of features I want to see overall.

• Games should be storable on external storage, whether on a USB HD, thumbdrive, SD card, or whatever. I don’t want to worry about having to re-download stuff all the time. If I have to move stuff back and forth between internal and external storage, I suppose I can live with that given USB’s speed limitations. But if they can be launched from the external storage, then they definitely should be.

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