If it sounds too good to be true?

A new company called “OnLive” has announced a service which will let you run high-end, 720p PC games at 60 FPS on any computer with a decent internet connection and web browser.  You could also buy a (theoretically) cheap “Micro-console” device from the company that would hook into your TV via HDMI that would also enable you to play all of these games in HD at 60FPS.

Assuming that the price for this service is reasonable, such a service would likely radically alter the gaming industry in a very short period of time.  High-end gaming PCs would be an absurd investment if even your $100 netbook could play the same games at ridiculously good graphical settings.  Powerful and pricey new consoles would look noisy and hot compared to a cheap, sleek, and quiet PSP-sized device that could play better looking games anyway.  Not only that, your device would never need to be upgraded to support the newest generation of games… your games would just keep looking better and better over time whether you’re using an old computer or an old “micro-console”.  All you’re responsible for paying for once you have a computer/microconsole is your internet connection and the subscription fee (and, of course, for the games, which would also be “rentable” since the problem of piracy goes out the window).

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Whodda Thunk?

I’m sure this is blowing the top business minds everywhere, but apparently giving people a free basically unlimited sample of something and then selling that something at a substantial discount will dramatically increase its use and sales.

I know, I know… Crazy, right?  But that’s the lesson we learn from the news that Epic’s Unreal Tournament 3 saw a 2000% increase in simultaneous players after allowing people to take it for a spin for free for a full weekend and discounting the game 40% off of its normal price on Steam.

Apparently, this result was so shocking that brilliant minds at Epic determined that they would extend the sale and do another free weekend.  Maybe it will be so successful that Epic will just feel compelled to permanently keep the game on “sale” and make every weekend a free one!

I guess Epic can’t take all the credit for this idea though… after all, this comes after Left 4 Dead sales increased 3000%, beating out even its own launch sales, after Valve discounted it 50% for a weekend.

It really is shocking… heavily discount a popular and well-reviewed game and its sales increase dramatically.  I never would’ve guessed.

Now, snark aside… I’m just glad that someone has finally realized that they can still have sales on digital items.  It seems that Microsoft is sort of getting the hint as well as they’re actually having weekly sales as well… though it doesn’t seem like it’s with things that are that interesting yet.  Why they don’t start discounting and having sales on some of their older catalog is beyond me, and the number one thing I am not looking forward to as we approach a discless gaming world.

LittleBigPlanet a LittleBitLonely?

I picked up LittleBigPlanet the Saturday before its “official” release date when Gamestop got their copies in early.  I played it a bit for a few days, but because the servers had not been brought online and were having problems, the deluge of other games, and my travel, I decided I’d give it a little break.

I fired it up again last night, though, hoping to finally see what people had produced to see if there was any user content that was more than just a gimmicky diversion, but unfortunately the servers still seemed to be down.  I was limited to the (admittedly pretty good) single player content.  Is anyone else still having problems with the LBP servers, or is something wrong with my game/PS3 or whatever.  For the record, the PSN store works just fine for me.

*Update* - Online finally worked for me last night.  I was able to try out a smattering of levels… a lot of them just seemed to be people finding creative ways to play video game music they liked.  There was 1 level I played that I actually really liked and gave 4 stars to… the others… nothing that great yet.  I don’t really like the system for finding levels… You can search for adjectives of levels, but you can’t search for just the top rated levels, which seems to me like a bit of an oversight.

It keeps going and going…

While it’s pace may have slowed down slightly, World of Warcraft has now hit 11M subscribers.  It is astonishing to me that after several years and several very well-hyped competitors that WoW continues to dominate like this.  Even though I don’t play it any more, Blizzard deserves enormous credit for somehow continually creating enough new content to keep old subscribers interested and new subscribers signing up.

Supposedly, Blizzard is creating another MMO now that is unrelated to WoW, but I’m guessing that it’s still at least 2-3 years away, as I imagine it’s going to take awhile before the number of WoW subscribers actually starts to decrease instead of increase, even if it’s normal pace of 1M per 6 months doesn’t quite continue (it took about 10 months this time).

Money can be exchanged for goods and services

Attention game industry, we already have a standard for which we can purchase items: money.  Let’s use it, shall we?

Obviously, we all know about Xbox Live Points, which inexplicably have a conversion rate of 80 points to every $1.  There’s just no reason to have such a stupid conversion rate except to slightly obscure the true price of downloadable items.

Nintendo/Wii Points are slightly better, but only because they have a sensible conversion rate of 100 points to every $1.  At least when you buy something there’s not a weird conversion that you have to pull off in your head to figure out how much it is.  Now we learn, however, that instead of just using the same pool of Nintendo points for DSi downloads, you will have to keep completely separate accounts for both.

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$6,000,000 for doing it wrong

Blizzard has won a lawsuit against the creators of bot software for World of Warcraft called “Glider”.  I actually hadn’t been following this before, but personally, I find at least part of Blizzard’s reasoning for the lawsuit to be patently ridiculous.  In the original story, they stated:

“Blizzard’s designs expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time.”

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Downloadable Renaissance

What’s going on this month?  Within just the span of a few weeks we get:

• Geometry Wars 2 (XBLA)
• Pixeljunk Eden (PSN)
• Braid (XBLA)
• Bionic Commando: Rearmed (XBLA/PSN)
• Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty (PSN)
• Castle Crashers (XBLA)

Geometry Wars 2 and Braid are not just some of the best downloadable games I’ve played, they’re some of the best games overall that I’ve played all year.  I loved the demo for Eden, but haven’t had a chance to purchase the whole game yet in the midst of the other great releases.  IGN has already reviewed Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and while one review does not a game make (nor do several reviews sometimes), they say it’s the best downloadable game made so far.  Certainly, Castle Crashers has been highly anticipated for quite awhile and R&C: QfB looks as high-quality as any previous title in the series.

Obviously, there are still some differences of what can really be done with a high-profile, big-budget game and the typically smaller-budget downloadable titles, but with games like Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty coming out, even that line is starting to blur.  There’s no question about it, this is a great slate of games.

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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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