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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Can you say WoW?

Blizzard just announced that they have reached 9 million active subscribers. The rate at which they’ve been increasing subscriptions is amazing.

There are very few regular non-subscription games that have even sold 9 million copies worldwide. Halo and Halo 2 didn’t sell that many. Zelda: Ocarina of Time didn’t do it. According to VGChartz.com, just 26 games ever have surpassed 9 million sales, and only a few from the last generation (all PS2). Blizzard has probably sold far more than 9 million copies of the game, they just have 9 million subscribers also paying $15 a month, which is a monthly revenue of $135,000,000 and an annual revenue (assuming no additional subscribers) of $1,620,000,000. That, of course, not even counting the actual revenue from sales of the game or its expansion.

Mind-boggling.

Reggie Spills (Some) Beans on WiiWare

Over at Level Up, N’gai Croal’s indispensable blog, they have a short interview/feature with Reggie Fils-Aime mostly on WiiWare, the upcoming original downloadable games for the Wii.

According to Reggie, the content will be basically unfiltered by Nintendo, aside from bug-testing.  Of course, this prompted questions about Manhunt 2 and it’s AO rating preventing it from gracing Nintendo’s console, to which Reggie mostly avoided the question and simply re-stated that AO games would not be allowed on Nintendo’s platform (or any other platform for that matter).

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Madden ‘08 Doesn’t Use Friends Codes

I can’t really tell if this is good news or bad news.  EA has announced that Madden ‘08 will use their own “EA Nation Persona” for online play.  Part of me is annoyed that there will be yet another system that will need to be used for online play.  But another part of me thinks that this is probably no different than game-specific friend codes, and actually, this could actually be a superior system to Nintendo’s own friends codes.

Of course, it’s baffling to me that it still won’t support voice communication, but instead will rely on “EA Messenger.” Yeah, I’m sure that won’t be annoying to use at all.

Nintendo Hates Friends

It’s really the only explanation as to why they have to make it so difficult to have them.

Nintendo Gamers Online (via Destructoid) has more or less confirmed what we basically already knew but were too afraid to accept: the Wii will use game specific friends codes.

I’ll mention that their confirmation is not 100% official, but they base it on newly released screenshots from Mario Strikers Charged that clearly show an interface to input Wii Codes.

I don’t know how much more I have to add to this over their own rant (which you should check out), but I’ll give my 2 cents as well after the break.

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Tapping into Free Games

Kotaku brings good news that Gametap will be changing their service starting May 31st to allow for a free, ad-based subscription as well as the more traditional ad-free paid subscriptions. A rotating list of 30-60 games will be offered through a Gametap “Lite” player that will include ads.

I think this is a great idea. I’ve just never felt like $10 a month would be worth the price, since I’d only use it on occasion. But, for those few times that I may want to play a game they offer, such as Sam and Max, this could definitely work.

It’s unclear exactly how the ads will be implemented. My guess is that they’ll be a bit more intrusive than just a bunch of ads hanging around the borders of the player, but as long as they aren’t popping up every minute or two, it should be fine. Even if it follows a “TV” model of 18 minutes of ads per hour (which my guess is it’ll be even less), I think this would still be sufficient for us cheaper gamers.

*UPDATE*

From the original article:

“The Green Level will be supported with video roll-in ads prior to gameplay in the Deluxe Player and banner ads in the Lite Player.”

There you have it.  The “Green Level” is still free; it just requires registration.  Depending on the player you use, you’ll either have an intro ad, or just banner ads.  Not a bad deal at all, if you ask me.

Conundrum of the Day

Is it strange to anyone else that the console with the worst online connectivity now has free (for a time anyway), final web browsing software while the console with the best, but also subscription-based online connectivity has none?

It’s not exactly a killer app, just a nice little feature.  And it’s just amazing to me that Microsoft, creator of Internet Explorer, still hasn’t implemented a web browser for their Xbox 360.  What exactly are they afraid of?  Is anyone else perplexed by this?