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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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.