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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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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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.

More Nazis! I Mean, Japanese.

Call of Duty 5 details have come out, and it looks like we’re returning to World War II.  This has of course prompted a whole host of complaints from sites like Destructoid, who argue that WW2 is played out and that we should be looking at other conflicts for inspiration.  I’d agree that there are plenty of games like this out there, but this complaint strikes me as largely unfounded.

First off, why are there so many WW2 games?  For one, it’s because the war was one of the few with undeniably, unambiguously ”good” and “bad” guys.  You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone - Pat Buchanan aside - willing to argue that this wasn’t a “good war.”  As a result, you can mow down hordes of other human beings without feeling too terrible about yourself.  And you get a nice warm glow inside when you accomplish your objectives.  Second, it’s epic: there just aren’t any other wars out there in the modern era with the same kind of epic scope and scale that World War 2 has… even WW1 was relatively uninteresting trench warfare for a significant portion of its duration.  As a result, there is a lot of ground to mine.  Third, it’s got neat gadgets.  WW2 was where many of the tools of modern warfare, like the tank and air combat, first came into their own.  Therefore, designers can make a fairly diverse and interesting experience out of combat.  And finally, it’s got a happy ending: the right people won.  Good gameplay scenarios in an epic battle between good and evil: sounds like it should get a lot of attention.

Additionally, there just aren’t that many other attractive scenarios.  The most obvious US battles of the last 150 years or so would probably include the US Civil War, World War I, Korea, and Vietnam.  Yet the first has quite a few games of its own.  And the latter three just aren’t very inspiring: Korea had an ambiguous outcome, and it’s not nearly as widely known as most other fights.  And Vietnam is such a cultural touchstone, with so many political connotations, that it’s tough to come up with a real game that isn’t also a political statement. 

Also consider the fact that even now, companies are able to advance the WW2 game in any number of ways - from CoD’s original European-focused titles, to RTS’s like Close Combat and Company of Heroes, there are plenty of recent games that do more than simply parrot their forebearers.  If the genre is stagnant, let’s hear complaints.  But “no more WW2″ is reflexively negative without due reason.

And lastly, it would be remiss to note that the Pacific theater is one that hasn’t been touched on in nearly the same detail as Europe.  The fact that CoD 5 is targeting this area seems like a great reason to consider it optimistically.  The CoD series hasn’t let us down yet.

Games I Can’t Care About: Assassin’s Creed

This is old hat for many of you, but I recently picked up AC on sale at Best Buy… and I can’t bring myself to play more than 5 minutes of it.  I just can’t bring myself to care.  Everything about it, from the cutscenes to the lengthy training video to the pointless story, grates on my consciousness like nails on a chalkboard.  I know Jeff actually enjoyed the game, but it still amazes me that there are heralded games that so actively repel me.  I don’t despise it as much as I loathed Elite Beat Agents, but the hatred is replaced by an apathetic void that compels me to throw it into a corner and never touch it again.

Are there games that you hated from the moment you laid eyes on them?

Not the Bestest Ever Multiplayer Game, at least, any more

After a brief stint at the top of XBox Live, GTA IV is no longer the most popular multiplayer game on XBox Live any more.  It’s been overtaken by both Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3. That didn’t take too long.

In all fairness, the multiplayer in GTA IV was only one aspect of the game that was so popular with reviewers, and my sanity has been partially restored as it is no longer ranked as the best game of all time.

You Don’t Say…

Apparently, Gears of War 2 has “axed” the squad commands that were available in the original.

Am I the only one that read that and thought, “Gears of War had squad commands?”

I guess this happens on occasion with games… I made my way through Mass Effect without knowing about a lot of things (and while I knew there were squad commands, I don’t think I ever used them).  Still, I don’t think I ever knew that Gears of War had them (unless this is a mistake by Joystiq).  Funny how that happens sometimes.

Two GTA-Related Links

Some guy with far too much time on his hands has apparently matched up photos of New York with screenshots of Liberty City.  Behold the power of unemployment.

Also, some dating advice that applies to the real world.

GTA IV’s Blueprint for Cross-Platform Titles

Destructoid points to a Eurogamer analysis that somehow determines that GTA IV runs at roughly 33 FPS on the XBox 360 and 28 FPS on the PS3. Like Destructoid, I don’t see this making much, if any, appreciable difference to the experience. Despite this difference, as well as the PS3’s slightly worse resolution, most people who have played both versions seem to think that the PS3 looks slightly better than the 360 version due to some extra filtering that’s done on the PS3 version. My guess is that this extra filtering can be done on the PS3 because of it’s extra CPU power. With this new information, though, the strategy for successfully creating apparent visual parity between the 360 and PS3 versions of the game becomes apparent:

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GTA IV Over-Infatuation

What am I missing about this game?

I still have a ways to go with it, but I am over 10 hours in and I’m actually completely baffled that this game is still sitting atop Gamerankings.com as the best game of all time (actually the best 2 games of all time, since there’s a 360 and PS3 version).  This could still change, of course, but with over 30 reviews now in for the game, it will definitely be retaining a spot in the top 10 if not the top 5.  Typically, the course for these heavily hyped games is to get some really high early scores, and then later reviews tend to “backlash” against those scores to bring it down into a somewhat more “reasonable” range.

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