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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Fallout Fall-out

I was very interested in Fallout 3 (the original is a long-time favorite), but now that I’ve veiwed the demo footage I’m very much underwhelmed.  They’ve taken a great deal of what made the franchise unique - a turn-based, tactical RPG - and turned it into a slightly modified FPS, a post-apocalyptic Oblivion.  It may be a fine RPG, but it’s not really Fallout.

An Lament To Paul W.S. Anderson

Look, I know that Anderson’s movies are almost uniformly terrible.  And I know that they’ve been almost uniformly treated as such, since he hasn’t had a commercial success since Mortal Kombat (and perhaps Resident Evil, which wasn’t a very big-budget film).  In fact, the only reason I assume studios let him direct is because they think gamers are idiots who will buy anything with a brand name on it.  So maybe this complaint is unhelpful.  But here goes nothing.  By what logic does it make sense to license a video game franchise, and then write a script for it that eliminates nearly every distinctive connection to that franchise?  This is not a rhetorical question. 

This isn’t good for gamers.  We don’t get the movie translation of the game we wanted, and so we’re less likely to be excited about the movie, less likely to see the movie, and less likely to talk it up to friends.

This isn’t good for studios.  A generic movie that’s unconnected to the franchise means that studios have shelled out a substantial licensing fee for no reason except to put the word Castlevania on it.  Since gamers who like the franchise are the only ones who care about that name, and you’re dragging it through the mud, the value of that word is nearly non-existent (or at worst negative if they take to the internet to complain). 

This isn’t good for theaters.  People who are at best indifferent to your movie, and at worst, openly antagonistic, aren’t paying $10.50 a pop to sit in an uncomfortable theater with loud children and overpriced food to see it.

This isn’t good for directors.  You’ve already stacked the deck against your future success.  Anderson may have more directorial lives than a Hindu cat, but his luck has to run out eventually.  No one’s going to pay for a director to make films that lose money.

This isn’t good for general audiences.  Another generic, vaguely vampire-themed movie with no discernable differences from any other?  Yawn.  That’ll stand out in a crowded market.

So who does this help?

Smoke In The Crystal Ball

Hal Halpin of the ECA takes a close look at some popular gaming predictions over at The Escapist.  Unsurprisingly, he views many of the futurist predictions as unlikely; when you consider that previous predictions in all sorts of industries have generally been wildly off-base, his skepticism isn’t really all that surprising.  People just aren’t very good at extrapolating across huge swaths of time - in part because technological change happens so quickly and unpredictably.

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Korearama

Hot on the heels of my own comments on Joystiq comes a GameSetWatch piece on Korea as well.  Worth reading, although it’s more from the perspective of a developer than a gamer per se.  I’ve seen a few links from related sites as well (Kotaku, Massively, etc.).

New Quantum of Solace game video does nothing for me

Joystiq seems incredibly enthusiastic about this new footage, but after watching it I’m not even sure why.

I’ll stipulate that I played quite a bit of Goldeneye back in high school, and was also a big fan of Casino Royale, and even the new movie trailer for Quantum of Solace looks great. I also know that the CoD4 engine is quite capable, but most of what we see in the trailer looks, and sounds, rather typical to me.

The first thing I noticed is how poor the sound effect was for the automatic weapon that’s used in the trailer.  It sounds like a typewriter, honestly.  Obviously, this is something that can change easily, so hopefully it will.

Other problems include some jerky animations, a Daniel Craig model that looks sort of plain and lifeless, and the fact that it sort of looks like they’re making Call of Duty: Bond Edition. Just because you’re using the CoD4 engine does not mean that they should be making the game exactly like CoD4.  There are some, potentially, nice additions like a cover system and some 3rd-person camera switches, but the first person stuff looks straight out of CoD.

The game is set to release around the time of the movie, which means they still have a few months to go to polish things up.  Hopefully the game will turn out to be as good as Joystiq seems to think it looks right now.

Guess Who We Won’t Have To Kick Around Any More

Judge recommends permanent disbarment for Jack Thompson.  Considering that Thompson has been more active (and considerably more effective) as a rabble-rouser than as a lawyer, I’m not sure if this will make a huge difference in his day-to-day activities, but ouch.

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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E3 Sneaks Up Next Week

Kotaku was nice enough to point out that E3 was coming up next week and while I’m sure we’ll hear more about games like Gears of War 2, Resistance 2, Far Cry 2, Rock Band 2, and Killzone 2 (that’s a lot of 2’s), I’m actually more interested in seeing if we’ll get more information about games that we DON’T already have some decent information about.  So, here’s my list of things, divided by platform, that I’d like to see next week (and that I have no clue if they’ll be shown or even exist):

• God of War 3 (PS3)
• New Ico/Shadow of the Collosus team game (PS3)
• Heavy Rain (PS3)
• New Zelda (Wii)
• New Nintendo IP (Wii)
• Peter Jackson Halo collaboration (360)
• Amplitude 2 (Non-Rock Band Harmonix game, perhaps the name “Wavelength” would be more appropriate) (Multi)

Admittedly, there are other games I’d still like to see more about (including the ones listed before, and others such as Resident Evil 5), but these are ones that we basically have hardly any information on, or don’t even know if they exist, and would make great surprises for E3.  What does everyone else think?

Men Are From Mars

Multiplayer Blog asks an interesting question: should female characters and male characters be treated differently, if those differences are reflected in real life?  For example, should men be stronger than women?  The responses are interesting but, largely because the readers fail to state the question they’re answering, inconclusive.

To me, this is really three different and related questions:

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