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Atari and THQ Show Mixed Financials, Game Details
An anonymous reader writes "GameMethod reports that for the fiscal 2004 first quarter, Atari announced that net revenues and income were down from last fiscal year, but still positive. Strong sales of [the somewhat controversial] Driv3r for both PlayStation 2 and Xbox are being cited as the main success, but the dip in comparative figures is being attributed to last year's release of Enter the Matrix, Atari's commercially successful (over 5 million units sold), yet critically jeered game. [Atari's Bruno Bonnell commented on the loss of the Unreal license that Epic's proposed deal was 'not acceptable from a profit point of view for our strategy.'] On the flip side, despite a net loss of $3.9 million for the fiscal first quarter of 2005, THQ announced a positive outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year. Full Spectrum Warrior for Xbox drove sales for the quarter, ranking as the top selling Xbox game and the second best selling title for the month of June."
I'm not surprised Full Spectrum Warrior sold well. It's a great game, with superb graphics and loads of atmosphere. However, I'm a bit taken aback by what it says about US Army tactical training techniques.
First of all, if you haven't played the game, I should make something clear. This is NOT a realism-shooter. When I bought it, I was expecting something broadly along the lines of the Rainbow Six games. However, it's nothing like this. Essentially, it's a military-themed puzzle game. Your soldiers behave like game-pieces on a board and there's no element of aiming or of using quick reactions to dodge incoming fire. Instead, you move your soldiers around and deal with a variety of thinly disguised puzzles. For example, if one of your two squads runs into a group of enemies behind cover, they will be unable to kill them. You won't be able to manually aim and pick off the enemies... instead your soldiers will trade fire with them, but not hit them... at all... ever. If your own soldiers are also behind cover, you'll then get a complete stalemate. You might be able to solve this situation by moving your second squad into a position where they can fire on the enemies without the cover interfering, and to achieve this, you may need to use the first squad to supress the enemies. The enemies behaviour, including which squad they will shoot at and, indeed, whether they will shoot at all, is all very mechanically determined. Every "puzzle" has a solution you can find which lets you beat it without taking any losses. In fact, you fail the mission if one of your soldiers dies.
I'm not trying to make a political point here... as it happens, I'm in full agreement with the US/UK invasion of Iraq, even if the implementation has gone a bit awry in places. However, I can see some serious limitations in this as a training tool. I can see why the game doesn't make players aim manually etc... these are obviously skills that need to be practiced on a firing range, not in a computer simulation (although try telling that to the hardcore video-games-are-evil-and-train-our-kids-to-kill activists). However, the idea of every battlefield problem having a neat solution seems to be to be training troops for failure. Surely, in real combat, a lucky shot *can* take out somebody behind cover and the enemy often behave irrationally. I'd be seriously worried about something like this stifling adaptability and resilience on the battlefield.
Of course, I've no actual military experience, so maybe I'm talking crap. Feel free to mod me down.
What did Atari not like about Epic's deal? Did Epic want as much time as they needed to make the game and Atari wanted them to throw out half-finished games instead? Did Epic want a share of the profits? I mean, it's the same guy who claimed that Enter The Matrix shouldn't pay extra (his comment on the WB "higher royalities for bad games" thing, he didn't have to pay, but if WB had that system in place earlier he would have had to) for brand damage since it sold really well (I'd call that "even more damage").
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.