Maybe August 24th is the day Bungie finally turns on the marketing machine. (The game is being released in November, its July now. I doubt they're begin advertising THIS early.)
Anyway, how often has a company done better with their second console? The only recent "new" player is sony and they had a hit straight off.
What the hell are you talking about? The PS2 was a total crash thanks to god awful launch games (PS1 games don't count) and the shortage of units at launch day. The only reason why it survived was because it played DVDs (now a moot advantage) and because it played PS1 games (once again, moot).
The only real killer game for the x-box is halo,
Go back to playing KOTOR, Splinter Cell : Pandora Tomorrow, and Halo on your PC and try getting a smooth framerate. I've been playing them smoothly with no hassels on my X-Box long before they were ported the PC. Wanna play some Mechassault with me? Oh wait, you can't.
At least from the business perspective. Think about it, the guy is a dinosaur by any perspective. When Final Fantasy IX came out, people were bitching about the 'old school' look being too 'kiddie'. Given the attitudes of most modern gamers these days (read : immature or impatient), theres no way he would've been able to lead a huge company like Square (now SquareEnix) into the 21th century of games.
Or for a simplier comparison, if Final Fantasy 1-6 was released in its purist form (no graphic upgrades, no loadtimes, no FMVs, etc) do you REALLY think it would last in today's market? (After removing the 'you have to get it because its an old school game' factor)
the $150 price tag alone shows you that this isn't like the "car shows" you see every year in every major city.
Well DUH. For E3, four years ago the Playstation was kicking Nintendo's ass and was making the Dreamcast a paperweight. Try eight years ago and you'll have an argument.
CES = Consumer Electronics Show. E3 = Electronic Entertainment Expo.
Big deal, you went to two different shows. Whats your point?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but was it not the same media and retailers who used to scoff at Nintendo and video games as 'just for kids' back in the 80's? I distinctly remember video stores and kids toy stores rivaling those of so-called 'video game stores' back then.
Just because it was 'low-key' doesn't mean it wasn't geared toward the public, it could've meant that no one took them seriously at the time and now they're riding the way of video games being a multimillion dollar business. By your logic booth babes should be non-existant at the show, photos of the main floor wouldn't be a dark, neon lit room, and showgoers wouldn't have to sit on the floor/stand in the back just because of overattendence.
After all, in the past those 'few thousand' who attended a show were pretty much the bulk of your entire audience.
In a nutshell, no. Does it matter in terms of convincing major retailers or stockholders whether to support a company? Yes. Does it matter to gamers who will never attend E3, will have to read 3 different sources to get all the info, and will have to surf 4 different websites for different video clips? No.
E3 used to be all about 'the games for gamers' but between Sony's move to make video game consoles the center of entertainment systems and the 'maturity' of gamers (thats debateable), E3 turned into an endless mass of unsorted, mostly behind closed doors media event.
True, but ultimately the problem comes back to the millions of Joe Averages out there with broadband connections and cheap yet overpowerful computer system any geek will tell you they just plain don't need. There are people who still send out and forward chain letters (not to mention open up suspicious, no-doubt-virus-ridden, e-mails) which already adds to the problem of spam messages. What are the chances of these Joe Averages collectively thinking 'hey, maybe I should stop leaving my computer on 24/7 and ask tech support why my computer always seems to slow down whenever I surf the net.'
don't make Lara Croft the main character. First things first, shes an overdone character who never really had staying power like Mario or Sonic, so put her to rest. Secondly, give the game a MGS2 move and make the player play as a 'rookie' character. It helps introduce newbies to the series and doesn't give veterans the sense of "ok I'm Lara Croft, I've been through no less than 5 different adventures, by now I should be able to make headshots with my dual welding semi-automatic pistols while vaulting through the air and avoiding plumes of fire above and below me."
Seriously, Lara Croft is an overdone character thats around simply because of the 'boob' factor. Take the series down a new path and watch the money roll in. Worst case scenario they pull a MGS3 and choose another character (maybe Lara Croft's father?) and make it a pre-Tomb Raider series game.
All of your points are valid, but you're ultimately missing the point when it comes to people wanting 'free' music online. The biggest, or at least one of, problems with the RIAA's 'strongarm' tactics on the music industry is simply the stagnation of certain types of songs in terms of supply.
If you walk into a random Tower Records store chances are you're gonna find every CD, every single, and every movie Britney Spears was involved in even if they haven't even sold one copy of the thing in a month. On the other hand if you walk to the video games section (assuming the store even has one, mine is a mere 2 rows not even earning a sign above it stating that its a video games section) you're not gonna find many, if any, FF soundtracks despite the fact that just recently there was a concert by the composer in California fairly recently. Go to your indies section (again small if existant) and take a look at your section there. Try a foreign songs section, etc, etc. The list just goes on to the point where people just don't wanna bother with the standard walk-in music store standard and deal with a shitty selection.
So what do people do? Turn to the net, but *gasp* lo and behold being the slow dinosaur the RIAA is, theres no fair and legal way to obtain songs online (pre-iTunes store). After years of being spoiled with free, good quality, excellent selection music, does the RIAA really expect people to go back to a web form of the same crap they just left?
After the mixed reviews of Return to Castle Wolfenstein (handheld miniguns, bio-mechanical soldiers, and an undead medieval prince?) a remake or a sequel probably wasn't out of the question. But after Enemy Territory I wasn't expected another game after it.
To an extent, yes a well developed and very active (not to mention LISTENED to) community can seriously help a development of ANY game not just MMOGs. Its like all utopian experiments. Sure when you did it with 20 or 30 of your most hardcore believers its gonna work at least for a period of time. But as you add more and more people the chances of someone breaking down eventually gets to the point where someone will ALWAYS be a jerk/waste water/hit another person/etc.
The same thing with gaming. Everyone talks about how Counter-Strike can be a really awesome and strategic game 'when you play on a well moderated, private server'. Thats like saying 'Iraq is a really safe place if you stay inside a military bunker in the Green Zone.' You may think 'oh well thats just one or two bad cases' but there are roughly 50,000 players playing the game at any given time, do you REALLY think that my bad experiences won't be replicated by other people?
The absolute best IP is 'Star Wars.' It has the whole idea of the Force, which translates well into gameplay.
Yeah, we all saw how well the world reacted when the first few Jedis began appear in SWG. People dropped everything to become the next Darth Vader/Yoda/Luke Skywalker/Darth Maul/Unknown Jedi #1432 who supposedly was the super Jedi on some forgotten planet and was now back from retirement to collect phat loot. Whatever roleplaying was in that game was lost the moment developers caved in and made it (relatively) easy to become/remain a Jedi.
Then again to be fair the Star Wars franchise has had its moments : Tie Fighter, Star Wars Rouge Squadron, (yes those two didn't really have the Force put in but what about) Star Wars KOTOR which is considered to be the best game Star Wars game and Jedi Knight 2.
The problem with this is, how do you ACTUALLY do it? Obviously you can't say, 'ok everyone drop what you're doing and prepare to overhaul the system.' This isn't a web server we're talking about here where you could take it offline for a year and no one would even care.
1. Anything that halts the patent process for more than 6 months is unacceptable, especially in today's information age. 2. Anything which involves massed hiring is also unacceptable. (We come back only to solve the problem of poor reviewers.) 3. Anything that involves reforming the patent system by Congress would immediately be targetted by lobbyists and therefore be subject to only making the system worse off than before.
So whats left? Ideally, Congress rams reforms through in less than a month not giving companies time to bribe politicians. The patent office follows up by hiring brilliant reviewers, reviewing all patents made in its history over a period of time, and streamlines the system to create a simple, yet straightforward multilevel system of restrictions. Course this would never happen since Congress hasn't majorly agreed on anything without doubting itself since the declaration of war against Japan in WWII, theres no 'patent reviewing' courses in college, and the sheer amount of patents already made would require nothing less than an army to sort through, let alone decide which ones to keep and which ones to toss. (7 million patents? Even with 700,000 people thats still 10 patents per person, and we all know no company, government, or military would hire THAT many people THAT quickly.)
MMORPGs are designed to be join in, get hooked, and dig in for the long haul systems. The addition of an expansion clearly aimed at Asian markets (I didn't play Ultima 7, 8, or 9 but I'm guessing ninjas and samurais weren't in them) probably won't garner much success. After all, why switch to a 7 year old game just for an expansion when you can pick up a copy of the 2 year old Final Fantasy XI which already features ninjas and samurais?
Hold onto your hats because we have a run down of the PSP games that are being released alongside the handheld wonder in Japan. We stress that these are only confirmed for a Japanese release and as yet there isn't a confirmed list for Europe.
News for only the Japanese launch, from a European website. Given Sony's track record of not many games never ever leave Japanese shores (Super Robot Wars anyone?), this probably equates to about 20 games for the European and US launch dates.
the students were only hacking the network to produce a news article on the lacklustre security at Oxford. They have a right to obtain evidence to support an article on the security systems, even by showing how the system can be broken into. Students likely have been complaining about it for some time.
True the students were producing a news article about the computer security at Oxford, but is hacking the same system a good idea to do? If we were to allow that to go unpunished, what would happen next? Would we let people who bring bombs onboard airplanes go 'because they wanted to show how lackluster airport security was'? Would we let people who speed down highways at dangerously high speeds on purpose 'because they wanted to show how lackluster funding to police made them unequiped for ultra fast muscle cars'?
This goes beyond public appearance of the college. What do you think Slashdot would do if you were to post a comment here explaining how it is possible to hack and take down the Slashdot server without asking for their permission to publish it, let alone attempt to confirm it? You'd have your user account banned to say the least. You wanna publish an exploit to the newest version of Windows Internet Explorer without telling Microsoft? Go ahead, but you mighta just caused the newest virus outbreak. You wanna publish how you managed to hack into the CIA database? Go ahead, but Russian KGB hackers just used that exploit to gain access their systems. Etc, etc, etc.
"the [PC Gamer paper-mag] reviewer claims it took 23 hours to complete."
Time sleeping, bathroom runs, stopping to take notes for the review, stopping to get cool screenshots to be printed, stopping to call over the other staff to see another 'cool thing', among other things which would kill time? After looking at how short some games are, you'll have to excuse my skeptism (23 hours? I beat Max Payne 2 in less than 15 and I didn't even play the first one.)
Hmm... looking at the screenshots, the details, the lighting, reading up on the physics, and the new sound system... I'm guessing a demo would weigh in at about 600 megs. Zipped.
True but when you REALLY think about it, how many Xbox games have been ported to other systems? SC2 (with mixed results being the graphics most notably), Splinter Cell (lighting effects on the PS2 are horribly turned down), and... Star Wars KOTOR on the PC? (Nice but most already had a Xbox or didn't wanna deal with the huge system requirements.)
Compared to Nintendo, Microsoft has its Mario (just go and make the Master Chief from Halo your mascot already!), its FPSes, a couple RPGs (does KOTOR count?), and enough sports games to challenge EA's draconan rules. In Japan, considering the sheer amount of games that are released there but never make it to the US... well. Lets just say theres enough PS2 games there that some video game stores there sell ONLY PS2 and they STILL don't have enough space to put up every game for the system. (Drumming games, guitar games, eyetoy games, dancing games, Japanese drumming games, karaoke games, a new Gundam game almost every year, a new RPG almost every 6 months, enough fighting games to make even a hardcore gamer's head spin, etc etc... We get about half that, plus awful voice acting, and often times poor translations.)
These companies are working at a backbreaking rate so that they can remain competitive. It's not like EA can afford to cut their development time per day and only put out a football game every two years.
If nothing else, this is a poor poor example. EA is a rich company to say the least (Madden series), so to say they can't afford to hold out an extra year is pure marketing by EA.
"Oh we can't hold out an extra year to fix all the lag and bugs in our games otherwise some other company will somehow manage to take away our near 50%+ control over the sports genre in the 1 year period of time."
I don't know about your university, but if you wan prove that you're a student or an alumni of UConn they'll give you free remote access for (some) of their databases. If nothing else these same online databases go for less than $50 USD a month, not much if you REALLY want that 'A.'
Me? Joe Average? No, but even if EU 'loses' the case against Microsoft, I'm willing to bet they make Bill Gates pay for the victory dearly. Its the same thing with cars and car companies. When your car spins off the road and crashs into a tree when you're driving 90 miles per hour on a wet road, you think Ford is going to listen to you? How about if the President's motorcade is equiped with a new line of Ford cars only to have the motorcade breakdown and force the President to retreat to safety? In this case, you better believe they'll be hell to pay.
One thing I'd like to see is a FPS with one screen is in 1st person view while the second screen is in third person view. It'd be awesome! It'd be like Metal Gear Solid meets Doom! You COULD play the game a la MGS snaping necks, tapping on walls, or using the cardboard box. Or you could run through gunning guards down only to look at the third person view when you wanna turn off the alarm by hiding. Though to be honest, FPSs don't translate to handhelds too well.
Another thing I'd like to see is some serious AI improvements, and not just a 'ok the player is doing insanely well, time to make the game impossible' a la Max Payne 2. I wanna be able to team up with an AI as good as Metal Gear Solid's (I like game the game a lot, did you notice?) BUT instead of having both screens to myself, the second screen would be for my buddy. So while I played on my screen I could use the touch pad to point out directions and orders to by buddy like we were real soldiers "go here", "attack this", "cover this area", etc. This would eliminate silly things like ammo symbols appear over people's heads when they shout 'I need ammo!' since I could just double tap the ammo symbol on mine/his screen to communicate with him. Kinda like Brute Force, only not Microsoft par quality.
My last idea would be a RTS on the handheld. It'd be insanely difficult to do, let alone play, but think about it. With two screens you could FINALLY watch your army while watching your base, no more losing a match because you were too busy killing an enemy outpost while the enemies were destroying your BASE. Two screens would TOTALLY innovate RTS games, since you could no longer risk playing 'turtle' style since even a newbie would be able to launch hit-and-run attacks while mining resources as well as you. Recon would take a new level since doing so before usually ment seeing a couple red dots on the minimap and having them disappear before you could click and see what it was. Flanking (long overlooked in games) would because vital in large army combat with fog of war in RTSes. You could send one part of your army to keep the enemy busy in a chokepoint while a second part snuck around and pincer attacked them in the rear from view of the second screen.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe August 24th is the day Bungie finally turns on the marketing machine. (The game is being released in November, its July now. I doubt they're begin advertising THIS early.)
"You know there isn't a single soldier in Easy Company who'd double time it up and down Currahee just to pee in that guy's coffee."
Well now you can without the double time!
What the hell are you talking about? The PS2 was a total crash thanks to god awful launch games (PS1 games don't count) and the shortage of units at launch day. The only reason why it survived was because it played DVDs (now a moot advantage) and because it played PS1 games (once again, moot).
The only real killer game for the x-box is halo,
Go back to playing KOTOR, Splinter Cell : Pandora Tomorrow, and Halo on your PC and try getting a smooth framerate. I've been playing them smoothly with no hassels on my X-Box long before they were ported the PC. Wanna play some Mechassault with me? Oh wait, you can't.
Or for a simplier comparison, if Final Fantasy 1-6 was released in its purist form (no graphic upgrades, no loadtimes, no FMVs, etc) do you REALLY think it would last in today's market? (After removing the 'you have to get it because its an old school game' factor)
Well DUH. For E3, four years ago the Playstation was kicking Nintendo's ass and was making the Dreamcast a paperweight. Try eight years ago and you'll have an argument.
CES = Consumer Electronics Show.
E3 = Electronic Entertainment Expo.
Big deal, you went to two different shows. Whats your point?
Just because it was 'low-key' doesn't mean it wasn't geared toward the public, it could've meant that no one took them seriously at the time and now they're riding the way of video games being a multimillion dollar business. By your logic booth babes should be non-existant at the show, photos of the main floor wouldn't be a dark, neon lit room, and showgoers wouldn't have to sit on the floor/stand in the back just because of overattendence.
After all, in the past those 'few thousand' who attended a show were pretty much the bulk of your entire audience.
E3 used to be all about 'the games for gamers' but between Sony's move to make video game consoles the center of entertainment systems and the 'maturity' of gamers (thats debateable), E3 turned into an endless mass of unsorted, mostly behind closed doors media event.
True, but ultimately the problem comes back to the millions of Joe Averages out there with broadband connections and cheap yet overpowerful computer system any geek will tell you they just plain don't need. There are people who still send out and forward chain letters (not to mention open up suspicious, no-doubt-virus-ridden, e-mails) which already adds to the problem of spam messages. What are the chances of these Joe Averages collectively thinking 'hey, maybe I should stop leaving my computer on 24/7 and ask tech support why my computer always seems to slow down whenever I surf the net.'
Seriously, Lara Croft is an overdone character thats around simply because of the 'boob' factor. Take the series down a new path and watch the money roll in. Worst case scenario they pull a MGS3 and choose another character (maybe Lara Croft's father?) and make it a pre-Tomb Raider series game.
If you walk into a random Tower Records store chances are you're gonna find every CD, every single, and every movie Britney Spears was involved in even if they haven't even sold one copy of the thing in a month. On the other hand if you walk to the video games section (assuming the store even has one, mine is a mere 2 rows not even earning a sign above it stating that its a video games section) you're not gonna find many, if any, FF soundtracks despite the fact that just recently there was a concert by the composer in California fairly recently. Go to your indies section (again small if existant) and take a look at your section there. Try a foreign songs section, etc, etc. The list just goes on to the point where people just don't wanna bother with the standard walk-in music store standard and deal with a shitty selection.
So what do people do? Turn to the net, but *gasp* lo and behold being the slow dinosaur the RIAA is, theres no fair and legal way to obtain songs online (pre-iTunes store). After years of being spoiled with free, good quality, excellent selection music, does the RIAA really expect people to go back to a web form of the same crap they just left?
After the mixed reviews of Return to Castle Wolfenstein (handheld miniguns, bio-mechanical soldiers, and an undead medieval prince?) a remake or a sequel probably wasn't out of the question. But after Enemy Territory I wasn't expected another game after it.
The same thing with gaming. Everyone talks about how Counter-Strike can be a really awesome and strategic game 'when you play on a well moderated, private server'. Thats like saying 'Iraq is a really safe place if you stay inside a military bunker in the Green Zone.' You may think 'oh well thats just one or two bad cases' but there are roughly 50,000 players playing the game at any given time, do you REALLY think that my bad experiences won't be replicated by other people?
Yeah, we all saw how well the world reacted when the first few Jedis began appear in SWG. People dropped everything to become the next Darth Vader/Yoda/Luke Skywalker/Darth Maul/Unknown Jedi #1432 who supposedly was the super Jedi on some forgotten planet and was now back from retirement to collect phat loot. Whatever roleplaying was in that game was lost the moment developers caved in and made it (relatively) easy to become/remain a Jedi.
Then again to be fair the Star Wars franchise has had its moments : Tie Fighter, Star Wars Rouge Squadron, (yes those two didn't really have the Force put in but what about) Star Wars KOTOR which is considered to be the best game Star Wars game and Jedi Knight 2.
1. Anything that halts the patent process for more than 6 months is unacceptable, especially in today's information age.
2. Anything which involves massed hiring is also unacceptable. (We come back only to solve the problem of poor reviewers.)
3. Anything that involves reforming the patent system by Congress would immediately be targetted by lobbyists and therefore be subject to only making the system worse off than before.
So whats left? Ideally, Congress rams reforms through in less than a month not giving companies time to bribe politicians. The patent office follows up by hiring brilliant reviewers, reviewing all patents made in its history over a period of time, and streamlines the system to create a simple, yet straightforward multilevel system of restrictions. Course this would never happen since Congress hasn't majorly agreed on anything without doubting itself since the declaration of war against Japan in WWII, theres no 'patent reviewing' courses in college, and the sheer amount of patents already made would require nothing less than an army to sort through, let alone decide which ones to keep and which ones to toss. (7 million patents? Even with 700,000 people thats still 10 patents per person, and we all know no company, government, or military would hire THAT many people THAT quickly.)
MMORPGs are designed to be join in, get hooked, and dig in for the long haul systems. The addition of an expansion clearly aimed at Asian markets (I didn't play Ultima 7, 8, or 9 but I'm guessing ninjas and samurais weren't in them) probably won't garner much success. After all, why switch to a 7 year old game just for an expansion when you can pick up a copy of the 2 year old Final Fantasy XI which already features ninjas and samurais?
News for only the Japanese launch, from a European website. Given Sony's track record of not many games never ever leave Japanese shores (Super Robot Wars anyone?), this probably equates to about 20 games for the European and US launch dates.
True the students were producing a news article about the computer security at Oxford, but is hacking the same system a good idea to do? If we were to allow that to go unpunished, what would happen next? Would we let people who bring bombs onboard airplanes go 'because they wanted to show how lackluster airport security was'? Would we let people who speed down highways at dangerously high speeds on purpose 'because they wanted to show how lackluster funding to police made them unequiped for ultra fast muscle cars'?
This goes beyond public appearance of the college. What do you think Slashdot would do if you were to post a comment here explaining how it is possible to hack and take down the Slashdot server without asking for their permission to publish it, let alone attempt to confirm it? You'd have your user account banned to say the least. You wanna publish an exploit to the newest version of Windows Internet Explorer without telling Microsoft? Go ahead, but you mighta just caused the newest virus outbreak. You wanna publish how you managed to hack into the CIA database? Go ahead, but Russian KGB hackers just used that exploit to gain access their systems. Etc, etc, etc.
Time sleeping, bathroom runs, stopping to take notes for the review, stopping to get cool screenshots to be printed, stopping to call over the other staff to see another 'cool thing', among other things which would kill time? After looking at how short some games are, you'll have to excuse my skeptism (23 hours? I beat Max Payne 2 in less than 15 and I didn't even play the first one.)
Hmm... looking at the screenshots, the details, the lighting, reading up on the physics, and the new sound system... I'm guessing a demo would weigh in at about 600 megs. Zipped.
Compared to Nintendo, Microsoft has its Mario (just go and make the Master Chief from Halo your mascot already!), its FPSes, a couple RPGs (does KOTOR count?), and enough sports games to challenge EA's draconan rules. In Japan, considering the sheer amount of games that are released there but never make it to the US... well. Lets just say theres enough PS2 games there that some video game stores there sell ONLY PS2 and they STILL don't have enough space to put up every game for the system. (Drumming games, guitar games, eyetoy games, dancing games, Japanese drumming games, karaoke games, a new Gundam game almost every year, a new RPG almost every 6 months, enough fighting games to make even a hardcore gamer's head spin, etc etc... We get about half that, plus awful voice acting, and often times poor translations.)
If nothing else, this is a poor poor example. EA is a rich company to say the least (Madden series), so to say they can't afford to hold out an extra year is pure marketing by EA.
"Oh we can't hold out an extra year to fix all the lag and bugs in our games otherwise some other company will somehow manage to take away our near 50%+ control over the sports genre in the 1 year period of time."
Yeah, RIGHT.
I don't know about your university, but if you wan prove that you're a student or an alumni of UConn they'll give you free remote access for (some) of their databases. If nothing else these same online databases go for less than $50 USD a month, not much if you REALLY want that 'A.'
Quality over quantity... usually. (PS2 launch games were AWFUL yet its dominating currently.)
Me? Joe Average? No, but even if EU 'loses' the case against Microsoft, I'm willing to bet they make Bill Gates pay for the victory dearly. Its the same thing with cars and car companies. When your car spins off the road and crashs into a tree when you're driving 90 miles per hour on a wet road, you think Ford is going to listen to you? How about if the President's motorcade is equiped with a new line of Ford cars only to have the motorcade breakdown and force the President to retreat to safety? In this case, you better believe they'll be hell to pay.
Another thing I'd like to see is some serious AI improvements, and not just a 'ok the player is doing insanely well, time to make the game impossible' a la Max Payne 2. I wanna be able to team up with an AI as good as Metal Gear Solid's (I like game the game a lot, did you notice?) BUT instead of having both screens to myself, the second screen would be for my buddy. So while I played on my screen I could use the touch pad to point out directions and orders to by buddy like we were real soldiers "go here", "attack this", "cover this area", etc. This would eliminate silly things like ammo symbols appear over people's heads when they shout 'I need ammo!' since I could just double tap the ammo symbol on mine/his screen to communicate with him. Kinda like Brute Force, only not Microsoft par quality.
My last idea would be a RTS on the handheld. It'd be insanely difficult to do, let alone play, but think about it. With two screens you could FINALLY watch your army while watching your base, no more losing a match because you were too busy killing an enemy outpost while the enemies were destroying your BASE. Two screens would TOTALLY innovate RTS games, since you could no longer risk playing 'turtle' style since even a newbie would be able to launch hit-and-run attacks while mining resources as well as you. Recon would take a new level since doing so before usually ment seeing a couple red dots on the minimap and having them disappear before you could click and see what it was. Flanking (long overlooked in games) would because vital in large army combat with fog of war in RTSes. You could send one part of your army to keep the enemy busy in a chokepoint while a second part snuck around and pincer attacked them in the rear from view of the second screen.