Sadly, it happens in the UK. I don't know whether it happens at Best Buy (who are still pretty much a niche player over here), but I've certainly had family members come across it at PC World. For the sake of US readers; PC world is a UK retailer that is more computing specific than Best Buy (the TVs and stuff tend to be sold through Currys, which is part of the same corporate family), but which aims at pretty much the same market segment. Nobody who is even remotely tech-savvy buys from them unless it's an emergency (when their late opening hours do come in handy).
Look, this is great and all (at least, I think it is - I've never used Home and have no interest in starting), but I'd much rather Sony focussed on a few other issues around the PS3's online service. Let's try these for starters:
- Making very, very, very sure that they have decent security around any and all personal data they hold.
- Reducing the number of mandatory firmware updates to something sensible (one every 4 months or so at most), so that my PS3 actually feels like a "switch on and play" console rather than a Windows 98 machine that needs a (lengthy) reset process every few days whenever there's an update.
- Getting a UI for the Playstation Store that can be navigated at a sensible pace. At the moment, the storefront is so far behind the Xbox Live storefront (which is not part of the subscription package over in Xbox-land) that it's just ridiculous.
- Upping the game on Playstation Plus a bit. I actually picked up a 1 year sub for this on a "give it a try" basis and it is wildly inconsistent. There's been some good stuff available, but it increasingly feels like another avenue for pushing demos, with a few mobile-phone style games thrown in around the margins. Sony needs to prove that this wasn't a bait-and-switch.
Still, at least it's better than the 3DS online services...
Ok, found more information from a farily reputable source
Bottom line - Gamestop are probably - though not certainly - ok in terms of criminal law - there is indeed no marking on the box. But depending on the nature of their contract with Square-Enix, they may be in line for a world of butt-hurt from that direction.
Not really. Could just mean "We hadn't seen the boxes until they arrived in our distribution centres - that's when we saw the label on the box saying there was an OnLive voucher included."
And it's not marked anywhere on the box? That's what I was getting at - it doesn't really matter what Gamestop is advertising it as on their website and their posters in store. If there's a little marking on the box saying "OnLive voucher included", then they may be in a world of legal hurt. If Square-Enix have something saying "OnLive voucher included in every PC boxed copy" on their website, then they may have issues as well, though that's probably less certain.
Actually, do you know that the coupon isn't advertised on the package? I don't know that it is - but it wouldn't surprise me. I've got plenty of game boxes on my shelf that have, on the box art itself, labels saying "voucher for x inside" or "free demo of y included". And I've got umpteen Blu-Ray discs which say "free digital copy included" and the like.
I suppose it depends on whether the coupon is advertised anywhere. If it's advertised as being included with the game - and especially if there's a marking on the game box itself saying "coupon inside" - then there are all kinds of trading standards laws that would be getting broken in the UK. I've no idea whether there are US equivalents.
If the coupon isn't advertised anywhere, then it may be murkier.
If you're competing against a fast-growing distribution method that has the potential to completely under-cut your own business model, the best way to do that is to... engage in behaviour that will really piss a good portion of your customers off?
It's not actually the removal of the coupons that bugs me - it's the opening of the game boxes. I know that some retailers do this a lot - fortunately, it's rarer here in the UK than it is in the US. But I really don't like it - I've certainly bought "new" DS games in the past in the US that had saves already on the cartridge (presumably a staff member's).
It's not as if they're just competing against download distribution. I've never bought a game from Amazon or play.com that had been opened before it arrived (well, aside from the time our local post-office staff decided that stealing was fun, but that's another story) - and those are almost always cheaper. Seriously, do these bricks and mortar retailers even want to stay in business?
Actually, IANAL, but is there a legal issue here? If there's a reasonable expectation that every copy of the game includes this coupon and Gamestop are removing it, are they committing fraud or theft or something? Either from the consumer or from Square-Enix? I mean, surely Square-Enix must have a civil case here - and it's almost at the kind of level where it starts to sound criminal (if it happened in the UK at least).
On the quality of the game - you're almost certainly right. I've played every major installment in the Call of Duty series and, with the exception of CoD4 (which was genuinely fresh and exciting), I've hated every single one of them. Modern Warfare 2's campaign was so bad I'm still convinced it must have been a practical joke. Black Ops was an absolute triumph of hype over quality; you can find no end of superior fpses across every platform.
However, thus far it's not stopped the games selling in bucketloads. If the Vita version can move a lot of consoles, then whether the game is any good or not isn't really all that relevant from Sony's POV.
Actually, two of the three "home" console launches last time around had a "killer title"; the PS3 had Resistance and the Wii had Zelda (and Wii Sports, I suppose). The 360 didn't really have one - Project Gotham 3 was probably the closest, but it did have a decent second wave of games that hit a few months after launch. Actually, if you look at the last handheld generation, the DS had Mario 64 and the PSP had Wipeout, Lumines and Ridge Racer.
That said, the biggest problem for the 3DS (after the deficiencies of the console itself, which I've posted about previously) is probably perception. It's gained a reputation as a flop, which given how risk-averse the games industry is right now, means that most of the announcements we see concerning 3DS games at the moment are about the cancellation of previously announced games, rather than the launch of new ones.
It's not quite over for Nintendo with the 3DS yet. They've had some better hardware sales since they cut the price - but one or two good weeks of sales does not make a success. If they can manage to get the thing to be the hot Christmas item in the way the DS had been previously (I still have nightmares of trying to find a pink DS-lite for a niece a couple of years ago), then it can be turned around. If we get to New Year and the thing still isn't resonating with the public, then it's finished.
The Vita hits with a much stronger launch lineup - though it's really unfortunate that it'll miss Christmas in most of the world. I would have thought, however, that a proper Call of Duty title, with the kind of graphics that the hardware should be able to drive and twin stick controls, would be a powerful system seller. The challenge for Sony (other than getting stuff like the battery life right) is to make sure that there's a decent second-wave of games behind the launch titles - because that's where the PSP fell down after a strong launch. The most important game for Sony to get announced is one that I have no interest in playing myself; a Monster Hunter game. That's how they could lock down the Japanese market, which will be where the machine will probably have to pass its first reputational test.
I think this is just a timing issue. Those who successfully incited riots will have longer charge sheets, including charges of actual disorder and criminal damage. Hence their cases will take longer to bring to trial than these relatively simple cases involving a single charge. They'll probably get even longer sentences when their cases do come up (probably in a couple of weeks).
And I don't particularly see why incompetence should be a defence in the face of the law.
Maybe to a degree - it had certainly been like that for a while before I quit. But honestly - things had changed quite a bit from when I first started playing in early Burning Crusade - and according to people who had been in since vanilla, they'd changed even more since then. I played a Holy Paladin as my main class and it was pretty stable right through Burning Crusade. Certainly, there was more than one valid way to build it back then as well.
It was, I think, only with the Lich King launch that Blizzard realised that they quite enjoyed the wholesale rebuilding of classes. My class was changed significantly under me about 3 times during the course of Lich King, because Blizzard had a new bright idea about how they wanted people to play it. It was the news that it was getting a total overhaul for Cataclysm that was the final straw that led me to quit.
I got out of WoW at the end of April 2010. I'd been a fairly hardcore player for a couple of years up to that point (having been fairly hardcore in Final Fantasy XI beforehand). However, by the start of 2010, it was clear (and probably had been for some time if I'd been looking for the signs) that the game was past its prime.
I think the trap Blizzard have fallen into is being too prescriptive towards their player base. In the Blizzard model of the world, everybody is basically working down a set progression path, with very little else to do. This is a theme that runs through every facet of the game.
In terms of overall progression, Blizzard have made it very clear that they want all of their players to be working on the same raid content at the same time. An expansion hits, raises the level cap and renders all previous raids obsolete. The new expansion has a tier of raid content, which everybody jumps into. A few months later, the next tier of content is added. At the same time, the previous tier is adjusted so as to be ludicrously easy - and the rewards from it quickly become obsolete. Then a new patch comes a few months later, and the previous content is all nerfed down again. After this repeats a few times, you get a new expansion and the cycle begins again.
What this means is that the game ends up not actually feeling like a persistent world. There's a treadmill that everybody has to stay on - with very little real potential to either pull ahead of the pack or - provided you are at least minimally competent - get left behind. This really diminishes any sense of achievement associated with the thing. Worse still, it's an entirely linear path that you have to tread; there are no credible alternative routes to gearing up and making progress, not least because the stats required for PvE and PvP are so completely different.
Now, I understand that there isn't a quick and easy fix to this and that some games have gone too far the other way; one frustration in FFXI was that a lot of the best gear in the game actually dropped from the "ground kings", who were some of the oldest (and most irritating to find) bosses in the game. Given the game's... what... 8 years old now, that starts to look a bit pathetic. But WoW's habit of doing a "soft reset" with every patch and a "hard reset" with every expansion is even more infuriating.
The lack of choice also runs through the character classes and the balancing. I always felt that Blizzard made a huge mistake in tying PvE and PvP balance together - they should have switched the game to different rules entirely whenever PvP was invoked. As it is, because of the constant tweaks required to maintain PvP balance, Blizzard got into the habit of constantly tinkering with every class in the game - and then fundamentally redesigning classes largely just because they felt like it.
There's no freedom in WoW to develop your class in ways that Blizzard hadn't anticipated. They know how they want you to play a class and if you don't go along with their scheme, they'll just patch it so that you have no choice. By contrast, when players found that FFXI's Ninja class, which had been designed as a damage-dealer and debuffer, actually worked best as a tank, Square-Enix followed their players, and while they did end up tweaking the class a bit, it was aimed at fitting it in alongside the other tank classes, rather than trying to reinforce their original intentions. Blizzard, by contrast, would likely just have banned the people playing the class as a tank for "exploiting" and then patched the class so that it could only be used as a damage dealer.
I think what I'm trying to say is that Blizzard's big mistake with WoW has been to let themselves become too interventionist, so that the game feels less like an exciting online world and more like a sequence of arbitrary hoops to jump through.
It's not actually impossible to have played smartphone games without owning a smartphone. Plenty of people around me desperate to show off their latest toy...
Yes, I think this is basically right. As somebody who would describe himself as a gamer, I can honestly say I've got little to no interest in smartphone games. In fact, I haven't even bothered picking up a smartphone myself.
Thing is, smartphone games can't hold my attention for more than a few minutes. My handhelds get most use when I'm travelling - on the plane or train to my destination, or while I'm away. When I'm at home, I have access to a gaming PC and all three current "big" consoles - so unless there's a really strong handheld exclusive title, I'm not going to bother with a little screen there. And for an 8 hour flight - or even a 2 hour train journey - the kind of games you get on smartphones just won't cut it - and nor will their woeful controls.
There's a lot of doom and gloom around handhelds at the moment because the 3DS is failing (and if things haven't picked up by Christmas, then I think we can start saying "failed" in the past tense). As a 3DS owner who tried to give the machine a fair shake, I can tell you now that the main reasons for this are:
- A lack of decent games to play now (despite the nostalgia-fuelled review scores, even Zelda hasn't stood up that well to the test of time) and a lack of interesting games in the pipeline.
- Game prices which are, I would estimate, 30%-40% too high - for both boxed and downloadable games.
- Dire battery life which is inadequate for any trip of over 3 hours or so.
- A 3D effect which is impressive for a few minutes, but then headache-inducing and nigh-impossible to use on the move. Oh - and which results in big "not for children under 6" warnings all over the thing.
- A sense that in technical terms, leaving aside 3D, the machine is actually lagging behind the 7 year old PSP.
- Rubbish online functionality, with an eShop that is a usability nightmare.
- Less significant than the other reasons, but still not trivial - region locking.
However, all of the above are specific mistakes on the part of Nintendo - not elements that are essential components of the handheld gaming market. Moreover, in the 3DS's biggest region of failure - Japan - it's not smartphones its losing out to, but the PSP and even its own predecessor. It feels a bit odd and worrying because the habit in recent years has been for Nintendo handhelds to Just Not Flop (TM), but it's not unprecedented (Virtual Boy).
Sony will avoid some of the mistakes above with the Vita, may or may not avoid others and could possibly add some mess-ups of its own - but we probably won't know until much closer to its launch. The launch games lineup is, at least, much stronger, which gets around one of the 3DS's biggest problems. I would say the main deciding factors for the Vita now (given that price and games lineup are known) will be the price of games and the battery life.
I've had a 3DS since the UK launch day. I tried to give it a fair shake (see my journal for a few posts from a few months ago when I was trying to be positive, or at least balanced), but I've now come to the conclusion that it's a turkey. I'm seriously regretting that I gave away my old DS to a young relative when I picked up my 3DS - at least the DS had the battery to do a translatlantic flight.
I took my 3DS on such a flight recently - on the day Zelda launched in the UK, actually, and with a copy of it picked up in the HMV at Gatwick Airport. I used the 3d for 30 minutes before turning it off to save battery - and even so, the thing didn't get 3h30 into an 8h30 flight before the battery was drained. Also, the 3d effect was difficult to hold in an unstable environment and the motion control is an atrocity, particularly when you don't have unlimited space (which in British Airways Cattle Class, you very much don't). Same concerns apply to using the thing on a train.
Oh, and Zelda? I hadn't actually played it before, apart from a short stint emulated on the PC, back when N64 emulation first became possible. I had high hopes, but at best, I can say it's a curious and often infuriating relic of another gaming age, which is occasionally amusing, but is generally just tedious and only really of nostalgia value.
My 3000-series PSP lasted out the rest of the 5 hours or so of the flight quite handily (admittedly playing games from memory stick rather than UMD) and still had 15% or so charge left when I landed.
The 3DS failed to deliver anything - other than a gimmicky 3d effect - which outperforms the PSP. In many ways, it's less pleasant to use than the 7 year old Sony handheld (though I will grant it has a marginally better analogue stick). And the battery life issue is an absolute killer.
"Core gamers" is anything but a small market. Call of Duty: Black Ops was the most successful entertainment product of 2010 - not just the most successful game - and while I don't regard it as a particularly good game, it is anything but a casual title. And a lot of the people who bought Black Ops (and probably more besides) will be buying either Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3 - or probably both - later this year.
Actually, there's no end of reasons to put Capcom on your "do not buy" list. For example, they're the only publisher to insist on "always online" authentication for console games (eg. Bionic Commando Rearmed on the PS3). But to be honest, there's a much better reason than that.
For the last few years, the games they've made have been almost universally shit.
Time and time again, they take what should be a really fun concept and surgically strip anything that even remotely resembles "fun" from it. I mean, look at the Dead Rising games? How can you make a zombie apocalypse game so utterly frustrating and tedious? It's simple enough, it seems, if you insist on retarded save systems, endless fetch quests, stupid time-limits and boss fights whose difficulty is on a completely different level to the rest of the game (requiring multiple abortive playthroughs just to grind levels). Or look at the Lost Planet series - I had a little sympathy for the first one, which just got squashed a month or two after release by the (infinitely superior) Gears of War landing in the same genre. But the sequel is an absolute atrocity - another game that trudges through stupid difficulty spikes, bad level design and poorly implemented controls. Like too many Japanese games of the last few years (with a few notable exceptions), these feel like the developers actively hated their players - not just the top brass deciding on the DRM strategies, but the workers in the trenches making the games.
Alternatively, look at the blatant whoring they do with the Street Fighter series. We've already got 3 versions of SF4 on current hardware and I wouldn't put money on them stopping here - and they don't give out those upgrades cheap. Plus, they wanted to lock down the PC version of SF4: Arcade Edition so most of the features were only usable while online (until public outcry stopped them).
Resident Evil 4 was a good game - quite a few years old now, but still a good game. Resident Evil 5 was less good in every respect. And the racism controversy? I was thinking it was overhyped as I played through the game until I hit something like the third chapter - the ones where you fight the mud-hut dwelling zombies who throw spears at you. Yes, the game was racist.
A couple of decades ago Capcom put out some real classics.1942, the original Bionic Commando, Ghosts and Goblins and Street Fighter 2 will always have a place in gaming history. But today's company does not come close to living up to that legacy.
But yes, they've just given us yet another reason not to buy their games (and oh boy is it a good one). It's just hard to imagine that you'll be missing anything much by boycotting them.
On the gaming side, Microsoft have actually been less evil than their competitors for years now. Sony's acts of wanton consumer abuse are too many and too well known to be worth documenting. Nintendo is actually no better, maintaining some of the most anti-consumer policies around, such as rigidly enforced region locking and rabid crackdowns on homebrew. On the PC gaming side, Microsoft's last really "evil" act was insisting on Windows Vista to play the PC version of Halo 2 - which was years ago. Their first and second party PC games have never gone in for the kind of DRM shite we've seen from Ubisoft.
These days, when Microsoft do something nasty on the gaming side, it's more likely to be down to incompetence (the RROD fiasco and Games for Windows Live) than malice. And to be honest, they are (slowly) getting better at avoiding that kind of thing.
Existing Kinect games are basically Xbox 360 games with some fancy motion control added on. Until somebody develops a working Xbox 360 emulator (which is probably years away), you will not be playing any of the existing Kinect games on Windows.
Unless, of course, developers choose to release PC ports of those games, which is very unlikely but probaly not impossible.
Space. I don't mind having 3 consoles underneath my TV, but I know full well I'm in a minority there - I don't really give a damn if one end of my living room looks a bit messy. Certainly, there's no way my parents would ever countenance having more than 2 boxes under their TV - one of which will always be their Sky TV box. At the moment, they have an Xbox360 that I won in a Christmas raffle and didn't need. This took over the slot previously occupied by their old DVD player. My dad does play a fair old bit of Forza, but the main thing their 360 is used for is playing DVDs.
Yes, in my case, it's a hold-over from Duke Nukem 3d and the early Quakes. I suspect most people's control preferences are shaped by the usual defaults for the first generation of fpses they played (ignoring Doom and earlier for the moment, as they didn't have vertical looking or jumping).
Good list. For once (and this doesn't happen often with these things), I don't think I disagree with a single entry. If I could add an eleventh, it would be:
"XI: If thou art an fps and if thou art not a realistic military simulator, thou shalt stick any ideas regarding two-weapon limits quite firmly where the sun shineth not.
Seriously, even console players seem to be getting sick of this particular convention, judging by the fact that one of the highest profile console fpses on the horizon, Resistance 3, is going back to the weapon-wheel system."
And while it's not a commandment, one thing I would really love to see on the PC is some kind of system (perhaps implemented via Steam or something) which carries my control bindings between similar games, so far as is possible. I like my mouse inverted, and I am quite insistant that my right mouse button makes my character jump, while "use" is always assigned to the space bar. Zoom/aim lives on the middle mouse button - never the right mouse button (even if the game in question doesn't feature jumping). It would be extremely nice if, even if only between games from the same developer, those settings could be carried over automatically.
There have been console fpses - good ones to boot - that don't have a two weapon limit. To my mind, the greatest console fps ever made was the original Resistance: Fall of Man for the PS3. It used a weapon-wheel system. Properly implemented, this system doesn't need to be any more than "hold in the right bumper button and nudge the right analogue stick in the appropriate direction".
Resistance 2 went for a 2-weapon system. The outcry was so great that Resistance 3 will return to the weapon wheel. Given half a chance, even console gamers will opt out of the 2 weapon limit.
There are a few games where such a limit makes sense. An Operation Flashpoint-style military simulator, for example. I could even stretch that definition to include the Call of Duty games, although they are a long way from being simulators. The problem is when it is pushed into non-realistic games where it doesn't belong - games like Duke Nukem Forever.
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Sadly, it happens in the UK. I don't know whether it happens at Best Buy (who are still pretty much a niche player over here), but I've certainly had family members come across it at PC World. For the sake of US readers; PC world is a UK retailer that is more computing specific than Best Buy (the TVs and stuff tend to be sold through Currys, which is part of the same corporate family), but which aims at pretty much the same market segment. Nobody who is even remotely tech-savvy buys from them unless it's an emergency (when their late opening hours do come in handy).
Look, this is great and all (at least, I think it is - I've never used Home and have no interest in starting), but I'd much rather Sony focussed on a few other issues around the PS3's online service. Let's try these for starters:
- Making very, very, very sure that they have decent security around any and all personal data they hold.
- Reducing the number of mandatory firmware updates to something sensible (one every 4 months or so at most), so that my PS3 actually feels like a "switch on and play" console rather than a Windows 98 machine that needs a (lengthy) reset process every few days whenever there's an update.
- Getting a UI for the Playstation Store that can be navigated at a sensible pace. At the moment, the storefront is so far behind the Xbox Live storefront (which is not part of the subscription package over in Xbox-land) that it's just ridiculous.
- Upping the game on Playstation Plus a bit. I actually picked up a 1 year sub for this on a "give it a try" basis and it is wildly inconsistent. There's been some good stuff available, but it increasingly feels like another avenue for pushing demos, with a few mobile-phone style games thrown in around the margins. Sony needs to prove that this wasn't a bait-and-switch.
Still, at least it's better than the 3DS online services...
That's kind of what I said. Either you're not reading my posts, or you're trolling. Either way, can't be bothered with you any more.
Ok, found more information from a farily reputable source
Bottom line - Gamestop are probably - though not certainly - ok in terms of criminal law - there is indeed no marking on the box. But depending on the nature of their contract with Square-Enix, they may be in line for a world of butt-hurt from that direction.
Not really. Could just mean "We hadn't seen the boxes until they arrived in our distribution centres - that's when we saw the label on the box saying there was an OnLive voucher included."
And it's not marked anywhere on the box? That's what I was getting at - it doesn't really matter what Gamestop is advertising it as on their website and their posters in store. If there's a little marking on the box saying "OnLive voucher included", then they may be in a world of legal hurt. If Square-Enix have something saying "OnLive voucher included in every PC boxed copy" on their website, then they may have issues as well, though that's probably less certain.
Actually, do you know that the coupon isn't advertised on the package? I don't know that it is - but it wouldn't surprise me. I've got plenty of game boxes on my shelf that have, on the box art itself, labels saying "voucher for x inside" or "free demo of y included". And I've got umpteen Blu-Ray discs which say "free digital copy included" and the like.
I suppose it depends on whether the coupon is advertised anywhere. If it's advertised as being included with the game - and especially if there's a marking on the game box itself saying "coupon inside" - then there are all kinds of trading standards laws that would be getting broken in the UK. I've no idea whether there are US equivalents.
If the coupon isn't advertised anywhere, then it may be murkier.
So... let me get this right.
If you're competing against a fast-growing distribution method that has the potential to completely under-cut your own business model, the best way to do that is to... engage in behaviour that will really piss a good portion of your customers off?
It's not actually the removal of the coupons that bugs me - it's the opening of the game boxes. I know that some retailers do this a lot - fortunately, it's rarer here in the UK than it is in the US. But I really don't like it - I've certainly bought "new" DS games in the past in the US that had saves already on the cartridge (presumably a staff member's).
It's not as if they're just competing against download distribution. I've never bought a game from Amazon or play.com that had been opened before it arrived (well, aside from the time our local post-office staff decided that stealing was fun, but that's another story) - and those are almost always cheaper. Seriously, do these bricks and mortar retailers even want to stay in business?
Actually, IANAL, but is there a legal issue here? If there's a reasonable expectation that every copy of the game includes this coupon and Gamestop are removing it, are they committing fraud or theft or something? Either from the consumer or from Square-Enix? I mean, surely Square-Enix must have a civil case here - and it's almost at the kind of level where it starts to sound criminal (if it happened in the UK at least).
On the quality of the game - you're almost certainly right. I've played every major installment in the Call of Duty series and, with the exception of CoD4 (which was genuinely fresh and exciting), I've hated every single one of them. Modern Warfare 2's campaign was so bad I'm still convinced it must have been a practical joke. Black Ops was an absolute triumph of hype over quality; you can find no end of superior fpses across every platform.
However, thus far it's not stopped the games selling in bucketloads. If the Vita version can move a lot of consoles, then whether the game is any good or not isn't really all that relevant from Sony's POV.
Actually, two of the three "home" console launches last time around had a "killer title"; the PS3 had Resistance and the Wii had Zelda (and Wii Sports, I suppose). The 360 didn't really have one - Project Gotham 3 was probably the closest, but it did have a decent second wave of games that hit a few months after launch. Actually, if you look at the last handheld generation, the DS had Mario 64 and the PSP had Wipeout, Lumines and Ridge Racer.
That said, the biggest problem for the 3DS (after the deficiencies of the console itself, which I've posted about previously) is probably perception. It's gained a reputation as a flop, which given how risk-averse the games industry is right now, means that most of the announcements we see concerning 3DS games at the moment are about the cancellation of previously announced games, rather than the launch of new ones.
It's not quite over for Nintendo with the 3DS yet. They've had some better hardware sales since they cut the price - but one or two good weeks of sales does not make a success. If they can manage to get the thing to be the hot Christmas item in the way the DS had been previously (I still have nightmares of trying to find a pink DS-lite for a niece a couple of years ago), then it can be turned around. If we get to New Year and the thing still isn't resonating with the public, then it's finished.
The Vita hits with a much stronger launch lineup - though it's really unfortunate that it'll miss Christmas in most of the world. I would have thought, however, that a proper Call of Duty title, with the kind of graphics that the hardware should be able to drive and twin stick controls, would be a powerful system seller. The challenge for Sony (other than getting stuff like the battery life right) is to make sure that there's a decent second-wave of games behind the launch titles - because that's where the PSP fell down after a strong launch. The most important game for Sony to get announced is one that I have no interest in playing myself; a Monster Hunter game. That's how they could lock down the Japanese market, which will be where the machine will probably have to pass its first reputational test.
I think this is just a timing issue. Those who successfully incited riots will have longer charge sheets, including charges of actual disorder and criminal damage. Hence their cases will take longer to bring to trial than these relatively simple cases involving a single charge. They'll probably get even longer sentences when their cases do come up (probably in a couple of weeks).
And I don't particularly see why incompetence should be a defence in the face of the law.
Maybe to a degree - it had certainly been like that for a while before I quit. But honestly - things had changed quite a bit from when I first started playing in early Burning Crusade - and according to people who had been in since vanilla, they'd changed even more since then. I played a Holy Paladin as my main class and it was pretty stable right through Burning Crusade. Certainly, there was more than one valid way to build it back then as well.
It was, I think, only with the Lich King launch that Blizzard realised that they quite enjoyed the wholesale rebuilding of classes. My class was changed significantly under me about 3 times during the course of Lich King, because Blizzard had a new bright idea about how they wanted people to play it. It was the news that it was getting a total overhaul for Cataclysm that was the final straw that led me to quit.
I got out of WoW at the end of April 2010. I'd been a fairly hardcore player for a couple of years up to that point (having been fairly hardcore in Final Fantasy XI beforehand). However, by the start of 2010, it was clear (and probably had been for some time if I'd been looking for the signs) that the game was past its prime.
I think the trap Blizzard have fallen into is being too prescriptive towards their player base. In the Blizzard model of the world, everybody is basically working down a set progression path, with very little else to do. This is a theme that runs through every facet of the game.
In terms of overall progression, Blizzard have made it very clear that they want all of their players to be working on the same raid content at the same time. An expansion hits, raises the level cap and renders all previous raids obsolete. The new expansion has a tier of raid content, which everybody jumps into. A few months later, the next tier of content is added. At the same time, the previous tier is adjusted so as to be ludicrously easy - and the rewards from it quickly become obsolete. Then a new patch comes a few months later, and the previous content is all nerfed down again. After this repeats a few times, you get a new expansion and the cycle begins again.
What this means is that the game ends up not actually feeling like a persistent world. There's a treadmill that everybody has to stay on - with very little real potential to either pull ahead of the pack or - provided you are at least minimally competent - get left behind. This really diminishes any sense of achievement associated with the thing. Worse still, it's an entirely linear path that you have to tread; there are no credible alternative routes to gearing up and making progress, not least because the stats required for PvE and PvP are so completely different.
Now, I understand that there isn't a quick and easy fix to this and that some games have gone too far the other way; one frustration in FFXI was that a lot of the best gear in the game actually dropped from the "ground kings", who were some of the oldest (and most irritating to find) bosses in the game. Given the game's... what... 8 years old now, that starts to look a bit pathetic. But WoW's habit of doing a "soft reset" with every patch and a "hard reset" with every expansion is even more infuriating.
The lack of choice also runs through the character classes and the balancing. I always felt that Blizzard made a huge mistake in tying PvE and PvP balance together - they should have switched the game to different rules entirely whenever PvP was invoked. As it is, because of the constant tweaks required to maintain PvP balance, Blizzard got into the habit of constantly tinkering with every class in the game - and then fundamentally redesigning classes largely just because they felt like it.
There's no freedom in WoW to develop your class in ways that Blizzard hadn't anticipated. They know how they want you to play a class and if you don't go along with their scheme, they'll just patch it so that you have no choice. By contrast, when players found that FFXI's Ninja class, which had been designed as a damage-dealer and debuffer, actually worked best as a tank, Square-Enix followed their players, and while they did end up tweaking the class a bit, it was aimed at fitting it in alongside the other tank classes, rather than trying to reinforce their original intentions. Blizzard, by contrast, would likely just have banned the people playing the class as a tank for "exploiting" and then patched the class so that it could only be used as a damage dealer.
I think what I'm trying to say is that Blizzard's big mistake with WoW has been to let themselves become too interventionist, so that the game feels less like an exciting online world and more like a sequence of arbitrary hoops to jump through.
It's not actually impossible to have played smartphone games without owning a smartphone. Plenty of people around me desperate to show off their latest toy...
Yes, I think this is basically right. As somebody who would describe himself as a gamer, I can honestly say I've got little to no interest in smartphone games. In fact, I haven't even bothered picking up a smartphone myself.
Thing is, smartphone games can't hold my attention for more than a few minutes. My handhelds get most use when I'm travelling - on the plane or train to my destination, or while I'm away. When I'm at home, I have access to a gaming PC and all three current "big" consoles - so unless there's a really strong handheld exclusive title, I'm not going to bother with a little screen there. And for an 8 hour flight - or even a 2 hour train journey - the kind of games you get on smartphones just won't cut it - and nor will their woeful controls.
There's a lot of doom and gloom around handhelds at the moment because the 3DS is failing (and if things haven't picked up by Christmas, then I think we can start saying "failed" in the past tense). As a 3DS owner who tried to give the machine a fair shake, I can tell you now that the main reasons for this are:
- A lack of decent games to play now (despite the nostalgia-fuelled review scores, even Zelda hasn't stood up that well to the test of time) and a lack of interesting games in the pipeline.
- Game prices which are, I would estimate, 30%-40% too high - for both boxed and downloadable games.
- Dire battery life which is inadequate for any trip of over 3 hours or so.
- A 3D effect which is impressive for a few minutes, but then headache-inducing and nigh-impossible to use on the move. Oh - and which results in big "not for children under 6" warnings all over the thing.
- A sense that in technical terms, leaving aside 3D, the machine is actually lagging behind the 7 year old PSP.
- Rubbish online functionality, with an eShop that is a usability nightmare.
- Less significant than the other reasons, but still not trivial - region locking.
However, all of the above are specific mistakes on the part of Nintendo - not elements that are essential components of the handheld gaming market. Moreover, in the 3DS's biggest region of failure - Japan - it's not smartphones its losing out to, but the PSP and even its own predecessor. It feels a bit odd and worrying because the habit in recent years has been for Nintendo handhelds to Just Not Flop (TM), but it's not unprecedented (Virtual Boy).
Sony will avoid some of the mistakes above with the Vita, may or may not avoid others and could possibly add some mess-ups of its own - but we probably won't know until much closer to its launch. The launch games lineup is, at least, much stronger, which gets around one of the 3DS's biggest problems. I would say the main deciding factors for the Vita now (given that price and games lineup are known) will be the price of games and the battery life.
This.
I've had a 3DS since the UK launch day. I tried to give it a fair shake (see my journal for a few posts from a few months ago when I was trying to be positive, or at least balanced), but I've now come to the conclusion that it's a turkey. I'm seriously regretting that I gave away my old DS to a young relative when I picked up my 3DS - at least the DS had the battery to do a translatlantic flight.
I took my 3DS on such a flight recently - on the day Zelda launched in the UK, actually, and with a copy of it picked up in the HMV at Gatwick Airport. I used the 3d for 30 minutes before turning it off to save battery - and even so, the thing didn't get 3h30 into an 8h30 flight before the battery was drained. Also, the 3d effect was difficult to hold in an unstable environment and the motion control is an atrocity, particularly when you don't have unlimited space (which in British Airways Cattle Class, you very much don't). Same concerns apply to using the thing on a train.
Oh, and Zelda? I hadn't actually played it before, apart from a short stint emulated on the PC, back when N64 emulation first became possible. I had high hopes, but at best, I can say it's a curious and often infuriating relic of another gaming age, which is occasionally amusing, but is generally just tedious and only really of nostalgia value.
My 3000-series PSP lasted out the rest of the 5 hours or so of the flight quite handily (admittedly playing games from memory stick rather than UMD) and still had 15% or so charge left when I landed.
The 3DS failed to deliver anything - other than a gimmicky 3d effect - which outperforms the PSP. In many ways, it's less pleasant to use than the 7 year old Sony handheld (though I will grant it has a marginally better analogue stick). And the battery life issue is an absolute killer.
"Core gamers" is anything but a small market. Call of Duty: Black Ops was the most successful entertainment product of 2010 - not just the most successful game - and while I don't regard it as a particularly good game, it is anything but a casual title. And a lot of the people who bought Black Ops (and probably more besides) will be buying either Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3 - or probably both - later this year.
Actually, there's no end of reasons to put Capcom on your "do not buy" list. For example, they're the only publisher to insist on "always online" authentication for console games (eg. Bionic Commando Rearmed on the PS3). But to be honest, there's a much better reason than that.
For the last few years, the games they've made have been almost universally shit.
Time and time again, they take what should be a really fun concept and surgically strip anything that even remotely resembles "fun" from it. I mean, look at the Dead Rising games? How can you make a zombie apocalypse game so utterly frustrating and tedious? It's simple enough, it seems, if you insist on retarded save systems, endless fetch quests, stupid time-limits and boss fights whose difficulty is on a completely different level to the rest of the game (requiring multiple abortive playthroughs just to grind levels). Or look at the Lost Planet series - I had a little sympathy for the first one, which just got squashed a month or two after release by the (infinitely superior) Gears of War landing in the same genre. But the sequel is an absolute atrocity - another game that trudges through stupid difficulty spikes, bad level design and poorly implemented controls. Like too many Japanese games of the last few years (with a few notable exceptions), these feel like the developers actively hated their players - not just the top brass deciding on the DRM strategies, but the workers in the trenches making the games.
Alternatively, look at the blatant whoring they do with the Street Fighter series. We've already got 3 versions of SF4 on current hardware and I wouldn't put money on them stopping here - and they don't give out those upgrades cheap. Plus, they wanted to lock down the PC version of SF4: Arcade Edition so most of the features were only usable while online (until public outcry stopped them).
Resident Evil 4 was a good game - quite a few years old now, but still a good game. Resident Evil 5 was less good in every respect. And the racism controversy? I was thinking it was overhyped as I played through the game until I hit something like the third chapter - the ones where you fight the mud-hut dwelling zombies who throw spears at you. Yes, the game was racist.
A couple of decades ago Capcom put out some real classics.1942, the original Bionic Commando, Ghosts and Goblins and Street Fighter 2 will always have a place in gaming history. But today's company does not come close to living up to that legacy.
But yes, they've just given us yet another reason not to buy their games (and oh boy is it a good one). It's just hard to imagine that you'll be missing anything much by boycotting them.
On the gaming side, Microsoft have actually been less evil than their competitors for years now. Sony's acts of wanton consumer abuse are too many and too well known to be worth documenting. Nintendo is actually no better, maintaining some of the most anti-consumer policies around, such as rigidly enforced region locking and rabid crackdowns on homebrew. On the PC gaming side, Microsoft's last really "evil" act was insisting on Windows Vista to play the PC version of Halo 2 - which was years ago. Their first and second party PC games have never gone in for the kind of DRM shite we've seen from Ubisoft.
These days, when Microsoft do something nasty on the gaming side, it's more likely to be down to incompetence (the RROD fiasco and Games for Windows Live) than malice. And to be honest, they are (slowly) getting better at avoiding that kind of thing.
Existing Kinect games are basically Xbox 360 games with some fancy motion control added on. Until somebody develops a working Xbox 360 emulator (which is probably years away), you will not be playing any of the existing Kinect games on Windows.
Unless, of course, developers choose to release PC ports of those games, which is very unlikely but probaly not impossible.
Space. I don't mind having 3 consoles underneath my TV, but I know full well I'm in a minority there - I don't really give a damn if one end of my living room looks a bit messy. Certainly, there's no way my parents would ever countenance having more than 2 boxes under their TV - one of which will always be their Sky TV box. At the moment, they have an Xbox360 that I won in a Christmas raffle and didn't need. This took over the slot previously occupied by their old DVD player. My dad does play a fair old bit of Forza, but the main thing their 360 is used for is playing DVDs.
Yes, in my case, it's a hold-over from Duke Nukem 3d and the early Quakes. I suspect most people's control preferences are shaped by the usual defaults for the first generation of fpses they played (ignoring Doom and earlier for the moment, as they didn't have vertical looking or jumping).
Good list. For once (and this doesn't happen often with these things), I don't think I disagree with a single entry. If I could add an eleventh, it would be:
"XI: If thou art an fps and if thou art not a realistic military simulator, thou shalt stick any ideas regarding two-weapon limits quite firmly where the sun shineth not.
Seriously, even console players seem to be getting sick of this particular convention, judging by the fact that one of the highest profile console fpses on the horizon, Resistance 3, is going back to the weapon-wheel system."
And while it's not a commandment, one thing I would really love to see on the PC is some kind of system (perhaps implemented via Steam or something) which carries my control bindings between similar games, so far as is possible. I like my mouse inverted, and I am quite insistant that my right mouse button makes my character jump, while "use" is always assigned to the space bar. Zoom/aim lives on the middle mouse button - never the right mouse button (even if the game in question doesn't feature jumping). It would be extremely nice if, even if only between games from the same developer, those settings could be carried over automatically.
There have been console fpses - good ones to boot - that don't have a two weapon limit. To my mind, the greatest console fps ever made was the original Resistance: Fall of Man for the PS3. It used a weapon-wheel system. Properly implemented, this system doesn't need to be any more than "hold in the right bumper button and nudge the right analogue stick in the appropriate direction".
Resistance 2 went for a 2-weapon system. The outcry was so great that Resistance 3 will return to the weapon wheel. Given half a chance, even console gamers will opt out of the 2 weapon limit.
There are a few games where such a limit makes sense. An Operation Flashpoint-style military simulator, for example. I could even stretch that definition to include the Call of Duty games, although they are a long way from being simulators. The problem is when it is pushed into non-realistic games where it doesn't belong - games like Duke Nukem Forever.