Category Archives: Xbox

Editorials, Games, Xbox

Halo 4: How is This Even Possible?

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You know, after so many years it’s only natural that this generation of hardware has run dry, that it’s impossible for the consoles to impress us any more…

Halo 4 cut-scene

Well, that’s a cut-scene. Obviously prerendered.

Halo 4 E3 2012

Nope. PR bullshot. Show me some real screens.

Screenshot © Eurogamer

Okay, so that one’s from Digital Foundry’s tech breakdown. It’s pretty undeniably indicative of how good Halo 4 looks. How 343 Industries has done this, how it got hardware that has seemingly been running on fumes for years now to push out what I don’t think, resolution aside, would look out of place on a decent PC gaming rig, how many virgins had to be bled dry in sacrifice to the gods of gaming, is utterly beyond me.

It doesn’t change my tune about new consoles being desperately needed, but I haven’t been this impressed with a game’s visuals since Uncharted 2. I’m genuinely flummoxed at why even first-party 360 games have so often been allowed to coast visually, content to be adequate rather than spectacular and giving rise to a popular opinion that the PS3 has a noticeable performance advantage. It frankly shows how lackadaisical Microsoft has been in pushing its developers and partners this gen, and I hope that this is the first sign of a rumoured push for more high-quality, exclusive, internally produced content from Redmond in the next generation.

Plus it’s bloody good to play. That always helps.

Editorials, Games, iOS, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Maybe 2012 Hasn’t Been That Bad

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Long time no post, eh?

Maybe I was being dramatic back at E3. Maybe, when I thought this year was so crap that I was considering getting out of games altogether, it was an overreaction. The fact that my list of GOTY contenders contained only a couple of entries as far into the year as May spoke for itself, but a few months later, 2012 hasn’t turned out so badly. New blood in the form of new hardware is sorely needed, don’t get me wrong, but it’s been far from the death knell of the whole industry.

I’m still struggling to see where ten games that are truly worth celebrating are coming from, to be honest, but the absence of big, big games to get excited about – Halo 4 being my one exception – has forced me to expand my horizons, giving B-tier games that might not otherwise get a look in a chance.

I think the disappearance of the B-tier game as all but the biggest and safest developers fail has been a problem, and as a result I’m keen to champion them. Look at how many minor classics, sleeper hits and brave experiments we had last generation that could never happen this time around. I’m talking about games like Beyond Good & Evil, Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, Freedom Fighters, Stranger’s Wrath, Breakdown. Some weren’t hits, sure, but those who played them enjoyed them, and one commercially failed experiment wasn’t enough to torpedo a developer.

Well, those games do exist, albeit in reduced numbers, if you care to look.

The Darksiders series is one. It was a new property, backed by a new and enthusiastic developer, that was fun and ambitious in scope. That’s why I keenly bought into Darksiders II and thoroughly enjoyed myself with it. Sleeping Dogs as well, which had a tumultuous gestation but turned out to be a critical and, from the looks of things, commercial success. Both were fun and would have been overlooked, had they stumbled into the big hitters that have no doubt shifted production to future hardware.

The consoles’ archaic hardware hasn’t stopped the progress of the PC, of course, and anecdotally I’ve seen a lot of bored console gamers investing in gaming PCs, which can be had for only a little more than the likely price of the next-gen consoles. This boost in the market has helped consoles as well, leading me to enjoy fantastic 360 versions of games that are traditionally PC fodder: XCOM: Enemy Unknown and The Witcher 2. Both likely candidates for my eventual GOTY list and worlds apart from the corridor-based man-shooters we’ve been told are all that’s being made nowadays.

Small developers, too. We’re starting to get some of the spoils of the Kickstarter boom in indie games and genre revivals, with FTL: Faster Than Light being another that I’ve fallen slightly in love with. Terry Kavanagh’s Super Hexagon has sucked an ungodly amount of my time and been responsible for more than one premature battery depletion on my phone. Great console downloads like Journey and Trials Evolution. The list goes on.

In fact, the two biggest disappointments of the year have been arguably its two biggest games from established names so far: Mass Effect 3 and Diablo III. Both had prominent PR disasters – the reception to the ending, which I actually defended in the name of artistic integrity, and Error 37 respectively – and should maybe be taken as evidence that those who are gnashing their teeth over the state of the games industry need to broaden their horizons. Look beyond the chart and the PR machine at where the buzz is, because passionate gamers are rarely wrong.

Come the end of the year, 2012 likely won’t be one that’ll be looked back on with any great nostalgia. The death knell of the industry, though? Perhaps we were hasty.

Games, iOS, Nintendo, PlayStation, Tech, Xbox

A Gimmicky Peripheral I Can Get Behind

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Motion gaming has been and gone, I hope, and it seems like the fad to see us into the next generation has been chosen, and it’s secondary touchscreen inputs. E3 2012 had its fair share of horrors, but I don’t think this is one of them and, oddly, I think Microsoft has the best implementation. The Wii U led the way and the PS3 will shortly gain the ability to use the Vita as a PS3 controller, while Microsoft unveiled a software solution in SmartGlass.

SmartGlass

Some of what SmartGlass will do will depend on what the companion apps support, but assuming it has some kind of 3D capability, it has all the upsides of the other platform holders’ efforts and none of the downsides.

First of all, it works on devices that I and many others already have. I wouldn’t have put it past Microsoft to limit it to Windows Phone or Windows 8 tablets, but putting it on iOS and Android was a masterstroke, meaning pretty much anyone with a penchant for tech already has a piece of SmartGlass-enabled hardware. The Wii U obviously requires a whole new console and the PS3 puts the functionality on an expensive handheld with a questionable future. An iPad or other tablet has a higher cost of entry, true, but they have applications far beyond games and people already own them in huge numbers. I had SmartGlass in the room three years ago without even knowing about it.

The second point applies mainly to Nintendo’s way of doing things. The Wii U GamePad has an increasingly long list of caveats – not least its negative effects on game performance – and isn’t even that technically advanced. It still uses a resistive touch screen, for instance, which was ancient tech when it appeared on the DS back in 2004, while even the cheapest Android tablet will have a multitouch display.

SmartGlass, on the other hand, suffers from none of these. We don’t yet know to what extent it’ll be able to leverage the graphical grunt of its host hardware, but the GPUs in decent tablets aren’t inconsiderable, and if SmartGlass is allowed to use them we could have similar full-fat second-screen functionality to the Wii U. It doesn’t have to be limited to glorified menus, without throttling the main hardware like driving a second screen on Nintendo’s machine seems to do. And my iPad will do this with a ten-hour or more battery life, versus the 3-5 that Nintendo’s official figures present.

Most of all, though, my enthusiasm for the idea of personal gaming screens like this is because it’s another example of how far ahead of its time a certain system was. Never forget.

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

E3 2012 Conference Review

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If last year felt like games were running on fumes, desperate for a bit of fresh blood, it didn’t take much to predict what we were going to be seeing this year. Although I don’t think anyone anticipated it being this bad.

For reference, you can find my last few E3 conference reviews here.

Microsoft

Ugh.

It seems like the days of actually using these shows to announce things and get people excited about your platform are long gone, at least if you’re Microsoft. Where were the big, surprising reveals that get people talking, that get them excited for the coming year? There weren’t any. The handful of games that actually impressed were ones we’d seen before and were mostly venerable franchises being supplanted by their “cinematic action game” successors in which you hammer a button and cool stuff happens. Or, if you’re Black Ops II, you do the last game again with Human Revolution’s piss filter on it, which tells you that it’s the future.

But at least you can search Bing and browse Internet Explorer in Spanish now, so that’s something.

In fairness, Halo 4 looked nice, SmartGlass is a very good idea, and Matt Stone and Trey Parker had a good line. And I’m interested in LocoCycle based on that teaser, simply because it’s from Twisted Pixel. That’s it. Thank God they were smart enough to make SmartGlass cross-platform so that I don’t need a Windows Phone to use it, as otherwise it would have been dead on arrival and the sole highlight of the conference would have been two guys who didn’t really want to be there taking the piss out of it.

I’m writing this on Monday evening and crossing everything that Sony and Nintendo bring out the big guns to definitively show up that nonsense as the shite it was.

I didn’t hallucinate that they brought out Usher, did I?

D

Sony

(Full disclosure: I didn’t stay up until 4am to watch this and so my opinions are based on retroactively reading live blogs and watching videos.)

Like last year, I thought Microsoft had left the door open for Sony to steal the limelight, and once again, Sony resolutely failed to do so. Arguably even more so.

First of all, I suspect that Sony has given up on the Vita. Its sales have been poor and there’s been a negative buzz around it, but at the time of writing, with an hour-long Nintendo show dedicated to 3DS software coming up tomorrow, all that was given to the Vita in two hours of Sony setting out its stall for 2012/2013 was a brief mention of exclusive versions of Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed. We’ve been here before with the PSP and it didn’t work, and that was several years after release when the hype had dried up and nobody cared any more. To let the Vita get to this point is bad, but to do it within six months of launch is shocking, and if I’d dropped £230 or more on this thing I’d be fucking angry at this non-showing.

The PS3 fared better, but like the situation with the 360, it’s clear that the big guns are tied up on bigger and better things. God of War: Ascension? I don’t care. Like Gears of War: Judgment, it’s a B-team project based on a franchise that has run its course, and that demo could have been any of them. The best and worst thing about any David Cage game is that it’s a David Cage game, and I can’t stand Ellen Page so Beyond is immediately on the back foot for me. Wonderbook is interesting and ambitious but is doomed to be another failed initiative like Move. If I want to read a book I’ll, you know, read a book.

The Last of Us was the best of the show by far, showing Sony’s reliance on Naughty Dog to consistently pump out the kind of experiences that this generation promised. You’d think it would be working on it’s big PS4 title, having wrapped up Uncharted so nicely – and it probably is, in reality – but this shows that there’s at least one new big hitter left in this generation. Two if The Last Guardian ever makes it out, but every missed trade show makes me less convinced that it will.

The Microsoft and Sony conferences were closer than some would like to admit, with one undeniably impressive game each and not a whole lot else, and certainly no major announcements. Sony’s was better because we saw more new games, but it goes without saying that next year is a big one for both of them. Their current consoles look like they’ll be on life support by then.

C-

Nintendo

The expectations on Nintendo’s shoulders were perhaps unfairly high given the failure of the first two conferences to show us anything worthwhile, but even with a new console to show off and such a low bar, Nintendo failed to jump it.

I’m frankly shocked at how bad it was. They actually got Ubisoft, which had knocked it out of the park yesterday with some brilliant-looking games, to give a demo of Batman: Arkham City. That game will be a year old by the time the Wii U launches, and it’s not like it was brimming with new features and content to get us coming back to it. Gimmicky touch controls that people have complained about for as long as iOS has been hosting games are now a fixture of Nintendo (Wii U), Microsoft (SmartGlass) and Sony (Vita) games. Enjoy.

Pikmin 3 was the highlight and then it was downhill from there. No Zelda or Metroid whatsoever. Two indistinguishable Mario games. Dance and fitness games. No price or firm release date for the Wii U, with the only notable announcement on that front being that it supports two controllers – a downgrade from pretty much every system since the N64. Oh, and it halves the frame rate if you run two of them. Have fun.

My Twitter feed was full of people hoping, praying for one ‘megaton’ before the end. An HD Zelda would have done it, at least giving us something to cling on to. Some were even talking about GTA V, notable for its absence at the other two conferences, making a surprise appearance. Nope. It was a collection of mini-games, wrapped around some social features like a Mii-filled PlayStation Home. It worked for the Wii when it was breaking sales records, so here, with no competition in the next-gen console market, is Nintendo sticking to what it now does best.

At least E3 2003 had Pac-Man VS.

D

Worst E3 ever? It’s up there. After all that build-up, the potential for a showing from certainly one, possibly three new consoles, the best showing of the whole thing was Ubisoft. Who saw that coming?

Editorials, Games, PC games, Xbox

The Witcher 2 and Playing a Character

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RPGs have been in what you could charitably call a transitional generation, somewhere between when Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest dominated and a place where role-playing and all that it entails is less a genre in itself and more a set of conventions to be adopted by others. I don’t like it, but it’s true.

Two elements that actual RPGs have been pioneering this gen, though, have been morality and branching. They go hand-in-hand to a certain extent, but for me they’ve become an integral part of the role-playing experience, mainly because they actually entail playing a role. Previously even silent protagonists have been stretching the definition of roles, being that you’re along for the ride and doing nothing to put your mark on the character.

The Witcher 2

I’ve been playing The Witcher 2 over the last couple of weeks, now that I can play the incredible Xbox 360 port – seriously, there must have been some actual witchcraft involved there – and it puts to shame most games in their attempts to get these new mechanics right. It shouldn’t be so, because this is the RPG where you’re actually playing a defined character with an established personality and back story, but by casting you as a protagonist who is by default a neutral outsider in all conflicts, CD Projekt Red has its cake and eats it, as Geralt, and therefore the player, can do what he likes without breaking character.

Morality in games has only recently become fashionable, and it’s often depressingly childish in how binary it is. Mass Effect is another offender, where your character genuinely starts to look scarred and glow with an eerie red light if you decide not to take the recklessly moral ‘Paragon’ route. The morality in that game is literally reduced to a number, your responses adding a +1 to your Paragon/Renegade bar depending on whether you prefer the recklessly idealistic absolute moral code of ‘good’ Shepard or the cackling villain of the ‘bad’ route, wherein you have to wonder about a galactic society that lets such an unhinged individual be in charge of the fate of everything. The series actually rewards you for picking one extreme over another, suggesting that Shepard is deliberately set up to be either Mary Sue or space Hitler. Continue reading The Witcher 2 and Playing a Character →

Editorials, Games, iOS, PlayStation, Xbox

I Won’t Miss Game

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In case you’ve missed the news, Game is on the ropes. Given that Game Group owns Gamestation, the only specialist high-street gaming retailers going under seems to be a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, which will leave us with the hardly stable HMV and… well… that’s it. Here in Bournemouth, with no large supermarket branches in the town centre, if Game and Gamestation go there will be absolutely nowhere to buy new games at retail – used from CEX, or the slim hope that the Tesco Express starts selling big releases.

I’m not going to deny that almost no high-street presence is a bad thing for the visibility of gaming, putting it entirely into the hands of online retailers and forcing platform holders’ hands in getting their digital distribution systems together. High-street electronics stores haven’t exactly been thriving either, and the low margins on hardware have always made them lukewarm on gaming at the best of times – again, none of them in my town – so it’s not unfeasible that some towns will have nowhere to buy games of any kind in the near future, unless you count an iPhone from the O2 shop.

But even despite these onrushing problems, I won’t mourn Game when it goes.

It’s been everything that’s wrong with games retail for a long time. Coupled with the supermarkets and online retailers, it mostly killed off the once-thriving independent retail market, which, for me, took away a big part of the gaming community and places where I made friends I still have today. No indies meant no import games in shops, but moving entirely online hasn’t destroyed that market and it won’t for the games market in general.

Having Game be this industry’s sole representative at retail has been embarrassing, frankly. Looking around one of the shops, it’s both a typical example of a retailing dinosaur, struggling to sell new product as it claws desperately to the RRP that no one expects to pay any more, and devalues games by looking and acting like it’s only patronised by people who like shopping in a glorified pawn shop. I don’t feel good when I bite the bullet and go in because I need a product immediately but find myself stuck in the queue behind a kid haggling over how little he’s being offered for FIFA 08, or when I buy something new and get nudged towards saving a whole £5 by buying the used one with stickers all over it and not a penny for the developers I’m supporting. No wonder people who only go in for birthday and Christmas presents think gaming is for people with a mental age of 12.

I appreciate that I just went after the notion of the RRP and that digital distribution has a lot to learn there, but without the likes of Game complaining, platform holders – and, you’d hope, the developers themselves – are free to actually compete on price. I fear Sony and Microsoft’s enforced pricing structures here, but I’m sure they’ll fall into line eventually. Microsoft has already shown itself willing to compromise on restrictive policies, with more rumoured to come, under pressure from gamers and developers, and all the collapse of retail means is that a lot of this learning is going to be done on the fly, perhaps sooner than we anticipated, more out of necessity than design.

So farewell, Game. You won a couple of battles, but you’re going to lose the war.