Tag Archives: EA

Editorials, Games, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Whatever Happened to Plug and Play?

Leave a comment

Remember when a new console had to be connected to power, connected to the TV, and that was it? Those were the days…

With all of the big three espousing network connectivity and, to wildly differing extents, higher resolutions, will those days ever come back? Getting the full experience from a games console is no longer a case of picking up a SCART cable along with the new hardware. As well as needing an expensive TV, just setting it up relies on an intimate knowledge of your TV’s supported inputs and resolutions as well as the favoured sound formats of your audio setup. I’m a technical masochist and so actually like fiddling with settings, but I doubt the average person does. We all must have cringed at friends with nice widescreen TVs but with their DVD player set to 4:3.

Networking is just as bad, requiring either a wired network within range of the console or a headfirst dive into the world of wireless networking – encryption protocols, DHCP servers, MAC filters, SSIDs, keys, and other such fun – to get what can be the main thrust of the hardware in the case of the 360.

And then there was firmware. The risk of completely killing your hardware aside, it’s more than slightly annoying to find yourself unable to play a PSP game because it has a mandatory firmware upgrade on the disc and your machine doesn’t have enough battery power to let you flash it. So much for ease of use there. Since its release the PS3 has had two firmware updates weighing in at nearly 100MB each, which is no quick and painless download on a 2Mb connection with a bandwidth limit. I’m sure you’re familiar with the stories of firmware updates killing 360s and Wiis, as well. Don’t even get me started on game patching and modern developers’ inability to notice players randomly disconnecting from online games.

Necessary evils though these may be if we want these new experiences, surely someone out there can come up with some kind of standards. Why not make TVs that can tell your devices what resolution they want? Why not test your bloody games before you ask us to pay for them?

Editorials, Games, Nintendo

Love The Tree, Hate The Fruit?

3 Comments

The day that we all get to play a new Nintendo console is getting close and what used to be a momentous gaming event for me is currently leaving me slightly cold. The above shamelessly paraphrased title from the 1UP Boards sums up how I feel, I think.

I’m reticent to speak out on my concerns about the Wii because, if I’m honest, I thought the DS was a crap idea. Now, having owned two of them and a decent library of original and entertaining software for it, I’ve eaten my words but I’m still not convinced that Nintendo will be able to replicate it on a home console. I want to play games for more than quick bursts, which is a format more suited to a handheld like the DS.

Looking at incomplete lists of launch titles the one Wii game that screams “MUST PLAY!” to me is a GameCube game with annoying-looking controls and, apart from a few obvious fits like Wario Ware and games designed to suit like Mario Galaxy (neither are launch titles), I’m extremely concerned that that it’s going to get games for other consoles shoehorned onto the new controls like Call of Duty 3 or Madden. I’d probably change my tune if Eidos made a Wii Hitman game with the nunchuck as a virtual garrotte but until I see that I’m sticking to my guns.

Of course the DS was much the same for the first year and now has some fabulous software, but what I want to play on a handheld is very different to what I want on a home console and I don’t see the experience transferring effectively. While it may be worth it for the Virtual Console alone, I applaud Nintendo for trying something different, WiiConnect24 is a great idea, and the Wii is unique as the only aesthetically pleasing console of this generation, with so much else to play this year I’m increasingly tempted to hold off until 2007 when the likes of Wario Ware will be out.

Am I the only one who isn’t drinking Nintendo’s Kool-Aid yet?

Games, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

So Long, E3

Leave a comment

So fresh off one of the biggest and certainly most controversial E3s in recent memory we find out that it’s going to be the last. It’s certainly going to change the dynamics of the average year in this industry but now how are games journalists supposed to get an annual free holiday to California?

Honestly, they might as well not bother putting on a show now. Publishers hold their own little events all year round (EA and Ubisoft have had them in the last month, for example) so nothing will change there, and since the huge events are incredibly popular it’s tempting to speculate that this is only going to make the venerable Tokyo Game Show and neophyte Leipzig Games Convention even bigger. Tempting in that it’s easier for me to get to Germany and preferable for me to go to Japan than Los Angeles.

But now how are fanboys going to endlessly debate who “won” E3? How are we going to see Peter Moore’s tattoos and Kaz Hirai’s hyperbole in the same place? What else do kids who run fan sites have to blag their way into? Where can shitty doomed peripherals go without Kentia Hall? And now there’s one less career path for jobbing “actresses” who are willing to drape themselves over cars and guns while overweight men in shorts have their photos taken with them.

And I’m not at all bitter that I’ve never been and now never will…

Completely off-topic I know, but I’ve also written a review of New Super Mario Bros. for the DS which can be found here and on the review index. Take a look.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Burnout Revenge 360

Leave a comment

£50 for a six month old PS2/Xbox game is a bit of a joke to be fair, but I never bought Burnout Revenge on an older console and I traded in that Perfect Dark shite for it, so it was a bit more bearable. While it’s debatable whether or not it’s worth getting otherwise for the moderate graphical update (that’s not so much anything against the 360 version as a big endorsement of the graphical prowess of the Xbox one), what you have here is a rollicking game that’s huge fun in online multiplayer.

Burnout Revenge

The graphics first of all, since I don’t think there’s anyone who hasn’t played a Burnout. The update is a lot less cynical than, for example, the 360 port of NFS Most Wanted, and actually puts the hardware to pretty good use. On an HDTV the game looks absolutely fantastic – 60fps (almost) all the way, blindingly fast, sparks flying everywhere, and it all means that the spectacular crashes that the series is known for can look painfully real. The sound is just as impressive, giving great positional audio through a 5.1 system as well as tons of bass that helps out during boosting and crashing. The weak link is probably the music which is mostly pop-punk-rock crap, but admittedly it suits the fast but fairly brainless action well.

World Tour mode provides a decent amount of gameplay and enough variety to make it worthwhile, but in my opinion it’s over Xbox Live that this comes into its own. PGR3 was great with friends, but this is an absolute riot where, best of all, you won’t be accused of cheating if you “accidentally” happen to nudge someone into a tunnel wall. It’s encouraged, and with rivalries saved persistently so that the game will warn you if you end up racing against someone you took out months ago it becomes delightfully competitive against people you play regularly.

Just to take the sheen off it, there seems to be an annoying bug with joining online games that can be frustrating. More than once with different hosts I’ve tried to play with a group of friends and at least one of us has been constantly kicked without explanation several times before managing to connect for any length of time. Once they’re in it’s usually fine, but it’s still a major annoyance and I remember similar issues with Burnout 3 on Xbox Live when I bought that.

Bugs aside, this makes me want to see how the inevitable Burnout built from the ground up on the next-gen machines is going to look, because for what is supposed to be a relatively simple port this almost looks like a whole new game. Criterion’s mastery of Renderware apparently translates very well. Whether or not it’s worth the money depends on whether or not you played it last September, but it’s still as great a game as ever.

Editorials, Games

In-Game Advertising

3 Comments

Having seen the news from a couple of days ago that post-apocalyptic MMO car combat game (what a combination) Auto Assault is to start getting in-game advertising, I felt the time was right for a nice little rant on the subject. Product placement is a phenomenon that’s gotten really big, often ridiculously so, in film recently and with development costs soaring it’s always a good thing to offset some of those costs, right?

Nuh-uh. EA games are full of product placement but the money plainly isn’t poured into improving the game and they’re still all the full price of £50/$60. In Fight Night Round 3 even the achievements are branded so that if you happen to win a certain tournament your account will be adorned with a Burger King logo for all who care to look at it.

I can actually deal with that because real sports are heavily commercialised and anyone who watches them on TV is used to hoardings around the pitch and tournaments named after beers and banks, but is having ads for current companies or this week’s TV shows in a post-apocalyptic world actually helping immersion? Doubtful. It didn’t help in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory when I had to watch sustained shots of Airwaves chewing gum or when I saw Manhattan plunged into darkness…except for the Airwaves blimp hovering above the city.

Thinking about how it affects immersion or the gameplay, the sheer amount of PR crap that goes into this is just creepy. A couple of months ago Edge had an interview with a guy from one of the in-game advertising agencies who said that “it’s really about enhancing the gameplay”. How exactly? They got a reply the next month from someone who used to work in development who listed stories of changes to actual gameplay that were vetoed because advertising space had been sold, or this one:

“I have personally heard the sponsoring companies haggle to get a ‘special mission in the game where the player has to buy a XXX phone to complete the mission.'”

I’d be pissed if I bought a game and it had something like that in it, but this kind of stuff happens all the time and is getting more and more invasive, now to the point of using your connection to stream in new ads. It’s downright insidious.

Advertising won’t drop prices just like products in movies haven’t meant prices dropping and products in TV shows haven’t eliminated commercial breaks, because the savings won’t be passed onto the consumer. The only example of free but ad-supported gaming that I can think of is the ‘Smarts Adds’ (their spelling) Gizmondo, and I think about 12 people bought it. A company with shareholders to answer to will pocket a few thousand off their development costs and continue to take £50 a time as long as people are willing to pay it.

Commercialisation of games is as inevitable as it has been with any other medium where costs only go up with technology, but I hope publishers can keep their feet on the ground with this. They’ve been making money for decades with little or no licencing (hell, even paying for licences to use in driving games) and I hope they don’t forget that because alienating thousands of fans isn’t worth a few extra notes in the pocket.

Games, General, PlayStation

Gotta Love EA

1 Comment

If you need any more proof that EA gets lower every day, check this out from Kotaku:

Imagine my shock when a message popped up telling me that I had to either pay $2 or give my privacy away to ESPN and whoever they feel like selling my details to, if I wanted to play online.

Basically to play the PSP version of Fight Night Round 3 online you either have to pay them $2 from your credit card for “authentication” purposes, or if you don’t have a card/don’t want to give them any more money/don’t want to give your card details over a public wireless network, you have to give them your email and mailing address and opt into the EA/ESPN mailing list. This is in order to use all of the features of a game you’ve just paid $40 for.

Apparently to play the 360 version online it’ll require the blood of your firstborn.