OrtizGames

Hey, guys!

Don’t think I’ve forgotten you; I’ve just graduated and am now wrapping up a few chores before I can get down and dirty with SPORE, my gaming culture essay and some Beyond Good and Evil.

So as a brief prelude to anything I end up writing this week, here’s a few quick impressions on what we’ve seen at E3 so far:

1) The economy is down, so E3 is very unimpressive. They’re still hyping it up quite a great deal, but coming from the mouth of attendees, E3 is not great this year.

2) Impressions of individual companies’s “big announcements”
Nintendo’s Wii “Vitality Sensor”: The day I need a game to remind me my cholesterol is bad is the day I need to stop playing video games because they’re becoming my mother. The design looks like it may end up being cramp-city. Also, I swear I’ve seen this device before. Didn’t we see a leak preview image of this way way long ago? I’m getting some kind of déjà vu that tells me this should look familiar for some reason.
It’s argued that maybe it could help the game measure which is the best time to COMPLETELY THROW YOUR WORLD TOPSY TURVY like in a jump-spooks horror game, but considering we’re dealing with Wii graphics and Wii hardware here, how smart could the game possibly be for this? Let’s not forget, Super Mario Galaxy may have looked great, but the AI (was there any?) was pretty much limited to “Here Comes Mario, Beat Him Up”. Resident Evil 4 had that same idea down: “Here Comes Leon, Walk Sluggishly Forward And Attack Repeatedly”. Then again, somehow Capcom made it work with Monster Hunter Tri, too.
So, Nintendo, any examples on how this thing will work? What actual uses it has?
Enough speculating; let’s move on.

Sony’s WiiMote: It’s basically everything the original Nintendo WiiMote was supposed to be in its proof of concept video, only with dorky colored balls at the end of it which I suppose are part of the capture process. But of course, if it’s a visual mocap process, there will be horrible glitches involved as with any motion capture technology, which makes me wonder why we are still bothering with freaking motion sense technology. At least they had a technical demo. It made Nintendo’s and Microsoft’s presentations look laughable at best–then again, it’s just a tech demo–the actual product won’t be out until Spring 2010, which means there’s nothing coming this year. Except Heavy Rain. Of course. Which looks as amazing as ever.

Microsoft’s Wiimote “Project Natal”: This is basically an awesome futuristic idea that will never work because Microsoft can’t make it do half of the things in this proof of concept video with any accuracy. It is a wonderful idea, don’t get me wrong. If this actually ended up being what this video makes it out to be, I will personally send a letter of apology to Microsoft, purchase an Xbox 360 and shut up. But I’m quite sure this will not be what it will be like–it’s a proof of concept video, used for patent purposes more than anything, and the likelihood that it gets up and running before Microsoft gets set on releasing the Xbox 1080/720/3/THE OTHER ONE is extremely unlikely. This “Project Natal” doesn’t seem to have any working prototypes, and might as well be Duke Nukem Forever with the amount of working product we’ve seen.

In short, E3 this year is pretty much how I felt yesterday, standing in GameStop, scanning the shelves and realizing I really didn’t want to be there. We’re hitting a low point. The economy is bad. The games are bad. The future looks boring.

We need saviors.

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Greg Costikyan wrote an article called “Death to the Games Industry” (Part 2 here) about two years ago. As much as I disagree with some of the things he says, I have to admit he’s right in this case. I read this article first around the beginning of this year or the end of last, and I had my own take on it back then. I completely disagreed. After learning a lot about the history of 20th century art, however, and analyzing the market over and over again, turning things around in my head, I’ve come to some very terrifying conclusions.

First off, let’s talk about Clement Greenberg. Clem was an art critic back in the 1950s and late into the 1980s that was known for his high praise of Abstract Expressionist art (more commonly referred to on Teh Interwebs as “Art That Doesn’t Look Like Anything”). Despite the cruel sport of “Clembashing” that has become popular over the years, reducing the critic to nothing more than a rambling old fool who couldn’t love anything more than pictures that look like nothing, Clement Greenberg was one of the most knowledgeable and insightful people of his time that helped establish a careful and precarious balance between what is “Kitsch” and what is “Avant-Garde”. He is the one who saw what no-one else seemed to be seeing: that art must be challenging the prior generation, making it, therefore, “Avant-Garde”, or “advance guard”, propelling art forward. Otherwise, it becomes “Kitsch”: easy, common, unchallenging, almost tacky in comparison. Pointless.

Now, this is especially important, because “kitsch” and “avant-garde” is not only relevant to painting. We see the same trend in literature and movies: compare a new book by Stephen King to his older works. Do you notice the difference? Back in the day, King was edgy, angry. Excited to write for a new audience, a new, darker world. Nowadays, he just releases gore on a payroll. It’s become easy, unchallenging. He’s stopped advancing. It’s the dividing line between avant-garde and kitch!

Now let’s move on to games. The problem with the games industry is that we’re starting to stagnate: to become to repetitive with our formulas. In other words, we’re becoming Kitsch. I call to the stand critically acclaimed games like Halo 3 and Soul Calibur IV. While the Halo 3 craze is slowly dying out, and more and more people admit, embarrassed, that no, Halo 3 isn’t Jesus Christ on Toast, Soul Calibur IV only came out recently and we’re still enjoying the hell out of it. I love it. I do. Personally, I enjoy it, and love it, and can’t wait to get more downloadable content so I can deck out my characters in all the armor I’m missing.

But it’s stale. It’s the same game it’s been for the past three games; don’t try to tell me about refining and balance and innovation, because I’ve heard it all before. Soul Calibur IV brings nothing new to the table, at all. You can give it stellar reviews. You can say it’s the best fighter game this year. But I can also give a restaurant five stars and say that it’s the best Italian food I’ve ever had. I can also compare two brands of soap, or hair conditioner, or soda, or furniture sets, and tell you which is better. It doesn’t mean it’s revolutionary. And here I must grudgingly concede another point to Costikyan when he says game critique is virtually nonexistant in today’s world. See, I’m not reviewing Soul Calibur IV right now. I could review it and say it’s great. Really, it is. Go buy it. But to critque art, to analyze it and to determine what was done, what was used, whether or not it’s moving forward… to determine whether it’s being avant-garde or kitsch… that’s what we need.

To elaborate on what’s avant-garde, let’s look at Portal for a moment. We all know Portal. It was stupendous. Do you know why? Yes, Glad-OS was awesome. But do you realize that you played through an entire first person shooter without actually firing any bullets? In fact, you never actually hurt anything directly, did you? Other than the Companion Cube. You jerk. But really, Valve in making Portal really challenged us to see what it could be like to play the same game we’ve played over and over again, but this time, do it in a completely differerent way. This time, we’re not going to shoot anything or anyone. This time, we’re not going to hurt people. In that same way, Mirror’s Edge might be doing exactly the same thing, really changing up the idea of what we’ve all experienced. But see, someone had to do it first. That’s avant-garde.

I wanted to disagree at first with Costik’s and my own thoughs. I mean, truly spectacular-seeming games like Heavy Rain and Little Big Planet are only on the horizon, and Fable 2 holds great promise (promises Molyneaux made for Fable 1, but we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt anyway). But we’re out of time already. Gameplay is dying. We need the industry to change fast, or it will be crushed.

Now, a lot of people thought the Wii was the savior of gameplay, and I know game designers all over were extremely enthusiastic about it. But I’ve been calling it for a while now, and nobody seems to have been listening. And now that we’re all more aware of Nintendo’s new end goal, people are walking around with their tails between their legs, and I feel awful because I was expecting it.

Here’s the thing about the Wii that people have been neglecting to think about: when you make a game focused on a new form of play, it’s revolutionary. Right? The Wii doesn’t do that; rather, it gives people the new form of play right off the bat. Therefore, most Wii games are forced designed around motion-sensing capabilities. To be blunt, every Wii game that comes out is basically just hacking off the motion sensor. Show me a Wii game that doesn’t use motion sensing technology in some fashion. It’s its only selling point! The Wiimote doesn’t open up new styles of play; it essentially incarcerates games into one hackneyed mechanic that requires little thought to implement!

Compare Portal to any new Wii title you’re looking at now. Raving Rabbids or that new Shaun White Snowboarding game. Raving Rabbids 2 actually uses the balance board as a sled function just like the Shaun White snowboarding game. And yet it’s so cheap! Anyone could have thought of that. The design requires no real challenge or thought as to how to radically change or improve a player’s experience–it’s just recieve, reprocess, repack and repeat! Whereas Portal took something people hadn’t done before and really moved the face of gaming! It’s now one of the most recognized titles on the market, acclaimed even by extremely embittered Yahtzee Croshaw, recognized internet game critic and author of the video series Zero Punctuation.

I mean, what are you going to do in Harvest Moon for the Wii? Tilt the Wiimote as if you’re watering plants? Move it up and down as if you’re cutting wood? Really? Seriously, think about it. Could it really be that hard to come up with the idea?

No.

Because when you do something once that no-one has ever done before, it’s innovative. When you give someone something nobody has ever done before and you let them all use it for their own creations, it’s a tool. The Wiimote is just another controller. It’s just another joystick. The design of games is still no different.

So gameplay is dying. And according to Costikyan, the industry needs to die, or it will crash itself. This sort of collapse happened in 1983, called the “Atari Crash.” A lot of us hip young freshie designers don’t know about it or can’t concieve of it because we weren’t alive back then. But it was bad, and there was a period of almost nothing in gaming until Japan and Nintendo suddenly brought it back again with the NES. We don’t want that to happen. So we need to look for innovation, for avant-garde games, to stop us from stagnating.

A huge source of inspiration for developers and publishers right now should be independent games. Not that independent games are all that great; personally, I usually can’t stand playing many of them. Much like indie film, they rely too much on shock value and mechanics and not enough on substantial experience. For them, it’s all about gameplay: it’s all casual. I’m a hardcore gamers. I’m a narratologist. I like story and plot points and cinematic. I like experience, and my closest friends dying, and the rookie coming out on top and Saving Private Ryan stories. I won’t experience those things in my own life; that’s why I play games, for new experiences.

However, developers need to learn from the indie market! The game I’ve been referring to again and again through this article, Portal, such a great example of what we need, is based off an independently developed student game named Narbacular Drop! I played it, and it was awful. Revolutionary, but terrible. But they had the idea down: portals, gravity, acceleration and perhaps most importantly, the core thesis of designing an action game you never actually hurt anyone or anything. Add some fascinating narrative and make the experience unforgettable, courtesy of Valve, and you have yourself a gorgeous gem of a game that now sells companion cube plushies.

The time is coming where the game market will be flooded by kitsch games that people will buy just because they’re on the market, and slowly gaming will lose its steam. Much like the decline of our contemporary civilization, we can’t let that happen. We need to continue forward, pushing for development, for improvement and preventing collapse at all angles. In this time of dire need, we need avant-garde. Otherwise, it’ll be a sad, slow, funless time before gaming comes back in a rebirth again.

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Please listen.

I’m not one. I never was one. People, if I were a Sony fanboy, I wouldn’t carry my DS around everywhere. It’s in my backpack right now. I’m playing Animal Crossing. I have Jam Sessions. I loved Twilight Princess. I have a Triforce badge and I own original copies of SNES Chrono Trigger and Earthbound.

The thing is, Nintendo has let me down. Check this comic out, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. Scott Ramsoomair knows it. I know it. We all know it.

And Microsoft has been doing things wrong from the start. Porting games to the PC because you want to sell more copies of your software is not good business for your console. You wouldn’t have to charge for online play if you just let exclusives sell your console. But Microsoft doesn’t care–they seem to just want to crush the competition. They deal out absurd amount of money to turn titles like Final Fantasy XIII and GTA4 multiplatform.

What happened to when we were all calling the Xbox 360 the “Xbox 180″? Why have people overlooked the hardware limitations and the RROD? Have we forgotten how cheap Microsoft has been with us? Are we all going to be hypocrites and pretend we like Halo 3 just because everyone else says they do?

Here’s Halo’s story for you: A race of English-speaking aliens whose ethnic groups don’t look anything alike despite supposedly being the same race put a jihad on humanity for no real reason and follow religious leaders blindly to a giant Ring Planet which is secretly a massive weapon (which, for some reason, is left floating in space, abandoned, and easy to access) designed to starve a race of evil crap that lives on it. A dude with no personality called Master Chief (why have people forgotten how stupid that name was from the original Halo?) blows up the ring planet. Then the aliens invade Planet America and afterwards teleport to another giant weapon, and then there’s seven giant weapons.

Then Master Chief just kicks everyone’s ass, practically alone. There’s also an alien called the Arbiter. He has no other name.

The only reason I’ve stuck with Sony–despite delays, broken promises, lost exclusives and titles that are not as impressive as advertised–is because they still release exclusive content and they still have the best policy and strongest hardware out there, trying to give people more power to play with when developing games, allowing them to do more and more. There’s a lot you can do with a pencil and paper, but Nintendo went for construction paper, and Microsoft turned into a printer. When are people going to realize what painting in three dimensional space can do?

PS3 is my only hope for this Next Generation. Come on, guys. Just try to break out of the box and look at the situation.

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Okay, so this post came much later than it was supposed to. So sue me. I’m here.

Nintendo’s skinny comes as a surprise–before E3, they were boasting the best sales in the console race to the point where they’re no longer part of it–the Wii is no longer considered next-gen but new-gen, a new generation of “more innovative” consoles that allow new player experiences. More on that later.

The Good: Nintendo has a new Zelda and a new Mario game in the works… in theory. They’re releasing a Shaun White Snowboarding game with the Wii balance board and Animal Crossing for Wii, as well as the long-awaited Wii Music, which should have been a launch title. Animal Crossing looks great, and I’ve always loved the game. Still a complete rehash of the old game (think Ninja Gaiden Sigma but no nicer graphics) and still not enough connectivity, even if there is more (damn you, Friend Code!). But I’ll definitely want to see it at some point when it comes out. They have a Star Wars: Clone Wars, Rayman Rabbids TV Party and Call of Duty: World at War, as well, all three of which use the wiimote sensor in some fashion.

They had Guitar Hero: On Tour which is pretty much Guitar Hero toned down a hundred times and SPORE Creatures which is a Tamagotchi Pokemon Nintendogs Designer hybrid thing. There is another Pokemon game. There’s a Grand Theft Auto game on the DS, too, which is highly confusing as to how it’ll work, and we’ve seen no videos or screenshots.

They’re suggesting some eerie things about those temporary downloadable games for DS, like cookbooks and maps and information and things that generally belong on an iPhone.

There’s something interesting called WiiMotionPlus, which is an adapter which apparently makes your Wiimote more accurate. I see it a little like the Nintendo 64 expansion pack. The way it looks, it simply reads your wrist movements.

The Bad: E3 was an awful joke this year from Nintendo. Nintendo basically spent an entire conference talking about how great they were doing and how many people they’d gotten to buy their hardware, stating that their Mario and Zelda teams were “working on games for the Wii”, which could mean anything, and then proceeded to preview games we know will not live up to the hype they generate for their “Motion Sensitivity”.

The Wii balance board being used as a “board” for everything is already sounding old with both Shaun White and Raving Rabbids using it. We know Star Wars: Clone Wars is going to be a disappointment. We expected lightsabers and swords to do what we do when the Wiimote has been in our hands, but after Zelda: Twilight Princess and Red Steel I know this is a dream and not a reality. It’s not going to happen. Watching two people duking it out with lightsabers and having to waggle their wiimotes and nunchuks back and forth in order to escape a clash was immediate proof of that. Even with the new WiiMotionPlus, which looks like it has potential, but was demonstrated with Wii Sports, a severely toned-down game when it comes to calculation, graphics and content. I’m expecting disappointment. Which I’m pretty sure is impossible.

Same goes for Call of Duty: World of War. Have we all forgotten the catastrophe that was Call of Duty 3 on Wii? Is the fact that it has no number now supposed to mask that it is a predecessor of that lousy combination of bad mechanics and awful visuals? Watching people fake it out while they hold that stupid plastic Wii Shooter in their hands was painful. Come on, people. We know the only way this will work is with lock-on. Remember Prime: Corruption? Yeah, that’s the only way it’ll work. And I don’t think COD will do that. I’m expecting somewhat of a rail shooter experience, actually. And that sucks.

Lastly, what happened to Harvest Moon and Line Rider? What, were they just not good enough to be in E3? Instead, pushed aside for stuff like Wii Speak–a microphone. It’s almost as bad as Sony putting emphasis in the Eye Toy, a webcam. At least the Eye Toy can be used for a few motion-based games like Tori Emaki. In fact, the Eye Toy comes with a microphone. And yet they promote it like it’s delivered from on high.

Wii Music looks like a great idea that will simply not be as great as it looks. While I love being able to use virtual instruments to create music, Wii Music’s presentation just was not that impressive. I know they’ve been working on it for a long time, but even so it still looks flawed. Simply not accurate enough, not seamless enough, not melodious enough. The notes Miyamoto played, opposed to what Miyamoto claimed, really did not seem to match the song. Hitting the right drum on the set seemed more trouble than it was worth. Taking a leaf out of the indy DS game Jam Sessions would have been a great idea over the system they developed.

I obviously expect everything Nintendo to sell like pancakes. I expect people to be thrilled with the WiiMotionPlus. I expect Wii Music to be a bestseller that will kill at Christmas, with no other triple A children’s games being released other than Super Mario Sluggers (a baseball Mario game, surprise) and I know they’ll continue to lead the pack as everyone thinks they will. But I hate it. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of people assuming the Wiimote is “innovation,” that it’s new and different and special. It’s just another button. A more intuitive button? Maybe. Though all that does is get you more sales. The moment you make it this easy for someone to add motion sensitivity to a game, you’re no longer being innovative. You’re being a goddamn tool.

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I don’t talk much about it. Probably because I know if I start saying things about the Wii, what comes out of my mouth will end up being negative.

It’s inevitable, however, for me to say something about that little white posh console, so let’s start out saying a few good things even though we all know where this is going.

1) It’s a great multiplayer console.

2) It has games for kids.

3) …

That’s about it for me. That’s all I can really say about it. You can scream and rant and rail all you want about the magic word innovation; the truth is, the point-and-click remote control idea has been something Nintendo has toyed with since the NES Glove Controller, and infra-red technology is about as twentieth century as it gets–not to mention that it’s recycled from the Game Boy Color’s failed attempts at infra-red ports sharing.

When you sit down and really analyze it, all this new garbage they come out with for the Wii that supposedly makes you feel “immersed” in gameplay because you’re mimicking the motions on the screen has simply resulted in extremely hackneyed and gratuitous calisthenics. I remember talking with a fellow designer about Harvest Moon for the Wii; he was all for it, expecting the addition of the Wiimote to be an amazing dynamic. I continued to try to point out my skepticism because the addition is simply so easy it can be perceived as tacked on. Anything that senses motion can immediately be exploited without a second thought–example: I can make a kayaking game where you swipe the Wiimote left and right to simulate paddling. There you go. I just implemented the Wiimote in a game that should sell bajillions because it has motion sensing technology and therefore should be fun.

What all these sad game designers need to start accepting is that motion sensing gets old. Special gear gets old. Transfer packs and GBA link cables and chainsaw controllers get old. When people start seeing games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4 and Alone in the Dark and The Orange Box come out on everything but the Wii… well. This article describes it best, and I am in total agreement. Most people I know have stopped playing their Wii altogether. Even Super Smash Brothers Brawl just doesn’t make it anymore. Nintendo’s giving us Mario Kart, but I haven’t heard a word out of anybody’s mouth about it. The little white console is fading, and keeping quiet.

What can I say? Nintendo gave it a shot. The problem is Nintendo is the only company that’s good at what Nintendo does, and like I said months ago: It’s my theory Nintendo titles will continue to sell the Wii. No other company will ever really get their fair share of the profit.

I wonder if Miyamoto’s got anything up his sleeves now.

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Peter Molyneux is like my “aww” developer. Sometimes he’s so silly he makes me laugh and sometimes he says something serious and I grow more fond of him. I think it may have something to do with how much I enjoy Fable.

Recently on Gamasutra, Peter (Molyneux) talked about how the game design industry has failed in being able to open up gaming for everyone. We’ve made huge leaps, he says, but we’ve gotten stuck here. He uses a controller as an example–how hard it is for the average person to wrap his or her head around the idea of a controller. While it’s true that a ridiculous amount–how many people? There’s statistics–of people play video games, games nowhere close to matching, for example, the number of televisions in the world. The number of computers. How many consoles have we sold? Millions. But how many televisions have been sold? The average American household is bound to have at least 2.73, and 2.55 people [source]. That’s over 300 million televisions. Molyneux refers back to a time when Clive Sinclair boasted people would play the Spectrum instead of watch television in every home in Britain.

We haven’t achieved that–I don’t think the Wii will achieve it either. It may be motion-sensing technology, but it’s still a controller. We’re still making high-technological-knowledge games for the Average Joe.

We need to make the things people know how to use–their hands, their fingers, their eyes–the controllers for the worlds they wish to interact with.  In that sense, I think the Wii a step–if only one step–in the right direction.

“But Andres,” I hear you say, “you’ve always expressed your distaste for the Nintendo Wii! Surely you’re not an utter hypocrite?” I am, in a way, because I think that the Wii’s innovative pointing system is a nice idea. However, I do think visual graphics play a huge part in the advancement of interactivity and mainstream acceptance. Not everyone can identify equally with creativity and imagination. I come from a town where the majority of boys play soccer when they’re kids–not with Legos and action figures. In a way they could certainly imagine themselves as soccer stars, but all this requires very vivid imagery as seen on television and in magazines. Unless those kids, now older, can get a good visual representation of what it is they’d like to be, they’ll have a very hard time suspending their disbelief and enjoying the game because it’s just not what they actually want to do. It’s not an experience. It’s still just a game. I think that gap needs to be bridged, just as much as the innovative controls need to be.

Going back to the Wii, if you’ll notice, I never say anything bad about the Nintendo DS. This is because I have one, and I think it’s an absolutely great console. I love its touchpad and dualscreen technology. But the thing that separates it from the Wii is that it has far more visual capacity than the Game Boy Advance. The Nintendo Wii isn’t capable of a lot more than the Gamecube is. I give a nod of approval any time I see something improving the capacity for visual quality–hence why I’m so enamoured with the PS3. Sure, the Wii can have nice graphics, and we all saw Mario Galaxy and how effectively good looking that was using Nintendo’s secret recipe that nobody else seems to have. But when you compare the difference between an Advance and a DS and you try to match that up from Gamecube to Wii you fall incredibly short. As for the Wii versus the PS3, the Wii doesn’t even come close, while the Nintendo DS comes rather close to the PSP. And while the PSP has nicer graphics, it’s more of a luxurious gadget, and I didn’t get a PSP until relatively recently because I knew Sony had had no experience making portable games. They’ve started getting some rather decent and exciting titles (instead of PS2 ports), however, and that’s certainly pushing their market out.

In the end, Peter is right. We haven’t reached enough people. There’s so much more we could do. If only we could get our technology far enough to where it’s not only stunning but incredibly simple to handle.

Then we’ll be in business.

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One of my friends recently told me today (after having read my People Hate the PS3 post) that while I had hit many of the key points as to why PS3 was getting such bad rep right now, the reason he personally “hate[ed] the PS3 with a passion” was because it was just too expensive. He also said the games coming out for the PS3 weren’t interesting to him, though I was intrigued as to how he liked Perfect Dark Zero and PGR3 over Resistance and Motorstorm.

After listening more and more, I came to the conclusion that, in all honesty, he was just a casual gamer. He pointed out that none of the games PS3 had come out with were easy to get into or had really fun split screen. I thought about it, and realized the games he plays on his Xbox (Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Halo 3) are all just glorified party games, and not really all that hardcore at all. Wait, Halo 3, a casual game? Halo, I concluded after a while, could really just be called casual. It’s pointedly simple, quick and requires very little strategic learning or improvement. Most people I know are good at Halo because–just that–they’re good at Halo. They didn’t practice, they didn’t get better–they’re just good at it because they are. This is from a biased perspective, of course, but I suspect it’s more or less the issue. People CAN get better–there’s the whole Rock Band and Guitar Hero progressive improvement based on difficulty level, same for Legendary Mode–but really, I can do voice on Expert at Rock Band, and I barely struggle. I was just GOOD at it… and I know there’s plenty of people that were good at Uncharted and Gears of War, but those games were bound to provide a real challenge to complete.

So that’s just it–what IS casual? What is hardcore? Where can you find them? It seems my friend would rather play games on his Nintendo Wii, so maybe that’s a more “casual” console? He bought the 360 because it’s cheaper than the PS3, but in all honesty does he like it more? Is it “more casual” or “less casual”? He says he’s neutral towards the 360 while hating the PS3, but I’m thinking if the PS3 were to release a few more on-console multiplayer games (like Killzone 2 or LittleBigPlanet, for example) and he had waited until then to make a decision between Xbox and PS3, he wouldn’t know which to buy. He’d go for the cheaper one, I’m suspecting–and the PS3 is lowering in price, now that production costs are at 400$ per console (Sony actually is making money off sales now). So what would happen in that instance?

In the end, I’m not sure. I’ve figured that the real competitive showdown in the industry is between those games that are deemed casual and those games that are deemed hardcore. Who’s the bigger audience? Casual. Who’s more likely to take to a game? Hardcore. How do you balance these out?

I’m thinking someone needs to come up with a symbiosis–something truly extraordinary, that will appeal to people all over. Games like SPORE (and maybe Rock Band?) come close to what I’m thinking, but nobody’s hit it on the nail yet–a merge between hardcore and casual, a game anyone can play but that feels just as epic as a game like Mass Effect. Something that appeals to everyone.

Portal? Maybe.

I don’t know. I’m just at a loss tonight.

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When Reuters says something, it tends to be rather serious, so in this article they just released on MGS4 I had to bite my lip a little. I promised I would write about M.U.L.E., but I really haven’t have that much time recently so I’d rather mention this current issue briefly.

Reuters suggests MGS4, along with a lot of other upcoming exclusives for the PS3 (and Wii and presumably Xbox 360, if in fact it’s getting any?) are among the last of the fading breed of console exclusives. Now, they may have a point that if games continue to become more and more pricey in their development, they’ll eventually be unable to sell their product enough to get a product, but there are several things that Reuters is not taking into account, and I say this in the humblest manner possible.

It is my opinion that exclusives will forever be a major part of console’s selling points, because each console has such a unique personality. It would be impossible, for example, to design a Ninja Gaiden Sigma for the Wii and maintain the attitude, grandeur and power of the PS3 version. We see what happened wih COD3 on the Wii. And the same goes the other way–I can’t imagine third party developers being too keen on developing a game based on motion-sensing technology and have to put it on the Xbox 360 and PS3 (though in some cases I guess the game could be ported to the PS3, too).

When we continue to hear things like the console war is still heated and rolling, it makes me think that exclusives must continue to play a huge part in the future of this industry, like a checks-and-balances political system; you release a Zelda, we release a Halo, they release a Final Fantasy.

Also, there’s the matter of the rising trend of online purchases. Through things like Xbox Live, The Wii Channel and the Playstation Store (I’m putting my money on it becoming integrated into PSHome pretty soon) players will have all sorts of unlockable/buyable, downloadable content. Costumes, add-ons, weapons, features can all be sold by the same developers for their exclusives and they can make a much larger cash influx (sort of how Blizzard just keeps making money off the same stuff). Because developers won’t have to go through stores and distributors (though I’m not sure how much they have to pay to put their work on each console’s online portal) they’ll be able to make a lot more profit off each feature sold.

Finally, to address the issue of MGS4′s looming deadline, I have a feeling well over 33% of Playstation 3s sold were bought by people who wanted Metal Gear Solid 4. After all, look at all those rumors (and another) spread around by Xbox 360 fanboys that MGS4 is cming out on Xbox 360, when Hideo Kojima already confirmed the bloody thing for PS3.

I remember reading at some point that Kojima replied, when asked why so many rumors kept popping up about MGS4 for the Xbox 360, “Well, because obviously people want it on the Xbox 360.” I lost the source, so I can’t really cite it, but when I read it I thought that was such a concise and clever answer.

So if this many people want it out, even those that don’t have a PS3, I don’t think MGS4 has anything to worry about.

And I believe firmly, despite the negativity I’ve heard around me, that it will be an excellent game.

Here’s to hoping.

P.S. WordPress somehow deleted this post which I put up earlier today… I seem to have had a draft saved so I could rewrite the end, but man, that was irritating and frightening.

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http://www.gamesradar.com/us/wii/game/news/article.jsp?sectionId=1006&articleId=2007112814148236064&releaseId=20070510171759869096

I kept telling everyone it wasn’t accurate.

Thank you, Nintendo.

Will this work for all games?

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Here’s a quick blurb on he news:

So there’s all this news this morning about various interesting things. We popped out of the dark ages of waiting for Rock Band, it seems. Anyway, Brenda Brathwaite already beat me to the punch for writing about a report put out by the University of Michigan. Only I read it on Gamasutra, so I feel special, and here it is.

As I have nothing more interesting to say on the subject than what has been said (by Brenda), let’s look at what Nintendo says about Western development and how they’re not planning on increasing it. As a Western-based game designer, this sucks for me. There’s a lot of untapped resources in the West, too–plenty of able and capable designers that can be just as effective as those found in Japan. It’s a little painful to see Nintendo limiting its resources and letting third-party games handle targeting the western market. Especially when you look at the top Wii sales, and see what developer is behind each game…

1		Wii Sports	Nintendo	53	421,419	6,695,293
	Super Mario Galaxy

Nintendo 2 417,301 1,106,571

Wii Play Nintendo 41 155,795 3,037,050

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Activision 4 110,685 549,276

Mario Party 8 Nintendo 26 71,749 1,458,651

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Nintendo 3 70,403 210,904

Link’s Crossbow Training Nintendo 1 66,758 66,758

Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles Capcom 2 65,078 183,187

Soul Calibur: Legends Namco 1 48,761 48,761

Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 Ubisoft 2 44,921 94,015(http://www.vgchartz.com/aweekly.php?date=39411&console=Wii&maker=&boxartz=1)

I’d like to point out, slots 1-7 excluding Guitar Hero III which is a console of its own (what with that guitar) are all made up of Nintendo, Nintendo, Nintendo.

It’s my theory Nintendo titles will continue to sell the Wii–and Western talent at NOA will never get a chance to develop for that audience.

Also, Final Fantasy XIII. Maybe the best yet? It sounds like a refined FFXII, which I approve of. I think FFXII could have used a lot of work.

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