OrtizGames

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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I’m going to talk about the E3 conferences in order, starting with Microsoft today, Nintendo tomorrow and Sony the day after. I have good and bad things to say about each, and will be doing it in short blurbs.

The Good: Microsoft has things lined up for the future. Good–there’s a world outside Halo 3.

They’re changing their interface to look like Windows Media Center (which I have always hated… but it works similar to Sony’s XMB, so what do you do?) and they’re adding Avatars, which are like an answer to PS3′s Home avatars and Nintendo’s Miis, only resembling Miis a great deal more.

They’ve also got a good lineup of games, including Fable 2 of Peter Molyneaux fame and every other multiplatform game we already know about like Resident Evil and Rock Band 2. Exclusively, they have Gears of War 2 and a few Square-Enix-published games.

The Bad: I was no excited by Avatars at all. While I appreciate companies trying to represent players in a virtual environment and I’m looking forward to Home and everything, I’m starting to become frustrated that it’s becoming a gimmick to incorporate avatar representation. Hopefully Microsoft Avatars will be just as customizeable as Home avatars and will not be as static and bland as Miis have turned out to be.

I didn’t fail to notice the fact that they only had really two big-name exclusives on their lineup. Of the four Square games Microsoft boasted, only two (Star Ocean: The Last Hope and Infinite Undiscovery) will be exclusive–the other two being Last Remnant and Final Fantasy XIII–the latter announcement which I already expressed my disappointment in. Both exclusive games are only published by Square Enix, developed by tri-Ace.

Also, I feel this being more or less a confirmation of Microsoft’s less-than-honorable payoff to Square. It also details some of Sony’s sneak tactics, which I’ll elaborate on the day after tomorrow.

Lastly, why did they change their interface? I never thought there was an issue with it. I remember actual complaints about the PSN store being the reason it was changed–and to resemble Wii Channels, no less–but giving the Xbox that WMC XMB new interface is rather uncalled for.

Nintendo’s Good and Bad coming tomorrow.

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I’ve realized that from a design perspective, demos are some of the most powerful tools available to experiment with your game mechanics in a real, out-of-studio setting. Previously, I always saw demos as an advertising tactic, and I never really appreciated the idea of getting only a fraction of a game–it made me feel like I was being sucked into eventually buying the full version. But now I see demos as such an exciting phenomenon.

Weekly I’ll check my news to see what’s been uploaded to the PSN Store. I’ll download most any little demo that comes out–Sam and Max, World in Conflict; you name it, I want to try the beta. I love to be able to see how the mechanics of a game work, and what the premise and definition behind it are before the studio actually gets around to releasing it.

The trouble is, most companies do still see it as an advertising tactic in order to get people excited and buy the product. The only time you hear the word “testing” related to demos is when it’s been grafted to the words “beta” or “alpha”. Which is fine, I suppose–but why don’t we see much beta and alpha on consoles, now that we have such intricate systems as 24Connect, XBLive and PSN? We’re seeing some examples–Playstation Home has had a private beta for a while, though we’ve still been waiting on the public one. I’m sure there’s other games that are being considered for alpha and beta release. But I want to see more of it–demos shouldn’t just be a “sneak preview” factor, but an experiment to see how the gaming community reacts to the dynamics being presented to them. Look at the Burnout Paradise example, and the different things EA tried (including amping the online multiplayer–for a demo of a game, of all things).

There should be more attempts to exploit the tool provided by releasing demos–or beta tests, if you want–and seeing the public’s response to the premise and mechanics.

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