Wellsir, it's been a blast doing this here video game blog for the past year and a half and change. But the time has come for me to move on to other things. Namely, snacks.
I'll still be reviewing games for the St. Pete Times and tbt*, and will continue cross-posting those here, but I won't be updating the blog regularly for the time being. A big thanks to everyone who stuck around this whole time, or anyone who just stopped by for a look.
That is all.
Guitar Hero is the greatest thing to happen to video games since the invention of a stereotypical Italian midget plumber. But each new installment is only as good as the songs it comes with, and the series takes its first unsuccessful stage dive with the new Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s.
By "80s" the game developers mean "Hair metal with a touch of new wave and dash of punk. But mostly hair metal." So if you like lots of Quiet Riot, Poison, Ratt, Skid Row, etc., etc., this is the game for you. But if -- like me -- you see these bands as somewhat amusing, fun-in-very-small-doses kitsch, then you'll probably be disappointed.
The songs are okay enough to play once through. But while I still love going back to the first two Guitar Heroes and playing Killer Queen, Ziggy Stardust, Sweet Child O Mine, Tripping on a Hole in a Paper Heart, Crazy On You and a bunch of others, there aren't many here I'll be replaying in a year. Synchronicity II and Only a Lad break out of the new wave boundaries enough (the pre-Nightmare Before Christmas bridge at 3:08 gives away that Only a Lad is a Danny Elfman tune even if you didn't know he was in Oingo Boingo); Iron Maiden's Wrathchild is both harder and more melodic than the hair bands; Los Angeles (X) and Police Truck (Dead Kennedys) are welcome punk additions to the Guitar Hero canon; and Extreme's Play With Me has ludicrously difficult riffs that are composed enough that I wanted to practice so I could play through and actually hear them. (Play With Me is the first time in a Guitar Hero game that I really longed for the original version; the many sections seem too choppily spliced together -- though it's very possible they seemed choppy because I missed a bunch of notes -- and it's noticeably different from Nuno's smoothly absurd wailing and the reverb-heavy drums of the original.)
But like the overabundance of harder metal songs in Guitar Hero II -- as a friend of mine so delicately put it, "But godd---, why do they have to put so much f---ing s---ty metal on it!" -- the pop-metal here quickly wears thin without any 80s greats there for balance.
There's no Living on a Prayer or You Give Love a Bad Name. No Pixies. No Guns N Roses. No Prince (his hits aren't exactly rockers, but Darling Nikki or I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man would work nicely). No Bruce Springsteen. No U2, for crying out loud. No Van Halen or Metallica. No R.E.M. or Replacements. No Love in an Elevator. No Money for Nothing. No Hells Bells or You Shook Me All Night Long. No Huey Lewis!!! Heck, I'd take Summer of '69 over 90 percent of the songs in Rocks the 80s.
I realize some of the no-shows are probably because of rights issues. But to have not a single one of these hits or big bands, to put out the equivalent of 30 album tracks as an 80s collection just seems cheap and tossed-off. Not to mention that they're charging the full 50 bucks for a scant 30 songs (For the same price, GH II for PlayStation 2 has 40 songs plus about 25 unlockable tunes).
The biggest loser in all this are the artists who made the music of the 80s what it was. (Rocks the 80s uses some original recordings rather than high-quality covers for the first time; though if they can use Twisted Sister's rerecorded and therefore not-80s version of I Wanna Rock, they should have used Crucial Taunt's version of Ballroom Blitz.) One of the main pleasures of the first two Guitar Hero games is hearing such a range of songs and how they all connect -- how riffs and strum patterns filter from one genre to another, even as it all stays on one branch or another of the rock family tree. In that context, Shout at the Devil, Carry on My Wayward Son, and Rock This Town can stand proudly alongside Can't You Hear Me Knockin, Free Bird, and Jessica.
But when the bulk of the setlist is second-tier songs presented with half a nudge and a wink, all they have to connect with is each other -- and instead of transcending their genres, they just reinforce how silly, derivative and incestuous the music was when taken as a whole
And if the game developers were just saving the good songs for Guitar Hero III? For shame. We want our Welcome to the Jungle, and we want it now!!!
Grade: B-
First Kotaku reports that a pinball game featuring classic William tables is coming to the Wii. And while there's no list of the pinball games included, they run a pic of Fun House with it!!
Now comes word that, in a total no-brainer, Rockstar Games is releasing Table Tennis for the Wii. About time!
Once these come out, my brother will have no excuses to avoid getting a Wii. None!
This year's mini-E3 is kind of strange. Shrunken down from the previous extravaganzas with thousands of people, it's now basically a press junket/giant advertisement for the next year's worth of games. Which I guess is what it was all along, but this just puts that in starker relief.
This year's is also weird because after the last two years' events -- when the Xbox 360 and Wii/PS3 were really detailed -- there's nothing big or surprising about this one, and so there's sort of no point to it. It's just getting to see on screen clips of everything that's been in the game blogs and mags recently. The only "news" -- which is to say, well-timed PR announcements -- of interest is the upcoming Nintendo game Wii Fit, which comes with a "balance board" and will let you do aerobics/yoga/hula-hoop (?), and the non-news that a new PSP is coming, but it's essentially the same as the current one.
Wii Fit is another brilliant move for Nintendo. One of the Wii's big selling points has been that you're actually up and moving around when you play -- but the rejoinder to that is, "Is swinging your arm slightly really working out?" Wii Fit is actually moving and working out, and what parent could say no to that? It's also Nintendo coming full circle back to the original Power Pad -- but now the technology actually exists to make it work.
Sony didn't announce anything that suggests the Playstation 3 will start catching up despite the recent price drop. All the big games they showed are for next year; the one PS3 exclusive for this year -- Haze -- looks to be a totally pedestrian shooter. Killzone 2 -- which wowed everyone two years with a video that turned out to be rendered, not the actual gameplay -- has returned but while it looks pretty good, albeit extraordinarily monochrome, it doesn't seem drastically better looking than last years Gears of War for Xbox 360 or the upcoming Call of Duty 4. There are so many shooters out and planned that it really takes something special to stand out. Haze won't do it, and I can't tell what Killzone 2's supposed to have to make it a hit, besides the lingering buzz from 2005. (I think the same thing of Halo 3, though obviously that's going to be a smash; if you just saw it without knowing about the massive following, it doesn't look like anything special.) Plus it's not even coming out until 2008. Unreal Tournament 3 is coming out first on the PS3, but the hardcore players will probably just get it on PC anyway.
So most of the big games this year are either only on the Wii or Xbox 360 -- Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros., Zelda Phantom Hourglass, Halo 3, Mass Effect, Bioshock -- or are on multiple systems. And with Microsoft saying this week that a price cut is definitely coming this year -- my guess is the Elite system with 120 GB hard drive becomes the $400 system, and the 20GB system drops to $300 -- it'll still be much cheaper to play all those games on either the Wii or 360 than the PS3.
There's one other reason why people are going to buy the 360 instead of the PS3 this holiday season: Rock Band. It's going to be the biggest thing ever, and with the details unveiled yesterday -- new songs for download every week and full albums for download (!) starting with Who's Next (!!!!) -- it's going to blow Guitar Hero 3 out of the arena. But here's the thing: EA hasn't announced a price for Rock Band, but it's likely going to cost $150 to $200 for the whole shebang. What's more appealing to the wallet, on top of that: a $300 Xbox 360, or a $500 PS3?
Seeing as how it's the All-Star break and fantasy baseball crazies (not that I'm one *cough*) have a deep void for three days, I thought I'd do a roundup of the latest baseball games.
Like many sports games lately, baseball games have been boring me for a while. It's less that they're all the same at base (like pretty much every sports game from year to year) and more that they amplify the slow pace and chopiness of baseball -- constant cutting from pitcher to batter to fielder to other fielder, unlike basketball (which is constantly moving) or football (which stops after every play but each play is continuous) -- and make pitching as unrealistic as possible (compared to the Wii's motion controls, pressing buttons twice as a meter moves feels like ... pressing buttons twice, not pitching). For all the realism of recent games, I still prefer old-school RBI Baseball and Baseball Stars. They may not be spot-on simulations, but at least they're fun to play.
Two new baseball games continue in that rut. MLB 07: the Show for Playstation 3 is a typical baseball video game: It semi-faithfully captures the sport yet leaches most of the beauty, verisimilitude and fun out of it. On first glance, MLB 07 looks pretty great. The player motions are good enough, and the graphics advanced enough, that it's sort of almost like watching baseball on TV. But after a little while, the video-gameness shows through.
When the batters do that slo-mo warmup swing as they step into the batters box, their arms seem to move independently of their shoulders. On some shirts where the sleeve is a different color from the rest of the jersey, the movement stops at that color line. After one batter got rung out on strikes, he stepped out of the batter's box -- directly through the catcher, as if the batter could morph like the T-1000. On instant replays, the players move in herky-jerky motions and clearly seem like a bunch of polygons, the video game equivalent of the movements in the Hall of Presidents. When fielders turn a double play, there's a slight pause as they square and throw to first.
Each of these things is small, but added up they constantly pull you out of the situation and remind you that it's just a video game. Of all the team sports, baseball is most focused on the movements of individual players, so realism is key to a good baseball video game. But when the wonder and how-did-he-do-that fluidity of a second baseman's diving backhand stop and quick flip to the pitcher covering turn out looking like an Audio Animatronic (albeit a very advanced one), one of the most unique and appealing aspects of the sport -- its aesthetics -- is lost. Combine that with a same-old pitching system -- you can either use a power meter, although there are no instructions about how it works, or just aim and throw -- and MLB is just okay.
The Bigs doesn't bother with realism. It's an arcadey game meant to evoke the quick fun of the old RBI games and the craziness of NBA Jam and the newer NBA Street games. You gain points for each strikeout, hit, double play, etc.; earn enough points and you can activate a power swing or pitch and basically get an automatic home run or strikeout. But even in a game meant to be overexaggerated, the lack of realism is fatal. Not the flaming fastballs, but the basic movements and feel of the game: when you try to stop a fielder, he keeps going for a few steps as if he were a cartoon running so fast his feet were a blurred circle. Whenever a fielder makes a leaping or diving catch, the camera slows down to make the play dramatic. But the way the player dives or jumps never looks right geometrically -- according to the initial path of the hit ball and the place they leap from, they should never make the catch -- and the view is always from below, so you end up looking up into this frozen visage that's supposed to be Jose Reyes but just looks creepy (though when players are coming up to bat, the Bigs has the most recognizable faces of the three games). The field seems weirdly disproportioned; routine grounders to short become close plays way too often. And some teams' uniforms are bizarrely colored, so it looks like the Mets and Giants players have been covered in Tin Man body paint. It's fun for a game or two, but that's about it.
The real problem with both games is they seem to be on the cutting edge of late 2005. MLB 07 would have been fine in the first wave of Xbox 360 games, but a year and a half later that doesn't cut it. Major League Baseball 2K7 for the Xbox 360 shows what happens when game companies have time to get used to a new system: It's by far the most realistic looking sports game ever made, and possibly the best of any game I've seen at capturing the nuances and reality of human movement.
In MLB 07, the players seem to exist on their own plane, as though they're superimposed on the background. In Major League 2K7, it looks like the players are in the real world: the sun shines off folds in their jerseys, the wind blows on them, the camera gets handheld-shaky and blurs the background as players step up to bat -- like an actual person is filming. David Ortiz's tummy is proportioned correctly to his giant thighs. Pitchers' squat-and-stretches before the game look like real people limbering up, and their quick ducking on a pitch hit up the middle accurately captures instinct's reflexes.
So few games, sports or otherwise, get human movement right -- the mass of it, the way muscles and tendons and synapses all work together, the non-robotic liquidity of it. An instant replay of a stolen base in Major League 2K7 gets the lengthening stride, the springy popup slide. The holy grail of video game physics (at least where individual characters is concerned) has been a system where movements occur naturally and on the fly based on the moment's context, as opposed to one where all movements are preprogrammed. Major League 2K7 comes extraordinarily close to achieving this. Not a single fielding play looks canned; each takes into account the placement of the hit, the location of the fielder, his momentum, the speed of the ball. Compare that to the Bigs' slo-mo dives, which in addition to being creepy and mathematically wrong all seem to feature the same diving motion.
Major League 2K7 has two flaws that keep it from perfection. The biggest problem, and only real gameplay flaw, is the pitcher's mound seems like it's 6 feet-6 inches rather than 60-6 away. This makes batting overly reliant on reflex and guessing, and it can get frustrating. (Then again, that's probably how it seems to real major leaguers, so in theory it's bonus realism points. In reality, just frustrating.). The other issue is a graphical glitch: the wind making players' jerseys ripple generally looks great and helps the whole environment seem real, but sometimes it blows a little too much and the shirts constantly flap. Definitely not realistic. Other than that, though, Major League 2K7 is a great baseball game. Even the pitching is fun; you aim toward where the pitch breaks, rather than where the catcher's mitt is set up, so it adds more of a video gamey aspect to each pitch. That's not exactly realistic either, but at least it's fun.
Grades
MLB 07: the Show (Playstation 3): C
The Bigs (Xbox 360): C-
Major League 2K7 (Xbox 360): A-
After months of denials and yet another denial on Friday when the news had already leaked, Sony has officially announced the Playstation 3 price cut. The 60 gigabyte version drops to $500, and there's a new 80 gigabyte version coming out that you can buy for $600 with Motorstorm (the one good exclusive-to-PS3 game so far) packed in. However Sony wants to spin this (and the New York Times story linked above plays it as "PS3 price drop, Xbox 360 crashes will help Sony), I still don't think it's going to be enough as long as you can get the same or better games on the cheaper 360.
Predictions are always dicey in this or any other tech business, but I think this and next week will go down as the weeks the Playstation 3 officially lost the video game war. With the mini-E3 expo coming up next week, word has leaked that the PS3 price is going to drop to $500. This is an absolutely necessary move on Sony's part -- a belated admission that the $600 price, and by extension the bet on Blu-ray, were huge mistakes -- but an absolutely painful one, as the company is already losing money on each PS3 sold and will be that much further in the hole now.
Even worse for Sony, the price drop likely won't make a bit of difference.
The PS3, with a 60 gigabyte hard drive, will still cost $20 more than the high-end, 120 GB Xbox 360 Elite. (And even though Microsoft is taking a $1 billion hit by extending the 360 warranty to 3 years because of too many crashed systems, they've got more than enough cash to drop the 360 price by the holidays.) The PS3 online system is still much less robust than Xbox Live. And the PS3 still has no great games, and no good games you can't get for the cheaper Xbox 360. Chris Kohler recently ran down the list of previously exclusive PS3 games that now are also coming out on the 360 (and you can bet Metal Gear Solid IV will also come out on the 360), and it underscores that there is simply no reason to buy a Playstation 3. With Halo 3 coming out on the 360, there won't be any reason to get the PS3 come holiday season, either.
Then there are the little Xbox 360 advantages. When Grand Theft Auto IV comes out, only the Xbox 360 will have downloadable extra episodes. Virtua Fighter 5 will only have online multiplayer on the 360. The high-profile WWII game Medal of Honor: Airborne is coming out on the 360 in August, but has been delayed till November for the PS3. Even though PS3 plays Playstation 2 games, you still can't use the PS2 Guitar Hero controllers -- so you essentially can't play the best game of the past three years on the PS3.
We'll see what happens at E3 next week, but I just don't see how Sony can pull itself out of this hole. Again, there's simply no reason for anyone to buy a Playstation 3 this year. And even if Final Fantasy XIII comes out next year only for the PS3, by then it will be too late.
I used to love Magic Eye pictures. I first saw them, before they became a phenomenon, in the back of Games magazine (that's a puzzle-and-crossword mag, not a video game mag). Either the magazine itself or an ad had a contest that was hidden inside Magic Eye scenes (though this was before Magic Eye became the semi-official name, I guess. They were just called stereograms). I never figured out the puzzle, though I could see the images with no problem.
Anyway, here's a fun flash game that somehow combines Tetris with stereograms. It's cool, but might make you woozy from crossing and uncrossing your eyes.
The next-generation video game wars aren't just about video games. Sony is taking a hit on each PlayStation 3 sold -- and betting so much on such an expensive machine -- because if Blu-ray Disc becomes the high-definition successor to plain old DVDs, Sony makes a bundle when everyone (theoretically) goes out and buys their movies again on Blu-ray. There have been constant back-and-forth reports about whether Blu-ray or the competing HD DVD format is ahead, but Sony got some (again, theoretically) very good news this week: Blockbuster, which had been stocking both formats in 250 stores, will rent only Blu-ray movies in the rest of its stores (the ones that have been renting HD DVD will keep doing so).
This is definitely a big deal for Sony. At least in the beginning, more people are likely to rent high-def movies than buy them anyway, especially if they're PS3 owners who didn't specifically buy the system for Blu-ray but want to take advantage of it (as opposed to early adopter home theater buffs who bought a standalone system for the movies and would be more likely to actually buy the movies even at a higher price). So it's better for Sony if the format war has been quickly, albeit partially, ended in the rental realm, even if it's still up in the air in stores.
But a couple of caveats. First, Forbes' report on Blockbuster's decision contains some hedges. The story says, "Blockbuster announced that its next batch of high definition DVDs will be exclusively offered in the Blu-ray format." (emphasis added) Later it says, "Blockbuster will continue to rent the HD DVD titles it already offers and may expand its HD DVD inventory in the future but, for now, the company has placed all its chips on Blu-ray." That hardly seems like a complete and sure vote of confidence. Basically Blockbuster isn't committing to anything long-term. The story also notes, "This month, Sony predicted Blu-ray player sales could jump from 100,000 to 600,000 units in 2007 because of the popularity of DVDs exclusively released on the format. Meanwhile, Toshiba lowered its 2007 estimate 44.4% to 1.0 million units from 1.8 million." Even if Sony meets that 600,000 target -- which I highly doubt considering standalone players start at $500 -- and Toshiba's sales hit its revised estimate, that means HD DVD would still have a 400,000-player lead for the year. And the PS3 will make up a lot of the ground, but it's not going to turn the tide selling only 80,000 systems a month.
The biggest reason Sony shouldn't celebrate yet is that winning the next-gen DVD format war still might end up being a pyrrhic victory. The average consumer is still plenty happy with $5 DVDs and cheap, good-enough-quality TV seasons on DVD. Sony has given no indication that it plans to drop the price of Blu-ray movies later on to DVD levels -- even if Blu-ray makes DVDs obsolete, I assume Sony will always charge some kind of premium for the upgrade in video quality -- and I don't think people will want to replace their ever-growing DVD libraries the way they upgraded from vinyl to CD. And even if people do get tired of regular DVDs in four or five years, when high-definition TVs become as ubiquitous as DVD players are now, chances are we'll be downloading most of our entertainment by then anyway.
So the Blockbuster announcement is certainly good news for Sony, but that Blu-ray bet isn't looking any smarter.
There are some new details out on EA's Guitar Hero challenger, Rock Band, from the latest issue of Game Informer, and it looks like a winner. (Hat tip: Kotaku.) Some choice tidbits: Guitars and bass have 10 frets, half for the verses and half for solos; the guitars have a built-in effects switch; mic doubles as tambourine! The best part is the announced songs:
Weezer - Say It Ain't So - Original Master Track
Black Sabbath - Paranoid - Original Master Track
The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again - Original Master Track
Nirvana - In Bloom - Original Master Track
Nice. I'm already more excited about these than half of Guitar Hero 3's songs and 98 percent of Guitar Hero 80s' songs. The big question is how much Rock Band will cost. But with enough boomer-approved songs like Won't Get Fooled Again, kids will be able to pitch it as a holiday gift for the whole family. (And who am I kidding: I'm going to get both Guitar Heroes and Rock Band, no matter how lame the setlists.)
