...all that remains is to determine whether it or FF8 is the worst post-NES game in the series. I have to say post-NES because otherwise people get all huffy about FF2.

FF8's problem was that it was a poor story told badly with unlikable characters. FF13's problem is that it is almost no story at all -- people walk a lot and every once in a while something completely arbitrary happens to prod the cast along to the next plot point. The characters range from bland to obnoxious, but it's not simply their design that makes them bad. It's that this withered husk of a story gives them nothing to do, and yet they're still expected to stop every five steps and talk about it anyway.

What is FF13's story, anyway? It's certainly nothing that evolves naturally out of a logical sequence of events. Deus ex machina usually rears its head at some point in a Final Fantasy story, but here it's made the core underpinning to the entire plot. Some random people get branded by the Fal'Cie. This branding is supposed to indicate that those so marked have a job to do, but none of them are given an idea what the job is, apparently because Fal'Cie are not sticklers for efficiency. The cast wanders around for nigh on 20 hours of game time, stopping every once in a while only to wonder aloud "Gee, what do you think we're supposed to do," until the Space Pope (sadly not my naming, but it fits too well not to use it) literally tells them what to do.

It's at this point the cast finds their way to the lower world of Pulse, and I've tried on multiple occasions to figure out why. An entire chapter is spent on the planet and absolutely nothing of value is accomplished. There's briefly some talk of finding a town, but that plan dies quickly. After even more pointless wandering around (even the in-game story summary starts this chapter with the title "A Fruitless Search"), the Space Pope sends them back home. What in God's name was the point of that? And if Space Pope has so much free time to be popping back and forth between worlds and leaving behind ships for my party to get around in, surely he can find some faster way to achieve his own ends without my help.

The only hint of any attempt at complexity or subtext in the game's story is in the idea that the people of Cocoon are irrationally afraid of Pulse because they've been led to believe so by the government. If I were inclined to give the writers any credit, I could say this is meant to be a terrorism parallel. But whether intended or not, by the end of the game the message is so blatantly and repeatedly hammered to the ground that it's hardly worth noting anymore. That only leaves us the other major lesson, which is that Australians are an earthy, tribal people unaccustomed to life in a world with indoor plumbing.

Of course, this is all story, and a satisfying plot in a Final Fantasy should be considered more of a pleasant surprise than an expected outcome. But the game also fails elsewhere, and more catastrophically. I've played plenty of RPGs with terrible stories, or no stories, that were still worthwhile for the world they created. FF13 doesn't have a world. It has only a long series of tunnels and hallways passing by pretty scenery, like the game was not so much constructed as it was burrowed by moles through some other, better game we never get to play. FF13 features an intriguing and entertaining new battle system, but even it can't sustain the pure, unrelenting grind of doing nothing but pushing forward and getting into fights for 45 hours. That's the irony -- by leaving out the traditional leveling system they sought to remove the XP grind that has been a common complaint of jRPGs, but somehow in the process they turned the entire game into one long grind. Final Fantasy XIII is an absolute chore.

Is it worse than FF8? Hell, after ten years I don't know that I could give a detailed enough comparison to know. I do know that every once in a while, I consider giving 8 another try just to see if my opinion's changed after all this time. I find it difficult to see myself going back to FF13 after any length of time, because there's nothing to go back to.

Posted by Will at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Over the past few years I've been picking my way through Quintet's so-called Heaven and Earth trilogy of action RPGs on the SNES -- Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. Soul Blazer was relatively straightforward and normal, putting aside the occasional.. eccentricity:

But Illusion of Gaia is where things started to get a little weird.

First, there's the game's infamous raft sequence, a scene in which the player and his token female friend stand around on a raft in the middle of the ocean for a long time. It's not a cutscene, because you still have control of your character, but you literally have nothing to do but walk back and forth on a square about a quarter the size of the screen, talk to the girl a couple times, and then wait for the next day to come so you can do it again. You have never seen a game stop so suddenly and dramatically in its tracks.

Later, you enter into a Russian Roulette game played with a glass of poison instead of a bullet. You and the champion take turns drinking from a selection of glasses until one glass is left, which must be the poisoned one. It's the champ's turn, so he must be the loser, except:

He insists on drinking it anyway, essentially committing suicide. (Despite how it may appear, this scene is not taking place on a raft.) You report back to his pregnant wife (!), only to find:

Kruks conveniently being the animals you need to ride to get across the desert to the next dungeon. How does she feel about this?

But the person you love just offed himself and left your only worthwhile possessions to the kids who blew into town this morning.

Still later into the game, your intrepid party gets captured by some starving tribesmen who intend to eat you. Just before they dig in, however, token female friend's pet pig comes running in and throws itself on a fire, cooking itself alive to feed the tribe and spare your lives. Also your dead mother's soul pops out.

Lastly, you deal with one of the game's villains by setting off a fire trap he's standing next to. In most games he'd just fall over, or perhaps flicker and disappear, but here he has to collapse into a flaming heap and crawl after you like the Terminator as his flesh continues to burn before finally expiring at your feet. He wasn't even a monster or something, he was just a regular man and then you set him on fire.

This is all ignoring the more subtle, less graphic weirdness to the game's story, such as the fact that all this magical crap is taking place on Earth somehow, as evidenced by visits to famous locations like Angkor Wat and the Great Wall of China.

The continuous bleakness of Illusion of Gaia lets up a bit in Terranigma. But the seemingly blase attitude towards death doesn't disappear entirely, as evidenced when you wake up in a cavern after barely surviving an avalanche.

Always a sign you drank too much.

The goat explains to you that she and her husband got stuck here in the avalanche too, and her husband didn't make it. As any grieving widow would, she then suggests you both eat him.

This isn't the first time he's been in my mouth, that's all I'm saying.

Iron-clad logic. But your prudish main character still isn't convinced, and says he can't eat.

That's a shame. I just.. I just really wanted you to help me devour my husband.

Later, you come to a kingdom with a princess who has been stricken mute. She was adopted by the king and queen from a village that was destroyed, and thus the boneheaded magical girl you're traveling with at the time suggests the way to snap her out of it would be to create the spectral illusion of her dead parents.

For some reason you go through with this plan. (Surely there were other options; I hear flowers work well.) I dunno about the princess, but the king sure finds it interesting:

I really should stop thinking out loud!

Yes, the resolution to this entire side plot is having the king casually mention that these two people look like some folks he had murdered. But it seems dead people don't fluster anyone around here:

Careful, it smells like something died out there. Because it did. It was the king. The king died. Out there.

But even without the occasional corpse, Terranigma is odd enough on its own. It expands on Illusion of Gaia's idea of a fantasy RPG taking place on the real-world Earth to a great degree, tasking your character with resurrecting what is essentially modern civilization. The world map is actually a simplified map of Earth, and you wander around locations like the Sahara and Arabia and Spain, whacking monsters with sticks to revive the world's plants and animals and people. Once you bring back people, you can start visiting towns, including a city in North America called... Freedom.

America, it would seem, is populated entirely by trollops, grizzled prospectors and black people. Seriously, you never see black people prior to this and then you go to Freedom and suddenly they're everywhere.

At least in Illusion of Gaia, signs of the real world were ancient artifacts like the Nazca Lines, which already feel otherworldly enough. But it feels weird walking around in a jRPG and stumbling across things like this:

This raises far more questions than it can answer. So Jesus existed in the world of Terranigma? Why didn't he fix all this crap then so I don't have to do it? Am.. am I Jesus?

To cap off all this oddity, Quintet put themselves in the game, in an office located (naturally) in Japan.

I imagine that's supposed to be a mustache, but instead it looks as if even the man on the sign is depressed. Inside, the developers are all represented by talking chickens sitting at computers. The office also contains a trash-strewn room where the team apparently sleeps when they're too busy to go home, which is suitably horrifying.

Later in the story, everyone in this building will die when a killer virus is released in Neotokio. I suppose they would want it that way.

Posted by Will at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I didn't know what to expect when starting MGS4. I liked 1, hated 2, and loved 3, so I had no idea where that put me with this one. Each game in the series has spun off into a bigger, bolder, stranger direction than the one before, so I could only imagine where 4 would go. The only change I never expected was no change at all -- that the series would turn inward and reflective. Which is a change of a sort, I suppose.

That's not to say MGS4 is a small production. There are still big action scenes and robots and big action scenes with robots in. But the game makes no attempt to go above and beyond its predecessors conceptually, and in fact spends most of its time sorting through them. With the exception of the BB Corps and Drebin, there are no new characters introduced -- everyone you meet is always somebody from somewhere you've been before. Even the Corps girls are named to recall old enemies, though the Corps in general feels a bit tacked on. There's not really a new plot, just a game-long attempt to tie all the old threads together and finish what was already started.

It works for the most part, I think. The plot is easy enough to follow and doesn't require the Olympic mental gymnastics (or maybe just the brain damage) the ending of MGS2 asked for. The dialog is still as artless and meandering as its ever been, but the story does a good job of making an understandable course through the Metal Gear series while allowing you to ignore some of the more incomprehensible details (did we ever find out what the crotch grabbing was about?).

The idea that Kojima wasn't coming back to the series became a running joke after he claimed he wouldn't direct 3 and later 4. I don't know that anyone took it that seriously. But if someone had told me (prior to E3, anyway) he genuinely didn't want anything to do with Metal Gear after 4, I'd believe them. Making Snake old originally seemed like a gimmick, but instead it becomes almost the point of the game -- it's been too long and too much, and now Snake is quite literally too old for this shit. The game goes from being nostalgic to being downright funereal at times, as if taking one last look at the accumulated story of the last ten years before burying it all for good.

What makes this striking is the change in tone it presents. The MGS series has always had plenty of melodrama and overwrought speeches about superbabies, but it also had a goofy and exuberant side. You could take pictures of Japanese idol posters to embarass Otacon or talk to Sigint for five minutes about every gun you had in your inventory. MGS4 isn't completely without those moments, but they're fewer and farther between. You hardly have reason to talk to anyone through the codec, and the game never approaches the sheer wackiness of Campbell's VR meltdown or running around wearing a crocodile head. By the time Otacon is making a fourth-wall breaking joke about Blu-ray discs, it seems almost out of place.

All told, then, MGS4 is a very solid (no pun intended) game that brings closure to the story as well as anyone could, but doesn't quite have the magic to unseat 3 as my favorite. I'd probably play through it again if I didn't have a billion other things waiting to be played. I'm hoping that the new MGS titles already announced (and any that may be yet to come) don't dig back into this material and undo all the work that 4 has done. It was bad enough that the final debriefing scene sucked a lot of energy out of what was otherwise a really good ending.

Let MGS4 stand as both closure to the story and as a monument to Kojima's most enduring legacy: That over the course of ten years, he transformed The Guy Who Poops Too Much into an important supporting character.

Posted by Will at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't know what it says that Microsoft's conference today got me thinking more about Sony than about the 360.

Looking at the conference as a whole, I think the news that stuck out most to me was the Final Fantasy XIII announcement. Not so much for the game itself -- I'll play it on one system or another eventually, I'm not really concerned where -- but for how, perhaps even more than last year's GTA4 coup, the image of exactly what Sony is has eroded in my mind.

Nintendo has always been, if nothing else, unique in their branding and stocked with heaps of exclusive IP. Microsoft, while a bit more muddled (and even more so now with their ham-fisted attempt to co-opt Miis), still has Halo and Gears of War and thus the "grey plates of metal attached to large angry men with guns" theme to fall back on. But Sony has almost entirely defined itself over the years by the content of others. The PSX ignored the tradition of launching with a company mascot platformer, instead shipping on the strength of titles like Ridge Racer and Battle Arena Toshinden (and borrowing a character from the latter to use as a spokesperson). While the Gamecube was being branded too kiddy and the Xbox was pigeonholed as the guns-and-racing machine, the PS2 was neutral ground, a space where GTA and Katamari Damacy could co-exist without either looking out of place.

But that was all a matter of circumstance. Sony's image became associated with blockbuster names like Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy, but it was more by default than due to anything the company particularly offered. The Playstation was the most popular system by far, so that's what you developed for. Now that they're no longer in such a position, they're one by one losing the things they had previously tried to give the appearance of being uniquely theirs. That neutrality that had formerly been an asset is now more of a liability -- the PS3 seems kind of faceless, known more for its technology than anything that's actually been done with it.

I'm simplifying a little, of course. Sony does have first party content, and some games like Gears are technically third party and, thus, could be lost. But Microsoft still has Halo to fall back on (and, uh, Viva Pinata). Nintendo, in their leanest years, could prop themselves up on Mario and Pikachu's stubby little legs and last for another millennium. But what does Sony have? I'm not going to debate the quality of Resistance or Gran Turismo, but do they appeal to a wide enough audience to sell the system? Are games like Ratchet & Clank strong enough to support the brand? When we think PS3, what image are we supposed to get in our heads?

Maybe all these questions will be answered by their press conference tomorrow. Hopefully they'll do something to distinguish themselves as something more than "the system where some of those 360 games also show up (also, Afrika)." Because at the moment, I've heard a number of people today say they've got one less reason to buy a PS3 now, and I'm not sure how many reasons that leaves.

Posted by Will at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

(Image taken from NeoGAF's Brawl screenshot thread)

Brawl has been out for two weeks and that's far too long to still be talking about something on the Internet, but I was waiting to finish unlocking all the major elements before putting this up. Blame the last character that took way too long to show up.

At any rate, this is a short list of annoyances and disappointments as I see them in the otherwise incredible Super Smash Bros. Brawl. None of it is game-breaking and I don't want to come across as one of those people who complains about every minute little detail, but at the same time one doesn't want to lavish a game entirely with praise without acknowledging that even the best work has faults.

As you might guess, the following post contains references to unlockable characters and stages if you're still waiting for your copy of the game to be shipped from Bolivia (or you're unfortunate enough to live in a PAL territory).

Continue reading "Nitpicking about Smash Bros. Brawl" »

Posted by Will at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As evidenced by one of the site headers in rotation for the holidays, I love Christmas NiGHTS. I've always appreciated when developers went out of their way to offer something extra as a gift to their fans without asking for anything in return, and I think NiGHTS was one of the last Sega titles to have real charm and heart before they went all weird with the Sonic Adventure series. Given that it was a limited release on an already unpopular system, however, I know a lot of people never got to experience it for themselves.

So, presented here are the opening and closing FMVs for Christmas NiGHTS, telling the story of Claris and Elliot remembering that the true meaning of Christmas is a bigass star on your tree. Then they fall down.

The keen of ear among you undoubtedly noticed that

1) It has voice narration when the regular NiGHTS didn't
2) This narration is awful

Not awful like "hey let's give NiGHTS a goofy accent" awful; it just sounds like they pulled in a random woman from the office who was far too timid to be reading anything in front of a microphone. But this, again, is part of its charm. The other part of its charm is that it really doesn't make any damned sense whatsoever.

Posted by Will at 11:02 PM | Permalink

http://www.lubbockonline.com/stories/111607/lif_111607052.shtml

My character isn't a costume I wear; it's more like a car I drive. And just like a car, I want my character to look cool, move fast and run over anything that gets in my way. I pick out equipment and fine tune all kinds of settings to make my character perform better.

So when you ask me why I prefer female characters, it's kind of like asking why do you drive a Corvette instead of a Jeep?

The first time I took my female warlock to Outland, I got some outstanding quest rewards that were much better than my previous equipment. I put on my new magic pants and looked like I was adventuring in a piece of sexy lingerie. My regal, dignified warlock character was walking around with her hips exposed, attracting whistles and catcalls from all across the zone.

It got so bad I actually sacrificed some attack power and put on a weaker pair of pants, just so I could cover myself.

Deep thoughts from Michael Duff of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. And just remember, the next time you see a sexy avatar stroll by in your newest online gaming obsession --

Posted by Will at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Is anyone actually keeping a list of all the references to past Mario titles in this game? I'm only 26 stars in and it's reaching almost Smash Brothers levels of random nostalgia. What I've noticed so far:

• Mario 1 underground and underwater themes as note trails
• Mario 1 8-bit background in one of the side areas
• Mario 3 airships and accompanying theme
• The wrench throwing dudes from said Mario 3 airships
• Mario 64 Bowser level music, virtually unchanged
• Mario 64 penguins
• Mario 64's big eel, and his.. new friend?
• Mario 64's underwater clams, now with eyes because absolutely nothing in Mario's universe can go without eyes. When Mario goes to the can it watches him crap.
• Mario 3 letters from Peach with gifts
• Kamek from Yoshi's Island
• FLUDD nozzles from Sunshine shooting anything from bubbles to flames
• Mario 1 flame lines
• A couple of background music themes from Mario 3
• The spinning nuts (um) previously seen on airships in Mario 3

I'm probably forgetting some. I'm sure I'll add more as I go along. I just want to see how much they managed to cram in.

P.S. If you're not playing this game you're retarded. This is everything I wanted Sunshine to be and the closest thing I've seen to a real Mario 64 sequel.

P.P.S. Your footprints stay on the beach a really long time. Finally developers are harnessing the true power of the Wii.

Posted by Will at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It's important for the growth of the video games industry that we allow more nuanced adult situations and topics to be integrated into new titles to extend the dramatic range of video games as an artform lest we languish in the dregs of juvenile fantasy and hamfisted OMG SOMEONE PUT SEX IN A VIDEO GAME?

OH GOD OH GOD TELL EVERYONE NOW

http://www.gamespot.com/news/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=25928388&part=rss&tag=gs_news&subj=6179029
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/09/18/mass-effect-allows-lesbian-alien-sex-men-remain-vanilla/
http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?p=987065#post987065
http://kotaku.com/gaming/sex/mass-effect-features-sex-scene-breasts-300946.php
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/820/820810p1.html
http://digg.com/gaming_news/Mass_Effect_Features_Sex_Scene_Breasts

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG U GUYS

I BET THE GIRLS KISS AND EVERYTHING

Posted by Will at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

By now I think everyone on the Internet has played at least one of the five million tower defense Flash games that are out there. (If you're really unsure what that is, see here for an example.) The problem is that they get pretty old after a while; placing and upgrading turrets isn't as exciting after the 500th one. Because it's all mostly static you can fall into a routine, and each new playthrough can be run exactly like the one before. What this weird little microgenre needs is a kick in the pants. It needs freshness. It needs dynamism. It needs physics and giant explosions.

Momentum Missile Mayhem features most of the conventions of other tower defense games -- you're defending against waves of enemies that want to travel to the other side of the screen, undoubtedly for nefarious purposes, and you must shoot them down. You have a certain number of lives, and each time an enemy passes the border, you lose one. The waves get stronger as you go along, and to compensate, you can earn skill points for weapon upgrades.

The very important difference is that rather than laying turrets down and watching them fight, you personally control the single turret on the map. And rather than simply shoot at enemies (so passé), your installation is equipped with a "gravity launcher" with which you fire balls of energy like a slingshot: you grab the ball, pull it back, aim, and let it go. The ball will hit enemy tanks and cause some damage, but will also knock them back and (if you planned it right) into a wall or other tanks. This soon becomes a necessity as you don't have enough energy or time to directly shoot each tank yourself; thus the strategy focuses more on plotting shots to send tanks careening into each other, causing domino effects that lead to mass destruction.

This twist adds about a dozen different improvements to the gametype. One, obviously, it's more exciting to actually fire at enemies yourself than to watch automated turrets plinking away at sheep or bugs or whatever. But it also adds strategy beyond choosing what kind of gun to buy. Pulling the "slingshot" back farther adds velocity but reduces stability, and an unstable shot has a risk (shown as a percentage at the bottom of the screen) of blowing up the second you fire it. Newer weapons are also less stable and cost more energy to use, but have added effects like higher damage or rebounding in random directions. So even while stability and energy reserves can be upgraded through skill points, one must still constantly maintain a balance of what to use when, like whether it's better to fire three quick basic shots that cost 250 energy points each or one slower high-end weapon that costs 800 but could clear out the map if you use it right.

But to hell with all this thinking nonsense, the real fun of the game is just the visceral thrill of throwing big things into other things and making them blow up. One of the special abilities you can buy with skill points is a zero point energy manipulator, and grabbing a tank that's just about to cross your border with ZPE like the hand of God and chucking it into a crowd of tanks to make the whole group explode so hard your monitor rumbles off the table is one of life's simple pleasures. Special abilities, along with some of your more powerful weapons, have cool down periods after use, so you can never come to rely too much on one type. But they sure are helpful in a pinch.

You can play Momentum Missile Mayhem here. It's all Flash, all free, and includes a handy downloadable version. Given the amount of stuff going on, it's a bit more taxing on system requirements than most Flash games, but there are three different quality settings if you find your box lagging.

Posted by Will at 4:11 PM | Permalink

So. Tits.

The first I really saw of Soul Calibur 4 was EGM's preview last month, and the most I saw of that was Ivy's gigantic flesh bags. It wasn't my fault -- they were so ridiculously bulbous that they pushed the words and pictures off the page. The magazine itself bowed out slightly in the middle, as if even the inherent limitations of two dimensions struggled to constrain the heaving mounds that threatened to burst forth from the paper to blot out the sun.

It was a little.. much, but I let them have it. I mean, it's Ivy for God's sake. If she looks like this now, we have to refer to this as her demure and tasteful period:

(This Gamespot blog post has some more direct comparisons of Ivy's changes through the years.)

Now new scans have been released from the most recent Famitsu showing off three more returning characters: Sophitia, Cassandra, and Voldo. Sophitia has been with the series for a long time and has already been undergoing a bit of an evolution. Here we have her in Soul Calibur:

And SC2:

Her thigh-highs shrunk in the wash, but otherwise she kept it pretty classy. Well, comparatively classy anyway. Then for SC3:

Slightly less classy. The metal boob cup seems both impractical and cold. How can they fix this glaring error for Soul Calibur 4...

Yes! Get rid of the damned thing! I told you it was cold, look. You take it off and her rack expands. Also, the heavy grade cloth she was using in SC3 was really wearing her down, so they replaced it entirely with tissue paper.

Focus groups (a Japanese salaryman locked in a broom closet with some hand lotion) responded that Sophitia looked too stand-offish and aggressive in previous installments. So she's been given a slight attitude adjustment, from "I am a warrior!" to "Please don't hit me again daddy! Look, I found a sword."

But Namco is nothing if not thrifty, so if you wonder where Sophitia's old outfits went, just look to her sister Cassandra. Soul Calibur 2:

And 3:

Well this is inexcusable. Somehow she actually gained covering. In fact, the most exposed skin she has is her wrist. I will not stand for this bullshit.

Yes. Don't even bother designing a new outfit, just start hacking chunks off her old ones. Make her tits bigger too, make everyone's tits bigger, give Lizardman some tits and blow those bastards up.

Also make Cassandra a cop?

I don't know where Namco is going with this. I mean, I know where they're going, but I don't understand why. Hasn't the Soul Calibur series been selling well enough without resorting to cheesecake (uh, more cheesecake)? Does any fighting game team seriously look around the market, see Dead or Alive, and think "there's our competition!" Maybe they really are just doing it for the hell of it. I dunno. You can see the scans for yourself below, but as a cleansing exercise, I have made one of the thumbnails an enlarged crop of Voldo's crotch. It's the least I can do.

Posted by Will at 2:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I can appreciate that you guys don't feel obligated to make bleeding edge games with elaborate, costly graphics, but now that Disgaea 3 is coming to the PS3, I think you can try a little harder than this.

Or sell the game for $20 because you haven't made any new sprites in six years.

Posted by Will at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Did this year's E3 seem kind of.. boring to anyone else? I realize the show was scaled way back, but with the conferences and the media coverage and the Live Marketplace Bringing It Home content, the trappings of E3 to the outsider at least seemed the same. But what actually came out of those sources wasn't terribly impressive.

I had planned to write about the conferences, as I have done in the past, but there was so little to them that there wasn't much to say. Microsoft deliberately avoided showing footage of Fable 2 or Halo Wars so we could instead get an extended pitch for Goddamned SceneIt (that's the full title). Nintendo breezed past the core gamer titles (Reggie briefly mentioned the Smash Bros. Dojo updates, as if to say that since we're getting info from the Dojo blog we don't need to get anything from him) to spend the bulk of their time showing off WiiFit, which will undoubtedly make them billions of dollars and only further prove that core gamers are absolutely unnecessary to them now. But as with Microsoft, it's not simply that they didn't have new games to show, but that they chose to avoid the subject. The first NiGHTS trailer was released the day before the conference, yet no mention of the game was made; even Mario Galaxy was only touched on briefly.

Despite -- or more likely because of -- the embarrassment last year, Sony had the strongest showing of the three, random Chewbacca cameo and Jack Tretton's nerves aside. The self-satisfied swagger of the previous year was nowhere to be seen, with Tretton even going so far as to cap off the evening with

We know that all of our accomplishments bring no guarantees for the future. We want to continue to earn each and every consumer's business, and we're dedicated to bringing them the very best entertainment experience possible.

Thus, Sony's conference was a pretty straightforward roll of game footage peppered with some talk about Home and a smaller PSP. It wasn't a knockout, but was at least pretty solid, and managed to actually show new games that grabbed people's attention, something neither Microsoft nor Nintendo bothered to do.

The show itself maintained the trend, remaining mostly concerned with games we already knew about. Many of the biggest titles this year were also the biggest titles last year. There wasn't much in the way of major surprises or announcements outside of WiiFit, a smaller PSP that will load a little faster, and Sony's pretend price drop (a move that doesn't make sense for about a thousand reasons, but I think everyone else has pretty much covered that by now). It's not unexpected to have a kind of lull the year after two console launches, but surely one of the big three could come up with something. At least throw us a new Brawl character, for God's sake. I'm not suggesting that there was absolutely nothing of interest at E3 this year (hey, at least Professor Layton is coming stateside), but it was all low key enough to make me wonder whether the show was necessary at all.

Posted by Will at 8:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't know how they did it.

The ESRB, it seemed, had a perfect test case in the Motion Picture Association of America -- a readymade guidebook on what to do and what not to do when establishing a ratings system. They no doubt saw the trouble the movie industry had with the X, then later NC-17, rating. The way everyone avoided it like the plague, rendering it less a rating and more a mark of death. The way it inevitably became associated with pornography -- hell, that's what prompted the change to NC-17 in the first place, but attitudes towards the rating stayed the same. Any reasonable amount of analysis would've shown that a different tact needed to be taken for the new video game ratings system.

But they didn't. The ESRB blindly galloped into the same quagmire the MPAA had been stewing in for decades by creating an Adults Only rating that almost immediately mirrored the NC-17 situation exactly. Stores won't carry it, magazines won't advertise it, and the people making the really filthy stuff are two-bit operations running out of a garage that don't bother to get their games rated anyway. Of the handful of games ever to receive the AO rating, the only one on consoles is the Hot Coffee edition of GTA: San Andreas, and that was only applied after the fact. Just as with NC-17, AO exists less as a rating defining a certain category of games and more as a bottomless abyss at the end of the road, into which is shoved anything deemed to go "a little too far." The definition of "too far", naturally, gets to change with the winds -- winds that are most usually emanating from bloated gas sacs lodged in the gullets of wailing parents and knee-jerking politicians.

I talk about this now because, in case you haven't heard, Manhunt 2 received a preliminary rating of Adults Only on Tuesday. After the announcement, Nintendo was quick to point out that they don't allow AO content on their systems, and later, more surprisingly, Sony said the same. Thus Rockstar is left with absolutely no alternative to but to censor their game and get it re-rated.

Now let's ignore the debate on whether Manhunt 2 should get to play the "artistic merit" card on this, because I don't care. The bigger issue is that any game should be put into such a position, where the developer is forced to change their content or be left with no avenue to release their work. I know, Rockstar should be and no doubt was aware of Sony and Nintendo's policies on AO ratings. But they can't know what rating they're going to get before they even begin.

But big deal. So they shorten some scenes or remove a few animations and get it re-rated. Why make a thing out of it. The problem is that we don't have an answer to the larger question, which is what happens when (not if) the games industry's Requiem for a Dream comes along. Requiem was given an NC-17 by the MPAA, but director Darren Aronofsky refused to edit the film, arguing that the intensity and offensive nature of the scenes in question were central to the message of the entire movie. (Having seen the movie, I agree with him.) Showing fortitude rarely witnessed in movie studios, Artisan Entertainment agreed to release the movie unrated. This obviously posed a challenge to distribution, but they did have the art house circuit and later home video to support them. Video stores especially are more forgiving about unrated movies, with the exception of some family-oriented outlets like Blockbuster.

Video games, on the other hand, practically live and die by their ESRB rating, as it is generally treated as the one and only reason adult content is allowed in games at all. Can you imagine if a game with adult themes was found to be sold unrated at a Gamestop? The same place where little Jimmy buys the latest Spyro game? He might catch sex madness! There was even a bill recently proposed in New York to permit the seizure of unrated games. So clearly even the work-around developed by the movie business is closed to game developers. How can we want the industry to grow and mature and tackle more important, serious, disturbing and even dangerous topics while also not giving them any outlet for their work if it crosses some arbitrary line in the sand?

Some people will attempt to counter this by saying that video games will never reach that point of artistic maturity, which is rather depressing. More because of what it says about public opinion than anything else, because I have no doubt we will reach that point someday (again, I won't argue whether Manhunt 2 is it) and we will have to deal with this. And once, just once, it would be nice to have a rational, sensible solution before we get there.

Posted by Will at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

IGN has word that two more songs have been announced for Guitar Hero III: Lay Down by Priestess and Even Flow by Pearl Jam. While any Pearl Jam is enough to make me even more excited for GH3's line-up than I was before, I feel it my duty to point out something that many people (especially radio DJs) are apparently unaware of:

Pearl Jam actually made albums after Ten. I know, it's crazy, but it really happened. There are a number of them, in fact. Albums of prose poems? Why, no! Albums of rock and roll music! The sort of music one might wish to hear on the radio or in a soundtrack. Music that doesn't involve playing Alive for the eight millionth Goddamn time

Ten is a fine album, we can all agree. But Jesus, guys, it's not their only fine album. Try to branch out just a little. I know Life Wasted was on the 360 version of GH2, but that doesn't count because it's little more than a promotion for the current album. Maybe you're afraid to dip into what some people consider PJ's "low years." Fine. At least pick something off Vs., they were still "cool" then.

But in other news:

The Living Colour song, Cult of Personality, is a track that people have been wanting in Guitar Hero for a long time. There was a slight hitch with it though. The master track was nowhere to be found. Instead of getting a cover, Living Colour came in and re-recorded the song just for the game. And they threw in a wicked solo that makes this song on expert just plain ridiculous.

That's awesome.

Posted by Will at 3:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)