Wii Sports: Bundle or Stand-Alone?

This question has plagued my brain for the last few days. Should Nintendo bundle Wii Sports with the actual system, or sell it as a stand-alone product?

You can come up with several reasons for both sides of the argument, but the real crux of the argument is what Nintendo will do. Bundling the game would essentially define the Wii as Wii Sports. If people think they will get it in the bundle, then their immediate experience of the Wii will be formed around the experience they have with Wii Sports.

This is exactly what Nintendo needs to do if they want to justify their route they took with the Wii and its controller. This will show the public that the controller is indeed a worthy way of handling gameplay for video games. →  Read the rest

Weekend Spotlight

What will I be playing this weekend, you ask? Why, only the great Indigo Prophecy, of course. I do thank you for asking.

I played the demo on the PC around the time of the game’s release, and simply loved how the game unfolded. I never purchased it, due to constraining circumstances (no money), but a friend at work let me borrow his Xbox edition.

Right from the moment you start the game, you’ll notice that Indigo Prophecy is heavily story-based. Think Metal Gear Solid. Actually, Konami’s spy game actually has more “game” to it than Indigo Prophecy does, if that’s hard to believe. You seriously are just watching this game with a few bits of gameplay thrown in for variety.

But don’t get me wrong, the game is great to play. →  Read the rest

Next-gen.biz apparently reads videolamer

Is it me, or does Next-gen.biz report on everything that I’ve said, only later?

Exhibit A

This is an interview of Raph Koster of Star Wars Galaxies fame at the Austin Game Conference where he talks about how much better life in PC development would be without publishers. He apparently read my second episode on game testing where I said the same thing. He’s definitely right, though.

Exhibit B

This second article was an interview with Charles Deenen at the same conference where he talks about how powerful sound and music are to a video game and the pursuit of emotional response. I think I read something like that on videolamer somewhere. Oh wait, it’s here! We’ve got some eerie similarities in our arguments, too.

Exhibit C

This last article delves into our inner psyche and asks: “What is the deal with video games?” →  Read the rest

Sony will have the last laugh…all the way to the bank…or something

Sony has gotten a lot of crap from gamers recently. Most of it is entirely deserved. They are forcing consumers to buy a Blu Ray player if they want a PS3, charging $600 for their new console and games are anticipated to sell for $60 or $70 a piece. PR statements from Kutaragi and Hirai have made Sony seem more arrogant than ever. More recently, there have been reports of delays in production and now Sony has announced that the PS3 will launch next year in Europe and the launches in North America and Japan will be limited. To top it all off, the new Sony slogan for European territories sucks total ass – Now this is living.

All of these factors combined with how promising the 360 and the Wii are looking have led many to attack Sony, some going so far as to “break up” with them (funniest article in the world – he acts like Sony is a girl, not a company, get it?). →  Read the rest

Life as a Game Tester: Episode 2

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the crazy, but always interesting world of video game development. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks for me, as we’ve delivered a few of our builds to Nintendo to be approved for manufacturing.

If you are developing anything for Nintendo, be it console or handheld, you need to submit your game to them when you believe it is completely finished (more on this later). They will then go through the game and see if they can find any problems with it. They have their own standards of what should and shouldn’t be in a game, and they even check stuff like how you reference the buttons on the controller.

If the A button onscreen didn’t look just like the A button on my controller, I’d be COMPLETELY lost.

 →  Read the rest

PS3 delay

Okay, so by now I’m sure we’ve all heard the news about the delay of the PS3 in Europe until 2007. If not, now you know. Of course this has led to the usual commentary, as well as editors pulling out the best of cliches. I want to talk about something else in this space, namely how much longer Europe will keep Sony on its golden thrown. There’s no question that the company has absolutely dominated the European market, thanks to some slick marketing and a curious sense of loyalty (or something).

But how long can this last? With the PSP, the console was delayed for quite some time (compared to the Japanese and U.S. launches), sold for a good chunk of change (over $300 in most regions), and still managed to do incredibly well. →  Read the rest

Bad Design 4

Today I’ll be complaining about the excellent KoToR, the ancient Heroes III and the crappy Samurai Western. As usual, I lied last time when I said this entry would be looking at an issue in Final Fantasy X. Maybe next time.

Hit A. HIT A!

Knights of the Old Republic: Bad Immersion — The characters in KoToR (for the Xbox) make reference to your controller. This makes no sense whatsoever and derails any believability. It is the equivalent to an actor in a movie showing the script to the camera and asking the audience to take a look at line 36. Some comedies do this and even pull it off (Mel Brooks writes excellent jokes about the characters being aware that they’re not real) but in serious drama it should probably be avoided. →  Read the rest

Review – Sword of the Stars

I’m still not writing to say that MOO2 has been unseated from it’s throne as best 4X space game ever, but Sword of the Stars may be the closest thing to bastard upstart rival capable of causing a genre wide (or at least, Golden Jew wide) civil war. The full game builds upon the demo, showing that the guys at Kerebros know what they’re doing and have created an extremely entertaining, robust game with a great deal of replayability.

This review will be written assuming you read my demo review. If you haven’t, you should go read it. Let me touch upon some high level items first. The one personal pet peeve I have about SOTS is they decided to go the route of “you should discover the intricacies of the game by playing it.” →  Read the rest

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.1.06

The better graphics only make it abundantly clear that football players have dead eyes.

Double Fine finds a new publisher to bring their flops to market
Tim at Double Fine is working on another game. Rumors suggest it may be Psychonauts 2: Straight to Bargain Bins. The good news for us perpetual whiners is that if it’s as creative and fun as the first game and does as poorly, there will be plenty of hell to raise.

EA predicts you’ll buy 18 copies of the new Madden
Good news, tons of people still buy new Maddens despite the fact that they are basically the same game. The proportion of internet whining I mentioned is directly proportional to how many times Maddens sales quadruple the new Double Fine game. My estimate is 32. →  Read the rest

Circuit City’s newest scam

Circuit City is known for being a shitty store with shitty customer support and shitty business practices. I have had problems there myself, so from experience I can agree on all counts about the store’s shittiness. Their newest shitty deal is that for only $28.99, they will make your Xbox 360 backwards compatible.

Wow, what a steal! Those who think the role of the market is to screw ignorant people out of money any way possible have been defending Circuit City on the interwebs. How they find time to argue between scamming the elderly and emailing people about millions of dollars in African bank accounts is anyone’s guess.

At first inspection, the “deal” almost sounds legitimate for people who can’t connect to Xbox Live to download the backwards compatability updates for free. →  Read the rest