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Rock Band Beatles – Facts and Opinions

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Last week saw the announcement of a few more details on the Harmonix developed Beatles music game. The information can be described in one or two sentences, and doesn’t add up to much more than a release date, but that hasn’t stopped many from speculating, worrying, and hoping. However, using common sense and just a bit of guesswork, we can try and make some more accurate predictions.

Fact 1: The game will be released on September 9th, 2009.

Christian’s take: This all but guarantees that there will not be a Rock Band 3 this year. In fact, Harmonix already said so a while ago. I don’t think anyone will have a problem with this. The market for downloadable songs is lucrative right now, and retail shelves are already stuffed to the gills with hardware. →  Read the rest

Most reviews aren’t worth reading

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It’s not very often that I actually read a game review. Over the years I’ve realized it saves a lot of time to just check Metacritic’s aggregated score, or maybe read the excerpts that it lists.

Why don’t I actually read what the reviewers have to say? Because their score is all they have to say. It was a while ago when I first realized that all their words are only there to validate that number. I don’t think anyone cares if the reviewer has something to say about a game, it’s the final percentage that matters.

Reviewers get their fair share of criticism though, and a lot of resounding complaints. Are they being objective? Are they getting paid by the publishers? Is the score fair? I have my own to throw in. →  Read the rest

eBay + Japanese Games = Financial Ruin

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I was recently banned from a forum I frequently frequent for a matter I’d rather not discuss in detail (suffice to say playing devil’s advocate on matters of morality can be quite dangerous). After looking through a handful of other gaming forums and being disappointed because the big ones are full of stupid people and the good ones have new posts at a rate of one every three days, I found myself on eBay.

It had been months since I’d won any auctions and years since my brief and costly bidding war addiction. After randomly skimming through pages of games I found the links to my saved sellers. This was a mistake because it led me to yamatoku, purveyor of extremely cheap Japanese retro games. Winning six of his auctions in two weeks and reading through hundreds of listings, I was struck with how many Japanese titles I have never even heard of. →  Read the rest

How should game collections be reviewed?

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If every game ever made were on a single disc, would that compilation deserve a “10” just based on volume? Would it make more sense to average the reviews of all the games and use that as the compilations official review score? Should points be deducted from the score for every game the reviewer already owns? And if this every-game game came out again in five years, should its past availability negate any value it would otherwise offer the consumer?

These are the questions I have been pondering as I look through the reviews for Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection. Many bring up the fact that much of the collection has been released multiple times in multiple formats. Something seems faulty about criticizing the quality of a game on the basis of its distribution. →  Read the rest

The Value of a Dollar

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I have discussed the dilemmas of downloadable content frequently in the past, and each new piece of news gives us more to chew on. Soon we will be seeing the very first DLC for Tomb Raider: Underworld. You know, the content that was meant for the original game, but eventually wasn’t. We may never know if someone put a gun to Eric Lindstrom’s head in order to change his story, but we’re here to discuss value.

This joystiq newscontains a quote from Crystal Dynamics claiming each piece of DLC will take between three to six hours to complete. Scroll down further and you will see that a few commenters simply won’t fork over the 800 MS points for it. Since then, joystiq’s more recent review of the level clocks in at around an hour and a half. →  Read the rest

Race to the Finish

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Here is a tip for developers.  Whenever you issue a challenge to the gaming masses, don’t make any bets, assessments, or guesses about how long it will take them to complete it, or if they will even complete it at all.  They will simply let out a long cackle, and by the time they take a breath, they will have finished it, perhaps twice over.  Usually these feats are seen in MMO’s like World of Warcraft, but this time it has popped up in the most unlikely of games – Noby Noby Boy.

In case you haven’t been following Keita Takahashi’s newest bit of quirk, Noby Noby Boy is an experience with a passive goal.  As each player plays around with Boy and makes him stretch his body, they can report to their friend Girl, a similar creature who is chilling out in space.  →  Read the rest

Street Fighter Folks

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Yesterday was the release date for Street Fighter 4, at least if you’re being technical. Most every store in the nation won’t be offering it until today, but if you had a preorder, or a lucky store, then your local Gamestop may have been your potential source for a Tuesday pickup. When it comes to broken street dates and flaky launches, the Maryland area seems neither particularly lucky nor unlucky. Furthermore, these days my buying habits are such that I never pick up a new game the week of its release, so I avoid such flaky launches.

I knew I should wait until today to find Street Fighter 4, yet I found myself ignoring my bus to the metro station, instead taking the 40 minute walk so I could stop by the Gamestop and scout their stock. →  Read the rest

Playing catch up – Phantasy Star IV

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I was a Nintendo kid growing up (until that stopped being cool, when I defected to Sony). I got a Genesis very late in the game, so I’m still playing catch-up on the Phantasy Star games. A couple months ago, the final game worth mentioning in the series was released on Virtual Console. I played through Phantasy Star 2 several months ago, so I figured I’d give its better-regarded descendant a go now that current-gen RPG releases have calmed down a bit.

Phantasy Star 4 deserves all of the acclaim it gets. If its fans are not heard as loudly as those of other, better-known series, they should be. Is it the Second Coming? Perhaps not. But it has all the requirements for a good RPG (aside from only one of two established religions being evil – I’ll overlook that). →  Read the rest

An ode to a fallen memory card

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In a spontaneous fit of impatience and retardation, I recently reformatted my GameCube memory card. Tales of Symphonia, which I picked up after not having played in two years, insisted the card was corrupt and needed to be wiped clean first by the GameCube’s internal mechanism, then by being throw into a wall. Instead of thinking it through and realizing I’d just been playing Metroid Prime and it saved fine and fearing I’d lose my 30 hours of Symphonia-ing, I hit “Sure, erase all of my saved games, it’s not like I put any time or effort into them” then practiced my pitching for 15 minutes.

The bad news is it was for naught as I had no clue what I needed to do next in Symphonia. After reading all of the back story (nice feature by the way) and then wandering and sailing and giant monster riding around the map for an hour I gave up knowing it was just as well. →  Read the rest

Wii gets another once HD game

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EA recently announced (or Twittered) that it is bringing Dead Space to the Wii. The company says they “will rival Nintendo in terms of quality,” which is frighteningly close to Ubisoft’s claim that in ’08 their Wii games would be of “Nintendo-like quality.” Of course, Ubisoft’s Wii games are shitty so EA’s bold words don’t really inspire me.

Empty promises aside, an alarming trend is beginning to emerge – HD games with watered down Wii ports. I am a proponent of good games getting wider audiences and if you’re reading this site you’re likely a “core” gamer, in which case you likely agree with me (unless you’re one of those casuals-gone-core via GTA and Halo who hates the fact that people who aren’t 16-21 year old males play games). Games that expand gaming’s audience is good for the industry – people who wouldn’t play these games now may, and there’s the potential casual gamers move upstream by buying other core titles. →  Read the rest

Getting the Lists Right

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The 2008 retrospective lists continue to roll in, and every time I see one I feel the need to comment on it. Without fail, once I’ve written my piece I simply delete the draft and worry about something more important.

I finally struck gold today. PC World has a list of 2008’s most overrated games (which covers consoles, despite the whole “PC” thing in their name). I have no problems with how PC World feels about the quality of each of the games, but I do get irked when professional journalists fail to do even a little bit of homework or editing. I am referring to their complaints about Call of Duty: World at War, which contain the following quote:

After all, the original developers were conspicuously AWOL, leaving game-creation duties to the underwhelming Treyarch

When I read “conspicuously AWOL”, I see words meaning “noticeable,” and “gone without permission.” →  Read the rest

Golden Jew’s Nuggets of Wisdom #4

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What happened to resource management/economic games?

Being a Jew, and a dork (as we have established by my contributing to this site), I love resource management games. Railroad Tycoon and Tropico bring back fond memories: games where you gather A, process A into B, and then sell B for C(ash). Unfortunately, I seem to be the only one, because no one has made a good resource management game in ages. It seems that Firaxis is the only company capable of “making” (and I use the term loosely, since Firaxis has yet to make a game in years in my book) these games.

Their most recent two efforts were half-baked bug-ridden crap: Sid Meier’s Railroads (which I loved for the concept before getting infuriated with the execution after writing a glowing review) and Sid Meier’s Civilization 4 Ultimate Colonization North American Challenge 2008, also known as Colonization II: We’re Using the Civ 4 Engine and Name for Sales. →  Read the rest

Condemned’s violence brutalizes its narrative

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It is a matter of fact that many of the games we play contain violence in some form. Rarely do we ever stop to think about this, since this violence usually comes with no strings attached. You kill people because they are the bad guys, and most games do not try to flip this notion upside down or bestow any great weight upon our actions (or maybe we are all just desensitized, take your pick). Every so often, I do find myself taken aback by something I witness in a game, which creates the potential for some rich discussion.

This time the scene came from Condemned: Criminal Origins. During the first chapter, as I wailed on doped-up vagrants with pipes and rebar, I noticed that something kept flashing in the corner of the heads up display, which hinted that there are special actions mapped to the D-Pad for use on disabled enemies. →  Read the rest

Golden Jew’s Nuggets of Wisdom #3

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Am I getting pickier, are developers getting suckier, or am I a fanboy?

I’m definitely gaming less, largely due to an increase in non-gaming activities eating my free time. As a result I’m finding myself particularly discriminating when it comes to what I actually buy and play. Video games aren’t my primary outlet these days, I’d say they consume 25% of my free time whereas in the past it might have been as high as 75%.

This has worked out well for me, because if I were a bored Golden Jew, I’d have trouble taking a strong stance on developers who have either pissed me off, or not managed to beat out the competition. Etrian Odyssey 2, for example, has turned me off to future installments of the game because of Atlus’ crass laziness in developing a sequel. →  Read the rest

Pachter predicts the PS3 is fucking awesome

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Sony is something special. Any other console with the combined hardware and software sales of the PS3 would be considered solidly in third place. Somehow when it’s Sony in third, however, it is simply a strategy to take advantage of a grandiose ten year plan. Imagine how violently you’d have laughed had Microsoft announced a ten year plan for the Xbox.

Predictions from analysts and insiders are only now slowly starting to show that the PS3 may not come out on top this generation. The initial prognostications from ’06 can be forgiven but many refuse to treat Sony like another console maker.

The newest example is in this gamesindustry.biz article. Analyst Michael Pachter has gone on record saying, “There was likely some substitution of Xbox 360 for PS3 purchases, due to recent price reductions for the Xbox 360 and the bundling of the console with two free games,” and “In addition, we believe that PS3 sales are being impacted by lower demand for HD televisions as a result of the recession.” →  Read the rest

Golden Jew’s Nuggets of Wisdom #2

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Cooking Games

This is a slippery slope I’m about to embark upon, but what do I care, you clicked this link, so you’re stuck with me. I can’t be any worse than doing your job, right?

I get video game escapism. I was a nerdy kid before blooming into my awesome alpha male self, so I understand the appeal of being a wizard, or space marine fighting space aliens, or a pirate ninja. Even though sports games don’t appeal to me, I understand why someone wants to play football and play like Tom Brady, or manage a college football team like the UF Gators, or rape a girl and get away with it like Kobe.

But where I get really fucking confused is when games like Cooking Mama become popular. I understand that there is this genre of “casual” games for people, where instead of trying to decide the proper build order for Protoss to rush Zerg, they want to just hit a tennis ball around with the Wii controller. →  Read the rest

Dragon Questing

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Before they even released their next iteration, Square Enix has announced that Dragon Quest 10 will see the light of day on the Wii. The announcement comes as a surprise to no one (which is different than the angry genre fans that bet and lost on the PS3 carrying the jRPG torch). The question still remains as to what this will actually mean for the console.

While it is true that Dragon Quest has always appeared on the most popular console of the time, the reasons for this have always varied. For DQ 1-6, Nintendo was so dominant that there was no question as to where to put the series. For 7 and 8, Enix took a “wait and see” approach before choosing Sony, and released them many years after either Playstation had established their own dominance. →  Read the rest

Strongbad Flash game better than Strongbad console game

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I just started and finished the Dangeresque Strongbad game on the Homestar Runner site and it is a pretty cool little game. I’d go as far as to say I preferred it to my play through of the first episode of the WiiWare Strongbad game, Homestar Ruiner.

The downloadable title has a ton of voice acting, pretty graphics, a handful of locations and is playable from my couch. The Flash game has only a voice acted intro, 2d sprite graphics, a single room to explore and requires me to be in a handstand to play (my computer is in a very inconvenient location).

Yet it is the intimacy of the Flash game that makes it so enjoyable. It’s only a few minutes long but the whole time you’ll be solving small little riddles. →  Read the rest

“Handheld games suck” say reviewers

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The best reviewed PSP game on Metacritic is God of War at a 91, on the DS Chrono Trigger just edged out Mario Kart, the game’s scores are 94 and 91 respectively. The GBA’s highest rated game is Link to the Past at 95.

On the console side the top reviewed games are the Grand Theft Autos, Halos, Marios and Zeldas, spanning from 95 to 99. Console game scores for the top games seem to be significantly higher and the high ranking handheld games are either console franchises or direct ports of console games.

So what is going on here?

There are two possible explanations I can think of. Handheld games could actually be worse than console games. This may be true to someone subjectively, but it seems an absurd position for professional reviewers to adopt. →  Read the rest

Black Friday from Home

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Who says you can’t score deals from your couch? Sony and Microsoft are giving you a chance to score some downloadable games for cheap. PS3 users can score some $10 games for half price, including Pixel Junk Eden and Echochrome. On the 360 side there is mostly junk, but the best picks are Catan and (fucking) Rez for five bucks each. Sony’s deals are until next Thursday, and MS’ are until Sunday, and for Gold users only.

Having saved on some travel costs, I picked up Eden and Rez. Two musically and graphically rich games are an absolute steal at that price, and I can’t wait to blast through them.

As for Nintendo sales, I suppose Reggie didn’t think we needed any. If he’s reading this, I’ll tell him that a Mega Man 1-3 combo pack or something would have been the bee’s knees.