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Thursday, February 08, 2007 |
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These Aren't The Games You're Looking For. Move Along. Move Along.
"It's just a weather balloon." Though I haven't heard a PR person deliver this line yet, I'm sure it's not far off.
As many of my colleagues who cover the world of gaming know, getting a publisher to acknowledge the existence of a game that it hasn't officially announced via press release or media alert is pretty much futile. A decade ago, it was all a lot easier. You could call up virtually anyone involved in the creation of a videogame and get a straightforward response. Developers would often happily oblige sharing details about their next title in development, no matter if a publisher signed on or not.
But then things changed. Publishers -- especially public companies -- worked hard to erect walls around the development teams and star designers, lest they inadvertently release something that hadn't been run by shareholders and could impact share prices or give the competition the heads-up. This was an expected development, even though the gaming industry's pursuit of leaks and news control is much more fervent than its older brother in Hollywood. Again, no surprise. You don't tell Spielberg "don't talk about Indy 4, fool!" -- but if CliffyB acknowledges the potential-maybe-possible sequel to a game that ended in a cliffhanger, the red phone with the colorful Windows logo will no doubt start ringing. With the exception of names like Miyamoto or Kojima, game designers aren't afforded the same autonomy over their projects to operate outside the controlled PR environment. Not that movie PR reps aren't pulling their hair out when someone like James Cameron comes out and openly comments about his next movie -- but it nevertheless remains an accepted part of movie making and buzz generation.
But I digress, this isn't really what I wanted to talk about. Let's go back to the quote in my headline. What gets me is when you're staring straight at the two robots you're looking for and someone waves their arm and says they're not it. But there's no rumble in the background; no blurring of the mind. You're still staring at the robots and you start stuttering: "But... But, that's them."
It happens every week in the world of gaming coverage -- and even more so with companies like ours that wear multiple hats. For example, IGN's teams don't only write about games, they also provide pre-formatted data about games to the end user. One such data point is how suitable a game is for a certain age group: you guessed it, the ESRB rating. In order to obtain an ESRB rating, a game publisher has to get footage and other documentation of its game in front of the ratings board. It's pretty much a mandatory step in the process of creating and publishing a retail game. The game is far along and almost ready to go out, it gets submitted and assigned a rating, the ESRB rating is fed to retailers, magazines and websites, and they all display the rating so their readers and buyers know what age group the game is appropriate for.
Here's where things get tripped up -- and where the famous handwave pops up again and again: a publisher submits a game for an ESRB rating that's yet to be announced by its PR team (and doesn't tell the ESRB to hold back distribution of the rating, which it can and will do); everyone gets the ratings feed; unannounced games get added to games databases and retail lists -- including IGN's external data feed to Muze (which in turn supplies big retail chains). Here's were things get all Jedi. The editor in charge of following up on the story calls the publisher for comment. The publisher says a variation of one of the two: 1) "We don't comment on rumors and speculation." 2) "That title's not on our radar."
I value our partners at PR greatly and sympathize with their challenge to control information flow, but there's got to be a way to fix this process. The notion that an ESRB listing is a "rumor" is insulting. The ESRB will rate a game if the publishers asks it. It doesn't go around and pick random titles and assigns a rating based on lucid dreams. A title listing is either a mistake or it's a confirmation that a game is actively being considered for release. The issue isn't one of overeager press or the ESRB "leaking" titles, it's the age-old multi-headed setup of the promotions engine at the big game publishers.
First of all, the process for obtaining an ESRB rating and the separate release of "prebook" information to retailers needs to be part of a chain of events, not run in parallel. A game should be announced to the public, then rated, then exposed via retail channels. ESRB ratings and retailers are services geared towards the public -- the process is broken if a publisher cannot reliably put 1, 2, 3 in a row. This is not an issue unique to the US and its ESRB, by the way. The same happens occasionally with PEGI in the UK, USK in Germany, and even with Japanese CERO ratings. The nature of the press in Japan is just such that they don't report it.
Secondly, publishers need to empower their PR teams to say "no." It happens once in a while that titles get "announced" that aren't real. "No comment" is either "yes, it's true," "no, it's wrong," or "I don't know." If the title doesn't exist, saying "no, it's wrong" does not cause any damage. It effectively ends rumor mongering before it gets out of hand and causes potential disappointments.
Lastly, publishers need to empower their PR reps to say "yes." Not to pick on KOEI, but how ridiculous is the fact that you can look up the ESRB rating for Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV for Wii's Virtual Console, but the publisher is unable to say either "we'd like to release it, but aren't sure yet," or "yes, it's coming." The game is more than 10 years old. It'll likely be downloaded by fewer Wii owners than read this blog. Where is the damage in acknowledging definite or tentative plans to release this title as a download? Will the potential of adding $8,000 of revenue to the publisher's fiscal year send shareholders into a frenzy? Will the planned announcement of this title (no doubt on a Monday morning at 5:00 am) send shockwaves through the ranks of strategy fans worldwide? Or is the worry that Matt and Bozon will be less surprised when they download the title from Nintendo's Wii Shop Channel for the first time and are introduced to a mysterious franchise they never even knew existed?
There are secrets worth keeping... and there are truths worth admitting. If secrecy is that important, publishers need to fix their information flow. But if there is no damage in telling the truth once in a while, how nice would it be if the bearded man stopped waving that hand in front of your face and just gave you the damn robots?
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Tuesday, February 06, 2007 |
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Fool Me Once, Shame on You -- Fool Me 24 Times...
Did you watch the latest episode of 24 yesterday? I have to admit, I felt a bit of 24 fatigue going into this latest season and was even considering skipping it this time -- but I'm glad I tuned in and saw Valencia, home of Mark Bozon, get blown up. It made for a some very cinematic moments, even if Kiefer's acting continues to be way over the top.
But with the latest episode, it feels like we're back to some of the show's more annoying repeating plot points. Instead of great chases, gunplay, and awesome stunts driving the action forward, we're once again getting a heavy dose of Formula 24, namely:
[Spoilers ahoy!]
Darth Official: Evil government officials who want to deprave the American people of their freedom are back. These usually take the form of evil-looking and irritating characters that nobody in their right mind would vote into office. This time around, it's not only the little wanker from Ghostbusters 2, they even threw in I-Could-Only-Look-More-Evil-if-my-Pupils-Were-Yellow Powers Boothe as the Vice President (known to Deadwood viewers as the proprietor of the evil whorehouse). Note that 50% of the seemingly evil officials will turn good at the end of the season and in return 50% of the good ones will turn evil. Seriously, quit voting, Yanks. You keep on electing villains!
Double-Cross: Someone unexpected and close to Jack is evil. This time, it's not enough to make Jack's brother a bad guy -- Jack's dad is even eviler and kills said evil brother to become the most evil of all. And to think he broke the warp barrier and spared that cute little pig. Bad, Cromwell, bad!
CTU in Peril: The season wouldn't be complete without one character from CTU getting in mortal danger. This time, it's Chloe's smoking heartthrob.
Sneer City: Chloe is making that annoyed face again. Sadly, without any of the other more sympathetic CTU people to counterbalance (they're all dead!), it's looking like the worst workplace on earth.
So am I the only one who gets irritated by these twists? I don't even want to call them that because they're really not surprising anymore. The show still has some great qualities and delivers the usual tense action, but I do wish the writers wouldn't try so damn hard to throw the audience for a loop.
I couldn't help but roll my eyes at this father/son scene that came across not only as utterly unbelievable, but so predictably "24" at the same time. As much as I disliked Prison Break switching up things in the last season (which caused me to stop watching), I'm really hoping 24 avoids these cloying cliches for the rest of the season.
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Monday, February 05, 2007 |
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VC This! Vol. 1: Live A Live
To me, one of the most exciting prospects of Nintendo's Virtual Console channel isn't the return of classic titles we all played years ago, it's the return of titles that should be considered classics that we didn't play years ago.
Back in the '90s, when 16-bit consoles roamed the earth, countless Japanese titles went unnoticed by the west simply because their publishers didn't want to take the chance and release them on our shores. You can't blame them for it, either. Many Japanese publishers weren't yet set up to pull off localization as easily as today -- which, as we all know, resulted in some humorous Engrish in shooters and action games when the translation efforts were handled in-house. But more importantly, the prohibitive cost of cartridges made sure that publishers didn't want to take chances with unproven genres and game types.
The biggest victim of this hurdle was of course the roleplaying game genre. With only the biggest RPGs arriving stateside, few Nintendo fans were clued in on the fact that the Super NES was a total roleplaying powerhouse, long before the western world discovered its love for the story-driven RPGs so popular in Japan since the dawn of the Famicom. It's impossible not to credit Square with popularizing roleplaying for the console generation, but for every RPG the company brought over the Pacific, another also went unnoticed by English-speaking gamers.
One such game was Live A Live. If your inner grammar hound wants to put a "(sic)" after the title, hold him back: the team behind the title wasn't just trying to say "live a life" and got lost in translation. The Japanese name really does say "Raibu a Raibu" – and if you look at the logo on the game's box, it should be clear why the designers chose the title. Yes, LIVE backwards is EVIL; a deliberate reference to one of the many awesome plot points in this unique RPG.
Unlike most modern RPGs, Live A Live didn't pick one setting and one principal character to center its story around. Live A Live features eight distinct chapters, each with their own protagonist, setting, musical theme, and look and feel. At its core, Live A Live is much more like a collection of short stories by a variety of different authors that comes to a collective close. Though unified by a common 7x7 grid battle system, each story is unique. At first, it seems as if you're playing through separate RPGs that go off in a variety of directions, but in the end, all eight plot- and timelines are united as the game comes to a crashing finale. The player can choose to play any of seven chapters right off the bat. These include a storyline set in the Stone Age, a martial arts-focused one in ancient China, ninjas in feudal Japan, a Sergio Leone-inspired western, a fighting-based quest for glory set in the present day US, a near-futuristic storyline that borrows heavily from the anime Akira, and a deep space sci-fi epic about an intelligent robot stuck on a spaceship with a deadly alien.
Once the player completes these seven, an eighth story kicks off, set in a traditional fantasy world populated by knights, dragons and nasty monsters. If you're ever planning to play this game, skip this next sentence as it's a definite spoiler -- but it's also what makes this game so cool. SPOILER START: By playing this eighth story, the player actually "creates" the game's antagonist. The main character becomes the game's ultimate bad guy. And as you head into the big finale, you get to pick sides. It's up to you who will be the main instrument to destroy evil – or, if you choose, you can even take evil's side and take down the heroes you've spent hours leveling up. How sweet is that? SPOILER END.
Live A Live is one of those rare RPG experiences that's well-polished not just from a presentation standpoint (though the music truly rocks), but received a lot of care on the story-telling side as well. Few games can boast this diversity, jumping from a prehistoric setting where characters only communicate via symbols to taking control of a "Man With No Name" in a digital Spaghetti Western.
Sadly, all these unique qualities didn't add up to something Square saw as a winning formula for the non-Japanese gaming markets. The game arrived a few months after Final Fantasy VI in Japan -- and Square decided to focus entirely on localizing the latter instead. Live A Live went unnoticed by the west (have you heard about it?). Though a group of hobby coders have created a translated ROM version of the title, Square is likely to continue to keep this title hidden away in its vault.
Though few would argue that Nintendo's VC game prices are fair compared to the volume and value rendered, Nintendo's Virtual Console on Wii is thriving. There are still tons of known classics waiting to be released, so it's no doubt a tough sell for publishers to sink extra money into localizing "niche" games when they have yet to cycle through their prime titles. Then again, with previously unreleased Final Fantasy titles appearing on handhelds, the time is ready to make a case for the forgotten few as well. In two years or so, I'm sure even prolific NES and SNES supporters like Konami and Square will be running low on virtual titles to release. Just like movie studios engaging in art house projects to support movie making culture and supplement their big money-making blockbusters, digital downloads are the perfect opportunity to try something new. ...or old.
Here's hoping someone at Square hasn't forgotten about Live A Live and realizes that localization of text-based games can be very cheap (especially if you can recruit some avid fans who've already done the job). With many of the current crop of Virtual Console games showing off the best (and worst) of the action genre, it's time some of the lesser-known RPGs got their play as well.
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Thursday, February 01, 2007 |
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Wii Control Challenges
I love navigating menus with the Wii Remote. Moving your cursor around is as easy as using a mouse -- and the subtle "rumble" adds just the right amount of tactile feedback to make it all feel natural and intuitive. But is it just me, or are you also looking forward to a time when developers are more at ease with how the controller should and shouldn't be used?
By virtue of its design, most games treat the Remote like this:
Well, yes. Like a remote. But there are some problems with this control scheme -- and they usually only rear their head when you're playing games for extended periods of time.
I was playing Kororinpa the other day -- but the same thing applies to Monkey Ball just as well -- and it struck me that function shouldn't always be exactly tied to form. You see, both games assume that the Remote is a stand-in for a flat surface. You tilt it in any direction and the play area acts accordingly. There are toy equivalents in the real world that act like this, such as little maze games that you hold in your hand and tilt to get a ball to a goal and avoid holes on the way. But there's a crucial difference here.
You usually hold those little toys close to your body and look down at them, while you play Monkey Ball in a more alert stance, with your hand stretched out, holding the Remote like a TV remote control. Your hand can twist left and right and up easily, but tilting forward causes strain on your wrist. Sure, you can make it work that way -- or you could swing your entire arm and knock your soda glass off the table, or balance the remote on the palm of your hand like in some of the Wario Ware microgames -- but fundamentally, the control mechanism isn't entirely comfortable. The human wrist wasn't built to hold a tool horizontally and tilt downwards.
The moment I started to play Monkey Ball, I wanted to tilt the controller upwards and pick an angled or vertical idle stance. Since Wario Ware uses every single way possible of holding a Remote, it'd be this one:
Like a detached joystick, you can tilt the controller in every direction without strain since your wrist is in its natural, straight position. I'm not sure if the Wii Remote tilt detection is less accurate when held vertically, but I'd greatly prefer a return to this admittedly more standard control setup.
Some games will no doubt also resort to having players hold the controller horizontally with two hands, like some of the racing games out now. Which leads me to the other problem child of Wii gaming: the first-person shooter.
Ignoring the current issues of trying to emulate mouse-look controls with a controller that you can't easily re-center without using a "drag" button approach, I'm a bit worried about extended playtimes in future FPS games. Aiming the remote at the screen and using the B Button as the trigger works reasonably well -- but there's a reason guns have handles. Once again, the shape of the Remote forces players to tilt their wrist forward at a slightly unnatural angle.
Luckily, the Remote doesn't act exactly like a light gun. That means, you're not required to aim exactly at a certain point on your screen. I'd love to see a developer include a calibration feature that lets you set up your Remote so that you're holding it at an upward angle, aiming at a higher point than the screen. It won't look like you're holding a gun (unless you pretend that there's an invisible gun barrel protruding at a 135-degree angle from the underside of the Remote), but it might just feel a whole lot more comfortable.
It's pretty clear that developers are still at the outset of starting to explore how versatile these Wii controllers really are. The issues I highlighted above only become apparent when you play games that don't allow for much repose between actions. There's no discomfort when you're pulling out Link's hookshot every couple of minutes or so -- but imagine playing a 15-minute match of an online FPS holding the controllers remote-style. I'm curious to see some of the solutions developers will come up with to support the marathon game sessions many online gamers are used to.
What do you think? Do you mind pointing the remote straight at the screen for long periods of time? Any control schemes work better than others?
I'm That Guy
Do you roll your eyes at characters in horror movies that do things that just don't make sense? I'm not talking about the bad guy getting up multiple times after being drowned, charred, blown to bits or buried -- I'm talking about the nubile teen hearing a noise from her basement and slowly creeping down there to investigate its source, armed with a flashlight.
I'm afraid to say that I just realized that I'm that person (well, minus the nubile and minus the teen part). As much as I hate seeing the "don't go in there!" cliche come up in every second suspense flick, I have to admit that I'm guilty of acting just like the idiots in the movies. I didn't realize this until yesterday, when I found myself looking for some fire wood next to my house and tripped over my axe. I stopped for a moment to ponder that I had just violated virtually all rules for horror movie character survival. I was 1) walking around outside at night, 2) without a light, 3) out of sight of anyone else, 4) in the rain, 5) in a place with an axe, 6) spider-covered wood logs, in 7) California. Luckily it wasn't 8) a full moon and I hadn't had 9) sex or 10) smoked pot or I would surely be dead. I laughed at the silliness of it all, violating rule 11): don't laugh while walking around outside at night, without a light, out of sight, in the rain, when standing next to an axe covered with spiders.
I'm actually not a courageous guy or anything. It's simply that things that happen in horror movies -- whether supernatural or realistic -- aren't on my mind when I'm looking for something. Case in point, two months back, my wife and I woke up in the middle of the night because we heard a strange scratching noise. I suspected the kids and walked out in the dark without turning on the lights to check who had the audacity to scrape the walls at 3:00 am on a weekday. You see, I didn't turn the lights on because I didn't want to end up waking up the two innocent kids on my quest to find the culprit. I found all kids asleep. My next thought was: "yuck, rats!" I finally tracked the sound to the hall closet containing our heating system. Inside: a damn sparrow.
Half a year ago, I heard a noise in the garage while watching a movie. I thought: crap, something fell off the wall. I walked into the garage right away, turned on the light -- and the neighbor's black cat came reeling out of the garage into my living room and knocked over my Japanese clay Haniwa statue. The latter is a replica of the clay idols the Japanese buried in ancient times with their dead. In hindsight, I seem to be great at ignoring obvious negative omens, too.
Maybe I shouldn't keep an axe next to my house. My garage's pretty full though. I might have to store my chainsaw outside in order to make room for the axe.
Sounds like a plan.
PS: Are you that guy, too?
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IceTGressa
Feb 11 '07 7:43 pm PST
My possible last taste of gaming.
I spent the day playing some old NES games like Metroid, Megaman 2, and SMB 3 and then played...
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Feb 11 '07 7:00 pm PST
Panda Sneeze
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Feb 11 '07 6:45 pm PST
The Sarah Silverman Program Pt. 2
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Feb 11 '07 6:24 pm PST
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Feb 11 '07 5:41 pm PST
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Feb 11 '07 5:07 pm PST
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Feb 11 '07 3:59 pm PST
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Feb 11 '07 3:12 pm PST
Classic cartridge cleaning
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Feb 11 '07 2:41 pm PST
I bought Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin today
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