The Gamer’s Quagmire #52: Pets, Guns, and Magic Wands
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.
by Jamison DeLorenzo
If you ever want a truly enigmatic experience, at this point you just may need a video game vacation. It does sound quite cliché, but it does a great job at soothing the body, the mind, and the soul. The gaming aspect about such a trip is always interesting (otherwise, why are would you ever plan one?), but the best part is invariably a discussion about the gaming itself. If you have a good group of people who can philosophize about this for several hours, you have yourself a winner.Replaying the week in my head this morning while on the way to work (maybe daydreaming along with cell phones need to be outlawed in cars- can we do that?) forced me to link two concepts that I originally thought were completely unrelated. Think about the success of the current consoles and health of the PC gaming market. Nintendo struck a chord with the Wii that tons of people did not expect, and that is the way in which we interact with video games. No, I am not referring to smashing a controller against a wall when the CPU defeats you.
People like to point to the PC gaming market as the place where all the best cutting edge games go, but is that really true? If you think purely about graphical achievements then you would be right on because looking at the video arms race, even just with a small reference window of this past year, you will see a gigantic leap in video card power… processing power and power consumption (remember, puns are our friends). Perhaps we have gone too far with the 2 PCIe slot graphic cards that you can easily use to bludgeon someone to death. Aside from pure power, the last real innovation the PC gaming market brought to the table was the online RPG.
Consoles have been the stage for the biggest innovations within the last several years in gaming. Look at the success of the EyeToy, Wiimote, DS, and the DDR pad. The world’s most successful games have largely been the result of a combination of any of these innovations, and that is discounting the Guiter Hero guitar (I cannot think of a quick catchy name for it, hence its earlier omission). It is true that there are games that just work on their own steam, such as a blockbuster console release like Halo, but the way I see it the truth of the matter is that gamers are tired of the dual analog and the keyboard/mouse.
If you don’t believe that the interaction is the latest big idea in gaming then you are missing out on some important things. First you should look at the stock price of Nintendo over the last year. If you are one of those ‘numbers are boring’ people or just don’t feel like doing the research then all you need to know is that your investment would have tripled in the past year. This is far more than just Nintendo getting lucky at the race track.
I am in the camp of people that need some graphical innovation, so shiny things do easily distract me. Unfortunately, cost of development is a big barrier for many companies that want to make a lot of successful games. This was easy when the gaming industry was just getting started because all you had was one button, a joystick, and 8-bit graphics. Games like Tetris don’t succeed because of graphics- they succeed because they are easy to understand and play.
So what did Sony and Microsoft miss this time around? Multimedia and online play do have a market, so they have put very good systems together (minus alarming hardware issues). Video game consoles in the home was new to everyone in the 80’s, and when games have one button and a joystick everyone can get in on the action. Bring a controller with 10+ buttons in front of your parents now and many of them will be scared away. Did you really thought DDR and the Wii were successful because the games were good? Seriously?
This has been the argument from the Sony and Microsoft fanbots almost since the consoles were first announced and to an extent it still happens today. Look at the games that were coming out in the 80’s and honestly tell me how games with such a simple notion could ever succeed today. Adventure was a horribly cheesy game, but the technology was so new that people had a unique experience playing it. What is very strange is that the dragons guarding the keys in the game still scare me.
Fast forward to today. Look at the stylus and the DS. After two years of struggling, Nintendo has finally found the games that sell the system. What, did you think Nintendogs sold because it was a deep and interesting game? Part of the reason for the game’s success is because of the previous success of Tamagotchi, but it is also one of the first video game translations of it. DDR is a sweeping success because everyone understands dancing to music. Girls will generally run away screaming from complicated controllers (almost as though you are trying to solicit a date), but throw down a pad where you can dance to modern music and they’ll have fun all day long. Put a guitar in the hands of people who are not used to it and they will be entertained for hours on end. Put a light gun in someone’s hand and they will be happy to shoot at anything that pops onto the screen. Put a magic wand in front of someone and they will do whatever they can (including embedding it in the TV, but that isn’t recommended).
The next time you catch yourself defending your PC for gaming because your graphics are always better or your keyboard and mouse will never be beaten you need to ask yourself when you became a dinosaur. Gaming innovation is now in the hands of new controllers, and any developer that does not seriously take this into consideration is going to endanger themselves with possible extinction.
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July 16, 2007
The Gamer’s Quagmire #48: Console Track & Field Disaster
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.
by Jamison DeLorenzo
Last week, in case you missed it, E3 was debuted in its new format. That is, it debuted in its new, trimmed town, invite-only, debut. For gamers this is like football fans needing the NFL giving them permission to purchase tickets to the Super Bowl. One of my must-do items in my life was, at one point, to take the trek over to the West Coast and attend this event. Getting knocked off of my feet with an overload of gaming was one of those things that just felt like it needed to be done. Some other form of gaming event is going to have to take place instead. To tie me over until I figure out what this may be, I decided to hunker down on my couch after a ton of meaningless housework (repairing some electrical wiring, doorbell repair, deck cleaning, weeding, etc.) and go back to Final Fantasy XII. This was never going to be a monumental event for me, but it has been making my skin crawl that I have not completed this game yet. So I spent the next day and half leveling all 6 of the characters in the game to almost level 60… and nothing else. Good times all around, right?
Unfortunately, E3 did force me to think about something during this gaming marathon. Watching all of the coverage from G4, including the commercial break in the middle of the new Halo 3 trailer on Day 1, I got some pretty big messages from each of the console developers. Being the person that I am, it wasn’t the message they were intending. Let me share with you my impressions of where each of the consoles is going over the next few months:
Xbox 360: If you ask me by now Microsoft should know exactly what is going on with their hardware difficulties. One of its hardware consultants even posted on his own web log (or perhaps it ran in a tech journal… who cares?) where the heat problem came into play with the console. Good news right? The Elite version that was announced recently is going to solve this problem? Okay, the timing was a little off. Fine. There is an announcement from Microsoft that makes us think they have a good idea what the problem though, right? Well, they did announce eating $1.5 billion in warranty costs. Luckily for us, who are still nervous about their console dying at any second, that there’s no end in sight.
If there was a way to transfer saves off my hard disk for when the new console comes in this wouldn’t be an issue. I’m not going to replay all of my old games so I can go after the bigger achievements, are you? Wait, they still have no meaning, so why even bother caring? Well, then perhaps that is one problem solved.
On the plus side their online services are still a major selling point and they do have several intriguing games coming around the corner. Mass Effect, the new BioWare RPG, looks especially mouthwatering. Granted, you may not have much to look forward too if shooters or RPG’s are not your thing, but game selection for a lot of people is not an issue. Still, it should bother everyone who pays attention to games that Microsoft is too (ignorant?) to see that if they solved their hardware problems then they would own the U.S. market and perhaps the European one as well. It’s tough to love a console that you are scared to death of will die any second.
PS3: We just started to get a glimmer of hope that Sony was going to start to turn their PR image around. The firmware updates have dramatically improved the functionality of the console, their price drop felt like an admission of guilt and a decent market correction, and even working on getting the rumble functionality back into the controller made many people feel good about what Sony has been doing since Katuragi left with his tail between his legs. People wanting to like the PS3 were just starting to feel good about themselves.
Fear not- the recent price drop has been a liquidation of what is now a hardware configuration that is no longer in production. It is now time to make room for the 80GB model because… well… um… the extra 20 GB is the next step in the console’s evolution? Did Sony forget how awesome it was that they allowed people to take out the hard drive of the PS3 and swap it in for any hard drive we wanted? Microsoft wants strict control over their hardware and doesn’t allow this (and they’re the ones who still have the hardware failures- neat, huh?). I can pop in a 400 GB hard drive at any time into my PS3. The manual that comes with the PS3 tells me how to do this.
Nobody should be buying a console for this reason, and while technical superiority should never be the top selling point of a console (games should always be #1, in case you are lost), it should at least be able to be a selling point. It is rather pathetic when you are unable to point to such a powerful piece of hardware and convince people that you know how to sell it. The price dropped by $100, and while it is not enough for everyone it was enough to get plenty of people jumping at the console. Now the price is back to $599. Does anyone at Sony with a brain have an MBA?
The positive news for the PS3 is that there are a good set of games coming out soon and a ton in development. The current PS3 library pales greatly in comparison to the 360, but it is not hard to see that the library is growing at a good pace. If the good games do not come out for it soon then it is very possible that the consoles will never start selling. You can’t ride the PS2 sales forever (which, remarkably, are still selling quite well).
Wii: This is the most difficult console to like because I was a huge Nintendo fan for a long time. Their new controller, while somewhat scary, looks like a phenomenal idea (ignore the extra wrist strain for now). The Wii has reached into a previously untapped gaming demographic and is easily the most intriguing selling point out of any this generation. Gamers should be thrilled, not only at the idea, but that because their older relatives would actually by the Wii for themselves that they are way more likely to be getting games for their gift-receiving holidays.
While the consoles are flying off the shelves for this reason, it also begs the question- will people who never cared about gaming for the Wii buy any new titles after they get the initial box? There are going to be a percentage of people that do not get anything else. Most will probably only be a select few party games for the system and call it a day. Honestly, Nintendo could simply walk away from the Wii right now and still point to a big profit and laugh and Sony and Microsoft. I wouldn’t blame them for this at all, because at least that would explain their upcoming list of games.
This the one console that I want to like but fail to see any games on the horizon worth playing. One or two I can sort of talk myself into renting to check out, but a console needs more than that. I’m not picking up a console just to play bowling or go fishing. I have way more fun doing the real thing. Something like Smash Brothers is worth getting people over at a house and getting drunk to play, but, again, a console needs more than that to survive. E3 should have been an announcement of all the cool games Nintendo was working on, and instead we get a steering wheel, mat, and gun peripheral (the latter of which I thought the base controller handled quite well).
Give a gambler a reason to gamble and they’ll thank you for it. Gamers are a similar breed, and each console is struggling to give me a reason, although honestly the PS3 is giving me the best reason… assuming that I can focus on the upcoming games list and not the business decisions. If Microsoft can solve their hardware issues and Nintendo can solve their software issues than we would finally have a good battle of games between all three consoles- something that Nintendo would probably win. Instead, we have three hurdlers knocking over several gates past the first turn in the race. In other words, things are hardly a pretty sight.
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