Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.

by Jamison DeLorenzo

Who doesn’t enjoy bashing companies like EA? Memorial day weekends bring that type of thinking to my mind. Anyway, judging by sales figures over the past couple of years it seems lots of people not only have been annoyed by a lack of good games from EA but many people have been also quite annoyed by many of their acts (overworking employees, buying out competition, destroying good gaming franchises, and creating monopolies with exclusive gaming licenses to name a few). As someone who has been steadfastly against anything EA has done for the past 3 years, I believe it is time to, at the very least, look at the cesspool that is their company and see if there is anything worth being salvaged.

It is true that avoiding their games has only been exacerbated by an unhealthy addiction to World of Warcraft. It is easy to avoid games when you only have interest in playing one. I am a much happier gamer now that I have moved on from that addiction. I still refuse to buy any new games with the EA logo on them, but enough time has passed where I can at least examine their current franchises to try and find something that may make me say that they are not operating at a 100% evil capacity anymore. They did pull the plug on their James Bond games finally, so they are starting to figure something out.

I will not make it a secret that the impending release of Spore next year is part of my motivation. I won’t even try to deny that Warhammer Online has piqued my interest. There have been a couple games that I would have given a chance recently had it not been my credo to avoid any of their products. I have not gone as far as convincing myself that what they spit out is covered in e-coli (yet) because most of their games have been garbage. Madden and NBA Live have been their most shining examples of trash games for three years running. This has made their exclusive license push all the more aggravating. It’s like the old saying goes- you cannot force feed your customers garbage. As they were topping the garbage with sewage I have not been hungry for any of their services.

Let us look at their main franchises to get an idea of what they can do to turn their name around (in terms of quality games).

Madden- Their most popular series in terms of units sold, this franchise has been dead to me since 2002 and many joined my way of thinking once the Sega 2K series started taking off and surpassed Madden in overall game quality and presentation. For many this series became dead once the exclusive license hammer dropped. I published a list of fundamental problems with the gameplay within the past year that I have had since 1999. The way I see it, until these problems are resolved and the exclusive license expires the franchise will stay dead.

NBA Live - If you are a sports junky like me you have been pained by this series for a good chunk of time. NBA2K has been the better franchise for 3 years (despite Shaq being on the cover), and really the problem is that Live dropped the ball after 2004. The 2003/2004 timeframe for Live presented great gameplay for basketball, only the franchise has regressed since then. The franchise mode does not feel as complete anymore, the constant changing of the jump step is annoying (first it was overpowered, and then it never resulted in anything but a charge or travel- make up your friggin’ mind people!), and the AI is terrible. I’m happy with 2K and have no intentions of going back. The Live games need to be completely revamped before I can consider giving them a chance again.

SimCity - To be fair this game was so good I didn’t even know that EA owned Maxis until SimCity 3000. I didn’t know Maxis made it until deep into my SimCity 2000 phase. I didn’t care. While there have been a plethora of Sim titles over the past 10 years SimCity is the flagship and the best of any of the other Sim games. That is, until SimCity 4 came out. By the grace of God I managed to borrow the game from someone before simply buying it. 3000 is my favorite of all the iterations in the SimCity franchise, so seeing 4 fall flat on its face was, in fact, heartbreaking. The economy in the game was completely broken- the fact that you needed to build a city whose sole purpose was to take in garbage and power from the city you wanted to build was very annoying. I was in the group of people who never had a problem making money in any of the City games in any of the first 3 titles, but somehow in 4 generating revenue became impossible. Sure, the integration with Sims to get people to give you feedback on neighborhoods was quite cool, but when you can’t have fun building a city you know the game is broken. Maybe the next title in the series will be fine, but until then nostalgia will win out on this series.

Sims - If you want to talk about addictions, this is a great place to start. The appeal of playing a game where you simulate someone’s life is difficult to explain. In college I coined the Point Blank Theory, which states that some games look less appealing than a Pauly Shore movie until you sit down to play them. The overall definition of the theory is still in flux because those movies are still highly unappealing when you sit down to watch them, which blows apart the gaming theory as a whole. Anyway, people went from openly mocking the game to refusing to give up the controller after 30 minutes. I mention this because the game didn’t look fun until I sat down and gave it a whirl. After years of playing the original I came up with a list of changes that I thought would be good shifts in game’s fundamentals. Three of them made it into Sims 2, which, to me, proved that my advanced degree in computer science paid off (nevermind the whole job thing). The downside is that the number of expansion packs for these games is a running joke in the gaming community, despite their high sales numbers. Reducing the number of expansion packs by making the packs larger would go a long way to rebuilding the character issues people have with the company.

Command & Conquer - One of the staples of the RWS (Real-time War Simulation) genre (a.k.a. RTS, but as I’ve said in the past real-time strategy is a horrid genre name because that name applies just as well to Tetris as this franchise). Quite honestly I was never as big of a fan of this franchise as WarCraft (before WarCraft 3), but these games have been genuinely solid. There has not been a lot of fresh ideas in the genre as a whole in a while, let alone this franchise, but if they did make the next game as fresh as the first and second games were people would eat it up. People are dying for a great new RWS- evidenced by the fervor surrounding the announcement of StarCraft 2.

Battlefield - Not being much of a war game fan it is hard to really get behind them and defend them as a good potential cornerstone for EA, but Battlefield 2 was a fantastic game at its core. There were some issues with multiplayer that hurt its reputation before some early patches, but this game was very well done as a FPS. Commandeering vehicles was fantastic, but the coolest part of the game for me was the ability to play the role of a general and drop in supplies and reinforcements. It isn’t that hard to bring in fresh ideas into such a young genre, but when you throw down the improvements that Battlefield 2 did you a great franchise starting to catch steam. War games are not my thing, but I can tell you that the reception the gaming community gave the last installment in the franchise will only serve as a launching point for fans and production budget for Battlefield 3.

Need for Speed - If you like driving games at one point you had to have given one of the Need for Speed games a shot. If you are like me you waited until Underground 2 in 2004 before you bothered looking at it. Right now I am knee deep in my used copy of Carbon and am loving every second of it. I used to think that GTA and Carmageddon were the only games where you just drive around and cause vehicular mayhem. Within the past two years I discovered this game and one other. The car customization combined with the street racing is entertaining. I don’t know how much fresh air can be breathed into this series considering the numerous iterations to date, but if EA keeps this franchise breathing then they can start to win people over again.

Burnout - This is the other game that involves vehicular destruction. This game is so similar to Need for Speed I wonder why EA continues to make it- other than to milk money off of a franchise name. This game doesn’t have a career where you build up a car like Need for Speed, but you do have several challenges for races and destruction. This franchise made sense to me when Akklaim held it, but right now it feels like the only thing this game has going for it is the destruction challenges. The game felt old to me after one iteration, and in my opinion this franchise should be buried and forgotten.

If you include the upcoming Spore release, the only positive things I can see coming down the pike from EA revolve around simulations, probably Need for Speed, and maybe Command & Conquer. Nothing else under the EA franchise name holds any appeal for me at all. Really the message I want to send here is that I want to lighten up on EA and give them a shot, but their lineup is not helping me get there. So while my earlier movie analogy failed, right now I honestly can state that this sentiment makes think of EA as the gaming version of the Wachowski Brothers.

No… that wasn’t a compliment.

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