MAHG - Can Sony Promote without Bashing?

Sony is insecure. They have a quality product with laudable features, but where they should be spending their promotional time and dollars advertising themselves and why they have a superior offering, they can’t seem to stop attacking and belittling their competition.

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MAHG - Kinect vs. Move

Nintendo has been a runaway success with the Wii console. Where motion controls and casual games were at best a niche market when it came to consoles, they proved that consumers would buy the hardware as fast as they could make it. Hoping to capitalize on the idea, both Microsoft and Sony have introduced new devices that promise to “change the way [we'll] play games” on their respective consoles. But how are they doing it, and will it pay off?

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A new gig - Mad As Hell Reviews

I'm taking on a new assignment, which hopefully will motivate me to write a lot more (or at least more consistently) than I have been up 'til now. I am now the Editorial Commentator for Mad As Hell Reviews, the opinion and editorial section of Mad As Hell Gamers.

MAHG is the creation of JediChric and SparkStalker, the ones who started the podcasting movement at GeezerGamers.com. They decided to branch out and do their own thing, creating their own brand as it were.

Since game reviews are the domain of some of the other contributors there, I'll likely keep my own game reviews (when I have time for them) over here, when I get around to them. But, I may end up throwing a review over there instead, if it happens to fill in a gap they need to have covered.

In any case, look for my first post, coming very soon. I won't spoil it, but I'll give you a hint as to the topic: it may move you, you may connect with it, and it'll change the way you read blog posts this holiday season.

Released this month was the beta for Halo Reach, Bungie's last game in the Halo franchise; and all people with a copy of Halo ODST were invited to jump in the beta (in a matter very similar to Crackdown and the Halo 3 beta three years ago).

I think it goes without saying that I, of course, jumped in.

It definitely feels like Halo. The look, the sounds, the weapons, they are all very at home in the Halo universe. But there are a lot of differences, too, that make it new and exciting.

Visually, I'd say Reach is "grittier" than the other Halo games. It is set immediately before the events of Halo 1, and it's made to look older and less polished than the games set in a later time. (Whether that "makes sense", considering Reach fell in a very short time before Halo 1's opening, is I'm sure a matter of debate.) Spartan armor is mottled and scuffed instead of smooth and shiny, and even the medals that appear on-screen have a dirty, textured look to them.

The "equipment" feature from Halo 3 has evolved into "armor abilities". Instead of picking up a piece of equipment, you spawn with a certain ability as part of your "loadout" (which is a combination of your armor ability — constant until you die — and your starting weapons — which can be replaced with what you find on the battlefield). You may choose a loadout with Sprint, Armor Lock, Jetpack, or Cloak. (Elites, in the game types where you can play them, have a Roll/Evade ability in place of the Sprint, and they have no Armor Lock.)

The loadout feature is nice, in that it gives you the option to tailor your abilities to your playing style. Also, since you can choose a new loadout every time you spawn, you're not locked into something for the entire game — you can switch abilities between deaths depending on how the enemy is reacting or how the game is playing. (In traditional capture-the-flag games, I was partial to using Cloak to get in or guard the flag, and then switching to Sprint once the flag was in motion.)

Also new are assassinations. When you come up behind someone, you can tap your melee button for an instant kill. That's not new. But if you hold the button down, you will perform an assassination move that lets your opponent know they've been owned, with a knife in the back, or a neck-breaking head twist, or a pound to the ground. That's new. They don't seem like much, but they add a lot to the game, especially when you sprint up behind the enemy flag carrier, jump up behind him, and do a two-fisted pummel to smash him into the ground inches before the score point to save the game. The only danger is, during the assassination animation, you are vulnerable, and someone can kill you to save their teammate. Or, someone can kill your victim and steal your kill (you are awarded with an "assist", for holding them still, I suppose). The beta did seem overly sensitive in turning quick-touch kills into animated assassinations, which resulted in a few vulnerable deaths in close quarter intense firefights; that may have been intentional, to show off and test the assassination code.

One of the interesting problems in making a prequel game is adding new elements to make the game interesting, but without adding things that make the past seem better than the future and leave you wondering, "What happened to R2-D2's thrusters?" I don't know if they've succeeded here or not. It could be argued that these armor abilities were only in development on Reach and were therefore lost when the planet fell. Maybe the campaign will address this, or maybe it'll just sweep it under the rug. While it may not be important to Reach's game play, it will have an effect on the overall Halo universe; and for a company that has dedicated much into the building of this universe's story, it will be important, especially to maintain the immersion. I suppose we'll see how it plays out when the game launches.

In all, I'm excited for the new Halo. It's different enough from Halo 3 to be new, but enough of the same to be worth playing. My preorder is in for the retail release, which, I'm sure by no coincidence, has been announced for exactly 117 days after the end of the beta.

Piracy Causes Everything

Many software publishers and developers like to blame piracy for everything, from less-than-expected sales to the reason for DRM, but this is a new one. Sony America's Senior VP of Public Relations Rob Dyer gave an interview to Gamasutra recently. In the interview, Gamasutra brought up the lagging sales of the PSP handheld consoles. Dyer's response:

… And we also believe that there's a way that you will be able to, not stop, but slow down the piracy in the first 30 to 60 days from a tech perspective. There's some code that you can embed that we've been helping developers implement in order to get people at least to see a 60-day shelf life before it gets hacked and it shows up on BitTorrent.

That's been the biggest problem, no question about it. It's become a very difficult proposition to be profitable, given the piracy right now. And the fact that the category shrunk inside of retail.

It's true; you can't hit any torrent tracker site without seeing thousands of download links for a Sony PSP.

Wait, no.

Last time I checked, you can't download hardware. And if pirates are actively seeking out games to download and play, it stands to reason they'd need a piece of hardware to play them on. So, rampant piracy of games, if anything, should have an increase of hardware sales, no? Heck, I'd be more inclined to buy a PSP if I knew I could easily hack it and get a bunch of free games for it (if I did that sort of thing).

Piracy may have an impact on the revenue the entire division brings in, when you combine hardware and software; but until we can hook up a replicator to BitTorrent, you'll have a hard time convincing me that the failure to move hardware is a fault of piracy.

A Look at Swearing in Video Games

Here's a nice little opinion piece written by the author Mohammed over at Frag Crunch, titled "A Look at Swearing in Video Games". I've expressed my dismay on more than one occasion here about a game's use of excessive language ruining the experience (or interest) for me. It's always nice to get a second opinion.

I'm not sure I'd go as far as he did in his conclusion, though, that the excess of a few examples necessarily negates a whole medium's status as art. I would suggest that Hollywood has put out quite a few movies that take things to excess with little value (language, gratuitous sex, violence, meaningless special effects); but just because Michael Bay puts out a few movies that are all explosions and no plot, I wouldn't say movies aren't an art form in the general sense. The value of certain, particular works of art in the medium can be debated, but I'd still say it's a form of expression.

Single player vs. multiplayer

I've completed the Legendary campaigns of Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo ODST. I've slogged through the Veteran campaigns of Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4, including rescuing a hostage from an airplane full of terrorists in less than 60 seconds. I've even managed to get through a complete episode of Left 4 Dead 2 on... well, Advanced, not Expert.

And yet, when I attempt to play on Xbox Live, I might as well bring a knife to a gunfight.

I don't know what it is, whether it's incompetent enemy AI or something in me that just chokes when I go against human players. All I know is, this music video sums it up nicely. :)