Good news, more content and games reviews are coming, I got friends of mine to write up reviews for Wii and PS3 games that I don’t own or don’t have time to play. Sense I won’t pay them in anything except love, I can’t guarantee when those articles will be available to me to publish, or when I will get around to uploading them. For that matter, when WordPress will not glitch up long enough for me to upload something, I swear when I get a job I am going to buy some cheap web hosting for this site. So yeah if anything is reading this that isn’t the two friends I have writing now, you have a reason to be excited.
As fair and balanced as Fox News.
Right-o time for another installment of my weekly news rundown, that isn’t weekly at all. I have got 6 subjects on the line for today and some of them are pretty good, others are things only I care about. But sense I wrote it and could give two shits about what you want, so here you go.
Is the 360’s decision to use DVD’s starting to hurt them? Verdict: Uh, pretty sure it has been for a while.
What the current 360 situation is.
Okay so everyone needs to dust their brains off here for a second because I am going to ask you to think, ready? Think back 3 years ago to a time when shiny new HD consoles were just starting to compete with one another. The Wii was in its only little world of sunshine, daisies, and happiness, blissfully unaware that its only good games for the next 4 years had just come out, and the rest of us were unaware that this wouldn’t matter for some reason. The 360 was enjoying a healthy dose of ‘hardcore’ dominance with hits like Halo 3 and the surprising dose of excellent that was Gears of War. The PS3 was just out and attempting the almost impossible task of crawling up the massive hole that Sony and Microsoft had collectively dug for the PS3. Sony had one big weapon it was using to get customers, the Blu-ray disc, capable of 40GB of data storage, it was supposed to usher in this wonderful new world of gaming where everything would look like a Pixar movie and play as good as Shadow of the Colossus.
The affore mentioned Pixar/SotC mix.
So Microsoft did something that was so incredibly brilliant, I am shocked to admit it happened, they went out and paid money so all those developers who were strapped for cash because of the massive cost of building new game engines, would release their games on both consoles. This was good for devs for a couple of reasons, first they got big checks from Microsoft, second developing for the 360 was like developing for the original Xbox or a PC you just had more power on tap so the costs were relatively low, and third it made them all pretty much hate the PS3 for being overly complicated, overly expensive, and there was almost no advantages to it all. So here you have this massive block of power that is the 360, and next to it you have the PS3 which is undoubtedly more powerful but that power is broken up into a bunch of smaller pieces you have to make worth together, which is hard, and devs are lazy lazy lazy folks, work is like the plague to them. So Microsoft effectively neutralized the advantage that the PS3 had in hardware, because it was cheaper and easier to make it for the 360, so they did, and then ported it to the PS3. So basically every game was only as powerful as the 360 could be, not as powerful as the PS3 could be, but see things designed to work on 360 hardware with DVD’s don’t work so well with PS3 hardware and Blu-ray discs. So we entered into this wonderful world of subpar ports and massive hard drive installs, because a Blu-ray reader is half as fast as a DVD reader so you have to install all the data to the hard drive to make up for it. So after owning say 10 games in the first year, your entire hard drive has already been eaten up. I think my best example of this would be DMC4, everyone cried out for Sony’s metaphorical head when they found out DMC4 had a 5GB install on the PS3, when they should have been asking for Capcom’s head. What the fuck? Sony didn’t program the damn game, if Capcom can’t figure out how to mask load times that’s their problem, I criticize because Uncharted had already come out and was eyepoppingly good looking with no hard drive install, if they could do it so could you Capcom, but that would have required work. Orange Box is another one to look at, let’s be clear here, Half-Life 2 is a great game, probably one of the best ever, but Source has never really been a graphics powerhouse. So when Orange Box got ported to the PS3 it would stand to reason it would look pretty good, christ my 5 year old laptop can play Half-Life 2 pretty flawlessly. But if you played Orange Box for PS3 you would know that it looks like Half-Life 2 running on the Commodore 64, because all EA did was take the PC code and dump it on a Blu-ray disc, that game had memory leaks you could drive an Aircraft carrier through.
Relativly speaking thats a small Aircraft Carrier.
Sony stood their ground and said ‘In 3 years you’re going to rue the day you decided to make the 360 your lead platform!’ and everyone laughed. Now 3 years later guess what? Actually it’s not what you think; about a year ago most studios switched over and made the PS3 the lead platform. Rockstar started the murmurings when they spent the vast majority of the last year of development complaining about having to cut a lot of shit out of GTAIV because it just wouldn’t fit. It’s funny because EA D.I.C.E. is one of my favorite targets in the world, they just make it too damn easy, but they were the ones that made the switch. Mirror’s Edge was lead dev’d on the PS3, and something really remarkable happened as a result, D.I.C.E. came out and said that making PS3 lead was struggle at first but after growing pains it was really fast and allowed them to push the game well beyond what it would have been. Then people saw MGS4, and Resistance 2, and Killzone 2, they saw the tech demo’s for Heavy Rain, the first shots of God Of War III running. They found out that Sucker Punch made infamous on an optimized PS2 engine and it looked better then a lot of their lead 360 games that got ported. It dawned on everyone, Sony was telling the truth. There system was expensive and cumbersome at launch but it was future proofed for years to come, the 360 was easy at launch but now basic games require 2 discs just to run on the fucking thing. If you think I am just blowing smoke, think about this, would Microsoft be touting Natal as a relaunch of the system if they had years of power yet to be unlocked? There games are maxed out so there shifting the focus to something else instead.
Thank god, it had been a year sense I bought Halo again! RE-FUCKING-JOYCE!
All of this is building up to the rather simple point that the decision to use DVD’s instead of a new media standard was a move Microsoft made to capture the eye of studios struggling with spiraling development costs, and to keep their system cheap to capture new gamers. But all that was stuff for launch and the 2 years that followed, they had no real concrete plan after that, and now everyone who is willing to admit it, is seeing the cracks in the mighty Microsoft juggernaut. The DVD’s were always a problem, they were always going to be a bigger and bigger problem with each passing year, id Software was the first major player to say it. There new title ‘Rage’ was going to have to be severely compressed to fit on 2 Xbox DVD’s, while the PS3 one was 1 disc that ran faster, with less load times and looked better. The Lost Planet 2 team is lamenting that 30% of their game is going to have to be released as day-1 DLC packs because they can’t fit it on the discs. Oh yeah in case you weren’t aware that’s why day-1 DLC for Multi-console titles has become big because they can’t fit it on the fucking discs and have to give it back to you right away. 700mb of content is roughly 1/10 of a DVD, so bonus quests and characters and maps and modes have to be sold back to you later. Sony loves it because developers pay by the mb on the PSN, so now all the sudden the 360 is costing them more money than the PS3, how do you like that? Payback, as they say, is a bitch.
Payback, personified.
Sony America’s new PSPgo promotion from an early adopter’s standpoint. Verdict: My balls hurt from being busted so much.
That is Sony's metaphorical cock, slapping me in the face.
Okay so admittedly that first one was a bit of an anti-360 rant as well as piece about why Microsoft knowingly fucked there users from day 1. Sense I am nothing if not a fair and balanced individual, lets balance the scales out by talking about how Sony fucked there users from day 1, and then 6 months later decided to slap them in the face for letting themselves get fucked. I want to make a point clear first, I bought a PSPgo day 1, drove 40 minutes to get it too, so I could use Best Buy coupons to make its price a little easier to swallow. I really like it, its light, it looks cool, and the idea of a handheld that is digital only is really cool; it opens the door for Sony to do some neat things with it. Just look at Steam, everybody loves it, hell my 60 year old Dad loves it because it’s easy and intuitive and most importantly it understands that as a digital only delivery platform it can do deals and promotions and still make gobs of money. You can tell that Sony looked long and hard at the iPhone as a games platform, and how its distribution works, and then they looked at Steam and how it delivers content, and then proceeded to take all those wonderful things they learned and throw them into a fire, and then take the ashes and piss on them, and then launch them into space.
Bye bye solid advice! We barely knew you!
For me the whole go of online distribution is that you can get things to people cheaper and faster than disc based, which would imply that things for the PSPgo would be cheaper then say the regular PSP, that implication however is dead wrong. It isn’t cheaper, not even 1 cent cheaper, in fact when you factor in powering the device and paying for the internet connection to download it, it’s probably more expensive. Let’s start from the beginning though, when the Go launched in America I got a voucher for Rockband Unplugged, it was a completely free game, and could not have cared less about it. No instead I went and got Patapon 2 and God of War, you know games that people care about and buy systems to play. Europe got Gran Turismo PSP for free, and got to trade in three PSP UMD discs for download vouches, essentially getting 4 free games for buying the fucking thing. Weeks later they were giving codes to download LittleBIGPlanet PSP, Assassins Creed Bloodlines, or Motorstorm. In case you’re wondering that tally is now up to 5 free 40 dollar games, which math teaches me is roughly 200 dollars, which means European owners paid around 50 bucks for their Go’s. Japan got similar deals with different games, and months later here in the U.S. the best I have gotten is still Rockband Unplugged. I think I qualify as a fairly loyal Sony consumer; I am one of maybe 250,000 U.S. PSPgo owners, basically the early adopters that are even allowing Sony to continue with this games Platform. I have maintained the entire time that eventually Sony will wise up and start giving discounts to Go owners via the PSN, and maybe some game vouches.
Like another really popular content delivery platform does.
So imagine my joy last week when I found out that they were finally bringing the AC:B and LBP deal to the U.S. all you had to do was register your device on the PSN and you would be sent a voucher…..wait, what the fuck? What if I already registered my device on the PSN months ago when I bought the fucker and couldn’t use it for 3 days until I got a goddamn wireless signal to do a firmware update sense you can’t do that over a corded connection for some arbitrary reason? If that’s the case then congratulations you have been completely fucked over by Sony, the deal is only valid for brand new PSN users, therefore only good for brand new Go owners. The rest of us that spent our hard earned money to support you in your fledgling days are getting nothing out of this whole deal except a big middle finger. Maybe someday if the whole thing works will get to say we were there, we were good men who would not roll over in the face of a tyrant, we fought for what we believed in, that a world could exist where digital distribution would not cost the same as disc based content, and hardware manufactures would appreciate there consumers a little more, and shortly after that me and my magical unicorn dragon will ride into space and find the kingdom of infinite cake.
This will happen before Sony does something smart with the GO.
Non-littleBIGplanet Avatar pictures were released. Verdict? 2-7!
Whenever the hell it was that I wrote my last news rundown thing I mentioned first off that Deadspace Extraction should release as a PSN and XBL download for 15 bucks and it would probably sell better then the Wii version. Well were about to find out if that’s true or not because EA is going to do just that, now that reaffirmed the undying love I have for myself, and stroked my ego into a giant ascending whirlwind of flame. So you can imagine how happy I was when found out that Sony once again read my blog and did exactly what I told them to do by releasing premium avatars that weren’t lBp. So last week they put out ones based on M.A.G. and I am pretty sure I am going to get the team Raven one, sense Raven is my team and I will admit that despite it being so far in last place in game statistics its frankly embarrassing, I still like them to a punch of hoodie wearing psychos over at S.E.V.R. Besides I get ball tons of bonus for finishing first all the time.
See, in context thats worth 50 cents.
This comes down to that same old impression as Home, which is, is it pathetic to buy stuff for an Avatar in a game, even if it is only 50 cents? Well no I don’t really think it is, weird as this sounds. See my PSN Avatar is seen by nearly 65 friends on there now. I buy a new shirt because I don’t want to look like a slob or the same as everyone else and that’s only for about 4-5 real life people that I care enough about to spend money on clothes. I spend a fuck load more money on games and care about my persona in online gaming a whole fuck load more too, so 50 cents to set myself apart in that world is really pretty worth it to me. In the end I just wanted to toot my own horn for being right again, much like Michael Pachter does for his industry best 1 out of 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 predictions.
He got his own fucking TV show :*(
Yakuza 3 is coming! Verdict: Hell yeah it is!
This is what popped up when I googled Yakuza 3
So this week a demo for Yakuza 3 was released on the PSN, later that night I was inundated with literally 2 emails asking me how excited I was for that game. Well the answer I would give is that I don’t think I know anybody that has played any of the other previous Yakuza games or knows anything about them that wasn’t really really really excited when they heard it was coming to the U.S. after a lot of speculations. For those of you that don’t know, the Yakuza series is probably the best example of the ‘Like GTA but’ genre of games. However unlike its bastard inbred cousins (Just Cause, Saints Row, etc) Yakuza has never been able to build any sort of U.S. fanbase. Well not one big enough to justify releasing the games over here. I mean they have, but every time they do they sell like a 9-year old boy in a chur….uh like a….Starship Enterprise replica at a Star Wars convention i.e. not good. After which Sega swears up and down that they will never release the next installment over here stateside, but then the next installment makes enough money in Japan that they can and do release it everywhere else.
That tatoo ain't cheap folks.
The focus of Yakuza is less on gunplay and general mayhem and more on good cohesive storytelling and good old fashion beat-em-up games. Like Double Dragon or River City Rampage(or, if you accidentally download a batch of nes games with porn mods, Pussy City Rampage), this game has you fighting with fists of fury. There’s an interesting notion, why did those kinds of games die off over here? Japan still loves beat-em-ups, so does Europe, but America just fell out with them, like Healthbars in FPS’s. Anyways, think Godhand with more than one background, and GTAIV without a brown/grey filter on it and you pretty much have the notion of Yakuza. The demo was a good start, and I think that Yakuza could really become one of those rare transitional franchises, where something really popular in Japan actually translates well to the U.S. market and sells well here too. The sort of game that people in the U.S. actually wait for to come out of Japan, if they market it right it could be a success story, here is hoping it is because there a fantastic series of games that really deserve some recognition. More than likely it’s going to get lost in the March shuffle though, sense that fucking month has become the new November for some reason.
Pictured Above: The likely result of the Yakuza 3 vs. God of War match.
Bobby Kotick says he is not a ‘Dick’. Verdict: But he is.
I mean really, the guy is a tremendous dick; this guy releases like 20 Guitar Hero games a year and then fires his employees when they don’t sell well. He approves making Tony Hawk Ride which is a shitty game with a shitty over priced skate board you have to plug in to use, and then tells console makers there shit is too expensive. He wants to make MW a pay to play service, you know because it offers you so many awesome features that other online shooters don’t to justify that cost. In short he is a very short man, with an even shorter amount of integrity, and will gladly hang you and everyone else out to die if it means getting his stock options up 1/10 of a point. Which makes him the enemy of any gamer that likes originality or new and interesting concepts, and for those of you that think what we think doesn’t matter, remember EA.
How Bobby Kotick see's the world.
Remember 10 years ago when they would release Madden 09, Head Coach 09, Player Trainer 09 at the same time and for every mother fucking system on earth? When they would hold their employees inside at gunpoint and force them to program crap before they would feed them. Well now they take risks with new and interesting ideas like Mirrors Edge, and shake up established franchises like giving Battlefield a single player aspect/campaign. That’s because we stopped buying there shit and sent them hate mail up the ass; remember consumers still hold the power here. The very fact that Kotick is making statements like this shows that he is starting to be slightly concerned about his image with gamers, maybe there dwindling returns on games this year, even MW2 really, is already having an effect on him.
Valve is sure they’ll make games for PS3 in the future. Verdict: Oh well thank you Valve.
Valve, cool logo, uncool company.
Well get ready because I think Valve has consistently pissed me off the most of anybody in the world over the past 5 years, and I spent 2 years dating a bi-polar girl. I really want to know when Valve got this inflated view of themselves as some sort of messiahs of gaming, who could actively ignore, no, who could actively antagonize an entire section of the gaming world for years and then just wake up one day and say ‘Yeah we’ll make some games for you I guess’ and were all supposed to just melt and thank them and throw roses at their feet. Yes ladies and gentlemen, be thankful because you too can now wait for the rest of time for Half-Life 2 Episode 3 to come out, in the mean time enjoying a completely underwhelming, yet inexplicably popular, dose of mediocrity known as Left 4 Dead. Seriously I have tried to play L4D no less than 6 times now, and every time I just haven’t gotten why people like it so much. You run around the exact same environment and fight zombies, the zombies change up now and then but that’s really all the game brings to the table. It’s graphically unimpressive and the Havok physics are once again laughable at best, with zombies frequently falling onto a board and then launching into the upper atmosphere.
Proper use of Havok Physics.
Source is just freaking old now, and Valve won’t make a new one for anything; they refuse to make HL2:E3, often saying they don’t even know how to end it yet; Left 4 Dead 2 was released recently and couldn’t have impressed me less. In fact the only thing they made in the last 7 years that has been at all worth it to even play was Portal, and they didn’t even make that, a local college that licensed there engine did. The last time Valve released a game for a Sony console was the original Half Life for the PS2, 10 fucking years ago. I would like to think that Sony gamers have gotten along just fine without them for this long, so I don’t really know what Valve expects to happen here. A Left 4 Dead port will sell like shit, they know that, which means that they would have to make Portal 2 for PS3 or HL2:E3 for PS3 neither of which I would think they would want to do based on some of the stuff they have said over the past 5 years.
Pic unrelated.
I really wouldn’t have cared that much, I mean there are plenty of people that don’t make PS3 games and I still like them. Epic Games are great fun; they have Cliffy B who is the logical opposite of Bobby K. The reason I don’t hate Epic is that every fucking time Cliffy B has opened his mouth for the previous 5 years he has not gone out of his way to insult Sony, the Playstation brand, and anyone that owns one. This, in case you didn’t know, is exactly what Gabe Newell has done. Gabe Newell is the fattest man on earth, and it seems he has let all that fat go directly to his head. I mean some friendly ribbing now and then is okay, but in over the last 5 years he has said, the PS3 is useless, that no sane person would own one or make games for it, Valve would never waste the money to make PS3 games, Left 4 Dead won’t be on PS3 because the community is awful, they didn’t care that Orange Box was awful on PS3 and that none of the patches were released for it. I mean it’s just classless, you get the impression Kaz Hirai must asked him how far along he was the first time he met him. He seems to have a completely un-rational hatred for all things Sony; he had neither PS3 development going on, nor any plan for it, so why the hell did he sit there and say it was expensive and complicated all those years? How did he know it was? Randy Pitchford the CEO over at Gearbox basically said Gabe was full of shit and should shut up, which, trust me, is what a lot of people out there are thinking. For that matter the CEO of Insomniac called him a dick on their Podcast, followed by Sucker Punch’s CEO saying Newell needed to lay off Sony and get some work done. Even their own quotes show an unnecessary level of hate, they didn’t even care that their own game sucked on the PS3, and how can you not care that something you made isn’t any good?
Pictured Above: Something that was not well done.
If you don’t want to make PS3 games, then fine don’t, no one is forcing you too. But you can’t expect to do and say the things he has said for the previous few years and then all the sudden realize that there is money to be made, and then change your entire attitude toward something. Maybe if they apologized or something it would be better, but when they come out and say ‘Yeah I guess we can’ there still acting like some emo-child you asked to go into the sunlight. It’s the most backhanded compliment I have heard in a while, I would tell you to boycott there shit to teach them a lesson but that would just give Newell more ammunition in his quest. No I would ask that you look at the simple merits of what you’re being presented with, with all the great stuff available for you to get on PS3, are you really missing the Valve stuff that much? Don’t be a crying baby like Newell, approach this intelligently and with dignity, leave the crying and dick jokes to yours truly.
Hey Gabe, Arnold has some words for you.
Peace.
Zack Knows It All 