Green Day: Rock Band

Well this is...unexpected. I'll even go as far as unwanted, too. I think Green Day is fine, but I never would have chosen them as a candidate for their own disc release. They're certainly not The Beatles, nor AC/DC. Not sure if they're as big as Lego... I'm interested to find out what will fill the disc, but at this point I'm very skeptical. If this were DLC I'd be singing a different tune...perhaps one by Green Day. As it stands, the Rock Band Network is my most-anticipated RB development in 2010.

What I'm Playing:

• Main Campaign: Muramasa: The Demon Blade
• Side Quest: Modern Warfare 2, Forza Motorsport 3
  

Ümloud '09 \m/

Excuse me, I'm a bit groggy today. It's for a good cause. Last night I went to Ümloud, a late-night Rock Band party to benefit Child's Play.

It was awesome! The crowd had a good-spirited vibe, and Chris Kohler was the perfect MC. Check out some of these performers:

Costumes, tunes, and other Rock Band 2 goodness wasn't all. There were gaming treasures to be coveted and won in the silent auctions, raffle, and swag giveaways.

All of those piles of donated awesomeness were given away to the crowd by the end of the night. Darn my luck, my tickets came up too early to be allowed to claim this vicious piece of signed Bioshock 2 art:


I watched it move around the club through the night, and as jealous as I was, I'm glad it went to a good home. That Final Fantasy Distant Worlds CD signed by Nobuo Uematsu? It looks pretty good on my shelf...

Look at all this craziness on the swag table!

Game Boy Advance games! T-shirts! Art books! A Blitz '99 arcade board with cabinet livery! A Kane & Lynch press kit! Goddamn Phillips CD-i games! It's like the nerdiest yard sale ever.

The whole night was a blast, and I can't wait until they do it again. Child's Play is constantly raising money to donate to children's hospitals across the country, and a night like this is a thoroughly enjoyable way to do it. I promised I would shout out to the Fire And Sonic blog, who are donating a buck to Child's Play for the first 100 people who comment on their own Ümloud post. Ladies, my swanky jacket and I like your style!

What I'm Playing:

• Main Campaign: Muramasa: The Demon Blade
• Side Quest: Soul Calibur 4, Rock Band 2
  

не русский

***WARNING: Major Modern Warfare 2 Spoilers***

Starting up the Modern Warfare 2 campaign, I was confronted with the warning that parts of the game might offend me. I think I'm a pretty level-headed guy, so I pressed forward unafraid. I was just too interested to to find out what could happen in the game that I might find unbearable.

As the lights came up on the No Russian scene, I admit I was a bit slow on the uptake. By that point in the game I was already accustomed to shooting people, so I was ready for more, especially if I got to use a really big gun. After realizing that I was gunning down unarmed civilians, I played the rest of the scene just going through the motions: shooting at the floor or stone columns, trying not to clue in the terrorists that I didn't want to participate anymore.

No Russian is unquestionably one of the major setpieces of Modern Warfare 2, but I'm still not quite sure what the scene ultimately accomplishes. It's emotional, but I don't think that it changes anyone's mind as to how they feel about terrorism and mass murder. The scene's flaw is that it's wide open to metagaming: when the player knows he can get through the airport terminal regardless of their actions (as long as they don't shoot their comrades) then those actions become trivial. Some people do like I did and avoid shooting, and I've heard that some of the game testers shot everybody in sight because at the core it's just a game. In the end, how you play No Russian says more about how you feel about video games than how you feel about war.

No Russian didn't even come close to what I had predicted would be worthy of a precautionary opt-out message. When I tried to think of what was the most distasteful thing I might be asked to do in MW2, something that I might feel strongly about and would be relevant to current world conflicts, I was sure that it would be a scene about torture. When moral choices are a hot topic for game designers, the choice whether or not to torture a prisoner would have fit perfectly within the fiction of Modern Warfare 2, and would have truly pushed gamers to show where they stand. Instead, the game takes an all-too-brief glance at torture as Soap closes a door just as one of your teammates is brandishing a set of hot jumper cables in front of a prisoner. There's already plenty of shocking imagery in MW2, but I wonder where Infinity Ward could have gone if they had chosen to present something truly controversial.

What I'm Playing:

• Main Campaign: Modern Warfare 2 (online), Valkyria Chronicles
• Side Quest: Forza Motorsport 3
  

Eliminate Pro

Eliminate was first announced by ngmoco at the Game Developers Conference, and at the time it was touted as the next step in mobile gaming on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It would take advantage of the horsepower in Apple's newest devices, as well as the new policies that allow apps to offer paid in-app downloads. The game is now at the forefront of the App Store, but for me it has fallen seriously flat.

Eliminate asks a valuable question of the iPhone gaming audience: if a game is given out for free, will people pay money to play more of it? The business model is similar to other free-to-play, pay-to-improve MMOs where you can play as much as you like for free, but can always pay a small sum to get little advantages like experience points, better gear, or other in-game advantages. Eliminate applies this to a first-person shooter, where you're given a set amount of play time per day, and can pay to gain extra play sessions beyond that daily allotment. You can have unlimited practice time against AI-controlled bots, but only by playing against live human opponents over the net can you gain credits that can be used to buy new weapons, armor, and other buffs.

The problem with this experiment is that it has to be attached to a game that one might want to play. Eliminate has real gameplay and presentation flaws that keep me from wanting to stay with it for more than a few minutes, let alone over multiple daily sessions. The textures are cold and flat, character models are lifeless robots, and the arenas are claustrophobic. The bland narrative of employees in a weapons testing facility builds no connection via a storyline. In all, the game design aims for a Quake 3 benchmark and still falls below that. The virtual thumbstick controls feel mushy and slow, and while auto-firing when a valid target is in the crosshairs helps, it doesn't turn the game around.

All of this is especially disappointing given ngmoco's pedigree. I'm proud to have played many of their games, and it's sad to see a publisher known for smart innovation shove out something like this. If the company wanted to see what could be come of a microtransaction-based mobile game, it should have been something that takes advantage of the iPhone's unique capabilities. I really don't know who Eliminate is meant to serve: it's overcomplicated for the casual gamer, it lacks the features and precision that would attract someone likes to commit to a strong FPS, and there's no sense of coolness in the presentation. If anything can be learned from this experiment, it's that publishers, even ngmoco, really can't rely on old game mechanics that aren't suited to the iPhone platform.

What I'm Playing:

• Main Campaign: Forza Motorsport 3
• Side Quest: Splosion Man
  

An Open Thank You Letter To Garnett Lee/We are...ghost.

When I first heard the news that Garnett Lee would be leaving 1Up for Game Fly Media, it wasn't hard to remember many entertaining moments with him on the 1Up Yours podcast. Even after the New Year's shakedown at 1Up.com, when the show lost Shane Bettenhausen and changed its name to Listen Up, in my head it was always Yours. Garnett, it was your goddamn show, and I loved it. I'm sad to see you go, but maybe with youngbloods like David Ellis at the helm I'll finally be able to accept the transition.

I want to congratulate Garnett on his new position, and thank him for all that he brought to 1Up's table. I felt that our gaming tastes matched well most of the time, and sometimes I thought you were flat-out wrong, but I always appreciated your attitude towards the industry on the whole. You're always looking out for what matters most in the games business: gamers. You consistently hold gamers' best interests at heart. That's important in an artistic entertainment industry that can too caught up turf wars and the bottom line, and forget what makes people fall in love with games. You clearly love games, and I hope you keep shouting that to the world. Good luck out there, Sir...

What I'm Playing:

• Main Campaign: The Beatles: Rock Band
• Side Quest: Castle Age, Mr. AahH!
  

Bobby Kotick, meet me at camera 3

Full disclosure: I'm a huge Rock Band fanboy. More to the point, a huge Harmonix fanboy. I greatly enjoyed the first two Guitar Hero games, as well as the third, but GH3's transition to Activision's own Neversoft team brought noticeable differences. Since then, the multiple annual additions to the franchise have lost my favor, and the man ultimately responsible, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, has been penned onto my shitlist.

His recent comments at the Deutsche Bank conference in San Francisco (story from Gamespot) has added to his demerits. I feel his desire for a Guitar Hero game not tethered to a major console is natural, and a predictable evolution of the technology, but maybe a little further ahead of the market. What Bobby wants is cloud gaming, of which I have also sung many praises. But retailers are already miffed at having to carry huge instrument-laden boxes on their shelves, so are they really going to be thrilled about carrying ones that are practically guaranteed to never be supported with disc software? Multiple versions per year? I doubt it. Guitar Hero owes much of its success to that of the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. Kotick is basically making a weak pitch at a new, extremely specific gaming platform. While Activision is a formidable gaming company, I wouldn't dare put them in the same category as Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, or Apple. This threat to go solo with their music games rings as hollow as the one to drop support from the PS3 (Giant Bomb article.)

But this corporate posturing is nothing compared to his statements about his business philosophy when coming on to Activision. It's not surprising considering that this douche-lord has consistently driven their perennial franchises into the ground, but it still breaks my heart. I'll let the man's words stand on their own:

"We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games...We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."



Stay classy, Bob. Stay classy.

One point I can stand behind is the idea that better mouth animation will lead to more realistic graphics. I'm sure that Masanori Takashima, facial animator for Bayonetta would agree (blog from Platinum Games.) I hope Bobby plays it.

What I'm Playing:

• Main Campaign: The Beatles: Rock Band
• Side Quest: Mr. AahH!, Rocket Riot
  

PS3 gets slimmer, Xbox 360 will keep its sammich

First of all, to Sony: 'grats for finally getting the PS3 down to three hundred bucks. I can't say that I understand or agree with every decision you make, but this is a no-brainer. A tolerable price and svelte new form factor are just what the PS3 needs to reinvigorate the console before what should be an exciting Fall season, full of awesome games...which the PS3 has...haters. The PS3 has had many self-imposed hurdles to overcome over its life cycle, but price has certainly been one of the most damaging. Should the rumored Xbox 360 price drop to $300 pan out, these two should be well-matched for even more competition than before. I don't plan to get one myself - I jumped on the slim PS2 eagerly, as that update came at a time when space was precious in my apartment; now I wouldn't think of letting go of my backwards-compatible 80 gig - but if you haven't gotten on board, then this is the best chance yet to do so.

In the wake of this good news has been some speculation from the analysts that a slimmed-down Xbox 360 is also in the works: not merely an interesting notion, but an inevitable development. I think that they may be getting a little too caught up in the when without giving due consideration to the if. First of all, I don't feel the 360 needs it; it has a just-right shape and size that's easy to work with in most home electronics set-ups, especially when compared to the extra-gravy OG Triple. But that's not necessarily the sort of thing that would hold back a tech giant that would love to cram the retail shelves with slimmer boxes. What does need some reconciliation is the hard drives. Would a slim Xbox 360 (Xbox 180?) support the current stable of hard drives, having them clip into the side perhaps instead of on top, or would Microsoft create a new line of drives for the new box? If they took that route, then it would again splinter an already splintered market. The best way might be to make a slim 360 with an internal hard drive, and eliminate the pitfall of having totally separate lines of accessories for the two machines.

But like I said, that's a lot of ifs to deal with. I expect that as Spring comes, Microsoft will be better-served by putting their hardware efforts straight into Natal. Natal's release really is a matter of when, but also of how...as in how it'll actually work. And how it will help the 360 challenge the Wii as a family-friendly, motion-controlled party console. We'll see...

What I'm Playing:

• Main Campaign: Rocket Riot, Marvel Ultimate Alliance
• Side Quest: Space Invaders Infinity Gene
  

Dark Side of the Game

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon has had a 1666-week run on the Billboard charts (an ominous number as of this writing.) That's more than 32 collective years of being somewhere within the public consciousness. I'm trying to remember exactly when I bought Dark Side of the Moon. I'm pretty sure it was in 1998. In that year, the album would have had its 25th anniversary, and its 10th anniversary after leaving the Billboard 200 chart following a run of 591 consecutive weeks. I do remember that after hearing this news, my father decreed that I must go out and buy a copy. Not that I should get it as a gift, but to purchase it at retail with my own money. And so the next time we were getting the usual supplies at Costco, he made sure that I stopped at the stacks of CDs and fulfilled his mandate. I understand now what he wanted me to learn from this experience: not only to be exposed to an influential collection of music and a touchstone of his generation, but to understand the significance of the album's longevity. That evening, I put on my headphones for an extended session with rock's most persistent favorite.

That a popular work can stay popular for that long is a remarkable achievement, especially through radically changing tastes and new technological formats. It makes me wonder when a video game will reach that same mark. In recent years I've been concerned about the longevity of games, and whether or not later generations will be encouraged, or even able to play older classics.

Imagine if Dark Side of the Moon stayed forever on vinyl, never making the transition to cassette, CD, or iTunes. It would have been removed from shelves decades ago, ignored by a narrow-minded audience focused only on the new music of the season. Vinyl copies would be a slowly dwindling resource coveted and traded by a devoted niche of collectors.

This is the current state of many classic games that were loved in their time, but are all but lost now. Games that are playable only on dusty old systems, command high prices on Ebay, and may be locked behind their rights holders or dead publishers. If you're a long-time gamer, I'm sure you can think of some examples. You may have bought one in a retro gaming store, or even played a bootleg on an imperfect emulator.

It irks me now when message-board game nerds accuse publishers of making cheap, money-grubbing ports when they announce that they're re-releasing an old game from their vault. Nintendo, Square/Enix, and Sega are common targets of this reactionary disgust. Square/Enix has gone back to the Final Fantasy IV well many times, and each time someone bemoans the idea that they would pander to their horde of fans with yet another port to the newest platform, while their new cutting-edge title still isn't done. It doesn't occur to them that they are not the only generation of gamers out there, and that nobody is forcing them to buy this release. Just because you, hipster 27-year-old played FF4 back when you knew it as FF2 on the SNES, doesn't mean that your 8-year-old niece has had the privilege. Never mind that in this age of skyrocketing production budgets for current-gen platforms, easy ports of classic games help the publishers fund new projects. Nobody is making you buy it, but don't get mad at the publisher for selling it.

From-the-vault releases keep old games fresh in the minds of the gamer public. I have a habit of re-buying Super Mario Bros, the first video game I ever played, whenever it reaches a new platform. I've owned it on NES, Game Boy Advance, and the Wii Virtual Console, and I'll probably keep buying it in the future. Frankly, I don't want to game in a world where I can't buy a fresh new copy of SMB and play it on a current system. Not that I need to, but I want to know that I can, and anyone else can, too.

So I wonder what will be the Dark Side of the Moon for video games; a game that is timeless and perpetually available to the audience. Pac Man? Tetris? Super Mario Bros? Half Life? Have these games, or any other reached that point? Among entertainment media, video games have shown the worst record of preserving their history, but when will the medium be comfortable enough with itself that this is no longer a concern?

What I'm playing:

• Main Campaign: Space Invaders Infinity Gene, Sacred 2
  
• Side Quest: Left 4 Dead, Bookworm
  

OnLive: Is the Cloud more than Vapor?

While it may be true that the annual Game Developers Conference isn't typically geared toward gamers, there's been no shortage of bombshells at this year's event. In particular, I've been most impressed by the announcement of the OnLive cloud-based gaming service. It's been covered obsessively by the major gaming sites already, but this was big enough that I'd like to toss my two cents into the pool.

Beginning with the promise of being able to play any PC game on your TV through a universally compatible box, OnLive first sounded like the Phantom 2. Not that Phantom 2 - this Phantom, version 2. But OnLive leaps much further ahead by putting all of the game-running horsepower in the ephemeral cloud, providing the gamer with a disc-free, all-download service that promises to run either on their own microconsole, or practically any PC or Mac that your Mom bought within the last couple years. The server does the work, and you have the fun as a video stream of your game is shuttled down the pipe.

In short, this means nothing less than changing everything about how games are currently produced, marketed, distributed, supported, and consumed. Imagine if, as a gamer, you never had to think about things like storage space on your hard drive, or upgrading your hardware. Development times and budgets can be made smaller while the games can be made bigger and better. Bugs can be squashed quickly and discreetly without the gamer having to download a patch. Post-release downloadable content like new player characters or levels can be made standard as part of the game experience, rather than offered as a userbase-splitting paid download. Piracy will be hamstrung. Digital Rights Management will be irrelevant. And retail outlets could be removed from the picture.

It's no secret that there's a lot of simmering animosity between publishers and platform holders, and the brick-and-mortar stores that are loath to give up their cut of the action. Should OnLive be widely adopted, it would leave these stores with no games to sell. What's the need, when the service could potentially run on any device that's sufficiently quick at decompressing the video stream, and has some way of attaching a controller? Even the microconsole version wouldn't have to be sold at retail if it's leased from a local office; did you actually buy your DVR? Used game sales would dry up, and the game makers would enjoy the profit.

But that physical product has, until now, always meant real consumer ownership. Having the disc or the cartridge in your hand and the hardware that runs it means that you can play that game indefinitely. It's yours. But in the Cloud, nothing is ever yours. It's all server-side, and if you're not connected, you're cut off. To me, this is the greatest risk of the all-download future: that without a physical record of the work, there is a risk that it could be lost permanently. For one, it's risky for the consumer: if the service ends after some time, what happens to all of the content that you've paid for? Will it be migrated to a newer service? Or will you get nothing more than a politely-worded email thanking you for your years of patronage? Even pressing a disc with all of your games might not be enough: if you've spent so much time on a disc-free platform, there's no guarantee that you'll even own anything capable of playing that backup.

Second, it's risky for the legacy of the video game medium. If some truly innovative games were released to OnLive (which they surely will) I would want those games to be preserved. Video games still haven't shown a real commitment to making themselves available to future generations. Preserving an old game is more complicated than preserving music, movies, books, or art. Until now, classic games have gotten re-released for current platforms, while more lesser-known titles have been guarded over by a dedicated collector niche. But without physical copies, download-only games stand the greatest risk of being lost to future generations. It's one thing if I can't play Braid, but it's quite another if nobody can.

In all, I think OnLive is ambitious and holds great promise. It's the video game fulfillment of current trends in computing, and it will happen, sooner or later, whether it's this specific service that does it, or if it's another very similar one. There are plenty of technical hurdles in the way, but I'm looking forward to seeing it when it works.

What I'm Playing

• Main Campaign: Killzone 2
• Side Quest: Rock Band 2
  

First Post!

Welcome to the first post of my new gaming blog! Games of all kind have been a lifelong interest for me, and I feel like they deserve their own space in my writing. Plus, I can separate this specific topic from my personal blog for the sake of anyone who could care less. I plan to make this blog my own opinion column about game culture, politics, trends, history, and any other musings that come to mind. If you've ever asked "what's Toby been playing," I hope I can provide the answer here.

I've been posting to 1Up and Giant Bomb for a while now, and while I fully intend to keep going to those sites regularly, I wanted to start this blog as my own little space that's not under anyone else's header (well, Google I guess.) And from this hub, don't be surprised to maybe see a few things respawn into those other sites. So this way, I get to consolidate my efforts and spread myself even thinner all at the same time, and isn't that really what the internet is all about?

Stand by for new posts, where hopefully I write something more interesting. Later!

What I've Been Playing:

• Main Campaign: Killzone 2
• Side Quests: Rock Band 2, Street Fighter 4