Irregular Columns
In a fresh PR announcement nobody asked for, EA has decided to tell the world that Wii U sucks. After Mass Effect 3 was released in the Wii U launch period and sold like shit (even less than Tekken), they’ve concluded that there is no market for quality games on the system.
It has been quite a wonderful couple of days.
Not only did Nintendo have its WiiU conference in North America and two Nintendo Directs for Japan and one for Europe, but this is quite possibly the BEST console preview I’ve seen from them in years. There was no gaming media bias, no shoddy camcorder work, it was you, Iwata and your computer screen. Nintendo Directs is Nintendo’s own personal way of delivering news, and I couldn’t love it more. Continue reading “I’m embarrassed to be a gamer now.”
The REGGIE SERIES is BACK, barely ahead of some JRPG that a handful of psychos cried for. NOA REGGIE ignored their grievances, spending his time more wisely by Wii-Playing with himself.
It’s been more than a year since Wii Play: Motion arrived, and like it or not, it offered a few glimpses of near-future gameplay elements Nintendo demonstrated in 2011 via 3DS and the upcoming Wii U. It explored additional curiosities beyond Wii Sports Resort, bringing another variety of “basic” motion concepts to life with effective results. Shamefully, the MotionPlus possibilities were hardly revisited in the context of more “complete” products by other game makers (aside from disastrous gimmicks on other systems) until the release of Skyward Sword. Wii Play: Motion is not robust – this 12-mini-game demo pack was never priced to be – but it is somewhat diverse, and some mini-games surprisingly have a lot more content than others (the very term “mini-game” is a bit misleading, making it sound like a one-shot deal worth only a minute before moving on to something new; each activity has a varying number of single and/or multiplayer modes, stages, and difficulty like its predecessor), but you can’t really count on journalists like GI-GN’s Gerstmasamassina to share useful information, can you. To top it off, these itty-bitty games actually work – no privacy-invading webcams and neon balls to calibrate.
Anyway, I have some inappropriate video and gameplay to observe. Reggie demonstrates.
Oh boy, here we go again. Only our favorite videogame analyst in the world, Michael Pachter, could be obnoxious enough to drag me out of hiding. And it’s a three-fer, so enjoy a triple helping of Pachterd Sandwich…
Let’s get straight into it, because every time I play online there’s at least one dumbass who shouldn’t have a karting license.
I hope you’re all enjoying the devaluation of intellectual property in the Steam summer sale. Spare a thought for those who live south of the equator in Australia, who not only have to contend with winter but have daily deals look something like this.
I was thinking of captioning this but the picture says it all really.
The way we game today is vastly different from just five years ago and worlds apart from prehistoric times when we blew into cartridges in the vain attempt to bring them to life on our fuzzy cathode ray tubes. Gaming is so different and continues to change so fast that many warn against trying to predict the future, for fear of looking foolish in hindsight. You won’t find such cowardice from me though and unlike some, who have built careers out of looking like fools, I’ll be correct. I’ll be correct because I’ve already had months of hindsight, using my incredible brain to critically evaluate last weeks news and extrapolating an accurate future from it. There were five key pieces of news last week that taken alone barely warrant comment but together shape the future direction of video game delivery. In decades to come I will be seen as a gaming prophet, the chosen one, able to divine meaning from these cryptic runes.
Continue reading “The Week that Shaped the Future of Gaming.”
The SimCity brand has been through a lot. The last good SimCity was SimCity 4, released back in the start of 2003, but even that wasn’t a true step up from SimCity 3000 until the Rush Hour expansion. Future expansions were theorised but never eventuated, leaving the game’s enthusiastic modding community to push the game engine to it’s theoretical limits and polish SimCity 4 into a kind of modern society simulator come digital train set. Since then, EA have kept original developer Maxis distracted with Spore while conspiring with Tilted Mill Entertainment to ruin the franchise with SimCity Societies and forcing their Japanese affiliates to badly port remixes of SimCity 3000 to DS and iOS. Apparently they also got the work experience kids to make a unique SimCity for Wii but no one actually played it because, you know, it was a third party game on the Wii. EA’s latest betrayal of Will Wright’s legacy is assigning Playfish to develop SimCity Social for Facebook.
Polyphony, Codemasters, System 3, Turn 10, SimBin, Brain In A Jar, this is directed towards ALL of you. I’ve been enjoying Supercar Challenge lately with my new wheel, playing a good few hours every few days. It’s the most satisfyingly realistic driving simulator I’ve ever felt. However, I’ve still only unlocked 3 cars in the game, out of 44. There are 41 cars I can’t drive. Despite the fact that this is a videogame, my options are artificially limited by in-game money earned by competing in hundreds of races with dull, easy, brain-dead AI opponents. That’s no knock on Supercar Challenge’s AI racers, all racing games have AI I don’t care about.
Should I really have to spend 50 hours in career mode just to enjoy Time Trial properly? Would it be considered a crime to let me drive the cars I want from the start? This is mindblowingly terrible design that has somehow become the standard in console racing games. Time Trial is what I love – I want to drive to my own limits and challenge myself, to properly appreciate the physics of these fantastic simulators. Why can’t I take ADVANTAGE of the fact that this is a videogame, and drive the car I want?
Continue reading “Racing Developers – Let Me PLAY YOUR GAMES”
The Mass Effect 3 extended cut is almost upon us and over the next few days I’m going to talk at length about the ending to this remarkable trilogy of video games. There is a lot to say about this ending, interpretations, the community reaction, the reaction to the reaction, and meta-interpretations. I’ll just take it as I go, but for today I’ll be stepping through a number of interpretations of the ending. Spoilers will be abound obviously.
It wouldn’t be unfair to say that Metroid: Other M got a mixed reception, tilted heavy in favor of it being a good game. Which is to say, that people can agree that the game is solidly built, a great throwback to the 2D games, and stylistically presented. In fact the only real “weakness” noted by reviewers and angry internet users alike is the story, and more particularly, its depiction of Samus as “sexist.”
The reason I put “sexist” in quotes is not because I deny sexism exists, but because I heavily question the source of the accusations’ sincerity. Most of the comments center on the developing studio, Team Ninja, the director from Nintendo, Yoshio Sakamoto, and their country of origin, Japan for being “misogynist” when it came to designing Samus and the storyline of the game. Whether it’s sexist or not is up for debate, but why the inclusion of Japan as a factor?
Pietriots 