What are the cost components that make up the retail price of a typical video game? Put another way, how much does each participant in the video-game development / distribution chain get?

I get this question all the time.

In this presentation to Columbia University students, Steve Perlman, OnLive’s founder, both demos the OnLive system and discusses their business model. At the end of part 3 and the beginning of part 4, Perlman discusses the graphic to the left (click for larger view) which shows the cost breakdown for a typical video game.

As you can see, for a typical console-based video game that costs U.S. $60:

• $15 goes to Retailers: eg: GameStop, Electronic Boutique, Walmart, Amazon
• $7 goes to Returns/PP/MDF: Returns are money paid-out to retailers for product returns. PP stands for “price-protection” which is money paid back through the chain if/when the publisher reduces the video game’s price. MDF stands for  ‘Marketing Development Funds” which are paid to retailers for promotions such as TV ads, local flyers, and in-store marketing displays.
• $4 goes to Distribution/COGs: Distribution = shipping and warehousing. COGs = Cost of goods sale. ie: the cost of the physical DVD, manufacturing, the instruction manual and the case.
• $7  Platform Royalty Fee: For every game sold approximately $7 goes to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo, as applicable, for whatever platform the game plays on – eg: Xbox 360, PS3, Wii.
• $27 goes to the Publisher. Unfortunately this $27 is not further broken down to show how much of the $27 typically goes to independent developers. The amount paid to independant video game developers can be anywhere from 10% to 70% of the amount paid to the publisher – but often only after the publisher has first recouped any advances paid to such third party developers.

The above graphic is used by OnLive to convince publishers to use their system. Interestingly, you can see that they suggest that for every retail game sold, $12 is typically lost to piracy and another $12 is lost from used-games sales. Publishers and developers hate used game sales. Gamers, of course, enjoy them. Whether these lost revenue figures are accurate is debatable. I won’t delve into that debate here.

Perlman then goes on, of course, to point out that all the red and brown square costs go away when publishing through the OnLive System. They can be split by the publisher and OnLive. In other words, more money to the publisher (and hopefully developers), no money to wholesalers and retailers, no piracy and no ‘losses’ due to used game sales.

Whether publishers will consider lowering prices given that their costs are dramatically reduced was not discussed. However, as you can see in my ‘OnLive Video Game System & Business Model Presentation to Columbia University’ post, publishers will be free to price games in any way they choose.

Part 1 – OnLive Company & System Background

In part 1, Perlman gives a basic introduction to the OnLive system, discusses his history with Apple and the technical limitations (compression/latency) that OnLive had to overcome to make their system work.

Part 2 – The OnLive Video Gaming System Demo’d

The system is demo’d on an Apple Laptop. You get a sense of the interface. Spectator mode is particularly compelling. Users will be able to watch whatever games their friends are currently playing. Users will also be able to watch the best players in the world playing each game. Gamers will also see how may people are watching their play.

Part 3 – Demo Continued on Micro-console and iPhone + Business Model

The demo moves to the micro-console and the iPhone. Members of the audience start playing. Perlman shows how you can watch what the other players are playing on their devices. He also demos how the compression algorithms work, with particular emphasis on graphics that are typically hard to do with video compression.

Perlman then discusses how and why the data centers are distributed throughout the U.S. and the need to be within 1,000 miles of the server.

He starts discussing the ‘Retail vs OnLive Economics’ slide that I discuss separately in my ‘Cost Components that Make up a Typical Video Game’s Retail Price’ post.

Part 4 – Business/Economic Model Followed by Q&A

The business/economics model discussion continue in part 4. This is one of the most interesting parts of the talk. The presentation formally ends and a Q&A begins. Questions get into a more technical discussion of how the system works. Of particular interest is a discussion of how OnLive’s compression algorithm works – how it is different from, say, TiVo’s or Apple TV’s compression algorithm. Less information needs to be transmitted because a video-game will never be ‘paused’.

Part 5 – Q&A Continues – Technology & Pricing is Discussed

More questions are answered. Perlman says there will be a base subscription fee to access the system (like the Xbox Live fee). Demos will be free. Publishers will be free to rent games for a limited time, allow users to play them a-la-carte, buy them outright or subscribe to them like WoW. Pricing will be up to each publisher on a game-by-game basis. The system support any pricing/revenue model.

All-in-all, a terrific, informative presentation.

See Also:

• OnLive Fully Detailed in Columbia University Presentation (the escapist)

Sony’s 2009 E3 Press Conference can be viewed here.  See also my 2008 Sony E3 coverage. Click on images below for larger views.

Exclusive PS3 Games Shown

 God of War III:  (demo’d – coming March 2010 ) Looks terrific! Except, that is,  for Sony’s continued reliance on quick time events in boss battles. Grrr! But I still can’t wait GoW 1 and 2 were terrific games.

Gran Turismo 5 (polyphony – teaser trailer – still no ship date) – photo realistically gorgeous as you’d expect – first time cars show damage in this franchise – still a SIM that is likely only playable by extreme racing gamers.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (demo’d – naughty dog – no ship date – multi-player beta starting immediately) I’m looking forward to this one! Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is still my favorite PS3 game to date. Demo looked terrific but the female lead has changed. Elena Fisher seems to be gone  

MAG: ‘Massive Action Game’ (demo’d – zipper interactive) – 256 online players can play at once – was announced at last year’s Sony E3 press conference – It looked impressive! I wonder how they’ll ever get teams of 126 people to work together under a few commanders. In my experience, everyone wants to be the commander in online shooters.

Final Fantasy XIV (trailer shown – square enix – 2010) – This being an exclusive was a surprise as was a scheduled 2010 release date – has online play – to be released in the same year as FF13.

MODnation  Racer (demo’d) A customizable cart racer that embodies the play, create, share philosophy of Little Big planet. Users can create and share race tracks, carts and players. They created a track onstage in minutes.

Last Guardian (trailer shown – by Fumito Ueda, creator of Shadow of the Colossus – no date).  A little boy befriends a gigantic dog-creature and take on the world together. That was one compelling trailer!

Agent (Rockstar – announced only) A third party spy thriller coming exclusively to PS3 but not demo’d. No date announced.

Non-Exclusive PS3 Games Demo’d

Assassin’s Creed 2 (ubisoft – holiday 2009) – Set in Italian Renaissance,  in Venice – 30 weapon types – now with guns (or at least ‘a’ gun)! Includes a ‘flying machine’ invented by DeVinci – Looks good. I’m looking forward to playing it on the Xbox360!

Final Fantasy XIII: (teaser – no game play shown – square enix – spring 2010) Looked good – pretty much the same as it looked on the 360 yesterday.

New PS3 Motion Controller

New PS3 Motion Controller: The controller has a glowing sphere that the PlayStation eye-toy can track. The demo was more impressive than the Nintendo Wii Motion Plus demo and much  more realistic than the Microsoft motion control demo.

PSP Announcements:

PSP Go: (no surprise – was leaked days in advance) Will not replace PSP 3000 – slide-out controls – integrated wifi & bluetooth – plays same games as earlier PSPs – 50% smaller & 40% lighter than original PSP – 16 GB flash memory – expandable memory – movie and game downloads – $249 U.S. – available Oct 1. in U.S./Europe

Media Go: PC app store for the PSP Go – used to transfer pictures, music and movies to PSP – All PSP titles to be available via downloads going forward. ‘Sense Me’ application to create custom music playlists on PSP

Movies & TV on PSP: PS3 video delivery service announced last year coming natively to PSP. Note: It’s still not available in Canada  

PSP Trailers Shown

Gran Turismo PSP (polyphony – Oct 1, 2009) 60 fps – 800 cars – 35 tracks – 65 layouts in tracks – single and 4 person multi-player modes – trading and sharing cars.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (konami – 2010) 10 years after MGS 3 – true sequel on PSP – set in the 70s – Kojima writing the script

PS3 Notes

• 22 million PS3s sold globally in 2008 – anticipate 13 million PS3s to be sold in 2010 (I’m not sure if I have these numbers right)
• 35 Playstation exclusives coming this year (presumably including on PS2 games)
• 6.5 million ‘Playstation Home’ users (85% return users) – though I don’t know why. Home bites!

PSP Notes

• Games Coming in 2009: They showed a video of many PSP games coming in 2009 including Resident Evil, Little Big Planet, Socom Fire Team Bravo 3,  Motorstorm Arctic Edge & Harry Potter.
• 24 million users – 11 million in North America
• 200 titles on PSP so far – 90 are exclusive
• Adding Final Fantasy 7 to PSP lineup as of June 2, 2009
• Decreasing price of PSP development tools

PS2 Notes

• Intend to keep PS2 alive beyond 10 years
• sold 9 million more PS2s in 2008
• 100 new PS2 titles coming out in 2009

Live Blog Coverage

• 1Up.com
• CrunchGear
• Engadget
• Gamasutra
• Gizmodo
• Joystiq

My Thoughts

The press conference and list of PS3 exclusives shown were better than I expected. I’d put the press conference on par with the Microsoft press conference.

I was impressed with their marrying of a motion controller with high-end graphics. Though, as with Microsoft’s Natal, they are still only in the prototype stage.

I was a bit surprised that Sony did not announce any social networking functionality like Microsoft and Nintendo did.

The modding functionality of the MODnation game was terrific. The question is, of course, how easy will it be for users to share their mods and what will the limitations be?

The two PS3 game exclusives I’m most looking forward to are God of War III and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

Nintendo’s 2009 E3 Press Conference can be viewed here. This has to be the most boring E3 conference I’ve ever watched.  See also: My 2008 Nintendo E3 coverage.

Announcements

• Multiplayer Mario co-op: (holiday 2009 – yawn)
• Wii Fit Plus: 6 new exercise modes, 15 new balance games, available as software-only (fall 2009)
• User Generated Content: Some user generated DS content initiatives discussed:
  • FlipNotes Studio: animation drawing app (this summer)
  • WarioWare DIY: Microgame creator
  • Mario v. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again – level editor and online sharing (DSi – June 8, 2009).
  • Will be able to upload DSi pictures to Facebook this summer.
•  Wii Vitality Sensor: Monitor health, pulse. Some kind of health / relaxation / stress diagnostics tool (no release date)
• Super Mario Galaxy 2: New 3D Mario game

Retreads

The following were previously announced but demo’d at the show.

• Wii Motion Plus: Provides more precision control. This was announced at last year’s E3 press conference.
• Wii Sports Resort – archery and basketball shown (July 25, 2009)

DS Games Shown

• Kingdom Hearts
• Mario Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story (this fall)
• Golden Sun
• Women’s Murder Club: video book brought to DS and DSi
• Cop, the Recruit (Ubisoft)
• Style Savvy – (girls fashion game)
• Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

2009 Third Party Wii Exclusives

• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers (RPG – Square-Enix)
• Red Steel 2 (exclusive to Wii with Motion Plus controller)
• The Conduit (shooter – Sega – June 2009)
• Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles (shooter – Capcom)
• Deadspace Extraction (EA)

Just One New Nintendo ‘Hardcore’ Wii Game

 Metroid Other M  (2010) That’s it! No other new Nintendo ‘hardcore’ games announced

Platform Numbers

• 15 Million Wii fit balance boards sold
• 100 million DS’s sold
• 1 million DSi’s sold in 2 months in America

Live Blog Coverage

• CrunchGear
• Engadget
• Gamasutra
• Gizmodo
• Joystiq

My Thoughts

This was slow and boring compared to yesterday’s Microsoft press conference.

Their focus was, once again, on audience diversity – bringing gaming to everyone. Little of interest to hard core gamers.

I appreciate their getting into the user-generated content space.

The third party exclusives and their one new ‘hardcore’ game were the only games that were somewhat interesting to me. Enough to purchase a Wii? Not even close.

In my opinion, the biggest Microsoft announcement at E3 today was made after their press conference was over. They announced a new Games on Demand service (coming this August). It has two important features:

1. Full Games Available for Purchase on Demand: Microsoft will start selling full games on-demand via download through the Xbox Live Service starting this fall. Following in the footsteps of Steam (and to some degree Sony), this may be a critical inflection point on the path away from retail game sales. The 30 announced games are all older games (eg: Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed and Bioshock). Games are to be sold at regular retail prices (no disk-free, Gamespot/E.B.; disintermediation discount). Nothing was said about the future availability of new titles day-and-date with retail releases. With the service in place there is, of course, no technological reason why this couldn’t happen. It’s just a matter of time.
2. A Step Away from Microsoft Points: Anyone who is a regular reader of my blog knows that I am a critic of Microsoft Points (see this post, for example). Games purchased through the Games on Demand service will be purchasable with a credit card. No Microsoft Points required. Amen! Let’s hope this is the beginning of the end for Microsoft Points. 

For details see:

• E3: Microsoft Announces ‘Games on Demand’ at Xbox Live Luncheon (Gamasutra)
• Games on Demand Bringing Digital Retail to Xbox 360 (1Up.com)
• Good-bye Games in boxes? Xbox 360 to get full game downloads (CNet)

The Microsoft Press Conference can be viewed here. See also: My 2008 Microsoft E3 coverage.

Big Announcements:

• Halo Reach: Bungie teased this new Halo game, set for a fall 2010 release. Whoo hoo! If its a Bungie shooter, and it has the name Halo on it, I’m in! Is ‘Noble 1’, Will Master Chief?
   
• Metal Gear Rising: The next Kojima / Konami Metal Gear game is coming to the Xbox!!! Holy Cow! The final coup de gras against Sony.  Kojima seemed genuinely happy to appear on stage for the announcement.
• Project Natal: A ‘controller free’ , full body motion capture, item scanning, facial and voice recognition. Will work on every 360. See demo here. I’ll believe it when I see it! I don’t believe the Lion’s Gate Milo demo pictured on right. It had to be heavily scripted (click for larger view).

New Console Features (coming this fall)

• last.fm coming to Xbox Live free (globally available)
• Netflix Queue on 360 will be manageable from Xbox Dashboard (no need to do it on PC anymore)
• HD download library being upgraded to full 1080p
• Instant 1080p HD Movies/TV – Worldwide: Faster movie downloads. Higher high def. Doubling number of countries where HD TV/video content will be available from 8 to 18
• Facebook on Xbox 360 (very much an Xbox 360 look)
• Titter coming to Xbox Live

Microsoft Exclusives Coming

• Shadow Complex – An Epic Games Xbox 360 exclusive arcade – reminds me of Little Big Planet. A side scroller. Bizarre!
• Joy Ride – a free Xbox Live bumper car-type game that uses your Xbox 360 avatar (next winter)
• Crackdown 2 (can’t wait – crackdown 1 was a big surprise when I first played it)
• Left 4 Dead 2 – zombies in the daylight! (Nov 17, 2009)
• Splinter Cell Conviction – Wow! looks very different from prior Splinter Cell games (fall 2009)
• Forza Motorsport 3 (Oct 2009)
• Halo 3 ODST – is it me or are the Halo graphics starting to look dated? (Sept 22, 2009)
• Halo Reach (fall 2010)
• Alan Wake (spring 2010 – looked interesting). This game is from the makers of one of my all time favourites – Max Payne. Can’t wait!

New Skateboard Peripheral

Non-Exclusive Demos Shown

• Beatles Rock Band. Likenesses of the Beatles sing and play along as you play the game.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward – looked great!)
• Final Fantasy XIII (spring 2010)
• Tony Hawk Ride – using new skateboard peripheral (see below)

Live Blog Coverage:

• CrunchGear
• Engadget
• Gamasutra
• Gizmodo
• Joystiq

My Thoughts

I enjoyed their focus on games and not things like console sales or attach rates.  I’m most looking forward to Halo Reach, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Halo ODST, Crackdown 2 and Alan Wake.

I don’t believe that Project Natal will do all that it is promising. It seems to be more a ‘vision’, ‘proof of concept’, or ‘goal’. As far as I know, no actual shipping product was announced.

I’m delighted to see that Microsoft has finally got the last major PS3 third-party exclusive franchise (metal gear) coming to the 360.

I was disappointed that there were no more details about Zune HD integration. I continue to be sad that Microsoft continues on with its ridiculous Microsoft Points system.

 [Update: Post press conference Microsoft announced FULL game downloads for real money (not Microsoft Points) via credit card. This is a big deal! Coming in August. See this Gizmodo post. Still sketchy on details – whether it will apply to other content like HD movie downloads.]

While Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm are nice, I won’t use them on the 360 – especially without a keyboard.

Reviews: Metacritic 89% | Game Rankings 89.17% | zero punctuation 
Reference:  | Achievements
Walkthrus: Mahalo | WikiCheats | GameFAQs
Developer: Valve Corporation, Engine: Source 

This is not my normal style of game. I hate zombies. I hate zombie games. I fully expected to hate this game. However, given its stellar reputation, I rented it, expecting to play it for an hour, and toss it. That almost happened.

At first I played the single player campaign. I didn’t know what was going on. I was frustrated. I kept dying  repeatedly. The game provides no in-game save option. Consequently I kept getting sent back 20 minutes to the last (rare) check point – a game construct that annoys me to no end.

After a couple hours of futility I was about to return it to the rental store. But, I had heard that it must be played online to be enjoyed. Having no friends with the game I loathed the thought of going online with unruly 13 year olds running off in every direction telling me how much I suck at it. But an amazing thing happened. I had fun.

I was into a game within 30 seconds. At first, I didn’t put my headset on. I expected to hate it and didn’t want to hear others berate my ineptitude. Strangely, 30 minutes later I noticed I was having fun – a lot of fun. At one point I was about to die and then someone came by and healed me. What? That never happens? Where did this sudden benevolence come from?

I put the headset on and found adults and teens playing. They were actually helpful. To succeed they needed me and I needed them. This was my first experience of online play with strangers where we all worked co-operatively together.

Amazingly, I spent the rest of the afternoon (about 4 hours) finishing the campaign with a changing set of adults (and teens). The game was uniformly fun from beginning to end.

Game Play

In single player, the game opens by setting the stage with a terrific back-story (Metal Gear style). I wish more games did this. I’m talking to you Prince of Persia.

The game consists of four longish levels (referred to as ‘scenarios’) where you and your team must make it from point A to point B alive (additional scenarios can be downloaded for an extra fee). Since the scenarios can be played in any order, there is no difficulty ramp – its uniformly tough all the way through – especially if you attempt to play it alone.

You are besieged by hordes of zombies of varying kinds. Your four-person team must work co-operatively to stave them off. At the end of each level the team must hold a zone for 5 to 10 minutes as they wait for extraction. This last part was always the hardest as the game tosses everything it has at you with only teeny breaks to give you an opportunity to regroup.

Game Encourages Co-operation:

Valve did four very smart things to both eliminate griefers and to pull-off a quasi-miracle – getting strangers to work co-operatively online:

1. Achievements: To heal a team mate a player must give up their health packs or pills. In most games, these would be horded. But the game rewarded players by way of Xbox 360 Achievement points for healing team mates. Beyond that, if you lose a team-mate the game gets much harder. Players want to save a dying team mate to increase their odds of survival.
2. Your Dead on Your Own: In every other game, playing co-operatively with strangers online is like herding cats. Invariably, your ‘team’ runs off in different directions and they rarely communicate with each other – let alone stick together. In Left 4 Dead, if you go off on your own, you will die – very quickly and very violently. To succeed players must stick together.
3. Ability to Vote Users Off: Typically only the host of an online game can boot off an aberrant player. In Left 4 Dead, any of the 4 players can initiate a real-time vote to boot a team-mate. If the majority agree (and cast concurring votes) the miscreant is booted off. The AI (or someone waiting in a lobby) instantly takes their place.
4. Leaving Them In the Closet: This is the best idea of all! If a gamer dies, they’ll respawn in a closet somewhere necessitating another team member to let them out to keep playing. However, if someone has been naughty, the rest of the team can, err, assist in their death, and then let them rot in the closet. It was hilarious to hear the jerk screaming from the closet to be let out, while the rest of us carried on without him. Other games must pick up on this ingenious idea!

Game Play Video

Below is a YouTube Video of  game play. You can get a handle on what the game is like here. But I wouldn’t watch too much as it shows a a good chunk the ‘Death Toll’ level/scenario and is, ultimately, a spoiler.

Limited Replay Value

As I said above, the game was not at all enjoyable in single-player mode. Having successfully played through all four scenarios of the campaign online, I had no desire to play through them again.  If, perhaps there were a dozen levels on the disc, I might have recommended this game as a purchase. That said, the scenarios were a bit longer than a typical game level.

There is a competitive ‘versus mode’ where you can play as a zombie trying to stop other players from successfully achieving their goals. I didn’t try that mode as it didn’t sound like it would be much fun to me.

Conclusion

Apart from Halo, I have rarely enjoyed playing video games over Xbox Live with strangers. This game, and my recent experience with 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, are delightful exceptions. This game, in particular, is made for online co-op and literally forces gamers to do something that, experience has shown, most are otherwise  incapable of or unwilling to do – work together.  I imagine that this is what raiding is like in an MMoRPG. I hope these games portend more enjoyable online co-op to come.

While I had a lot of fun playing what I played, my score reflects the lack of on-disc levels and, ultimately, its limited replay value. This game is not fun when played alone. But, for a weekend rental, if you have Xbox Live and are otherwise a shooter fan, I heartily recommend it.

Reviews: Metacritic 71% | Game Rankings 72.47%   | zero punctuation
Reference:  | Achievements
Walkthrus: Couldn’t find any – you won’t need it! 
Developer: Swordfish Studios Engine: Unreal Engine 3

In 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand, rapper Curtis Jackson (aka ‘50 Cent’) was to be paid for an African concert with a diamond encrusted skull. The skull was stolen. 50 Cent and his G-unit side-kick become a two man army, rampaging through Africa killing anyone that stands between them and their skull.

This game can be aptly described as a shooter with training wheels meets Lego star wars. If there was any game worthy of a zero punctuation lampoon, this one is it!

General Observations

I knew going in that this was going to be a poor game. I tried it, nonetheless, because someone on the Listen Up podcast mentioned that the game was a lot better than it was given credit for. While I agree that it was better than expected (I expected a 1.5 out of 5) I certainly cannot recommend it beyond a $5 rental.

After playing through on ‘normal’ I was set to give this game a 2 out of 5. However, my score was bumped up to 2.5 after playing it through on hard and playing online co-op. 

The game is ridiculously easy on both normal and hard. It does get a bit (and I mean just a ‘bit’) more challenging towards the end of the game but only on hard mode. Having leveled-up all my weapons, taunts and counter kills (lame melee attacks) before playing co-op, I admit that I had some fun running and gunning through the game, co-operatively with strangers over Xbox-live, with super-pimped out weapons and characters cussing up a storm.

Pros

While the cons far outweigh the pros, I have a few good things to say about the game:

Nicely Detailed Environments: The game by no-means taxes the Unreal Engine 3. However, the environments are more richly detailed than some games. That said, the graphics/textures weren’t much nicer than a last-gen title

Guns: The guns felt good and shot well. The gun sounds and force feedback on the controller were solid

Mini Challenges: To make up for extremely easy game play, the user is continually provided with mini-challenges along the way. Rewards (ie: temporarily powered up weapons, points, grenades etc.) are doled out for successful completion. These added something to the game. Indeed, since the game was so ridiculously easy, the mini-challenges were sometimes the only challenge.

Motion Capture: The motion capture in the cut scenes (like the one pictured here) was pretty good.

Grenade Throwing: The grenade throwing animation was poor. But the accuracy and quickness of the grenade throwing was, arguably, the best I’ve experienced. I am constantly frustrated by poor grenade throwing mechanics in other games. Developers can learn something form this game.

Enjoyable Flying Level: Reminiscent of the overhead bombing campaign in Call of Duty 4, the game provides one short level where you use a helicopter gun to kill everything that moved below you. I enjoyed it.

Audio-Visual Effects: The game has good audio, lighting, particle, smoke and explosion effects. When blown up, enemies flew across the screen in an enjoyable way.

Mindless Fun: As mentioned in the intro, I did have some mindless fun playing co-op online, with strangers – something of a rarity in my experience of online play I might add (Update: I also had a lot of fun playing Left 4 Dead online with strangers).

Cons

Ridiculously Easy and One Sided: Through all of normal and much of the hard levels, the game was crazy-easy and wholly one sided. The slightest tap with a minor bullet took  down most enemies. Yet 50 cent could withstand bullet onslaughts and rocket propelled grenade attacks with virtually no damage (on normal mode). I will add, however, that on hard mode, towards the end there were times when 50 cent could be taken down with one-shot from a sniper or a perfectly placed grenade. This was rare. I shudder to think what the game was like on ‘easy’ mode.

Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing: I mentioned in the ‘pros’ section that the game has decent special effects, sound, lighting, smoke and explosions. But all of it is for not. Simulated danger, when there really was none, got old really fast. For most of the game I could walk 50 Cent straight through gun battles, with bullets showering around, all while searching for collectables, with little worry of persona injury. To the extent he took damage, he self-healed almost instantly.

Driving Levels Were Joke: So long as you kept moving and could steer, you could get through the two, short, driving levels in one pass. No skill of any kind was needed.

Outlandish Profanity: I don’t mind profanity in a military game, for example, where it makes sense contextually. Perhaps I don’t have the gangster rapper mentality to enjoy profanity in every sentence. Dialogue was ridiculously profane and juvenile. You can even increase the profanity by purchasing taunts and pressing the left stick. I must admit, though, that I did have some fun on co-op hurling insults as my counter part spared no opportunity to click the profanity (err, taunt) stick! .

Side Note on Profanity: The game is wall-to-wall profanity. As you play you can unlock pictures, music videos etc. I had to laugh because some doe brain executive decided that swear words in unlocked music videos needed to be bleeped out! What’s up with that?

Cover System: First, the game is so easy that there is no need for a cover system (except towards the end on hard). Be that as it may, the cover system was generally fine when I wanted to use it. Unfortunately, the button to go into cover (the green ‘A’ button on the 360) is the same button you press to role/jump out of the way and to dodge incoming fire. About half the time when I meant to dodge, the cover system grabbed my character and glued it to a cover spot – usually on the wrong side where the bullets I was trying to avoid were coming from. Grrr!

AI Enemies & Combat a Joke: There was no effort put into creating challenging AI. If there was a gas can (and there were lots of gas cans), the stupid AI would be standing right beside it.  The AI pretty much stood in place waiting to be killed.

Melee Ridiculous: Melee (called ‘CounterKills’ in the game) involved nothing more than pressing ‘B’, quick-time style, whenever indicated. You can purchase new CounterKills but little changes when using the new ones. The system for selecting the CounterKills for use is stupidly opaque.

No Save Option: The game saves at pre-determined checkpoints. You have no choice where to save the game. That said, it was so easy on normal that I had to work at getting killed. So, while the lack of user-selectable save points is normally a big pet-peeve of mine, the lack of them here made almost no difference.

Limited Maneuverability: 50C cannot run, jump/walk over the tiniest of obstacles – even a foot high – let alone climb over edges or drop down 3 foot ledges. I often got tangled up in doorways and other narrow spaces with the G-Unit side-kick guy following me around – and always at the worst times.

Rewards Run & Gunning: The game rewards running and constant gunning over patient, thoughtful or stealthy play. If you kill someone they drop money. You can pick it up, but only it only stays there for a few seconds after death. You need to be close to pick up the cash. Distant kills miss out on the cash. Chained killing (ie: multiple kills in a row) yields extra bonus points. Slower, patient, stealthy killing does not. While there is an enormous amount of amo scattered around, there’s a lot more short range weapons amo than for long range weapons. You are even rewarded with bonus points for picking up amo – even if you don’t need it or use it. This rewards emptying guns into the air to pick up amo for points. Daft!

Odd Weapon Equipping System: The game allows you to carry 4 weapons (mapped to the D pad) at a time. You can purchase more weapons for your  inventory. To swap weapons from your inventory you need to find and use a pay phone! Huh? Alternatively, when you find weapons from fallen enemies, you can stand over them to swap weapons in and out from your existing inventory. Note here, that I’m not saying that you can pick up the fallen enemy’s weapon. You cannot. That would make too much sense. Rather, enemy weapons are used as a trigger point where you can swap out weapons of the type dropped by the fallen enemy from your inventory. It made no logical real-world sense. I’ve never seen this silly mechanic in any other shooter – and I’ve played a LOT of shooters.

Tired Animations: Every time 50C and one of his G Units did any of the following moves (which was constantly), the same tired animation played: opening doorways, boosting one another to another level, jumping down to a lower level; bashing boards, lifting metal doors.  You’d think they’d at least include a few variations given that these animations play over and over through the game.

Excessive Hand Holding: The game holds your hand throughout. You are provided with: (i) arrows continually pointing out where to go; (ii) big, gaudy orange circle indicators (see picture above) where you must stand to perform an action; (iii) a big yellow G (which is confusingly similar to the yellow targets you are looking for on the maps) hovering over your ever-present G-unit ‘buddy’; (iv) bright red outlines around your enemies in the mini challenges; (v) red dots and arrows pointing out where the next offensive is coming from; (vi) indicators where the ever-present helicopter is; and (vii) subtitles. You can’t turn any of this off. And if you still don’t know where to go, the G-Unit will always be conveniently standing next to the door you are to go through next.

No Crouch or Prone: While not really needed given how easy the game is, you cannot crouch or lay prone. This is especially annoying because the G-Unit guy is constantly shouting at you to get down or lay low. Yet, the game provides no method to comply.

Lack of Map Depth: Players either retrace steps or fight repeatedly around the same map – often using a different level on the same map.

Annoying Music: I like some 50 Cent music. I’m not a rapper hater. But to save my sanity, I had to shut off the non-stop, vapid, gangsta – ho, rap ‘music’.

Plot & Lame Ending: Plot, what plot? The premise was ridiculous. As endings goes, the final act has to be about as lame as they come. And why must almost every level end with the shooting down of a helicopter? Good grief!

Tips

Easy Cash / Leveling Up: Surprisingly, this is not a defect in the game. When loading a level, the game brags that, if 50 dies, he doesn’t loose his cash. This can be used as an easy cheat. To get cash fast, find a lucrative stash of cash boxes that appear right after a check point. For example, after the first checkpoint on "Mission 7 – Destroy the AA Gun’. Collect the cash, allow yourself to die, respawn and collect the cash again – over and over. At this particular spot, you can pick up cash in $35,000 increments for each 60 seconds round. Makes all the cash-related achievements (purchasing of weapons, taunts and counterkills) easy. Good grief!

Blow Through Weapon Change Animation: It took me awhile to realize that there is no need to wait for the animation to complete when changing weapons. As soon as you push the button to change, you can start shooting with the new weapon – before the animation is finished.

Conclusion

One wonders who this game is targeted towards? Gangster wannabes, who enjoy 50 Cent’s ‘music’, that are so incompetent when it comes to shooters that they need everything to be spoon fed to them? Gamers that want to feel like a bad-@ss without actually having to do anything difficult? Hard core gamers will hate it.

If you’ve played every other shooter, and are really bored, rent it. But do not under any circumstances purchase it!

With its excessive profanity, this game is definitely NOT for the kiddies!

(3/5) – action – adventure Reviews: Metacritic 81%| Game Rankings 80.68% | zero punctuation
Reference:  | Achievements
Walkthrus: Mahalo | WikiCheats | GameFAQs
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal, Engine: Scimitar / Anvil

Game Synopsis

In Prince of Persia (“PoP”), an unnamed prince, who isn’t really a prince, travels with Princess Elika to each of the 24 regions, jumping, climbing dodging, fighting enemies to get to the region’s ‘fertile ground". He defeats a bad guy, Elika ‘heals’ the fertile ground, then they retrace their steps on either side to collect light ’seeds’ (Crackdown-style) to level up. THEN HE DOES IT ALL AGAIN – TWENTY-FOUR TIMES. That’s the game.

It’s gorgeous and somewhat fun, but left me wanting. I preferred the the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time on the original Xbox – especially the fighting elements and the ability to rewind time.

General Observations

Tomb Raider Meets God of War : The game style can best be described as a cell-shaded combination of God of War, Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed and Tomb Raider without GoW’s terrific combo-leveling up system. I note that PoP uses the same game engine as Assassin’s Creed (Scimitar) which explains a lot.

Grander in Scale: This Prince of Persia is much grander in scale than the original Prince of Persia: Sands of Time  and similar in scope to Assassin’s Creed.

Level Intricacies: The intricacies of the 24  regions are quite amazing – especially given their three dimensional nature. You explore every nook and cranny, but, unfortunately, you must explore each nook at least three times to fully complete the game. This is the poster-child for games that extend play by forcing you to retrace your steps, over and over.

Pros

Frame Rates: The frame rates are so much better than the most recent Laura Croft/Tomb Raider games on the 360. I could play this game all day without any queasiness.

Terrific Hybrid Camera Control: At some points you have complete control of the camera. At other times the camera is controlled for you. Few games pull off this hybrid trick well. This one does.

Uncollected Seed Counts: Integral to ‘leveling up’ in this game is finding all the seeds of light. Happily the map indicates how many seeds are remaining unfound in any of the many regions. This is in stark contrast to otherwise good games like Crackdown and Assassin’s Creed where you could find 599 of 600 orbs (in the case of Crackdown) and have no hint as to where the missing orb is in the vast world. Kudos to Ubisoft for that!

Achievements: There is a recent trend in 360 games to make achievements increasingly difficult to achieve. Call of Duty 4 and Guitar Hero 3, for example, each make achievements ridiculously hard to achieve. As you can see from my gamer card, I got 930 of the available 1,000 (though with the help of an achievement ‘glitch’? I might add – see below). Thanks Ubisoft.

Save Points: Anyone who reads my reviews knows that user-selectable save points are important to me. Happily you can save the game any time, any where (except in the final boss battle – even after cut scenes – but that’s a trivial gripe). The save system was otherwise perfect.

Character Interactions: While nothing like the best of breed story in Uncharted – Drake’s Fortune, the story/dialogue between Elika and the ‘prince’ was generally enjoyable. My only issue is that you can’t talk while moving around. You always have to stop to have a conversation.

Elika Sexy: What can I say, Elika is amongst the sexiest gaming characters I’ve had the pleasure to interact with.

Cons

Basic Explanations Lacking: For the first hour, the game does a poor job of explaining what is going on and what to do. It presents an open world but doesn’t give you any way of determining the relative merits of which path or power to choose. Reading the manual ultimately helped (see tip below) but, come on Ubisoft!  Developers should give the gamer some basic info, back story or help screens to get them going. Any game that requires the user to read the manual is making a mistake.

Extremely Repetitive: Despite the interesting differences between the regions, as per my synopsis above, the game is extremely repetitive. I gather that goes with the territory for games of this scope. I had the same fundamental criticism of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed.

Dismal Leveling Up Rewards: Unlike most collection and fighting games, the leveling up achievements were meager and increasingly far between. The prince didn’t become more powerful or gain battle skills. Rather, leveling up gave him access to: (i) four regions;  and (ii) four different jumping/grappling/flying techniques that propel him around the world. After finding 560 light seeds, there was no advantage to finding the remaining 341 (except for a final 360 Achievement). Most disappointing his fighting skills, techniques, weapons or combos were unaffected by ‘this leveling up’.

Lack of Proper Difficulty Ramp: Because the game is open-ended, you can approach the game’s regions in any order. As a result there is little in the way of a difficulty ramp from beginning to end. The mini boss fights are largely identical throughout. This, combined with the lack of fighting skill leveling up, makes the God of War player in me disappointed with the battle sequences. I want fights to get more difficult but I also want my skill and weapons set to improve as the game progresses. Neither of these occur in PoP. Zero Punctuation made the same point in his sardonic review.

Button Mashing & Carpel Tunnel: In God of War, Combos are earned as you play. You get a clear sense of how they work. Four hours into PoP I was still largely button mashing. Yes, I understood the combos but found them difficult to use and to time properly for much of the game. You get screens full of them from the start. It’s hard do discern which combo to use, at what point. As the game progressed I did get better with the combos. The timing is quite different from other fighters. The game gave me mild carpel tunnel syndrome on my right thumb from repeated mashing. I’ve never experienced that with other games.

Reliance on Quick Time Events: The game relies on quick time events – something that annoys me. The implementation was pretty mild. Games like God of War and Fahrenheit implement QTE’s in a much more annoying fashion so I can’t complain too much. But, this is a tired mechanic whose time is over.

No Hour Glass Mechanic: The ability to roll-back time with the hour glass doesn’t exist in this version of PoP. Instead you are instantly (and frequently) saved by Elika who can fly (but ironically needs you to carry her on your back while crossing vines). This makes the game easier. But, I much prefer the hour-glass, rewinding time mechanic from the original Prince of Persia.

Yellow (Wings of Ormazd), Y-Axis Inversion Issue: I play with the Y axis inverted. Elika and ‘the prince’ fly through the air while using the Wings of Ormazd (yellow plate) power. But, the Y-Axis is not inverted during these flights – making it very difficult to fly. Unfortunately, Ubisoft is not the only developer guilty of this defect. It happens too frequently when a game employs a secondary movement mechanic such as swimming or using a fixed place turret. You’d think that by 2008, this kind of oversight would be behind us.

Tips:

Read the Manual: RTFM’ing is rarely a requisite for modern video games. But the manual describes the four powers that you are collecting light seeds for. It also explains what do in the early stages of the game. I’m amazed that the game does such a poor job of this. The manual also provides info on basic attacks, blocks etc. that the game does not. It’s the first game in years where I felt that reading the manual was necessary.

Elika’s Powers (Leveling Up): For the first half of the game you’ll be collecting seeds to unlock Elika’s four powers. Each power allows her to access certain parts of the realm. More importantly each power allows her to use power plates placed within the realms to move about in fantastical ways. You can choose the powers (and access the realms) in any order you choose. I recommend choosing the powers in the following order:

• Blue – Hand of Ormazd (let’s you jump from plate to plate)
• Red – Step of Ormazd (let’s you grapple from plate to plate)
• Yellow – Wings of Ormazd (let’s you fly through the air to collect seeds)
• Green – Breath of Ormazd (let’s you wall run in any direction for extended periods)

Note that these are roughly in the order that they are presented on the bottom of the map. My power selection suggestions are made purely on the basis of ease of use. Blue and red are the easiest to use. Yellow (flying) is harder and green (wall running) is the hardest to pull off because you have to run around obstacles placed in your way at the last second. Obviously, if you are keen to explore an area associated with the green power, you’ll have to choose the green power before the others (as I did, and regretted). If I were to play the game again, the order above is how I’d choose them, though red and blue are virtually identical in actual game play so you could interchange their order. Whatever order you choose, you’ll still play each realm essentially the same way. You’ll always have to re-visit realms later to collect seeds that you couldn’t get to the first time through because you didn’t have the necessary power needed to access the needed power plate.

Pay attention on Wall Planks and Vines: If you land on your feet on a wall post/plank (instead of hanging from a poll), there is a good chance that it is a launching point for a light seed, grappling hook or a plate. Look around before moving on. The same is often true when sliding left to right on a vine. Keep an eye out above the vines.

Light Seed Gathering: I collected all the light seeds. Surprisingly, they are all pretty easy to get. Every time I thought I couldn’t get one, it turned out I was missing something pretty obvious. I had several Homer Simpson-style D’oh! moments. While some are challenging, there are no dirty tricks played here. Keep trying different ways or approach from another angle. While there is a way to safely retrieve them, it’s easier sometimes to just jump out, grab the seed and let Elika save you. Remember to use ‘magic jumping’ (ie: double jumping with Elika’s assistance). Sometimes you have to do several of these in a row, back and forth (eg: in Martyrs Tower), to get to the seed. If all else fails, use the walkthrus linked to the top of this post. And, there’s always YouTube.

Stay in Center of Ring while Fighting: During the boss (and even minor) battles, if you get close to the edge, a wall or the black gue (aka ‘corruption’), chances are your foe will push you over, against or into the gue – requiring Elika to save you (and the enemy regaining health). Constantly moving to, and staying in, the center of the arena is key to quick and effective boss fights.

Lead with Elika in Fights: I ultimately learned to use every combo available in the game. For me, the combos that lead with Elika (or at least those that included her) seemed to consistently be the most effective. So much so that every boss battle became a breeze once the Elika combos were generally understood.

Combo Button Pacing: The pace of combo button pushing (mashing) in Prince of Persia is much slower than in games like God of War – almost a second a part. Quick button mashing in a fight will be useless. Paced, deliberate and somewhat slow button pushing for combos is the winning strategy here.

Two Free Achievements: I have never seen this in a game before. I let the credits role through to the end. I enjoy reading who and what is involved in developing a video game. And sometimes games include treats or teasers (Halo 3) after the credits have finished. When the P0P credits finished rolling, the game gave me both the "Be Gentle With Her" (100 pts) and the "Speed Demon" (10 pts) achievement for free. Both of these would have been enormously difficult, if not impossible, to achieve normally. I’m wondering if I hit a glitch in the game or if this was intentional?

May 27, 2009 Update:

I’m reading this NeoGAF forum post on the best looking person in the gaming industry. The picture below, of Kari Wahlgren, the voice of Elika, came up. Wowzers! No wonder I found Elika so hot. The voice behind the character is attached to a similarly beautiful woman!

But my vote goes to Veronica Belmont – she’s the quintessential Dale-type!

1. Listen Up – formerly The 1Up Yours Podcast:

Listen Up is the successor to the 1Up Yours Podcast. Oddly, the name was changed after 1UP.com was purchased by UGO Networks in January 2009, but the format and content is largely the same. It ‘airs’ Friday evenings. The show is still hosted by Garnett Lee, but most of the former cast (who make occasional guest appearances) have moved on to other things: Luke Smith – now with the Bungie podcast; Bryan Intihar -now with Insomniac Games; Dan ‘Shoe’ Hsu – now on permanent vacation; John Davison now at what they play; and Shane Bettenhausen, now Director of Business Development at Ignition Entertainment. Despite the constant cast changes, Garnet continues to provide an interesting set of revolving guests that consistently provide an entertaining and informative podcast week-in and week-out. My original 1Up Yours criticism still remains – the show is often too long and the interesting content (ie: the news) is usually held back to the the end. Not quite as good as it was when the old cast was there, but still the best video game podcast out there.

2. CO-OP – formerly The 1Up Show (video) Podcast:

The CO-OP podcast (pictured above), continues on where the cancelled The 1Up Show left off. It shares the same cast and terrific production crew. It’s still my favorite video podcast. It provides a comprehensive set of visual video game previews and reviews. It also features interviews with industry luminaries and provides trade show coverage. If you want to watch a video game before purchase, this  is the best place to do it. This video podcast comes in small and large sizes (3x the size) suitable for viewing on the iPhone/iTouch and AppleTV respectively.

3. Bungie Studios Podcast:

When Luke Smith abandoned the 1Up Yours podcast to become Bungie’s pool boy, a Bungie podcast became inevitable. This ‘insider’ podcast was launched just prior to Halo 3’s launch in September 2007. While the podcast’s frequency is irregular (sometimes months go by between episodes), it is almost always interesting. The podcast features ‘behind the scenes’ discussions with everyone at Bungie from level designers, graphic artists to Marty O’Donnell (music). Even for non-Halo fans, this is a very interesting podcast given its unique ‘insider’ perspective.

4. Xbox Live’s Major Nelson Radio:

Yes, I know its de-rigueur to criticize Major Nelson (Larry Hryb) as a Microsoft shill. Despite his being a Microsoft insider (and being a bit pompous), I find his podcast to be consistently professional, informative and interesting. It has improved since Xbox Live Ops Manager ‘e’ (Eric Neustadter) joined as co-host last fall. It’s a consistent, high-quality source of Microsoft/Xbox 360 and Xbox Live information from a semi-official source.

5. X-Play’s Daily Video Podcast:

The X-Play TV show is/was difficult to watch. The TV show repeats a dozen or more times per week. Prior to the podcast, I had set my TiVo to record it. But I spent most of my time pruning the repeats and fast forwarding through it to find reviews of games I was interested in.  The X-Play Daily Video Podcast is a welcome substitute to the TV show. As with the TV show, it is hosted by Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb. The podcast is a sliced and diced version of the TV show. Each episode consists of individual video game reviews or guest interviews featured on the TV show – but cut out and distributed piecemeal as individual podcasts. This is quite useful. Since each podcast is labeled with the name of the video game being reviewed or the personality being interviewed, I can delete the podcasts I’m not interested in and watch only those that do. I still prefer The 1Up Show video podcast, but X-Play’s 1-game-1-show format is quite good for honing in on games of particular interest.

‘Honorable’ …. Umm … Mention:

Joystiq Podcast:

The Joystiq podcast is not very good. I am including it here because I consider the underlying Joystiq blog to be the most useful general video game blog on the Internet. If I’m pressed for time and can only review one video-game related blog, it will be the Joystiq blog. The podcast is less professional than those listed above. The podcast is particularly annoying because the hosts, Chris Grant, Ludwig Kietzmann and Justin McElroy are seemingly genetically unable to string two or three sentences together without the incessant use of ‘umm’ and "ahhh’. While these guys are generally knowledgeable and good natured hosts the umm’s and ahh’s drive me to distraction. Guys, take a public speaking course — please! I  listen to this podcast only if I have nothing else to listen to and want back-ground chatter to fill the empty space.

Deadpool

The following video game podcasts are no longer with us.

The 1Up Yours Podcast:

This is was my favorite video game podcast. It ‘aired’ Friday evenings. Despite its continuous personality turnover (Luke Smith; Bryan Intihar; Dan ‘Shoe’ Hsu), Host Garnett Lee, with Shane Bettenhausen, John Davison and a revolving set of guests consistently provided an entertaining and informative podcast week-in and week-out. I’m sad to see it, and its former cast no longer around.

The. Game Theory Podcast :

The Game Theory podcast (previously the Next-Gen.biz podcast) was a terrific weekly video game podcast – my second favorite. While 1Up Yours was strong in games coverage, the Game Theory podcast’s strength lied in its broader industry coverage. Gary Whitta & Colin Campbell are veteran video game industry reporters who put on an engaging and enlightening podcast. And, there was something about their British accents that seemed to elevate it.

Unfortunately the show died on a whimper when they abruptly announced on their blog, in September 30, 2008, that the show was being cancelled because they didn’t have time for it any more.

With the demise of the Game Theory podcast, I’m looking for recommendations for an alternative video game industry podcast, as opposed to video game review-type coverage. Any suggestions?

The EGM Live Podcast:

The Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine put together this weekly podcast. It typically "aired" on Tuesdays. As yet another Ziff Davis podcast, it shared an overlapping set of guests with the 1Up Yours and The 1Up Show. It’s host Jen  Tsao did a reasonably good job of keeping the show interesting. Frequent contributors include Michael Donahoe, Greg Ford, Garnett Lee and Shane Bettenhausen.

This podcast was cancelled and replaced with the 1UP FM Podcast. The cast changed with the name. After a few episodes I abandoned the 1UP FM Podcast. It was too infantile for my tastes. Along with several other Ziff Davis podcasts, it too was cancelled when purchased by Ugo Networks in January 2009. The hosts were laid off and started their own podcast, Rebel FM. Given that I didn’t enjoy the prior podcast I haven’t tried the new one.

Please let me know what your favorite video game podcasts are.

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It’s time to create a whole new category for the Wii phenomena. Holy cow– more than 2 MILLION in sales in North America in November is crazy. Yet, to this day there still isn’t a single game on the Wii I’d want to play – not one. Yet you can’t deny those sales numbers.

Video game industry sales are UP 10% year over year. Terrific given the economic downturn.

I was happy to see the 360 outsell the PS3 and PSP combined. Though I’m starting to worry about the PS3’s long-term prospects given its continued poor results. Despite the industry upturn, the PS3’s sale’s numbers are LOWER than its November 2007 numbers.  The PS2 results show its time is coming to an end. I wonder how many months before Sony kills it?  But, it still hasn’t reached the $99 price point. Perhaps it can grasp a few more months of breathe with a price drop before Sony puts it out of its misery.

Meanwhile my copy of November’s top selling Gears of War 2  is collecting dust as I finish Resistance 2 for my review. Gears 2 sold 1.56 million sold – trouncing Resistance 2’s comparatively meagre 385K unit sales. I’m really looking forward to Gears when I get the time – especially online co-op.

November 2008 Console and Game sales results after the break.

Console Results

- Wii: 2.04m 1.237m (154%)
- DS: 1.57m 1.079m (220%)
- Xbox 360: 836K 465K (125%)
- PSP: 421K 228K (118%)
- PS3: 378K 188K (99%)
- PS2: 206K 70K (51%)

Game Results

1. Gears of War 2 – Xbox 360 – 1.56 million
2. Call of Duty: World at War – Xbox 360 – 1.41 million
3. Wii Play w/ remote – Wii – 796K
4. Wii Fit – Wii – 697K
5. Mario Kart – Wii – 637K
6. Call of Duty: World at War – PS3 – 597K
7. Guitar Hero: World Tour – Wii – 475K
8. Left 4 Dead – Xbox 360 – 410K
9. Resistance 2 – PS3 – 385K
10. Wii Music – Wii – 297K

On November 3, I wrote about my Xbox 360 experiencing the Red-Ring-of-Death (RRoD) (original post here). Today, twenty-five days after shipping my unit out for repair/replacement, I received a replacement unit.

• Replacement Unit: The manufacture date of the replacement unit is 2008-05-29. I presume it is a Falcon. I did not receive a new power supply with the unit. It appears to be brand new (not refurbished).
• Much Quieter: The first thing I noticed was that the replacement unit was much quieter than the jet-engine sound coming out of my older unit. This is terrific. I can barely hear the replacement 360 when it is turned on. A welcome change indeed.
• 1 Month Xbox Live Free: In the box was a card that gave me one free month of Xbox Live. Not much of a bonus given that my box was gone for almost a full month of my current subscription.
• 3 Months Warranty: The replacement unit came with an additional three month warranty beyond the original 3 year warranty period that had just ended. The extended warranty ends on February 26, 2009 – 3 months from the ship date of the replacement unit.

• Needed to Re-Download All Purchased Content: In order for my previously purchased Marketplace content (Halo maps, arcade games etc.) to be properly licensed I had to go to the ‘Downloads History’ part of the new XBox Experience Dashboard and re-download all previously purchased content. If you don’t do this, purchased content will not work when you are offline or attempt to access the content from another account on the same Xbox. Instructions on how to do this came with the replacement unit. This isn’t as daunting as it seems. You actually don’t download anything. All that seems to be downloaded is a new license. For each re-download, after 1% was downloaded, it showed download complete. it took only a few minutes to complete this process for all my previously purchased content.
• Temporarily Lost: Normally the replacement process takes just 2 to 3 weeks. My unit was temporarily ‘lost’ for two weeks during this replacement process. Two weeks after shipping the unit in, I received an email from Microsoft saying they hadn’t received the defective unit – though I had shipped it out that day. A dozen phone calls and a week later they found it on the Don Mills (Microsoft’s Toronto repair center) loading dock. Turns out the original person I called (at the 1-800-4-My-Xbox number) typed the serial number into the computer wrong so the serial number of my shipped unit and the serial number that they had on record didn’t match. This resulted in my Xbox being shunted to a warehouse shelf for two weeks until this was sorted out. At week 3 a manager was assigned to the case, called me personally, gave me number to call him back at personally, helped find it and worked with me to expedite the repair and return process. While the repair/replacement process took longer than usual, I was happy with the quality of service to expedite things once the lost unit was found.

[For an Interesting read on the causes of the RRoD see: The Truth about the Xbox 360]

[Update: On November 28, 2008 I received a replacement Xbox – see details below]

I called Microsoft support (1-800-4-My-Xbox – 1.800.469.9269), expecting to have to pay for a warranty repair.  Happily, while the support rep walked me through his trouble-shooting script, I experienced the Red-Ring-of-Death for the first time (see picture below – yes, that’s a Halo face plate on my 360 – sorry for the fuzzy picture). I was able to boot the 360 a couple more times after the first RRoD, but it inevitably failed to the Red-Ring-of-Death state within minutes or seconds.

The reason I say “Yeah!” in the title, and why I’m happy about this, is because I was one of the ‘lucky’ one’s that purchased my 360 on launch day – November 22, 2005. Microsoft’s extended RRoD warranty lasts for three years from the date of purchase. My 360 RRoD’d just 19 days before the third anniversary of my purchase date. As a result, I qualified for the free replacement (see details below).

My Support Experience and The RRoD Replacement Process

The first time I called the support center I connected with a woman somewhere in India that couldn’t speak English well. I decided to call back rather than go through a half hour of translation hell. Thankfully the second support rep spoke English and completely understood my RRoD situation.

He walked me through the trouble-shooting, warranty process. He first took down all my info, including the 360 Serial Number. He asked me to boot up and shut down the 360 several times, asking what I saw, removing the face plate to confirm the specific three red-rings. He got me to remove the hard drive, boot, replace the hard drive, then boot up one last time.

He confirmed it was the Ring-of-Death problem. I was instructed to remove the hard drive and the faceplate and to ship the bare 360 back to Microsoft (no cables, power transformers nor chords need be sent back either either) via UPS according to the instructions which were to be emailed shortly after the call. Within an hour I received an email from Microsoft that included links to:

• UPS return documentation and instructions;
• a UPS mailing label with bar-code for printing out;
• a receipt, tracking info and number; and
• a map showing the closest UPS stores (one just a few blocks from me).

I put the 360 in its original box, printed off the documents, including the UPS label with bar code and walked to the UPS store. The lady at the counter knew exactly what to do. I didn’t have to fill out any paper-work at the UPS store. I simply handed over the box and the label/bar code. That was it.  I was in and out of the UPS store in less than a minute.

So, that’s it. I’m now waiting for a refurbished Xbox to arrive via UPS. The support rep said it would take two to three weeks. That sounds about right. That’s how long it took my friend to get his replacement for a similarly RRoD’d 360 last year.

No Receipt/Proof of Purchase Required

At no point in the process was I required to provide my original purchase receipt or a copy of it. I gather this was the case because, up until November 22, 2008, every 360, by definition, was purchased within the 3 year warranty period. After that, I expect Microsoft to start requiring proofs of purchase.

Falcon vs. Zepher Question

Does anyone know if Microsoft replaces RRoD’d boxes with 360’s that have the Falcon chip yet? Sites like this one and this one indicate that you know you have a Falcon-based Xbox if you see 175 Watts on the Xbox label (vs. the  203 Watts of the earlier Zephyr-based 360s). For obvious reasons I’d prefer the 65 nm Falcon-based units. But, since I am keeping my old power supply, which supplies the 203 Watts needed by the Zephyr, I’m doubtful that the old 203 Watt power supply could interoperate with the requirements of the 175 Watt Falcon? Any ideas?

Replacement Unit Arrives [Added November 28, 2008]

Twenty-five days after shipping my unit in for repair/replacement, on November 28, 2008, I received a replacement unit.

• Replacement Unit: The manufacture date of the replacement unit is 2008-05-29. I presume it is a Falcon. I did not receive a new power supply with the unit. It appears to be brand new (not refurbished).
• Much Quieter: The first thing I noticed was that the replacement unit was much quieter than the jet-engine sound coming out of my older unit. This is terrific. I can barely hear the replacement 360 when it is turned on. A welcome change indeed.
• 1 Month Xbox Live Free: In the box was a card that gave me one free month of Xbox Live. Not much of a bonus given that my box was gone for almost a full month of my current subscription.
• 3 Months Warranty: The replacement unit came with an additional three month warranty beyond the original 3 year warranty period that had just ended. The extended warranty ends on February 26, 2009 – 3 months from the ship date of the replacement unit.
• Needed to Re-Download All Purchased Content: In order for my previously purchased Marketplace content (Halo maps, arcade games etc.) to be properly licensed I had to go to the ‘Downloads History’ part of the new XBox Experience Dashboard and re-download all previously purchased content. If you don’t do this, purchased content will not work when you are offline or attempt to access the content from another account on the same Xbox. Instructions on how to do this came with the replacement unit. This isn’t as daunting as it seems. You actually don’t download anything. All that seems to be downloaded is a new license. For each re-download, after 1% was downloaded, it showed download complete. it took only a few minutes to complete this process for all my previously purchased content.
• Temporarily Lost: Normally the replacement process takes just 2 to 3 weeks. My unit was temporarily ‘lost’ for two weeks during this replacement process. Two weeks after shipping the unit in, I received an email from Microsoft saying they hadn’t received the defective unit – though I had shipped it out that day. A dozen phone calls and a week later they found it on the Don Mills (Microsoft’s Toronto repair center) loading dock. Turns out the original person I called (at the 1-800-4-My-Xbox number) typed the serial number into the computer wrong so the serial number of my shipped unit and the serial number that they had on record didn’t match. This resulted in my Xbox being shunted to a warehouse shelf for two weeks until this was sorted out. At week 3 a manager was assigned to the case, called me personally, gave me number to call him back at personally, helped find it and worked with me to expedite the repair and return process. While the repair/replacement process took longer than usual, I was happy with the quality of service to expedite things once the lost unit was found.

In the early days of console gaming, about 25% or so of all games made me nauseous, dizzy or gave me headaches to the point where I couldn’t play them. A prime example was Deus Ex: Invisible War. I enjoyed the game and wanted to continue playing it. But I couldn’t play for more than 15 minutes without becoming dizzy and nauseous. Ultimately, I had to abandon the game.

[Updated May 25, 2009. Added first person bobbing-while-walking factor.]

In the current (Xbox 360/PS3) console generation, the percentage of games that are unplayable due to nausea, headaches or dizziness has dropped dramatically to, perhaps, 5 to 10%. For example, I couldn’t play the otherwise enjoyable Laura Croft: Tomb Raider Legend for more than 15 minutes without feeling ill.

Below, I identify three four factors that cause me dizziness, headaches and nausea when playing video games.  I also list specific games that have made me sick.

I’d be interested in your thoughts – especially with respect to what might be behind the X-Factor discussed below.

Nausea Caused by Aggressive Camera Centering / Fighting

When a game gives me only partial control of the camera, especially when I need to fight the game for camera control, this makes me nauseous every time. Ironically, when a game takes total control of the camera from me, such as in God of War 2, I do not get nauseous.

The poster-child for this type of camera-control-fighting-induced nausea is the entire Resident Evil series. Not only does the game st0p you from moving your character wherever you wish (they are all ‘on rails’ games), the game aggressively fights the player for control of the camera by constantly pulling the camera back to the center every time the player looks hither or thither. Rumor has it that the forthcoming Resident Evil 5 might finally hand camera control to the player where it belongs. Surprisingly, this is controversial.  I won’t be playing RE5 unless this problem is finally fixed. [Spring 2009 Update: The reviews for RE5 were so bad, I’m not even going to bother trying it.]

Each of the recent Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Battlefield: Bad Company, Resistance Fall of Man, Grand Theft Auto IV (but only when driving) and Star Wars, Force Unleashed (but only while moving) games fought me over the camera somewhat. This resulted in mild dizziness. Happily the implementation of camera centering in each of these games wasn’t aggressive enough to cause me to abandon the games over the issue.

Nausea Caused by No Y-Axis Inversion Option

The first console-based video game I ever played was Pilot Wings, on the N-64. As a flying game, it naturally featured inverted Y-axis controls. A dozen years and a hundred or so games later, I have inverted the Y-axis on every console game I’ve played since.

If I can’t invert the y-axis I can’t play. Non-inverted game play makes me instantly nauseous. My brain is wired in such a way that when I pull the right stick back, my brain expects the camera to move up. When the camera goes the opposite way it is very disorienting.

There are very few games now-a-days that do not provide the inverted control option. Indeed, inverting the Y-axis is so common that the Xbox 360 can be set to automatically configure every game I play with the Y-axis inverted.

I was astonished to discover that Silent Hill: Homecoming does not allow players to invert the Y-axis for normal viewing (it does have a limited Y-inversion option for shooting when the gun is wielded).  As I wrote here, the game was unplayable. I had to abandon it.

Dizziness Caused by First Person Bobbing While Walking

I first wrote this post in October 2008. In late May 2009 I played F.E.A.R. 2 and remembered another cause of dizziness – the screen bobbing while a character walks. In F.E.A.R. 2 and several other first-person video games, the screen bobs up and down as the character moves. The bobbing, I gather, corresponds with the cadence of the character’s walk. This doesn’t make me dizzy or nauseous as quickly as the other factors discussed in this post, but I can usually only play a game that does this for an hour or so before becoming dizzy. The game is not unplayable, but it has to be taken in light doses.

Nausea Caused by the X-Factor – Possibly Frame Rate

Finally, there is a class of game that makes me seriously dizzy or nauseous even when I have full control over the camera and the Y-axis is properly inverted (see list below).

I’ve never fully understood, absent the camera/Y-axis issues, why some games make me dizzy and nauseous while others do not. I’ve always assumed it was a frame-rate issue. I’d be keen for any of you to suggest other possible causes.

Whatever the reason, such was recently the case with Mercenaries 2. The game gave me complete camera control and I had happily inverted the Y-axis but it still made me nauseous to play.

List of Games Causing Dizziness / Nausea

Below is a list of games that have made me seriously dizzy or nauseous. I also list the underlying game engine in parenthesis. Note how many games are built on versions of the Unreal and  id Tech engines. I intend to expand the list over time as I remember them:

PC:

• Half Life 2 (Valve’s Source Engine): Enjoyed it so much I pushed through about 80% it. But, to this day, just the sounds of that game (the gravity gun in particular) make me woozy.

Original Xbox:

• Brothers in Arms: Earned Blood (Unreal Engine 2)
• Brute Force (?): Finished it anyways given how hyped it was – didn’t really enjoy it much
• Deus Ex: Invisible War (heavily modified Unreal Engine 2)
• Doom 3 (id Tech 4): Finished the game anyway – holding my cookies the whole way)
• Psi-Ops (Unreal Engine 2)
• Return to Castle Wolvenstein (id Tech 3): Finished it anyway but wasn’t that good.
• TimeSplitters: Future Perfect (??)
• Unreal Championship (Unreal Engine 2): Couldn’t play for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Xbox 360:

• F.E.A.R. 2 – (Valve’s Source Engine): First person bobbing while walking issue
• Half-Life 2 – Episodes 1 and 2 (Valve’s Source Engine)
• King Kong (Ubisoft’s Jade engine): Bad game – pushed through just for the easy achievements
• Laura Croft: Tomb Raider Legend (Crystal Dynamics Proprietary):  I enjoyed it so much I pushed through about 40% of it before I had to stop because I couldn’t take it any more.
• Mercenaries 2 (EA proprietary)
• Perfect Dark Zero (Havok’s HyrdaCore): Thank goodness the game was  horrible – I didn’t miss much
• Quake 4 (id Tech 4): Abysmal game.
• Prey (modified id Tech 4): Also pushed through about 75% despite extreme dizziness.

PS3:

(Note, the numbers are fewer here because,  if given a choice, I play the 360 version of a game. Each platform is an equal opportunity nausea causer.)

• The Darkness  (Starbreeze Engine)
• Resistance Fall of Man (Insomniac Engine): Caused only mild nausea. I was not nauseous when I played its sequel. I note that it’s sequel, Resistance 2, did not make me dizzy or nauseous.
• Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (Naughty Dog Proprietary) – Best PS3 game yet!

Conclusion

Thankfully, better graphics, higher frame rates and the abandonment of nausea-inducing camera controller techniques is making gamer illness increasingly a thing of the past. Unfortunately, as the recent games Silent Hill: Homecoming and Mercenaries 2: World in Flames have shown, we still have a way to go.

Reviews: Metacritic 73%| Game Rankings 77%
Reference: Achievements|
Walkthrus:  WikiCheats | GameFAQ   | Mahalo
Developers: Konami | Double Helix Games
Genre: survivor – horror
Status: Abandoned after escaping hospital

As explained in my “Video Game-induced Nausea, Dizziness and Headaches” post, I had to abandon Silent Hill Homecoming due to nausea caused by the inability to invert the Y-axis.

It came as a shock to me that, while there is an option to invert the Y-axis when shooting, Silent Hill Homecoming does not give you the player the option to invert the Y-axis when walking around, fighting or doing anything else in the game. This is extremely rare in modern video games.

A quick Google search to see if there is a patch, cheat code or some other way  to rectify the situation yields posts like this one and flame wars like this one. It seems that Konami is aware of the issue and just doesn’t care. No patch is available and none is in the works. It’s truly bizarre that Konami does not provide an across-the-board option to invert the Y-axis in a major title such as Silent Hill. This is a standard option in virtually every console game that comes out these days.

The upshot for me – the game was unplayable. I tried. I killed some nurses and critters, got a couple achievements and made it out of the hospital. But 25 minutes of playing without inversion made me too dizzy and nauseous to continue. FYI, the game also suffers from reliance on quick time events – which I detest.

Thank goodness this was a rental. Back it goes.

Reviews: Metacritic 73%| Game Rankings 72% | zero punctuation
Reference: Achievements|
Walkthrus: Mahalo |  WikiCheats | GameFAQ  
Developers: Pandemic Studios | Pi Studios
Genre: Third person shooter
Status: Abandoned after first level

As a shooter fan, I was looking forward to Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. Unfortunately, I had to abandon it after the first level due to nausea. 

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was fun – as far as I got. Nothing spectacular, but some good old-fashioned sand-boxy, shooter fun.

I unintentionally ended up playing the hottie female character, Jennifer Mui, pictured to the right. I’m not sure how that happened because I didn’t necessarily intend to pick her. But she was fun to play nonetheless

The weapons were fun, the controls were responsive, the vehicles were enjoyable. I liked the tracer-bullet effects (would like to see that in more shooters). The sounds were realistic. The collecting cash bit was a bit cheeky. It looked like it was going to be a fun romp.

But, within minutes of starting, that old-familiar dizziness, headachy feeling that, in me, leads to nausea, reared its ugly head, forcing me to stop playing an otherwise enjoyable game.

It’s been awhile since nausea (in this case for the x-factor reason) forced me to stop playing a game. Having also been forced to also stop playing Silent Hill Homecoming due to nausea (caused for a different reason), I decided to write this “Video Game-induced Nausea, Dizziness and Headaches” post.

I hope those with stronger stomachs/heads enjoy Merc 2.

Below are the fall 2008 video game releases that I’m most looking forward to, not sure of and two 2009 games that I’m chomping at the bit to play.

Fall 2008 Can’t Wait

• Oct 17? – Max Payne 3 – Only Rumoured – but the Mark Walberg movie comes out Oct 17. Max Payne 1 and 2 were two of my all-time favourite games. [Update: Oops - so much for wild guesses]
• Oct 21 – LittleBigPlanet (PS3) – Who isn’t looking forward to this one?
• Nov 4 – Resistance 2 (PS3) – I enjoyed Resistance 1 much more than I expected.
• Nov 7 – Gears of War 2 (360)– What’s not to love? Can’t have too many COGs.
• Nov 11 – Mirror’s Edge – Looks like pure platforming fun like Crackdown was.
• Nov 18 – Tomb Raider: Underworld – I hope they finally get frame rate issues resolved – every Tomb Raider to date has made me nauseous within a half hour.
• Dec 2 – Prince of Persia 2008 – This one is looking like its getting back to its excellent PoP: Sands of Time roots. I wasn’t a fan of the intervening PoPs.

Not Sure

• Oct 21 – Far Cry 2 – I want to like it, but thought Far Cry 1 (especially vehicles) was a bit wonky.
• Oct 31 – Fallout 3 – RPGs are just not my thing – but may begrudgingly try it given the hype.
• Nov 4 – James Bond: Quantum of Solace – Concerned about Developer being Treyarch – need I say more? While often fun, James Bond games usually have terrible save points. I’ve also often had game save issues (no manual save points, auto-saves too far apart) with most Bond games in the past).
• 11 Nov – Call of Duty 5 (World at War) – Loved Infinity Ward’s CoD 2 and CoD4. Hated CoD 3 by Treyarch, same developers making CoD5 – I am definitely sceptical!

2009 Can’t Wait

• Feb – Killzone 2 (PS3) – Will it live up to the 5 year hype!?
• Fall 2009 – Halo 3 Recon (360) – Best Game Franchise in History!

Related

• 1Up.com: Most Anticipated Fall 2008 Games
• PC World: The 15 Coolest Games of Fall 2008
• Yahoo! Games: Top 20 Games of Fall 2008

  (3.5/5) 
Reviews: Metacritic 72%| Game Rankings 72%  | zero punctuation
Reference: Achievements|
Walkthrus: Mahalo |  WikiCheats | GameFAQ  
Developer: Lucas Arts Genre: Action-Adventure
Engine: Ronin, DMM, Havok and Euphoria

Pros: engaging story – music – excellent auto-save points – genuinely fun – first rate physics – achievable achievements – fair

Cons: some camera issues – use of quick-time controls – boss battles – no co-op or online modes – corridor corralling

Fun

Simply put, for action-adventure fans, Star Wars: Force Unleashed (SWFU) is a fun game, with a nice difficulty ramp, good auto-save points and challenging for players at all skill levels.  The primary gaming mechanic are force powers similar to the telekinesis powers in Deus Ex: Invisible War  While a tad glitchy, the game was generally solid. Unlike so many other games, (except for the star destroyer boss battle discussed below) I didn’t feel cheated by silly gimmicks to prolong game-play or artificially make the game more challenging. It was generally all-round good fun.

Star Wars Story Between Episodes III and IV

Star Wars fans will enjoy the story. It is a reasonably immersive, entertaining and well told story about Darth Vader’s apprentice, Starkiller and his love interest Juno Eclipse. The story takes place between Episodes III and IV of the Star Wars series. However, it wasn’t a ‘bridge’ between the two episodes as I had been lead to believe. It was more or less an irrelevant side-story (much in the way the Enter the Matrix game was an engaging side story to the Matrix Trilogy) involving some of the familiar Star Wars characters (Darth Vader, Princess Leia (using Carrie Fisher’s likeness but not her voice), Senator Organa (using Jimmy Smits likeness and his voice), Senator Organa (briefly using Ewan McGregor’s likeness) , R2D2, Emperor Palpatine, among others).

Enjoyable Environments

There were some really nice environments. The lush and colourful outdoor planet Felucia, pictured to the left, was very nice. A complex, multi-level indoor environment inside the death-star towards the end was also particularly good. The graphics were good throughout but certainly not pushing the next-gen envelope. The environments were, however, for the most part corridor-based. There was little free-roaming, sandboxy play. Most of the time there was only one way to advance.

First Rate Physics

Processing power usually reserved for graphics was likely put to use by the best-in-class physics engine. I can’t emphasize enough how terrific the physics engine was. Better than any I’ve seen. Every reaction, every moving object or player was tossed and bounced around realistically and uniquely. You never saw the same movement animation twice – brilliant!

MiniMap

Since the game was largely a corridor fighting game, I shut off the minimap. The minimap was overkill for newbs. There is  a minimap-related glitch/bug in the game. Despite being shut off by me, a half dozen or so times, while in combat, the map spontaneously appeared. I had to go back to the options screen to turn it off each time.

Good Achievement Points

For the first year of the Xbox 360’s life, most games provided achievements that average gamers stood a good chance of getting. This has changed dramatically in the last two years where, in most games, if a player gets half (heck, more than 250) of the available achievement points they are doing exceptionally well. Happily, mere mortals can aspire to get the full 1,000 achievement points in SWFU if they choose to go for them – assuming they don’t experience the ‘*Default Text’ glitch discussed below. That is a very welcome change.

Music – Sound Track

As with the Halo series and any Indiana Jones game, the soundtrack is superb and truly enhances the ambiance. Though It can get a bit monotonous over long periods of time. I ultimately turned the music volume down after awhile.

Camera Issues

At the beginning the camera was a tad annoying but I got used to it. It is less responsive then I’d like. There is no zoom.  You cannot look straight up when you’d like (eg: while going up an open-air elevator or when wookies are jumping down on you from above).

Like too many games, the camera pulls back to the center as you move, whether you want it to or not. Fortunately there is a bit of a delay before it does. So its not as nausea-inducing as many other games. If you remain stationary while looking around, the camera remains fully in your control. Move and it pulls back to center.

Camera control is taken completely away from you during boss battles. It pulls away and remains stationary during the battle. This, frankly, sucks! During my first boss battle the camera got stuck behind a floating something-or-other. I literally couldn’t see the fight I was engaged in – daft!

Why can’t game developers let me use the camera how I want? I like to look around at the environments as I move around without fighting the damn camera. Let me!

Quick Time Events

Ugh! Why do otherwise very good games (God of War 1 and 2, Indigo Prophecy, Drake’s Fortune) rely on S_T_U_P_I_D quick time events (having to press arbitrary buttons displayed on the screen one after the other) to complete ‘finishing moves’ in boss fights. Fortunately in SWFU the button patterns are not randomized as they are in other games that rely on them. So they are generally easy to learn. I do not like quick-time events on principle. They are lame. But I must concede that in this game they were no impediment.

Manual Save Points Broken?

The game has a save option on the options menu, but best I can tell it does nothing. The game auto-saves whether you use the save option or not. If you select ‘save game’ between auto-saves, leave the game, come back and load the game, it loads from your last auto-save point – not your manual save point. I don’t see the point of this manual save game option that doesn’t appear to do anything. Happily, the auto-save points are very good and I never had to play over large swath’s of the game that I had previously completed. And, frankly, I didn’t die very often so this didn’t matter much. It’s just odd.

Escort Level

I generally despise escort missions. The Cloud City level was entirely an escort mission. But it wasn’t so bad because the escorted NPC didn’t act like an idiot and get himself killed as usually happens in escort missions. He generally stayed behind me and didn’t advance until the coast was clear. I’d rather have no escort levels in a game, but if they are going to be there, this is about as good an implementation of it as you can get.

Tips:

Training Room Achievements: After basic training, save your training room time until after you’ve levelled up – well, unless you actually need/want the training. I spent time in the training room solely for the achievement points. Since you go into the training room with your then-current levelled-up state, it is much easier to complete the training (and get the achievements) once you are levelled up.

Learn/Use the Combos: I’ve read reviews of SWFU complaining that the combos are not needed. That may be so, but the game is much more fun if you spend some time to learn at least a dozen or so combos. I made a concerted effort to learn most of them. There are extra points and achievements for changing things up. Plus its a lot more fun. Using the same attack over and over leads to boredom.

Jumping Distances: When jumping, in addition to the double-jumping (A,A), followed by dash (LB) you can add a wee-bit more to long jumps by hitting (B) to get a small boost. This is absolutely needed to grab at least two holocrons in the game.

Easy Levelling Up: By accident I discovered that if you go back and play earlier completed levels, you go back with the Force Upgrades you achieved in later levels. Fighting earlier battles was therefore almost effortless yet you continue to level up through that process. After the 7th level, I went back to search for missed holocrons on earlier levels and finish some missed objectives. Unexpectedly, I continued to level up several times during my Holocron hunting. This approach effortlessly yielded significantly more Force Powers/Combos and Talents than I otherwise would have had to finish off the final few levels.

Force Grapple: When doing the (B+Y) grapple or the (A+X) combo, you only need tap them simultaneously quickly. You don’t have to hold them down as I was doing for a long time.

Lightsaber Flourish Challenge: There is a 20 point “Sith Trials” achievement for completing all the Training Room challenges. Assuming you’ve levelled up during the game, they are easy to complete after the game is over EXCEPT the “Lightsaber Flourish Challenge” which I was having no luck with (tried probably 20 times) until I read this Gamespot forum tip. Three things to know here: (i) ignore the damn tutorial that says strike when you see the flash; (ii) take a longish pause between each strike – count 1 Mississippi, 2, Mississippi etc. and only strike on the count; and (iii) once you land your first hit, stay still (let go of the left stick), you no longer have to move your character to finish the guy off. If you do, you needlessly push him into a wall and make it hard to complete the flourish. Using those tips it took me only two tries to do.

‘*Default Text’ Glitch:

Many gamers, including me, experience the “*Default Text” glitch. See a discussion of the glitch here and on the official Lucas forums here and here. When this glitch appears the words ‘*Default Text” appear on the Bonus Objectives table as shown below – circled in red (click on image for larger view).

From what I read and experienced the glitch causes only one major adverse affect. It prevents you from getting the 75 point Holocron collection achievement – which is a real bummer if you spent hours, as I did, hunting them all down. It also has the minor affect of not telling  you what the the bonus objective for the affected levels are and it does not track your force points or holocrons collected in a given level. You can find the secondary achievements in the walk-thrus that I linked to above. Otherwise, all other achievements in the game and game play generally seem to be unaffected by this bug.

LucusArts is aware of the problem and have promised a patch but as of the time I wrote this post, no such patch has been released.

Star Destroyer Take Down: [WARNING: Spoilers]:

For me the most difficult and frustrating ‘boss battle’ of the game was taking down the Star Destroyer. It took me four attempts over four days before I figured out the key (see below). If you are like me, you are going to learn to hate the phrase “Rip that Destroyer from the Sky”. I must have heard it 100 times. However, if you follow the instructions below, you should be able to get through this part in 20 to 30 minutes tops.

The battle cycles you through several rounds of tie fighter attacks followed by star fighter force pulling. The objective, of course, is to pull the star fighter from the sky. Several walkthrus say this will take you 3 to 6 cycles. Bumpkus. It took me 6 initial deaths in the tie fighter portion alone before I mastered that part and maybe 70 cycles through the star fighter force pulling sections before I was able to pull this off.  But, if I had understood the key to this battle and otherwise followed the instructions below it would have take me a lot less time.

Preparation: You are going to use a lot of lightning strikes to take down wave after wave of tie fighters as quickly as possible. You’ll get very good at this. The rapidity of the strikes requires fast force power rejuvenation. Therefore, before you start this battle, you would ideally have maximized your Force Lighting Force Power and the following Force Talents: Force Focus (to maximize force energy), Force Affinity (to maximize force energy recovery), and Battle Mediation (to reduce the amount of time it takes to charge force powers).  It may be worth resetting your force talents if needed (X button) – ie: if you’ve spent more than 20 minutes without success. Health is less important because after a few initial deaths you’ll quickly learn how to avoid them (especially if you follow the Tie Fighter tips below).

Tie Fighter Tips: While frustrating at first, you’ll get very good at taking down the tie-fighters in short order. I got to the point where it was taking me no more than 15 to 30 seconds to take out each wave of fighters.

• Understanding Tie Fighter Flight Pattern: Each wave first flies in straight at you then swoops off to the left or the right. From then on, those swooping in from the left fly out on the right and vice versa.
• Pick a Side of Attack: You’ll be taking them down as they swoop away from you to the left or right. Pick a side (I chose the right side) and take them down from behind as they fly past. When there are one or two left you can use Force Dash (LB) to move quickly from the left to right if you wish.
• Use Pillars for Cover: There are two central pillars, one to the left of center and one to the right of center (as shown in picture below – click for larger view). Take cover behind them to avoid incoming tie-fighter fire. If you are on the right, stay behind the right pillar as you wait to strike them with lighting when they swoosh off to the the right. As you strike with lighting your character will move to the right. After taking down a tie-fighter or two, move back behind the pillar to recharge a bit, then strike some more. In this way you keep your health at as close to 100% as possible. Obviously if you are fighting from the left, reverse those directions.
• Wait for Blue Icon: Don’t waste your lightning strikes by firing randomly. Wait until you see the blue icon indicating a tie-fighter is selected and strikeable. Proper timing will result in you taking down fighter after fighter with ease.
• Two Lightning Bolts per Tie Fighter: Plan on two lighting strikes (pressing Y twice) as each tie fighter flies by. The system almost always deflects the first bolt at floating debris and other things and the second on the tie fighter with the blue icon you are aiming at.

Star Destroyer: Here’s the tough part (but not so tough when you understand the key). You’ll be using the left and right sticks to center the Star Destroyer’s nose before pulling it in. For the longest time I thought you had to follow the on-screen left/right stick animations perfectly. That was dead wrong!

• The Key: The key to this is getting the Star Destroyer’s nose perfectly centred before pulling it down. But to do this, pay attention to the nose and not so much the on-screen left/right stick animations. In fact, they’ll lead you somewhat astray.  It is very helpful to pull the nose past the center, to the left of center on the x axis (with the left stick) , and somewhat past the up/down center – above on the y axis (with the right stick) because gravity will pull them back a bit. So, swing them a little past where the on-screen indicators indicate, so they’ll settle back to center before you start pulling.  That’s the key. After a short while you’ll be able to do this without even looking at the on-screen left/right stick animations. Once I figured that out, I had the star destroyer pulled down from the sky in just two more attempts – after some 70 previous attempts when I failed over and over by following the on-screen left-right indicators exactly.

And, oh, did I mention I HATE boss fights like this!@!$@#$!

Conclusion

A good, well written and engaging story. A challenging and a fun game for players at all levels. If you like the Stare Wars universe and enjoy action adventure games, you’ll enjoy this one. I did.

Reviews: Metacritic 65%| Game Rankings 68% | zero punctuation
Reference: GameFAQ |
Developer: Silicon Knights, Engine: Proprietary Genre: Action-RPG
Status: Abandoned after 3 hours

Pros: beautiful, well-rendered environments – user selectable save points – good graphics/character models – solid cinematic production values – good death/penalty system – online co-op (though oddly without story elements)

Cons: no camera control – nausea inducing – story didn’t grab me – too complex for little pay off – too much button mashing – ballistic aiming was poor – too much HUD – no story/direction screen

As a Canadian, with the Silicon Knights development studio just a few miles across Lake Ontario from me in St. Catherine’s Ontario, I felt obligated to give Too Human a try. Plus, after listening to dozens of interviews by Denis Dyack and with all the controversy swirling around this game, I was curious.

I made it just past the point where you have to choose to go the human or cyborg paths (about 3 hours in) where I abandoned the game. I’m generally not an RPG-playing, leveling-up, inventory-managing, kind of guy though I enjoyed both KOTOR and Mass Effect enough to finish them (I similarly abandoned Oblivion after a few hours, though I made it through a good 10 hours or so of Morrowind).

Camera Control Issue

Lack of camera-control is one of my bigger video game pet-peeves. Too Human is one such game. I listened to Dyack go on and on about the cinematic advantageous of allowing the game to control the camera – analogizing that movie viewers don’t control the camera. Sorry Denise, movie-goers are passive by definition. While your game was among the better games without camera I’ve played, every game like this is a loser for two big reasons:

1. they always make me nauseous (Too Human was no exception); and
2. I need/want to control my view to fight the battles the way I want to fight them – not the way a game designer intends.

I’ve only played a few games to the end that did not allow me to manage the camera: God of War 1, God of War 2 and Munch’s Odyssey. Most others I won’t even try. I’ve never managed any in the Resident Evil series for more than 10 to 15 minutes without needing to toss my cookies.

Inventory Management

The inventory management system was ultimately the straw on the camels back that killed it for me (at least at that point). After choosing the cybernetic route, I wasn’t enthused enough about the game to care what blue-prints to purchase or what upgrades to add.  I didn’t want to think that much. The manual does not explain how to use the ruins that need to be applied to something-or-other for more powers. I didn’t understand the descriptions or what they’d do if I even managed to figure out how to use them. The management screen was complicated. You use the right and left triggers to move from screen to screen and I never understood how to use any of the three screens on the right – and really didn’t care to learn.

Fighting System

The game is criticized for being little more than a button masher. The major melee control consists of pointing at an enemy and letting the game fight him. There was some degree of combo capability. I was just getting interested in the combo system (and spent about a half hour reading the manual and the combo screen to figure them out) before I abandoned the game as described above. I therefore can’t make any definitive conclusion on the fighting system other than to say the ballistic/gun aiming system was broken. I couldn’t aim at the enemy of my choice. Rather I just leveled up the guns as best as I could, held down the triggers and hoped for the best.

Consequences of Death

Despite criticism, I liked the death-system. As with Battlefield: Bad Company before it, I think it is a plus when death doesn’t set you back 15 minutes. I want nothing more than a minor penalty for dying. Unlike way too many other games, Too Human’s death system is just right.

A Word About the HUD

HUD’s should always be minimal. Yes, I understand that I could make the HUD disappear. That’s not the point. I like useful HUDs. Too Human’s didn’t need all its complexity. It just gets in the way.

Click on either of the pictures in this post to view the HUD. I don’t need to know how close I am to the next level, for example, I can see that on the skills or inventory screen. Why does anyone need to see the character class insignia? Do the words LVL, AMMO, EXP or EFFICIENCY really need to be there?

While the manual was clear enough as to what these all were for, when I looked at the in-game help system to decipher them, their little description screen was undecipherable. The background graphic got mixed up with all the arrows so that I found it very difficult to understand. I had to resort to the manual. Silicon Knights, its always a bad idea to force you users into the manual.

No Story / Direction Screen

Most RPG-type games have a screen where you can go back and read the latest script or on-screen instruction you might have missed and to see what your next objective is. There was none of that in Too Human. When a new onscreen instruction came up, it always flew by too fast for me to read it (especially when I’m occupied with something else) and there is no place to go back and read what you just missed. Again, that’s a basic modern-day gaming convention that was missing that diminished the experience for me.

Conclusion

I didn’t get far enough along in the game to fairly give it a score. While beautiful to look at, the game seemed only average in fun-factor. My sense is I would have given it 3 out of 5 Dale-heads had I completed the game. But if action-adventure/RPG games (this is really is own unique genre) are your thing, you will probably enjoy it. Silicon Knights says this is a first of a Norse mythology/cybernetic trilogy. Let’s hope they give control of the camera back to the user in subsequent releases, otherwise I won’t even bother.

Sony Movie and TV Service: The biggest ‘news’ of the Sony press event was the U.S. launch, today, of the previously announced (see here) video service. Sony, Fox, MGM, Lion’s Gate, Warner, Disney, Paramount and Turner Entertainment have partnered with Sony to provide movie and TV content for the on-demand download service. The system uses progressive downloads so users can watch as a movie/TV show as it downloads. Sony says, content is playable a minute or so after ordering. Purchased content only plays on PS3 and PSP. No PC, iPod, iPhone or other device support was announced. No official word yet on how long rentals will be available for viewing – one site mentioned that it will be the usual 24 hours and 14 days to start.

Note: While the previous announcement stated that a service like this would be made available ‘world-wide’, I checked my PS3 in Canada and there was no such content available. Note the "video" button circled in red in the picture above (click for larger view). If it isn’t there, no movies for you!

Resistance 2: They showed a little of Resistance 2. It’s looking good and includes 8 player online co-op support (probably only for certain missions). I quite enjoyed Resistance 1 so I’m looking forward to this one. What is it with the ‘brown’ colour in all the PS3 and 360 games this year?

Massive Action Game ("MAG"): This massively multiplayer shooter looked interesting. MAG supports up to 256 simultaneous players with 8 player squads, ongoing faction campaigns and character growth. The trailer looked great. It’s hard to imagine that 255 players will follow a command hierarchy that goes up to one or two generals. In my experience 8 players will rarely ever co-operate in an online shooter battle. I’ll have to see this one to believe it. See the blatantly pre-rendered trailer below.

God of War 3 Teaser Trailer: A teaser trailer was shown [watch here]. I enjoyed God of War I and II so I’m definitely looking forward to God of War III. I’m a little nervous with the departure of David Jaffe from the project however.

No Killzone 2 Update: Given how Killzone 2 has been played up by Sony over the last several E3’s it was surprising that it wasn’t even mentioned this year.

Worldwide News Service: As part of the movie and TV service the Playstation Network will provide a ‘world-wide’ news service.  This is to be launched by the end of July. No word on whether ‘world-wide’ means available outside the U.S. or not.

Gran Turismo TV via GT5 Prologue: (Aug 1): Yet another TV-like service was announced. Watch real world racing programming through the PS3 – but only if you own the GT5 Prologue game.

Downloadable Ratchet & Clank: Sony announced that there will be downloadable Ratchet and Clank games over PSN.

Game-Specific Theme Lobbies in Playstation Home: The long-over-due Playstation Home was briefly mentioned and they showed a new ‘feature’ where player avatars can "hang out" and wander around with other player avatars inside games – in a Warhawk hanger or a bar in Drake’s Fortune for example. I hadn’t see this before. I’m assuming these are game-specific lobbies. Otherwise I don’t know why any gamer would want to use these.

Developer Testimonials: I found the high-profile developer testimonials to be interesting. There’s been very little praise from the developer community about  PS3 game development. It was nice to see that ameliorated somewhat by seemingly realistic praise from real-world developers. It seems like they are getting used to developing games on the multi-core system.

132 New PS2 Titles: Amazingly, Sony announced that 132 new titles will ship for the PS2 in this, its 9th year.

Additional Coverage: Engadget | Gizmodo

And nothing happened. Nothing captured my interest and certainly nothing was announced to satisfy the hard-core gamers.

New Products

Wii Speak: A microphone that sits atop the TV that picks up all the sounds and voices from a room. This will be used in games in lieu of a headset. But the Wii doesn’t have a system-wide voice system (let alone a decent online game strategy). This will need to be supported from game to game.

Wii MotionPlus: An add-on that plugs into the WiMote to add wrist based twisting motions to its repertoire of recognized real-time movements. One wonders how developers are going to appreciate the burden of developing titles that work with both the WiiMote alone and with the MotionPlus adapter.[gizmodo review here]

Wii Sports Resort: A new game, similar to Wii Sports, but situated at a beach resort. They demoed Frisbee throwing (with a cute dog catching it), sword fighting and lumber chopping. This game uses the new Wii Motion Plus for accuracy. Coming March 2009.

Wii Music:  A new music game featuring 50 virtual instruments was announced. A virtual piano, violin, sax and drum kit were demonstrated. Unlike Rock Band and Guitar Hero, the user doesn’t need to purchase physical plastic instruments. Nor do they follow note patterns on a screen to play. The instruments are ‘virtual’. Waiving/moving the WiiMote around in a manner similar to the instrument being played simulates the instrument. The virtual drum kit (see picture below) that uses the WiiMote and Numchuk as the drumsticks and a WiiFit board as the drum peddle was clever. But the other instruments looked like little more than air-instruments where regardless of what the user does some facsimile of music will be produced. Lame. And it sounded pretty awful. [more info here]

Animal Crossing: Animal crossing is coming to the Wii.

Statistics Can Say Anything

Nintendo used statistics to contrast the first ‘19′ months of sales on each console. For example Nintendo pointed out that in the 360’s first 19 months they had just 126 games on the market compared to Wii’s 246 in their first 19 months. Whether that is true or not is irrelevant because the 360 is in its 32nd month and by the end of 2008 there will be 1,000 games out on the 360 and about 300 for the Wii. 

Nintendo also failed to mention that their attach rate (the number of games sold per console) is the worst of the three current devices with Microsoft doing circles around the other two. Microsoft has sold more games for the 360 than the Wii and the PS3 combined. This is somewhat astonishing given that the Wii has outsold the 360 2-1. Console owners are playing the 360 far more frequently and playing more games on it than they are the PS3 and the Wii. Most Wiis are sitting unused and collecting dust on shelves around the world. Once the initial novelty of Wii Sports has worn off most Wii’s are rarely used again.

Finally, Nintendo failed to point out that almost all of the big selling Wii titles are Nintendo franchise retreads. Third party games are largely selling poorly on the Wii.

I applaud their initiative to grow the market to grandmas and non-gamers. But the Wii is no longer a main-stream gaming machine. It’s a mass-market toy.

Now, the DS, that’s another story. Kudos to Nintendo for outstanding sales on an outstanding portable game playing device.

Additional Coverage: Engadget | Gizmodo

(Click image to watch abridged version of Microsoft’s 2008 E3 press briefing)

[Full Microsoft E3 2008 coverage is here]

A new Dashboard Interface for the 360: It’s coming this fall. [ Watch demo here]It’s nicer than, but seems influenced by, the PS3 ribbon. It looks like it will be easier to use than the current blade system. I question whether people will want to learn a whole new interface.

Avatars coming on 360: Looks like Microsoft is trying to bring a bit of the Wii and Playstation Home to the 360. I’m not sure if my adult friends will take the time to create their own avatars.

Integrated Netflix coming to the 360: Netflix users will be able to queue up their Internet ordered videos to be played on the 360. This probably won’t be available outside of the U.S. for years (if ever). Regrettably, it appears that movies will only be streamed through the Netflix service and not downloaded. This means (i) fastforwarding and rewinding will janky; and (ii) the quality of the picture will vary depending on your Internet connection speed.

Final Fantasy XIII Coming to the 360! The hitherto PS3 exclusive franchise is coming to the 360 on the same day and date as the PS3. Final Fantasy XIII coming to the 360 is another Microsoft coup. Other than Sony Studios first party games and Metal Gear Solid, I can’t think of any major game franchise that is a PS3 exclusive any more. Interestingly there will be no Japanese 360 version.

Live Game Shows: Microsoft announced a partnership with the Endemol U.S. subsidiary of the Dutch Endemol, a major game show producer, to create live game-show like games playable during prime time, through the Xbox with up to 100 other participants. Real world prizes will be winnable.

Exclusive Portal Something?: Coming this fall. Something related to Portal will be exclusive to the 360. I originally inferred that new levels would be available. But it really wasn’t clear what Microsoft is offering here. If its just the original Portal game split out of the entire Orange Box package I won’t be impressed. Too bad I’ll need to pay for whatever this is with Microsoft Points denominated in 2006 Canadian dollars. 

New Cross-Game Party System: Just as you can party-up in Halo and play with your friends from Halo match to Halo match, soon you’ll be able to party up with your friends and move from game to game – not just within one game. I have expected this for over a year. It’ll be interesting to see how they integrate this into prior games (if possible). More interestingly, incorporating this function into the interface frees up developers from the burden of recreating the wheel every time they want to add party system functionality to a game. Fantastic!!

Sharing Movies with Friends Over XBox Live: Soon 360 users will be able to pop the popcorn, sit down and watch movies with other 360 users – across the city or across the country. Presumably users will be able to talk about the movie through the headset while watching. The implication of the announcement was that only one user needed to purchase/rent the movie for all the friends to share. If this is not the case and all users have to separately purchase/rent the movie, this will be less interesting. I’m not sure if this will be limited only to movies rented through the new Netflix feature or not. It’s also highly probable that this will not work across international borders or be available outside the U.S.

Music Games: Lot’s of new music for both Rock Band and Guitar Hero was announced. I dislike the trend of tying up bands to exclusive contracts with one game or the other. This in no way benefits the users. It keeps the purchasers of one music game from accessing music that is tied to the other game. Just like guitars that can’t be played from one game to the other, some songs/bands will be exclusive to specific games. Sad. I do like Guitar Hero’s decision to make songs purchased with prior versions being playable on future versions. That is a much needed improvement.

Games: No new blockbuster games were announced.

• Gears of War 2 (exclusive): Gears was the only game that I’m interested in. But I was interested in it already. Co-op will return and bot play is being introduced. (Nov 7, 2008)
• Fable 2 (exclusive): I didn’t like Fable I, so I’m not looking forward to Fable 2. I did like that they introduced co-op into an RPG though.
• Fallout 3 (not exclusive - by Bethesda, the same gang that brought us Oblivion). The demo was disappointing. So far I’m not seeing what all the fuss is about. But then again, I’m not an RPG fan. One thing is for sure. You’ll be able to dismember enemies in seemingly infinite gruesome ways.
• Resident Evil 5 (not exclusive): The wonky Nintendo centric control system, camera fighting and on-rails game play made the prior Resident Evils unplayable to me. This one looks like it may be playable. But killing thousands of mindless zombies doesn’t appeal. As with Fable 2 and Gears 2, I’m happy to see the inclusion of online co-op once again.

I especially like the emphasis on online coop shown in these games. After years of anticipation, online coop now seems to be a permanent feature of major game titles.

Additional Coverage: Engadget | Gizmodo

Diary: Entry #1, 
Reviews: Metacritic | Game Rankings
Reference: GameFAQ |
Developer: EA DICE, Engine: Frostbite
Status: Finished “Welcome to Bad Company” (the intro level)

Pros: Boat load of shooter fun – Immersive – Humorous – Destructible environment – Terrific death/penalty system – Save points therefore a non-issue – Very good graphics/character models – Difficulty Level is just right – Amusing squad – PC can jump

Cons: Fighting with camera while driving – No coop – No customizable controls – Daft syringe/help system – No prone position

Introduction

In Battlefield: Bad Company (“BBC”) you play Private Preston Marlowe, of “B”ad Company, a band of misfits in the 222nd army battalion of the U.S. army -currently fighting the Russian Federation.

Somehow BBC had escaped my radar until I read Paul Thurrott’s review here. Our tastes in gaming are almost identical. So on his recommendation, I decided to try it.

Other than a few hours here and there, I’ve never played a Battlefield franchise game before. So I’m new to this franchise and, so far, I’m really enjoying it! Much,  more so than MGS 4.

Initial Impressions – The Good Stuff

Fun From the Start: From the amusing jazzy-organ playing opening credits/main menu this game felt like was going to be something different.

Immersive: As with other leading shooter, the ambiance, 5.1 sound, terrific graphics and, in this case, almost instant death if hit, give this game a terrific immersive (feeling like you are really there) quality that is still too rare.

Destructible Environment: The much touted destructible environment is definitely fun! But it is odd that you can’t totally destroy a building. You can knock out most of its walls but try as you might its support pillars will not blow up. So you can not, for example, topple over a two story house – even though you can knock out every one of its walls. Kinda lame.

Character Animations/Graphics: Character animations are as good as they get, and dare I say it, possibly better than those in MGS 4, (except for Solid-Snake himself). The overall graphics are also terrific

Sandbox Fun: From the get-go I was able to wander much further afield than similar games without artificial barriers or invisible walls holding me back. The map makes it clear where you can and cannot go. It doesn’t feel restricting like so many other shooters.

White Men Can Jump: As trivial as this may sound, it bothers me when the playable characters in games like Gears of War and MGS 4 can’t jump over even the smallest of barriers. I know Cliffy B wants to avoid the constant bunny-hopping witnessed in the Halo series. But being unable to jump makes the game unrealistic. I’m happy to report that Private Marlowe can jump.

The Not-So-Good

Fighting the Camera: What is it with games that insist on fighting you for the camera? One of my chief criticisms of GTA IV was that when you are driving, the camera is always pulling back towards the center. The same is true in BBC. So far this is my only real criticism of the game.  We are supposed to be looking for gold and collectable’s but the game keeps fighting me as I look around while driving.  It’s not only annoying but it makes me nauseous. The same problem inexplicably occurs on the in-game map. As I scan around the map, it keeps pulling the overhead camera back to the center. Grrr.

No Coop: Every modern 360 shooter should employ a co-op level, and ideally over Xbox Live. There is no co-op of any kind in this game – either local or online. That is a disappointment. But this is the first Battlefield game that’s ever had a single player campaign. So I can’t complain that loudly.

Daft Health System: Three is an unlimited supply of health. Simply jam a syringe in Marlowe’s gut and you are back to full health. I’d much prefer slightly less accurate enemies and a more realistic health system followed by death.

No Lying  Prone: You can stand and crouch but you can’t lie prone. This is the first military shooter (outside of Halo) that I can recall that doesn’t allow the player to lie prone. It’s a bit hard to get used to.

No Customized Controls: If given a chance, I prefer to set up a game with Halo-esque controls. There is no way to customize the controls. That said, I had few problems using EA’s default control scheme. 

A New Take on Save Points and Death

As readers of my MGS 4 Diaries will already know, I hate the tried-and-true game extending game mechanic that most every game employs – that of forcing you rto replay lengthy portions of the game that you already completed when you die. This is especially annoying when a game has either poor auto-save points or does not let you save the game where you choose.

BBC completely eliminates this problem. It makes save points irrelevant because there isn’t really any penalty to dying other than that sinking feeling of defeat you get when you are killed. I like this a lot! I’ve always railed against games that force me to replay parts of a game I already finished. EA may have the perfect solution with this approach.

Thoughts on Difficulty

Some reviewers have complained that the enemy AI’s shooting is too accurate, making the game too difficult. They have also surmised that EA chose not to penalize the player on death owing to it’s inability to properly balance the game.

I have to disagree. In a real war, enemies are accurate and do shoot to kill. If real soldiers took the tactics that the average video gamer takes, they would die pretty quickly.  I like this realism. I like the difficulty when combined with a forgiving approach to death.

I HATE being killed and do anything I can to avoid it. I don’t need the game to penalize me any further. Indeed, providing achievement points for surviving a level without being killed is even more of an  incentive for me to play tactically and stealthily than forcing me to replay long stretches of a game on death.

I am going to caveat my my next statement by noting that I only just started the game and my opinion may change. But so far, I consider this easy-to-be-killed/little-penalty-on-death approach to be superb! I wish more (heck all) games would emulate it. Kudos to EA for trying a novel death/revival construct!

Mowing Down Trees

I noticed that there was an achievement for mowing down trees. So, I spent a good deal of time shooting them for awhile. I understand why the achievement exists. It makes you realize that if trees are obstructing your view of the enemy, you can just shoot them down to get a clear shot.

Xbox 360 Version

I originally set out to rent this game but my local rental shop, Rogers, only had the PS3 version. While I own a PS3, if a game is cross-platform, I choose the 360 for achievements points and for the superior online gaming experience inherent in the 360 platform. Ultimately I purchased it.

Opening Credits

It all started with The Chronicles of Riddick – the first game I recall employing interactive opening cut scenes and Hollywood-style opening credits. Then came GRAW 1 & 2, CoD 4, GTA IV, MGS 4, and now BBC, all bearing compelling/interactive opening credits. I like this trend.

Aim Assist

WARNING: Aim assist is turned on by default – a disturbing trend over the last year or so. Any self-respecting shooter fan will need to turn that off  before starting (Options/GamePlay/Aim Assist).

MGS 4 Diary: Entry #1, Entry #2, Abandoned!
MGS4 Reviews: Metacritic | GameRankings.com
Reference: GameFAQ Walkthrus |

As beautiful and cutting-edge as MGS4 is, after making it past the laughing Octopus stage in the second act, I abandoned the game, at least for now. This surprises even me. I have been waiting for years to play this game, but the lack of a decent checkpoint system and endless cut scenes turned me off.

Poorly Implemented Checkpoints

You cannot save the game when you want and it’s checkpoints are few and far between. Adult gamers do not have endless hours, nor the desire, to replay extremely long portions of even a great game over and over.

When I play stealth games I want to be stealthy and play it right. This means taking my time, exploring every nook and cranny. Being sneaky. But when I sneak around for 30 minutes, successfully execute difficult manoeuvres and then die, I do not want to play through the whole 30 minutes again. No game should ever force a gamer to replay more than 5 or so minutes. Period.

Yes, I could have cheated and run through sections with abandon, gunned down everyone until killed, thereby learning where all the baddies are and what their tricks are, to avoid them on the next play through. But I refuse to do that. That’s gaming the game and not playing the game. It takes all the fun out of it.

Stealth games, by definition, are designed to be played thoughtfully and slowly. The player should have a realistic chance of beating a level if they play that way. But, when they die, as they will, they shouldn’t be forced to replay the last thirty minutes or an hour to get back to where they were.

Ration Pack Frustration

Prior to the  point where I abandoned the game, I had gotten so angry at the game’s checkpoint system that I uncharacteristically gunned through a couple of difficult parts without concern for my ration pack inventory – thinking/hoping they’d be as abundant later as they had been to that point (they aren’t).

It was unfortunate that I survived. Because from that point on I had only one ration pack, and no way of replenishing them, I kept dying. This compounded my checkpoint frustration to the point where I had enough.

Riddle me this. How is it that I can order up rockets, grenades, and an endless arsenal of weapons at any time and they are instantly delivered, yet I can’t order a ration pack, or any health related materials at ANY time from any where?  Grrrr!

Of Cut Scenes & Blue-ray Abuse

I understand that Kojima is a cinematic master. But wholly cow, I have never seen anything like the length of these cut scenes. People are not joking when they say there are several feature films worth of cut scenes in this game. I had a love-hate relationship with the endless cut scenes.

They are beautiful – truly. They push envelops and raise the bar (to mix my metaphors). But I’m not a fan of the series. I don’t understand the back story. And, as I understand it, even fans of the series don’t really know what  is going on in this, or any other MGS, game. I don’t like skipping cut scenes because I want to understand the story. But I also don’t want a mini-movie for every cut scene. Kojima seems exceedingly self-indulgent in this excessive use of cutscenes.

MGS4 presents a good argument for why the expansive amount of storage space on blu-ray disks is a bad thing. Perhaps he could have created a system where shorter versions of the cut scenes are shown on the first time through with optional director’s cut versions for the second play through – or bundled with the game on a second disk. Net-net, they turned me off.

Back to the Rental Store

I rented MGS 4 and held it two days beyond my limit. I wasn’t eager to resume play anyway. Wimbledon will consume my free-time for the next two weeks anyway. So back it went.

Odds are less than 50/50 that I’ll rent it again. I may pick it up in the bargain bin one day. But I’d much prefer to take up GTA IV where I left off than go back to this one any time soon.

MGS 4 Diary: Entry #1, Entry #2, Abandoned!
MGS4 Reviews: Metacritic | GameRankings.com
Reference: GameFAQ Walkthrus |

Progress: I made it to Act 1 – Crescent Meridian (7th of 8 parts to Act 1)

What a difference a day makes. Discovering that Weapons/Items need to be equipped before they appear was important! (See Update in Diary Entry #1). You’d think the game or manual would have mentioned that somewhere up front!

Visuals

I can’t say enough for the visual and cinematic feel of MGS4. The particle effects, fabrics, lighting, character models, rich and detailed environments, the camo suite, the Dolby surround sound audio. This is a visual and audible masterpiece.

Love the Bright Sunny Arab World

Stealth games are usually too dark (can you say “Splinter Cell”). Heck, too many video games are too dark. One of the reasons I love the GRAW series so much is because they are mostly set outdoors in the bright sunlight. I wish more games were set in the sunlight.

How Do You Tell the Difference Between MPCs and Militia?

If you kill militia, by accident or not, they’ll turn on you. So it’s important to either avoid them and PMC’s in all battles with stealth or determine which of the factions is militia and which is PMC and then side with the militia (you can side with the PMC but they’ll still shoot you).

So that’s been my big question/challenge today?  Previously, the only way I could tell was to use the solid eye and zoom in close to read the character’s names (militia’s are named ‘militia”). I had thought there was going to be a colouring difference (ie: the text and symbols) but there is none – at least initially.

I have noticed that when some militia get to know you, their icon box beside their name turns a different colour and their name turns blue (from orange). It’s hard to see that from a distance and it isn’t the case for all militia. And the names of the PMCs always seem to be blue. Aside from the few militias whose icons turn green (or some other colour) once they know you, most militias still are indistinguishable from PMCs. I couldn’t find a way to force them to get to know you (like standing beside them).

To make things worse, your threat meter shows them as a threat – even when they are not shooting at you.

I’m hoping there is an easier way, or at least I’m hoping I start to learn the uniform distinctions because I’ve killed militia several times now by accident with the result being, I’m their next target.

By the end of Day 2, I was pretty good at distinguishing between the two. It’s a pain, but doable.

Too Long Between Save Points

As always, this is a pet peeve. But this time not so much because I’m getting killed over and over and can’t make it to a checkpoint. Rather, I don’t necessarily have an hour to kill between checkpoints.

Checkpoints

Only at the very end of my 2nd day of play did I notice that on the bottom left, just above equipped item icon, it says “Checkpoint” when you’ve reached a checkpoint. The letters are small and it goes by quick. But at least I found a way of knowing if I reached a checkpoint.

More Tips

No Need to Rush: This is stealth game. Twice now I acted on Otacon’s instructions to hurry up and get to the rendez-vous point only to get killed. There is never a need to rush (at least not so far).

Rotate Between  Solid Eye & Rations: I originally intended, whenever possible, to keep the Solid Eye equipped until I realized it ran out of batteries and needed recharging. So, my strategy so far is to flip between Solid Eye (to find things easily) and rations (for instant health recovery during battles).  In any case, if I’m about to do battle, I put on rations to protect myself – regardless of whether the solid-eye needs charging. I also switch to anything other than solid eye any time I have to leave the game for a moment. Might as well let it recharge while you are away.

Salvage Bodies Quickly: If you let dead bodies lie, they will disappear along with salvageable goodies. Get’m while their still warm.

Briefing Screens are Useful: The ‘briefing screen” (available if you click the “Start” menu while playing) doesn’t provide you with mission briefs as you’d expect. It provides more of a ‘codec’ type environment where the basic game mechanics are explained really nicely. It’s definitely worth a look through.

More Nits

Dead Body Shake Downs: This whole mechanic of having to pick up a dead body and drop it in order to find goodies is a bit annoying. I’d rather the game just let me go over and press a button to search.

What’s Up with the “Codec”?: As I mentioned above the ‘Briefing” screens provide what I’d expect in a Codec and all I can get from the “Codec” screen is the last set of mission instructions from Otac0n. Is that all that its supposed to do? I think they have the “codec” and “briefing” menu items mixed up.

Endless Enemy Spawning: This is starting to feel like Call of Duty 2 when the enemy spawns endlessly when you are not advancing. This is the case in the latter parts of he first mission. I hate that. This is supposed to be stealth. Endless spawning forces you to proceed even when it isn’t safe.

Meryl and Beyond

I just met Meryl and her team. Too much poop-humour for my tastes. But she sure is pretty. But what’s up with her stiff hair. Goes to show that even in an advanced game like this, they still have a tough time getting hair right.

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