|
| June 19, 2009... Roughing It
In Style |
First, I'd like to direct
your attention to the new front page banner. It was
inspired by the Genesis game Ultimate Qix, which appeared on
other consoles with the title Volfied. If you're a fan
of Qix, or just looking for something to break the
monotony of marathon Fallout 3 sessions, I'd recommend you
give it the old college try.
This is day nineteen of my exodus from
civilization, and so far, I haven't withered away from
broadband internet withdrawal or long-term exposure to
sunlight. In fact, I think I've lost a few pounds from
getting outside and actually doing things! I haven't
completely stopped playing video games, however... I'm just
getting in touch with my inner Luddite by playing random
selections from the original GameBoy library.
I never liked the old black and white
GameBoy back in the day... it always seemed a little weak in
the knees compared to more ambitious color handhelds like the
Lynx (holy crap, scaling and rotation!), TurboExpress (holy
crap, console games on the go!), and Game Gear (holy
crap! Uh, what was this good for again...?).
However, now that all of these systems have been left in the
dust by today's even more potent portables, I can look back on
the best titles in the GameBoy library with an unjaded eye and
admire them for their brilliance.
Many of
these titles demonstrate a lost art in the video
game industry; the ability to wring every last drop of power
out of handicapped hardware, or make the limitations of a
system seem inconsequential. A really, really
good GameBoy game can make you forget that you're playing it
in black and white, even after a decade of being spoiled by
21st century technology.
Here's a handful of GameBoy games I've
recently tried, using the Visual Boy Advance emulator.
Some live up to that noble game design ideal of doing
more with less, while others were quirky novelties at
best. However, they were all a fun change of pace
from the sensory overload all too common on today's
game systems. Sometimes, roughing it is a lot less rough
than you'd expect.
MOLE MANIA
Mole's in control! Mole's on a
roll! Mole's gonna win the equivalent of the Super Bowl! Wait,
I've used this joke already, didn't I? Anyway, this brilliant
puzzle game pits you, a tiny bespectacled rodent, against a
cranky farmer who's kidnapped your wife and children. The
action takes place on two separate layers... above ground,
it's like Sokoban and its GameBoy equivalent Boxxle, but with
a more capable lead character. The mighty mole can not only
push obstacles, but throw them into enemies and even flip them
behind his back. Below ground, he'll find power ups as well as
hidden paths to otherwise unreachable areas. It takes practice
to get used to the gameplay, but once you've got the knack,
you'll sink hours into this incredibly clever (and
unappreciated... what the hell, people?) release.
OPERATION C
Contra's never been my game...
I've always been a Gunstar Heroes kind of guy
myself. However, even I have to admit that
this is a damn fine entry in the Contra series, closely
resembling the first two titles on the NES but with a reduced
difficulty to compensate for the original Game Boy's blurry
screen. The graphics are incredibly sharp on today's handhelds
thanks to the magic of TFT, but the less challenging gameplay
is still a blessing to gamers who've been chewed up and spit
out by the other Contra games. However, more macho fans of the
series will be relieved to hear that absolutely nothing else
has been compromised, from the powerful soundtrack to subtle
details like the shimmering water on the horizon in the first
stage.
CYRAID
This is a pretty crummy game
that quickly becomes an unhealthy compulsion, like picking at
a scab or poking a cold sore with your tongue. You know you
could find a better use for your time, and you know you're
going to regret it the next day, but you just can't stop!
Maybe I couldn't put Cyraid down because it reminded me of Mr.
Do's Castle, one of my childhood favorites. Like in the Aruze
classic, you crush enemies with blocks and kick ladders into
place, but unlike the wily unicorns in Mr. Do's Castle, your
foes in Cyraid are the size of microbes, with brains to match.
Come to think of it, EVERYTHING is tiny in this game, making
it tough to judge your onscreen position and collect the
energy spheres that spring open the door to the next stage.
Yet for all its flaws- the puny characters, the puzzling
power-ups, and the mutated orange that regularly stomps across
the screen like a citrus-flavored Godzilla- the game does have
a certain perplexing appeal, a jene se what the hell
is going on here, if you will.
ADVENTURES OF STAR
SAVER
I won't lie to you folks... I
thought Super Mario Land was pretty pathetic. Sure, it was a
Game Boy launch title, but it also was a huge step down from
the NES games, including the very first Super Mario Bros. that
was packaged with the system in 1985. After the majesty of
Super Mario Bros. 3 four years later, the tiny, badly drawn
characters and simple, derivative gameplay of Super Mario Land
just didn't cut it. Nintendo remedied this years later with
the sequels, starring Mario's evil twin Wario, but Taito also
took a crack at righting Nintendo's wrongs with Adventures of
Star Saver. Fundamentally, the game is very similar to Super
Mario Bros., but instead of boosting your strength with
mushrooms, you climb into the cockpit of a mech straight out
of the film Robocop. Star Saver also features an effective
science-fiction motif, with your ED-209 knock-off leaping onto
detailed planets and gunning down robotic rabbits. A sequel
called Max was released in Europe, and while the game had
larger, less linear levels than the original, it also lacked
much of its charm due to some very plain artwork.
WORLD HEROES 2
JET
Ooh, I actually own the
cartridge for this one! This is one of Takara's remakes of a
Neo-Geo fighting game, and while they had the right idea with
the squishy superdeformed characters, the shaky execution
makes me all the happier that I own a Neo-Geo
Pocket. The control in this conversion of ADK's shameless
Street Fighter II clone is appalling, forcing you to
frantically wiggle the joypad and jab at buttons to pull off
your favorite attacks from the arcade game. You
might be inclined to blame the GameBoy's stiff
directional pad for this, but even on an emulator, and
even with that Rolls Royce of fighting game
controllers, the Sega Saturn joypad, the
control still sucks. This in turn means that the
game sucks, in spite of the squeezably
soft artwork and the full cast of characters from the
arcade original. Oh Takara, you were so close, and yet
so far away...
| June 13, 2009... Transition
Impossible |
I thought I was hot shit,
hooking my parents up with a coupon for a digital
converter a year before the transition to digital
television actually happened. Little did I know that
they would also need a new antenna to compensate for
the weaker digital signals, blocked by Michigan's
overabundance of trees. Hey Obama, any chance you're
going to give us a coupon for one of those? Better throw
in an extra fifty bucks for installation while you're at
it.
What's most confounding
about this whole DTV nonsense is that the number of channels
we receive has varied wildly over the past couple of
days. At first, we were able to catch a full complement
of stations, minus the local Fox affiliate. After
turning the antenna, we still didn't get Fox, and
lost most of the other channels in the process. On the
day of the transition, all of the channels vanished
except two flavors of PBS (oh joy) and ABC, which I gladly
would have sacrificed for any of the
other three major networks.
It's 1:00AM right now, and
I'm picking up everything except NBC and PBS, with My Network
popping up as a booby prize. I have to wonder
about this schizophrenic reception... I have a sneaking
suspicion that when I wake up tomorrow morning, I'll lose all
the other channels but get Qubo and a radio broadcast off the
coast of Fiji.
Anyway, speaking of
television (and not video games, which I'm supposed to be
covering here), I've just written a retrospective on Late
Night with Conan O'Brien, in honor of
Conan's well-deserved promotion to the host of The
Tonight Show. I urge you to give it a look; I'm really
proud of how it turned out.
| June 10, 2009... PSP Came and
Went |
The more things change, the
more they stay the same, eh? Four years after the Playstation
Portable was released for an offsetting $250, it's coming back
with the UMD drive and much of its size stripped away... but
the price left intact. And the world groans once again at
Sony's stupidity.
I'm no fan of the Nintendo DSi
and its own inflated price tag, either, but this is just
ridiculous. For a Japanese company desperate enough for profit
to hire a Welshman as its savior, Sony seems completely
unwilling to learn from the mistakes that first led to its
financial ruin. It's become the Will Farrell of multinational
conglomerates... smug, self-assured to the point of
irritation, and a constant victim of its own bumbling
ineptitude. When gamers bitterly complain about the PSP's lack
of a second analog thumbstick, Sony ignores them. When PSP
owners plead for a more open system architecture, Sony
responds by routinely blocking access to homebrew
applications. Now, in a dismal economy that's emptied the
wallets of gamers around the world, Sony has both
substantially raised the price of the PSP and went with a
digital distribution model that makes the system useless to
anyone stranded in the broadband-free boonies (uh, me). It's
not even much good as a paperweight now that it's smaller and
lighter than before! When Sony's attitude for the past four
years has been "my way of the highway," it's no wonder that
traffic has been so congested on Nintendo's side of the
street.
Speaking of Nintendo, I've been
pretty irritated with the company for the past year thanks to
their confusion over the term "quality control" (hint: it
doesn't mean keeping quality from reaching your game system),
but it looks like they're making a genuine effort to atone for
their past mistakes and give gamers what they've been
demanding since they finished Super Mario Galaxy in 2007. Not
only is a sequel to that outstanding release planned for 2010,
but Nintendo is hard at work on a side-scrolling Super Mario
Bros. game, similar to the DS release New Super Mario Bros.
but with improved graphics, new abilities (you've gotta love
that penguin suit), and a chaotic four player mode featuring
Mario, Luigi, and a small posse of Toads. I don't know how
well the side-scrolling action of Super Mario Bros. is going
to accommodate a multitude of gamers, each eager to go in a
different direction, but I won't mind it too much as long as
Nintendo puts the emphasis on the single player mode where it
belongs.
| June 5, 2009... Down on the
Farm |
The site's going to be
largely inactive for the next couple of months, while I'm
stuck at the farm with my folks. Hopefully it'll be
back in the fall, after I've moved to Arizona and received
loans and grants for my next semester of college (man, this
shit just never ends). In the meantime, I've updated
the ColecoVision page
with six new reviews, because the old ones really
sucked. Seriously, you have no idea.
| May 20, 2009... Have You
Played Atari Today? |
I have, and there's
thirteen new reviews on the 26 Hunter as
proof! I've also taken the liberty of revising the page,
adding screenshots and trimming away buggy
HTML code. That's great news for old fogeys like
myself who spent most of their childhoods in front of the
Atari 2600 and are always craving more information about its
games.
So hey, if any of you folks are looking
to add some old-school video games to your collection, I'd be
happy to offer some
of mine... for a reasonable price!
If you're not in the market for video games, I'm
also accepting donations, because I'm shameless like
that. Also broke. Very broke.
| May 14, 2009... Snap into a
Slim PS3? |
It could happen, and a lot
sooner than anyone expected. A recent post on, well,
pretty much every gaming and tech blog out there reveals a
wafer thin console claimed to be the next model of the
Playstation 3. It's a little hard to believe that Sony's
already got the technology shrunken down that much, especially
when you consider that X-rayed image of the original PS3 that
appeared on the same blogs about a month ago. That case
was packed with more gear than a Snickers bar has
peanuts! However, I'm not completely convinced that this
is bogus. After all, this is the video game industry...
stranger things have happened, as anyone who remembers the
Gizmondo debacle can
attest.
| May 11, 2009... Ruh Roh
Retro |
Things are tough all over for retro fans this
week. After years of difficulty in bringing
its Intellivision collection to the Nintendo DS, Realtime
Associates has hit a new roadblock, set by Nintendo
itself... the individual games in the collection can't be
released on DSiWare because they're running on an
emulator. Nintendo's been marketing to non-gamers for
years now, but this is the first time they've taken a hardline
stance against releasing actual video games. After all,
who needs those when you can have Animal Crossing-themed
calculators?
Oh, but it gets better, folks!
Remember how frustrated gamers were with Sonic's Ultimate
Collection, which offered Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles but
not the two games merged together? The nerdier ones even
posted the three lines of code Sega would have needed to take
advantage of the latter game's Lock On technology. Well,
Sega finally acknowledged its
mistake... by selling a fixed version of
the game on Xbox Live Arcade! Gee Sega, I really
underestimated your ability to fleece your
customers. I thought that would come to a
screeching halt after you got out of the hardware business,
but you've been able to use digital distribution as your
own personal 32X, masterfully fragmenting
and infuriating what remains of your user base.
Bravo! What you lack in common decency you more than
make up for in crafty
duplicitousness.
| May 2, 2009... Crystal
Dynamics, Part 2
(Nintendo) |
I originally did these
predictions in order from Sony to Microsoft to Nintendo, but
I'm going to shuffle the arrangement now, because Nintendo's
been on my mind lately thanks to an insightful article
about the company recently published on Wired. I'm going
to save Microsoft for last, because I'd hate to lose my
train of thought in a week, when I eventually finish this
feature. Anyway...
Last but not least
(that honor goes to Sony!), we have Nintendo. The
company releases the Wii in November of 2006 for $229, and in
a welcome return to the old days, includes a game with the
package. That game is Wii Sports. It doesn't look
pretty, but it does get players ready for the Wii
experience. A handful of first-party titles are
introduced with the launch of the system, and all of them cost
$39.99 each. Yes, even The Legend of Zelda: Twilight
Princess, which actually costs ten dollars MORE on the dying
GameCube.
This is where I start blowing these predictions. The
Nintendo Wii was actually released for $249, which is probably
twenty dollars more than its actual value considering that it
is just a turbocharged GameCube with shaky motion
controls. The system did include Wii Sports in the
package, but I can't take full credit for that prediction, as
this was the subject of some speculation at some of the video
game forums I used to visit. Also, as we all know,
first party games for the Wii retail at $49.99... ten dollars
less than either of the competing systems, but ten dollars
higher than I'd expected. Finally, Nintendo didn't sell
the GameCube version of Twilight Princess at a premium as I
had initially expected. I suppose the motion controls
(as tacked on as they were) were enough of an incentive for
gamers to purchase the Wii version instead.
The American public
becomes curious about the Nintendo Wii... so curious, in
fact, that it becomes the top-selling game system in Christmas
of 2006. Japanese gamers are just as fascinated by the
Wii, resulting in a worldwide feeding
frenzy. The Wii is swept off store shelves in the
blink of an eye, and the incredible demand becomes the subject
of evening news reports, talk shows, and web sites. Has
Nintendo finally reclaimed its throne as the leader of the
video game industry?
Nailed this one! Hey babe, check this out...
fire-powah! Anyway, the Wii was indeed a hit on both
hemispheres, although there was an initial eBay-fueled rush on
the Playstation 3 when it first hit store shelves. After
interest in the PS3 evaporated (a high price and a limited
software selection will do that), the Wii continued to sell at
a record pace, blowing past both of its competitors and being
routinely sold out at retail stores for two years. I can
personally attest to how difficult it was to buy a Wii back in
its freshman year... a good friend at a GameStop held onto one
for me under the condition that I purchased it the moment the
store opened the next morning. I felt like I was buying
a vial of crack and an automatic firearm in a back
alley.
Well, yes and
no. Nintendo can only maintain this popularity in
Japan. Riding on the success of the Nintendo
DS, the Nintendo Wii outsells the overpriced Playstation
3 by a ratio of three to one. The Japanese fall in love
with the console's compact size, its irresistable price, and a
library of games that cater specifically to their unique
tastes. Some gamers (and third party licensees) remain
loyal to the Playstation 3 regardless of its price, but
it becomes increasingly obvious as the years pass that
this is a fight Sony can't win.
I blew this prediction, but who could have seen all the
crazy shit that's happened in Japan coming? Conventional
wisdom has been turned on its head in the land of the rising
sun, with handhelds greatly outselling homebound
consoles. At first, the Nintendo DS took the country by
storm, but once it thoroughly saturated the market, the
PSP replaced it as Japan's best-selling system. The
brick wall that Nintendo hit with the Nintendo DS is
understandable, because one out of every five Japanese
citizens owns the system. The only way you could
possibly improve that adoption rate is to give them away in
ten packs of ramen or force the government to implant one in
the back of every newborn child.
I was going somewhere with this, really. The Nintendo
Wii sold like gangbusters in Japan for about a couple years,
but it hit its own brick wall... namely, a lack of
any truly excellent games. Once the novelty of
the motion sensitive controllers wore off, the Japanese were
eager to adopt a console with more consistent software
quality, and the Playstation 3 was it. They
could have bought the less expensive Xbox 360
instead, but you know how the Japanese are about embracing
American technology. There was a survey
in Enterbrain which listed the
alleged reasons that the Japanese were
hesitant to purchase Microsoft's system, but the truth is
that the Xbox 360's failure in Japan boils down to a misplaced
sense of national pride. You know, lazy
illiterate Americans and all that
nonsense.
That's Japan.
In America, the Wii becomes a short-lived fad, much like the
Nintendo 64 before it. Americans quickly tire of the
novelty of the Wii interface and demand more of the same,
which both Sony and Microsoft offer in ample amounts.
Lousy third-party support, the Achille's Heel of the Nintendo
DS, also factors into the decline of Wii sales in the United
States. However, Nintendo remains the leader of
interactive family entertainment, despite Microsoft's best
efforts with Viva Pinata.
I should have reversed these two predictions, because this
has been the reality. The Wii is still a hit in America
despite a drought of high-quality software, while Wii sales
have taken a nosedive in Japan. Also, calling lousy
third-party support the Achille's Heel of the Wii would be
incredibly clairvoyant if it weren't also the understatement
of the decade. Square, EA, and Capcom, where the hell
are you? We've gotten one decent Wii game from
each of these industry titans (Dragon Quest Swords,
Boom Blox, and Zack and Wiki) and that's it. That kind
of indifference in the face of fifty million units sold makes
you wonder just where the priorities of these three leading
developers lie.
Meanwhile, on the
handheld front, Nintendo is dismayed to discover that the PSP
is slowly catching up to the Nintendo DS in US sales.
Sony still has its supporters, and at $149, the PSP is
the only currently supported Playstation system they can
afford. Nintendo shifts its attention from the Wii to
the Nintendo DS in America, hoping to maintain its leadership
of the handheld market. Wii sales continue to suffer,
leaving it in the same unenviable position as its predecessor,
the GameCube.
The PSP is pretty much sunk in America, and it's unlikely
that the redesigned, market fragmenting PSP Go! will change
this. However, as was mentioned earlier, the PSP is
a big hit in Japan thanks to a combination of market
oversaturation for the Nintendo DS and the current
Japanese obsession with Monster Hunter. As was also
mentioned previously, the Nintendo Wii is still America's
best-selling game console. So the Cliff Notes is that
the entire paragraph is full of bogus
predictions.
In 2010, the Wii
has taken a gigantic portion of the Japanese market... around
70%, with the remainder going almost exclusively to
Sony. Nintendo once again becomes synonymous with video
games, and the Japanese are already excited about the Wii's
successor. It's a different story overseas, but the news
is still encouraging. The Wii has taken almost 30% of
the US market, edging out the Playstation 3 and
demonstrating a marked improvement over the GameCube.
Things may never be the same for them in America, but on all
fronts, Nintendo has a promising future ahead of
it.
According to VG
Chartz, the Wii holds about two-thirds of
the Japanese market, but with the current trend toward the
Playstation 3, that's likely to change in a hurry. By
the end of the year, the two systems could be neck and neck in
overall sales, with the Playstation 3 threatening to pull
ahead. Here in the good old US of A, the Wii is the
dominant game console at nearly 23 million units sold, but its
lead is threatened by a different console, the paradoxically
more powerful and less expensive Xbox 360. If Nintendo
insists on going down its doomed path of all crap and no
games, the Xbox 360 is almost assured to overtake it in the
next three years.
So I guess the lesson to be learned from all this is that
Nintendo needs to get its shit together in a hurry if it wants
to maintain its leadership of the market both here and
abroad. Recently, Nintendo president and former VIC-20
game designer Satoru Iwata apologized for the lack of
compelling software on the Wii, but it's going to take a lot
more than hollow sympathies and acknowledgements of the
plainly obvious to turn things
around.
You couldn't tell from
reading this web site, and you probably couldn't even tell
from looking at me, but yes, I really am alive. I'm just
suffering from a nasty flu (hopefully not swine-related) on
top of my usual issues. I'm sure I'll be able to power
my way through it in a couple more days,
though.
So, it sounds like it's
full speed ahead for the latest PSP model, which replaces the
slow and klunky UMD drive with digital downloads. If
they were going to make that drastic a change to the design,
you'd think that Sony would include that extra analog
thumbstick that gamers have been demanding since launch, but
nope, Engadget reports that the button layout will remain
exactly the same as it's been since the system debuted in
2005. On the plus side, Gran Tourismo may finally make
its PSP debut... and only four years after it was first
announced! It may have actually mattered back in 2005,
but with God of War on these shores and the Monster Hunter
series in Japan, I have a funny feeling that the PSP
owners of the world have moved on.
What else? Well,
Capcom is finally releasing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for the Xbox
360 and Playstation 3, with all the characters unlocked and an
option to replace that heinous jazz music with tunes from your
own collection. Square-Enix recently purchased Eidos,
and is hungry for more struggling developers with high-profile
games. Could Midway be next, or will Warner Bros.
Interactive get to them first? There's a new Ace
Attorney game on the horizon with an elevated side-view
perspective, and Nintendo's released shadowy pictures of a new
fighter who will appear in the latest Punch-Out!! game.
With his blunted nose and cropped hair, he looks like Killer
Instinct's T.J. Combo, but since Microsoft-owned Rare
currently holds the rights to that series, that's probably
just a coincidence.
That's it, folks. Now back
to my regularly scheduled coughing and wheezing, already in
progress.
| April 20, 2009... Will 2009
Be Like 1984? |
It could be for Japan,
which has seen steady sales drops for nearly every game
console over the past few weeks. Even the Nintendo DSi,
which had a strong start when it launched last November,
sold just over 40,000 units this week, down 10,000 units from
the previous week.
This may not necessarily be
cause for alarm, but dwindling console sales along with a
weak economy and cynicism from developers (dating as
far back as late
2007) could spell trouble for the
future of the Japanese video game industry.
The United States had its own crash back in 1984, while
gaming in the East thrived thanks to the popularity of the
Famicom. Perhaps now, it's Japan's turn to flounder
while America flourishes.
| April 18, 2009... Crystal
Dynamics, Part 1
(Sony) |
Back in 2006, I posted a series
of predictions about the outcome of this
generation of game consoles. It's three years later and
we're halfway through the lifespans of the Wii, Playstation 3,
and Xbox 360, so I thought it would be fun to see how those
predictions panned out.
We'll start with Sony, who
was the undisputed leader of the video game industry back in
the first half of the decade. All right, here we
go!
It's the end of an era as the
Playstation brand name begins to lose its hold on
consumers. The first cracks in the armor began to show
with the release of the PSP in 2005, but that armor begins to
fall off piece by piece when the Playstation 3 is introduced
at the tail end of the following year, just in time for
Christmas. The PS3 is delivered with the price tag that
Sony had promised at E3, between five hundred and six hundred
dollars. That sticker shock alone is enough to drive
most consumers away from the unit and straight to its
competitors. Parents who want to entertain their kids
but have no need for a game console themselves will head
straight for the Wii. Older gamers who demand a more
sophisticated experience will opt for an Xbox
360.
No dispute here. Granted, my
personal bias colored this analysis, but it is nevertheless
right on the mark. Sony did indeed sell the
Playstation 3 for $499 and $599, and sales
did shift into first gear after an initially
promising holiday rush. True to Nintendo tradition, the
Wii was a big hit with kids, but the big surprise was how well
it went over with the soccer mom and baby boomer crowd.
Really, who saw that coming? Aside from Nintendo COO
Reginald Fils-Aimes, who's been pushing that angle from the
moment the system launched...
The Playstation 3 trickles out
of stores, and it's given high praise by some media outlets
for its high performance hardware and excellent Blu-Ray
film playback. The system's developers took special care
to make the Blu-Ray support in the PS3 as good as it can
possibly be. As a result, the Playstation 3 is on par
with dedicated Blu-Ray players selling for twice the
price. However, consumers aren't yet ready to abandon
their DVD collections for a new format, and game developers,
already strained by high software development costs,
are reluctant to take advantage of the additional storage
that the Blu-Ray format offers.
I had a funny feeling that the
Playstation 3 was going to be an excellent Blu-Ray player,
since that functionality was supposed to be the key to its
success. It certainly lived up to my expectations in
that respect. Last year, HDTV
Magazine praised the console as a
standalone Blu-Ray player, saying: "The video looks
absolutely stunning and the audio quality is amazing. We
haven't seen Blu-ray look or sound any better than on the PS3,
nor have we seen it any worse, but that just means it is as
good as any Blu-ray player out there. You do not suffer
any quality loss simply because it's intended to be a gaming
console and not a dedicated player."
As for the success of the Blu-Ray
format, that's subject to debate. However, Cnet reported that
Blu-Ray disc sales have nearly doubled from last year, to nine
million units. There are also an estimated ten million
Blu-Ray players in the United States, with the likely majority
of those being Playstation 3 consoles. It's got a long
way to go before it can match the lifetime sales of DVDs or
the ancient VHS format, but Blu-Ray has already
beaten the hell out of Capacitance Discs and "oh, no"
Beta. Plus, the recent actions taken by ISPs to reduce
bandwidth on their networks (don't kid yourselves folks,
Time-Warner isn't through fighting for bandwidth caps) could
keep digital distribution one step behind Blu-Ray as the
dominant high-definition video format.
Games that once put Playstation
systems in millions of homes are starting to lose
their hypnotic effect on fans. Tekken, Ridge Racer, and
Gran Tourismo are old news, and the high price of the
Playstation 3, coupled with the lack of innovation in all
of these titles, have convinced players to look elsewhere for
their entertainment. Ridge Racer 7 in particular is a
crushing disappointment, lacking both new ideas and the
extraordinary visuals that PS3 owners expect from
the system that emptied their wallets. After dire
sales, Namco Bandai reconsiders making its flagship games
exclusively for Sony's systems... but doesn't stop to think
that those games are too old and busted to sell on ANY
console.
I played Ridge Racer 7 six months after
the system was launched, and it was so far behind the times
that I kept wondering if I'd see Fred Flintstone's
foot-powered car on the racetrack. The only difference
between it and the previous Ridge Racer games released for the
Xbox 360 and PSP is... well, there aren't any
differences. Getting off the subject of the Playstation
3 for a minute, Namco has really been sucking ass since the
merger, haven't they? Everything they've released in the
past three years has either been a hopeless rehash of previous
games or awful enough to prompt reactions like this from
gamers. The only recent Namco title that has been
worth the price of admission is Retro Game Challenge, and that
was outsourced to another design team!
After a few years, some
impressive exclusives (particularly Metal Gear Solid 4, which
actually lives up to the hype), and a grudging price
drop, the Playstation 3 begins to pick up momentum.
However, the real star of the Sony line-up becomes the
Playstation Portable. After a reduction in price to
$149, the PSP becomes the console of choice for gamers
who wish to stay loyal to the Playstation brand name,
but can't afford Sony's latest system.
That price drop did come in
2008, but at the cost of the system's backward
compatibility. Looking for ways to reduce manufacturing
costs, Sony tore the Emotion Engine from the heart of the
Playstation 3, replacing it with software emulation and
eventually, no backward compatibility at all. Early
adopters may have paid big bucks for the PS3, but at least
they received a more complete system out of the
deal.
As for the Playstation Portable, that's
still going strong... in Japan, at least. After three
years of Nintendo DS dominance, the system made a miraculous
comeback thanks to the popularity of the Monster Hunter
series. It not only consistently outsells the
market saturated DS, but every other game console available in
Japan, including its big brother the Playstation 3.
I missed the mark on the price
drop, but not by much. The PSP is currently selling for
$169 in the United States, about the same as the recently
released Nintendo DSi. That price is not likely to drop
when the next, possibly UMD-free model of the PSP is released
at the end of the year.
Gamers witness a mass migration
of third party developers from the PS3 to the PSP, and the
once unappreciated handheld becomes a serious threat to the
Nintendo DS's market dominance. However, this is only
the case in the United States. The Nintendo DS remains
uncontested in Japan, with the PSP clinging to life on the
backs of a few stubborn supporters. A redesign of the
system (including a reduction in size, improvements in battery
life, and a screen with a higher refresh rate) does boost
sales, but not by much.
Ha ha! No. If anything,
developers have been stampeding away from the PSP,
especially in the United States, where sales have been
sluggish and piracy has glued even the best releases to store
shelves. I completely blew it with most of these
predictions, although a slimline PSP with an (arguably)
improved display was released in the United
States late last year.
2010 arrives, and brings with it
word of a new generation of systems. Sony is left
humbled and hurting after the high manufacturing costs and
lackluster sales of the Playstation 3. Nevertheless, the
system becomes a cult hit among early adopters and Playstation
loyalists. Like the owners of the Sega Master System in
the 1980's and fans of the Sega Saturn in the 1990's,
Playstation 3 supporters stand by their console of choice,
proclaiming it to be the best on the
market.
2010 is still nine months away, but it's
already pretty clear that the Playstation 3 will be dead last
in this console war, at least in the United States. I'm
also confident that in ten years, there will be gamers who
will insist that it was the best of the three systems, and
that it didn't get a fair shake from customers enamored with
the gimmicky Wii and economically priced but just as
economically built Xbox 360.
A handful of games on the system
do demonstrate its superiority over other consoles, but the
fact remains that Sony only captured 20% of the US gaming
market with the Playstation 3. The system sold better in
Japan, but only marginally, taking 25% of the market.
Sony obliges its small but devoted user base with the
marginally improved Playstation 4, but focuses much of its
attention on the PSP II, its next generation
handheld.
It's not an authoritative source, and
I'm sure I'll catch hell for treating it like one, but VG
Chartz claims that the Playstation 3 has
sold over eight million units in the United States, and nearly
22 million systems worldwide. Here are the figures from
April 18th, 2009:
The site claims that the Playstation 3
has taken 21.6% of the total gaming market across all
territories, which is pretty close to my own estimates in
2006. Before you gasp and swoon at my amazing
clairvoyance, however, remember that we haven't yet looked
at my predictions for the other two
systems. An Xbox 360 with a built-in HD-DVD
player? Oh, three years from the past Jess, you crack me
up!
So, what did I miss? Well, Eye of
Judgment and Little Big Planet were both awesome games that
were retail failures. That's a shame, because Eye of
Judgment made use of some really exciting technology, and
Little Big Planet demonstrated what Sony could do when
thinking outside the box they've been trapped in by hardcore
gamers. I had no idea that backward compatibility would
be taken out of later models of the Playstation 3, or that
there would be four different PSPs by 2010, including
the rumored but highly probable model without the UMD
drive. Past that, I think I was pretty much on target
with these predictions. We'll see how well I did with
Nintendo and Microsoft next week.
| April 13, 2009... The Tower
of Crippled Hours |
The title doesn't have anything to do with this
update... I was just reading Midnight's Children and thought
the term "Tower of Crippled Hours" sounded really cool.
By the way, you might want to check out the book if you've got
the attention span for it. It's hard to describe, but
imagine X-Men if it took place in India, and had a lot less
action and a lot more philosophical musings.
Honestly, I'm at a loss for
things to talk about right now. The video game industry
has slowed to a crawl, and the latest news has been
anything but exciting. When the announcement of a Judge
Mathis game is the best the blogs have to offer, it makes you
want to crawl into a hole and hibernate until the Electronic
Entertainment Expo begins.
However, your visit to the
site was not in vain! I've uploaded not one, not two, but three Awesome NES
pages, because I've been lagging well behind on updates and am
itching to get this section of the site wrapped up by the end
of May. Wherever I'll be in two months, I probably won't
have broadband internet access, so if I'm going to make any
changes to the site, now would be the time for
it.
| April 6, 2009... Putting the
"Anal" in Analyst |
I'm a little 'neebed right
now, so I'll make this brief before I make too big a fool of
myself. I was reading Joystiq earlier today and ran face
first into the headline Analyst: Investing in Wii Development is
Fool's Gold. This led me to
wonder... why do all the analysts sound like wind-up toys
for Sony? Seriously, every time an analyst releases one
of these statements, it's always something like "Nintendo Wii
Just a Fad," or "Playstation 3 Will Win Console War in
2014," or "Xbox 360 Makes Players Impotent," or "Kaz Hirai
Expected to Be Playgirl Magazine's Stud of the
Month." God, it's like reading a press release from
North Korea. These analysts need to wipe all the
dust off their crystal balls and finally come to the
realization that Sony isn't the industry titan it was back in
2003.
Anyway, there's a new page
on Awesome NES.
We're opening up a can of nerd on your ass with reviews of
Star Trek and Star Wars, then following it up with a look at
the two StarTropics games. Yes, we've got all your
star-related gaming needs covered this week.
| April 1,
2009... Party
Pooper |
No April Fool's joke this
year, folks. I figured that new reviews on this site-
and of Sony products, no less!- would be unbelievable
enough. Special thanks go to John Roche for his reviews
of Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero? and the Playstation Home
service, which you'll find right
here.
All right, before I go,
let's get in a quick rundown of the latest gaming news.
The Playstation 2 dropped to $99, prompting SCEA rep John
Koller to crow that the former industry heavyweight could
steal market share from the Nintendo Wii. Not without
new software it won't! The Wii is supposed to get a
conversion of the lesser known and even less liked light gun
game Mad Dog McCree, because heaven knows there just isn't
enough crap in the system's library. The upgraded (but
in all the wrong ways) DSi has already sold two million units
in Japan, double the number of the Xbox 360s that Microsoft
managed to move in that country over the last four
years. I think even Sega sold more than a million
Dreamcasts in Japan, didn't they? Koei unveiled a new
logo in celebration of its merger with Tecmo, and it's
hideous, making even Konami's tamponriffic identifier and
Ubisoft's tentacle monster peering into an open manhole look
charming by comparison. Annnnd I think that about covers
it! |
|
|