E3 is once again upon us (albeit in its retooled, min-E3 format). I won’t cover every single announcement here - there are plenty of up-to-the-minute industry news sites on the blogroll at right, so set your RSS reader and fire away. But a week like this always has a few thought-provoking surprises, and presents a good opportunity to take the industry’s pulse. It’s like halftime, leading up to the holiday season endgame.
There’s a lot to be excited about in Capcom’s lineup this year, with Street Fighter IV promising a return to form in offense-geared, fast paced brawling along with a hot new 3D presentation. It’s a big, big development for Street Fighter fans, but I’m actually more excited about the return of the true blue bomber in Mega Man 9 on the Virtual Console and PSN.
For this installment, Capcom went back to the series’ roots and opted for the graphics and sounds of a classic NES game. In an industry that’s constantly pushing the hardware for higher frame rates and jaw-dropping visuals, it’s a breath of fresh air to see someone opt for the look and feel that just plain fits the character best. Mega Man 7 (on the SNES) and 8 (on the original PlayStation) were both good games in their own right, but just didn’t have that classic Mega Man charm, as anyone that played through Mega Man 2 would attest.
The decision from a big studio to go lo-fi for the latest entry in their flagship franshise is a subtle, but important development. It’s an artistic choice, to create a similar experience and evoke the same feelings as we had playing through the glory days of the series.
This is the second awesome videogame quilt picture I've run. Please send more.
I’d love to see future installments of classic franchises explore what made them great in the first place. And while we’re at, why not breathe new life into the classics we’ve already played through a million times by adding more content? Wouldn’t it be cool to pick up a Double Dragon game where part 3 left off? Or play through the NES port of Maniac Mansion, with running commentary from the (reunited) original development team?
I don’t have the time (or reflexes - zing!) to post every time Sony release a firmware update. The latest update for the PlayStation 3, version 2.40, is actually a fairly big deal for Sony and the entire industry.
They might as well have called this update “the Xbox Live patch.” It finally adds game-specific Trophies (mechanically the same as Live’s Achievements) so borderline OCD cases competitive gamers can scour their retail games and PSN downloads to truly complete every game, and compare Trophy collections. The real innovation, however, is the ability to access the Sony Cross-Media Bar in-game.
In-game XMB means PS3 players can finally message their friends across the entire network, regardless of what game they’re playing. So, a player who wants some live competition in MLB 08: The Show could pause the game and drop a line to challenge anyone on his friends list. One of his friends playing Metal Gear Solid 4 could see the message, pop in MLB, and get a game of baseball going. It seems arbitrary, but simple functionality like this made Xbox Live the gold standard in online console gaming.
The PlayStation 3 has supported PSN friends list since launch day, but they’ve never really mattered until now. Under the old method, you were more likely to find a randomly matched opponent on a particular game than you were to sign on and find one of your friends waiting for you.
In-game XMB also allows you to listen to your own music library while playing, but it’s tough for me to get too excited about it. After all, haven’t we been doing this since the first time someone turned up the stereo while playing Tecmo Bowl in a dorm room in 1989?
The fact that the PlayStation Network is now a cohesive online community that operates across the entire PS3 games library significantly levels the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 playing field. The question is, can Sony capitalize on it and bring hardware sales up to a more respectable level?
It would seem that Sony has two significant advantages over Microsoft. First, PSN is completely free to use, while Xbox Live Gold accounts cost $50/year. This could be a crucial point for Sony, provided they market it well (easier said than done) AND don’t screw it up with tiered service and pricing. Qore, their online magazine with “subscriber benefits” like access to private beta tests, is off to a rocky start. And who knows what Sony has planned with the introduction of their Home virtual world…
Second, Sony can leverage the PSP to expand the PlayStation Network and finally deliver the portability to PSN that Microsoft has been endlessly planning for Xbox Live. It’s a big opportunity, as Microsoft has shown zero interest in producing a handheld of their own, and even allowing the Viva Pinata characters to appear in Nintendo DS games. Also, the PSP looks to be on an upswing, with outstanding hardware sales in the fickle Japanese market, some critically successful games on the market and in the pipeline, and a winning hardware/software bundling strategy.
The all-but-confirmed Xbox 360 price drop can’t be far off, and Sony’s unlikely to follow suit. They already are selling the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there, and have made no secret of just how much they need to recoup as much as possible from the PS3 development costs. It should be interesting to see how they proceed, once the momentum of Metal Gear Solid 4 wears off.
Since the early days of Nintendo fever, TV networks have been trying to create programming with gamers in mind. Makes sense. After all, the potential audience for a game-centric show just keeps growing and is an advertiser’s dream with the full spectrum of ethnicity, a steadily widening age range and a lot more women paying attention in recent years.
A big problem is, the content has been pretty universally unwatchable. There have been plenty of bad cartoons, the occasional odd game show, and even a few reviews/news/interviews shows with hosts that have run the gamut from pretty-but-uninformed to so-annoying-you-wish-for-their-demise. The G4 Network promised 24 hours of games programming over a year ago, and they’re still filling afternoons with COPS reruns and reality shows like Ninja Warrior.
To be fair, there has been SOME decent gaming TV out there. A few months ago, the Discovery Channel aired a fantastic 4-part miniseries, The History of the Videogame. And I’ve always like G4’s Icons, which feels a little bit like VH1’s Behind the Music for game developers. Only with less booze. And I don’t think anyone on Behind the Music ever talked about how they got their start grinding it out in bug testing, but I haven’t watched that show in years.
One format that’s actually working quite well in Japan is Game Center CX. It’s a reality show that challenges its host, the affable Shinya Arino (”The Kacho”), to beat a different notoriously difficult retro game (usually an original NES title) and documents the entire process. It’s such an ingenious concept, I can’t believe an English language version hasn’t been rushed into production yet. Every single gamer can relate to this - we’ve all been stumped by a at least one ridiculous NES game. And forces like crappy design, rental store late fees, and puberty kept many of us from seeing the endings of a lot of these “gems.”
This week saw the official kickoff for ’s Will Wright’s Spore, as the Creature Creator module was made available on quite a few platforms. While I wouldn’t quite say it’s the games industry’s Chinese Democracy*, Spore’s had its share of delays since being announced (and winning the “Best of Show” award) at E3 2005.
I’m thoroughly impressed with the way EA/Maxis has managed to keep the community’s interest piqued over the course of Spore’s journey from cradle to shelves. Will Wright’s been fairly reclusive since the SimCity days, and his quasi-vow of silence endured even during the development cycles of high profile titles like SimEarth and The Sims, after his rock star status had been firmly established. The long runup to Spore, however, has yielded unprecedented glimpses into Wright’s development process, through the eyes of the absolute best writersin games journalism.
Under normal circumstances, gamers would have given up long ago on a title that had this many public delays. But Wright’s reputation, candor with the enthusiast press, and build-ins for additional platforms, like the DS and iPhone, have bought EA/Maxis a reprieve in this case. Just last week, Wright even weighed in on the “games as art” argument in this gem of an interview with GameDaily Biz.
We won’t know until September if all the anticipation was worth it, but for now the project originally dubbed “SimEverything” stands as a textbook study in how to premarket a huge, genre-defining multiplatform game.
*For those scoring at home, Duke Nukem Forever is the game industry’s Chinese Democracy. A dubious honor if ever there was one.
In case you missed it earlier this week, be sure to check out this superb Wall Street Journal article on Tomonobu Itagaki’s sudden (and fierce) departure from Tecmo. He’s best known for stylish series like Dead or Alive and the revived Ninja Gaiden, both of which cater to hardcore fans without apology. Along with Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamato, Itagaki’s one of a very few big name Japanese producers still active in the industry.
The fact that a dispute over a completion bonus led to Itagaki’s decision to leave (and sue Tecmo, to boot) shows that this industry still has a lot to learn about how to treat talent, especially if video game companies want to play in the same league as movie studios and music labels. When was the last time Steven Spielberg or Jay-Z had to sue a studio to get a bonus out of them?
Itagaki produced some really groundbreaking games during his run at the helm of Tecmo’s Team Ninja, and helped move plenty of Dreamcasts for Sega, PlayStation 2’s for Sony, and Xboxes (and then 360s) for Microsoft over the years. Love them or hate them, every one of Itagaki’s games had a unique voice and visual flare that was distinctively his. Is Tecmo so stocked with talent that they can afford to just let him walk out the door? Not likely.
The WSJ article touches on how Itagaki (and other visionaries in the industry) favors working with a smaller team of 100 or so programmers and designers that “get” the vision, rather than a small army of code monkies updating last year’s game and plugging in new graphics. The fact is, we need this type of passionate, creative producer to remain committed to building new, breathtaking experiences and expanding their original IP to draw in new audiences and keep influential, hardcore gamers in love with the hobby.
We’ve (hopefully) come a long way from the EA Spouse days, the novelty of producing games will wear off in time, and the industry needs to figure out how to nurture and maintain the creative people that keep it moving forward.
I’ve long held that, out of all the major pro sports, hockey makes the absolute best translation to video games, and has ever since Blades of Steel on the NES. It was the first organized sport I played, and still one of my favorites to watch.
Big congrats to the Red Wings for bringing the Stanley Cup to Hockeytown once again! And if you happen to be reading this from Detroit, please have a drink for me when the parade comes up Woodward.
Seth Schiesel’s NY Times piece on GTAIV voice actor Michael Hollick from last week raised some interesting questions. While I don’t think anyone would argue that a game’s voice and mocap actors help the player connect better with the characters, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison with film, or even traditional cartoon animation.
Actors in a video game are only one small part of a much larger team that builds and develops the characters. Of course, it’s industry standard for actors like Hollick to receive royalties for appearances in traditional media. But as we saw in the recent WGA writer’s strike, the old rules governing things like re-watches, syndication and cross-media viewing simply can’t apply to new media for it to remain profitable.
The fact is, if a developer like Rockstar is forced to pay a hefty residual to the actors that appear in its games, then it won’t be long before the coders, designers, producers, and even QA testers unionize and line up for “theirs.” After all, in a medium where the player is both the director and protagonist (as Stephen Johnson sharply observed), every one of these rank-and-file positions is just as critical as the next. And once publishers have to cut all those residuals checks, it becomes infinitely harder to make a profitable game. So then developers can’t take risks, and the fastest growing entertainment industry quits growing so fast… In short, what’s good for these actors could be really, really bad for the industry.
That said, Rockstar has a reputation for breaking new ground, and fostering creativity. So they (and parent company Take 2) can’t just write off the actors completely. I think Hollick actually showed the way towards a happy medium last week - he appeared on a morning radio show on DC’s WJFK FM. He mostly chatted up his experience making GTAIV, and offered an outsider’s perspective on how the magic happens.
Hollick’s appearance comes after GTAIV was established as a bona fide hit, so it’s unlikely that it caused any noticeable blip in sales. But if Hollick had hit the talk show circuit during release week, chatting up Dave and Jay and Conan, it’s possible that even more copies of GTAIV, and the boxes to play it on, would’ve flown out of retailers. After all, EVERYONE watches late night (including non-gamers), and if games continue to generate cash at a level on par with feature films and TV shows, shouldn’t our talent be expected to pitch in and market them the same way?
Like it or not, actors like Hollick are way more marketable and “TV friendly” than even a marquee producer like Will Wright or Shigeru Miyamoto. If their guilds and unions are going to push for a cut of profits from games in which they appear, then developers should insist that they serve as the face of the game.
I take great pains to avoid throwing words like “fanboy” around here too often. After all, there’s at least a little bit of a fanboy in all of us over something specific, be it sports or politics or games. And I try to cover industry news related to ALL home consoles, PC, you name it (although I know there are more than a few of you that check out each new post and say, “is he talking about the @#$% Wii AGAIN?!)
The fact is, there have been unapologetic fanboy gamers ever since the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis first arrived on the scene, and gave us all a horse to back. Sega even helped the process along, publicly vowing that the Genesis could do whatever “Nintendon’t.”
Of course, the anonymity of the internet has since turned the opinionated fanboy into some sort of annoying vitriolic supernova. Seriously, read any Kotaku comments thread that’s been up for an hour. It’s enough to make you wonder how any sane person could claim to love one console/developer/game so passionately, and yet hate another so vehemently.
Rob Walker, a regular contributor to Slate, the New York Times Magazine and blogger behind the stellar Murketing, looks at the bonds we form with what we buy in his upcoming book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.It might shed some light into what causes the fanboy condition… Check out Rob’s interview with Rick over at eyecube (one of our new friends in the WordPress Marketing Bloggers Network, in the blogroll at right). It’s definitely worth a read.
It’s a real rarity to see insider games industry coverage from our dailies here in NYC, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the all the attention that local think tank the Center for an Urban Future generated for their study, “Getting in the Game.”
You can grab the .PDF at their site (and it’s certainly worth a read), but the Cliffs Notes of the report boil down to a very logical conclusion - and a somewhat obvious one, if you follow the industry closely: “The fast-growing video game industry represents a promising opportunity for New York City’s economy, but the sector faces significant challenges and still lags well behind established gaming hubs like Seattle, Los Angeles and Montreal.” The coverage wound up in every reputable game blog (naturally), but more importantly, it made the cover of at least one of the dailies, and Sewell Chan posted on it in the excellent NY Times City Room blog.
I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the lack of a big game development scene in NYC, indie or otherwise. The creativity and talent is here, and the post-bust Silicon Alley community is keeping up with the west coast Joneses when it comes to attracting VC funding. We even have a few superb full-time games journalists residing in the 5 boroughs.
As the report shows, the handful of publishers that have set up some sort of base in the city (Take 2, Atari, and a few small developers) are mostly staffing marketing and C-level operations out of New York, and leaving the development to guys out west/across the pond/anywhere but here.
The fastest-growing entertainment industry can’t stay confined to the west coast forever, but a mass migration to NYC is no inevitability either. The same day that the Center for an Urban Future study went public, the office of Georgia Governor Sonny Purdue announced his state’s new incentives package for entertainment industry investment, with a ton of language specific to the games industry. Not to be outdone, Boston kicked off their inaugural conference focused on wooing more developers to the city last year, with a similar event in the works for 2008.
It’s great to see individual cities pushing for more developers in their locale, but what’s getting lost in the mix here is just how much the industry, as a whole, would benefit from moving a few creative eggs outside of the Bay Area basket. Just as Austin, TX filmmakers developed their own look and feel and the Atlanta hip-hop scene became a powerful force in music, the infusion of local developers from all over the map could lead to the discovery of some hot, undiscovered talent.
Services like Steam, Xbox Live, WiiWare and PSN now eliminate the most expensive parts of distribution, so as long as the ideas are good enough (and the developers are savvy about interacting with passionate gamers), the sky’s the limit.
Earlier this week, Nintendo’s long-awaited WiiWare indie game download service launched in the US, to surprisingly little mainstream media coverage. Perhaps it’s GTA4 hangover, or editors planning to cover WiiFit next week didn’t want to run two Wii-centric features in consecutive weeks, or maybe it just didn’t seem like big news in light of PSN and Xbox Live’s beating Nintendo to the punch by more than a year. Either way, it’s pretty big news for a number of reasons:
WiiWare is a decidedly “new Nintendo” move. Bite-sized, casual games from garage band developers are the very embodiment of the “blue ocean” strategy that Reggie Fils-Aime and the rest of the current Nintendo higher-ups operate under. The old guard at Nintendo (the ones that insisted on cartridges for N64 games over CD’s, and limiting the number of NES games they would allow any one publisher to make in a year) would have rather died than put games from indie microdevelopers on their precious system
While Nintendo already had the Virtual Console in operation, WiiWare’s debut means all three of this generation’s consoles (and both of the portable systems) have dedicated channels for instant delivery of retro games AND original downloadable content. Nintendo was the last holdout (and a significant one, considering how quickly their installed base is swelling). This could have serious ramifications for retailers, especially the ones that draw heavily from used game sales. How long before the new DLC reality spooks GameStop investors?
Thus far, a weak library of third party titles has been the most legitimate gripe consistently lobbed at the Wii - and rightfully so. The Little White Wonder’s seen way too many shoddy ports of last-gen games and minigame collections for its own good. WiiWare has the potential to reverse the trend. With quality titles available for a fraction of typical retail prices, how long can the market last for shovelware at retail prices?
As I write this, the questionable Summer Sports is $40 at GameStop, while $10 on WiiWare will get you Lost Winds, a gem of a game whose novel platforming and gentle, innocent storytelling reminded yours truly of the hauntingly beautiful Ico. Seriously. I rest my case.
There’s a lot to be excited about in Capcom’s lineup this year, with Street Fighter IV promising a return to form in offense-geared, fast paced brawling along with a hot new 3D presentation. It’s a big, big development for Street Fighter fans, but I’m actually more excited about the return of the true blue bomber in Mega Man 9 on the Virtual Console and PSN.
