03.30.07
Posted in games at 2:12 pm by Rob Fahey
Medal of Honor: Vanguard on the Wii is completely crap. That shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone; the Medal of Honor (EA insists on the horrible Yank spelling, for some reason) series has been on a downhill slide since the first game, and EA has so far demonstrated precisely zero understanding of how to develop games for Nintendo’s quirky alternate-control consoles.
It’s getting a bit upsetting, though, that every time I review a Wii game that turns out to be shit (see Far Cry: Vengeance for another excellent example), this is instantly seized as conclusive proof that the Wii itself is a disaster. If we’re going to judge the potential of a console based on its weakest titles, then frankly, we might as well pack our bags and go home - gaming is dead.
Equally, I find myself scratching my head a bit at the claims that the Wii is fucked because a) it’s not getting enough good games; b) it’s only getting good games from Nintendo’s first-party studios.
The former claim I can pretty much understand. There’s definitely been a drought in the first few months after launch, and Nintendo deserve a slap on the wrist for that. However, most consoles experience this to some extent, and I think the company has done a good job of throwing out videos and demonstrations of stuff coming in the back-end of the year that people are getting excited about. Still, it’s a bit annoying not to have a few more games for the little white wonder.
What’s curious is that the argument from the Nintendo-bashing contingent seems to be that the console won’t get enough AAA games - “much like the GameCube and the N64″. I’m not really sure what people are looking for, to be honest; AAA games every month? No console in history has had that. The GameCube - and the Xbox for that matter - was sustained by having four to six massive releases every year, as opposed to Sony’s approach of having six to ten huge releases surrounded by acres of pap. Four to six big games a year does me fine, as a consumer; I don’t really want to pay for more than that, nor would I have time to play more than that. If the Wii gets six massive games this year, I’ll be bloody happy, and I think most of its owners will be too.
The other side of the argument, however, is utterly batshit loco. Who cares if the Wii’s biggest games are all Nintendo games? If they’re great games, I don’t care if they’re made by Nintendo or by Bob the bloody Builder. Certainly, Nintendo’s games have a certain look and feel which is eminently suited to their hardware, and if you don’t like that, you don’t buy a Nintendo console - but the claim that the Wii is somehow doomed to failure because of the lack of solid support from the likes of EA and Activision is clearly nonsensical.
Sure, I don’t think anyone is arguing that Wii is going to supplant the PS3 as the console of choice for the hardcore late-teens early-twenties gamer. Hell, Nintendo itself readily admits that that’s not really what it’s trying to do. So why do people insist on trying to judge the console’s merits according to the desires of that demographic group? It’s like moaning that Snickers bars are a bit shit for people who don’t like sweet things. Or peanut allergy sufferers.
Anyway, it’s a bit depressing to see the company who made the console taking the stick for the crap efforts of a development team. It’s like walking out of a crap film and having a moan about the Odeon - utterly ridiculous, but apparently that’s how we roll in videogame circles these days.
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03.24.07
Posted in games at 6:45 pm by Rob Fahey
I’ve got console launch fatigue. The arrival of the Xbox 360 was exciting, and dragged me out for a midnight launch; the emergence of the Wii saw me stranded up in Newcastle, of all places, but was still somewhat thrilling thanks to the pre-orders myself and plenty of my friends had placed.
PS3 came out this week, and I’ve never been more “meh” about a hardware launch in my life. Strangely, this isn’t actually Sony’s fault - I’m simply worn out from a year and a half of fanboy arguments. It’s a sad fact that teenagers and insane people with vast amounts of time on their hands will always win Internet Arguments against more well-reasoned people armed only with such things as Facts, Knowledge and Logic. Constant barrages of nonsense from platform fanboys (one side is as bad as the other, although at least the Sony kids have been quieter of late) wears you down.
Not, of course, that Sony has done themselves any favours in the last 18 months. I’ve enthused about Home on this blog already, but while I maintain that it’s a great move for them, it’s a bit sad that it’s one great move all out on its own, surrounded by a sea of utterly baffling decisions.
Or at least, baffling to a degree. I’m not daft enough to believe that Sony has a Great Fantastic Gameplan which they’re keeping secret from us, but I do think that they can see a little bit further with PS3 than people are giving them credit for. I laid out some of the arguments for that in an editorial for GamesIndustry.biz this week (which you can also read on Eurogamer.net if you fancy the version that supports reader comments), and I think it makes sense to some extent, at least. There’s a puzzle here regarding pricing which few people have mentioned, and Blu-Ray is the key to it, I believe.
Or at least, I hope for Sony’s sake that this is the case. There are a lot of “ifs” involved here. In an ideal world, one could see Blu-Ray player prices tumbling by early 2008, with PS3 following the drops closely to bring it down to a more reasonable price point. However, that relies on Blu-Ray being successful; which in turn relies on a vast number of uncertain factors, ranging from consumer attitudes to High-Def (I might write more on that shortly) through to the actual ability of the companies behind the BD-ROM standard to deliver cost benefits to consumers rapidly.
On the other hand, I could be allowing Sony a bit too much credit here. Someone accused me of thinking this through more deeply than Sony themselves have, which seems like quite a funny statement, but it gave me pause for thought at the same time. If I’m wrong, then Sony could end up in a situation where the PS3 is vastly, vastly more expensive than entry level Blu-Ray players. It will be open to competition from every angle, and will be a high-end, high-quality, but ultimately extremely niche product, leaving Microsoft and Nintendo to hoover up the mass-market.
So here’s another prediction, hedging my bets a little - if my prediction on the price of the system turns out not to be true, Howard Stringer will be kicked out as head of Sony within two years, and replaced with a nice “safe” Japanese executive who will be more palatable to the Nikkei’s tastes. It won’t be Kutaragi, either. He’ll be put out to pasture long before then - in an even more remote field than the one in which he’s currently chewing the cud. He will never hold a truly senior and influential role at Sony again.
Either way, it’s going to be a very, very interesting few years for PlayStation.
By the way, I reviewed a couple of the PS3 launch titles for Eurogamer. Virtua Fighter 5 gets a princely 9/10, for being extremely good albeit still not exactly my kinda thing; Genji: Days of the Blade however is exactly my sort of thing, but sadly very flawed in its execution and ultimately mediocre. At least it’s better than Full Auto 2, which was shit. Not genuinely awful and shit, but still shitty enough that you shouldn’t buy it unless you really like shit. As in, like it quite a lot.
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Posted in food at 1:50 am by Rob Fahey
Everyone is ill. The entire household trekked down to Southampton for an anime convention last weekend and have returned with a deeply unpleasant dose of something chest / throat / sinus related to suffer through. I seem to have got off lightly, which I’m attributing to the massive amount of fruit I’ve been consuming recently (although it’s altogether more likely that I’ve just had this particular bug before, or something). While everyone else is rolling around being generally unhappy, I managed to shift a couple of days of lingering illness with a decently long sleep and about a litre of Innocent smoothie.
With the house (and my LJ friends list) feeling so infected, I decided to take myself off out for a long-promised visit to Borough Market today. Despite living just a couple of tube stops from this famous food market, I’ve never actually gone there before, and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Mac and I turned up at about 1.30pm with no clear objective other than “find something for dinner” - and I proceeded to spend two genuinely delightful hours wandering around looking at incredibly delicious things.
I think I’d expected it all to be more commercialised and sanitised somehow; it certainly isn’t that. Entire stalls are devoted to things which wouldn’t merit half a shelf in the “weird shit” section of your local supermarkets. I found a man selling incredibly sweet, creamy smelling fresh Parmesan (a million miles from the hard, sour stuff you get in supermarkets) which he cut off giant cheese wheels in front of you. A specialist stall sells only meat pies; another is dedicated purely to venison. In the butchery section, there’s a table of wild boar products. Delicious freshly made cakes and flans are around every corner; a cage-style enclosure houses a vegetable area stacked over six feet high in places with an eye-popping variety of fresh veg, the root vegetables so fresh the soil is still damp on them, the leaf veg uniformly crisp and beautiful.
The sheer variety is overwhelming, and frankly, I would have been a bit lost due to the absolute oceans of choice were it not for having the altogether more decisive Mac on hand to make “suggestions” (i.e. tell me what to do when I was dithering like a fool). We grabbed some salt beef sandwiches for lunch, first; huge ciabatta baps dumped on a disposable tin tray and then loaded up with as much fresh, steaming salt beef as they could fit without overflowing the tray, for four quid. I then decided I wanted to try something from the venison stall, having never cooked it before. We settled on a venison casserole (well, a stew really, since it was cooked on the hob rather than in the oven) with red cabbage side dish, and procured some delicious crusty bread to mop up the juices; I also picked up some lovely looking cheese and fruit, while Mac bought a fresh-baked apple and blackberry crumble pie for dessert.
It’s not exactly speedy food - over two hours of slow simmering on the hob, in fact - but god, that sort of food hits the spot. Cooked in a full bottle of red wine, the root vegetables crumble together with the fat from the meat to form a thick, rich gravy, flavoured by huge leafy stems of rosemary and a sprinkle of thyme and parsley. The big chunks of venison are dark and deeply flavoured, but so soft from lengthy cooking that they fall apart in your mouth; and the red cabbage, simmered with sugar and juniper berries in red wine and red wine vinegar, makes a lovely tangy side dish, which somehow tastes of winter. The whole thing is an ideal, warming meal for the cold snap of weather we’re suffering at the moment, and after chilling our hands and faces at the market this afternoon, I’m glad we opted for that rather than something a bit more suited to spring. It’s filling, too - and there’s plenty left for a couple of reheated bowls at lunchtime tomorrow, too.
I’m definitely going to make Borough Market into a more common haunt - although I may control my spend a bit better in future. 50 quid on tasty food isn’t something I begrudge in the slightest, but it might be better if it doesn’t happen too often!
(I know this blog is tagged as media and technology, but dammit, I can’t play videogames on an empty stomach!)
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03.12.07
Posted in games at 10:17 am by Rob Fahey
If you had told me a week ago that the only thing worth talking about at this year’s Game Developers Conference would be Sony’s keynote, I’d have laughed in your face. Perhaps not a barking gale of uproarious mirth, but a sly snigger, at least.
However, with not a lot to see in terms of third party publishers, it was down to the platform holders to provide interest. It went a little something like this:
- Microsoft: Here are all the games you’ve seen before. Also, Fable 2 will have a dog in it. APPLAUSE.
- Nintendo: Shigeru Miyamoto’s wife quite likes games now. APPLAUSE.
- Sony: PlayStation 3 is going to have a user-customisable 3D online universe populated by detailed avatars, each with a personal space, interacting in lounges, lobbies and other spaces put together by media and consumer companies. There’s going to be an incredible-looking game where you can build your own levels and puzzles with unique objectives and share them over the network, then play other people’s games and rank them to contribute to global standings. Singstar is going to let you upload videos of your performances as well as downloading new music to sing to, so you’ll be able to take part in competitions and rate other people’s talent. Etc., etc.
You could, of course, dismiss the Sony stuff easily enough as a knee-jerk reaction to someone over there discovering Web 2.0, renaming it Game 3.0 and throwing out a bunch of products - and yes, you can identify all sorts of places they’ve nicked ideas from. Their Game 3.0 stuff (I’m going to have to continue using that awful moniker until I think of something better to call it, sadly) steals wholesale from a wide variety of sources. There are chunks of Xbox Live and Second Life, of course, but also elements of YouTube and even AmIHotOrNot, both of which are/were sites on the vanguard of Web 2.0.
Plenty of people have been dismissing PlayStation Home on those grounds, and on the basis that it’s not a game. People won’t buy a console for something that isn’t a game, they claim.
They’re wrong.
People will buy a console (perhaps not a 425 bleedin’ quid console, although that’s a discussion for another day) for a “gimmick” like PlayStation Home. The more I look at it, the more I like it - both from a personal “I’d like to mess around in that” level, and from the point of view of respecting the decisions Sony has made in focusing development efforts on it. It’s a great critical-mass product… If you’ve got a few friends who own PS3s and who use PlayStation Home, the peer pressure to buy into it will be immense. It’s not hard to envisage teens (and quite a lot of twentysomethings for that matter) “hanging out” in PlayStation Home, especially since it acts as a portal to a bunch of multiplayer arcade titles, as well as to what looks like a fair amount of media.
Besides which, the most stunning thing about all of this is that Sony has actually leapfrogged Microsoft in terms of online vision - something nobody really expected to happen within the next 18 to 24 months. Note that I say vision, not implementation. I’m not willing to put down any wagers on how long it’s going to take for them to actually get their online service up to the level of consistency and reliability that Microsoft has achieved on Live - but regardless of that, they have flashy headline features and a genuine forward-looking approach which leaves Xbox Live looking like a tool of the last generation.
Which is great - not because I want Sony to “beat” Microsoft, or vice versa, but simply because it’s about bloody time someone brought competition to Microsoft’s doorstep in the online space. Xbox Live is dull as fucking dishwater in a number of ways. It’s fantastic if you want to play games against your friends online, but it’s become increasingly clear in the last two years that that’s not the be-all and end-all of online. Bringing to consoles something I was doing on PCs almost a decade and a half ago doesn’t count as innovative or, frankly, even interesting, not least because there are plenty of people who aren’t interested in competitive multiplayer - it should be there by default, and it should work well by default, but it should no longer be a headline feature.
PlayStation Home and the other stuff Sony announced last week is if nothing else a step towards doing Cool Shit with the network port on the back of every modern console, and one of the best things about it is that hopefully it’ll knock some heads at Microsoft together and make them think up some Cool Shit as well. It’s win-win for consumers in that way - proper competition between big corporations is good for us, so Sony getting back onto the bike they’ve been falling off in slow motion for a year and a half is great news.
Although, on a worrying note, it’s actually edged me to the point where I’m probably going to buy a PS3 by the end of the year. The press versions of the console don’t do any of the media stuff and suck at connecting to the network (there’s a test platform network they use instead), and the promise of Blu-Ray playback and PlayStation Home is almost enough to justify the price point to me. Almost.
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