No more new old games

A few weeks ago, it was announced that the Xbox Originals are no more. Remember? It's where you can download original Xbox games to your 360 for much more than you would pay at GameStop or a pawn shop. In honor of Max Payne 3's announcement, for example, they re-released the first two games at the standard Xbox Originals price of 1200 Microsoft points each ($15). You can buy both Max Payne and Max Payne 2 from Gamstop for $12 combined. But then you wouldn't get all the achievement points you can get only on 360! Oh wait... Xbox Originals don't offer those. Major Nelson said it was, "to preserve the integrity of the original gaming experience". And yet Galaga, Pac-Man, and Paperboy have achievements. That doesn't really seem fair, does it?

Another problem with the Originals is that most of them will steal about a gig of hard drive space. I only have a 20-gig hard drive on my 360 (big ones were too expensive!). That's a lot of wasted space. I would rather have the game take up space on my shelf. There's a lot more room, and then visitors can revel at my geek-tastic wall shrine!

The last issue is the same one facing Wii gamers with their Virtual Consoles - the good games that were re-released for download are already owned by the people that wanted them. People aren't going to pay another $15 to play an exact duplicate of an Xbox game they completed 6 years ago. That's three times the price of nostalgia of an NES game on Wii. For 400 Microsoft points, you might have yourself a deal. Triple that... probably not.

Still, it was nice seeing some underappreciated gems like Psychonauts and Dreamfall getting a little bit more attention a few years too late. Maybe it will get the three people that downloaded them to try something obscure and interesting in the future? We can only hope.

Zombie Rediscovery

So I recently rediscovered Left 4 Dead. I bought it a while back on sale at Target, and only played it for a few hours before it was relegated to the massive game collection lining my wall. But I liked it. And I felt like blowing away a few zombies again recently, and there is no better place to do that than in Left 4 Dead. It showcases Valve's commitment to excellence and feels just like one would imagine the zombie apocalypse to be like. They're everywhere! Yet there are still some problems.

First, there are only four "levels," and they're all "get from point A to point B" types. No deathmatch levels, no capture the flag, just survival. "But that's what the game is all about!" you say, and "Most people on Counterstrike only play three or four maps anyway, too!" Whatever. Four is a very small number, especially if you have no friends to play with online.

My least favorite part is the time commitment. Now, I have no problem with sinking dozens of hours into a game, but I don't want to set aside an hour-and-a-half chunk just to play a L4D campaign. There are checkpoints, but no saves. Even while playing a one-player game, you can't stop playing after hitting a checkpoint and come back to play later. You are in it the whole way, and there's no getting out alive! It's like a zombie apocalypse being spawned from your Xbox to suck away your free time, not with little casual gaming bites, but with movie-sized blocks that would feel better spent on something productive.

The problem is, I would probably play a whole campaign to completion most of the time anyway. But by forcing me to every single time, it removes any of the "quick gaming fix" potential. Left 4 Dead is a great game, and a lot of fun... if you have the time. Clear your schedule, and grab your shotgun.

Useless game tie-ins, part I

So there is this soda out now (you may have heard of it) called Mountain Dew. Apparently, it's very popular among the young folks. So is World of Warcraft. Hey, marketing people got a brilliant idea:



And why not. They did it with Halo 3:



Because gamers like to stay up all night, incredibly caffinated, playing Halo 3 and WoW. It's true. This collaboration makes sense.

But how about this one:



Apparently, since most gamers are hairy man-beasts, they have a different skin type than people who actually go outside and see the sun occasionally. It's hard to see this connection.

But it gets better:

http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=GameMuseum.Detail&id=40

Gunstar Heroes on the Genesis came packaged with a Fruit Roll-Up. Wonder if there are still sealed copies sitting around somewhere, waiting for a hungry gamer to break the seal and eat the hard sugary treat from decades past before partaking in one of the finest shooters of the generation?

There might even be weirder tie-ins, but it's going to be hard to top a Fruit Roll-Up. Just have to wait and see!

One more funny for the day...

Wow.

This is the first year that I've actually followed E3 as it was happening, and, compared to what I've read in magazines after the fact from other years (Wii Music... Yay.), this may have been the coolest year ever.

Why? Project Natal.

Video Games | Project Natal | E3 09: Project Natal Intro

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Incredible. I hope it works as promised.

And this is my first video embed, and I'm not an HTML tag expert yet... so sorry it covers up the other stuff on the side. But this must be seen by everyone. It's the future. You know, if M$ can make it work.

Do games NEED multiplayer?

If you want to be able to play one game and one game only for the next year of two of your life, then yes, multiplayer is a necessity. Sure, there are single-person experiences that seem limitless (Spore, The Sims, Tetris) but eventually you need something more. Why do you think the Sims have had expansion after expansion after expansion? In today's A.D.D. world of YouTube and an MTV that has lost it's "M," people need constant, updated stimulation. Online multiplayer is one easy way to accomplish this.

Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and Call of Duty: World at War - the top three online games on 360. They will remain this way for the forseeable future. CoD 4's single player was great - the scripted action was intense, the characters were believable, and the sense of immersion in the battles was unparalleled. Yet, there is no reason to play it more than once. The experience will always be the same, no matter the difficulty level you select. But online, you can meet new people, and shoot new people. The experience will never be scripted; the experience will never be the same. Online multiplayer has helped WoW become a pop culture phenomenon, and one that's doesn't show any sign of letting up. A game can be fun, but without online multiplayer, there is no reason to keep getting better and better indefinitely. If you invested 200 hours into Final Fantasy XII to get yourself the sweetest, toughest party in RPG history, who will know? Who will care? I sunk 120 hours into Oblivion, and now it just sits on the shelf, collecting dust. At least I got all 1,250 achievement points!

A distant cousin to online multiplayer is the increasing availability of online leaderboards. Rock Band, Mirror's Edge, Mega Man 9, N+, basically every other XBLA game... by getting people to compete with each other to shave half a second off a speed run, single player games are given incredible long term vitality. Mega Man 9 came out months ago, and people are still competing for the top spot on the leaderboards. How many full-budget games can make that claim? Not as many as would like to, that's for sure.

Vital Stats

TheGameLlama

Level: 4
HP: 82/100
Experience to next level: 1,337 points

Strength: 40
Perception: 21 (needs glasses)
Endurance: 25
Charisma: 68
Intelligence: 88
Agility: 35
Luck: 50

Inventory:
- 360 games - 40 (3 unopened)
- PS2 games - over 100
- Wii games - 18
- Wii games being enjoyed currently - 0
- 6 plastic guitars
- 2 real guitars
- 4 gaming microphones
- Mountain Dew and Cheetohs (a.k.a. dinner)
- Dive-bombing cockatiel
- Geriatric cat of self-licking
- Ceramic lawn gnome
- $3 Salvation Army thrift store wall art
- 5-foot-tall cardboard Tiki man

Quest:
- Success - Find it. Slay a dragon, perhaps? They guard that, right? Next to the gold?

Secondary Quest:
- Go to work, bring home the bacon.
- Blog.
- Teach self web design.

Time out!

Time travel in games has always been a tricky subject, yet that hasn't stopped numerous companies from trying it out (see: Shadow of Destiny, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, Braid, Chrono Trigger, Ocarina of Time, Prince of Persia, and plenty of others). The big paradox with time travel, though, is that if you go back in the past and affect something, you present will not change. It's in the past. Chronologically, you've already changed the past, and your present should be exactly the same. It's destiny. It's complicated, what with all the parallel universes that "could" be created by dabbling in the affairs of history. Games tend to ignore the idea that you can't affect the future. I mean, come on, the whole idea of playing a game is reliant on the idea that you can affect the game's/world's outcome. But did you ever see/read The Time Machine? He made a time machine to save his girlfriend's life, went back in time and saved her, and then she just found a different way to die. If she hadn't died, the time machine would not have been created, so the mere existence of the time machine ensured that she would eventually have to die to necessitate its creation. It's circular and very, very fate-based.

If I was Bill Gates and had a time machine, I'd go back in time and make the PS3 have the Red Ring of Death instead of my precious 360. But the world would already be like that if he did indeed have a time machine... so maybe Shigeru Miyamoto is the one with the time machine? He did invent Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. Despite the Nintendo president's recent assertion, he may, in fact, actually be God. Or at least own a time machine.

The Interwebs

The Wii has one thing on the 360 and the PS3... a web browser. Why oh why is the family-friendly Wii allowed access to all the inappropriateness of the internet while far more advanced systems are left in the cold? A web browser was rumored to be included with the New Xbox Experience (NXE), but those rumors were proven false. As it stands now, the Wii, the system least-connected yet with the greatest market saturation, is the only system that can get on the web without having to be hacked. Oh, the PSP works too... but there's no keyboard for that! Maybe if they released a peripheral like the 360 controller/keyboard that comes with the messenger kit then it would discover some viability as a "connected" platform.

Eugh. There is no real good reason that the 360 and PS3 continue to refuse to release a web browser. Aren't game systems of the future trying to become more like multimedia extravaganzas? With Blu-Ray, HDDVD, media centers, CD burning, and movie downloading/watching, these systems do it all... except let you check your MySpace. Sure, there are viruses on the 'Net. But it will be at least a few days before a hacker creates a virus just to infect your Xbox save files and steal your GamerTag. The Mac has just recently been introduced to the wonderful world of computer viruses, and it's been around for 20 years. I'm sure your MGS4 snapshots will remain safe.

I understand that not many people will use their 360's or PS3's to surf the web, but wouldn't you at least like the option? When my PC went on the fritz, my Wii actually saw some use - it became my only connection to the wide outside web world. It's nice to have a back-up plan. When my 360 red-ringed, I still had a launch-day PS2 that continues to work just fine. Same concept. But with the Internet! See?

Cheaper... cheaper... not?

Games depreciate faster than cars. You drive a brand new car off the lot, and it loses half of its value. You open a game, and then it's just not worth much anymore. That's why you can get an open copy of Chrono Trigger on the SNES for $50-100, but a sealed one will net you over a grand, easy. I just got Far Cry 2 on 360 for $10 on a clearance at Target. I can go on Xbox Live and get N+ for $10. Both are quality games. But Far Cry 2 started at $60 then lost 83% of its retail value. N+ was released before Far Cry 2 and maintains its original $10 price tag, all whyile not offering the benefits of tangibility. You can't bring it over and show your friends. You can't read the instruction manual in the bathroom. You can't pass it down to your children someday like I hope to do with my NES and Atari 2600 games, proving to them just how far we've come and just how lucky they are to live in a world with more than 8 colors. Why are downloadable games able to maintain their value so much longer while not even being real? They are real in the fact that you pay for an experience, and you control it like a normal game, but you can't hold it. You don't get to rush home, break the seal, and take a huge whiff of that "new game smell" (you know the one). I've wanted to download Cloning Clyde since I first played the demo on my new 360 a few Christmases ago, but it was ten bucks. It's still ten bucks. Games that were available at retail at that time have prices that have completely plummeted. It's not fair. It makes it really hard to want to download games when full, expansive retail games are available for the same price.

Also, I seem to be blogging about game prices a lot. With the economy in shambles, it's easy to get hung up on how much things cost. I don't want to sacrifice quality, however. A $20 year-old 360 game is almost always better than $20 Wii shovelware. But downloadable titles... they're almost all the same price, regardless of quality or age. Money is harder to come by nowadays, and I could use that $10 on rent, or to eat, or to fix my car. Even in America, our expendable income isn't as expendable as it used to be.

Black Sunday

Best Buy had a $10 game sale today. The details were leaked on the web a few days ago, but it wasn't until the Sunday newspaper ads came out that the clueless public knew about it. There were about 100 games for $9.99, spanning Wii, PS3, 360, and DS, and I was most excited for Devil May Cry 4 and Infinite Undiscovery... two cool games that I just didn't want to pay full price for. By the time I showed up at Best Buy at about noon however, I was too late. Sold out. People that read the newspaper get up early! Sure, there were still plenty of copies of Quantum of Solace and Alone in the Dark and even the crappy Wii version of Samba de Amigo... but who cares? I almost settled for GTA: Chinatown Wars for $20 (what a steal!), but then I remembered that I don't ride buses or planes enough to get handheld games. And when I'm home, I can pop in GTA IV and be infinitely more entertained. So I bought some new shorts instead (not at Best Buy) and went home to play some of the stellar games I own yet haven't even opened. Americans are so wasteful and greedy! Sucks to be us, I guess.

They look the same! Weow.

New games on PS3 and 360 pretty much all have the same price: MSRP $59.99. The boxes are the same size, and they take up the same amount of shelf space. The covers have the same generic border, and the manuals all contain the same legal mumbo jumbo. But games are not all the same value. The latest Wii shovelware is obviously inferior to the latest Bethesda masterpiece. Yet they cost the same. Games are like books - eventually, they all just sit on the shelf, collecting dust. The money you spent on them is not spent on a product, but an experience. If it wasn't worth the price, then what was the point? You just wasted your time on an inferior product, and your money, and they time you spent to get the money. Game decisions are important. Should I buy this one or this one? You are stuck with your choice; you can't resart from your life's last checkpoint. Sure, you can always trade it in, or get a new one, but that time will never come back. Good luck making the right decision.

Good things come to those who wait

If you have Xbox Live Gold and you're not an automatically renewing member, sooner or later, it will expire. After that time, you will log into Xbox Live one day and it will demand of you, "Give us money or revert to (gasp!) Silver status!" Honestly, I didn't play many games online. Sure, I spent a good chunk of time climbing the Rock Band leaderboards, and there's plenty of SF IV achievements that you can only get by playing online, but it was never really a big deal to me. Growing up, I was one of those gamers that lived in his parents' basement, gobbling up the latest RPG's while effectively ignoring the fact that there was a big glorious world right outside full of girls and war, happiness and regret. Now that seemingly everyone is online, it's hard to keep myself from even not having the option. I started looking around for a new year-long Gold card in stores, because if you buy it in real life you get the 13th month free! I found it cheapest at Sam's Club - $43 for 13 months. Not too shabby, less than 4 bucks a month, even after tax.

Then today, I got an e-mail from Microsoft itself! "Come back, we miss you. Here, have a year of Gold for $40!" Sold. Now I can go back to ignoring my "friends" and playing online once every few months. At least my dashboard won't continuously remind me that I don't have Gold and am not hip enough to hang with their crew. Passive aggressive Microsoft jerks.

A limerick for a hassled day

There once was a game on 360
I thought that it might just be nifty
But it was a new MMO
So now it's a no-show
Guess I'll go play Final Fantasy...

360 = PS3

Back in the day, exclusives were what made the system. There weren't just a few first party titles separating on console from the next. The N64 had plenty of great games that you couldn't find anywhere else (maybe due to the cartridge format, maybe due to the fact that relatively few third-parties made stellar N64 games, with Rare being the most notable exception). Now, the Wii has the original games (mostly crap - games don't down-port well), while the big boy systems are virtually identical. PS3 has Blu-Ray, Killzone, Uncharted, Ratchet & Clank, and Metal Gear. Xbox 360 has Xbox Live, Achievements, Halo, Fable, and a lot of limited-time exclusives (Bioshock, Orange Box, GTA IV DLC, Rock Band). Besides this handful of games/features, the two systems are practically identical. Even the controllers are equal. (Although the innovation factor goes to Sony for popularizing the dual sticks with the first PlayStation back in the day... remember Ape Escape?)

When you can play the same games on either system, you have to buy a console for the one game you really really want to play, or you get the one your friends have so you can play online with them, or you pick the one that's cheaper (360), or you pick the one with Blu-Ray (PS3), or you pick the one with achievements. Achievements are in every 360 game and are probably the biggest reason multi-platform games sell better on Microsoft's system every single time. Try to ignore them, if you can. But who would have thought something as simple as a Ba-DOOP could help Microsoft pull far, far ahead in the console wars?

Go. Outside.

Halo 3 just broke the record for most wasted time. There have been over 1 billion online matches, equal to 64,000 years of life wasted online. Say a person today lives 100 years (not too hard to imagine, considering the rate science is progressing). That would be the entire lifetimes of 640 people. That's about six times the size of my graduating class. That's a lot of time that could have been spent better. Still, most of my graduating class is wasting their lives anyway (including me), so who am I to judge? Oh wait, I remember... I'm on the Internet. Judging is what we do here!

Red Ring of Death

Sometimes, after you play a 360 for a month, it breaks. Ok, almost all the time. But Microsoft is really good about it. You mail it in and they'll fix it for free, and you go without games for a month. Of course, there's still the Wii, collecting dust on the shelf. When you realize that you've already beaten all five good Wii games (you know - the ones Nintendo made), you get sad again. You go to GameStop and you buy an original Xbox for $50. You play KOTOR, Riddick, Stranger's Wrath, and Deus Ex 2. You realize that the Xbox wasn't just a bigger, less successful PS2. You discover that you won't be sad and gameless for a month. Yay.

Is this Microsoft's master plan? By not being completely backwards compatible, they encourage you to keep your original XXLbox even though it doubles as a TV stand. Also, pawn shops sell old Xbox games for $5. Kinda makes you never want to go to Best Buy and spend $200 on Rock Band again. You find out that Mirror's Edge is just a polished version of Breakdown and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is just Baldur's Gate with guns and a different setting. Oh well, there's probably originality out there somewhere. Or not. There used to be, but our NES's aren't even plugged in any more. Whatev.