61 Frames Per Second : playstation 3

Whatcha Playing: Earth Day Edition

Derrick Sanskrit — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

April 22nd, the day we all take off from work and gather at our local mosques and synagogues to solemnly pay respects to our mother Earth on the anniversary of her creation... or something. So do your part and take your game time today away from blasting zombies and chainsawing aliens in half, instead playing games all about helping mother Earth. Here are the four games that I'm playing for Earth Day:

Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol for Nintendo DS

Rather than cleaning up a house and helping with domestic troubles, this Chibi-Robo has been tasked with turning a barren field of sand into a lush flourishing public park. Like SimCity, you get to design your own world, laying paths and streams, rocks and hills, even benches, fountains, clock towers, statues, and mini-games to your liking. The nicer your park, the more visitors it gets each day. You also have to befriend local toys (including Molly Mapletree, seen above) to help you build up your park and battle smoglings who aim to pollute all the beautiful nature you've brought to the park, but the majority of gameplay is planting flowers. It's actually a lot more fun than it sounds, thanks to the charm and playfulness found in all Skip-developed Nintendo games.

Flower for Playstation 3

Nature is so relaxing for those first few levels, but the final stage really flaunts the nature vs. man-made-atrocities vibe. It's vindicating to smash your trail of flower petals straight through scaffolding and watch a child's swing-set color itself and start swinging in the wind. My only problem with this for Earth Day is that it romanticizes the wind more than the flowers. Playing Flower makes me want to go ride a bike, not water a tree. Still, at least it's prompting me to go outside.

Bonsai Barber for Nintendo Wii

This WiiWare title asks you to be kind to nature in a very different way, by playing the neighborhood barber in a village of anthropomorphic plants. Yes, it's a cute and quirky little topiary simulation. The adorable factor in this game is fairly high without ever becoming sugary sweet, and seeing your shrubbery clientele bristle with joy when you've completed their new 'dos might just make you want to go outside and trim those hedges.

Pixeljunk Eden for Sony Playstation 3

If the above games are a bit too casual and cutesy for you, though, here's a true hardcore platformer. While a bit more abstract, the main focus of the game is pollinating flowers. You essentially play as a spider who thinks it's a bee who has done some psychadelic drugs in the garden. Through the techno and bright colors, the message is clear: more flowers = more awesome.

Related articles:
Ecco the Dolphin: Was This Game Ever Considered Fun?
Comfort Through Gaming: Accomplishing Anything in SimEarth
Chiptune Friday: Spring Into Spring with Sonic

Vandal Hearts Resurrected, Has Terrible Character Art

John Constantine — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

You’d never suspect that, once upon a time, strategy RPGs were a rare and beautiful beast. Twelve years ago, you wouldn’t open a magazine and think, “Ah, yes, I see. This month there are thirteen different Game Boy games coming out from Namco, Square, Inis, Nippon Icchi, and Atlus that will allow me to train tiny warriors to walk across a colorful grid to slaughter evil beasts. Oh, look, there’s six more on Sony’s Playstation and nine more on Sega’s Saturn. Can’t wait to see next month’s haul. I’ll be moving across those grids and having fun until the sun goes out, by gum!” It just didn’t work like that. There were only a few of them. There was Tactic’s Ogre, which was made by Yasumi Matsuno. Then there was Final Fantasy Tactics which was, um, made by Yasumi Matsuno. But then there was Vandal Hearts, a dead ringer for Matsuno’s SRPGs that was, in fact, not made by Matsuno. It was one of Konami’s early Playstation/Saturn RPGs that, like its cousin Suikoden, could have easily been mistaken for a Super Nintendo game. It had its fans, but after one sequel it disappeared into videogame history. That’s why Konami’s announcement of a Xbox Live Arcade/Playstation Network prequel, Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment, is such a surprise. They showed off some of the game at their Gamer’s Night 2009 event and Vandal Hearts is looking pretty different ten years after its last installment. First, the game’s entirely polygonal now, with a much darker color palette than it had back in the day. Its character art also looks less like this:

And more like this:

Bleh.

Word is Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment is out on XBLA in August and PSN shortly thereafter. More snide commentary on the art style as we see it.

(Link: Siliconera)

Related links:

The 61FPS Review: Suikoden Tierkreis
PSOne on PSN: Somehow, it’s Suikoden
Beating the Dead Horse Who Has It Coming: Playstation Releases on PSN

The Art of Heavy Rain

John Constantine — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

We have absolutely no clue what Heavy Rain is going to be. Well, we have some idea, sure. We know that Quantic Dream’s unsettling detailed three-dimensional characters and environments recall the world on its most, dreary rain-soaked day, shades of grey and brown and green. We know that the character’s have facial expressions that dip so low into the Uncanny Valley that they stop being repellant and become entrancing. We know that the game will be played predominantly through quick time events. We know that, if Indigo Prophecy and Omikron are anything to go by, Heavy Rain’s going to be, if not good, one hell of an interesting game. Truth is, we know so little because Quantic Dream hasn’t shown the actual game to anyone besides a small handful of journalists and employees of Sony Computer Entertainment. They’ve shown two demos as examples of the technology and style that will make up Heavy Rain. That’s it. No actual game. Quantic Dream are mysterious Frenchmen, so they are.

Today, we can add some new pieces to the Heavy Rain puzzle. This concept art may not tell us a whole lot about the game’s story or what it will actually be like to play, but they speak volumes about its tone. This game is going to be unsettling.

The three color environments are spooky enough. They’re dark, lonely places. Even the hotel room is ominous, inviting at first until you spot the cracks in its ceiling. The black and white drawings are flat out disturbing in their depictions of violence. Weary policemen standing around a rainy murder scene aren’t uncommon in games. Mid-coital stabbings, and possible rapes, however, are.

Sony’s classified Heavy Rain as a “Psychological Mystery/Dark Thriller”. Seems that’s an apt description.

Much love to NeoGAFfer Cyberia for finding these.

Related links:

Feeling It: Social Versus Primitive Emotion in Videogames
In Defense of the QTE: Ninja Blade
Less Than Perfect: Jak and Daxter and The Flawed Character
Crossing the Uncanny Valley

Sony’s Xi: It’s Something to Do in PlayStation Home

Joe Keiser — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Because I am a relatively sane human being, I hadn’t noticed the strange new alternate reality game that has apparently been teased in PlayStation Home for the past few weeks. That would have required me to play Home, a nightmarish exercise that no good person should have to experience more than once.

But these aren’t normal circumstances. This is Xi, Home’s first alternate reality game, which officially launched yesterday. Never mind that the point of ARGs is to take place in the real world, while Xi looks like it will take place primarily in Home: I didn’t re-enter Sony’s hellscape of marketing to argue semantics. I went in to figure out if you should chance it too.

Everyone knows the strategy of the average Home player goes thusly:

1. Find a female
2. Turn on bubble machine
3. Dance like an idiot until female leaves/turns into fat man.

Xi ups the ante on these players: now Home’s sexiest alpha tester has disappeared! So if you’re ever going to find her, to gloriously Charleston with her, you’ll need to figure out whatever crazy, cryptic thing she was doing, as well as the mysteries that lie in Home’s super-secret Alpha Zones.

On day one of Xi these mysteries took players to The Hub, a new tiny map that turns Home into a rudimentary adventure game engine. New to the Home experience are cutscenes, context-sensitive voice-over, and hotspots triggered by specific emotes. There’s also items to gather and puzzles to solve, but this stuff is particularly simple—there’s no inventory to manage, and challenges have so far been of the “figure out the password and type it into the keypad” variety. So it’s still not very interactive, but it’s just day one. Less forgivable was that by the start of day two, The Hub had replaced some of its flavor content with tips on what to do if you experience game-crippling bugs. A video of sexy alpha tester was provided (perhaps as penance) but this is not a good sign.

But Xi is still something to do in Home, which is a thing Home has lacked since it launched. It also expands the scope of Home enough to imply that there might be more to do in the service in the future. But Xi still has to play out over the course of weeks. Whether or not it’s worth following along as a player will probably not be answered until the very end of the game, when Miss Attractive Alpha Tester turns into (or doesn’t, in which case this will all have been for naught) Sweaty Alpha Fatso. I’ll keep on it, and let you know when it’s worth diving in.

Related Links:

Revisiting the Curious Case of Playstation Home
Playstation Home: All Your Worst Fears Realized
Home: Your Virtual World Sucks

Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and the Second Chance

John Constantine — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

There’s just something about a re-release. Not a remake mind you, I mean a game being released a second time, possibly ported to another system, with a few ancillary new features thrown in to entice previous owners to cough up more cash. Sometimes they just get me angry. Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime on Wii with new controls? Why?! You can buy perfectly good versions of those games for half the price and play ‘em the way they were supposed to be played! Grumble mumble whyioughta. That’s just the idiot inside, the natural born fanboy hungry to defend an allegiance, doesn’t matter to what or who. He’s easy to ignore, but hard to suppress. Most of the time, I love a good re-release. Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime on Wii with new controls? Excellent! Those are great games that more people should play, glad they’re getting a new lease on life.

It is too much to ask that a game be better than it was the first time around. If a game is good enough to warrant a second try, the best you can hope for is that whatever was excellent in the original release is preserved, that anything added is un-intrusive icing on an already delicious cake. There are rare exceptions to this rule though. Devil May Cry 3’s Special Edition re-release on PS2 was unceremonious but significant. The original game, known for its sadistic difficulty, had been rebalanced in its entirety and you could now play the entire game as its villain. Persona 3: Fes, in its North American incarnation, added twenty hours to the original, made a supporting character into the lead at the climax, and rewrote the game’s ending. These don’t happen often, but they do happen.

Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden is a curious example, since it is both proof of and the exception to the rule. When it was re-released the first time as Ninja Gaiden: Black, it was improved upon greatly, featuring many of the same tweaks and additions that made Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition so, well, special. It’s second re-release, however, was less rosy. Ninja Gaiden Sigma on PS3 modernized the visuals and added a new playable character but it also demonstrated just how much the underlying game of Ninja Gaiden had aged. It preserved, certainly, but added nothing.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, Tecmo’s impending re-release of the Microsoft-published Ninja Gaiden 2, is branded as a remake. We all know better though, don’t we? My sincere hope is that Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is one of the rare improvements because, unlike its predecessor, Ninja Gaiden 2 wasn’t a very good game. Its camera couldn’t follow the action, the combat lacked Gaiden’s precision, and the environments were cramped and ugly. It felt, as I said in my review, unfinished. The Itagaki-less Team Ninja has a second shot at living up to the first game’s legacy. Good luck to them.

Related links:

Fix It: Alone in the Dark, Tiger Woods, and the Death of the Glitch
The 61FPS Review: Ninja Gaiden 2
My Top 10 of 2008 in No Particular Order: Persona 3: FES
Rock Star Designer Fallout: Team Ninja’s Post-Itagaki Future

Sony's Trailers Are Graphics Whores

Derrick Sanskrit — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

We get it, Sony, the Playstation 3 is the most powerful of the three current-gen home consoles. You don't have to flaunt it over and over to make yourself feel better for being in last place in sales this generation. You seem to be treating this as a beauty pageant, and you're certainly not in the running for Miss Congeniality with these repeated boasts.

I'm referring, of course, to the recent trend of all of the PS3's exclusive AAA titles featuring trailers of all in-game footage. This would be fine, in fact commendable, if not for the fact that they have to tell us, heavily implying that other trailers rely on CGI cutscenes (they mostly do). The latest offender is this one for Sucker Punch's Infamous. It may be all in-game footage, but I'm pretty sure all that excessive blur and reverse time were added in post-production (the slow-down may very well be part of the game):

Others on the docket include God of War III and Uncharted 2, both of which look like intro cutscenes, but we're guaranteed they are at least in-engine of not direct gameplay:

You know what would help convince us this was in-game footage? A HUD. Some sort of graphical elements to convey "this is what's happening". You know your games have these. At least the occassional your-character-got-shot-so-now-the-screen-flashes-white-and-desaturates that every action game does nowadays. Showing what could very understandbly be rendered footage and telling us it's all in-game isn't as convincing as it used to be (remember what happened with Killzone 2?). There's no shame in third place these days. Nintendo was third last generation and look at them now. I love you, Sony, just stop being so cocky.

Related articles:
Sony Might Just Hate You
Facepalm: PS3 Hard To Program For "On Purpose"
Infamous: Unsung Contender of 2009
Screen Test - Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Alternate Soundtrack: Noby Noby Boy vs. Daft Punk

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

As John previously mentioned, Spring is in the air here in New York. Coats and coffee have been replaced by t-shirts and...well... some people still have coffee. I've been rocking the cranberry juice myself. With all of this new life in the air, I find myself returning to my summer lover, Alternate Soundtrack, and where better to begin than with Bandai Namco's newest Springtime insta-classic, Noby Noby Boy.

As I'm sure you know, because you're all just that well-informed, oh wonderful 61fpsers, Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy is a game all about relaxed play. In fact, the game's title is a pun on the japanese words for "loose" and "stretch," much like how the original Katamari Damacy was a visual pun in that the two kanji were nearly identical, but I digress. While Katamari was notorious for its ridiculously catchy and enthralling soundtrack, Noby's is much more subdued. Introductory tuba and bells clear the path for sedate acoustic guitar plucking. That's about it. Thankfully, Noby uses just about every feature of the PS3's Cross Media Browser, including the ability to play music from the hard drive, allowing you to make your own soundtrack with incredible ease. I found that the game works wonderfully with Daft Punk's Discovery.

Quite a leap, huh? Plucked acoustic guitar to pungent synth blasts, but it works. Much like Takahashi's sophomore game (let's face it, We <3 Katamari doesn't count) represents a shift in his own career, focusing less on "goals" and "craft" and more on the fun of play and freedom of youth, Daft Punk's sophomore album attempted to be more open-minded and playful than their previous material, and was as such named for the childhood psychological phase of discovery. Philosophically, the two works share a great deal of common ground: occassional moments of poignancy and introspection amidst an overall air of liberation and excitement, the carefree juxtaposition of elements from unrelated fields (cavemen did not have helicopters, but that makes the game more fun!), a deeper sense of connection with its intended audience and reliance on their reaction to achieve the works' goals. Oh yeah, and robots.

But it's all too easy to ramble about the meaning behind anything done by Takahashi and/or Daft Punk, let's just go to the video for a demonstration:

Oh yeah, that's the stuff right there.

Be sure to check back here in the not-too-distant future for more Alternate Soundtracks, and, of course, you're welcome to share your favorites and your ideas in the comments. If you sell me on a particular idea, it just might be featured later on, and I'm always happy to give credit where credit is due.

Previously on Alternate Soundtrack:
Castlevania III vs. Bush
Ai Cho Aniki vs. Xiu Xiu
Orbital vs. The Notwist
Altered Beast vs. Natalie Portman's Shaved Head
Kirby's Adventure vs. girlsareshort

Trailer Review: Infamous

John Constantine — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:00:00 GMT

The media blackout on Suckerpunch’s Infamous is finally lifting. Some very positive, extensive previews of the game have started popping up. Edge’s recent cover story got me particularly pumped. This new trailer is light on play but heavy on ambiance. Still very cool.

Now that Killzone 2 is out, Sony really needs to turn their attention to pushing this game. More than that, they need to start emphasizing the game’s branching good/evil narrative and deeper combat. I keep reading about the meatier powers you get as you progress through the game and how much more interesting they are than the point-and-zap stuff they've shown in trailers, but why haven’t we seen any of it? Why is Sony so reticent to push a game that’s shipping in just three months? And why aren’t they taking pains to demonstrate how different it is from Prototype, a game that shares more than a few characteristics with Infamous? The media blackout may be ending, but its high time the hype train gets rolling.

Previous Trailer Reviews:

Watchmen: The End is Nigh
Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure
Dante’s Inferno is Looking Even More… Something
Machinarium
Mightier
Demon’s Souls
Final Fantasy XIII Looks Disturbingly Interesting
Priston Tale II: The 2nd Enigma
King of the Fighters XII
Edge
Dante's Inferno
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Resident Evil 5

Multi Multi Boy?

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

A new "daydream" appeared on the official Noby Noby Boy website over the weekend. It's presented as a sort of comic strip and labelled "#1", implying there might be more of these to come. That's not actually all that interesting, though. What's interesting is the contents of this "daydream", which I've made into the animated gif seen below. Might this be a hint at a Noby Noby Boy update in the near future?

Multiplayer Noby Noby Boy? I'd be lying if I said the concept didn't fascinate me. I watched as a friend played Noby Noby Boy (with minimal control instruction from me) at my place for an hour this weekend, breathlessly absorbed into the colorful playground, scanning up and down GIRL's sleek physique, and generally winding his way around and devouring everything he could. The freeform gameplay practically begs to be shared, and playing together is certainly more fun than taking turns. Plus, cumulative lengths of multiple palyers on one machine at the same time can only expedite GIRL's growth (while she reached the Moon a week earlier than developers predicted, if players were to continue stretching at the same rate without losing interest to other games, it would still take over a year of playing to reach Mars, the next "goal").

Both of my sisters have found their ways into moderate obsession with Katamari Damacy, especially after discovering the two-player versus mode. I know they'll want to try Noby Noby Boy when next they visit me, and having multi-player will only make the experience that much better. Yes, we'll all be able to cooperate and stretch together and generally play, but just like most players do in the single-player game, multi-player sessions can find challenge in self-imposed goals. Longest stretch in five minutes wins! First to eat the giant chocolate doughnut wins! First to wrap themselves around a cloud three times wins! First to eat their own butt wins!

Hey, that poses an interesting question... would one BOY be able to eat another BOY's butt? Only in a game like this can I ask that question seriously. I love it.

Related articles:
61FPS Review - Noby Noby Boy part 1 and part 2
Screen Test - Takahashi's Nobi Nobi Boy
Katamari Christmas - Rediscovering the Cosmos... Twice
Katamari in the Classroom part 1 and part 2

The 61FPS Review: Killzone 2

John Constantine — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

NOTE: The following review and the grade attached to it are based entirely on Killzone 2’s single player campaign. Stay tuned to 61FPS for a follow-up, post-release examination of the game’s considerable multiplayer component.

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

There may be hundreds of them, but first-person shooters can really be broken down into two categories. The first type of FPS is marked by a strong balance between play, narrative, difficulty and pacing. If that balance is good enough, the game warrants a full playthrough. The other type is competent and even entertaining, but it’s just one more game with a gun. For one reason or another, maybe the challenge isn’t engaging enough to keep me going, maybe it’s the story, this type loses my interest long before the credits roll. Guerilla Games’ Killzone 2 almost falls into the latter camp for me. Had it not been for the demands of this review, I never would have finished the game.

I’m glad I stuck it out though. Killzone 2 stumbles in its first half. Unwieldy controls, awkward combat dynamics and an unfocused, impersonal narrative are a lethal combination. But during the game’s back half, everything gels. It just takes some time to get there.

While most of it falls under the generic, game-with-a-gun banner, the aforementioned unwieldy controls set Killzone 2 apart from its peers. Like its predecessor, Killzone 2 is a cover-based FPS. Unlike every other post-Gears of War, cover-heavy shooter (first- or third-person), a single button press does not lock you in to a “safe” location. In Killzone 2, you have to hold down the Dualshock’s L2 trigger to take and remain under cover. This is piled on top of button presses for iron sights aiming and firing, leaning with the left analog stick and the occasional D-pad press for sniper scope zooms. I know that’s a lot of busy language, but it’s even harder on your hands. You’re left with a lot of busy fingers stretched into uncomfortable positions. I’ll admit, a big part of why the game’s first half felt so uneven to me had to do with my own failings. I had to spend time unlearning modern FPS controls to adapt to Killzone 2. The game’s unorthodox combat scenarios and aggressive AI only steepen the learning curve.

Consider Call of Duty or even Gears of War. In those, players find cover, fire across a “No Man’s Land” at the enemy and push ever-forward in the process. This is traditional war simulation, fighting for inches. The emphasis in Killzone 2 is instead placed on surviving within a dynamic battlefield. Your Helghast enemies are smart, always on the move, and terribly efficient even in the game’s default, “Normal” difficulty setting. They’ll chuck grenades, fire blind to keep your squad suppressed, support one another with intersecting arcs of fire; they move and act like trained soldiers. Fortunately, Killzone 2’s battlefields are massive. There are typically multiple routes to any destination, including one or two which lead to prime flanking opportunities and tackling these opportunities forces acclimating to the controls. If you’ve got an uncomfortable grip on the controller, then you’ve probably been hunkered down in one place for too long. Some fudging of the rules under Killzone 2’s hood unbalances what would be an otherwise absorbing challenge. Helghast soldiers tend to blind fire with pinpoint accuracy from behind cover. They also seem to have a sixth sense for knowing when a sniper rifle’s crosshairs have drawn a bead. Their ammo supplies are apparently limitless as well; there are no wars of attrition in this game. You simply choose a tactic, push forward and hope like hell that things work out. Even the weapon selection feels unbalanced in the early going. Killzone 2’s assault rifles are inaccurate and underpowered. Short bursts are the order of the day, but for medium- and long-range engagements, players will find that their pistol — with its unlimited ammo — is the best bet. Like everything else in the game, variety comes later on. Sniper rifles pop up along with shotguns, two variations of LMG, flamethrowers, grenade launchers and the boltgun, a shottie/’nade launcher crossbreed. Good times, for those who stick it out.

The incentives to stick it out beyond play, namely story and visual thrills, are mixed but rewarding. Narrative is often an afterthought in militaristic shooters, and Killzone impersonal tale certainly doesn’t do it any favors. Too much time is spent on the big picture of the ongoing conflict between the ISA (Space America) and the Helghast (Space Nazis), with little time spent on developing character beyond archetype. Dramatic incident can’t inject personality into a story when the incidents are so predictable. For half the game, players will be running through the standard battery of military missions: take out this turret or armor, capture this point, blow up this structure, etc. Graphically, Killzone 2 is stunning. Many of the indoor environments feel same-y and bland, but every outdoor battlefield in the game is a powerful spectacle. From the epic-scale backgrounds to the hordes of soldiers fighting the war around you, Killzone 2 lives up to its burden of proving the Playstation 3’s technical heft. Once again, the late game is considerably tighter in this regard, particularly a pitched battle on a moving train and a desperate last stand aboard a friendly cruiser stationed above Helghan.

It’s Killzone 2’s decidedly against-the-grain FPS experience that elevates it above the game-with-a-gun hordes. Considering the gobs of hype preceding it, I’m impressed by Guerilla’s willingness to separate itself from the pack with such demanding play. It’s rare to see game that favors repetition and constant spatial awareness over the measured, strategic play of its most popular competitors. But this is both the game’s most valuable asset and its greatest failing. In focusing so intently on making only certain aspects of Killzone unique — its strange control, its war play, its AI — Guerilla failed to make something solid throughout. Does it live up to the hype? How could it? Is it good? Absolutely.

Rating: B

Past Reviews:

Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

Up All Night: X-Blades and the D-List Preservation Society

John Constantine — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

“We need new pornos!” – “Spaghetti Western” by Primus

Les Claypool was right. We do need new pornos. We need new trashy entertainment that borders on the pornographic. It’s essential. No, seriously. Come back. For all my highfalutin talk about the creative potency of games, I relish those games that might be a little base. A little crass. Sometimes, those games are terrible. That’s a good thing.

I’ve been suffering a weird fascination with Gaijin Games’ X-Blades ever since it first popped up on Kotaku way back in November 2007, when it went by the name Oniblade. Its origins got me curious. There are hundreds of games out there that, even if you’re a rabid fanboy or a member of the press, you’ll never hear about. Korean MMOs, unlicensed Brazilian Genesis games, and, yes, weird action games from the Eastern Block; it’s impossible to follow everything. There’s just too much. So when something like X-Blades, some Russian paean to Japanese action games, pops its head far enough out of the ground you take notice. Especially when it’s coming out for consoles notorious for exorbitant development costs and marketing budgets.

What’s it like to actually play? It’s pretty terrible to be honest. X-Blades’ heritage as a PC game made on a budget shines through in long load times, complete with the sort of little spinning icon in the middle of the boot screen from the good ol’ days of Hexen. The camera sits right on protagonist Ayumi’s pantsless behind and it never bothers itself with following the action. When you move said camera to try and get a look at things that might be attacking you, it just stays wherever you leave it. The game controls well-enough, but it’s about as deep as your average SNES beat ‘em up. One button for every action and that’s that. X-Blades is more or less exactly what it looks like in that old trailer: a bootleg. A Trasnmorphers to your Transformers, if you will. And I love that it exists.

The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 don’t see a whole lot of games like X-Blades. That’s not to say that they don’t have their fair share of bad games. They have those in spades. What you don’t see, though, is D-List games. Games destined for the bargain bin, far from best-of and best-seller lists. They’re curios remembered by the scant few that played them. Not every game on a console needs to be budgeted with millions of dollars in the attempt to have the next platinum seller. This is the difference between, say, Sega’s Golden Axe: Beast Rider and X-Blades. Both are action games starring women built for thirteen-year-old wank fantasies, but one of these games cost far more to make than the other. Just because you’re making a game for the highest end technology doesn’t mean that it has to utilize all of it. The low-development cost D-List game is a time-honored tradition in the medium. Where would we be without D3’s Simple 2000 series? We’d be in a world without Zombies vs. Ambulances, that’s where.

61 Frames Per Second salutes you, X-Blades. We salute Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers. Hell, we salute Ninjabread Man on Wii. We salute the D-List. You may be terrible games, but we love you just the way you are. You are why Up All Night exists.

Related links:

Up All Night: Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe
Up All Night: Doritos Dash of Destruction
Up All Night: Blackthorne
Up All Night With Jaleco: Never the Best, But Never Forgotten
X-Blades and the Cultural Uncanny Valley

Where Is SSX?

John Constantine — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:30:00 GMT

Let me ask you a question, EA Canada: must it all be so gosh darned realistic these days? I’ve played Skate and Skate 2. Cool games. Cool games that helpfully reinforce, digitally, that my brain is not ready to take up skateboarding. The sheer amount of things I need to take into consideration whilst performing a simple trick in Skate terrifies me. If I tried to do this in real life, and I had to think about all the different things I was asking of my body, a plank of wood, some wheels, and gravity, I would experience complete ego disintegration right before rupturing my testicles on a railing in some public park. Why oh why can’t you take me back to the good ol’ days of extreme-with-a-capital-TREME sports, EA Canada. Why can we not head back to the mountain for some good times with a new SSX, the awesomest fake snowboarding game of all time?

SSX 4 showed up on a few release lists back at the end of 2006, right around the time that the Xbox 360 was ending its first year and just before the release of the Playstation 3. These were the systems said to be home for such a wonderful sequel. Alas, that game was never ever officially announced and has failed to materialize since. A sort of remix of SSX 3, SSX: Blur, came out for Wii in March 2007 and it remains the single most frustrating game I have played in my entire life. They added some new cel-shaded graphics and motion controls that give a shockingly real simulation of a crippled nervous system. You move following onscreen prompts and then NOTHING HAPPENS. Playing it is demoralizing and makes you hate things. Even your pets. After trying to play SSX: Blur for an hour, I ended up yelling at my cat and blaming her for the hantavirus.

DJ Atomika, the chipper voice of SSX Radio throughout the game, re-emerged in Criterion’s Burnout Paradise and hinted at some fresh snow on the mountain. Please don’t lie to me, Atomika. My heart couldn’t take it. I long for sweet, sweet fake snowboarding on 360 and PS3. Grant me this simple desire.

(Much love to NeoGAFfer Wario 64 for asking this very same question. Props.)

Where Is?

The PSP
Hydrophobia
Prototype
Shuichi Sakurazaki, Creator of Ninja Gaiden
Yasunori Mitsuda

Rite of Spring: Flower and What’s Lacking in the Romantic Games Movement

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:00:00 GMT

Last week was full of everything you want out of a vacation: a change of setting from urban sprawl to glorious mountain range, rancid air exchanged for clean winter wind, great food, better scotch, and the best company. Of course, there was also a smorgasbord of great portable games. Retro Game Challenge, Atlus’ under-the-radar curiosity My World, My Way, and Kirby Super Star Ultra made for marvelous palette cleansers, washing away the last traces of Epic Holiday Gaming morsels still stuck between my gaming teeth. It was restful, brief, and rejuvenating. When I returned, I knew that it was going to be time for 2009 hardcore gaming to go into high gear what with Street Fighter IV and a Killzone 2 demo waiting, but the first thing I had to spend some time with was Flower. As soon as it had finished installing, well, it felt like my vacation had just gotten an extension.

The game is exhilarating. Having grown up in rural upstate New York, the contrast of Flower’s city-bound preludes and its soaring bucolic playgrounds pulls at very specific heartstrings in me. The game is brief but I’m no less taken with it. Jenova Chen and ThatGameCompany are damn good at eliciting just this sort of emotional response with their games. Their debut Cloud was rich with the same bittersweet catharsis that characterizes Flower. Both are something like the game equivalent of a symphonic poem, their fluid flight-based gameplay replacing music as the visceral informant of a visual/audio narrative. They’re games unified in subject too; Cloud and Flower chronicle escapes to a pure, natural world from metropolitan confinement. They are concerned with beauty and simplicity.

I wouldn’t say that Chen and TGC started it, but they’re certainly poster children for what appears to be a burgeoning romantic movement in game design. As much as Jon Blow’s Braid was a commentary on play conventions, it was also a deliberately lyrical game. Trading in pastoral visuals and acoustics to inform its tale of romantic loss and redemption, it shares more than a little with Flower and Cloud. I’m wondering, though, why these new romantics have yet to explore more emotionally troubling and challenging themes. Gamers and critics are constantly citing “dark” themes as a mark of credibility in mainstream game design, but the darkness they refer to is usually tied up in angst driven narrative and violence. Where are the games that are legitimately dark, games that don’t just gain their emotional thrust from beauty or human ugliness? Braid’s ambiguous conclusion and TGC’s exploration of predatory natural selection, Flow, flirt with ugliness and dissonance but never make them their focus. (Flow’s poetic prescript “…life could be simple…” limits the game’s reach from the start.) But why can’t the lyrical style and play of these games be applied to subject matter like Procedural Arts’ Façade, a game that places you directly into a married couple’s complete relationship breakdown?

I’m excited by these creator’s efforts and, yes, moved by them. I was caught up in Flower from the start. But I am anxious and thirsty for the romantic games’ movement to find its Stravinsky, that artist who asks me to look at and hear and play something I’d rather not to make their work that much more powerful.

Related links:

Flower - A Zen de Blob?
Indie Dev Moment: Dyson
Far Out, Man
Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming

Ghostbusters: There Are No Words For How Good Bustin' Makes Me Feel

John Constantine — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

I haven’t seen shit that will turn you white. The shit I have seen, namely a fresh build of Ghostbusters: The Video Game for Xbox 360 and PS3, will make you green. With slime. And envy.

Last summer, a preview build featuring a portion of the widely seen New York Public Library level made the gaming press rounds. The unfinished code appeared out of thin air, its sender listed only as “Evil PR Monkey”. The demo was raw. Very raw. But not so raw as to diminish Ghostbusters’s promise. There were Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler and Winston Zeddmore (noVenkman in the demo), fully voiced by Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. Aykroyd and Ramis’ script, even just that tiny chunk, was characterized by the same wit that made the original films such classics. Then a few weeks later, Activision announced that, following their merger with Vivendi, they would not be hanging onto the Ghostbusters license.

News on the game since, even following Atari’s confirmation that they would be publishing Ghostbusters in June 2009, has been disturbingly light. No more of the actual game has been shown since that messy preview code. Until last week. While I didn’t actually get to go hands-on with it, I did get an eyes-on playthrough of the remainder of that library level. And now… well… I ain’t afraid of no Ghostbusters.

The presentation — third-person perspective, story, voice actor/likeness participation, core ghost-wranglin’ mechanics — are unchanged. What’s fresh is a new sprint button and a multi-directional quick dodge. Both significantly tighten up the gameplay. If you haven’t gotten a look at any video of play, there are two types of spooks and specters to combat.

First are capturable Ghosts, boss and mini-boss-style baddies. You wear them down with the Proton Beam — Or another weapon. More on those in a sec. — and then snare them in a Capture Beam. The captured ghost has to be slammed into walls until it is weak enough to be pulled into a trap. Then there are the more common Entities, supernatural conglomerations of physical objects, such as books, papers, lamps, and the like. These spirits can be flat-out destroyed (or is that neutronized?). They typically have shields that must be stripped away before they can be taken down. Still others manifest as hulking beasts; these must be worn down with sustained attacks until their head – glowing lamps, during the library demo – can be ripped away with the Capture Beam.

That’s the talent, so what about the tools? Weapons stem from the Proton Pack which, along with a dangling PKE Meter, serves as your HUD. The pack itself changes appearance depending on the beam type in use, and each beam now features primary and alternate modes of fire. The vanilla Proton beam is supplemented by the Boson Dart, a concentrated burst shot which works like a rocket launcher. The newly introduced Dark Matter Beam fires either a damaging shotgun-like spread or a sustained stasis beam which has the effect of slowing down targeted enemies. There’s also a Slime Blower, which is used to clear away dark, red-tinged slime. No “Higher and Higher” to accompany it though. Throughout the game, you can upgrade the ‘busters’ equipment with money earned from capturing ghosts and collateral damage. The bill for the latter goes to one Walter Peck, by the way. It’s true what you’ve heard about his genitalia. Just saying. The demo ends with a knockdown boss fight against a familiar supernatural librarian. Cornered in a cavernous space tucked away in a distant corner of the NYPL’s sub-basements, the librarian ghost mounts a final offensive from behind her shield of floating books and candelabras. After finishing her off, the team moves to investigate a trans-dimensional portal which has appeared in the center of the room. The walls peel away to reveal a hellish landscape and… the pause menu pops up. Demo over. A good portion of the game will send the Ghostbusters hurtling into these Otherworlds, though the “what” and the “why” of them remain a mystery for now.

It’s clear that Atari is giving Ghostbusters: The Video Game the triple-A attention it deserves. The publisher switch has resulted in remastered FMVs, newly written and recorded lines of dialogue, additional mo-cap work, and an apparent tightening of the gameplay. Plus, even though it wasn’t shown, I was told off-duty Ghostbusters will be able to explore the team’s iconic firehouse. No concrete details were shared, but I was promised that “rewards” await those who take the time to explore. As long as we can use the pole, all is good. The mid-June release date is creeping ever-closer, and I have to it’s very exciting to see this polish applied to Ray, Egon, Peter, Winston and Nameless New Guy’s (i.e. You) HD-console adventure.

Related links:

NYCC 2009 - Ghostbusters Wii
Screen Test: Ghostbusters
Films to Games: Ghostbusters Really is Ghostbusters 3!
Ghostbusters. Peter Venkman. Walter Peck. The World is Just.

NYCC 2009 - DC Universe Online

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Editor's note: I'm still pretty darn worn out from the frenetic pace of New York Comic-Con this past weekend. My entire body hurts. Expect a good amount of post-con reporting over the next few days as I sift through my notes, photos, and edit together a few videos which will hopefully be fairly rad. For now, though, let's just start off with something easy, the first massively multiplayer online game to officially license characters and scenarios from one of the biggest pop-culture publishers in the world...oh lord, what am I doing?

One of the biggest crowd-pleaser games at New York Comic-Con was Sony Online Entertainment's DC Universe Online. The massively multiplayer online action title was set up for anyone to play using either keyboard and mouse or or the Playstation DualShock3 and there was a panel discussion about the game featuring several members of Sony's design team along with human-style-guide Jim Lee and story and scenario writers Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman. Those names should sound very familiar to you if you're read any superhero comics in the past twenty years or so.

That they referred to it as an MMO action game rather than an MMO RPG is very telling in what we saw from the presentation and our play sessions. It plays just like all the other open-world action brawlers, only you're playing with other people to either cooperate or compete in objectives which are continuously sent to you from the game's servers (cleverly disguised in Hero mode as Oracle from Batman and Justice League). Run, jump, smash, repeat, no arcane spell casting. Super powers and otherwise special skills are relegated to a line of icons at the bottom of the HUD and activated (on the DualShock) by holding down the left or right trigger and pressing the button that corresponded with the power you wanted to use - circle, square, triangle or X. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but no more so than any other 3D action game.

A couple of interesting points raised during the Q&A session:

Right now, the developers are able to play PS3 co-op and versus with PC on the same network but are unsure if this will be possible in the final retail copy. They'd love it if everyone could play together. "It would be better if everyone just had a PS3."

The disc release will only be "the first part" of the game as there will be seasonal downloadable updates with new stories and objectives that should keep the game up to date with the comics. Apparently this game is a new full-time job for Jim, Geoff and Marv.

Regarding the customization options on building your own heroes/villains, one audience member asked "Am I gonna see billions of other ice guys who look just like me?" This question was met with a resounding "No!"

When asked how failure/death would be handled and if, like in other MMOs, players would be need to worry about corpse runs, Jim Lee joked "You'll have to wait a year so we can relaunch you." Seriously, though, heroes and villains don't die in DCUO, they just get "knocked out." After a few seconds you will be given the option to get back up, just with slightly reduced health and energy.

All of the environments will be unique and instantly discernible (no confusing Gotham City with STAR Labs).

Pedestrians are affected by your character's Threat level. Throwing a bus will upset them, regardless of whether you're a villain or hero, but just walking down the street, villains have a higher Threat level. In the slums, though, villains fit in just fine and heroes stick out. No need to worry about protecting civilians from collateral damage as the NPCs of DCUO "will be amazingly agile."

There's still a good amount of development time to go on this game, and Sony's not rushing it out to meet a deadline. That said, the demo we played was definitely a good start. It played very similar to another Con crowd pleaser, Activision's Prototype, only without all the zombies and mass destruction. The real competition, of course, if the likes of Champions Online, who are at the distinct disadvantage of not having Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and company in their game. No subscription plan has been decided on yet, or even whether there will be one on the PS3 version, but this may just wind up being the first MMO that I will play until it ruins my life. The controls are very action-gamer-friendly and the prospect of teaming up with friends as our own heroes or villains within the DC Universe is a tantalizing one indeed.

Related articles:
DC Universe and the Console MMO Conundrum
At Least Batman: Arkham Asylum's Story Will Be Good
Batman Can't Even Land A Punch On Superman In A Video Game
MMO Predicts Life In 10 Years

The Five Characters You Won’t See in Street Fighter IV

John Constantine — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Written by Cyriaque Lamar

On February 17th, a numerical Street Fighter sequel will come out in America for the first time in ten years. In an act of unprecedented video game democracy, the good folks at Capcom allowed fans to vote for the characters that would appear in the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions. Their shortlist included such perennial favorites as the panties-flashing Sakura and the leotard-clad M16 agent Cammy. As in the 2008 presidential election, sex appeal commanded the polls.

But what about those fighters who didn’t make the cut? Join me as I take a look at Street Fighter’s lesser-known pugilists and postulate why these lovable losers didn’t earn a silky-smooth 3D sheen.

Rolento

Who?
Rolento debuted as a boss in the 1989 arcade beat-em-up Final Fight. As a boss character, he was entitled to certain amenities players were not, such as a baton, incendiaries, and a subscription to the Ginsu-Of-The-Month Club. When he turned up in 1996’s Street Fighter Alpha 2, he returned with all of his thwacking, exploding, and stabbing habits intact.

Why He Should Have Been in SFIV
Rolento is an absolute hoot to play. For a game full of high-flying karate-men, it’s surprising that the most agile character is the guy with grenades strapped to his pectorals. Rolento’s moves include a wide array of flips, rolls, and the ability to use his baton as a pogo stick. Playing him is like playing a paramilitary spider monkey. Furthermore, his backstory is hilariously bad even by Street Fighter standards. As he puts it, Rolento aims to create a militaristic new world order free of “panty-waist politicking”.

Revolutionary rhetoric.

Why He Isn’t
We suspect his absence has something to do with all those unfair knives, grenades, and super moves involving trip wires and impaling opponents with crane hooks. The moment you bring a goddamn crane to fisticuffs is the moment you’ve left the realm of “street fighting” and gone headlong into “demolition derby” territory.

Sodom

Who?
Another expatriate from Final Fight, Sodom was the boss of the underground wrestling match in Level 2. Despite his menacing shogun attire and dual katanas, Sodom was easily thwarted if the player stood directly below him. He later appeared in 1995’s Street Fighter Alpha. Sodom proved to be a more formidable foe in this game, as players could only walk left and right.

Why He Should Have Been in SFIV
He’s the most meta character in the entire Street Fighter mythos. A white guy with an overweening respect for Japanese culture, Sodom fancies himself a modern samurai. He flaunts fans and writes in pidgin Kanji. Capcom seem to be making fun of American fans’ geekier proclivities. Hey gaijin, see this joker? He’s you. Go do some push-ups with Guile.

Dude, leave E. Honda alone. He’s above your nonsense.

Why He Isn’t
That name is best left in the past, don’t you think?

Oro

Who?
Oro is a Street Fighter III original. A hundred-plus-year-old hermit from the Amazon rain forest, Oro spent decades in solitude until he grew bored and entered the third World Warrior Tournament. Hey, after Rolento’s rationale, that’s as fine an excuse as any.

Why He Should Have Been in SFIV
Along with collecting AARP benefits out the ying-yang, Oro handicaps himself by tying his left arm to his chest. And he’s not fighting one-handed for laughs — Oro’s so tough that he could accidentally kill his opponent if he unloosed his other fist. He can also take a nap mid-fight, which is one of the best flip-offs in fighting game history.

Why He Isn’t
Although there’s nothing like schooling your opponent with a one-armed, half-comatose decagenarian, playing against Oro is a viscerally unsettling experience. Many of Oro’s moves are grapples, so you’ll spend most of the match getting groped by a greasy geriatric wearing nothing but a loincloth. Plus, he’s from Street Fighter III, and clearly SFIV producer Yoshinori Ono hates that game’s characters. Even if they’re awesome.

Twelve

Who?
Twelve is Necro’s nemesis in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. Necro’s special moves unabashedly mimick Blanka’s electricity and Dhalsim’s stretching. His antagonist needed even more novelty powers to be a formidable foe. So, naturally, he’s a crazy advanced version of Necro made by the Illuminati.

Why He Should Have Been in SFIV
Twelve was a Whitman’s Sampler of ridiculous gimmicks. Invisibility? Check. Flight? Check. Ability to become a doppelganger of your foe? Check. Ability to transform into a fighter jet? Double check. It’s like Capcom said, “The arcade industry’s in a freefall and this might be the last Street Fighter game we ever make. Fuck it, let’s pour all of the worst excesses of fighting games into one character and hit the karaoke bar.”

Why He Isn’t
For all his shtick, Twelve is perhaps the least playable character in the SF franchise. He can turn invisible, but the player has no idea where he is onscreen. He can turn his hands into pickaxes, but he’ll do almost no damage. Capcom balanced out Twelve’s bells and whistles by making him terrible. Street Fighter III rule also applies.

T. Hawk

Who?
He’s from Super Street Fighter II and possibly the worst caricature of Native Americans since Iron Eyes Cody. Hell, Capcom Japan wanted to name him “Geronimo” until Capcom USA intervened.

Why He Should Have Been in SFIV
T. Hawk is the only character on our list to make Capcom’s shortlist. So in theory, had anyone actually voted for him, he should have been in Street Fighter IV.

Why He Isn’t
Let’s ignore T. Hawk’s F-Troop routine for a moment to talk about his gameplay. In short, he combined Zangief’s complicated special moves, Sagat’s unwieldiness, and a sleeveless Canadian tuxedo. I have terrible childhood memories of selecting T. Hawk on our Super Nintendo versions of SSFII, only to have 5’5” Cammy knock the wind out of his longhouse.

Memories like that stick with you forever, so let’s hope SFIV’s new challengers don’t disappoint – check back in 10 years to see if we’re griping about “that goddamn Crimson Viper” by the time Street Fighter V hits the Xbox 1080, Zii, and Atari Jaguar 2.

Related links:

Street Fighter IV's Dress Rehearsal
Video Game-Grade Pretension: Not For Street Fighter?
Play Street Fighter in Youtube
Finally: Playing Street Fighter IV and Super Street Fighter II HD Remix With Seth Killian

Trailer Review: Demon’s Souls

John Constantine — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

From Software, you guys got some weird in your blood. Who in the hell makes console exclusives these days? Not only that, who in the hell makes exclusives for every console on the market? And who in the hell makes console exclusives that are spiritual successors to cult hits that were console exclusives in the previous generation? You guys, whew, you guys are nutty. You’re nutty nut bars and I love it.

It’s a big month for From Software. Just last week in Japan, they released Ninja Blade on Xbox 360. Ninja Blade is a third-person action game that is a modernization, in both tone and technology, of their Xbox-only franchise Otogi. Today, they released Demon’s Souls in the land of the rising sun. Demon’s Souls is the Playstation 3 version of From’s PS2 oddity King’s Field, a series of distinctly western RPGs full of the dungeon crawling and character customization Elder Scrolls fans go ga-ga over.

As you can see from this trailer, Demon’s Souls is a real odd duck.

The presentation is polished but by no means mindblowing and the same can be said of its art direction. It really doesn’t look like a product of the east or west, its RPG-tropes coming across as just… neutral. I have no idea what to make of it. There’s still no word on whether or not this one’s coming to the States. The Asia version of the game, though, has both full English voice acting and all English menus. I don’t know about y’all, but this one’s so strange I might just have to import it.

Previous Trailer Reviews:

Final Fantasy XIII Looks Disturbingly Interesting
Priston Tale II: The 2nd Enigma
King of the Fighters XII
Edge
Dante's Inferno
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Resident Evil 5

Flower - A Zen de Blob?

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:59:00 GMT

thatgamecompany's long-awaited "Zen game" Flower is finally being released on the Playstation Network next week, having been originally teased way back at the Tokyo Game Show in 2007. So far the game has caused all who've witnessed it to find themselves unable to accurately describe what the "game" is, only that it is captivating.

VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi was recently treated to a demonstration by Creative Director Jenova Chen. While it is still nowhere near as telling as an actual hands-on experience with the game, it is most definitely insightful.

Controlling the wind via Sixaxis motion control, carry colorful flower petals through the dreary grey flowers and grass to energize the world with color, panning out for cutscenes of landmark colorings. This looks decidedly similar to the story mode of de Blob (my #1 favorite game of 2008) with the notable exception of being incredibly relaxed. There don't appear to be any enemies or noteworthy obstacles, just the garden around you. We've heard that the "levels" of Flower are each the dreams of potted flowers on a window sill and that other dreams include bringing wind to a valley and bringing light to a darkened city. It appears from this demonstration that the little success cutscenes will feel very liberating and joyous for the player, an excellent way to form an emotional connection in such a "casual" game. (You may notice I'm using quotation marks a good deal here. That's because the jury is still out regarding Flower feeling like a "game") Very interesting here is Jenova's explanation that the player will still be in control even during the cutscenes so that they never lose that sense of immersion, even when the camera pulls away, similar to how the player could still control the camera during cutscenes in Shadow of the Colossus.

Flower looks to be the game of the season that shows the most of what the Playstation 3 can do. Tens of thousands of blades of grass moving independently, pushed and pulled by the player in lush high-definition. If you have a Playstation 3 and ten dollars, you should probably get Flower when it hits the PSN Store next week. I know I will.

Related articles:

Far Out, Man
When Video Games Make Us Sniffle
Sony Gives Thanks Via Charming PSN Deals

Cross-Atlantic Buzz!

John Constantine — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

At Least Batman: Arkham Asylum's Story Will Be Good

John Constantine — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:30:00 GMT

It’s been pretty disheartening to see so many people losing their game industry jobs these past few months. First and foremost, it’s terrible to see thousands of talented people out of work. It’s also tragic to see so many games get cancelled. I’m still upset that Free Radical’s Star Wars Battlefront 3 will never come out. That game looked unbelievable. That’s not always the case with cancelled games though. For example, I think the world’s a better place now that Pandemic’s The Dark Knight tie-in won’t clog up shelves across the land. From the sounds of it, that game was troubled with a capital OUBLED. It’s cancellation also means that Rocksteady Games’ original Batman game, Arkham Asylum, will have a much better chance of getting noticed by the millions upon millions of people obsessed with Bruce Wayne and Joker.

This new trailer doesn’t have any play in it, so it’s pretty useless for giving an impression of Arkham Asylum as a game. What it does have is plenty of story. Competently written and awesomely voiced story. Not to be too gigantic a geek, but that’s Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy you’re hearing! The Joker and Batman of Paul Dini’s Batman: The Animated Series! Speaking of Mr. Dini, he’s the man in charge of writing Arkham Asylum. This game is going to be like a giant playable episode of that show, albeit an episode with graphic violence suited to the drippy, bumpy textures of a game built on Unreal Engine 3. Sounds like a winning combination to me.

Rocksteady Games only has one other title under their belt, a PS2 first-person shooter called Urban Chaos: Riot Response. Anyone out there ever play it? Should we trust these guys to make an awesome Batman game?

Related links:

Batman Can't Even Land a Punch on Superman in a Video Game
A Silver Lining to the Dark Knight
Of Children and Lego Games: A Valid Concern

Bayonetta: Not As Gratuitous As You Think

John Constantine — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Nah, I’m playing. Bayonetta is totally as gratuitous as you think. Sega came to NYC today and they brought Platinum Games’ Xbox 360/PS3 debut with them. I wasn’t allowed to get my hands on the controller, only a guided playthrough of the game’s first stage, but that was enough to say that Bayonetta’s every bit as over the top as its initial trailer made it out to be. It also looks like a hell of a good time.

Games are more than their graphics, I know, but it’s impossible to discuss Bayonetta without mentioning its presentation first. Without question, it is one of the most visually impressive games of the last five years. The game periodically goes into brief, playable flashbacks showcasing a war that left the titular character comatose for decades. One of these sequences is frames around a boss fight against a towering, obese dragon with two heads and a human face protruding from its swollen belly. The scene is a riot of color. Every inch of the crumbling environment is a meticulously detailed and animated. Even though the game’s months away from its fall 2009 release, Platinum Games’ new engine runs all the action without a hitch and the camera, a notorious trouble-maker in 3D action games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden, follows the action without obscuring it.

The best part of the demo was that it was all play, no cutscenes, and the best way to describe the action is Devil May Cry-on-speed. It looks like Kamiya’s spent all his time since the original DMC trying to come up with new ways to make combo-driven melee-and-gun combat even more of a spectacle. In addition to the kicks, punches, and four-limbed-rapid-fire shooting, Bayonetta can pick up any weapon dropped by an enemy, and use unique attacks. It sounds pedestrian when you put it that way. It’s a different story when you pick up a trumpet and start blowing up angels with music or picking up staffs and pole dancing bad guys to death. Like I said, Bayonetta is as gratuitous as it seems. As reported, the titular character's chief weapon is her hair, and since her attire is also happens to be her hair, progressive attacks reveal more and more skin. The fighting and special one-hit kills — fill a combo meter, press a button, kick an enemy into a spectral iron maiden — are so fast, though, that you barely notice that she’s de-robed. (Let me stress: the combat is fast, faster than any other 3D action game I've seen.) The same can’t be said for the finishing moves in boss fights, since Bayonetta turns her entire outfit into an enormous hair-dragon while the camera busies itself with her body.

So it looks great and the play seems tight, but the jury’s still out on whether or not Bayonetta is a good game. Without actually playing the game, it’s impossible to say whether or not the combat is as satisfying and nuanced as Devil May Cry 3’s. (It’s even harder to make any judgments since the demo had infinite life and combo meter turned on.) I also glimpsed a stray non-action part of the level that had Bayonetta running around a city populated with ghostly NPCs. Apparently the game takes place on a dimension overlaying reality and these ghosts are how regular old people appear from there. Unfortunately I wasn’t clued in on whether or not these adventure portions had any significant presence in the game. Looks like I’m just going to have to wait ten months to find out if Bayonetta’s a great game or merely a pretty one.

Related links:

Face-Off: Bayonetta and the Merits of Exploitation
Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum
Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games

Survival of the Knittest: How To Make Better LittleBigPlanet Challenges

Derrick Sanskrit — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet delivered on its promise of providing players with all the tools they would need to design their own dream stages. Unfortunately, we then all learned that building a satisfying game level is pretty damn hard. Thankfully, a few of the cool kids from Media Molecule's design team put together this very helpful tips video, reviewing everything you need to make your survival challenges successful as compelling game experiences. They even show a few examples of excellent user-generated survival challenges to show what those people are doing right:

So, lots more switches, basically.

That reminds me, I really need to finish that stage I started building with my sister over the holidays. I left off swinging from the biplane onto a rocketing unicorn... but how am I going to get li'l sackboy over to those shooting star cars before the dragon breathes fire all over the cloud platforms?

Related articles:
Mega Man 9: Powered Up and LittleBigGalaxyMan
The 61FPS Review: Little Big Planet - Part 1 & Part 2
If Sales Numbers Mattered, LittleBigPlanet's Commercial Would Be Appealing
Sony Might Just Hate You

Curveball: Hands-On With Wanted: Weapons of Fate

Joe Keiser — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

When I first saw the trailer for the film Wanted, my brain immediately said, “Wow, a Joe ten years younger than current Joe would have thought this was the best movie ever made.” Current Joe still hasn’t seen the movie, but briefly getting my hands on Wanted: Weapons of Fate, the feeling was distinctly similar—that a younger version of myself would be completely blown away by this specific vision of adolescent bombast. I’m pretty sure I’m complimenting my time with the game when I say that.

The version of myself that’s writing this is, of course, more skeptical. Yet there’s no denying that Weapons of Fate is taking the tropes of the movie and translating them thoughtfully into meaningful gameplay. The most obvious example of this is the game’s bullet-curving mechanic—it’s an interesting system that forces the player to not just think in terms of straight lines during gunfights, it’s useful and necessary in battle, and rewards smart usage and connecting shots with not draining the meter that lets you curve bullets.

Then there’s the cover-chaining system, which turns grasping for cover into a fast dance from hidden vantage to hidden vantage, often ending in a violent and surprising assassination of the enemy. There are also interactive environment elements that change the nature of the battlefield in dramatic ways. While I can’t say whether or not these elements combine into a true vision of Wanted, they do combine and there is a vision. It certainly compares favorably to The Bourne Supremacy, a game that is thematically similar and that I played about the same amount of.

When this comes out, cynics might say that bullet curving is just a glorified hand grenade system, or that Wanted as a property is cut whole cloth from videogame tropes anyway, or that the game shears too closely to Gears of War. But it seems to me that Wanted, as a cross-media franchise, is not for cynics. Wanted is for people who scream “SHIT YEAH!” when a guy in a duster curves a bullet into another bullet and the resulting explosion sends a million bits of bullet shrapnel into some guy’s face (yeah, you can do that in the game). That audience could well be most people, in which case Wanted looks like it’s shaping up.

Note: This hands-on preview was conducted at an event hosted and with conditions controlled by the publisher.

Related Links:

Gone Vertical: Hands-on Bionic Commando
Trailer Review: Wanted
Movie to Game to Movie: Goldeneye

Mega Man 9: Powered Up and LittleBigGalaxyMan

John Constantine — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Every now and again, I curse the internet and its countless paths. It’s easy to get lost in here. it’s easy to lost literal hours of your life on completely meaningless, mindless drivel. How many times have you, dear reader, fallen into a YouTube spiral, clicking related video after related video until the moving images no longer hold meaning? Every URL is perilous I tell you. Then I come to my senses and remember the all important truth about the 21st century: the internet is awesome. As is meaningless, drivel, and the access we have to it.

Despite my recent renaissance with the game, I probably wouldn’t have found out about this brave soul’s Mega Man: Powered Up adventures if it wasn't for aimless internet wandering. They've made a close-to-perfect recreation of Galaxy Man’s stage from Mega Man 9. Behold:

It does, however, show the limitations of Mega Man: Powered Up’s versatility as a device for recreating classic Mega Man. Mega Man 1’s levels are faithfully preserved in the core Powered Up game but it’s impossible to replicate the wide-open rooms in Galaxy Man’s stage without turning them into multiple areas. All the same, very cool.

And, internet spirals being what they are, this video led me directly into the arms of another Galaxy Man recreation, this time in Mega Man: Powered Up’s descendant, LittleBigPlanet. This one’s obviously less perfect, but is still swell. It also helps highlight the merits of Mega Man 9’s lo-fi presentation; can you imagine how lame a Mega Man platformer would be if it actually looked like this?

Related links:

Little Big Trailblazer: Revisiting Mega Man Powered Up, User-Generated Content Pioneer
Mega Man 9 Bosses Look Like Mega Man Bosses
More Downloadable Remakes! More, Says I!
The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes - And Five That Weren't So Great, Part 2

Ode to the Light Gun or The Only Peripheral You’ll Ever Need

John Constantine — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Peripherals are bothersome. A controller is fine; it’s compact and, with the ubiquity of reliable, long-lasting wireless technology, they’ve become easy to store and maintain. These days, controllers just aren’t enough for developers. Every game has to have its own little thing. Oh, I need plastic guitars and drums to play this? A little plastic wheel to act like I’m steering? A massive twenty-four button console array meant to simulate the cockpit of a gigantic walking tank?! Well, la-di-da, Mr. Game Developer! I don’t live in some kind of mansion, I’ve already spent all my money on your products. I don’t have room to store a billion and one plastic devices used for only a single game.

Like every gamer born before 1990, though, there’s one peripheral my gaming home needs: the light gun. Nintendo may be the young family’s best friend these days, providing safe, accessible entertainment for all, but back in 1985, their consoles came with fake firearms. Those of us who grew up in the US and Europe got a grey Laser Tag knock off that was clearly — a toy later re-colored neon orange and grey to appear even more like a toy — but look at the original sumbitch Gunpei Yokoi designed for the system:

Now that’s the kind of weapon you can use to hold up a fake bank.

Much as I adore the light gun, it’s fallen on somewhat hard times. The decline of arcades in the Western world has kept many recent light gun equipped cabinets – like the ambitious House of the Dead 4 Experience, Rambo, and Silent Hill: The Arcade – confined to their native Japan. The other problem is that classic light guns can’t function on plasma or LCD televisions, barring owners from classic light gun goodness. There are modern equivalents, though, helping keep the tradition alive. Namco’s Guncon 3, which is only compatible with Time Crisis 4 on PS3 at the moment, gets the job done pretty well. Surprisingly enough, it’s the Wii and its remote that’s doing the most to keep the spirit of light guns alive. Nintendo themselves put out a new Zapper to compliment (amongst other games) ports of three Sega light gun classics, namely House of the Dead 2 & 3 and Ghost Squad. It isn’t much more than a plastic casing for the remote and nunchuck and it’s pretty uncomfortable to use. But it’s fighting the good fight. Sega also gets a high five, not just for keeping the genre of light gun game alive on Wii with decent ports, but for making an original House of the Dead for the system. And making this to go with it:

Sweet.

Editor's Note: I'm aware of Big Buck Hunter's proliferation across the land. But, seriously, screw that game.

Related links:

You’re Doing Great, Sega: Space Harrier Returns
Sega "Gets" the Wii
On Sega and the Proper Use of the Wii in 2009
Trailer Review: House of the Dead – Overkill

Star Ocean and the HD-JRPG Conundrum

John Constantine — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

After literal years of anticipation on the part of geeks across the world, Square-Enix will finally release Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope for the Xbox 360 on February 24th, 2009. It’s a momentous occasion for the genre. Star Ocean is the first A-list JRPG franchise to make the leap to HD consoles. You can argue that Tales of Vesperia earned the honor first, but Namco’s Tales franchise is more a brand/masthead than a bonafide franchise, one even more diluted than the Final Fantasy heading. I’ve never cared for the Star Ocean series’ battle system – Penny Arcade said it best when they described Star Ocean’s battles as “deciding which character gets molested by lizard men” – and its science-fiction narrative has always been more interesting in concept than in execution. I want to be excited about Star Ocean 4, but not because I feel like I’m missing out on a series that so many other gamers seem to love. I just want to be excited about an HD-JRPG.

JRPGs have been enjoying a renaissance on the DS, not unlike the one they had on the PS1 some twelve years back, but the genre has been woefully underserved on the 360 and PS3. Half-baked efforts like Enchanted Arms and Eternal Sonata, janky action-based experiments like Infinite Undiscovery and The Last Remnant, lumbering traditionalist games like the aforementioned Vesperia, and the twin disappointments from Hironobu Sakaguchi, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, are all we lovers of leveling and melodrama have had to sink our teeth into since the 360 launched in 2005. Why? Why is it that the best JRPGs to come out in 2008 were either re-releases or games made on decade-old hardware?

The most obvious answer is Japan. Not a little has been written about the decline and stagnation of the Japanese games industry, so it’s no wonder that their number-one genre has suffered alongside the console market in the transition to HD. The answer is slightly more complicated though. The disintegration of traditional genres has defined console gaming over the past few years. Look at Call of Duty 4, a game that transcends the traditional first-person shooter mold by making RPG-style character growth an essential component of its multi-player modes. Or take Little Big Planet, a game which is a platformer at its core, but whose real appeal is in molding the game into whatever you want it to be. Shooters are no longer just shooters, platformers aren’t just platformers. JRPGs have yet to successfully transcend the boundaries of design tradition, and attempts to grow the genre, like The Last Remnant, have been underfunded.

I hope that the 360 and PS3 get a JRPG as exciting and adventurous as Persona 3 and 4, and I hope that game gets made soon. But I’m starting to wonder if videogames finally have their genre equivalent of jazz: an art form that’s also an evolutionary dead end.

Related links:

Why, God, Why: More SaGa Games on the Way
Your JRPG Narrative is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
Fun Fact: Dylan Cuthbert - The Genre Masher
Pay-Per-Grind: Tales of Vesperia Let’s You Level With Cash
Whatcha Playing: Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World
Low-Rent RPGs: A Good Idea

Indiana Jones, We Hardly Know Ye

John Constantine — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

It is very, very strange that there are so few excellent Indiana Jones games. The characters and fantasy-20th-century that make up Henry Jones Jr’s world are uniquely suited to the tropes and traditions of game design. This isn’t to say that Indy hasn’t had some success in the medium. The arcade game of Temple of Doom is a memorably colorful quarter-muncher (though, the less said of its home ports, the better,) JVC’s Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures on Super Nintendo is the best platformer that studio produced, and Lucasarts’ point-and-click adventures, an adaptation of The Last Crusade and an original story called Fate of Atlantis, are rightfully beloved for both their branching stories and their taxing logic puzzles. The rest of Indy’s gaming oeuvre, however, ranges from tolerably mediocre, like Traveler’s Tales’ Lego Indiana Jones, to plain bad, like Windows/N64’s Infernal Machine. (Infernal Machine is especially notable because it’s the only game in the franchise that falls into the genre most-suited to Indiana Jones, the Tomb Raider-styled 3D platformer. Tomb Raider has always been modeled on Indiana Jones’ particular brand of archaeological adventuring. Raider’s spiritual successor, Uncharted, is even more explicitly inspired by Jones, right down to the sarcastic male lead of dubious morality with a heart of gold.) It’s true that officially licensed videogames have something of a history when it comes to sucking, but given Indiana Jones’ Lucasfilms/Lucasarts pedigree, you’d expect the franchise to have at least as good a track record as Star Wars. (By my calculations, you get one good Star Wars game for every three terrible ones. Luckily, that equates to a lot of good Star Wars games.)

Today, the pertinent question is not why are there not more good Indiana Jones games, but why aren’t there more Indiana Jones games period? Intrepid internet spelunkers will find word of not one but two Indiana Jones games that will never se the light of day. According to IGN, the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 Indiana Jones that was all the rage at E3 2006 has finally been cancelled. Lucasarts still hasn’t officially confirmed that but, considering the game was being developed internally, it wouldn’t come as a huge surprise following the company’s massive layoffs last summer. Then there’s Indiana Jones: Staff of Moses for PSP. Developed by Amaze Entertainment, a small studio that specializes in small-scale licensed games, Moses was never even officially announced. According to NeoGAFfer Shiggy, who brought the game’s existence to my attention in the first place, Moses was supposed to come out in 2008, presumably to coincide with the release of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. As of now, though, the game hasn’t been heard from since 2007.

Indiana can’t get a break. I’m very disappointed that the untitled 360/PS3 won’t be materializing. The early videos were admittedly stiff, but they showed promise, and Lucasarts proved themselves capable of making a decent 3D action game with The Force Unleashed. Alas, it joins Indiana Jones and The Iron Phoenix in the pantheon of cancelled Indiana Jones that might have been awesome.

(Link: IGN and NeoGAF)

Related links:

Where Is the New Indiana Jones?
Fortune and Glory, SNES-Style
Indiana Mackey and the Kingdom of the Cardboard Box

The 61FPS Review: Valkryia Chronicles – Part 2

Joe Keiser — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

For Part One of the review, click here.

As it turns out, Valkryia Chronicles doesn’t hold up all the way through. As one gets closer to the end, the story veers off the path of “historical allegory” and gets lost in its fantasy elements—something about an ancient race with sacred blood that could manipulate their version of oil to make themselves death-dealing gods. Here the story becomes vague and generic, and much, much stupider.

If this wasn’t enough to make the ending unsatisfying, the battles also lose their way as the finale approaches. Combat scenarios that previously required the player to think about situations tactically and outmaneuver the enemy became increasingly gimmicky, culminating in a final boss battle that is incredibly simple (not easy, but simple-minded) and cheap.

So as the story progression made me roll my eyes more and more, I turned to the game’s saving grace in the end times: the skirmish mode.

The skirmish mode is a tacked-on addition to the game that lets you replay a handful of the most tactically elegant storyline missions again, in order to grind for experience points and cash. It’s here that the game really shines, though. In story mode, the game often batters you for mistakes or failing to set up an advantageous situation quickly, which makes most of the gameplay reactionary. In skirmish mode you already know what mistakes to not make, because you’ve played the situation once in the story. Thus you can focus on polishing your tactics and trying new things in order to get your completion time as low as possible. Understanding your special abilities and the lay of the land can take a battle that originally took over an hour and whittle it down to four minutes. This is immensely satisfying.

And Valkyria Chronicles seems to know this, because once you get past the story epilogue (which fortunately returns the game to its trademark charm) every battle becomes playable as a skirmish, and the rewards for keeping your times low here are sizable.

So the game doesn’t end flat on its face. But suppose it did; even then the game would still have an incredible amount to recommend, from its unique and delightful art style to its strong genre hybrid of mind-bending tactics and fast action. I understand why everyone missed it last year, because I did too. But in January, with nothing coming out for months, this should be first on your catch-up list.

Score: A-

Previous Reviews:

Karaoke Revolution Presents: American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

Life Without Playstation

Bob Mackey — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:00:00 GMT

The future is a funny thing. If you had told me back in the fall of 2005 (what I regard as the height of the PS2) that Sony would be a money-bleeding mess three short years later, I probably would have slapped you out of pure contempt. It wasn't that I was a Sony fanboy, you see; it's just that the thought of a powerful company taking such a fall from grace was something once regarded as sheer lunacy--hell, even when Nintendo was sucking with the N64, they at least had the Pokemon brand to pump billions of dollars into their coffers. Sony? ...Not so much.

Things have gotten so bad that a London Times article from a few days ago slyly pointed to some major changes in the Playstation brand as a possible solution for Sony's problems. Changes in this case meaning massive upheavals:

Despite the promise of reform inherent in the appointment of Sony's first non-Japanese head, sources close to Sir Howard describe three years of frustration as the company's British-born chief has tried to impose changes on an unwilling entrenched management. Those frustrations - and a clear internal cultural clash between Japanese Sony and its US and European operations - have finally begun to be noticed by Japanese analysts. Several have started to call for Sir Howard to be free to take a “gloves-off” approach to running Sony, even if that means that the axe falls most heavily on the group's Japanese operations.

This wouldn't be the first time a cultural clash between East and West led to the death of a console; the Sega Saturn died mainly because of the miscommunication, separatism, and, at times, antagonism between Sega of America and Sega of Japan. Sonic X-treme, what would have been the system's killer ap, wasn't really helped by the fact that legendary dickhead Yuji Naka threw a hissy fit when he learned the team had co-opted some of his NiGHTS code for their own purposes. And really, the little petty East v. West problems with the Saturn are endless--though they are fascinating. But interesting stories don't exactly make for a profitable business; Sony's sleek little overpriced panther of a console is looking more and more like a Jaguar as the days roll on.

Related Links:

Sony’s New Year’s Resolution
New Year's PS3 Wish List: part 1
New Year's PS3 Wish List: part 2

Sony’s New Year’s Resolution

John Constantine — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

For all intents and purposes, 2008 was an excellent year for Sony and the Playstations. Was it the salad days of 2001, when the Playstation 2 was coming into its own and Sony was crushing every proverbial ass in the world? Certainly not. But the Playstation 3 managed to finally get itself a stable of quality exclusives that weren’t completely ignored by the public and panned by the media. The Playstation Portable, despite receiving only a scant few notable games, had a banner year in Japan and continued to grow its install base in the rest of the world. The Playstation Network worked out a few of its kinks, and even if it’s the ugliest baby since Sloth, at least Home launched. And the good ol’ Playstation 2 continued, eight years after its birth, to both sell and play host to great new games. The end of the year, however, did not look so hot. The Playstation 3 got trounced by its competitors leading up to Christmas. You see, it didn’t matter how damn good Resistance 2, LittleBigPlanet, Motorstorm: Pacific Rim, or Valkyria Chronicles were. What mattered is that the average person in every country where the system is sold does not have $400 for a videogame console right now. Money, as you may have heard, is something of a concern for everyone right now. They don’t have much of it, and there isn’t a whole lot of work for them to make more of it, so it’s no wonder they aren’t paying for your box which costs just about twice what everybody else’s box does.

Sony? Resolve to make the damn Playstation 3 cheaper in 2009. Making the console profitable should not be the priority right now. Getting it into as many homes as possible needs to be priority one. Your first and third party line-up for 2009 is a traditional gamers’ dream. Rely on it. And if the box is cheap enough, you just might grab back a piece of that casual pie. March price drop, no new SKU. Done.

Oh, and also, software backwards compatibility. You shouldn’t have taken it out in the first place.

Related links:

Microsoft’s New Year’s Resolution
Virtual Console New Year's Resolutions
Nintendo’s New Year’s Resolution