Gaming in the Near Future Pt.2

Hm. Upon review the Xbox best-sellers list is pretty boring, you can probably guess the whole list without too much trouble. Much more interesting is the PS3 number one spot: Motorstorm , the relatively casual quad-bike racing game. It’s 311,000 units ahead of MGS4.

Now you’re thinking, “Aha! Perhaps the PS3 is not the bastion of hardcore gaming i had assumed! Touche mister Luke.”

However, note that Little Big Planet has not made the top ten list.

Read into that what you will.

Updates might be a little sparse for the next few weeks, on holiday for 10 days, then many many essays to write :S Doesn’t help that to distract me i have the excellent GTA: Chinatown Wars. Oh yeah one more thing, buy Chinatown Wars.

Gaming in the near future Pt1

Apologies for the infrequent posts recently, i’ve had a lot on my plate with this troublesome degree i’m earning.

It’s easy to whine about the decline of video games, (which i still refuse to write as one word) and the general influx of casual game(r)s ruining what was once a beautiful and creative industry, with global gaming corporations turning a broad and varied art form into a mass of identical blockbusters designed to part increasingly wealthy preteens from their cash. (That opener may have accidentally revealed my bias) However i rarely see statistics to back up these claims. Therefore over the next few posts i’ll be looking at sales figures across the gaming landscape and trying to predict, using my mystical powers of reason, what they mean for the future of video games.

Nintendo DS – 10 million sales club.

Nintendo have attracted more criticism than any other company for pandering to the casual market. Nicole Kidman sits in a beautiful house training her brain – surely this is not the same company that made Donkey Kong?! The DS plays host to some amazing games (mostly third party) but how is this represented in the sales chart? Here are the 7 games which have sold over 10million each.

Nintendogs – well, it’s kind of a game i guess? Many of the early DS’s shipped with this, so i’m not sure if this one actually counts, sales-wise. Still, you can’t put a price on a virtual dog.

New Super Mario Bros. – excellent to see this on here, a brilliant 2D adventure, with every convention intact. If i was being sceptical (which i am) i’d point out that this was a launch title and was released before Nintendo saw the massive profits to be made from games which aren’t games, so it’s possible we wont be seeing another great game like this for a while…

Brain Age – Find an answer to the baffling question, “how old is your brain.” Now you can finally put paid to the myth that wisdom comes with age as you manically compete to have the youngest brain achievable. Fun app, not a game.

Pokemon Diamond/Pearl – well i guess somewhere there are kids still playing the DS then! Not that pokemon is exclusively for children, they’ve always been awesome games. However worth noting that the formula hasn’t really changed since red/blue back in 1999, as long as it still works i don’t know why Nintendo would do anything other than tweak.

Mario Kart DS – fantastic racing game, sublime controls and much less of the random element present in MKwii. (though i quite liked the unfairness!) still plagued by rubberband opponents (you overtake them and somehow they spring right back into the lead) but this game has passed many a car journey and for that i am grateful. Still, like Mario Bros. it was a launch title, leaving it up to interpretation how frequently we’ll actually be seeing games of this quality.

Brain Age 2 – pity the ignorant whelp who thinks he can get an accurate handle on the hypothetical age of his brain from Brain Age 1! Times have changed! Your brain-gauging technology is hopelessly obsolete!! Buy Brain Age 2!

Animal Crossing: Wild World – Interesting to see a life sim on this list, it’s a shame i don’t have any statistics on consumer satisfaction though, as i feel this was advertised as being something more than a mortgage simulator. Having said that this game has a dark streak a mile wide. Coming back to your house to find Tom Nook, the local land baron has extended your house without your permission and has left the hefty bill on your doorstep is always worth a chuckle.

This is a list of few surprises. Every title is from a Nintendo studio, and only half of them would qualify as games by many people’s standards. Seeing as how the iPhone does applications better than the DS, Nintendo had better man up and make some games, or they’ll find they’ve lost the one thing most valuable in this industry, the insane fanboy battalion; which Nintendo have dutifully pandered to for 20 long years. Days are passing when kids will buy anything with that big beautiful Nintendo Official Seal of Approval stamp, now the big N will have to start again with a whole new market. I predict a thousand cheap and easy Brain Age clones, and many more copy-pasted pokemon games.

Next time i’ll track down the best selling Xbox games, which should be a little more interesting.

edit: GTA: Chinatown Wars might change everything. (but probably wont)

Rockstar Drama

If game studios were people, and those people were your friends, you’d think long and hard about which ones to invite to your party. At this fantasy party Nintendo would be drinking a cocktail, holding a dozen conversations at once and generally being a young, healthy person, telling politically correct but very funny jokes. Capcom would be wearing a bandana and espousing the virtues of Thundercats to Sony, the sweaty uncomfortable nerd trying to act aloof. In a slick suit with a big false grin EA would be giving a toast, and Rockstar… well, Rockstar wouldn’t be invited. I imagine he has a handlebar moustache and big aviator shades, and has been known to get wasted, throw up everywhere and try his luck with the lovely Square Enix.

The past few weeks Rockstar have been causing drama, and not only in my insane imagination. On the contrary, they’ve been upsetting people left right and centre. Every upset revolves around the impending release (by the time you read this it’ll be out) of the first episode of downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto 4. Titled ‘The Lost and the Damned’ this expansion lets you control the motorcycle gang from the original game, and play through an all-new story based around their murderous exploits and curb-stomping adventures. Good news, right? Well sort of. The expansion is only available to download on Xbox 360, leaving Sony feeling a little cold. Microsoft reputedly paid 50 million dollars for exclusive rights to the game, and so yet again Sony are left empty handed, leaving PS3 owners feeling a little short changed.

To get a handle on this, consider Rockstar’s history with Sony. The Grand Theft Auto franchise has traditionally been at home on the Playstation, give or take the odd gameboy port. At the very least every game up until GTA4 was released to Sony before being ported to other platforms. Bringing the fourth instalment out on 360 and PS3 simultaneously was a move that garnered controversy from the Sony corner, and plunged the internet into a flamewar the likes of which had never been seen. (This mostly consisted of screenshot analysis to discover which platform would get a better draw distance and a higher-res textures) Apparently those Sony fanboys were right to be suspicious, as what was once a killer app for their platform has now sided with Microsoft. This is doubly frustrating for Sony as they pride themselves (quite rightly) on their online section. They have new DLC (downloadable content, make a note of it) for Little Big Planet every week, they don’t charge for demos, they have Playstation Home, and most importantly you pay for things in Euros, Pounds and Dollars, not ridiculous middle-man currencies like ‘Microsoft Points’ which can only be purchased in blocks of a hundred million.

People who like the GTA series are people who like Playstations. They’ve gone hand in hand for so long that if the Human Genome Project found the gene that coded for Playstation purchasing, they’d probably find it also coded for a love of sandbox mayhem and an affection for running over prostitutes. Sure, GTA4 on the Xbox will draw in legions of new fans, but this departure from Sony will be interpreted as a huge kick in the teeth to all those who followed the franchise from the very beginning, and even did something as crazy as buying a PS3 to try and keep up.

The Lost and the Damned will feature male full frontal nudity. This has not only upset all the usual outspoken pressure groups, but has offended the sensibilities of critics reviewing an early version of the expansion. It has been branded a cheap publicity stunt by some, whilst others claim it adds nothing to the gaming experience. (Obviously not quite true, it adds male nudity) The in-the-buff action is limited to one cutscene, which if you are so inclined, you can find on Youtube. (I would offer a link but the videos keep being taken down) For the less curious all you need know is that the Euphoria engine manages to control those tricky genital-physics with aplomb.

Lastly and most importantly Rockstar have upset me this week because ‘The Lost and the Damned’ still doesn’t feature any jetpacks. What on Earth is the point in a fully explorable sandbox world if I have no way of getting onto the roofs of skyscrapers?! This highlights a fundamental misunderstanding on Rockstar’s part, in thinking that the joy of the GTA games is watching your character go through a character building gritty adventure and come out the other end a little richer and wiser for the experience. Rather the joy of the GTA games is turning on all the cheats and flying a tank around the city, crushing hapless citizens by spawning hundreds more tanks in your wake. It’s taking a jetpack up to the top of the highest building, turning on the no-reload cheat and jumping off, using the rocket launcher to hilariously propel your corpse miles across town. It’s turning the gravity down and throwing people off the tops of mountains, then hijacking a jumbo jet to fly into them before they can hit the ground, and using spawn cheats to create a ramp made of cars on top of buildings that you can drive a motorbike off, bail in mid-air and land headfirst on a family enjoying a picnic in the park. In GTA4 none of these things were possible, and The Lost and the Damned does nothing to improve upon this relative lack of freedom. Rockstar, sort yourself out, stop upsetting everyone and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get invited to my murder-mystery cocktail evening.