The Sandbox

Who do you see when you picture a video gamer? A 17-year-old boy playing Grand Theft Auto in his parents' basement? Or a 55-year-old mom playing Mahjong online?

With the success of Nintendo's Wii console, which targeted "non-gamers" with its intuitive motion-sensing remote controller, Microsoft is now waking up to the power of older gamers. As Microsoft v.p. Peter Moore recently told Bloomberg, ``If we don't make that move, make it early and expand our demographic, we will wind up in the same place as with Xbox 1, a solid business with 25 million people...What I need is a solid business with 90 million people.''

First off, let me say what a huge Bungie fan I am. The company behind Halo took over my life back in the early 90s with their Mac shooter, Marathon. And other cool games - like Oni and Myth - followed. When Halo hit, I was a prime target - not just as a journalist, but as a gamer; I'd played all the FPS titles, and was ready for something new. The game delivered - with a sort of cinematic grace that we hadn't experienced before. I was lucky enough to play Halo 2 a few months before it came out when I was up doing a story on Bungie. The game didn't disappoint.

So now here we are in the first throes of Halo 3 hype, and why I am feeling cold? I think know.

Microsoft recently confirmed that it is banning gamers with modified consoles from playing on the Xbox Live online service.

I think this is a mistake.

Long before "user-generated content" was a catch-phrase, computer gamers had been breathing life into titles by creating and sharing their own modifications: new weapons, levels, characters, sounds, and whatever else they could engineer.

Wow, Microsoft is paying Take-Two Interactive $50 million for two exclusive downloadable episodes of the upcoming game, Grand Theft Auto IV. The retail version of the game is first coming out in October on the PS3 and Xbox 360, but then Microsoft's Xbox Live online service will deliver two additional installments starting in March 2008.

$50 million? For two episodes?? Okay, I was an English Lit. major but according to my math, that's $25 million per episode. For that kind of money, Microsoft could make an entire new game. Obviously, the company is leaving a sparkling candy trail to lure the early-adopting, must-have, way-cool game boys. And then there's that little Xbox game called Halo 3 on the horizon too.

No, it's not a wireless guitar for playing the most excellent Guitar Hero. It's the Messenger Kit for XBox360. Thirty bucks, and if Microsoft is smart, they'll quickly make it standard in all XBox360s.

Why standard? Because then developers will actually develop for it. Whole genres of multiplayer games open up when you have a keyboard to chat: games where lots of people want to talk, and network performance makes voice a non-starter. Now please excuse me while I go get a contract to put the Infocom adventures on XBox Live...

The New York Times has a story today about how gamers could (allegedly) care less about their faulty Xbox machines. Xbox malfunctions have become a serious problem in recent months. In fact, according to the piece, Microsoft "has set aside $1.1 billion for repairs, a figure that suggests to industry analysts that the problem could affect a third of the 11.6 million 360s already in the hands of consumers."

I'm skeptical about this story. Case in point: my buddy, Mike. His Xbox machine broke down, and rather than deal with the hassles of repair, he went out and bought a Wii. Gamers are impatient. And while some diehards will suffer repairs to play their favorite game, there's a tipping point of players who will look at the snafu as an opportunity to try out another console.

$1.1 billion for repairs?!? The story here isn't about the loyalists willing to endure the pain; fanboys are always ready to go to great lengths for their passions. The question I'd like to hear answered is: how and why a company like Microsoft could make such a gargantuan mistake.

I've blogged a few times about Microsoft's $1.8 billion screw-up - Xbox malfunctions that are causing droves of repairs.

Geeks have been wondering why/how the company could have made such an error. Now a trusty Spectrum editor points out one possible clue: an investigation by Nikkei Electronics into the Xbox 360's heat radiation system.

Could this be the culprit? Read on.

So, I finished Bioshock a little while ago and ended up fairly disappointed. Although the environments continued to amaze and the Alice In Wonderland fullness of the art and model design remained sexy, in its way, the gameplay and narrative faltered badly in the last quarter of the game.

You've seen the ads. Clutched the Halo 3 soda cans. Read the (interminable) hype. But now that we're less than a week from the release of this year's biggest game, the thing is: who cares?

Don't get me wrong, as I've said before, Halo had me from hello. I stopped my life twice before to play through the game, and I'll surely do it again for the third installment. The Halo franchise's greatest hook is its cinematic flair - the pacing, the music, the scope. But let's not lose sight of one simple fact: this is a sequel. A sequel to a sequel, actually. And while sequels can be awesome (like any Madden or Half-Life game), they are, at best, riffs on a theme. And what really matters - what this industry desperately needs - is not variation, but innovation.

I got my advance copy of Halo 3 this weekend. Early impressions:

KILLER HD - Like I blogged before, to me Halo's biggest contribution to gaming is bringing a cinematic flair to the medium. That works even better in HD. You can almost feel the surface of your armor as Master Chief. A legitimate reason to play the game is just to wander around and check out sights.

THE SCORE - The music of Halo 3 is really an unsung hero. Bungie, the developers of the game, understand that music should not be an afterthought - try to imagine Star Wars without the familiar John Williams score. Halo's monks and driving techno backbeat and drums add an indispensable layer of thrills and pacing to the game.

THE WEAPONS - So far, the most notable improvement on Halo 3's gameplay is the gear. Best new weapon: the Brute Gravity Hammer, a savage ax that whacks the scales off the covenant beasts. I also love how you can now rip the turret weapons from their tripods and haul them around while you blow stuff up - brilliant (and the accompany physics - how the heavy weight of your carried turret slows you down - is well done).

First the good news. I'm having a lot of fun playing Halo 3. Like any good game, it's keeping up me up past my bedtime. And, when I do call it a night, I can't sleep because my blood's racing like I've just been at war.

That said, why does the game feel boring compared to the first Halo? Because of the story. In the first Halo, the world was new and the game could simply wow us with this rivetingly imagined universe. Master Chief, power warrior, taking on the fundamentalist Covenant. Well done.

But in third game, the drama isn't there. It feels like one shooting gallery after another - with some interstitial cut-scenes thrown in. There's no emotion beyond mow-down thrills. No mystery. The best scene so far is when I encountered a group of Covenant bad guys praying to a God - and, for a second, I felt a moral dilemma: do I shoot them in the back or let them pray? That's awesome - and something that can only be imparted through a game. Why aren't there more moments like this?

Someone told me that Halo 3 has hit the stores. I've been too busy playing Team Fortress 2 to notice...

Halo 3 has such hype, and such an economic swirl around it, that one would be forgiven if one thought that it represents the apex of action gaming. But I'm one of those folks that can't get past the fact that handheld-controller FPS gamers are dilettantes compared to mouse-and-keyboard FPS gamers. Maybe I'm an uninformed fogey, but from the brouhaha I heard about the ethical ramifications of the XCM XFPS adapter on the XBox online FPS community, I'm guessing that the FPS community at large thinks the same thing.

TF2 is my new game for the next little while.

I'm waiting for the dust to settle a bit on Halo 3 to make my own comments. However, when I read the extant reviews, I'm consistently impressed with the discrepancy between the text and the scores.

Okay, it took me a while but I finally finished Halo 3 (compared to my 16-year-old neighbor who has played through the game THREE times already).

I love the part near the end where you end up like Jonah flamethrowing your way out of the belly of a beast. It was original, fresh, and fun. But the last bit of Warthogging over an exploding landscape - dull. And the vaguely ambiguous Sopranos ending suggesting the death of Master Chief, cliche. This was a riveting game experience - cinematic and sweeping, as I've said before - but hardly memorable. It could have been just as effective as a multiplayer only release. Single player shooters need to raise the bar on the genre, not just improve it. Call of Duty Modern Warfare accomplishes this, as does BioShock. And maybe the next Bungie game will too.

Just in time for the holidays - a way to lock out all the Xbox addicts.

Today, Microsoft announced the "family timer," a way that parents can "set the appropriate amount of gaming and entertainment time for their kids, on a daily or weekly basis," according to the release. I seem to recall something like this for PC gamers years ago. It was a program called Addiction Manager, and you could use it to lock yourself out from playing too much Quake or whatever. The FF, on the other hand, is being pitched to parents as a kind of vidgame leash. Good luck. Most parents I know have no idea how to boot up an Xbox, let alone lock their kiddies out.

So I spent the weekend playing Rock Band, the latest play-along-with-the-music game from the creators of Guitar Hero. Yes, it's awesome - a big, bombastic hulk of a vidgame that both restores one's faith in, and advances, the medium.

Like Guitar Hero, the object is to smack different colored buttons on an instrument-shaped controller in sync with corresponding dots on screen. It's oddly reminiscent of Space Invaders - the cascading blips on your screen that you have to eliminate. Except in this case you don't hit the fire button, you thwak your guitar or drum pad instead. You have three instruments to choose from: guitar, bass, and drums. You can also sing vocals, karaoke style, and your performance is measured based on your pitch and timing. Each song, like "In Bloom" from Nirvana or my personal favorite, "Wave of Mutilation" by the Pixies, can be a solo or multiplayer (band) affair.

So, I continue to plug away at the sprawling Mass Effect.

Last night, during a session of medium length, at the end of a fierce and difficult battle, just before I was able to save my game...

KER-ZIPPPPP!

...down goes the Xbox 360 for the count.

Admittedly, I had been worried listening, as I had been, to the constant hum and whine of the machine whenever Mass Effect was in the drive -- worried indeed about overheating the unit.

So now I'm a couple weeks into Rock Band play, and it duly rocks indeed. I haven't had this much fun in a multiplayer game since the first time I played Marathon deathmatch in the mid-90s. As you've probably heard, the game lets you play in a virtual band on "real" instrument-shaped controllers: drums, guitar, bass, mike. You have to play in sync with the cartoon band on screen. At the right moment, when you're, say, mid-way through the Pixies' "Wave of Mutilation," you actually feel like you're in the band, like you're making the music. It's weirdly transporting, and maybe the most convincing alternate reality experience around.

There are problems too. Despite some of the marketing, this game is not newbie-friendly. It still takes gamer instincts to grok the hand/eye coordination, etc. I wish the developers had put in some options below the Easy tier, particularly songs for kids. I mean, come on, shouldn't there be a few Hannah Montana songs in the game? This is actually a frequent gripe of mine - that games are too hard for non-gamers, and keep the audience from growing. The vocalist in Rock Band probably has the lowest barrier of entry. Me? I'm all about the guitar and drums. Although taking the bass on "Gigantic" would be tempting, if only that Pixies tune was in the mix.

I bow before our new End of Year Best-of list overlords. Here's my short list of my favorites of 2007:

1. Lord of the Rings Online. Because I worked on it for four and a half years to ship it, and have worked on it since then, and it's clearly the best MMO of 2007. No personal prejudice here, no sir. But I'm playing it, which says a lot about a game that I've worked on (which I seldom play post-launch).

2. Rock Band. My childhood dreams of drumming, stifled by my parents who desired peace and quiet in their house, are now finding outlet, and obliterating my wife's goodwill towards me.

3. Portal. Great little game. Suffers from the "giant thick client to play a teeny-tiny game" problem, but who cares when it's this fun? You want thin client, play Flash Portal.

4. Super Mario Galaxy. I used to disdain Nintendo, early in my gaming career, as nothing but Cute. Jeebus, was I an idiot.

5. God of War 2 / Heavenly Sword. They're the same game, with different avatars of destruction. But they're both onslaughts of epic annihilation that appeals to the little kid in me that still writhes with excitement when I see shiny things.

6. Bioshock. Great art direction. Gameplay and story were sort of meh, but they tried.

7. Team Fortress 2. TF is back, and it's still fun. I miss EMPs, though.

8. Phase. Addictive little iPod game. Five bucks well spent.

Not on the list, but still decent: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect. They're really good, but I was not inspired to finish any of them, so I can't feel good about giving them a final score.

Didn't play: Call of Duty 4, Crysis, lots of other things. I only have so much time.

It was a good year for games. 2008 will have some work cut out for it: Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't look so "ZOMG" these days, now that we've seen other games that look just as good.

More categories for this article than I thought possible... it's about everything.

Leigh Alexander is very much worth reading, when you're in search of thoughts on the game industry. Two recent articles are the case For and the case Against this new world of entertainment media convergence. Is this intertwining of games, web, movies, television, cell phones, GPS, fresh baked bread, and the fat pipe connecting your checking account to media producers' coffers, is this good for games?

Leigh gives the definitive maybe. I mostly agree.

The other day, I blogged about the increasing momentum behind Blu-ray drives vs. HD DVD. Now word is out there that Microsoft may be releasing a Blu-ray expansion for the Xbox game console as soon as May.

I suppose given how much Sony has banked on Blu-ray, it's not suprising that Microsoft wants a piece of that game too. Also given that May is just before the upcoming E3 gaming convention, this would be a strategic way to take some of the spark out of Sony's uniqueness. Of course Microsoft gave Sony the biggest buzzkill by striking a deal to release the upcoming Grand Theft Auto IV, part of a franchise that had long been Sony's exclusive first run. This means all the more pressure on Sony to distinguish itself this year with innovative games like LittleBigPlanet and robust online features like its virtual world, Home.

From Gamasutra.com: for the second month in a row, the PS3 has outsold the XBox360 in North America. The interesting thing is that I'm guessing this has a lot more to do with the fact that it's pretty much the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there, or at least the cheapest that anyone knows about, because as you can see on the software chart at Gamasutra, there's only one PS3 game in the top ten, compared to six XBox titles. And the PS3 title, Devil May Cry 4, is behind the XBox version.

This says folks aren't seriously gaming on the PS3s they're buying, they're finally buying hi-def DVDs players, now that the format war is over.

Rumor mill alert: according to a story on MTV News, Microsoft is developing a Wii-style remote controller for the Xbox360. The site includes a sketch drawn of the remote drawn by an unnamed source.

If true, this hardly comes as a surprise. The Wiimote did an outstanding job of redefining what a videogame can be, and of course Microsoft would love a piece of that action. But a Wii-mote does not a Wii make. Nintendo's success isn't just a matter of controls, it's the games that bring the remote to life, like Wii Sports. When we think MIcrosoft, we think of blockbuster shooters like Halo 3. And I'd still rather play Halo 4 (if there is one) using my thumbs. It'd be interesting if Microsoft could raise the game by creating new kinds of wireless experiences - ones that don't resemble Nintendo's products at all.

[via 1up] Microsoft may be looking to unload its crushing hardware cost burden onto other folks, and license other companies to produce XBox consoles. As an exercise in expanding the brand, it's a brilliant move: XBox consoles are expensive, and Microsoft has already established a serious presence with the console and with XBox Live. Now they can continue to make the pie bigger by inviting hardware competition in increasing the platform's spread, driving costs down, and hopefully resulting in better quality (not to mention quieter, sheesh) consoles. Let's hope it happens.

So my hand is sort of cramped up from playing Guitar Hero: On Tour for the DS, and it just got me thinking about the world of input devices, and how this is really a new golden age of interesting ways of interacting with games.

It's a Soulcalibur kind of month, it is. Soulcalibur is, for my money, the best fighting game series ever, and Soulcalibur IV is coming out at the end of this month. They're prepping us with a cute little manga about how to play, and they've brought the retro with a release of the Dreamcast Soulcalibur on XBLA.