Author Archive | Jared Newman

Sony Attacks PSP Pirates, Hurts Used Game Owners

Posted by Jared Newman on February 18, 2010 at 4:25 pm

Sony’s PSP has a piracy problem. The company has complained about it, game developers fret over it and the download-only PSP Go exists partly because of it. But Sony’s newest scheme to prevent PSP piracy takes things too far, punishing players who’ve done nothing wrong.

IGN reports that SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3, out this week, won’t play online without a voucher code that’s included with the game. If you buy the game used, you’ll need another voucher, which costs $20 on its own. I also wonder whether people whose PSPs are lost or stolen will have to pay another $20 to restore SOCOM’s online play.

The game costs $40 new, so until the used version costs half that, you won’t save any money on a used copy if you intend to play online. GameStop currently lists used copies of SOCOM 3 at $33, so it doesn’t seem that the extra expense for multiplayer is driving down used prices.

What Sony is doing isn’t novel. Electronic Arts chief executive John Riccitiello is fond of saying he views illegal downloads as potential sales, in that people may decide they like the game enough to purchase some downloadable content. Sony’s approach is more sinister, effectively withholding a portion of the game from people who are technically paying for the whole thing.

I’m no pirate, which is why it pains me to see legitimate buyers become collateral damage in the piracy war. Sony’s director of hardware marketing, John Koller, won’t say whether the company will use this anti-piracy tactic in other games. It’s a trial run, he told IGN. Hopefully, the experiment is short-lived.

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Open Sarcasm Picks a Bone With SarcMark

Posted by Jared Newman on February 16, 2010 at 3:18 pm

A month ago, a company called SarcMark began selling a special punctuation of the same name, intended to denote Sarcasm. As some of our commenters pointed out, punctuation shouldn’t cost money, and SarcMark was charging $2 for the privilege.

Now, a group called Open Sarcasm is staging a protest to crush SarcMark and replace it with an upside-down exclamation mark (¡), which text fields already recognize and doesn’t cost a dime. Open Sarcasm’s organizer even came back to our original blog post to let us know about it.

The group says “¡” is graphically indistinguishable from Temherte Slaqî, an Ethiopic symbol that comes at the end of a sentence, used to indicate an unreal phrase or a sarcastic tone in editorial cartoons. No joke, Open Sarcasm pulls the idea from Wikipedia’s page on sarcasm, which sources a document (PDF) from the 15th International Unicode Conference.

Despite the subject matter, Open Sarcasm appears to be dead serious, writing a manifesto that specifically calls out the SarcMark, starting a Twitter page and opening an online merch store. Of course, the group is also accepting donations, for what I’m not sure.

I still don’t think punctuation for sarcasm is necessary — words alone leave plenty of room for nuance in tone — but a movement to liberate sarcastic punctuation from commercial gain is admirable, at least.

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Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live: A Feature Wish List

Posted by Jared Newman on February 15, 2010 at 4:05 pm

It was only a matter of time before Microsoft brought Xbox Live to a mobile device, as it will with Windows Phone 7 Series. Still, Microsoft hasn’t described this feature of its upcoming mobile OS in detail. All we know is that Windows Phone 7 will be able to play select Xbox Live games, view friends’ avatars and check in on profiles and achievements. I hope there’s more in store than just a few board and card games, plus a native replica of the 360 Live iPhone App. Here’s my unsolicited wish list for Xbox Live on Windows Phone 7:

The following Xbox Live Arcade Games: Braid, Marble Blast Ultra, Trials HD, Castle Crashers, Peggle, Worms 2: Armegeddon, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and Catan. All would translate well, or at least well enough, to a virtual joystick, touch buttons or accelerometer controls, and they’re great games.

Xbox Live Game Room: This is the virtual arcade Microsoft introduced at CES this year, to launch this spring. You’ll already be able to play the classic games on either the Xbox 360 or Windows (for an extra charge, unfortunately), so why not throw the third screen into the mix?

1 vs. 100: The massive multiplayer quiz show seems perfect for mobile devices. Imagine getting a text message before one of the live shows, and being able to participate from the road.

Bonus content for Xbox 360 Games: Here’s an idea floated by Gizmodo’s Mark Wilson. Instead of isolating retail Xbox 360 games from Windows Phone 7, Microsoft should include extras for people who own both products. A game like Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies would be so much better if it were tied to the Xbox 360, or bundled with its parent console game.

Windows Phone as Xbox 360 controller: Microsoft already plans to reach a casual gaming audience this year with Project Natal, a 3D motion-sensing camera. Adding a touch screen controller for media and an occasional gaming seems like a natural fit. It’d at least be cooler than the button-driven interface of Sony’s Remote Play for Playstation 3 and PSP.

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Bioshock 2’s No Friend of the Colorblind

Posted by Jared Newman on February 12, 2010 at 7:49 pm

When I was in college, my buddies brought an old Nintendo Entertainment System to the dorm hall, and nightly matches of the primitive hockey game Blades of Steel ensued. But when my best pal stepped up to the controller, certain combinations of teams were off-limits; his red-green colorblindness often made it too difficult to distinguish between the game’s two-tone uniforms.

Now, an aspect of the newly released Bioshock 2 has colorblind gamers furious. They say the game’s hacking segments — minigames that allow players to overthrow mechanical enemies for a tactical advantage — are nearly impossible. When hacking, a cursor slides back and forth along a pattern of colors, and the player must press a button to stop the cursor on the correct color. The problem for red-green colorblind gamers is that landing on green completes the hack, but landing on red hurts the player and triggers an alarm.

In other words, if you’re colorblind, it’s impossible to distinguish between good and bad. Check out Negative Gamer’s comparison after running a screenshot through a color contrast analyzer. Players with deuteranopia (6 percent of men, 0.1 percent of women) or protanopia (1 percent of men, 0.01 percent of women) will have a tough time hacking. Also, the 0.01 percent of players with tritanopia, a type of blue-yellow color blindness, will have trouble distinguishing between a successful hack and an extra bonus; not as critical, but still worth noting.

Bioshock 2’s not alone — see this feature by Destructoid’s Anthony Burch on the troubles of being a colorblind gamer — but this is certainly one of the peskier cases in recent memory. Developers needn’t constantly watch themselves to make sure they’re not mixing red and green, but in cases of straight-up color matching, they should know to include some other type of queue. At least in Blades of Steel, the difference between teams was only cosmetic.

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Rock of the Dead: More of This, Please!

Posted by Jared Newman on February 11, 2010 at 6:09 pm

If Activision or Harmonix never released another Guitar Hero or Rock Band, I’d be satisfied with the existing plastic instruments and gobs of downloadable songs. But there’s still potential in music games, as shown by the upcoming Rock of the Dead.

IGN ran a preview of the Wii game, a cross between the zombie shooter House of the Dead, the keyboard skill-builder Typing of the Dead and Guitar Hero. Each zombie gets its own sequence of notes to play on your guitar controller, and you must enter the sequences correctly to destroy your foes.

As a concept, Rock of the Dead rules, but I’m not as enthused after watching a video of the action. This would be so much better if each note produced a crunchy guitar riff, instead of a dull thwacking sound against a bland backing soundtrack. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of potential in using music game instruments for games that aren’t explicitly about karaoke.

Rock of the Dead isn’t the first one to try. A new game called Fret Nice mimics the platforming style of Super Mario Bros., but with the option to use a guitar controller. Sadly, critics said the experiment didn’t work, and the game is better off with a standard controller. The problem is that Fret Nice tried to map a new control scheme onto a genre that’s already too familiar. In a sense, Rock of the Dead is doing the same thing, even though on-rail shooting games aren’t as universal of a genre.

Still, imagine if a music-themed adventure game like Brutal Legend incorporated the guitar controller, or maybe there are ways to experiment with music games that don’t involve popular songs or straight-up performance (for instance, Rez). There’s fertile ground here, and I’m glad Rock of the Dead developer Epicenter is playing with it, because the music game genre, left alone, is stagnant.

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Wii’s Old Supply Problems Are New Again

Posted by Jared Newman on February 10, 2010 at 6:00 pm

It’s 2007 all over again, with Nintendo’s Wii in short supply at retail shops and online stores.

Shipments are coming in, but they’re selling out fast, Joystiq reports. Nintendo hasn’t gone into specifics on why it can’t meet demand for the Wii, but the company said “replenishing Wii inventories will be a challenge” in the short-term.

According to Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia, 47 percent of GameStops had the Wii in stock last month, IndustryGamers reported, so you might have to call around to get one. Supplies are a bit scarcer at other retailers; Bhatia said 28 percent of channels had the Wii in stock last month.

Why are Wii shortages happening again? One GameStop employee told Joystiq that it’s a regular occurrence after the holidays, and that supplies should pick up in mid-February, but that doesn’t jive with Nintendo’s remarks about short-term supply challenges.

Back in the early days of the Wii, a popular conspiracy theory held that Nintendo was intentionally holding back supply to stir up buzz. I never really believed that, and it certainly doesn’t seem likely now. However, a variation on that theory, from GameStop chief operating officer Dan DeMatteo, seems plausible: In March 2007, he said Nintendo was holding back supply because the company already met its yearly sales goals.

A similar motive could be at work here. Despite a 23 percent drop in profits last quarter, Nintendo does seem on track to meet its sales forecasts for the year ending March 31, so the company may not be in a rush to boost production.

Again, only Nintendo knows for sure what’s going on here. As a consumer, it seems silly that a company would make it harder to buy its product, but that’s business for you.

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Sky Siege: iPhone Augmented Reality Gaming, Still Rough

Posted by Jared Newman on February 8, 2010 at 5:25 pm

Thanks to Gizmodo, I got wind of Sky Siege, an augmented and virtual reality game for the iPhone, and I plunked down $3 at the App Store so you don’t have to.

Using the iPhone 3GS to look around, you must track down little helicopters, blimps and fighter jets, taking them out with a machine gun or missile launcher before they get you. You can either play the game with its own grassy field background graphics, or switch on the camera to use your real life surroundings as the battlefield. The game plays the same either way. Here’s a video showing the action:

After playing Sky Siege for about 20 minutes, I’m a little bit dizzy from all the spinning and twisting, and believe me, 20 minutes is all you really need. The virtual reality target practice is amusing at first, but it’s a one-trick pony. It wasn’t long before I had enough of the augmented reality gimmick, cool as it was.

Seeing as Sky Siege is the only augmented reality video game I could find in the App Store, it comes off more as a tech demo than a fully-realized game. Other than using your room as a backdrop, there’s no actual interaction with the real world, which might’ve added some nuance to the experience.  There’s also no dodging or other movement required besides spinning and twisting to aim. As a game, Sky Siege doesn’t stand on its own; if it used virtual thumbsticks instead of an orientation-tracking algorithm, I certainly wouldn’t recommend it.

But there is potential here. I want to see more games that take the real-world theme deeper, like the upcoming Ghostwire for the Nintendo DSi. Sky Siege proves augmented reality gaming is possible on the iPhone — and if you’ve got $3 to burn it might be worth getting just to impress your friends — but it’s not the definitive example of what augmented reality can do.

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10 Games You’ll Miss for First-Gen Xbox Live

Posted by Jared Newman on February 5, 2010 at 4:52 pm

On April 15, Microsoft will kill online play for original Xbox games. Even if you own an Xbox 360, you’ll no longer be able to play original Xbox games online, including backwards-compatible discs and downloadable Xbox Originals. While it’s probably for the best — Microsoft is promising new, yet-unspecified features that weren’t possible while still supporting the old Xbox — some games are just irreplaceable. Here are 10 original Xbox games that have no equal on the Xbox 360 (which means no Halo 2 or Call of Duty 3):

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Best Buy, Wal-Mart End Used Game Kiosk Flirtation

Posted by Jared Newman on February 4, 2010 at 5:33 pm

When it comes to trading in used games, there really is no stopping Gamestop.

Best Buy and Wal-Mart, who both experimented with used game kiosks last year, are pulling out, according to IndustryGamers. Both companies relied on a third-party, E-Play, to run the kiosks, and will remove the machines over the next few weeks. E-Play’s Web site has a sombre little message saying they’ve suspended operations, and thanking customers.

In addition to offering credit or debit card credit in exchange for used games, the kiosks rented DVDs (as long as there wasn’t a Redbox machine in the store as well), Blu-ray discs and video games.

A couple guesses why the pilot programs failed: Unlike Gamestop, where you can call to find out a game’s trade-in value, a kiosk is unpredictable, and the prices E-Play offered — $25 for new titles down to 50 cents for throwaways — isn’t better than anywhere else.  Marketing and awareness could’ve come into play as well. If you call Gamestop, you’ll likely hear, “Thank you for calling Gamestop, where we buy and sell used games” on the other end. Somehow, “Welcome to Wal-Mart, check out that kiosk over there” doesn’t have the same ring.

All’s not lost for trading games outside of GameStop. Toys R’ Us, which began buying used games in select markets last year, expanded the program nationwide in September. Amazon will buy your old games in exchange for online store credit, and Wal-Mart still sells used games online, but does not buy them. Still, none of these competitors offer the whole package of buying and selling used games. Local stores and smaller chains, such as Game Crazy, are still around (barely), and thrifty gamers will still rely on Craigslist, eBay and Goozex.

But for most of the United States, for quickly unloading a used game and getting another one in its place, GameStop’s got it locked down.

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In Standard Def, Mass Effect 2 Has Trouble With Words

Posted by Jared Newman on February 3, 2010 at 2:56 pm

Count me among the legions of gamers who are totally sucked in to Mass Effect 2. It’s not the combat — a Gears of War-Star Wars cocktail — but the branching, choose-your-own dialog that hooked me. I’ve probably spent more time conversing with the galaxy’s countless creatures than I have shooting up baddies.

Unfortunately, players who own standard definition televisions — even big ones — complain that the text in Mass Effect 2 is too small to read. There’s a lengthy thread on the topic in developer Bioware’s forums, and Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera, who picked up on the story, said he’s getting hit with e-mails from upset gamers.

High definition allows game developers to include text in smaller sizes, freeing up screen real estate for other, arguably more important things. But in Mass Effect 2, text is front-and-center. The game routinely bombards players with conversation choices, many of them crucial to the outcome of the game. In addition, players can spend hours in the game reading up on alien races, unexplored planets, historic locations, notable people and the (un)scientific phenomena that give characters their special powers. I can imagine how frustrating illegible text would be.

This isn’t the first time text posed a problem for gaming in standard definition. In 2008, players complained that the font in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts was too hard to read. Originally, developer Rare said the issue would be too expensive to fix, but they ultimately caved and released an update. I ran into this issue with several games a few years ago, before making the leap to HD.

The question is, should game developers put in extra man hours to accommodate standard definition text? For now, I think an option for big text is reasonable. Leichtman Research Group says nearly 50 percent of U.S. homes have at least one HDTV, not enough to leave stragglers out in the cold for a text-heavy game like Mass Effect. I don’t know the technical challenges adding optional large fonts to a game, but Bioware isn’t rushing; The company’s message board moderator said small text was a design choice, and said not to expect a fix in the near future.

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