Is Spore Day A Flop?

Thanks goes to the Corvus for putting Twenty Sided's note on his reader about the tragically bad Spore reviews mounting on Amazon. Over 400 one stars so far? That's an ouchie even by the widly unscientific standards that comprise Amazon ratings.

The vast majority of them? Complaining about DRM. That's not exactly a good story when Wired calls your game kinda boring.

The only person I know in RL who has played the game said it was pretty good, but I'll be honest ... a game with this much hype? I expected to be awashed in Spore Love by now.

Update: Joystiq points out that DRM slam party aside, the title is #1 on Amazon's charts. So I'm guessing no, right now there aren't a lot of execs worrying they overhyped the product.

Friendly Reminder: New Terminator Tonight

Awesome female robot. 7:00 CST. What more do you need to know?

Takahashi's Red Ring Report

I can't recommend Dean Takahashi's Xbox 360 defects: an inside history of Microsoft’s video game console woes enough. It's an excellent overview of what is, I don't mean this in any sensational manner - Dean comes to the same conclusion, one of the biggest hardware blunders in gaming history.

Read his stuff for the rundown. I think the entire tale is interesting in hindsight. For one thing, it's an amazing testament to the brand loyalty of some, if not most, 360 gamers. I've pointed out previously the American media's ability to whip Sony repeatedly for things Microsoft was given a free pass on - specifically delays and supply problems. When Microsoft couldn't get units in the store priotr to the holidays the blogosphere mood was "wait till next year." Sony wasn't treated quite so kindly.

As Sony ramped up to launch, the amount of FUD the Internet was willing to dish out on the console was moderately astounding. I honestly think this is a cultural thing. Microsoft, even though geeks love to bash them, is an American company. They speak to us in a way we understand. Sony, on the other hand, has a hard time not coming off as arrogant and weird. Microsoft is extremely savvy about using this to their advantage.

But looking at the RROD problems - it's interesting to wonder how two of the key factors of console could have played out. Specifically how much should the 360 have cost and when should it have been released? Honestly I still shake my head that the console costs what it does and lacks WiFi. But imagine how much more it might cost if Microsoft had to confirm it would still work in a year.

And I'm sure you 360 fanboys are sharpening knives about now. You can save it. You can take some assurance that Microsoft has at least shored up one of the most impressive game libraries to help combat one of the worst hardware designs. If Dean's article proves anything else - it shows that great software will get people to deal with hardware woes.

I guess console gaming really has become more like PC gaming.

Edit: Just a side note. A lot of outlets are describing this as "a retrospective". Technically that's inaccurate as new 360's are still getting the old RROD.

Game Play: Monster Madness, Grave Danger

Why exactly Monster Madness requires a subtitle I'm not entirely sure. It's a rework of the 360 title Monster Madness, Battle for Suburbia but not precisely a new episode or experience entirely.

The game follows the basic modern Gauntlet style of gameplay - coop with basic melee and missile attacks, stat upgrade paths and hoards of monsters. There's not a lot of innovation here, but what is here is done in a colorful comic style that gives a light comedic feel to the title.

So far we have a more or less competent title provided you have someone else to play with - a simpler version of Marvel Alliance basically (and in some ways, for anyone who has spent fifteen minutes purging the inventory in that game could tell, that's a good thing). The real problem is that this game has about as many bugs as it does monsters. Twice yesterday the audio just completely cut out from the game. There's no recourse it seems except to restart the game, which can kinda suck in the middle of the level.

Worse, we're pretty certain we glitched a boss fight. Unless, of course, the boss is supposed to just stand in the corner not doing anything while the only items that can hurt it stop producing is how it was designed...

Salt in the wounds is that some of the attempts to change up the gameplay don't entirely succeed. The vehicles are often a welcome change but could really use another pass on the controls. At one point the game needlessly turns into a cheap stealth sneaker except that the camera and controls almost completely force failure on the player.

I'm not saying the game is a complete waste. It's decent coop and cheaper than most other titles. As a rental with a friend it's a pretty safe bet, or if you really like coop games in general it might be worth a buy - but otherwise I'd wait for a patch.

TV Watch: Rome Seasons 1 and 2

We chewed through both seasons of Rome with some ferocity. It's pure historical fiction meets soap opera, with all the backstabbing, devious plans and Roman orgies one might expect. Getting through both seasons give the entire a show a healthy feeling of the epic structure at work here. In particular, the relationship between Lucius and Titus plays out brilliantly from beginning to end.

And sadly it seems to be an end as there doesn't look to be a Season Three on the horizon. A victim, I think, of the plot framework which would have been pretty unforgiving to anyone trying to jump into the middle of the show. The characters and their conflicts are pretty fluid and without some kind of cheat sheet it can be hard to know what's going on.

An excellent show, though, and recommend renting the DVDs highly.

Funny Thing, Technology

I had a simple goal this morning. Upgrade the Mini to Leopard, hook it up to the HDTV and see about making it into an iTunes/Torrent server. Install disc in hand, everything went horribly, horribly wrong.

The disc consistently ejected itself. Some googling offered up a few solutions which seemed to fit the scenario but nothing really worked. Resetting the PRAM allowed the DVD to at least be recognized but when the install started it would just eject once again.

What seemed to be required was a firewire cable and a spare Mac, to boot the DVD via remote for the Mini. A trip to Best Buy later I had what was apparently the very wrong firewire cable. So I went back to beating up the firmware.

Finally, and this is some hours later - it occurred to me clean the damn DVD.

It's worked fine ever since.

Funny how a four cent alcoholic tissue makes a five hundred dollar machine behave.

360 Temptation

Friend Seth came and left in a rolling cloud of beer and console gaming. He packed his 360 along with him and so I was treated to a bit of Mass Effect and Gears of War (along with a touch of Assassin's Creed).

In actuality, if there's one title which really tempts me to getting a 360, it would probably be Fable 2. The Girl and I with two player offline RPG coop? Gah. I was really under the impression Mercenaries 2 had a similar setup, but apparently not. Reviewers and people who write info summaries need to be clear - there is a huuuuuuugggggeeee distinction between online and offline coop.

Don't get me wrong, this is no PS3 lament. I love the shiny black box. It really is a superb media machine, has a great stock of online games and plays our old PS2 games wonderfully. However, some of the 360 exclusives, both disc and online based, are pretty tempting in the long run - not to mention all those old Xbox games I never check out.

I said sometime ago that this might be the first generation of consoles where I owned all the current ones while that generation was still alive. Still, I'm not sure how willing I am to jump into the hardware revision jungle and roll the dice with the old red ring of death. I think Microsoft has gotten a incredible free pass on what has to be one of the great hardware blunders of gaming history. I wish they would come out with a revision in which they could clearly say - that was the problem, we fixed it, we're good. And while hints and accusations point to one purchase or another which might be safer - I don't see a clear statement from Redmond on that matter.

Another Sign Twitter Might Be Off

Just this week two people, whom I'm not sure who they might actually be, signed up for my twitter feed.

That might not sound odd unless you go see my twitter feed. And that's the way it's been since day one. And probably the way it will remain. I've given twitter a bit of a hard rap, although I can finally get the appeal a little more as I browse Facebook status updates - essentially the same thing with, as it seems to me, less noise. I guess I live a life on the Internet where that can be a wildly lovely thing.

(Brin, Corv - sorry to have lead you to the dark cobwebs of twitter at somepoint...)

In pretty unrelated news, my old place of employ got their redesign out the door. This was a complicated affair and as I put it to my boss this morning, I'm happy to be simply whelmed.

I Declare The Following Cliche

Spent much of the last 24 hours playing video games with an old college roomie of mine. We realized that since playing Doom around the old fraternity house in the days of old that several concepts have moved into first person shooters which may now be wearing out their welcome:

Female Correspondents
Look, we all loved Cortana - but does that mean every shooter now needs an excuse to have some chick whisper instructions in my ear? We're playing Resistance and when the (already narrator) female character appears in the game, I declared "I bet she has a radio that we'll need.... yup, there it is..."

Crates
Enough said.

Transhumanism
From the undead soldiers of Doom to the Chimeran hybrids of yesteryear, with every Strogg and headcrabbed scientist in between - mutated humans have been done to death. Just stop with it already.

Dead Space Moves Up, Banned

Andrew of the clan EA dropped a note by to say that Dead Space has moved up its release date and will now drop on October 14th. Well, some places at least - apparently the title has been banned in Japan, China and Germany.

As marketing pushes go, Dead Space's has been pretty enjoyable. Watching the animated comic now off the PS3, showed off the trailer to a friend this afternoon and the ARGish No Known Survivors has plenty of appeal. It's marketing which is well designed to not just sell the product, but to expand the story around the game as well.

Game Play: D&D Tiny Adventures (Facebook)

It's almost like someone went back to my complaint about Facebook gaming and like, well, read it. Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures does not force you to hit up all your friends in order to level up - in fact they don't even embarrass themselves with one of those "click here to spam your entire address book" kind of screens.

Instead, the game offers up a simple interface, chock full of the lovely kind of artwork fans of D&D would expect, which allows you to push an adventurer off into danger and see what happens. You're control is minimal, which harkens back to the door games of old, but there's enough interaction with inventory management along with the well-written adventure events to make it interesting. As the events are time delayed, the game provides for an excellent periodic distraction throughout the day.

The social aspect allows you to help out friend's adventurers in need. Sadly, the real adventurer in need here is the game itself. The biggest problem the game has is that it doesn't always work. The server is about as reliable as an ex-girlfriend for about half the day and recently the team had to fall back to an earlier database.

Stability aside, it would be nice to see some more customization down the road. But largely, it would just be nice to be able to play the game.

For Sunday: The Front Fell Off

And yes, this is satire.

Game Play Quickies: Big Willy, The Force Unleashed Demo, Zak & Wiki and Tenchu

Generally when you're sick, if you aren't watching Robin Hood - you're playing games.

Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed (Wii)
I haven't been this wildly disappointed in a title in some time. The Girl and I are more or less fans of the series and probably would have been in line to play another one "just because" and while in general this game suffers from concepts which feel cut and pasted from the other titles - that's not the real crime here.

The real crime is that for the Wii this game was released half-cooked. The textures are simply inexcusable - sub PlayStation 2 for certain ... they'll make you wonder where your N64 controller is hiding. The HUD, and this might be some kind of odd HDTV conversion, looks miserable. There are weird additions to gameplay like hitting floating orbs to mind control which seem tacked on to appease someone who thought it would make for "good Wii play".

It's just bad, and in an cheap and ugly way.

The Force Unleashed Demo (PS3)
I think I had been warned about this in a preview - the problem with The Force Unleashed is that you'll run around slaughtering people left and right and the suddenly, jarringly, run into some boss or miniboss which gives you an absurd amount of difficulty. Even on hard I mowed down every bipedal foe in the demo except for the AT walker at the end. Which, damn you Kratos, seems to require beating up to a specific point and then engaging in some "follow the button" minigame to kill. If there was a game mechanic I wish people would think twice about using - this would be one of them.

Don't get me wrong - I'm either buying or renting this game. This is largely, though, because the Star Wars games end up being such better experiences than the movies (as the apparently wildly disappointing Clone Wars can prove). Basically if you want a good Star Wars movie these days, buy a game or call Genndy Tartakovsky.

Zak And Wiki (Wii)
Love it. Looove it. Wish I had unwrapped it when I got it so many moons ago. There's not much to say about the title since most everyone else has mooned excitedly about it - but it's an adventure title which harkens back to the good things about King's Quest with very little of the bad. Completely brilliant.

Tenchu: Wrath Of Heaven (PS2)
Remember when I bemoaned the lack of PS2 compatibility in the new PS3 models? This is the reason why. Tenchu still looks pretty decent upscaled and aside from some lingering camera issues still delivers the goods when it comes to sneaking around like a ninja, jumping on victims from above and doing very sinister animations on them.

TV Watch: Robin Hood, Season One

Being sick really kinda sucks. Sure, you get to do all of the things you normally would love to have an excuse to do - eat ice cream for dinner, shuffle around in pajamas, laze around on the couch and generally moan when someone asks you to do something responsible (this, unfortunately, turned into a kind of moaning recursive loop since The Girl was at least equally sick at the same time). You get to catch up on all sorts of video games and movies - but at the same time you feel like you're just waiting to feel better.

Basically trying to relax and have fun actually turns into a chore. It's evil.

So let me preface that my view of Robin Hood, BBC's recent television show about the classic, might be a bit colored by the above facts. That's not to say we didn't enjoy the show - and in fact devouring the entire 13 episode first season was a pretty decent chore while we shuffled about moaning like zombies.

Basically the show boils down to a very British version of Xena. The plots aren't terribly complicated, there's a bit of touch and go when it comes to history, and most of the plot points involve fight scenes involve fight scenes. It's not nearly as cheesy as the old Raimi shows, mind you, at least not usually - and by the end of the first season you see the some shadow of depth forming. The show tries admirably to flesh out Robin as a war veteran, hero of the people and lovesick puppy. When it works, it works well and when it doesn't - well, he's generally doing something tricky with a bow so you don't really care.

If anything sells the show, though, it's the Sheriff. The basic theme of the character is "someone evil who really enjoys his job" and it is played out for every ounce. Most of the other characters are moderately two dimensional, but still enjoyable and the while the show doesn't fall into the "he's good with knives" formula of story telling too much - we certainly hope the second season finds more plot motifs than "break into Nottingham Castle and get something out".

Recommended in that beach read kind of way.

Noknownsurvivors.com = fun with floating body parts

EA sent word along about the Dead Space related online puzzle / story (I won't quite call it an ARG, but you can see the similarity) NoKnownSurvivors.com, to "tell two equally tragic four chapter stories" using interactive 3D elements and what appears to be some pretty decent voice acting as well. Props to "the hub" as they call it, which would be those floating body parts which will unlock the stories as they are released.

Sadly these are the kind of things I wish I had more time to toy around with - but generally don't. Worth a poke if you've got some free time, though. If I get a chance to actually get a feel for the stories, I'll post some more.