Penny Arcade

When they stepped forward with something called a Wii Vitality Sensor, we exploded with rage.  Shortly thereafter, the sky cracked and we were reborn in a radiant pillar of divine bliss.  The announcement of a new Metroid would have brought me joy merely because I love Metroid, because there is a place in me that Metroid is fitted to.  That it would answer the nameless yearning of my heart and posit a serious take on the setting - with Team Ninja at the helm - was entirely too much to bear.

Sony’s “Agent” announcement is precisely the sort of thing you shouldn’t do when the eyes of all the world are upon you.  They suggested that Rockstar was making a game exclusively for the Playstation 3, and that it was going to be as big as Grand Theft Auto, popped up a logo, and that was it.  It was ridiculous.  It would be like a magician gesturing at a hat, suggesting that the hat in question contained a rabbit - you’ll just have to trust him - and then proceeding to the next trick.  Even the God of War demo, which should have plunged the whole earth into an eon of fiery doom, had no consummation - ending an interminable conference on a downward trajectory.  Time was, you could count on Sony to at least deliver some questionable video!  We may come to look upon those times with affection.

Peter Molyneux has no credit with me - he must always pay in advance, cash only.  I am completely impervious to him, so when he says that he’s invented some kind of digital boy this firm assertion is refracted into harmless light.  Illusions of the kind he proposes are tremendously fragile - it’s hard enough to maintain them in raw text, without the idiosyncrasies of the nested recognition systems in play with Milo.  Please understand: I love the future, and I long to live there.  I want very much to simulate a cognizant digital imp.  But this man has broken my heart so many times that it can no longer contain love.

In general, the freaky-deaky augmented video mechanisms presented by Microsoft and Sony are inert for us - that is to say, we have no reaction to them whatsoever.  Absent anything beyond minigames and puppet shows, I don’t know how to contextualize this technology.  I can’t be certain that it has ramifications of any kind for the games I like to play, the ones my friends like to play, or for the games that built this industry.      

(CW)TB out.  

i can’t get no quadrilateral

Our favorite parts of the Sony conference were the Assassin’s Creed 2 live demo and the presentation of Uncharted 2, so the recently activated code for the closed beta of Uncharted was more than welcome. 

Man, I hope they crack this thing out to a wider audience before release, because a demo this confident makes a deep impression.  Gabe and I tucked in a few rounds earlier today, Plunder and Deathmatch modes both, and it’s fucking slick.  It’s got a party system built in for quick, painless joins, Gears-style map voting, and a handful of customizations to refine your character’s capabilities.  It’s got co-op built into the same demo, but I can’t find anyone who wants to play it when the base offering is so compelling.  That’s a good problem to have.

One of the biggest announcements, at least to my mind, didn’t take place during a conference - Microsoft announced that it would be offering full game downloads for their system.  I was sort of expecting Sony and Microsoft both announce something on this level, and Sony did in a way - the PSP Go! is a device that almost entirely removes Gamestop from the equation.  Without a UMD slot, the only thing Gamestop gets to sell is the device itself - a contraption which is nothing less than a stake in their own heart.  I’m sure they’ll love that.

In reality, their power is such that they can exact a cut of your digital profits in exchange for selling your hardware.  That is in addition to artificially maintaining retail pricing for digital downloads, which were supposed to herald an era of unmitigated consumer power.  I typically opt for digital, because the convenience represents a significant value - but it might have been premature to suggest that the rise of digital necessarily represents the fall of the dedicated games retailer.

Is Final Fantasy XIV the fastest turnaround ever on a so-called “exclusive?”  I recall Assassin’s Creed being very quick as well.  We’ll see how Conviction fares, but I suspect that the prospect of making more money with the same product might come into play.

When you create a product like an MMO, you don’t begin your meetings with a discussion about how to limit your subscriber base.  Reading comment threads, you’d get the impression that Square Enix didn’t already have an MMO currently running on Microsoft’s platform.  I don’t know that it made a particularly big splash, but in the contortions MS went through to get the game on their box, they broke system’s cardinal rule:  that players need a Gold tier account to play online.  Indeed, they broke this rule so badly that eventually they had codify this sundered rule into policy.  Not only can MMOs on the 360 allow online play from Silver accounts, they can also require storage - the two things no title is supposed to do.  There’s no barrier for Square or Enix on the system - at least, no barrier they haven’t already agreed to.

With their own cross-platform engine, there’s nothing to stop Square Enix from releasing the game anywhere they damn well please.  This isn’t the first time they’ve played the platform holders off of one another, and it won’t be the last.