With the end of March upon us, we make the translation from crazy game release period to crazy game announcement period. A few bits and bobs were revealed at
GDC this week, but we’ll start seeing the real juicy stuff in the next 2-3 months, particularly with the apparently re-energised E3 happening in June. I think this year we’re going to see a lot more games released during the American summer time – the current release schedule already has
Ghostbusters,
InFamous, and
The Sims 3 are already lined up for the first month. Is possible that gaming sales could top the summer box office?
This week
The Warp Pipe will share a bunch of random thoughts and observations on material vaguely related to video games.
Absent-minded Pondering
When it comes to choosing subjects for a column, I often have good ideas that have to be left by the wayside because they simply don’t have enough meat to fill a full edition, or tend to be issues that seem to resonate more with me than anyone else I know. This week, I thought I’d run through a few of these recurring issues in summary form to just get them out of my head and out into the Internets.
- Pacing seems to be becoming a major issue as games take on more movie-like forms. Some games just take too long to get going, while others show their best hand too early. I like to see a game start out with a bang before getting down to business – could you imagine what something like Star Wars would have been like if it was just C3PO and R2D2 roaming around Tatooine for the first half hour?
- There are still a lot of complaints about the length of games, particularly since they’ve become shorter in the last 5 years. How many people finish the games they buy, and what proportion of gamers is seriously bothered by short games? How big is the average backlog and how far back does it go? I know I’m not the average gamer, but mine is getting dangerously close to 250, and I’ve still got games I bought close to ten years ago that are not yet beaten.
- My fiancée has a tendency to get offended when male gamers recommend that other male gamers use games like Cooking Mama to get their girlfriends into gaming. Why do some men think that women want to play games about mundane tasks like cooking? Why do some men insist on forcing video games upon their significant other? What makes a game more appealing to the female audience without being “too girly”? Five points to whoever is daring enough to suggest Nagging Mama.
- Is there any inherent advantage in having a staggered release system for games on the Virtual Console, PS1 Classics on PlayStation Network and Xbox Originals on Xbox Live Marketplace? Surely it would benefit from an approach similar to iTunes, where all of the stuff goes up at once. I honestly thought we’d see a lot more promotional releases, like Super Metroid being released the same week as Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, but it just doesn’t seem to be happening.
- MadWorld appears to have raised the seemingly dormant issue of low quality 50Hz conversions. How many people still play video games on a TV set that’s incapable of displaying 60Hz? I’m pretty sure it costs more to buy one of the current consoles than it does to buy a TV capable of running multiregion signals. More games on each system are coming out 60Hz only – will they cut the cord on them next generation and give us US systems and software, or will we be chained to Europe forever? I’m prepared to give up the “U’s” in my words to get cheaper and faster games.
- Does anyone else feel like game worlds are becoming a whole lot less interactive? I know that increased development costs probably have a lot to do with it, but games like Killzone 2 and Resident Evil 5 have a distinctly static feeling. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but 9 years ago, I thought Deus Ex’s level of interactivity and immersion would inspire more games in the future.
- OnLive seems to be dropping a few jaws at GDC, but I’m curious to see how it runs in a real world environment. It’s got to be at least five years off being viable – and that’s for the rest of the world, not a broadband backwater like Australia. A few people have being eyeing cloud computing as the future of gaming – Ken Kutaragi brought it up on a couple of occasions in the last decade. I guess we’ll have to just wait and see.
- The general consensus about special editions seems to be that they just aren’t worth the extra dough. On the other hand, many game companies produce really awesome press kits that really put to shame anything that comes out on store shelves (Street Fighter IV immediately springs to mind). If they can give these out to outlets that don’t produce reviews, surely they could produce a few extra units to sell on their websites to die-hard fans for a little extra. I’m sure a few retailers would be happy to see the end of products like the Halo 3 cat helmet edition.
- Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games seems to be singlehandedly keeping Sega alive, and they’re going to do one for the Winter Olympics – good for them. Surely they could produce a game featuring the two franchises that’s actually somewhat appealing? A Mario vs. Sonic platformer or RPG is guaranteed to sell just as many copies. I know I do a lot of armchair management regarding the Sonic franchise and Sega as a whole in this column, but after the relative failure of Sonic 2006, Sonic Chronicles and Sonic Unleashed at retail, I feel it’s justified. Surely someone there has a Saturn and a copy of Sonic Jam lying around.
- The Xbox 360 turns 4 this November, and the PlayStation 3 and Wii turn 3, which would normally suggest we’re past the halfway point of the hardware cycle. Where are we really? It seems like sales of each of the three formats are starting to ramp up, and the PS3 and Wii are yet to have significant price drops. I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve still got a long way to go before we see new hardware, and can’t imagine what they’re going to do next.
| 
Just because a girl can cook doesn’t mean she wants to play a video game about it |
MadWorld has been gimped for PAL gamers |
Crocs are only half as deadly as knee-high piles of rubble |
There’s more they can do with this crossover |
Are we still gearing up, or are we on the home stretch? |
)
)
)
)
)
More News
Suggest News
RSS Feeds
Digest Subscriptions
