Dark Side of the Carton

Well, I will as soon as UPS delivers it later this week. I’ve finally made the jump and picked up one of the ceramic white PSP units complete with Darth Vader’s awesome mug on the back.

With this purchase, I have solidified myself firmly in the video game world as a complete and total nerd. I now own every current generation console and handheld gaming device. I have 5 current gaming devices and the amount of time I spend on them seems to be on the decline.

Ironically, my son’s time with my gaming systems seems to be on the rise. Funny how that works.

Endless Ocean and the new Advance Wars: Days of Ruin are both dropping on Monday for the Wii and DS respectively, but I got my copy of both games today. As I try to do, I am posting pictures of the “swag” that accompanied them even though it is less swag and more nifty promotional packaging I still appreciate the effort that Nintendo/Golin Harris goes through to pretty these things up for us.

Ooh. A message in a bottle. Too bad it is just the stock info sheet that comes with all the games.

Another view:

Days of Ruin came a few promo stat cards on a few of the in-game vehicles and an invitation to jump on the Wi-Fi connection tomorrow for some pre-release multi-player action. Maybe I can actually make it online then.

Sites like GameRankings, MetaCritic, and GameStats are what the lazy people of the internet use to gauge a game’s overall quality. The theory behind this is that on average, a large sampling of reviews will give you a proper perspective of the game. I would tend to agree. Being a Statistics geek, the previous statement only holds true if you have a large enough sample size. How big of a sample size is necessary? That is anyone’s guess at this point and not really the focus of this post.

Getting your site listed on these major aggregate sites is by no means easy. There is essentially a single entry path to gaining acceptance on the list, something my site still has yet to do after 5 years and 800 reviews with the exception of GameStats. Our previous attempts to get into the good graces of Game Rankings were met with a stern response about the design of our site, that the editor in question didn’t happen to like. The other reason we weren’t included was that we didn’t officially have a numeric scoring system, something we officially fixed about 6 months ago. Talking about the faults with the numeric scoring system is something I want to revisit at another time though.

One of the more interesting things you will notice when visiting any of these sites today is who they are owned by. GameRankings and MetaCritic are both owned by CNET. Guess who else is owned by CNET? That’s right, GameSpot. What about GameStats? Owned by IGN Networks, as is the popular movie site Rotten Tomatoes. These aggregate sites exist to provide a fair and unbiased look at all of the published reviews on a given game, or at least they used to.

Now before I start accusing anyone of not playing fair I took a quick look at a few sample games on all of the sites. MetaCritic sorts their external review links based on score so there is no blatant attempt to direct traffic to their sister site at GameSpot. GameRankings goes one step further and actually seems to exclude an article listing for GameSpot reviews, a move that actually surprises me quite a bit. I mean, why wouldn’t you at least include a link if you own both sites? The sorting method on GR appears to be random or sorted by a piece of data that the end users don’t have, making it difficult to find a particular outlet’s rating.

GameStats took a little different approach and included coverage from IGN’s site, but actually lists content in the reverse order that it was added to the site, leaving the top links on the page to the sites that get coverage up last. An odd method for sure.

When I set out to write this post, I figured for sure that I would see some malicious behavior using these massive aggregate sites to push traffic to sites also in their respective networks, but it doesn’t appear to be the case. In all liklihood, the staff and original owners of the sites maintained control over the sites even after being purchased by CNET or IGN Networks and have taken a hard line to ensure that they don’t appear to come off as biased.

Now if I could only get myself on the GameRankings list…

I’ve been waiting for a good time to pick up a PS3 since it launched just over a year ago and that time finally arrived. With the almost extinction of the 20GB and 60GB models available for purchase I decided to pick up a refurbished 60GB model from Overstock this evening for about $470, $129 less than it’s original retail price. Considering this was probably my last chance to pick up a console that had the internal PS2 hardware necessary for full backwards compatibility, it was worth the cost. It even comes with a copy of Motorstorm and just might qualify for the 5 Free Blu-Ray promotion.

At any rate, I can’t wait for it to get here so I can pick up the newest installment of the Ratchet & Clank series. I also can’t wait to start building my Blu-Ray library. There are so many good movies out on Blu-Ray that I just can’t wait to see in HD.

If you aren’t familiar with the situation, here is a brief summary. Rock Band launches to massive fanfare and clamor for additional guitars to make a full band. Standalone guitars won’t be available until sometime next year. Standalone Guitar Hero guitars ARE available so why not use them? This is a non-issue for Xbox 360 owners as Microsoft required a standard controller configuration from both developers. Sony, however, did not. Where that leaves us is that the Guitar Hero controller does not work on the PS3. Not without a patch that is.

This is where things get tricky. Rumors trickled out that Harmonix had prepped and tested a patch for the PS3 version of Rock Band that would allow gamers to use the GH controllers. Activision, however, kindly told Sony not to allow Harmonix to release the patch effectively ensuring that their controllers couldn’t be used on a competitors game.

You can’t really blame Activision for this move. I mean, initially it sounded like a dick move, but the more I think about it the more I side with Activision. If you let anyone use your controllers, then others can skip the need to develop a controller and profit greatly on the heels of your work.

Back to the story at hand, Activision looks like the bad guy preventing gamers from using something they already own to play another game. In reality, Activision went on record saying that they gave Harmonix the opportunity to work with them for the right to also use the GH controllers. What this means in PR talk is “We told Harmonix they could use our technology with Rock Band for $XX.xx and they said no dice.”

Again, I have to side with Activision. It’s not Activision’s fault that:

1. There are no stand alone Rock Band controllers
2. The Rock Band hardware is having serious issues aka The guitars just don’t work

I haven’t really been keeping up with that the gamers think of the whole situation, but I personally don’t see anything wrong with what Activision is doing. The only bit of advice I have for anyone considering jumping into this fiasco is to buy the Xbox 360 version of Rock Band and forget this ever happened.

Playing video games is a great way to have some fun and kill some time. What happens when you shift that form of entertainment from a hobby to work? Over the past 5 years, I’ve been rushing through games all in the name of doing write-ups for Snackbar Games, and while I love both aspects of what that entails, I think it’s ruining the joy of playing video games for me. I’ve got a stack of new and awesome games at home and I can’t bring myself to even turn them on right now. It’s a wholly dis-heartening thing to be experiencing.

I know all things happen in cycles and I am just going through the regular burn out phase, but man it’s hard to get motivated to pop in a game and play enough of it to actually do a proper review without sacrificing all of my integrity and bullshitting through it.

I seriously hope I can get out of this rut soon as I am missing out on some seriously good games right now.

I’m a big fan of skateboarding games for some reason. In High School I was an “aggressive rollerblader”, a term that I hate to this day. It just sounds so… gay. I mean, skateboard just kind of rolls off the tongue and “ag-gres-ive roll-er-blade-er” doesn’t. In fact, it kind of struggles to make it to the edge of your tongue and then trips and falls off in spectacular fashion.

At any rate, I love skateboarding games. The market to date has been totally dominated by a little series named Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. EA decided to challenge Activision’s dominance and NeverSoft’s formula with their own title that emphasized somewhat realistic moves and a real hands on approach to controlling the skater and the board. What they ended up with was skate.

I had a pretty tough time jumping into skate. I kept wanting to Press A to do an ollie or jump. This is not how things work in skate. You have to Flick-It to jump. Basically the whole paradigm of pressing A to jump and then execute the trick in the air is out the window. skate allows you and forces you to be more hands on by essentially controlling the feet of your skater with your right analog stick. Hold down and then flick up to do an ollie. Slight variations of direction combined with slight rolls of the stick create an endless stream of wicked tricks. Once I got over the massive learning curve and broke free from the years of THPS training, I really got into the title and I am loving it.

There is nothing easy about executing some of these tricks, but it takes patience and a calm, collected, composure to really stick some of these tricks in the heat of the moment. I’ve still got a long way to go in this game, but so far I think EA did an amazing job building a new title from the ground up that is going to change the genre in a big way.

My brother let me borrow his copy of Call of Duty 4 to check out and I just played through the first 2 missions. Graphically, it’s very impressive and so realistic I felt like I was playing a movie. Gameplay wise though I felt like I was playing a squad based game like Ghost Recon and my team was doing most of the work and I was along for the ride. If the entire game is like this, I doubt I’d sing very high praises about “playing” it. I’ll try and get through the at least Act I before I am too harsh or critical of the way the game plays.

Super Mario Galaxy just showed up at the house and with it came a pretty nifty Commemorative Coin. Apparently these coins were given out for pre-ordering the game, although I am not sure which store was actually giving them out. Regardless, here are a few pictures of the swag.

Back when I had a disposable income that would buy more than a pack of chewing gun I used to buy all sorts of expensive gadgets. Those days are long gone. Having a family tends to do that, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. The reality is that having a family keeps things in focus for me and forces me to be this frugal person. Trust me when I say that I’ve become a total bargain shopper. I don’t buy anything at full price anymore and that is ok.

Switching gears a bit, the next generation console war is pointless. I mean, the competition generated by the ebb and flow of the industry is good for everyone involved. The next generation dvd format war, however, is totally stupid. So stupid that I sometimes want to bang my head against the wall until I pass out. Ok, I’m not that invested in the format war that I’d knock myself out over it, but it still irritates me.

From an IT standpoint I really like Blu-Ray. The higher disc capacity rocks and the idea of a 4 or 8 layer disc with 25-50GB per layer makes me salivate. On the other hand, I don’t trust Sony and their licensing. I also don’t want my old DVD collection to be useless and have to keep another player around to play them. HD-DVD satisfies that aspect of my needs.

The other factor is price. HD-DVD players are dropping like rocks in price and the Blu-Ray ones are not dropping as quick. With that said, Wal-Mart went all Black Friday a little early today with a special on Toshiba’s HD-A2 HD-DVD player. They had the things marked down to $98. $98 borders on insanity and would definitely move a lot of players. I know it convinced me to go buy one, and at present the only way a Blu-Ray player is going in my home is if I somehow end up with a PS3.

I also bought Transformers on HD-DVD. Now I can’t wait to get this setup and running. I’m so very excited. $10 says I can’t find my extra HDMI cable now that I need it.