News!

This time, a post gathering several news items regarding gaming:

Lets start with the bad news first: Its been over a week now since actor Don S. Davis passed away, to the sorrow and grief of many, many fans. His art and different roles in films he played in (mainly known as General Hammond of Stargate SG-1) are remarkable, and I would like to stop and offer my condolences to his family.

As I looked up his IMDB page, I found he had a role in a movie not yet released, named Far Cry. By Uwe Boll. It made me think of all the previous game-based movies Boll directed before, and I couldn’t understand why he’s so persistent. Every game-based movie he ever made was a total failure. I truly appreciate the attempts to bring our favourite pixelish heroes to the big screen, but it all turns out crap. Of course, I’m still going to see it, because it has Davis in it, and its based off FarCry. Maybe this is what he wants?

Anyway, here’s the trailer to your delight:

 

 

 So that’s that with FarCry. But that’s not the end of it: it seems Max Payne will appear in his very own movie! Now, I’ve always said Max Payne had a great storyline, but it has me concerned: It might not be Uwe Boll, but overall, it’s still a game-based movie. Fun fact: Beau Bridges will play in the Max Payne movie. He also was a General in Stargate.

A slightly more cheering topic: It seems that for the very first time, us gamers can rejoice in something that has to do with lawyer Jack Thomson: Florida’s supreme court will have Thomson face a disciplinary hearing following the recommendation of the Florida Bar. Thomson is accused of, among other things, dishonoring the court of law. The final decision will be made and brought to public in September, but there is little chance for him to keep his lawyer’s license. Thomson says he may not fight video gaming in court, but his voice will be heard. Probably mostly by his neighbours. And so, at the end of this long running joke, I say: So long, and never come back!

And finally, last but not least, this is a day to be remembered in the history of gaming: Activision and Blizzard finally join arms into one corporation: Activision Blizzard corp. It may not be fancy, but they sure do take EA’s place as the largest game developing and publishing company out there. 93% of the shareholders gave their approval to this deal which makes Activision-Blizzard (lets call the Actizzard for now, shall we?) worth $18.9 billion, while EA is worth a mere $14.1 billion. So as much as I’d hate to see less and less independent companies, it might actually benefit gamers. Cheers, Actizzard!

If any of you want me to review some major event in the gaming scene, contact me via email (alon38@gmail.com), or comments.

FIFA ‘09 – PC as well?

Electronic Arts’ Sports division stated some major improvements (Sunday) in the long running soccer game series, with their upcoming FIFA ‘09. While that can be summarized to prettier graphics, improved physics and more animations, what it reminded me of and wer’e here to discuss is EA Sports’s promise not to develope any more games to the PC, beside that very FIFA ‘09.

Piracy, as we all know, is a world spread phenomenon, and anyone today knows how to download and install cracked games. This isn’t new: games have been illegaly obtained for many years, even in the DOS period (on Floppies, yep). And there have been many attempts to fight it: better protections, validations and even half monthly periodic validation was suggested (and rejected due to gamer’s protests). None of which prevented the cracking teams from doing their magic.

Thus, there is a recent trend of companies abandoning exclusive PC game developing, or even developing for consoles only. In my opinion, it shows those companies’ true abilities in handling with a crisis. A company not able of creative thinking and out-of-the-box marketing and selling, can’t exist much long. I mean, bailing out of ship that wasn’t sinking in the first place is the stupidest thing to do: hundreds of millions of new computers are bought every year, and no console has ever even got close to that. So let’s try and help EA Sports and its friends, and think of new ways to earn money:

Direct-to-PC selling: VALVe did it big time, and it appears to be working. Steam is an efficient and very easily accesible way to sell games, and you even get to cut the losses of the manufacturing a bit. Take a look at IGN’s Direct2Drive!

Cutting off the prices a bit is always considered a generous move by the buyers. Although this has to do more with the game stores, it’s not like the developers and publishers haven’t got a impact on those stores. even 5$ will be enough, it will at least hold piracy back a bit.

In-game ads: integrating ads in-games, especially online games, will be an alternative to actually selling the game or selling it in half the price. It might be annoying, but it’s far more irritating having the major publishers and developers whine about piracy.

Last but not least, one I thought of myself – recently a small website named StreamMyGame went live, and it offers a way to stream games from one machine acting as a server to a receiving machine. Now imagine whole server farms doing just that: renting game time for people, charging a small fee: lets say, 2$ an hour, an average game is 10 hours play, so you rent the entire game for 20$. This isn’t that bad and it virtually eliminates all low-end machines unable to play new games. Of course, someone’s got to lose money – that’s the computer manufacturers (Intel and AMD mostly). And of course this will only be possible in a future when upload/download speeds are much higher than today’s.

So it seems retail selling doesn’t work anymore, so instead of sticking your head in the sand, figure out a new method of earning money, making both the players and the publishers (and developers) happy.

comments?

Diablo 3

Some very exciting news were told during the opening events of the 2008 Blizzard Invitational: Diablo fans rejoice – Diablo III is on its way! Blizzard, known for its ability to excite gamers around the world, announced the return of the Diablo series, featuring battles of epical proportions in RPG style. well, the part where you choose your character gender and class is RPG, but the rest is just hack n’ slash. So, what’s the fuzz all about?

the Diablo series (1997; 2000) was one of the first to introduce the player to huge waves of enemy to kill, terminate and cut to pieces and the result was pure fun. The story was quite good as well – war between heaven and hell, save the town, the world and the princess and so on (no, not really, this isn’t super mario). In the second game – face a corrupted hero, the devil and his employees and save the girl again (this, im just making up again), but the game was pretty straight forward: killing hundreds of monsters attracted the players and created a huge fan community, expert button-mashers and blood-spillers. Some may say I underestimate the depth of the game, but overall, the game was all about killing monsters with a grin on the face. Sometimes, for hours. Oh yes, and the settings and levels of the game were great too, but who cares as long as they held enough things to slay.

Anyhow, it is quite easy to understand why Blizzard’s announcement of Diablo 3 was, maybe not surprising, but very exciting. Two new classes (if you don’t know them, your’e not worthy of reading this), and a brand new shiny graphics engine made the teaser look cooler than ever (By the way, did you hear Runescape got a new engine too?). 

What do I gather of all of this? Well, since the blog’s name is “I Think”, I’m pretty much obliged to tell you what I think. It’s Blizzard, ffs! It’s got to be awesome! They could have done a remake to Pacman, and it would have sold millions. Lately I hear my friends speaking of how shallow and banal games have recently become, and I agree. Games like Crysis (read previous post) and good ol’ Postal make the entire industry look bad. Nonetheless, when its Diablo wer’e talking about, there’s no need for it to be like, say, ES4:Oblivion, or Mass Effect. Sometimes, a game that gives you pure fun is the best game there is. Why do you think people still play CS:S (aside from being very balanced) and TF2 (and aside from being extremely funny and not very balanced recently)? Only because they give the player what a game is all about: having some fun. In that perspective, Diablo is king.

However, don’t expect much this year. Blizzard is also known for countless delays and they already sadly reported Starcraft 2 won’t launch this year. So that kinda bummed but at least we know it’s going to be very polished. One last thing (I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go), they also said a brand new game is being developed now, yet unrevealed. Some claim it may be World or Starcraft, or an entire new game. I don’t really care what it is, as long as they keep the development time shorter than Duke Nukem Forever’s.

(Last time there were no comments at all. Im doing it all for you, and invest time and, well, not money, in this, so please, please comment so I know how to improve my style and writing)

Crytek to announce a Crysis sequel

Last thursday, our favorite game developer, Crytek, announced a sequel to our favorite game, Crysis. The sequel seems to portray Crysis’ plot through another character eyes, who we met previously: Psycho. Crysis as you may all know, didn’t really quite sell as Crytek and publisher Electronic Arts had hoped it will, and it seems they are trying to squeeze the juice out of the franchise with this Crysis: Warhead game.

I only played Crysis’ demo, but from what I gathered, it’s rubbish. The so-called “plot” was apparently written on a napkin, and we all know what happened the last time someone did that. I mean, fight aliens who, from out of nowhere, decided to invade a distant planet on the edge of a standard galaxy? How original is that? And if they made it all the way to earth, couldn’t they just obliterate all life on the planet with their uber-strong-advanced-laser-pie-making technology or something? If I traveled light-years to another planet, I think some guy in a nano-suit shooting small metal chunks would be the least of my concerns. This is virtually a remake of Space Invaders!

Now lets talk about the gameplay, or the lack of it. Keyword here is “nanosuit”, which i mentioned before. You go around in a tight latex suit (worth a O_o) with some LED lights, and it appears you never really let go of the left mouse button: all there is to it is shooting. Yeah, it’s fun to occasionaly go to strength mode, grab some poor korean soldier and throw him two miles away, but even that gets dull after a while. The game also allows you to roam free throughout the island your’e on, but there’s no reason to do that, because every second wasted in the game is a second you will never get back.

What’s left of this game is its graphics engine, Cryengine 2. It looks really really good. But chances are you will never get to see its full power, since you are going to need a 3000$ machine. And to think the graphics are the selling point of the game.

So that’s the game. Definitely NOT worth what you pay for it. Anyhow, not long ago Crytek in the frenzy of game developers abandoning the PC, decided to blame the players themselves for the game not selling. “19 out of every 20 copies are illegal”, they said (rephrased). Well, why? perhaps because after you buy a machine able to run the game, sell your car, dog and grandma, you barely got cash to buy the game? or perhaps because people only buy games worth buying! and so, Crytek blamed internet piracy for their game not selling, and not the game, for not selling. It’s crap. Why would anyone buy it?

And now I return to my original statement: Crytek are trying to squeeze every drop of the franchise by releasing another game virtually similiar to the originial Crysis. It’s supposed to “handle” with the high system requirements. Right. So I say: don’t be surprised if this sequel won’t sell either.

(By the way, I would appreciate comments on my first post )