SteveStreeting.com

I read today that it’s estimated 90% of people playing the full PC version of World Of Goo have a pirated copy (note: the authors 2Dboy chose not to include any copy protection). Edit: For those being pedantic about this figure, here’s how it was estimated; but arguing the exact number is chronically missing the point.

You see, this is why PC gamers can’t have nice things anymore. It’s why desperate publishers reach for horrible, broken DRM measures to try to stamp out piracy, universally failing of course and often upsetting the small minority of paying customers they have left into the bargain. This is why games companies like closed, proprietary boxes which are harder to crack (without resorting to often detectable hardware modification). It’s sad, because it’s these jerks which are increasingly making the PC primarily ‘the WOW platform’.

People who rip off the good work of hard-working small developers like this are, without exception, reprehensible, despicable little sods. No excuses - don’t give me that crap that you pirated it because you didn’t know if you’d like it; play the damn demo instead. And if you couldn’t afford it - well, if you can’t afford something you don’t get to have it, you whining, self-righteous little crybaby.

Everyone who complains about copy protection on Steam, and DRM in general should stop and do something practical instead. Ask PC gamers you know or encounter about how many pirated games they have in their collection. Then, kick them in the nuts (because let’s face it, most of them are going to be male) precisely that number of times. Steel toe-caps are an optional but recommended accessory. Make a note to do this every week until they buy real copies.

I can understand (but not condone) poor students dabbling in pirated super-expensive pro software that they couldn’t possibly afford, in order to expand their education (luckily, most companies do educational or cut-down versions these says of course). But for frivalous entertainment, when the price isn’t high, and especially when this is a small company who happens to have come up with something great and needs a revenue stream to do more great things, it’s just unforgiveable.

But, no doubt the little buggers will continue to get away with it, and turn the PC into a place where only subscription-based products will turn a reasonable profit for their creators, and self-contained product won’t sell well enough whether they’re crippled with DRM or not. No doubt the pirates will be justifying their actions with stupid excuses while they ride the platform into the grave. Well done, gitbags.

Serious games are big these days. Whether it’s training firefighters, soldiers, plant operators or surgeons, the benefits of a simulated environment in which people can hone their real-world skills is widely recognised. Now, with the impending release of Left 4 Dead, we have the necessary training environment to prepare ourselves for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. You’ll be thanking those foresighted chaps at Valve in due time, mark my words.

I just picked up the demo today - on PC, because if there’s one thing that’s going to increase the likelihood of the recently dead opening your skull and spreading your grey matter on water biscuits, it’s being limited to a fixed turning speed. Somehow being able to flail wildly and spray bullets in a 360 degree arc while squealing like a girl makes me feel more in control of those high-pressure situations.

So, it was pretty much what I expected, only more so in some areas and less so in others. I expect I should probably get slightly more specific if I’m to maintain this tenuous ruse of being some kind of reviewer, so here we go.

If you’ve seen Dawn of the Dead, you pretty much know what to expect in terms of the rank-and-file zombie experience; ie zombies that do the traditional zombie shamble when they’re unaware of you, but when they are alerted to you they begin to sprint like Ben Johnson, also climbing over fences, up to higher floors, leaping over cars etc - it’s very difficult to feel safe anywhere (except for a particularly comforting broom cupboard I found on the first level). I’m actually really impressed at the number of zombies they managed to get running at you at once - you think it’s getting crowded and then another 10 sprint round the corner. Certain events also trigger what is best described as a ‘zombie rush’ - this can be setting off a car alarm (which infuriates and attracts more zombies), but also getting covered in the bile from an exploding ‘boomer’ (basically a fat inflatable zombie), which attracts the little blighters like moths to a flame. Also, your view is distorted while this happens, looking convincingly like you’re peering through thick liquid, which is horrific as you see the shapes of many zombies homing in on you.

Other ’special’ zombies seem to be mainly designed to bring the co-op elements into sharper focus, since all of them have a special attack which renders the victim helpless and in need of rescuing by comrades - the ‘hunters’ are very fast and have a tendency to leap onto you, pinning you to the ground, the ’smokers’ (recognisable by the hacking cough and the fact that they disintegrate into a cloud of noxious gas) fire out some kind of ‘toungue’ which reels you in if hit, much like a mobile version of the barnacles in Half Life. The ‘witch’ seems to be an extra-tough zombie that you’re supposed to sneak past but goes nuts for the first person to disturb her, again needing rescuing.

Overall, the feeling of being trapped in a zombie-infested city with 3 other companions is pulled off extremely well. The zombie hordes are highly convincing, the music is dynamic and always puts you on edge, and the co-op element works well, you really do feel that you need to stick together. I played single player with AI comrades - I tried briefly with other random people but succumbed to the usual annoyances of kids who won’t shut the hell up on voice chat, or who generally behave irritatingly (yes, you’re teabagging a zombie, how very droll and original). The ongoing problem with multiplayer of course is that it involves other people. But if you have a group of reasonable people (ie actual friends) I think it would be huge fun.

The action is allegedly controlled by AI which balances the experience dynamically, meaning that you don’t get the same experience twice. I can’t really comment on that yet, only having gone through the demo once, but it does seem to flow pretty well. In the full game, a person can take control of that, directing zombies and changing music, apparently. That sounds interesting.

There are some downsides though. Despite it being very creepy, and the variety of the different types of zombies throwing a few curve balls in there, and the exquisite moments of panic that can be created by a car alarm going off or a boomer covering you in goo, it does often feel a bit like a shooting gallery, just in slightly different surroundings each time. I wasn’t bored in the demo, but I wonder if after a few more levels I might start to be. You start to get a sense that after it’s been quiet for a while, there’s going to be another ‘zombie rush’ soon, so you start scoping out the potential entry points. Sometimes it surprises, with zombies bursting through walls, windows and doors, over railings and up through ruined floors, but I wonder whether it might get a bit predictable. I also wonder if that would matter so much; maybe the appeal of co-op zombie massacre in different surroundings doesn’t get old that fast. Difficult to say.

I’m also not sure about the decision of giving the pistols infinite ammo. Sure, the other weapons are far better and you really like to conserve ammo on those, but I quickly settled on a strategy of using the pistols for distant enemies and moments of reduced peril, and flip to the bigger firepower when things got hairy. I never felt in danger of running out of ammo - the main peril really came from just large zombie rushes, not from any individual ones. I think there’s less tension this way, knowing you’ll never really be out of ammo so it takes a big wave of undead to really put you in danger (or a special attack). One of the terrifying things in the Resident Evils and System Shocks was the thought of having to face horrific creatures armed with only your travel toothbrush, and that made you treasure each bullet and watch that depleting ammo gauge with beads of sweat forming at your temples.

So, it’s good fun, but I’m not sure if I’ll buy it as a full retail game. I’d be quite happy for this to be in something like the Orange Box, but on it’s own? I’m not sure. I think I’ll wait for the reviews of the full game.

This is kind of interesting, because I’ve certainly noticed the noise that Fable 2’s data streaming causes:

I only have a regular old-skool 20GB HDD in my 360, but I seem to constantly have around 12GB free anyway so I’d be willing to burn 6.8GB on this kind of noise reduction.

Based on the demo, Mirror’s Edge is one of those games that I really want to love, but in the end just end up respecting from a discrete distance.

As a milestone in the game industry’s development, it’s a great game. The visuals are refreshing, and the premise of a first-person game where the aim is not to have to shoot people is a welcome change. Technically, the impression of embodying a character who leaps and jumps and rebounds from every feasible urban surface is well realised, to the extent that when you’re hanging from a ledge and want to look around, you can see yourself let go with one hand in order to do so.

However, the choice of view also has some problems. Since in terms of mechanics this is mainly a platform game concentrating on finding and exploiting escape routes, I found the first-person view very restricting, because it cuts out all peripheral vision, when in practice being able to see what’s to either side of you, and above and below you quickly is absolutely paramount. I think if I was on a PC I might have found it less restricting, because I could use a mouse flick to quickly cast a glance around without materially affecting my runner’s trajectory, but with 2-stick control you can’t really do that, meaning the restrictions on the view meant it felt very much like I was occupying a small metal cockpit with a small front windscreen on top of a robot body, piloting it with a slightly clunky interface, rather than truly embodying an athlete. On relatively straight runs it’s ok, but as soon as you need to look around, it gets awkward and it’s all too easy to miss things in the rush, and have to fall back on repeat plays - you really need to know the level before you can leap around the more complex parts of it. I can’t help but feel that a third person view would have made the whole process of navigating through the world much smoother because it would naturally give you back that  all-important peripheral vision, but of course that would have eliminated the major selling point of the game. Tough one.

Secondly, it makes me want to barf. All that bobbing around and (worse) forward rolling certainly does add to the atmosphere, but if you get motion sickness like I do, it isn’t pleasant. After playing through the demo in 30 minutes I had a raging headache and felt slightly ill - not quite the Penny Arcade result, but I can see where their inspiration came from.

Lastly, the platforming is pretty annoying at times. The game is highly unforgiving about grabbing on to drainpipes for example; if you miss it by 30cm or so you’ll be plummetting to your death pretty quickly. The restricted peripheral vision doesn’t help in this regard, timing jumps can be difficult when you can’t see your feet (of course, you can look down to see them, but then you can’t see where you’re going). Again a mouse would help here for quick glances, and perhaps with time this would become more natural, but I can’t help thinking that being a little more lenient with the jumping mechanic would make the whole experience a little smoother.I also have no idea why they chose to use the 2 shoulder buttons for jump / crouch, it feels seriously unnatural when you’ve been programmed to use the primary face button for jumping for years. Maybe they thought that it would feel more intuitive (top shoulder button = jump, below shoulder trigger = crouch) but in practice I found it hugely awkward and often ended up using the wrong one in pressured moments - a simple A to jump and B to crouch would have been much more natural and more consistent with other games. Not the control system I would have picked.

So, a very interesting game, but not one I’ll be buying, mostly because of the motion sickness aspect. If it wasn’t for that I’d consider getting it just because I like to support new ideas, but I would stick to the PC version so looking around to search for routes is snappier, and would alleviate the ‘boxed in’ feeling a little.

User generated content is currently something of a media darling in the game industry. Of course, it’s actually nothing new - gamers on open platforms like PC and the home computers before it have been creating mods and new content for their games for a couple of decades now. What’s different now with the advent of yet another acronym to remember (UGC) is that the concept has finally come to the home consoles, those friendly ‘turn on and play’ devices.

On paper, it sounds great - finally, people using consumer-friendly boxes can be creative without having to hunt down FAQs on the internet and learn how to tame often esoteric toolsets (although many people, me included, find this part of the fun of course). All the tools you need are presented in the box, together with a way to distribute them to your friends and the wider internet. But, as ever, the downside is related to the fiefdoms of control the consoles always operate within.

Guitar Hero : World Tour and Little Big Planet are the two most recognised sources of console UGC right now, and both are subject to many media reports of users’ carefully crafted content being deleted by moderators, due to copyright concerns. Any cover of a commercial song, or even a game tune, is summarily removed from GH:WT (as was widely predicted), and now levels which are in homage of titles like Mario are getting removed from Little Big Planet too. It’s perfectly understandable of course; the companies running the servers on which the content sits cannot afford to be sued over it, so are taking the cautious route and pre-empting any problems. But it also shows that centrally controlling content is capable of stunting the otherwise grand promise of user generated content.

The Internet is as successful as it is because control is distributed. For better or worse, you can find publish pretty much anything, and that makes it what it is - a sea of dubious quality data from which search indexes, linking and recommendations turn into a usable, ever mutating wonderland. UGC has this potential in the gaming space, but it can never fully realise it while content is regulated at a central source. It’s similar to the way fanfic and fanart are always popular, but organised publishers of it get sued these days, so the place to really find it is on smaller, distributed fan sites, not central corporate ones. Console UGC is certainly good fun, and better than no UGC at all, but the fact that it may only be published in one place means Big Brother is always controlling what can and cannot be published, and that is the antithesis of the principle of personal creativity. Creativity wants to be free, not penned in by what a central source says it can and cannot express; if I want to create a LBP level where Link and Mario belch a cover version of Bohemian Rhapsody, I damn well should be able to. But, that won’t happen in the control-obsessed world of the console any time soon I’m sure.

I’m about 8 hours into Fable 2 now, and I feel I have at least some ability to give an impression of the game, although due to it’s nature, I do have to put a big warning sticker on this saying ‘work in progress’ - because one of the main things about Fable 2 is that it’s a slow burner. You really, really need to spend a number of hours with it before you really start to settle in.

The Bad

Let’s get the negative things out the way, because I do actually want to finish on an overall positive here. My first impressions were a bit disappointing to be honest. The ‘child’ sequence was a little dull, filled with very simple fetch quests and dialogue that was far too slow paced, despite being well acted. In particular there’s an odd pause between almost all the sentences that really has you tapping your foot at times waiting for them to get the hell on with it.

The next disappointing thing was that local co-op really doesn’t work very well. The second player is limited to a predefined henchman (or henchwoman in our case), who in essence gets very little out of the play experience beyond tagging along and being there for fights (since they can’t interact with objects or people) and the fact that the camera has to accommodate two players becomes quickly unwieldy. After a few hours of playing it together we gave up and are now playing solo, and are enjoying it much more. It’s a shame, because co-op play was one of the things we were looking forward to.

Lastly, the main quest is (so far) a fairly typical hackneyed fantasy story - you are born ’special’ and must fulfil your destiny to defeat the evil villain who would destroy the world, yadda yadda. It really doesn’t do the rest of the game justice. I’ve played enough RPGs (and read enough fantasy books) by now that I wince visibly whenever someone uses this old crutch as a storyline, there’s really no excuse for it. Go read some Guy Gavriel Kay or Neil Gaiman and get some new ideas for goodness sakes. Whether Fable 2 is actually just setting this up for a bit of genre parody that’ll all twist into something original later I’m not sure, because the rest of the game certainly shows far more imagination, but so far the main quest is very straight-laced and really not the most inspired of plotlines.

The Good

Ok, so that’s all the weaker bits out of the way. Despite these issues, Fable 2 is actually a hell of a lot of fun.

Firstly, it looks lovely. The world is fun to explore because it’s fairly densely populated with interesting landmarks and vistas, in contrast to something like Oblivion which had a huge area to explore but which consisted of far too much identical looking forest. Someone’s been reading GPU Gems 3, because they have a lovely crepuscular rays implementation (translation: god rays) that I can watch all day. I like the setting too - it’s not typical fantasy (despite the cliches in the main quest), it’s more like a fantastical twist on a Victorian world, kind of like Van Helsing or the Brothers Grimm (in atmosphere, not quality). In short, the world is sumptously realised in almost every way and is a joy to just wander around. There’s a very occasional graphical glitch where if a new area comes quickly into view (say seeing into another street through the gap between two houses), it appears to pop in a frame too late - I’m guessing this is either down to an occlusion culling lag, or asset streaming - but it’s really only noticeable to graphics geeks like me who use it to try to figure out what they’re doing behind the scenes.

Secondly, the world is full of fascinating and original things that put the main story to shame. The incidental encounters & side quests are very entertaining; the world is awash with NPCs going about their business, and they all behave rather realistically, whether you’re trying to charm the pants off them, or putting the willies up them by summoning undead in the market (hey, who else is going to carry my shopping?). Side quests are abound, and humour is a very common theme - such as being asked to retrieve the Normanomicon (the Book of the Extremely Dead) in an obvious parody of Evil Dead III. The characters are often very amusing, and the outcomes sometimes surprising. Like the best of western RPGs, you have a lot of flexibility in what you do with your time - I’m personally playing an evil character because the lure was just too tempting, and so many of the ‘underside’ characters are more fun to be around, in a comically nefarious way. As soon as I realised I could boost my advancement in the ‘Temple of Shadows Reward Points Scheme’ by sacrificing my spouse (rather than random strangers) on the Wheel of Misfortune, I was running back to the marital home with an evil chuckle. She was getting a bit annoying anyway  It was pretty much a downward spiral into villainy from there on, and I’m loving it.

My wife and I are taking different paths through the game - I’m ripping off my customers (I own a humble meat stall right now, plans to expand later), doing the odd bit of stealing, extortion, and of course the regular sacrifices probably count against me (although not as much as you might think - you appear to need to try quite hard to attain the pinnacle of dastardly evil), while she is pursuing a far more honourable path, and we’re already getting treated quite differently. Children run away from me in the street and people mutter about what happened to my innocent victims when I pass, and I’m currently sporting a small pair of horns and a dog which now has disconcertingly red eyes I get store discounts by making people afraid of me, rather than buttering them up like my wife is doing.

At the end of the day it’s these little things that make Fable 2 fun. You can spend entire days ignoring the main quest and finding things to mess about with. I’m getting a bit fat thanks to scoffing (cheaper) food for healing; my character did indeed eat all the pies. I amused the townfolk by sporting a fabulous mullet for a short period. I tricked the monks at the temple of light into following me into the temple of shadows to be sacrificed, by swaying them with charitable donations. I’ve been pursued halfway across town by a gay weapons merchant who wouldn’t take no for an answer. While the side quests in Oblivion ultimately put me off, since they were as boring as they were crushingly numerous, the ancilliary distractions in Fable 2 are what keep me coming back. From the numerous silly achievements (like bygamy and chicken punting), to the bonus gargoyles that you have to hunt out and shoot, a bit like Zelda secrets, that taunt you incessantly in a Scottish accent to give you a clue that they’re around, it’s all a bit daft but a lot of fun to boot. Oh, and you absolutely have to read all the descriptions of all the items, there are some hidden gems of comedy writing in there that are among the most entertaining elements.

On the core gameplay experience, the fighting is quite fun once you get a few skill enhancements, allowing you to aim your ranged weapons more specifically and perform special attacks. The spell system is simple but workable, and the spells that are provided are entertaining. Exploration is very solid, the world is not large compared to some games, but it’s certainly large enough for me and is dense; seeking out hidden secrets is entertaining and again very Zelda-like. The dog is done very well indeed, he’s a genuinely useful companion, alerting you to danger and finding hidden treasure, as well as savaging your enemies when they’re knocked down. He’s very convincingly animated meaning it’s very easy to get attached to him - even if you do end up turning him into something from the Omen through your own misdeeds like I have.

Conclusion

I think if you’re the kind of person that likes linear, heavily story-driven RPGs (like JRPGs), or wants hundreds of hours of gameplay to discover (like Oblivion), Fable 2 might be disappointing for you, because there are games out there already that have done these aspects better.  However, if you like your games to be compact and perfectly formed,  infused with a sense of humour, a lot of character, and like to spend time messing about with things seeing what’s possible, Fable 2 delivers that humour, quality and flexibility in spades; you just need to give it a bit of time.

In terms of the core gameplay experience I would definitely say it feels more like a weird mixture of Zelda and GTA, rather than a ‘traditional’ RPG. It’s kind of like Zelda with a wicked sense of humour, an evolving character & world, bucketloads more freedom, and random sex & violence. Put it this way, if Navi were in Fable 2, you’d have the option of spit-roasting her, marrying her, or selling her to a travelling freak show. And who wouldn’t want that?

Overall then, recommended.

Some of the Rock Band full-album DLC I’ve been really looking forward to is finally getting released next week; The Colour and the Shape by Foo Fighters. Finally I can play Monkey Wrench again (it was in Guitar Hero 2 - although only in cover form), plus the bonus of classics like My Hero, Hey! Johnny Park and - well, there really aren’t any bad tracks on this album.

The only shame is that I have the remastered & extended version of the album, which includes an extra 6 tracks, but none of those have made it in, it’s strictly the original version of the album. Ah well, can’t complain really.

Now, please please please can we have DOA and The Pretender?

Oh, and did you notice they actually spelt ‘Colour’ correctly

Edit: The MTV Multiplayer Blog now has a write up of using GH:WT drums with Rock Band too.

I’m still of the opinion that Harmonix make the most fun music software, and a lot of veteran players agree with me (except Eurogamer, who said GH3 was ‘better in every way’ than GH2, which IMO is total nonsense). However, Red Octane tend to make good hardware - personally although I own both I much prefer the Rock Band Strat to the GH3 Les Paul, but I know I’m in a minority there even among RB fans. The GH:WT drums have been getting some very good reviews, despite a few sensitivity issues which sound like they’re being addressed (Activision is going to allow you to download a PC-based software package that you can use to tweak the sensitivity on the drums, which is pretty damn cool).

Therefore, given the cross-compatibility between the instruments now - on PS3 GH:WT drums don’t work on RB2 yet but that sounds like it’s being fixed - what would be the best route for drum hardware, assuming Rock Band 2 is going to be your main choice of software? Does the cross-compatibility really work in practice, and is it the best route even if it does?

Firstly, here’s a video of someone using GH:WT drums with RB2:

Sounds like it works pretty well, the hardware is obviously good and it functions in RB2 mostly the way you’d expect. Maybe a little confusing in the mapping, since it’s designed for a different game, and it’s a real shame that only one cymbal does anything (the hi-hat); the crash cymbal doesn’t work. Also he mentions like most people that the weak point of the GH:WT drums is the pedal, since it’s plastic rather than metal like the RB2 pedal, and some people find it moves around a bit too much. I’m guessing that mods will appear for that though, just like they did for the weaknesses in the RB1 drums.

An alternative to get a comparable version of the functionality is to use the RB2 drums and mod them with cymbals. The RB2 kit has 3 cymbal inputs, and several companies produce optional add-ons (Mad Catz officially, other companies unofficially), like this (this is the official set):

The difference here is that you’ve had to buy the cymbals separately, but all 3 of them actually work with RB2 instead of just the hi-hat as with the GH:WT drums. but, of course it costs you a little extra (although that could be offset by not having to buy a pedal reinforcer since RB2’s pedal is already metal).

Personally I don’t think I’ll switch my modded drums just yet, which work well, unless they die - at which point I’ll have to consider whether to go down the RB2, GH:WT or Ion drumset path. But for those buying hardware soon, assuming RB2 being the main software you use, the pros/cons would seem to stack up like this:

Obviously the Ion is out there on its own, but when comparing the RB2 and GH:WT kit it’s actually closer than I thought. I expected GH:WT drums to be a no-brainer, but the fact that in practice only one cymbal works with RB2, plus the fact that you’ll probably want to mod the pedal anyway, makes it a much closer race.

My conclusion - I think if you’re not the modding type, then the GH:WT drums would be a better bet out of the box - even if only one cymbal works with RB2, it’s still raised so will probably make it feel more realistic than RB2’s kit out of the box - and presumably you just hope you don’t snap the pedal (and experience with RB1 suggests some might). However, if you’re looking for more long-term and are willing to do a little modding and add the cymbals to RB2, I think the RB2 kit looks a little better, because you can get up to 3 cymbals working the way they should and the mapping from software to what you play is clearer. Also, although within the game the cymbals just duplicate the pads to retain compatibility, in the drum trainer they are all separate inputs (so a max of 8 separate inputs compared to 5 on the GHWT kit when used with RB2); kick pedal, 1 snare, 3 toms, hi-hat, crash and ride cymbals) so if you’re looking to learn how to play drums properly it’s a pretty good bet if you don’t want to splash out on a real drumkit (or the Ion). There’s also the possibility that in future Harmonix games they might start adding gameplay elements for these separate cymbals too. I think if my RB1 modded drums die, that’s what I’d go for, unless I’m feeling flush enough to go large with the Ion kit, because I don’t mind spending a little extra to mod my drums (as I’ve done already). As ever, you may prefer otherwise but hopefully this adds a little more concrete information for you to base that on.

Damn - the Christmas glut hasn’t even started yet, and there are already too many games for me to play. I’m at the stage where I don’t actually have to wait excitedly for any games, on account of the fact that I’ll be so distracted by the current set of games I don’t have time to play properly that the new ones will still turn up early enough for me to have trouble accommodating them.

Fable 2 just came out, which I’ve played for all of an hour or so on account of being away all week, and now catching up with what I missed while away. I still have Rock Band content to catch up on since I’ve been avoiding playing lots for the last 2-3 weeks while my back healed, and I didn’t trust myself with the drums. I’m 10 hours into both Okami and Professor Lanyon and only managing about an hour a week tops on either of them. Geometry Wars 2 still tends to devour my teeny-weeny time slots (having finished the clever Braid). And in addition there’s a few things out now that look good; Dead Space looks great (if a bit of a rip-off of System Shock 2, but then if it does it well who cares), Fallout 3 looks like it turned out surprisingly well, although I’m still a bit dubious about it given how much the also-highly-rated Oblivion put me to sleep, and I still haven’t played GTAIV, or Dead Rising which I keep meaning to find on eBay sometime. In the next few weeks I’m going to be bombarded with Rock Band 2, Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead, Mirror’s Edge, and goodness knows what else. I’m almost relieved that Little Big Planet is exclusive to PS3 so I don’t have to factor that in. Almost.

Help! I can’t handle this much gaming! How does anyone find the time for MMOGs?

Finally - after a lot of speculation about whether it was a mistake that a 360 advert announced that RB2 was out in the UK in November, it’s been confirmed for 21st November (on 360 anyway). Definite purchase! The hardware apparently won’t be out until early December, but I’ll be buying the solus anyway.

Also we finally know who ‘won’ when it comes to securing the rights for the first Beatles tracks in a music game, and it’s MTV / Harmonix. I can’t imagine how much they had to pay, or what they had to promise, but it’s definitely happening. I’m personally not a huge Beatles fan, I think they made some great songs but are idolised far too much - I can think of a number of bands I think were just as important in the last 30-40 years, and I really don’t subscribe to the view that the Beatles are the best band ever without question, and will be forever - some fans seem to verge on religeous fervour in this regard, which is a little scary. In fact I find the whole suggestion that one band could be ‘the best ever’ offensive. It’s like saying one painter mattered more than any other in the history of art - total nonsense.

While I’m pleased to hear the ‘better’ team got the license here, what’s concerning is that the galloping hubris / idol worship that seems to regularly orbit the Beatles seems to have affected how they’re going to develop this game. They’ve announced that this is a brand new game, not a Rock Band pack, crafted specifically around the Beatles in a ‘unique and innovative’ way. This sounds like it might be at risk of ‘rubbing its own rhubarb’ to me - I trust Harmonix to make great music games, but will they end up being constrained / railroaded in terms of design here, to the detriment of the gamer? Only time will tell.