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Looks like a bug has been discovered in Rock Band 2 that can randomly reset your band’s progress under a certain set of curcumstances. So far it appears that it only happens if you play the career mode with a certain combination of accounts - notably a player with a Live-enabled account, and a player with a non-Live-enabled account.

Here’s hoping they fix it before the UK release, although I actually don’t think I’d suffer from it anyway, since Marie & I both have Live accounts, and when other people play they don’t use their own accounts, they just jump in as ‘Player 3′ or whatever; so far those combinations sound like they’re immune to this bug.

The moral of the story would seem to be not to use non-Live accounts with Rock Band 2. I’m not sure why you would anyway, if your machine is connected to the internet, since a ’silver’ Live account is free anyway (and it’s still a ‘Live-enabled account’ - you get leaderboards & gamerscore tracking but not multiplayer). Still, a nasty bug if you happened to get caught by it.

Looks like the new Rock Band site is going live as we speak, they have a placeholder page up right now. The new site will allegedly let you take photos of your band to share online, get (real) T-shirts branded with your bands logo and other fun (yet entirely pointless) things. Obviously I’m looking forward to seeing that.

Since I’ve been taking a rare weekend off, I took the time to download the latest batch of XBLA demos to check out the latest slices of (hopefully) juicy bite-sized gameplay. The results were mixed.

Braid

I’d actually downloaded the demo for this a while ago, but at that stage I’d been pretty short of time, and on getting frustrated with a particular section I had tossed it aside and gone with the far more immediate Geometry Wars 2 instead. But, I came back to it, and when you’re in a more relaxed state and can take the time to ponder the game, it’s actually very good. An interesting platform-puzzler with a nice central idea (the manipulation of time), very solid game design, and a nice art style. Personally I’ve yet to appreciate the genius of the narrative, which seems a little overly self-indulgent to me right now, but people have been applauding it for where it ultimately culminates so I’ll just reserve judgement on that for now. We’ve bought it anyway; it’s certainly interesting enough to justify the purchase.

Mega Man 9

I’ve never actually played a Mega Man before, and 10 minutes with this convinced me I hadn’t been missing much. Quite why Capcom would choose, in 2008 with the full glories of modern technology at their fingertips, to replicate the graphics and sound (and I use that term in the broadest possible sense, ‘poorly modulated noise’ would be more accurate) of the NES with quite so much authenticity I don’t know. I really don’t see the point of creating a new product and making it look and sound like the emulation of an old one - surely if the gameplay is that good, smoothing off a few rough edges and making the sound not shred my eardrums would not be a heresy? Next, you discover that the difficulty level is such that it makes Ghosts and Goblins look like a cake walk. I didn’t even get to the end of the first level before grinding my teeth to powder. Maybe if you grew up with the NES and Mega Man (I didn’t, the NES was never officially released in the UK and I don’t remember even the later ports of MM being very  popular), maybe you’ll find this nostalgia captivating. Although to be honest, my experience of going back to old games (such as through the Wii Virtual Console) has been profound disappointment and shattered memories; it’s generally best to just remember your old games as fantastic, rather than to re-experience them, IMO. However, many reviews have said MM9 is great, so I will have to assume that someone out there likes this game. I personally found it to be a stupidly hard, annoying platform game with some of the worst graphics and sound I’ve sat through in a long time, and about as entertaining as paying someone to randomly stick a fork in my leg. But I guess there are people who are into that kind of thing too.

War World

Oh dear. The first thing I noticed is that it makes what I thought was a fundamental set of incredibly basic demo errors, which in themselves would make me toss it away. Firstly, although the full game allows you to choose from around 10 mechs, the demo only lets you use one. Assuming there are differences that would nuance the gameplay, any developer with half a brain would imbue the demo with 2 mechs to test at least, to allow the player to see what the kind of differences might be. Secondly, the demo is limited by time - you can play for no more than about a minute before you’re kicked out, making any kind of evaluation of the game almost impossible. If this was a quality game, hobbling the demo like this would be absolute stupidity on the part of the game developer. However from what I read, the game is a bit rubbish so perhaps not letting you see much of it in the demo is a blessing. What struck me most of all in the tiny slice of time I got to experience it was that they got the scale all wrong. If you’re going to make a game about robots, they have to be big robots. The smallest one should be as big as tall as a 2-storey house, minimum. Instead, they’ve taken the bizarre decision to make the robots only slightly taller than Bob Hope, meaning that it comes across as just a poor UT3 knock-off with robot skins. Inexplicable.

Duke Nukem 3D

Talking of nostalgia, this was fun to put on for about 10 minutes. Duke is of course basically Doom with a sense of humour, some more interesting weapons & environments, copious one-liners stolen from Evil Dead and They Live, and strippers. Certainly entertaining in short bursts, and it provoked fond memories of the deathmatch games we used to have in our youth (there were a number of hilarious pipe-bomb incidents in particular that resurfaced in my memory on seeing familiar parts of maps). But, the world has moved on - it best serves like an old family album, reminding you of the good times - so much of this kind of game relied on the technology (wow, we can look up and down, sort of!), it’s not really enough anymore to hold your interest for very long.

So, Braid is recommended, everything else only if you’re a masochist or have nothing better to do with your time and money

I just watched the Little Big Planet beta video that VG247 posted, and I have to say well done to Media Molecule for creating a game with a definite British feel to it (as well as it still looking damn interesting). I complained a while back about the overt Americanisation in so much of the output of British studios in recent years, losing a lot of the regional quirkiness that I think enhances content from any country, so I’m glad to see the spirit is not dead. In particular I liked the use of the ‘gallery’ music from Take Hart, which is hugely appropriate. Great way to get the credits actually watched too. LBP remains the one exclusive that piques my interest on PS3 and I’m looking forward to having a play with it on a friends machine.

I’ve read that Fable 2 has a definite British slant to it too, I’m looking forward to seeing how that turns out next month.

For some reason I was suddenly curious as to how much money I’d spent since last December on digital content for the 360, such as XBox Live Arcade titles and more recently Rock Band DLC. Of course you buy things in Microsoft Points on the 360, which like Wii Points and Disney Dollars are designed precisely to disguise how much money you’re actually spending. The PSN has my respect in this regard for taking the brave step of actually pricing things in units of real money. Quite why Microsoft and Nintendo chose to go against the precendent set by every other marketplace in the developed world (except Disneyland, but that’s intentionally ‘wacky’) I’m not sure - I doubt we’d take most high street retailers very seriously if they required us to buy things in ‘Starbucks Bucks’ or ‘HMV Quatloos’.

Anyway, when I totalled it all up, I’ve chugged my way through 13,000 Microsoft Points in 9 months so far, which in the real world is £110.50, and judging by the dates, about half of that has been on Rock Band DLC, the rest being XBLA titles. I’ve spent more on digitally delivered content on my 360 than I have on boxed games (just software, excluding plastic peripherals) - some of that is because I received most of my boxed games as presents, and I picked up a back catalogue from eBay, but even so, I do think my own habits are a sign of how quickly digitally delivered content is becoming accepted.

Small purchases (micropayments is an often used term, although that usually refers to even smaller amounts) are just easy to mentally justify, even if you end up making enough of them to exceed a larger pruchase that you would perhaps think about more carefully. It’s really easy to slap down £1.36 for a new Rock Band track (that’s less than 2 tubes of Pringles), or £6.80 for an XBLA title (Geometry Wars 2 is particularly a no-brainer); it really doesn’t take much to convince you, particularly when you know exactly what you’re getting - after all you can check out the Rock Band tracks on RockBandContent.com and play demos of every XBLA game before you buy.

Taking out the overhead of the retailer and physical distribution makes products cheaper - that’s obvious. Games are, in general, very overpriced - we pay £40 for a boxed game which required the same budget to make as a Hollywood blockbuster I can pick up across the aisle for a tenner. One obvious reason is that market is smaller, another reason is the silly situation we have where a console platform holder takes a huge slice of the pie just for letting developers deploy on their platform.  All these things are interlinked - the audience is smaller partly because the content is so expensive, which leads to content marketed more at the core audience which spends that money, and larger margins required to make back console hardware development costs, etc etc. Nintendo has broken out of that to some degree, but they’ve mostly appealed just to the mass market, leaving most of the core audience on 360 and PS3. Ideally we’d have a situation where the whole spectrum of game players (’core’ and ‘mass market’ are the most talked about but there are lots of graduations) existed in one place, just like you have with movies, and obviously this is the holy grail that certainly MS and Sony are trying to chase, even though I have serious doubts that we’ll ever get there until the industry rids itself of the counterproductive market segmentation that multiple proprietary consoles creates. I do think that digital distribution helps though, because it disrupts the status quo, creates a more fluid situation that just can’t exist very easily elsewhere, and makes a space for people to experiment more - both as producers and consumers - and to see what works.

I’d love to know the bigger picture of how much money is spent on the likes of XBLA, Steam, PSN etc. I’m sure it’s generally smaller than retail sales, but I’d be interested in knowing the trajectory of those numbers, and in particular which kinds of players they are. Anecdotally I get the impression that digital distribution tends to be good for those ‘ex hardcore’ gamers like me - we don’t buy a ton of games anymore, but like quality bite-sized content and are willing to pay for it. We’re not casual, but we’re not hardcore anymore either.

Anyone else got interesting comparisons of their physical / digital purchase numbers?

You’ve no doubt heard about the first tests of CERN’s LHC today, but the folks at Reddit are clearly ahead of the game on this and are making sure that the scientists are adequately prepared for the discoveries that may be around the corner. They’ve taken the prudent step of sending CERN a crowbar, a copy of the Half Life Strategy Guide, and a ‘training headcrab’, together with a simple note:

“Get this to Gordon Freeman. He’ll know what to do.”

When pan-dimensional hell breaks loose, we’ll know who to thank for our ultimate salvation.

One of the latest items of news in the music game scene is that Sting is now confimed to be lending his likeness to Guitar Hero : World Tour, along with the already announced / leaked likes of Ted Nugent, Billy Corgan, Jimi Hendrix, and Ozzy Osbourne.

Now, I can imagine marketing men getting excited about being able to include famous characters in a game, in a wonderful brand marketing / halo effect / leveraging synergy moment, but I look at these announcements and really can’t give a rat’s arse. I wondered if it was just me that thought this feature was completely pointless, but it appears I’m not alone.

See, I play music games because ‘playing’ along to tracks you love, particularly with a bunch of friends, is a huge amount of fun. I don’t play them because I want to ‘be’ Slash, or Sting, or Ozzy, or anyone else. I don’t want to be them, I just like to play some of their tracks. If anything, embodying some of these rockers in a game would put me off; let’s face it, some musicians, despite being very talented, are total wankers. There are plenty of bands I can think of that I like, but would never want to socialise with even if I had the opportunity. Personally I don’t hold being a bit of a twat against them if they make great music, but would I want to pretend to be them? No thanks.

Of course the ability to compete against & then play as rock stars arrived in GH3, and not only was I not interested in playing the characters in that game, the way they were introduced was one of the worst mechanics in the entire game - the boss battles. These were so irretrievably awful and painful to play that I can only conclude that either the entire QA team was completely retarded, or that they raised the fact that the boss battles were a rubbish idea but were overruled by those higher up because it was a great bullet-point on the box, even if in practice it was crap. I’m betting it’s the latter, and I’m also betting that these same people are responsible for using precious resources on getting more rock stars faces into the game, resources that presumably could have been spent elsewhere on the core game experience. It makes sense from a marketing point of view, but makes absolutely bugger all difference to the actual game.

Suits: 1 Game players: 0

I’m still reserving judgement on GH:WT until I get to play it, but focussing on stuff like this when they haven’t even confirmed the setlist yet seems like an odd set of priorities, and after GH3’s many rough edges they still have everything to prove to me. A lot of people concentrate on Red Octane’s hardware (which is looking good) as GH:WT’s advantage, but since instruments will now be interchangeable I don’t buy this so much; the experience delivered by the software is paramount. We’ll see.

I blogged a little while ago about the soul-crushing tedium that was my brief, never to be repeated experience with EVE Online. Well, happily Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation has waded in with his size 9’s and had me cheering from the stands in between chuckles.

Amen, brother Yahtzee, amen.

Ok, soapbox time. I’m going to alienate a lot of people and say that ubiquitous voice acting in many games, particularly roleplaying games, is a bad thing. The reason is that it’s constraining the ability of script writers, particularly in conversations.

It’s obvious really - recording voice is more expensive than text, both in terms of the time required to produce it,  and the space it consumes on the final media. Therefore, it’s a scarce resource. You simply cannot afford to have a ton of conversation that only 5% of the player base will ever hear.

I think about the games that I hold as some of the best in terms of script writing and particularly flexible, engaging and truly variable dialogue, and they’re all in the past, because they are all text-based. Planescape Torment sits on the ultimate podium here - a game simply bursting with rich, well-written dialog with a very large number of variations. Also Fallout (the original) - where you really could affect the world around you, and have genuinely different conversations depending on what you did, and the kind of character you were. It’s watching the videos of the latest one that I can clearly see how far conversational systems have fallen from those heights.

Fast-forward to the current generation and current ’standards’ say that we can’t expect the player to actually read anything, because today’s gamers expect everything to be narrated to them, as if they’re a 3-year old wanting a bed-time story. Sure, in games like Mass Effect there’s a bunch of supplemental material that you can read if you want, but all the information pertaining to the actual game experience is stubbornly all voice acted. As such, although they clearly do try to make it individual and variable, the constraints of time and space mean that the dialog options can’t hold the merest glimmer of a candle to the best roleplaying games I was playing 10-15 years ago. How many games do we see now where the only conversation options are:

• “No thanks”
• “I’ll do it”
• “Give me more money and I’ll do it”
• “I kill you! I kill you now!”

Is this the best we can do?

Far too many games these days want to be movies so badly that they seem to forget that there are other media forms they could also be looking to for inspiration, such as literature. A good book is arguably much richer and deeper than any film could ever be, simply because it doesn’t have to rely on moment-to-moment live communication through visuals and narration; it is consumed by the mind first and foremost, rather than the eyes and ears, and as such the flow of information is dynamic - I can choose the pace at which I consume and how much I ponder. Guess what - games can be consumed at varying speeds / intensities depending on the player too, so why aren’t we giving people more opportunity to have a deeper experience if they look for it, rather than going for the lowest-common denominator, the whiz-bang Hollywood level?

Planescape Torment was so good precisely because it tapped into the principle that you can deliver good literary material in pieces, as part of an adapting, changing story, in response to the players actions. There was a huge amount of material there if you decided to dig for it, and different players had genuinely different experiences, and not just at a superficial level. The beauty of games is that they can mix different media and make it new - I don’t want to sit there just reading pages and pages of static text, any more than I want to sit there watching a long cutscene (I’ll read a book or watch a film if I want those things), but I can certainly have a wide variety of quality writing delivered to me piecemeal on demand, interactively, depending on on my actions - that’s what a good conversation system should be like, deep and involving with lots of options, that almost certainly can’t all be voice acted economically.

But, of course visual and audio spectacles sell by the bucketload to the kind of people who buy the latest consoles, and far too many of these players wouldn’t know a good book if one hit them in the face. There’s probably no going back to text conversations in games, but I do think we’re the poorer for it in many cases.

Ugh. I’ve liked the Prince Of Persia series (although I only mostly only experienced the latest lot as a spectator, my wife played them more), but I have some misgivings about the gameplay trailer for the latest one.

My gripes:

1. Firstly, all that jumping & grabbing. It really doesn’t seem very fluid, more of a vertical shuffling game than the graceful acrobatic series of moves I’ve come to expect of PoP.
2. That magic-using woman giving you a ‘leg up’ in mid-air seems to be a rather lame excuse for a double-jump system. From what people are saying it even sounds like her assistance is automatic,  saving you implicitly from death-by-plummetting (or rather, from the abrupt deceleration that comes at the end), which if correct would seem to completely undermine the peril that goes with doing aerial somersaults.
3. QTE-style combat moves that were getting repetitive even in the short trailer
4. That horrible Buffy the Vampire Slayer style banter. The American accent and jovial flippancy just grates on my nerves even in the demo. I know they have to be commercial, which means appealing to American generation X-ers, but it’s just completely at odds with the setting. I know they can’t give him a realistic accent and still hit their target demographic, any more than they can call it ‘Prince of the Islamic Republic of Iran’ and expect to it to sell to the white bread masses, but it just sounds so wrong. It may even exceed Assassin’s Creed’s ability to make the main protagonist sound like an annoying tit whenever he opens his mouth (Altair clearly should have been doing movie trailer voice-overs).

I might be being too harsh on the back of an early gameplay trailer, but I definitely have my misgivings. The graphical style is nice though.

Damn, this game is good. The first one was great of course, but suffered from being a bit too limited in scope - it was great for a quick blast but the fact that there was really only one game mode worth playing (the other being a retro take on the same thing) made long sessions unlikely. The sequel resolves this by including 6 different game modes, with competitive and co-operative multiplayer variations thrown into the mix.

All the game modes are fun, and all quite different, with the possible exception of ‘Evolved’ and ‘Deadline’, which are variations on a theme; the former being ended by losing all your lives, the latter giving you a fixed time limit. The addition of new enemy types, and the genius of the ‘gates’, which both reflect shots (giving you extra points if you hit things with the reflections), and give you a bonus if you fly through them (destroying nearby enemies), but include the twin dangers of lethal points on either end and that they can lure you into flying into difficult situations to chase a bonus. Definitely a great risk / reward system. They’ve also changed the multiplier system, basing it on collecting ‘geoms’ from vanquished enemies, and it has no upper limit, leading to multiple-hundred multipliers if you’re good. It really does separate the men from the boys, and I can only look on in awe at some of the scores in my friend list (Falagard, how the hell?). This surely does harken from the arcade machine era.

‘King’ involves only being able to shoot while inside ‘bubbles’ which decay as soon as you enter them, ‘Pacifism’ is a grueling mode where you can’t shoot, and can only destroy enemies by flying through gates (incredibly tricky), ‘Waves’ is a continuous onslaught of waves of ‘rocket’ enemies that travel from edge of the arena to the other in great lines that you have to frantically shoot holes in to survive, and ‘Sequence’ is a series of setpiece levels that you just have to survive, destroying all the enemies in 30 seconds, and feature some of the most outrageously intimidating enemy sequences since Robotron 2084. If you’re not squealing like a girl by level 5 as you desperately bolt for cover, you’re clearly on some kind of chill-out medication.

This is easily my favourite arcade game so far, finally edging out Pac Man Championship Edition (a stellar game too - buy it). If this was 1982 you could put this in a cabinet and take it down to some public area and just watch it devour people’s money insatiably for weeks. Having just watched King of Kong recently (great film if you’re a retro game geek in need of some nostalgia) it seemed highly appropriate. Now we get to pay a mere £6.80 for unlimited number of plays - we’re so spoiled. Highly recommended.