SteveStreeting.com

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

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?