Okay, so I'll admit it. Right here in this very blog, I said that Nintendo wouldn't be making their next console a handheld. Well, with the recent announcement of the 3DS, the proper successor to DS, I can say that I was quite wrong.
The theory was sound, at least: DSi is graphically more capable than DS, a sort of subtle-successor to DS Lite, ready to have exclusive, shinier games (which, though it looks unlikely now, Nintendo can still make). Meanwhile, Wii is facing a stern test in seeing off the new motion control options offered by its competitors (see below for more on that...).
But that is Nintendo for you. Unpredictable. As ever, Nintendo came up with a pretty left-field idea and caught us off-guard with the announcement of a handheld that can create the effect of a 3D image on its two screens without glasses. Not only that, but it's going to be a true graphical leap from the current DS, and it will probably release this year.
Why now? Well, perhaps Nintendo was rattled by reports that Apple, that 'non-gaming' behemoth, has snatched 19% of the handheld gaming market - more than PSP - without even selling a dedicated handheld. Perhaps DSi didn't sell as well as they'd anticipated. Maybe rumours of an ultra-powered PSP2 forced Nintendo to get in first.
The likely answer, though, is none of the above. Nintendo does things on its own terms, sometimes infuriatingly so (hello, friend codes). The question we should be asking, though, is what this announcement means for the games industry.
Well, whether it actually works remains to be seen. Something closer to Avatar than Journey to the Center of The Earth (not the great book, the awful '3D' film with Brendan Fraser)in terms of 3D quality would be a big boost to the handheld's credentials, but the practicalities of the actual experience are important too. Will the images be 3D on both screens? Will they conflict with each other - or form one huge image? Do I have to hold it in a certain, awkward way?
We don't know, and we're not likely to find out until E3 this year. But on paper, the idea is full of promise. It seems that Nintendo has hit upon something massive. The one barrier to entry to 3DTV adoption, when they go on sale this year, is certain to be the price. Yes, Sony will update the PS3 with 3D-gaming capabilities, but can you afford the £1000+ tech to play on? Anyone who recently emptied their bank account on an HDTV won't exactly be itching to throw their 42" in the bin just yet.
What's the point of a 3D-enabled device if most owners don't and won't own a 3DTV? Well, when you buy a handheld, you buy a screen (or two, in the DS' case). Make them 3D capable at a low enough price and suddenly every 3DS owner has a 3D-enabled games console. That also means that Nintendo can make the 3D capabilities central to the experience. If Sony put in 3D-only content in Killzone 3, for example (like a puzzle that requires the extra dimension), they'd cut out the majority of players from accessing some of the content. But Zelda 3DS can utilise the added depth to the full, because every player can see the mind-bending puzzles. It's simply a stroke of genius.
Don't take my word for it, though. I've been wrong before. Time will tell whether the extra dimension can make the DS a success all over again. Whatever happens though, at least people won't notice now when Sony copies DS' touch screens. That's old news now.
Monday 29 March 2010
Copy That...
First of all, apologies for the lack of activity recently; without regaling eager gamer-readers with the intricacies of my personal life, it’s been hectic.
It seems I’m not the only one who’s been busy though, nor the only one in need of making an apology.
It seems that Sony fans everywhere should be extending the olive branches right now – Playstation Move, the new motion controller from Sony, is a real Wii-too effort.
Nintendo fans everywhere are – quite fairly – lording it over their Sony counterparts, partly from the smug realisation that their downtrodden Ninty had fought back to literally and metaphorically lead the pack, in sales and ideas, partly out of anger from being so blatantly copied. Should Sony find runaway success with Move, Nintendo might well feel a little hard-done by.
The games industry, though, is above such petty squabbles. The fact is that Nintendo’s move towards motion has just taken one step closer to being the gaming standard. Will traditional button-based pads remain come PS4? Probably, but for the foreseeable future, if you aren’t up for arm-waving, you’ll be waiving your chance to play some key titles. Rumours of a motion-based Uncharted 3, a waggle-infused Heavy Rain add-on and even some sort of integration into the ever-delayed Gran Turismo 5 are flying around almost as readily as limbs in a sports-based set of mini-games, one of which has already been announced as a launch title for Sony’s wagglesticks (wonder where they got that idea, too?).
Gamers need to be ready to embrace motion, because it’s where the games industry wants to go next. Even Microsoft’s ‘big new idea’, Natal, is based on the idea of limb-flailery in the extreme. It may use a sophisticated camera to track your movements rather than any sort of controller, but the end result is the same – jumping about to kill, explore, score and kill again. All the usual gaming objectives can be accomplished.
The thing is, many gamers aren’t ready. For every gamer out there who wants to literally punch the air to make a kill or hit a home run, there is at least one who wants to stab X, eat crisps and gawk at the telly from the comfort of their sofa. If the ratio is even 1:1, that creates a dangerous split in the demographics. Yes, for now, Sony will still serve up great button-based titles – but what if Move doubles PS3 sales? Roughly speaking, that would mean that roughly half are still traditional gamers – but you can bet that motion would be crowbarred into every title, regardless of the large contingent who aren’t interested.
This is the real issue. It seems that no one actually wants to serve the traditional gamer any more. Why spend a hundred million pounds making a GTA V when you can knock up a motion mini-game collection for 3% of the development cost but 50% of the revenue?
The Xbox 360 and PS3 have so far amassed sales of 71 million consoles, combined, since the beginning of this generation without any kind of motion controller being available on either system. Never mind that this is actually more than Wii’s 69 million, but it’s pretty clear that the traditional gamer is still a market worth paying attention to.
Sony might find some success by mimicking Nintendo’s little white box, and Microsoft with their quirkier new camera, and I wish them luck, but they would do well not to Move too far from those gamers that bought ten million copies of Modern Warfare 2. Hopefully losing standard game-pads forever will be one motion gamers won’t carry.
Sunday 7 March 2010
Let's Get Critical
Games reviewers. Both our best friends and our worst enemies. When they slap a high score on that title we’ve already thrown down a hefty pre-order price for, we’re quick to sing their praises. When they cruelly slam our most anticipated titles with a witheringly low ‘6/10’, or some such figure, the conspiracy theories fly. ‘They’re Xbox fanboys!’, ‘they hate this genre’, ‘they’ve been bribed by Sony/Microsoft/etc.’
Our relationship with reviewers, then, is truly Marmite – which is to say, very love/hate. But is it just our crazed internet personae being baited into knee-jerk reactions online, or is does the system itself need to come under review? I certainly think so.
Games, it has often been argued, are an entertainment media on the up. What was once seen as a childish or nerdy pastime (though the medium still struggles with such labels) is more commonly being seen as a serious form of escapism, culture and very occasionally, art. Titles like the recently-released Heavy Rain (pictured) seek to show a more considered, mature side to gaming.
Not the big guns, big swears, bigger 18-symbol kind of mature, but the kind which focuses on strong narrative and adult dialogue. Games like Brain Training and Wii Fit have taken a stab at gaming maturity in an entirely different, but arguably even more successful way, taking a ‘kiddy’ pastime and allowing adults to utilise it to solve deadly serious adult problems like weight gain and senility.
It is time, now more so than ever, that we treated the medium seriously. Which is to say, critically. We cannot allow games to have an easy ride, especially when the standards of production values, graphics and even writing have never been higher. It’s time we got critical.
Other serious forms of entertainment are regularly given a rough ride, panned and pulled apart for every tiny flaw. Whilst I’m not arguing that every film is minced by critics, nor that every game should be, either, it is only by calmly acknowledging a game’s drawbacks can we improve for the future. If games reviewers simply foam at the mouth every time a good game comes along, we’ll never be able to tell what’s truly hot and what’s just hyperbole.Case in point: Grand Theft Auto: IV. The darling of reviewers this generation, garnering a 98/100 average on reviews-aggregate website, Metacritic.
Hold on. 98/100? On average? It doesn’t take a mathematical whiz-kid to work out that 98 on average is an absurdly-inflated score. Similarly, Super Mario Galaxy, Nintendo’s biggest critical success on 97/100 average, is obviously over-scored.
As a regular reader of gaming reviews, it is quite difficult to accept. SMG is possibly Nintendo’s single greatest achievement, potentially besting Super Mario 64 or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In my humble opinion, it does. But I still don’t think it deserves a 97/100 average. I don’t think any game does.
Film reviews are more considered. You get the feeling that the critics aren’t simply raving fanboys, rabid hype-junkies or silly company-politics obsessives.
For example, Avatar, now the most successful film ever, garnered a very impressive 84 on Metacritic.That's a hugely positive review score, and any game developer should feel proud to achieve such a stunning critical reception for their title. Except, that’s not quite the case. For games reviewers have become accustomed to only using the top end of the scale.
As a result, a 6/10 seems ‘a poor score’ when in reality it’s above-average. Similarly, 9/10s and 10/10s are dished out like Guitar Hero instalments, meaning it’s difficult to distinguish a truly outstanding title from a pretty good game. Now, games reviewers have created a vicious cycle in which only the highest scores will do. Regularly, reviewers point out real flaws in a title whilst going on to award it a 10/10 regardless.
Some publications do things differently, and get a fierce kicking from all corners of the internet as a result. EDGE magazine, for example, recently handed Final Fantasy XIII a 5/10. They argued that the game was technically accomplished but far too linear. Fair complaints, if we take linearity to be a bad thing (but that’s for another day...). A 5/10 is not a bad score, it is average. A game doesn’t need serious flaws to score in the middle of the scale, just be a game which is not particularly outstanding. Many forum-dwellers quickly pointed out that ‘an EDGE 5 is a normal 7 or even 8’.
Sadly, they’re right. Games reviewers and the industry at large needs to realise that high scores should be the exception, not the rule, if gaming as a medium is to truly be respected.
Don’t agree? Good. We need to be more critical.
Our relationship with reviewers, then, is truly Marmite – which is to say, very love/hate. But is it just our crazed internet personae being baited into knee-jerk reactions online, or is does the system itself need to come under review? I certainly think so.
Games, it has often been argued, are an entertainment media on the up. What was once seen as a childish or nerdy pastime (though the medium still struggles with such labels) is more commonly being seen as a serious form of escapism, culture and very occasionally, art. Titles like the recently-released Heavy Rain (pictured) seek to show a more considered, mature side to gaming.Not the big guns, big swears, bigger 18-symbol kind of mature, but the kind which focuses on strong narrative and adult dialogue. Games like Brain Training and Wii Fit have taken a stab at gaming maturity in an entirely different, but arguably even more successful way, taking a ‘kiddy’ pastime and allowing adults to utilise it to solve deadly serious adult problems like weight gain and senility.
It is time, now more so than ever, that we treated the medium seriously. Which is to say, critically. We cannot allow games to have an easy ride, especially when the standards of production values, graphics and even writing have never been higher. It’s time we got critical.
Other serious forms of entertainment are regularly given a rough ride, panned and pulled apart for every tiny flaw. Whilst I’m not arguing that every film is minced by critics, nor that every game should be, either, it is only by calmly acknowledging a game’s drawbacks can we improve for the future. If games reviewers simply foam at the mouth every time a good game comes along, we’ll never be able to tell what’s truly hot and what’s just hyperbole.Case in point: Grand Theft Auto: IV. The darling of reviewers this generation, garnering a 98/100 average on reviews-aggregate website, Metacritic.
Hold on. 98/100? On average? It doesn’t take a mathematical whiz-kid to work out that 98 on average is an absurdly-inflated score. Similarly, Super Mario Galaxy, Nintendo’s biggest critical success on 97/100 average, is obviously over-scored.
As a regular reader of gaming reviews, it is quite difficult to accept. SMG is possibly Nintendo’s single greatest achievement, potentially besting Super Mario 64 or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In my humble opinion, it does. But I still don’t think it deserves a 97/100 average. I don’t think any game does.
Film reviews are more considered. You get the feeling that the critics aren’t simply raving fanboys, rabid hype-junkies or silly company-politics obsessives.
As a result, a 6/10 seems ‘a poor score’ when in reality it’s above-average. Similarly, 9/10s and 10/10s are dished out like Guitar Hero instalments, meaning it’s difficult to distinguish a truly outstanding title from a pretty good game. Now, games reviewers have created a vicious cycle in which only the highest scores will do. Regularly, reviewers point out real flaws in a title whilst going on to award it a 10/10 regardless.
Some publications do things differently, and get a fierce kicking from all corners of the internet as a result. EDGE magazine, for example, recently handed Final Fantasy XIII a 5/10. They argued that the game was technically accomplished but far too linear. Fair complaints, if we take linearity to be a bad thing (but that’s for another day...). A 5/10 is not a bad score, it is average. A game doesn’t need serious flaws to score in the middle of the scale, just be a game which is not particularly outstanding. Many forum-dwellers quickly pointed out that ‘an EDGE 5 is a normal 7 or even 8’.
Sadly, they’re right. Games reviewers and the industry at large needs to realise that high scores should be the exception, not the rule, if gaming as a medium is to truly be respected.
Don’t agree? Good. We need to be more critical.
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