Rock Band Gets Keyboards, Guitar Hero Gets Hard Rock. FIGHT!

The battle of the band simulators just got interesting. Rock Band 3 Vs Guitar Hero 6 looks set to be the most epic plastic axe face-off ever, bigger than RB1 vs GH3.

In the RB corner, we have two massive additions (in terms of importance and price, no doubt) in the form of three-mic harmonies, lifted from The Beatles RB and keyboards. Yes, keyboards.

A recent Xbox 360 Green Day Rock Band demo hinted at the inclusion of keyboards with a little monochrome keyboard symbol along with the usual drums, bass, guitar and (three) mic symbols – all alongside a jagged, Rock-Bandy 3. Harmonix haven’t officially confirmed it, but it doesn’t take a Science Genius Girl by Freezepop to work out that the keyboards are coming to the next proper Rock Band.

What could this mean exactly? Well, a much needed reinvigoration of a stagnating music genre for one. And secondly, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. If the epic seven-minute wonder is in RB3 and playable on keyboard, expect sales to fly like a rocket ship soaring through the sky (yes, I know that’s Don’t Stop Me Now, which would be equally welcome).

This brings us to Guitar Hero 6’s response. Well, it’s going to have to be big, isn’t it? Well, the setlist which has so far been confirmed by an Official Playstation Magazine UK leak isn’t so much ‘big’ as eye-wateringly, head-bangingly massive. Dragonforce are back, and Slayer, Megadeth, Metallica, Ozzy Osborne and Children of Bodom have come to join them. Oh, and it definitely has Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (except without the keyboards, we assume). It’s going to be epic.

Activision’s response to Harmonix’s ‘ultra-realism’ band sim (they are, apparently, going for a more realistic approach to RB3) is to make Guitar Hero an axe-shredding, finger-burning cavalcade of killer rock again, like it used to be before they sold out and started putting in Coldplay.

That means no more turgid pop-‘rock’, no more teeny-bopper indie bands (that’s what Band Hero will do now, apparently). GH6 is going to be Guitar Hero III – The sequel, like everyone wanted World Tour  to be. It might still have full band support but the focus is squarely on guitar riffs and screaming solos.

Thus, we have two very different approaches to the music game genre from the two largest behemoths in gaming – EA and Activision. The original Rock Band sold like hot cakes despite GH3 having been out at roughly the same time and selling some 12 million copies in the face of EA’s full band sim (whereas GH3 had only guitar or bass support). This would suggest that there’s room for both in the crowded genre – but that was years ago when the phenomenon was still exploding.

Whether people opt for Harmonix’s super-real, keyboard-toting, all-in-one band sim or Neversoft’s monster rock and metal fest with a killer guitar setlist might decide the direction of the industry for years to come.

I’ll have one of each, thanks. It’s like Gran Turismo V Burnout – If they both keep to their own identities rather than ripping off each other, there might be room on gamers’ shelves for two new rhythm action games this year.

And really, who saw that coming?

ModNation Mindblowing

It's brilliant. Fantastic. Great.

That's all you need to know about Sony's latest Play Create Share title - the LittleBigPlanet of the racing world.

But in case you do want to know more, here you go: It's better. A bold statement - certainly - but it's true. In just a few hours, I've created a couple of genuinely fun-tracks, three karts (with 'Eat My Dust' on my rear bumper) and a bunch of celeb mods. The internet, too, has delivered. No sooner had I checked the servers was my hard drive teeming with pixel-perfect plumbers, bending units and villains (that's Mario, Bender and The Joker). I even found a Monaco F1 track (a free cookie for anyone who can recreate a Wipeout circuit, by the way) - and the game hasn't even hit US shores yet. I can only hope Sony doesn't start deleting the copyright-infringing content, because it would be a huge disservice to the extraordinary level of cartoony realism that can be crammed into every 'Mod'.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to rip off Mickey Mouse, build a Bugatti Veyron and maybe, just maybe,  even race.

Sony to give away free games on a premium PSN model

That's right, E3 is coming up. Which also means that the rumour mill has gone into overdrive. Aside from a supposed quad-core, cell-based PSP2 powerhouse portable set for 2011, the other big 'leak' (take it with a grain of salt) is the arrival of a premium PSN at this year's E3.

The rumoured features include a spotify-like music streaming service, which will also play in the background of games and one free PSN game every month for subscribers to the new premium model - free for only £50 per year.

What suprises me here is that people across the internet are already being pulled in by the marketing spin. Ooh ooh! A free game every month! Well it isn't free, is it? You're paying for it in the subscription charge. The beauty of the model - from Sony's point of view - is that you PAY to get 'FREE' stuff. The other extras, like a music streaming service, will cost a little for Sony to set up, but then next to nothing to run in the long term. Similarly, bonuses which we might get (purely speculation here) like giving new features to premium users, or updating premium user's PSN store a day earlier, again would cost nothing to Sony. It's just a gimmick to ensure that Sony can pull you into spending a dedicated amount of money on PSN every year - i.e., to ensure they make money, while pretending that you're really getting stuff for free to pull you in, and your wallet out.

And do you really expect the 'free' games to be top of the line ones? No, they'll be games over a year old and under £5 each when bought normally, anyway.

Don't believe the spin, is all I'm saying, if Sony really do bust out this pay-for-PSN model at E3 alongside the current free service.

Having said that, if Wipeout HD sells a few more copies thanks to giveaways under such a model, I'll be signing up. If you can't beat 'em and all that.

(Thanks to VG247.com for bustin' out this rumour).

Guns don't kill people, violent games do

Have you ever wanted to stab a man? Maybe you’re not a blade sort of fella; perhaps gunning down a group of helpless pedestrians on your nearest pavement just because you can, just to see quite what this murder lark is all about, before you hurtle your Ferrari, new-car smell still lingering, into the nearest wall/river/yawning chasm, is more your thing.

Probably not, though. Most of us would be horrified at the thought of such monstrous, inhuman behaviour. It just wouldn’t be polite, frankly. But more importantly, because we know there are consequences. That man had a wife and kids. He had dreams, ambitions. He was scared of bees. Similarly, that Ferrari took a group of underpaid Italians weeks to watch the automated machines to make, cog by cog. Wrecking it would be like licking the Mona Lisa clean – tragic, inexplicable and pointless.

That’s real life, though. What about in games?

Games are not real. Regardless of what Jack Thompson (that guy who hates GTA), Barack Obama or the BBFC (those stiffs who slap 18 symbols on our games here in the UK, along with PEGI) might have told you, the guy you just ran over on Liberty City’s grimy ‘street’ isn’t real. He didn’t have thoughts, feelings or a family to go home to. In fact, he’s the same guy who was in the gun shop a minute ago – and I swear he just came back from the dead and is now walking around the park without a care. In short, he was a just a bunch of polygons, duplicated ad nauseam. It doesn’t matter that you just checked your tyre pressure on his legs.

But that’s not how the government, angry mothers and the media seem to see it. Games, to these groups, are sick, depraved filth causing our youth to turn into violent yobs, stabbing everyone they meet for kicks because they saw it in Call of Auto 6: Generic Subtitle.

It is, quite simply, ridiculous. As a society, we’ve gone – in just a few hundred years – from ‘children’ marrying at 10, being industrial slaves by 12 and fighting wars by 16, to a bunch of mollycoddled fatties who might be influenced by the ‘horrific’ scenes in the latest shooter – so terrible that they’ll obviously cause an entire generation to run into the streets and overthrow society one pistol round at a time. By that logic, the 1980s should have seen a sudden uprising of sickening turtle stampings, ghost persecution and Italian u-bend menders eyeing apes suspiciously.  Violent games don’t modify children’s behaviour any more than watching darts makes us all fat beer drinkers.

Games are an arena in which we can live out our wildest fantasies; driving obscene race cars, saving the hot girl and shooting the bad guy. But they are also – and this is something that some people will simply never grasp – consequence-free simulations in which we can let our darkest curiosities play out; stealing a cop car, causing a 10-car pile-up and yes, mowing down every Tom, Dick and Harry in the latest ‘sandbox’ city just because.

After all, better that than on a real street; with real people, with real families. We can’t hide away our healthy desires any easier than we can our slightly psychotic thoughts (“let’s see what happens when I minigun that helicopter”), but we can at least have a place that we can explore both sides of our psyche without causing problems.

After all, parents shouldn’t be letting their children play these games anyway. They’re sick, violent, and they’re all mine. The difference is – I’m over 18. I understand where gaming ends and reality begins. Parents need to understand that they have the responsibility to protect their kids until they are old enough to realise, too – whatever age that is in each case.

Now pass me the pad; I’ve got this sick idea.

Background patching for PS3: Rumour or reality?

Hello there. I hope that you're here to roam through the internet, to attempt to soak up as much gaming information and commentary as your brain will allow before you forget how to eat soup or wash.

But there may be another reason, in fact. If you're a PS3 gamer, you might well be here for one very simple reason: you can't actually play your PS3 right now. It's updating. Again.

Gamers new to this generation don't know they're born, with their shiny HD graphics, their particle effects and their universal online capabilities. In my day, we had a cartridge, a dark room and a high score to beat. But one way in which gaming has definitely gone backwards is in its laborious and time-consuming insistence on patching every damn time we turn our console on.

PS3 owners are certainly the most-blighted by this irritating new phenomenon. Barely a day goes by in which I'm not patching the thing or one of the games I want to play. The other day I felt like playing Burnout Paradise - big mistake, even bigger mandatory download. How on Earth Criterion felt they needed to add another 385MB to my hard drive, I'll never know. I backed out of the menu and have been avoiding one of my favourite racers ever since. It's gotten to the point where I have to insert a disc which I haven't played in a while just to check that I don't require an epic, internet-breaking download the next time I actually want to fire it up.

It shouldn't be this way. I should be able to game on my own terms, not be dictated to by a little (well, large) black box about when I install what. And, for the love of all that is holy, games developers need to learn how to release a polished, perfect game from day one, not rely on epically large, hard disk-stuffing updates in order to keep glitches at bay.

What about the (still significant) proportion of HD gamers without readily-available internet access on their console? It's not fair to release your latest run 'n' gun 'n' race 'n' pimp title full of glitches and game-breaking problems and expect the internetless-minority to just put up with it. Two to three years of development producing games which are immediately patched upon release just smacks of a poor attention to detail and a lazy development studio.

That's why I hope that the recent rumours of background patching on PS3 are true. It's about time. Time-poor gamers can't afford to lose even half an hour to install a bunch of 'updates' which, nine times out of ten, are simply security patches built to lock out the active minority trying to tap into the system. If I had all the time back that I'd been waiting for patches, well, I might have found the time to slog through Final Fantasy XIII.

I know, I know. That would have been an equally wasteful  use of the time. But it would be on my terms - and that's what Sony needs to realise - a games console is built to provide entertainment for the gamer, on demand. That's why if background patching is no more than a rumour, I implore the Playstation people to make it a reality.

The Art of Gaming

Games can’t be art, apparently.

Well, that’s if you believe Mr. Roger Ebert, who argues this very point in a recent blog post;

 “One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome... an immersive game without points or rules ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.”

Tosh. Ebert would not be the first to assume that he had the medium of games figured out. Think of some of the stereotypical images of ‘gaming’ which many see as typical of games – sweaty teens turning the air blue, red in the face, pulling the trigger until they black out from malnutrition. Unwashed football fans ripping one other’s personal pride to shreds in Fifa 10. Even happy families playing Wii Sports golf, rosier though the image is, are a far cry from achieving anything ‘artistic’ when they play.

Well, that’s all true. In the same way that much ‘art’ is unfettered nonsense (cross-sections of Sharks, or diamond-encrusted skulls are not art), or many films are less about serious cinematic issues (Harry Brown, Billy Elliot) and more about inane fart jokes and boobs (American Pie, Road Trip), many games are not about serious artistic direction, but simply exist for the purpose of having fun.

This is where Mr.Ebert, I think, is getting confused. Because in the games industry, for every Modern Warfare 2 there is a serious, art-driven title given much less media exposure.

Games can be art despite also serving a purpose. A painting on a canvas is pretty straightforward – some paint, an image and perhaps a subtle dig at society. A film, similarly, can go about creating whatever representations it wants, because all you need to do is watch. A game, as Mr. Ebert quite rightly points out, carries a goal, requires an input. It’s something you can win or lose.

But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be artistic, or that they can’t carry within them a sense of character, of commentary, of inherent beauty. Think about Okami, the criminally-overlooked Zelda-alike which hit PS2 late in its life, and was more recently (excellently...) ported to Wii. The game had a goal; to push through the story, beat enemies and kill bosses. But the execution of that goal, and of individual aims within that game, was nothing short of an artistic masterpiece. At the press of a button, you could call upon a ‘Celestial Brush’, turning the very environment around you into your canvas. Drawing a line across an enemy in ink would do damage, and encircling a dead tree would rejuvenate it, instantly, restoring rich watercolours to its immediate surroundings. Not only did this form a sense of creating art whilst conquering your goals, but the very presentation of each environment was artistic in itself. The graphics were lusciously poured onto a sort of ‘rice paper’ effect, every tree had a hand-drawn look, every enemy seemed to move as if a painting had come to life. Okami is art.

Heavy Rain is another prime example of a different sort of art. Sony’s hard-hitting, gritty ‘interactive movie’ dealt with serious issues, placed the player in difficult moral dilemmas, and did so whilst maintaining an air of mature realism. Its story-telling was at times clunky, the controls could be chaotic, but as a stab at genuine art, serious narrative and exposition, it showed how far gaming has come.

These are perfect examples of games which can be artistic in spite of the need to ‘win’, or to achieve something. But there are a whole host of games which require no such thing. There are games which outright encourage artistic expression and individuality.

You may not have heard of Korg-10 DS. It’s a ‘game’ which allows the player to create music, a sort of virtual synthesiser inside a DS cartridge. Its bleak black and white presentation, low-fi feel and niche appeal didn’t translate into the hottest sales, but it’s a very versatile tool for music creation. This month, a trio of teens took to the stage in Germany to perform a gig using only their Korgs and DSes.

Similarly, Flipnote Studio, the free DSiWare application, is art. It is actually art. The whole ‘game’ involves drawing a series of slides by hand with the stylus and replaying them to create miniature, amateur movies to upload online. Aardman animations, the studio behind Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run, have already created several superb Flipnote animations to help publicise the ‘game’.

Ever since Mario Paint on SNES, gamers have been encouraged to get creative. Even today, in the likes of Littlebigplanet, Drawn to Life or the upcoming Modnation Racers, games have allowed people to express themselves.

Whether that expression is by games developers, creating environments which carry the creativity and beauty of a modern masterpiece, creating narratives which ask the player serious questions, or it comes from gamers themselves, constructing their own artistic creations, the truth is that gaming has never been closer to art than it is today.

Just look at Wipeout HD. What a masterpiece.

360 = Going Round in Circles

Failure. It’s not a concept that any company wants to have associated with their products. Just look at the furore surrounding Toyota’s recent accelerator-happy death traps on wheels. Turns out, people like it when their cars stop when they tell them to.

Similarly, people like it when their games consoles work. I was very unhappy, as a young ‘un, when I managed to spill strawberry milk into my Gameboy Colour, promptly and unceremoniously killing it. I was equally unhappy when my PS2 decided it preferred to produce disk read errors rather than operate on top of my booming soundsystem’s basslines.

But those were my fault. The Xbox 360, however, is another matter. The 360 is a better investment in the long term as a doorstop than it is a games console. They simply don’t stop breaking.

This is the part where I’d usually tell you about the mate of my mate’s who’s been through eight 360s in four years (true story). But there’s no need. Because as it turns out, the recent results of a survey of gamers  by No Fuss Reviews.com has resulted in some shocking evidence.

Of the 500,000 surveyed, the number of Wii owners that needed a repair is an impressive ‘less than 1%”. For PS3 players, that number jumps to a worrying 8% (that’s 800 people in every 10,000 consoles – far too many). But the 360? A staggering 42%. That’s almost half of all 360 owners. For ‘3 repairs or more’, the number is still an unbelievable 39%.

39%!? So, over a third of Xbox 360 buyers will need to have their console repaired three times or more? It's not even five years old yet. Compare that to the PS3’s 2% or the Wii’s 0% and the figure seems inexcusable.

These kind of failure rates are simply unfathomably huge. When you consider that the 360 has sold nearly 40 million, it must be considered that a shade over 16 million of those will break. That’s a lot of unhappy customers.

Surely, then, the Xbox 360 is the Toyota of the games industry – except Microsoft haven’t reacted to try and rectify the situation, haven’t apologised and, er, haven’t even fixed it yet, as new 360s still seem to die as easily as the old models did. Great.

Obviously, I’m not having a go at anyone who did buy a 360 – and there are a lot of people out there, more than the PS3 – but you have to wonder whether those customers would have stumped up a bit more cash for Sony’s offering if they knew about the appalling failure rates of Microsoft’s console. It’s a great console because of its wealth of excellent exclusives – Halo, Forza and Gears of War, to name just a few – and its frankly brilliant online service and achievement system. But technically speaking, it’s not a great console. It’s a dreadful, rushed, noisy, ugly beige box prone to random death at any moment, made viable as a purchase only for the efforts of Microsoft and other developers in furnishing the console with a ton of games and features at an affordable price. If the fragile Xbox had to get by with PS3’s early range of games and online services, it would be long dead.

People should not have to put up with it, though. Sony’s system has caught up in most regards, and excels in some others (Hello, Uncharted 2). Microsoft should be made to pay the price for rushing an untested system to market knowing they’d just have to fix them all later.

I love gaming, and that’s why I can’t love Microsoft. Go and make a console that I can actually game on, consistently, and I'll buy it instantly. But I can't accept the inherent faults built into half of all Xboxes, and other gamers shouldn't have to, either.