What I really want to see is a game that focuses on truly open ended gameplay. Something that works more like a Dungeon Master, who takes your input and subtly guides you back on task; reading how you play the game and attempting to find hooks that get you back into the storyline, or hell, give me Oblivion where I have multiple storylines or the side stories are more interesting than the main plotline. Give me a game that has five plots that intertwine a bit here and there and let me just go play what suits my playstyle, give me a bunch of tools to choose from, and don’t dictate to me where I should go. If I wander from the path, let me visit. Don’t make the NPCs brain dead. Allow me to interact with them. Hear their stories. Watch where they go to work, see where they live. I want to experience your virtual world and participate in the events happening around me, and not just play an interactive movie.

[Read more →]

Ordering a new guitar for Rock Band, using the express method, but seriously, $125 if I don’t return it for processing and handling fees? I’m pretty sure this thing isn’t worth even remotely half that amount. I imagine it costs so much simply because they don’t want people ordering one and keeping both guitars rather than sending one back. I could see people gaming that to get an extra Rock Band guitar since you can’t buy ‘em in stores. Yet. AHEM.

[Read more →]

In light of how used games is hamstringing this industry, Rock Band could be the mighty carrot that gets people to start paying very real attention to Direct Downloads. I have so far downloaded roughly $20 worth of songs (and I’m not even grabbing every song). If this pace keeps up, I will have downloaded an equivalent amount of merchandise to buying an expansion game within the next month. EA could feasibly wind up netting two, three, even four times their normal single title revenue with DLC, and completely bypass the brick and mortar outlets for everything past the initial sell-in, guaranteeing a revenue stream which cannot be sold used.

[Read more →]

As much as I used to love that show Press Your Luck when I was a kid, I am upset to report that my whammy bar broke tonight while attempting to get a million fans with the wife in our World Tour. I am, as the saying goes, no whammies.

[Read more →]

  * Now that Live allows you to look at your friends’ friends, and I’ve got a couple of decent achievements under my belt, I’ve been wondering what other folks’ achievements are, and pouring through their profiles seeing what they’ve played when I’m not actively gaming on the system. The profiles themselves are nice and [...]

[Read more →]

Whoah, Rock Band is going to have a Stage Lights and Smoke peripheral??!?? What I want to know is: where the hell am I supposed to plug this in? If I had two Rock Band guitars plugged in, plus the drums, plus this stage thingamajiggy (assuming it needs only one USB port), plus a microphone, that would be five USB controllers.

[Read more →]

But the tanks? A serious disappointment. They were obviously nothing more than armored pickup trucks with a turret attached to them, as far as the code was concerned. They didn’t do anything that an actual tank could do. Hell, sometimes, they couldn’t even drive in reverse uphill, and I won’t even get into the “friendly” AI driving worse than a NY cabbie. Still worse, the optics on them were non-existent. I.E. they had none. A current day Abrams tank can accurately hit a target two miles away. Crysis takes place, what, ten years in the future and I can’t get a set of optics on the thing even half as good as a sniper rifle? Hell, I’ll even take the assault scope optics here. Just give me some optics. But none? Completely inexcusable. On foot I’ve got my choice of two different scopes and a pair of smart binoculars with a laser/shotgun microphone. Am I to believe there was no room for a pair of binoculars on this tank?

[Read more →]

I’ve been sitting at 5 stars long before the end of a song, and never bothered to use my star power (what’s the point, I was at 5 stars), and thought “hey, why don’t they just keep tracking your stars here and see if you can actually get a 6th star?”

Well, as it turns out, they do, by tracking it as 5 gold stars.

[Read more →]

Rock Band Solo Expert Guitar Tour Update. Step 1:  Practice “Green Grass and High Tides” for over an hour. Step 2:  Really concentrate extra hard on the Solo 2 sections that always flub you up.  Namely the “back and forth” sections around 2H and 2J or so. Step 3:  Start playing the damn song in [...]

[Read more →]

Awhile back I mentioned that my number one rule in game design is: Gameplay is King. It will always be king. There is nothing that should ever trump it. Not the art, not the license, nothing. Except for one thing: Jedi. It goes without saying that Jedi are extremely popular in geek/nerdlore/culture. So, it seems [...]

[Read more →]