Science Check: Jurassic Park January 25, 2012
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Back in 1993, when the first Jurassic Park movie released to theaters, my family took me to a local museum which had an extensive collection of dinosaur fossil exhibits. The museum was getting quite a lot of attention following the release of the movie and was more than happy to pass out pamphlets filled with scientific information about the dinosaurs that fascinated us. Inside the pamphlet I clearly remember reading an entire page entitled “Why Jurassic Park Would Not Work”. Well, a brand new Jurassic Park game has been released by Telltale Games and I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. Playing through the game twenty years after the first movie released made me think back to just how plausible a concept Jurassic Park was. I’m sure like a lot of other people, they are wondering just how accurate the science and technology of Jurassic Park was. Well, have a seat because there is plenty to talk about.
Sometimes, you’re forced to make some severe leaps of logic as to just how plausible a video game’s grounded reality can be. Some things we’re willing to take for granted, like enemies will simply just carry health and ammunition supplies with them at all times, and you will be immediately able to make use of them.
But then sometimes there will be moments in gaming which skirt the bounds of reality and you are forced to ask yourself…COULD THAT REALLY HAPPEN? Fortunately for me, I happen to have a bunch of friends on speed dial with science backgrounds and when I ask them questions, they have no problem filling me in on just what reality would do in these situations.
So this is Science Check, where I take a look at the leaps and bounds of scientific logic that games have made over the years and check if it would indeed work, or if you tried doing it in the real world, you’d be totally screwed.
Now I want to mention that I’m going to be talking about the whole of the Jurassic Park movie franchise. I will sprinkle in facts taken from the various Jurassic Park games and if needed anything presented in either of the bi-coastal theme park rides. I’ve never actually read any of Michael Crichton’s original books, but I am familiar with a few factoids in them that did not appear in the movie when applicable.
For those of you who have not seen the Jurassic Park movies (seriously, go watch the first movie, its one of the greatest movies of all time), here’s the concept behind it. A theme park was able to create living dinosaurs by extracting DNA from intact blood left behind in fossilized mosquitos. Mosquitos existed alongside dinosaurs 65 million years ago and would bite them. Sometimes the mosquito with this dinosaur blood still inside would land on a tree and get stuck in its sap. The sap would fossilize after millions of years, preserving the mosquito and the dinosaur blood inside it. Jurassic Park scientists would find the fossils inside massive mines, extract the blood from the mosquito and use it to create dinosaurs. Using the DNA of a frog they filled in any gaps in the gene sequence. It was similiar enough and saved time, had they used a complete intact DNA strand it would have taken much longer. With a complete genetic code, a dinosaur could be created inside an empty ostrich egg.
The whole park was monitored by an automated system programmed by Dennis Nedry. The animals were kept enclosed inside electrified pens to keep them from getting out (or other animals getting in). The point of the movie was to show that even with the most sophisticated control system imaginable you can’t keep living creatures under control, especially ones that don’t belong in modern day.
While I don’t have the museum’s pamphlet with me any more (I was 9 when I went to see Jurassic Park for the first time) I do clearly remember the case that the museum made as to why the cloning of dinosaurs on the scale that Jurassic Park used would not have worked. The museum did not deny the possibility that fossilized amber could hold intact DNA from fossilized mosquitos. They did argue however that with the technology available at the time, it would have taken fifty years to go through all the DNA and create a dinosaur with it. If there was any mistake, they would have to start the process all over again. In fact the Jurassic Park movie clearly stated that if you looked at a fast moving screens of genetic codes once per second for eight hours a day, it would take two years to read the entire DNA strand. They claimed that using “virtual reality” (yeah that was big at the time) they could break down a strand in minutes and show the scientists where the gaps were in the DNA sequence.
Here’s the thing. These numbers were crunched based on 1993 figures (or 1987 figures if you want to base it off of the book’s timeline) of computing power. In the game Trespasser, John Hammond did confirm that InGen spared no expense to the computing power for the genetic scientists and had access to multiple Cray supercomputers, which were used for the gene sequencing. At a cost of about fifteen or so million dollars a piece, they had about half the power of an original model Xbox. Computing power was still very low, and even if Jurassic Park spared no expense with what kinds of computers they were able to buy, they were still limited by the computing power of their day. Nowadays a current model iPhone costing around 300 dollars is about ten times more powerful than a computer costing fifteen million dollars was back in 93. Would it take less time now? Well, we were able to map the human genome in less than fifteen years, and during the time it was being worked on there were already other organizations trying faster methods to do it in less time. I’m sure if you put some of today’s fastest and most expensive supercomputers in the world at the task they would be able to do it in a hell lot faster than fifty years.
The funniest part I found after watching these movies nowadays is that the computing technobabble (most of it spouted by Dennis Nedry) is actually quite accurate for the time. He made it clear that any changes he made to the park’s code base would use up the memory and cpu cycles used by other portions of the park while it was operating. This was quite accurate. With software as complex as what it took to fully automate Jurassic Park with a minor staff, its software would take a while to debug, reprogram and compile. The computing hardware that would be available to the park at the time was limited by today’s standards but accurately used. Nedry had his own set of Macs to debug and build the park’s computer code. In the movie they mentioned the park used a UNIX system designed for SGI workstations. Back in the day, SGI workstations were considered the cream of the crop when it came to design power. I’ve seen plenty of people online use them to replicate the interface Jurassic Park used, so it’s quite possible they can operate as shown in the movie. To provide the computing power needed, Nedry networked together eighteen connection machines, which is typical for that kind of system. If the server drives which contained the park’s operating system was set to read only, resetting it would clear out any changes made to it since it was installed, however it would have been a lot simpler and safer to restore a working backup.
As far as I can tell, if there was one thing the movies got completely wrong it was the electrified fences. Modern electric fences, like the ones that are used to keep animals penned in wild preserves are only dangerous when touched by something grounded. This still would be effective against ground based animals (I can’t imagine a T-Rex or Triceratops would be jumping very high). However, Monkeys are notorious for violating electrified pens like this by simply jumping onto the fences. There was no way Tim would have been shocked while climbing the perimeter fence, but he would have needed to jump off once it had turned on.
So that’s Jurassic Park, science checked. If you haven’t seen Jurassic Park yet, you really should. The Jurassic Park game is out for purchase on the Xbox 360, PC or Playstation 3. You can find the PC version for download on Telltale’s site, the Xbox 360 version at retail and the PS3 version for download through the PSN.
A Perfect Platform for FMV Game Resurgence, The iPhone January 22, 2012
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Back in the early 00s I was reading an article which listed various classic games from the various gaming genres and what at the time were considered the best most recent games of those genres. In that article, instead of listing a modern game alongside King’s Quest, they simply had the headline “Adventure Gaming is Dead.” Now in the early 2000s that certainly may have been true, but it sure isn’t anymore.
In my opinion, adventure gaming saw a resurgence in the latter half of the last decade primarily fueled by the episodic gaming experiment of 2006. While it was expensive and time-consuming to make a shooter and release it episodically, there was something about adventure games that lended itself well to an episodic formula. Telltale Games were probably the only survivors of the episodic experiment that I can think of, and it is still their preferred business model. However, they weren’t the only ones doing well with this new generation of adventure games. New adventure games started to see retail release and not only see decent review scores but sell pretty well. Quantic Dream released Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit) and started a whole new model of adventure games and called them interactive movies. They followed Indigo Prophecy up one generation later with Heavy Rain, which also saw great sales, had very high review scores, and personally convinced me to be an early adopter of the Playstation Move controller system.
However, in the 90s the adventure game was a staple of the PC platform before the FPS craze took over. There are a lot of classic adventure games that people have been talking about for the past twenty years that some people were never able to play. A lot of them were shot in Full-Motion Video (FMV). While the FMV trend was universally hated after it left us towards the end of the 90s, there are a lot of people talking about these games again, and inspired by internet personalities like The Spoony One, want the chance to play these games. Boxed copies of older games (especially unopened ones) can cost large amounts of money, or you could hope that they could see a downloadable release through an online service like STEAM or Good Old Games, but there’s still the chance of compatibility issues. You could have an older computer still lying around that could play the game, but the chances of them having long since broken down is very high. You could try to emulate the older operating systems that the game requires, but that would require either having a copy of the older OS in your archives still or buying a new boxed copy off eBay or Amazon.
All these problems beg for these games to see a re-release on a new platform better suited to handle an adventure game’s interface. When you think about what translates a mouse’s point and click interface the best the answer becomes obvious, it’s the touch screen. A modern iPhone nowadays has more processing power than a computer made at the time these classic adventure games were released and the downloadable marketplace can take advantage of the low filesize of some of the older games, and their expanded internal storage capacity can certainly fit the large filesizes of the larger games that used multiple CD-ROMs.
Adventure games are already out for the iPhone and iPad. In fact I remember shortly after the app store launched someone released the original game Adventure from the Atari. The tilt sensor translated perfectly as a control system in lieu of the lack of a directional pad. Telltale releases many of their adventure games to the iPhone/iPad since the third season of Sam & Max.
Older adventure games like Myst and The 7th Guest have already been ported to the platform, where they have access to a wide customer base with no fear of running out of product. There’s been a demand over the past two years to see more of these games get re-released for the iPhone, I think the most vocal demand has probably been to Konami and Kojima Team for a Snatcher iOS re-release, but I can think of a bunch of more games that would work perfectly ranging from Policenauts, to The Daedalus Encounter. Also I think a lot of people want the chance to play some of the games that reviewers have been bringing back into the limelight like Ripper, Phantasmagoria (and it’s sequel), and Johnny Mnemonic.
Having played (or seen played) some of these games personally I can attest they would work perfectly with a touchpad interface, and could probably be remade with just some minor tweaking to the game’s interface (like occasionally bringing up a keyboard/keypad). While its possible that many of the companies that made these games originally have long since gone out of business, someone must have those original game assets lying around in a vault somewhere. While these developers may not exist anymore the publishers certainly do, or have had their assets absorbed by other currently existing publishers. It would be a lot more profitable to work with already existing assets and release them to guaranteed sales in a market where they can’t sell out than build more full priced retail games from scratch.
A Home Without a UCON January 17, 2012
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I’m unfortunate enough to live in an area where, while there’s a perfectly large population in it, is completely ignored by the mainstream media. Up until recently, the western United States was the only place to go when it came to any major gaming events. The Electronic Entertainment Expo has been in Los Angeles for the past twelve years, PAX was in Seattle, GDC in San Jose, and Quakecon takes place in Texas. If I wanted to attend any of these events I was going to need hotel arrangements, a rental car, and airfare, all of which are quite expensive. Yes I know there are some great fan created conventions like Magfest, but those were still pretty far away from me and would have required hotel arrangements and a lot of gas money. I longed for the day that I could attend some kind of major convention which would be within a reasonable distance of where I lived, and be affordable to attend.
Two years ago, that changed. I heard musings from several peers that a new convention was going to be held at the University of Connecticut, which, while not super close, was within a reasonable distance. Called the UCON at UCONN, the organizers were creating a new by fans for fans convention anyone could attend. There would be panels ranging from the debate on should anime be subtitled or dubbed, lectures by prominent professors on comparing the games of Halo to the work of Homer, and several viewing rooms showing all sorts of classic animation and science fiction shows. Best of all, it was free to everyone, and you didn’t have to be a student to attend.
I first heard about the UCON at UCONN while visiting Doug Walker’s site, That Guy with the Glasses. He announced that he was going to be at the convention for that weekend doing a panel and signing autographs with his brother Rob. When I started to do some research on just what the event was I was floored. A free convention within close proximity and some awesome events planned for it? I signed up.
I attended the first day’s events with a close friend who was a UCONN alumni. Arriving just in time for the opening ceremonies, the organizer (a friend of my friend) kicked off the event and showed a funny little video he made of some of the things that would be at the con. It was a great way to kick off the show. After the opening I sat in for a lecture on Halo by one of UCONN’s professors and then hit the screening rooms to watch some episodes of Batman: The Animated Series.
That night I was really excited for the chance to watch the screening of Mystery Science Theater 3000’s most infamous episode, Space Mutiny, starring Reb Brown. I had never seen it before and was really excited to finally get the chance to watch it. Right before the episode started, Doug and Rob came in and sat down. They were really nice guys and we talked for a bit before they started running the movie. I told them to feel free to say whatever they wanted while it ran but they said the episode was funny enough without their comments added to it. We did however join together in a group sing-a-long of the theme song as the episode began. It was a great night, and to top it all off I think at one point I was hit on by a college girl dressed as Sailor Moon.
That Saturday was just as great when the panel kicked off with Doug and Rob Walker’s Q&A, there was a live improv show, and later on I kicked back and watched some episodes of Invader Zim. The night ended with a video game tournament, but while there was a pretty wide selection of games they were having tournaments for (various fighting games, etc) there wasn’t much of a presence for the particular multiplayer games that I was any good at so I didn’t play. I asked Doug and Rob what their plans were and they said they had every intention to get into one of the gaming tournaments.
It was a fantastic weekend that I very rarely get to have in my home state, and I was really looking forward to the next year’s event. When the next year’s started up I felt that second UCON was just not as good as the first. I attended the first day and left very disappointed. The show started a lot earlier than the last year’s had and the panel slotted for the prime time slot never happened because the host of the panel was MIA. It also ended really early, much earlier than the last year. Doug and Rob were delayed and didn’t arrive until that Saturday for their panel. After the disappointment of the first day, I didn’t attend the other days, although I did later regret not attending on Saturday because I heard that was the day General Zod announced he was running for President.
All good things must end and I’m sad to say that UCON at UCONN will not happen this year. My insider has informed me that the UCON student organizer was a senior at the time of the first event and graduated the year after. The organizer of the second UCON was someone different, and they also graduated after the event. Now it seems that with no guiding light, the convention will not happen. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to operate like this. Wouldn’t you want to keep the successful organizers of the events to continue their good work?
The world is a lot different now, as major convention organizers have started hosting events on the East Coast. PAX has an extremely successful second show in Boston. The New York Comic Con in NYC has hosted panels ranging from a preview of the upcoming Avengers movie to live demos of The Darkness II.
Now, I know there is another by fans for fans convention in my state that predates UCON, but I’ve never actually attended it due to cost or scheduling problems. UCON, being free and open to the public, had a charm about it that made me feel quite welcome. If they decide to bring it back, I’d love to give it another look.
Top 10 Things to do Until Christmas December 24, 2011
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Hey everybody! It’s Christmas Eve. I know a some of you can’t wait for the day to pass and get to the main event tomorrow. Video games, consoles, handhelds and gift cards may find their way between friends tomorrow and I’m sure the anticipation is quite high.
For those of you with time off from work or school and before you go to spending all that time with friends and family at parties and events, you may have a small lapse in things to do and have some time to kill before tomorrow. Worry not, because Maniac has you covered with some things to do to kill time. Some regular readers will remember a lot of the stuff I mention here has been things I covered in the past. This is not designed to be a list of groundbreaking surprises, but a nostalgic take through the site’s history on the eve of the holiday.
10. Watch Game Boys. It’s free to watch and is pretty good. I know I reviewed it over a year ago, but everything from the characters to the soundtrack make the movie merit a second watching. Since Game Boys was released, Jones has also released another movie, Midnight Heat, which while not gaming related, is also great.
9. Watch Captain S team up with The Angry Video Game Nerd to save Christmas. First released back in Summer of 07, this is a yearly tradition for me to watch. A lot of the AVGN’s fans didn’t like this because it was not a vulgarfest like his usual videos are, but I enjoyed it a lot. Captain S reminded me of the superhero shows I enjoyed a lot growing up and seeing two unlikely heroes forced to join forces to save Santa Claus was just great.
8. Read the PVP Christmas Special. Written by Scott Kurtz for gamespy.com, the Christmas Special details a timeless story. All the employees have the rest of Christmas Eve off and with company gift certificates in hand spend the afternoon at the local mall. Of course the good hearted office troll accidentally gets confused for Santa Claus and flashbacks start happening of a certain movie about a miracle. It’s a lengthy read I will go through page to page every Christmas.
7. Do your LAST last minute Christmas shopping.
6. Download the free Batman Inc skin for Batman: Arkham City for your Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.
5. Pull one of your favorite games off the shelf and try to get some achievements in it you haven’t gotten yet. If you already got all the achievements, why not just do a victory lap through it?
4. For those of you expecting iPod, iPhone or iPad tomorrow, it would be a good idea to install iTunes in advance and migrate over your music library to it. You can even download apps from the iTunes store in advance. They’ll be installed automatically the first time you sync your device to the computer. Just make sure to create an iTunes account.
3. Check out some of my recent How-To videos. I have a lot of guides in there for various things you may need to know tomorrow. If you need to transfer your data to a new Xbox 360, connect your console to a new HDTV or install a new hard drive to your 360, you’ll find all the information you need here.
2. Check out some great gaming documentaries. While G4 no longer airs any, they actually used to make some of the best, with their series Icons. If you want to go looking for making-of documentaries for games through other means, most of the time game developers will produce them them for release online. You could probably rewatch some documentaries included in game Collector’s Editions you already own, or you could go searching to watch some of them online, through various sites like GameTrailers.com. Heck, their retrospectives alone are worth a watch.
1. Have a good time spending your day with friends and family.
My Disappointment of 2011 December 21, 2011
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I don’t really have my own disappointment list of 2011, but if I did have something to say about the year is that I have been so disappointed that SO MANY major titles had to come out within the span of just three months. This has been bad for everyone, including the consumers and the retailers. Because so many titles from major franchises came out at pretty much the same time, there were a good half-dozen or so games that came out I just have not been able to play, including RAGE and Resistance 3.
This same thing happened in 2008, but the problem was made much worse. In 2008 the winter season got dominated by a SINGLE platform exclusive major release for each platform. Resistance 2 came out for the Playstation 3, Gears of War 2 came out for the Xbox 360, and there were premium boxed editions of the major music franchises with all the instruments. Games that came from (then) unknown IPs like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge saw very little in sales, and wouldn’t get a second wind until the next year following a price drop.
This year, there has just been an OVERFLOW of major platform exclusives and multiplatforms. Forget about small releases, they have been largely ignored. In some cases you have major platform exclusives coming out for the same platform. This isn’t a console launch year! It isn’t a good idea to compete with your own products. Sure you may incite some consumers who were on the fence to buy your consoles with the new library of exclusives you have, but a console purchase is a BIG one. Buying a new console (and everything that goes along with it) can easily take up an entire paycheck. With new games being $60US a pop, a new console adopter could pay the same amount he did for the game console just by buying four new games before Christmas.
GameStop had mentioned they were expecting a major holiday season based upon the initial preorders they were getting for the strong lineup that was coming out. Then they posted less than optimistic returns because (gasp) people weren’t redeeming their preorders because there were just so many games coming out they just couldn’t afford to do it. Didn’t anyone at GameStop’s management see the enormous volume of major releases coming out in such a small timeframe and ponder this may happen?
So with so many games having already released, 2012 with its so far pretty evenly spaced out release schedule, is looking like a much kinder year on gamer’s wallets, and the games lined up for next year are looking to be pretty free of major competition and will probably get decent launches.
Really looking forward to 2012, well, at least my wallet is.
The Best Game Openings Ever December 20, 2011
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With the end of November, all the major game releases have come out before the holidays. With all the games coming out, the importance of how a game starts is increased tenfold. A game has to grip the player immediately in order to keep their attention and having amazing opening is essential.
I wanted to share with you guys a list of some of my favorite game openings over the years. These are presented in no paticular order.
Max Payne – The Prologue Level. My best memory playing the opening cutscene to the game was right after I had just installed a GeForce 2 MX 64MB into my new PC. In fact somewhere in my video archives there’s a high-8 tape of that reaction. Seeing the sweeping landscape of New York City as helicopters flew through it recording the journey brought upon it by just one person, the player. The camera climbs up the building and holds on our hero, Max Payne, finished with his journey. Then the game flashes back to the beginning where Max’s perfect life is destroyed. Really it could have happened to anyone. Drug addicts break into Max’s house and he is too late to stop them from doing what they intended to do, kill his wife and baby daughter. The developers chose to have this scene playable as you fight your way though the house trying to save them to give you a deeper connection to Max and his story. To this day it’s one of the most tragic scenes I’ve ever witnessed in any media.
Half-Life – Tram Ride. Everyone cites this game as having one of the best openings in the history of games and who am I to argue with them? The first game’s opening was perfect at setting the stage for the game and the environment you would be playing in. As you ride the tram on the way to work, you are teased with the diverse environments of the Black Mesa Research Facility. As the ride continues the information about just who the character the player is controlling. It was one of the first games to give a player downtime before the fighting started and it was a great design decision which foreshadowed where the player would be going over the course of the game.
Dead Space – Introduction. As our protagonist watches the brief transmission from his girlfriend silently, we know what’s at stake in this game within the first few seconds. Suddenly we’re shown the most beautiful vista of space that I’ve ever seen, as glowing light fills up the cockpit and we see our destination. We’re introduced to the supporting characters, and their archtypes are set up very quickly as all of a sudden, a dangerous situation is presented and they have to react to it at the immediate possiblity of peril. As Mr. Plinkett would say, is it cheap and easy? Yes. Does it work? Also yes. Another interesting note is that rewatching the sequence after playing through the whole game a second time, with full knowledge of all the supporting character’s real motiviations, the scene still works perfectly. I can’t say the same for a lot of poorly written movies or comic books which have twist endings.
God of War – The Hydra Battle. I don’t think anyone would ever question my choice of this opening. I know some would argue that the openings for each subsequent God of War game had been designed to outdo the previous game’s opening (in a lot of respects the Collosus of Rhodes in the second game was a bigger more epic battle then the hydra battle, in that you’re given the Blade of Olympus from Zeus to slay it) but there is just something so classic about the first God of War in that it’s an all encompassing beginning that plays a part with the game’s ending, something that no other God of War game has done. By the time we first hit the start button, the game menu morphs into the opening cutscene and we see our protagonist attempt suicide. Then the game flashes back to the events that started him on that path and we find ourselves on a ship under attack from the hydra. Everything from the atmosphere to the music feels right to complement the opening to this story as it serves to introduce the player to Kratos and the whole game’s universe. After the defeat of the hydra the game continues and we not only find ourselves being a jerk to a guy who’s been recently swallowed by the creature but we are also treated to some fully exposed breasts, something unusual for games of the time, but now more commonly accepted because of that game.
Bioshock – The lighthouse. Almost immediately upon hitting the start button you find yourself treading water in the middle of the ocean. The only safe venue to swim to is a lighthouse not too far from where you crashed. As you enter it and you see the first inklings of Rapture and it’s creator Andrew Ryan. Quotes of Ryan’s and statues made of him adorn the interior of the lighthouse. You step into the bathosphere and are treated to a short filmstrip about the ideals of where you are headed, but nothing in the film can compare to the vista you’re treated to of underwater city as the bathosphere makes its approach. When you enter you see a disturbing sight, a beautiful location with the remains of a protest. Hand carried Signs are all over the ground, but no people, not even any bodies. You ask yourself, “What happened here?”
Uncharted 2 – The Train Crash. The beginning of the game is actually the…middle of the game. Teased originally in preview videos, Nathan Drake found himself bleeding inside a train dangling off the side of a cliff. The player has no idea how he got there or if he will survive. Injured, you start the game’s first platforming segment, which the series is famous for. In no time, you’re climbing up the train cars as they dangle over a snow covered cliff. As you climb, things bend and break under your weight. It’s the perfect mash of suspense and adventure and it starts immediately. As soon as you see the dagger the scene ends and you see how Drake got to be there.
So those are my ideas but I want to hear yours too! What do you think are some of the best introductions in games? Post a comment!
A Second Broken Rock Band Christmas December 6, 2011
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Rock Band 2 released one year after the release of the first Rock Band game. The first being an enormous success and a financial gold mine for the developers and publisher, a second one was pretty much guaranteed and would provide all new features that the fans had been clamoring for. The problems I had with the first game’s release forgiven, I planned to buy the new game’s Special Edition with all the new improved instruments that came along with it, including the new wireless drum set, which had become my preferred instrument. After that next Christmas, I was able to get the money together to buy the new package, but remembering the trouble I had with the Rock Band, I decided to put a two-year warranty on the new game, figuring that in the off-chance I would have a problem with it, it would be faster just to return it to the store for a replacement than to have to send it back to the manufacturer like I had to with the last game.
The new wireless drum set I got with the Special Edition was completely out of whack and would randomly go through periods where it would no longer properly register hits since the moment I first started to use it. How bad was it? I could play through an entire song and register a very high accuracy where I could hit upwards of 99% but still only 4-star the song. It would incorrectly blow multipliers without me even registering a single tap on the drum pads, blowing my score and the score of the entire group if I was playing with friends.
After a week of playing, I could no longer stand it. I had a broken drum set, but unlike the last year, where the developers had already acknowledged that they had a problem with some of the guitars that shipped out, the game’s publishers and developers were not owning up to anything wrong with the new game. I tried to get the publishers to offer me the chance to replace it, but there was no program in place for a free return like there had been with those broken guitars last year. If I wanted a new drum set I was going to have to pay to ship it back to them to have them look it over and fix it. Boy was it a good thing I had bought the game at a store that offered me an extended warranty on the item, I was going to use it.
I brought the broken drum set back to Best Buy with all my warranty information along with it. I told the clerks what was wrong with the drum set and that the rest of the instruments seemed to be fine. They took my warranty and told me they would be happy to replace the drum set, but wanted me to test any new sets to make sure I didn’t get another defective one.
They set me up at one of the Rock Band 2 demo stations and had me set up any of the drum sets I wanted to test on it. I could play a song or two and see how it reacted while they watched. This was actually kind of fun since they were set up on a pretty big screen with a sound system and I had no problem syncing Xbox controllers to a system.
For what felt like an hour me and some of the Best Buy clerks tore open brand new copies of Rock Band 2 only to find that their drum sets were also indeed completely defective. I have no idea what was causing all these wireless drum sets to go bad, maybe it had something to do with how the product was packaged, but these were brand new out of the box drum sets and they were completely useless. It was only after we opened up the third copy of the game we found a drum set that worked perfectly. They replaced my broken drum hardware and the foot pedal just to be sure that everything worked, and told me they were sending the broken components (as well as all of the other new copies they found to be defective) back to the manufacturer.
I felt bad that we had to crack open so many copies of the game to find me just one working drum set but the store managers assured me they had no problem at all with it, because my warranty was valid and they were fine with knowing now that their merchandise was defective. It saved them from selling it to what would become angry customers.
I posted an abridged version of this story on the Rock Band official forums after it reached its conclusion, with the hope that it would help anyone having similar problems with the drum set. I was told by some of the people on the forum that the known failure rate for those drums were 66% at the time. Why nobody owned up to what was obviously a major issue was never explained. A full copy of Rock Band 2 cost quite a large amount, and with the amount of money paid you’d expect to have a working product or at the very least a guarantee along with it. That just didn’t happen.
After this happening to me twice I was pretty much done with the music genre in general. I stopped buying games bundled with new peripherals (my room was already pretty full with them as it was) and in some cases I stopped buying new music games in general. After that year the market for it became far too over saturated and it was clear it bought too much into its own success. When the market was new and there wasn’t a lot of competition, it was pretty easy to get into, by the end of its lifespan, it had become a nightmare of yearly expensive releases, new rebranded peripherals that offered little improvement than aesthetics over the previous one, and never ending DLC. My wallet just screamed uncle and I had to call a stop to it.
A Broken Rock Band Christmas December 5, 2011
Posted by Maniac in Editorials.add a comment
In 2007, Guitar Hero II had surpassed all expectations and was on its way to creating a whole new genre of gaming. By the end of 2007, everyone was looking forward to the release of not just Guitar Hero III but the game more people considered Guitar Hero II‘s sequel, Rock Band.
Rock Band released with not just a guitar controller, but drum and microphone support. Nowadays every new music game supports that, but it wasn’t until Rock Band that the game and hardware to support it would see a release.
I picked up a full boxed Special Edition of the game in stores the day after Christmas. A Special Edition of the game came with everything, all controllers and instruments. I had already played it with some friends when it was released so I knew it was a great game before I bought it. As I unpacked the game, I saw a notice on top of the box to call the publisher if I have any problem with the controllers instead of returning the game to the store.
I played that game a lot, starting with the guitar campaign. By the very next day the guitar controller broke on me for no reason at all.
Apparently the publisher discovered before the game shipped that the strum bars on some of the guitar controllers were broken very easily just with regular use. To ship out the amount of copies to fill shelves, they shipped the game anyway and figured if anyone had a problem with the guitars, they would just ship them replacements free of charge.
I went through the website provided in the included letter with the game box and told the site I had a guitar with a malfunctioning strum bar. They told me I had two options. They could send me a box free of charge to send the guitar back to them in, and once they got it they would send me a new guitar or they could send me a guitar immediately but it would mean a charge of $130 to my credit card that would only be removed once they received the broken guitar. Well, I couldn’t afford that second option so I choose the first.
I was planning a vacation after the New Year, so instead of having the guitar by the time I got back, because I didn’t get the box before I left I couldn’t send the guitar out until I came back.
The worst part about this was there were no copies of Guitar Hero III on shelves any time after Christmas. The game was sold out in pretty much every store until deep into January, so it was a long wait. I did eventually get a working controller, but by that point I was playing Guitar Hero III.
I had also heard of other people having worse problems, like being sent guitars or guitar boxes for the wrong platform, putting their credit at extreme risk. There was no technical support number provided so if you had any problems with the process you would have to start digging for phone numbers and hope you got through to the right person.
As bad as it was, it could have been worse. It could have been the experience I had with Rock Band 2.
Father From an Analog Generation December 1, 2011
Posted by Maniac in Editorials.add a comment
For those of you who have been enjoying my little series on Christmas, I have a small revelation to make. Not all my gaming related Christmas stories are shopping related! Christmas is also about friends and family and this story is about that!
Last year, I was hanging out at diskreader117’s place right after Christmas. He wanted to show me his brand new HDTV, which he was now using to play his Xbox 360. He had been playing Halo Wars on it (he’s a fan of strategy games like Age of Empires) and I asked him to show me what the cutscenes looked like on it, since that would be the best benchmark for the TV’s quality. When the image popped up, it looked…wrong. Completely wrong. The screen was fuzzy, the black bars were far too wide and there was a lot of static over the image.
Another major peeve of mine is seeing an improperly formatted image on a TV. I know for the longest time people have complained about seeing black bars in DVDs, but theatrical black bars can be lessened or even completely eliminated when exhibted on widescreen televisions (which are pretty standard nowadays for new TVs). Just like the eye can detect fakeness quite easily, I can detect an improper image just as fast, and will usually say, “That image is wrong,” and endeavor to correct the issue before the person can ask “What’s wrong?” Most modern HDMI supported players can take care of these problems automatically, but some older players (or players that aren’t hooked up with an HDMI cable) need the user to set what the proper resolution and dimentions of the tv is on initial setup. Since some people don’t know about this requirement (or any of their own TV’s specifications) they just leave the settings untouched and lose the benefits of the extra money they spent on their equipment. If you’ve ever had to look at a 480i image on a 1080p screen you know you’ll never want to see it again if you can avoid it.
I asked him who hooked up his 360 to the new TV and he said his father had done it. Sure enough, when I looked at the back of his HDTV only the standard definition portion of the 360’s video cable was used. The HD component cables were left dangling from the back of the TV.
It wasn’t really his father’s fault. Never having owned an HDTV before, he used the connections he had just always been familiar with, and that was limited to just one (yellow) pin plug video cable. He was unfamiliar with three pin component cables (red, blue and green) which had become standard with DVD for progressive and HD video playback. Never seeing the 360 in HD before, diskreader had just assumed what he was seeing was normal.
I plugged his component cables in and started testing what resolutions his HDTV could support. We bumped up the 360’s resolution to 1080p and loaded up the game. The difference was like night and day and diskreader could now enjoy his new tv to its fullest.
The moral to this Christmas story (and the previous one) is that with all this new technology coming out for home theater systems every year, if you intend to buy new home theater equipment and you don’t know anything about how it works, consult someone who does. Don’t hire the people who work at the store, I’ve seen they’re actually not very knowledgeable about what they’re selling. You likely have at least one person in your family or friend circles who does. If you don’t, I recommend finding someone local who is experienced with home theaters and pay them to take care of setting your equipment up for you or instruct you how to do it yourself. It will save you a lot of headaches and will give you quite a Merry Christmas indeed!
Gaming, Star Trek Style: Star Trek: Borg November 30, 2011
Posted by Maniac in Editorials.add a comment
Tonight at 8pm, a documentary that I’ve been looking forward to watching since the New York Comic Con is going to air on the Science Channel. It’s called Trek Nation, and it’s being done by the son of Gene Roddenberry. With the show airing tonight, I wanted to talk a little bit about my personal memories with Star Trek, and its enduring gaming legacy.
My first major experience with Star Trek gaming came when I rented the VHS version of Star Trek First Contact. My cousin had access to Pay Per View, and I remembered enjoying the film tremendously when it was shown on the service. When I finally gave the film a rent, I saw something that appeared odd during the previews section of the tape. There was some NEW Star Trek footage I hadn’t seen before. As the preview progressed I saw an extremely high quality video produced of some new characters I was unfamiliar with fighting the Borg. Then at the end of the preview they said this was not a new television series or movie, this was going to be the next Star Trek game, an interactive Full Motion Video (FMV) adventure, and it was called Star Trek: Borg. As someone who just got his hands on his first Windows 95 CD-ROM PC, I had to play that game.
Another popular electronic’s chain from my childhood was closing down for some reason and taking all of its local stores with it. My father wanted to check it out and see if there was anything worth picking up in the major sell off. It turns out, they did have some copies of Star Trek Borg in the store, but some of them had been looted. As we were about to leave the store, I found an unopened copy of the game, slightly dented but still quite intact. Didn’t cost more than $10.
I was having a problem with my audio drivers on my computer at the time, but once I solved the problem I was able to just boot up the game and play, and boy was it a lot of fun.
The story followed a young Starfleet Cadet (the player, shot in a first person view) whose father was killed at the famous battle of Wolf-359 along with the rest of his ship. Ten years later, the Borg are coming back, and all cadets onboard starships planning to go into battle are ordered off, no matter how much they want to stay and fight. As you’re leaving, Q (played by John deLancie) decides to pay you a little visit and offers you the chance to go back in time and stop that from happening. You take over the body of the ship’s head of security, an alien with a very special gift you’ll need, who was supposed to have died before the battle, and with Q’s help (he’s taken over the body of the ship’s Chief Medical Officer) you have to save the ship and your father from the Borg!
John deLancie’s Q is one of my favorite Star Trek characters, and I thought he really overdid himself in his performance. In fact, in my opinion, it’s deLancie’s best Q performance, because unlike in previous Trek episodes, where he was a secondary guest actor, Q is literally the star of this game, and really had the chance to shine. Nowadays, I’ll always watch anything he appears in whenever it ends up on TV.
It took me three months to figure out how to survive the Borg Cube sequence on the third disc, but I was very satisfied with every second of the game itself. If you’re like me, and were a huge fan of the FMV CD-ROM craze back in the 90s, give the game a look.
Unfortunately, I can’t find that commercial anywhere anymore. Even Simon & Schuster Interactive’s official website only had a teaser which put together Borg related clips from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Heck, when I finally did buy myself a VHS copy of First Contact, the game’s trailer was not included in it! They must have only included it with the initial batch of the movie’s VHS release.
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