A Second Broken Rock Band Christmas December 6, 2011

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.

The Christmas Helper Strikes Again November 30, 2011

Happy Holidays everyone.  With the passing of Thanksgiving I’ve decided to spend several times over the month sharing some of my favorite gaming related Christmas shopping memories.  I want to share another quick story with all of you from a few years back.

I’ve got a pretty short story to tell this time.  With all the major technological advancements that are made every year and then become standard within the next year, some people who are just jumping in can find themselves in deep water without a floatation device.  Six years ago, did anyone even know what an HDMI cable was?  By 2013 everyone will have to support it if they want to continue to watch Blu-Ray movies after that date.

I have two stories that happened at two different years right around Christmas that involve people from the analog generation being thrust into the digital one, and thankfully, I was there to help them out so they could give their families a merry Christmas.

The first story happened while I was Christmas shopping for various friends and family, and at the time I was just browsing looking for deals on hardware.  I overheard a cell phone conversation with this older gentelman (looked to be in about his mid-40s) and it was clear he was talking to someone he had trouble understanding.  While I couldn’t hear what was on the other end of the phone, his mannerisms and what he was saying made it pretty clear he was being told to buy something he had no understanding of, and was completely lost.

Just to show you how lost he was, he clearly said into the phone, “What’s HDMI?”

Oh boy, was he in trouble, and he needed help.  I flipped around a DVD player I was looking at and saw it had an HDMI port.  I said to him, “That’s HDMI,” and pointed at the port.  He heard me and nodded and I walked away.

I know I probably should have minded my own business since that’s the popular judgement most people have for each other nowadays, but it was Christmas and this guy was obviously completely lost as to what he was expected to do.  I figured some help was in order, and I’m sure his family appreciated that he got them the correct gifts for Christmas, instead of running the chance of having to find reciepts and return anything that he incorrectly purchased that wouldn’t work properly with whatever their existing setup was.

In short, this is just another example of what can happen when you have what should be private cell phone conversations in public.  People around you can probably hear you better than the person that’s on the other end of the phone.  In my case, I decided to be a nice guy and help him out.  I mean, wouldn’t anyone help a lost man find his way out of a forest?

Don’t Listen to Clerks, Listen to Me November 29, 2011

Happy Holidays everyone.  With the passing of Thanksgiving I’ve decided to spend several times over the month sharing some of my favorite gaming related Christmas shopping memories.  I want to share a quick story with all of you from a few years back, it didn’t help me get a job, but it may help you out this shopping season.

I was in my local Best Buy during the holidays, buying some Christmas gifts for my friends and family.  An older couple was behind me in line to ring up their items.  They had purchased a Nintendo Wii and a bunch of shovelware games with it.  A clerk was with them talking about the Wii and the games they had purchased.  The clerk was completely clueless, and had no idea about the technicals of what he was selling.  My evidence to this conclusion ranged from the gaming selection the couple had to the comments he made to them, like he had no idea what kind of internal memory capabilities the Wii had (it does, but not very much, just enough for saves and a few downloadable games) or if Wiimotes have rechargeable batteries (they don’t, they use two AA batteries, and you can only get a rechargeable batteries for it through third parties, not recommended).

As he walked away I turned around and commented on their Wii purchase.  The line was pretty long and I figured I had about five minutes to kill, so it didn’t bother me.  They were actually quite nervous about their purchase and had no idea if they had bought their son right thing.  I’m platform agnostic, so I saw no issue with anyone receiving a Wii as a gift, as long as they got some good games along with it.

I asked how old their son was and they responded he was twenty-two.  I looked at the stack of games they had, and not seeing the obvious game any twenty-two year old with a Wii would have I told them to leave the line immediately and buy him Super Smash Brothers Brawl, which as far as I was concerned was a must play for the Wii.  When they asked what it was about, I said it was a cartoonish fighting game with Nintendo characters and it was very well made and quite fun (I had been playing it at the time).  They left the line and came back with a copy, now satisfied of their purchase.

I guess my problem is I have a serious issue with minding my own business.  But thank goodness for that, or else I’m sure their son would have been out $50 for the copy of Super Smash Bros he would have eventually bought for himself.

I know that a lot of you parents are going to be stuck buying things on your child’s Christmas list that may look as if its written in some foreign language.  You may be asking yourself things like, “What the Hell is an Xbox 360 Kinect 250GB?”  Worry not, because that’s what I’m here for.  If some random person who is not wearing a store tag tells you something knowledgable, take it with a grain of salt, but listen well, he may just know what he’s talking about.

The Cycle of Modern Game Companies November 4, 2011

When the news hit that Sony had bought out Sucker Punch, I started thinking more and more about just what the companies who make video games have to go through during their life cycles.  After looking at it for over ten years, I’ve been noticing a pattern over the past few development cycles starting to emerge.   I don’t like it one bit, and I think the rest of the industry shouldn’t like it either.

During the early days of the gaming industry it was exactly as you probably imagine it was.  A bunch of geniuses would get together in a dorm room or an apartment and use their programming and art skills to make a game for the early computers.  Back then it didn’t take much to publish a game.  You could make floppies with the game, seal them up in a ziplock bag, put a label on it, and sell them in quantities to computer stores, who would put them on the shelves alongside the games made by major publishers.  There wasn’t a lot of overhead back in those days.  The teams were very small, averaging around five people, who would be building these games in their spare time on computers they already had (or stole from work).  They wouldn’t bother with stuff like offices or marketing, there was just no need.  The market was so small anyway that everyone was treated with legitimacy and if you could make a game that was good, you’d do well for yourself.

id Software was one of the poster childs of this era. They had started as just a few employees of a larger company that were not being allowed to make they projects they wanted to make, so every weekend they’d steal their computers from work, and build video games in a lake house in Shreveport. After they completed the first Commander Keen trilogy for Apogee (later 3D Realms), they were taking in checks for $65,000 a month!

As technology improved, more and more people got into the business interested in getting in on this quickly booming business.  Larger teams of developers would be needed to have projects completed quickly.  With technology improving rapidly, new people were needed to bring different skills to keep up with the advances in technology.  With all these people, creating a real business would be a necessity because people would need to be paid a salary and have a place to work.  This didn’t bother the early startups.  They had done really well the first time around, and had the money to expand their businesses, nor were the publishers bothered, because they were making most of the money from games sold anyway.

The problem is once you fail things are going to become very difficult for you.  Heck, even if you’ve made a great game,  you can’t pay your employees with review scores, it has to make money for your company.

Once the company has been exploited as far as it can be, if the publisher isn’t interested in any other projects they have to offer or have no other projects they want them to make, the company is either shut down or absorbed completely by the publisher.  This happens FAR too often!

Microsoft is NOTORIOUS for doing this.  After the completion of Shadowrun, Microsoft shut down FASA Studios, which had produced fantastic games under Microsoft’s publishing arm for years including the Mechwarrior series and the fan favorite series Crimson Skies.  I heard musings that they would work on a Crimson Skies game after completion of Shadowrun, but with the company shut down it never came to fruition.  Did anyone else notice the way Jordan Wiesman talked in the Ode To Bungie documentary when he told the story about how he was asked by Microsoft to tell Bungie that being owned by Microsoft wasn’t that bad just so they could strike a deal.  I’m sure during that interview Weissman realized the irony of that statement now that Microsoft had shut his company down four years earlier.

There’s also the story of Digital Anvil, a company created by Chris and Erin Roberts, who were responsible for the Wing Commander and Privateer series while working at Origin.  When they decided to strike out on their own to make a new universe of similar games, Microsoft stepped in initially just as a publisher for four games the company had under development.  After the release of their first game, Starlancer, Microsoft started putting more money into the company, eventually getting ownership of it, and the Roberts brothers left.  Two of the games the company was working on got canceled outright, although one of the games, Conquest: Frontier Wars, was so far along in development another publisher picked it up to finish and release it.  Digital Anvil existed just long enough to release the long in development and much hyped Freelancer game, which even though it sold extremely well and got very high reviews, could not save itself from being fully absorbed by Microsoft.

Do I even need to talk about Ensemble Studios?  I think everyone knows what happened to them after Halo Wars got released, and these were the guys who made the Age of Empires series, considered by many the best Western RTS guys in the world!

Is this what we’ve become?  An industry where a promising startup forms under the banner of a visionary industry veteran.  A lot gets invested in it by a publisher.  The game ships and either doesn’t pay it’s bills or doesn’t make enough to fund another game, and the company dies.  It’s happened so many times.  Flagship Studios is a huge poster child for this.  Here was a company formed by Blizzard veterans who promised to redefine the traditional PC RPG game with a whole new business model of tiered multiplayer.  It would be a single player game with an MMORPG component as well, use the most recent DirectX graphics engine to take full advantage of new PC hardware.  Sales would come in from retail sales and the optional MMO subscriptions.  The problem was the publishers were the ones calling the shots with the game and not the developers, and they forced the game out before it was finished.  Initial reviews of the game were lukewarm, and while the developers did improve the game tremendously through patches, the initial reviews weren’t going to be changed, and the costs of maintaining the company and the game’s MMO portion was higher than they were taking in sales and subscriptions, and the plug was pulled.

Even for the independent companies, no matter how successful they are, or how many good titles they’ve developed, to publishers with money, they’re only as good as their next project.  Troika Games was responsible for releasing some very fun and yet very undercooked games for the PC, which were well designed but released extremely buggy.  I will admit to everyone who will listen to me that I loved Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines with all my heart, and playing it every summer has been a tradition.  The game’s atmosphere was second to none.  They took a realistic environment like Downtown Los Angeles, California, added in the premise that everything that we assume bumps in the night was in fact real, and created a very atmospheric game with mature themes that worked perfectly for the environment and subject matter.  Only it was released before it was ready and had tons of gameplay bugs and a really nasty memory leak.  When the company was ready to pitch its fourth project, no one was interested in it, and the studio heads shut the company down, cutting off any chance for them to continue development on Bloodlines to fix the issues with it.

Some companies tried to buck this trend and do something creative to prevent something like this from happening to them.  It was met with mixed success.  Back in 2006, there was a huge resurgence of companies interested in episodic gaming.  The three companies which were poster childs for this, Valve, Ritual Entertainment, and Telltale Games, planned to release games episodically at a lower price for each individual game.  The intention was to use the same tools to continue game development through an entire series, with each episode funding the next one.  The problem with this business model was that the money made from each individual episode was enough to cover costs of development of the episode, but not enough to cover development of the next episode.  Valve survived this because they were Valve, but  Ritual not able to weather this storm, and to survive they were bought out by Mumbo-Jumbo, which absorbed them.  This stopped support for the SiN Episodes, even though many updates and patches to the game was promised and even ready for deployment.  But you could tell Valve’s perspective on Episodic Gaming had been changed.  When Half-Life 2 Episode 2 released, it was bundled with four other games, two of which were already released, to get them a full retail price point.  How dead is Episodic Gaming?  The fact there has not been a word spoken about Half-Life 2 Episode 3 in over three years speaks volumes about that.

However, Telltale Games thrived under these circumstances, since unlike the other two companies, they charged a price point for not just individual episodes, but offered a deal to sell all episodes in advance by paying a flat fee, and they would go out to the customer when finished.  However, in the past year I have noticed Telltale has been quick to start taking preorders for the full downloadable games months before a first episode is even released.  Of course, they still will give you the game when it releases and the option to pay just for shipping when all the episodes are released to DVD-ROM, but you could be paying upwards of $40US up front for that now.

Bungie is the only exception I can think of to this rule.  After making millions upon millions of dollars in profits for Microsoft with the Halo series of games (in exchange for it’s 60 million purchase price), Microsoft let Bungie have their freedom back in exchange for two more Halo titles (which were Halo 3 ODST and Halo Reach).  With their freedom, there was no way Bungie would share the fate of companies like FASA or Ensemble, but Microsoft would keep the rights to the Halo franchise.

How can a whole industry survive, let alone thrive, if all the new talent isn’t being given the chance to throw their hat into the ring and make games?  It just doesn’t make business sense for a company to form, release a game, then be shut down after the game completes, forcing its employees to form a new company and start the cycle all over again.

We can’t be an industry that is built on the backs of the same companies that started this whole thing in the first place, because even some of them are falling on hard times with poor products coming from very long development cycles.  Duke Nukem Forever is what killed 3D Realms.  They spent more years than they probably should have developing the same game over and over again thinking each time that the new product they were creating was better than the old one, when in fact people would have been fine with if they simply released the game they showed back in 2001!  The cost of development over the extreme number of years bled the once highly profitable company’s profits and overnight it shut down.  The game would be saved, but the lesson remained nevertheless.

However, it seems that with the release of smartphones like the iPhone or Android, the industry may have hit a reset button.  Almost overnight a new breed of game developers saw these new devices and the new marketplace they ushered in and decided that was where they wanted to stake their claim.  Once again overheads are low and because of that profits could be high as the sky.  With the device’s low cost, great features, and decent hardware, an enormous install base has come from it.  Games selling at .99 cents a download have made some developers overnight millionaires and in the always connected internet age, word of mouth travels fast for what is good and what isn’t.  They’re not forced to pony up large amounts of cash up front or be heavily in debt from the outset like startups are nowadays.  Failure, even on a monetary basis, might not be fatal to the company.  Without the worry of having to sell, creativity has the chance to thrive in this new environment.

We could be seeing the start of a whole new generation of games coming from a completely different mindset that is not based around the PC or Console at all.  I mean, everybody’s gotta have a phone these days don’t they?