Playstation: Advertising That Gets Me October 10, 2011

Right now the video game media has been drooling all over this new Playstation advertisement, called the “Michael” ad, which they claim is probably the greatest video game advertisement in history.  While I wouldn’t go as far as to say all that, I did like it.

But you have to remember something, that Sony had just gotten back into the groove of continuing with their highly successful advertisements starring Sony VP Kevin Butler, and the launch of the Long Live Play (LLP) campaign, all started with the return of Kevin.  Kevin of course said that LLP was his idea in the first place.

Kevin of course, has understood me in the past quite a bit.  I still remember the Sony E3 2010 press conference.  I don’t know if I was proud or sad that I recognised the face of Jack Tretton in that advertisement, I was laughing too much that Kevin would keep a picture of Jack in his desk at all times.  That was my favorite moment in the ad.

The thing is, people who have been following the gaming industry for the past ten years should be in the know that Sony has been making ground-breaking advertising since the days of the original Playstation.  While no one would argue there were be plenty of ads they’ve done in the past ten years that completely missed the mark (the 1995 commercials looked pretty stupid and anyone remember that PS10 series back when the PS2 launched?) the recent wave of successful ad campaigns Sony has been riding reminded of one of their very early commercials, which hold up even to this day.

Two years ago I attended a gaming discussion hosted by Yale University which was moderated by N’Gai Croal and featured speakers like Kellee Santiago.  Before the discussion began, N’Gai showed us this Playstation ad to get us into the mood.

The ad talked about the double lives we have as gamers, and that’s what facinated N’Gai about it.  That we as gamers do live a double life.  In the one life we have the mundane jobs and scurry about with everything in black and white, and in our gaming lives we have reached for the stars to accomplish the impossible tasks we could never achieve like command armies.  Those words looked at the surface of something much deeper.  Its almost as if these shared experiences almost make gamers everywhere like brothers, and whoever wrote the ad understood that.  This was years before Kevin Butler was “named” Sony VP.

So, bravo Sony Marketing Department, you still get me, you still get us.

A Metal Gear Solid 2 HD Wish List September 19, 2011

In December, both Metal Gear Solid games that released on the PS2 as well as Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, which was a Playstation Portable exclusive, will be bundled together and remastered for High Definition TVs in the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

The initial previews of the game have come back from the trade shows they have been demoed at. The previews have been partially negative, because Konami did not touch any of the graphics in the games, opting instead to increase resolution and performance. I think the people who have been previewing these games are idiots. Honestly, I don’t have a problem with that at all. I’m glad that they’re keeping the game’s aesthetic completely intact, and only updating what they have to in order for it to run on modern systems (and modern HDTVs).

However, there are some problems I do have with the versions of the games that Hideo Kojima has announced they are releasing in December, and that is if they release everything as intact as they said they will. Now, I have no problem with the fact that they’re releasing the versions they are of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, which is the Subsistance Version of the game, or of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, which should have the ability to exchange save files between the PS3 and PSP versions of the game. Those game versions are perfect, and I’m glad they’re including those versions.

No, I have a problem that they’re including the version of Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance which came to the United States, when there’s so much more they could have included with that version of the game, including things fans like me have been requesting for the past ten years.

I don’t know if a lot of people know this but Metal Gear Solid 2 released in November of 2001. That was two months after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. As someone who’s played the end sequence in the released version of the game, you can easily tell something is missing before the final Solidus fight. In what was probably intended to be a spectacular finale sequence, all you see is Arsenal Gear go under a bridge and then all of a sudden Raiden and Solidus are knocked on top of Federal Hall with rubble all around them. The first time I saw that sequence I asked myself, “What did I miss here? Did I hit the X button and something jumped?”

Ryan Payton confirmed (while he was still working for Kojima Team) in the official Kojima podcast that there were more scenes that were supposed to be in the game which they did not have time to redo before ship, so instead they just had to chop them out of the game. GameTrailers.com, when they did their retrospective on the game, mentioned some glaring omissions that we never got to see. The first was an all out attack on New York City by Arsenal Gear just before it crashed into Manhattan! It was obvious we saw the first part of this sequence when Arsenal Gear was cruising up the Hudson something terrible was about to happen. This attack would have caused the displacement of the Statue of Liberty, which has been done already in action movies. We’ve seen things like it happen in Batman Forever or Judge Dredd, heck, even Ghostbusters II. Finally the American Flags all over Wall Street were removed. Anyone who’s ever been to Wall Street (I have) knows that there are American Flags hanging from poles every ten feet across the building entrances. You can clearly see the flagpoles in the final version of the game, but no flags on any of them, including the one that should be on the pole on top of Federal Hall. The reason why Raiden raises up his sword after defeating Solidus was because he was chopping the flag down on top of the building, and this flag would have fallen to cover Solidus’s dead body. The action wasn’t to look cool, Raiden gave a final honor for the game’s former President of the United States.

After the end credits, a news report would have revealed the Statue of Liberty had been fully restored and was given a new home, Ellis Island. I smiled when I found out they would have restored the statue, and I think the fact that they put things right at the end gives them the creative liberty to restore all this in the game without fear of any lingering repercussion.

I liked this original ending so much when I wrote the story “That Day at Federal Hall”, which told the story of two normal people caught in the middle of that event, I included that nod to the deleted scene in the story’s coda. I can moderately understand why they would feel the need to cut all this content out at the time, but that was ten years ago. When Steven Spielberg refused to cut the Twin Towers out of A.I. for its DVD release, the insanity of censoring anything happening to New York in any fictional medium started to calm down. Watchmen depicted New York City exactly as it was in the original book, with it’s unaltered 1985 skyline, with no media repercussion.

Also, Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance did not ship with two important things that other countries got. It did not have a complete demo theatre feature that is in Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 3. Metal Gear Solid 2’s story is my favorite of the three games, and I wanted to be able to watch the cutscenes from start to finish with a tub of popcorn just like I could do with the other games (or even games like Metroid: Other M). From what I heard, the European Version and Japanese Version of the original game, since they released after the American Version, did ship with this feature, although I could have been misinformed about this. It would be nice to see it included in the American release of the HD collection, or at the very least have the demo theatre that was included with the US version of MGS2 Substance have all the game’s cutscenes included, instead of just the few that were.

My other desire is for a re-release of the Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 disc. This was a budget title released for the PS2 shortly before the Substance re-release of Metal Gear Solid 2, and included a very in depth DVD-style documentary about the making of the game and included a playable preview of the VR missions that shipped with Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance. This is a heavily sought after collector’s item I am not fortunate enough to own, as it shipped at an awkward time before I owned a PS2 and did not have the ability to get one. When Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance was released in Japan, the Document was included as a bonus disc, but the US never got a re-release of it. For a game that was $20US at launch new, prices on Ebay for it go for over $30, even for one that’s been badly scratched. This has been considered one of the best game documentary discs of all time. It would be nice to see this re-released, even if it’s the original PS2 version of the disc, I would leap at the chance to buy it if they released it again.

With the release of the HD Collection in November, Konami has the chance to bring back everything they were not politically allowed to do, and provide much requested fanservice to those who have wanted them to rectify these decisions for the past ten years. No mention has been made specifically about any of these features of the game, but they are three months from releasing it. If you’re going to do it, Konami, do it right, and give us a great reason to rebuy it.

Ed- Thank you to the Unknown Cameraperson for the correct nautical term for describing what a boat does on water.

What Happened to Bawls? September 16, 2011

Since shortly after its release, Bawls has been known as a soda exclusively drank by gamers, BMX riders and paintballers.  It was designed to be a high-caffeinated soda in a world where high caffeinated beverages like Red Bull are extremely popular, but they all reportedly taste like crap.  Bawls was different.  It is a high caffinated soda that tasted great.  A great tasting high caffinated product didn’t take long for this product to find itself a market, and it did, with the gamers.

How much of a gamer’s drink was it?  I first became aware of the product because it was being sold by the case in computer stores like CompUSA.  That just shows you how hardcore it was. To advertise their product, Bawls would sponsor LAN parties, where gamers would get their computers together in a common venue and challenge each other at the latest games. They even sponsored LAN parties as big as Quakecon or as small as the local ones here that took place in a converted bar.

You’ve seen me drink it with friends in some of the past videos I’ve done.  The reason why I did it was because recently it is popular to shoot a video of yourself trying some weird or obscure food or beverage online and post it up for people to see.  While the practice of trying new food and beverages on camera and posting it online has been popular for quite a while, I have not seen a single internet personality try Bawls, so I took it upon myself to do it.

But why did Bawls become so obscure and get so hard to find?

In 2007 I started to notice it was getting easier to find Bawls in stores. While CompUSA, originally the only store I could buy the soda, was shutting down for good, 7-11s and various gas stations in my area started to sell the stuff by the bottle.  Trust me, I would buy out their stock as much as I could!  Then I started to see it was being sold in four-packs of cans by Target.  The packaging style was just like Red Bull was being sold. With Target selling it across the country I was elated I could get Bawls so easily, but I preferred the taste of the soda in the glass bottles opposed to how it tasted in aluminum cans.

Then around 2009 something awful happened. For some reason Target stopped selling the four packs of the can version in their stores. I no longer could find bottles or cans of the soda in 7-11s or smaller grocery stores.  I couldn’t even find Bawls in Publix, and they were one of the very few major grocery stores that sold Bawls early on.  The official Bawls webpage stopped being updated with content.  The company stopped sponsoring major events like Quakecon.

Heck, even some LAN centers were having trouble stocking the stuff.  What was going on?

For over a year, the only place I could find the stuff would be online through sites like Thinkgeek or Amazon, and you’d be paying upwards of fifty dollars a case for it!  It was a very dark, expensive time, but you could tell that the demand was still there.  Thinkgeek said on numerous occasions it was one of their biggest selling products, and it would have to be restocked constantly.

So what happened?  I did some research and it turns out that the company nearly went bankrupt around 2009. The owners of the company were forced to step down and were replaced by the current owners of the product, BAWLS Acquisition (yes that same organization I listed as the owners in my videos).

According to the research I did, it turns out the product had extended itself tremendously to tons of different retail channels in 2008, and by 2009 it couldn’t be sustained. In my opinion, this happened because you had a niche product being sold to a mass market.  This is not a major problem for most similar products.  Red Bull and Monster have thrived in the past few years as a mass market product and they supposedly taste awful, but Red Bull and Monster had massive marketing campaigns on TV and in print to get awareness of the product out, and what their gimmick was. Aside from appearing as background in The Hangover, Bawls did not step up its marketing campaign to match their product expansion.  It was still a product only known by its base but it was being widely distributed through more channels than could be sustained by the company.  The distribution network for the product crashed, which is why the only place we could get it was online for a year.

But there is a silver lining to all this.  Bawls is coming back.  Under this new management, Bawls has started getting back the distribution network it had before it imploded. According to a press release I read from earlier in the year, Bawls has regained about 65% of the distribution network they previously had before their near bankruptcy.  They even were a part of this year’s Quakecon.

If you’re a gamer or not, Bawls needed to realize that they had a really good product that could have mass appeal if marketed correctly. Forget about being a drink exclusive to gamers! The cool looking blue bottles alone are a very good sell when put next to other products in a refrigerator case. It’s very distinctive if properly put in an advertising campaign. It’s also one of the few high caffeinated beverages that tastes good! With some people forced to drink in excess of five of these a day just to stay alert while working, this is an extremely important selling point.

A store down the street from my house has started selling it again, and I’ve been told other people across my state have noticed it in various stores as well. Heck, I’ve talked to some other gas stations in my area that didn’t stock it and they seemed interested in stocking it based on my recommendation. If you like it, spread the word. You just might see it in a store near you.

My Educational Resistance September 13, 2011

With the release of Resistance 3 for the Playstation 3, I decided to reflect on my best memory that the series provided me over the years.  A little background on me, I have a BA in English and a few years ago after I got out of college my parents were on a power trip which insisted I set my life goals to do everything but what I was good at.  They wanted me wasting my time applying to graduate schools even though I had spent my entire life in school by that point and was completely sick of it.  After twenty-five years of schooling all I wanted to do was to work and earn money.  I didn’t need to have a good paying job, I just wanted something that I could do and would enjoy doing it.

Two years ago I was working as a permanent substitute teacher for a high school English class.  The class’s permanent teacher had quit after just a month working there.  When something like that happened I would get a call to fill the teacher spot until an accredited teacher could be hired.  I would be allowed to create an acceptable lesson plan and give it to the students so they’d have something that could be graded while a teacher was being hired.  One fond memory I have of the experience around the time I was working there was the day Resistance 2 was released.  In my educational experiences I knew I had very little room to do things that excited me so any chance I got I would usually submit a college paper about video games or talk about them in a class discussion if they were on topic with what we were going over.  I really enjoyed the Resistance series and that day I decided to mess with my students a little bit.

That day on the blackboard I wrote this.  I took a picture of it before class started with the intention to post it up on Insomniac’s official message boards, so here it is so you can have a chance to look at it for yourselves.

This quote was taken from the opening cinematic for Resistance: Fall of Man, a launch title for the PS3 and a killer app for the system. I am a huge fan of documentaries on the History Channel and Discovery Channel I thought the writing in the first game matched that style very well, which is exactly what they were going for.  I asked the students if they knew where the quote could have come from.

I was pretty certain the students would not be able to identify where the quote came from, but I wasn’t expecting them to. The method behind my madness was I wanted the students to tell me the quote was a fake, and could not possibly have happened. Instead for the whole day the students were telling me that the quote had to come from a historical documentary. They recognized the name Nathan Hale as the namesake of another high school in the district, but they had no idea that the Nathan Hale the school was named after has been dead for about two-hundred years.

I was disappointed to see these students couldn’t tell the quote was a fake. The Americans had never launched an assault on England. The dates were all wrong for any kind of war they could have confused the battle with.  They really had no idea who the real Nathan Hale was or what he had done for the United States of America.

Nowadays I like to tell people I probably learned more from watching the History and Discovery Channels and playing video games than I ever learned in my schooling, but where does that leave the people in the school systems not fortunate enough to have a person who knows what they’re doing as a teacher when they aren’t privy to further educational outlets like that?  There are still some students who probably don’t even have general access to a computer, to say nothing of having Internet access, which is considered by the UN a basic human right nowadays.

These students would eventually get a full-time teacher and I was reassigned.  I got out of substituting around a year ago when I discovered I could make a lot of money fixing computers after years of my parents doing their best to prevent me from learning that.  Every once in a while I have a positive memory of my experiences like this one, but I don’t think I’ll be going back to it.  it just wasn’t right for me.

LA Noire, the Game That Could’ve Benefitted from Remedy’s Decisions September 2, 2011

I played through LA Noire last month on the Playstation 3 and am pretty close to 100% completion. What have I done in the game? I five stared all the case files in the game, completed all the side missions, solved all the cases (sans the majority of the DLC missions), rode in every car, found every landmark, and got every trophy (except for the $40,000+ damage case). I enjoyed the game, and did not feel bad about shelling out $40 for it at Best Buy, but I can’t help but feel that some of the problems that me and other critics had with the game could have spared Team Bondi for just what would befall them after its release.

With Team Bondi closing permanently today, not because they failed to make a well received, decent selling game, but because no publisher wanted to work with them on any other project, I wanted to talk about something I’ve noticed in every review I’ve read or watched of the game. In short, Team Bondi and through that, LA Noire, would have benefitted greatly from making the same decisions Remedy Entertainment made during the development of Alan Wake.

The first problem I have with the game is that the open world environment, while enormous, does not provide anything fun to do in it. The enormous environment only serves as a facade for every single case. Driving around in it only provides an opportunity to cause accidents, which will negatively impact your final case ranking. If you want the best possible rank in each case, you’re best off having your partner drive you automatically to each destination, cutting you out of the chance to explore this ENORMOUS wasted enviroment.

There is just nothing to do in downtown LA. This is unlike games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can easily pick up things to do in the world. You can be a taxi driver and take fares, catch theatre or entertainment, you can collect side bounties, watch TV or listen to the fully scripted radio stations.

The only thing you can do are side missions, but they’re dependant on getting the call for one while driving. If your partner drives you won’t be able to do them unless you free roam after completing the case desk. Side missions themselves are short and can be easier completed during these open world driving aspects once all cases are complete. There is an incetive to find and drive every car in the game since these count towards your game completion percentage and unlock you the cars in the vehicle showroom. The problem is only police cars are equipped with radios and sirens, which are essential to getting a perfect rank in some cases. Finally, in LA Noire there’s only one radio channel, and you have no control over what’s on it or what you’re listening to, and there’s nothing really that good on it on the level of Lazlo’s Chatterbox, Pat Maine, or the Deb of Night.

My other complaint is that a good amount of the cases in the game (especially the vice cases) are downloadable content, and not included on the disc. The game also shipped on the PS3 with an exclusive case (the Consul’s Car), but one you still had to download (with a free code). If you wanted the whole story you would have to spend an extra eleven or so dollars for a Rockstar Pass, which would enable you to download all the DLC for the game (including some you may have already gotten free with the disc). Easily there were three or four extra cases that could only be investigated by purchasing them online. Instead of making them feel like an extra benefit that expanded the story after its conclusion, it felt like there were large chunks of the game missing from the retail release. This was glaringly clear when there were only three vice cases in the retail game, whereas other desks had many more!

There was another company and another game that faced these similar problems, and they made the hard decision to cut these features from the game during development. It cost them wasted development time, but in the end they released a tighter product which didn’t suffer from these problems. Remedy Entertainment had originally designed 2010’s Alan Wake as an open world environment. It was also planned to be followed up with multiple downloadable episodes to continue the story of the game. But when they started to realize that having an open world environment in the story that they were telling just wasn’t working out for them, they cut the game’s open world ability and locked levels to a single path with enviroment bridged between cutscenes.

Some people were upset about this, but a lot of what was cut was featured in the Alan Wake: Illuminated book, and I don’t think anyone thinks the lack of an abandoned dirt track for time trials or an interactive ball puzzle in a museum is that sad a loss or further enhanced the game’s story.

Their intentions with DLC was also rightfully scaled back. They intended the first Alan Wake game to be analogous to a season for a television show, and further DLC would be considered special side stories, or as they put it, “interludes.” If they planned anything further, such as a new major storyline that would seem more fitting of a second season of a show, they said they would just make Alan Wake 2 instead. This scaled back what could have been a long DLC series to just a two episode epilogue. They even gave out codes for the first DLC for free with purchase of a new copy of the game. By ending it after just two downloadable episodes, Remedy could now (in theory) focus Alan Wake efforts on a whole new game. And since these downloadable levels took place after the main game and were just a side story, anyone who didn’t play them weren’t missing out on large chunks of the story in the middle of the game.

With just one product release, I am sad to announce that as of today, Team Bondi is no more. LA Noire received high reviews from critics and fans alike, but to me, my feelings about the game were far more complex than loved it or hated it. If they had made the tough decisions early on during development that they needed to (after the game’s release stories leaked to the press on a daily basis on just how bad the game’s management was) they could have had a shot at releasing a tighter game on a shorter development timetable, and that could have looked better to publishers who they needed for their next project.

Still, their efforts were commendable, and they do have a good product to show for all their hard work. I wish we could have parted on better terms.

Happy 25th Birthday, Metroid August 21, 2011

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the release of Metroid in Japan. It was a game that has inspired such a cult following from its fan base it has been made a staple of Nintendo’s portfolio of properties, putting it on par with the likes of Mario and Zelda.

To celebrate the anniversary of the game series that brought what was probably the first major female action video game protagonist, Samus Aran, I have decided to scour the internet to bring back some of the best and most nostalgic memories I have of this beloved series of games.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, I recommend starting off like I did, with watching a very good retrospective series produced by GameTrailers.com a few years ago, right around the time Metroid Prime 3 was releasing on the Nintendo Wii. They go into pretty explicit detail about the release of the games, the platforms they were released on, and along the way you can get a feel for just what has made this series so beloved for the past twenty-five years.

Metroid was the brainchild of one of the major Nintendo head honchos, Gunpei Yokoi. Due to his pedigree during the early Nintendo years some people put him on par with his pupil, Miyamoto (considered by many Nintendo fans to be the father of us all) and one of the reasons the company was so succesful with games and game systems. Yokoi is also considered to be the father of the Nintendo Game Boy, which was a highly successful handheld device that kept Nintendo on top of the handheld market for several generations. Like a match made in heaven, Metroid 2 would release exclusive to this handheld platform, continuing the story of Samus Aran, and expanding the Metroid universe even further.

I have to admit personally that while I did own an original NES (as well as an original Game Boy) I was severely limited by funds and only could have so many games for the system and sadly Metroid was not one of them. I also was never fortunate enough to own a Super NES during its lifespan, and while I had seen games demoed on it when visiting various friends, I never got to experience any of them myself during the 16-bit era. This is why I’m so grateful that the Nintendo Wii had the Virtual Console store, and it actually was a huge selling point for me when buying the system. I wanted to be able to play all these classic games I missed out on and the Metroid series was a big part of that.

For those of you who would prefer an abridged retrospective of what those years were like, enjoy this brief retrospective that Nintendo did just prior to the release of Metroid: Other M. For a short, it’s actually extremely well done, narrated by Samus Aran herself, showing the story of the first three Metroid games cut to remastered CGI footage which retold the ending of Super Metroid (Metroid 3).

Following Super Metroid, the glory days of Metroid would hit a dark period following the end of the 16-bit era. In the aftermath of the massive failure of the Virtual Boy, Yokoi was forced to leave Nintendo and tragically died two years later in a car accident. Many have considered his death a conspiracy, or assume had he not been fired from Nintendo he would still be alive today, but no one can really predict that sort of thing. Regardless, There was no Metroid game released for the N64 generation.

But it wasn’t going to be the end of Metroid forever. Nintendo now had a new console, the GameCube, which was in last place in the console war behind Microsoft and Sony. While it was last, It had some graphical power behind it if you knew how to develop for it well enough. They also had the direct access of a very talented second party developer named Retro Studios, and they were going to release a new kind of Metroid game for a whole new generation. What follows is considered to be one of the most nostalgic game commercials of all time.

Metroid Prime was a major hit for the Nintendo GameCube and became a killer app for the console in a time when it was desperately needing one. This was around the time I started to get into Metroid. After seeing all the positive reviews of the game, I just had to play it for myself. Once Metroid Prime released for the Player’s Choice line, I bought a GameCube off a friend of mine just so I could play the game!

When Nintendo announced they planned to bundle the game with new GameCubes I sold my GameCube back to my friend (for exactly what I paid for it) and bought a new silver one, because the bundled copy of Metroid Prime had a behind the scenes preview disc for Metroid Prime 2. That preview disc was gearing up to be a major collector’s item. What made it so special was it could only be obtained by either buying a new GameCube bundled with Metroid Prime or buying five listed Nintendo games and registering their unique codes on Nintendo’s website. This early game registration site would be a precursor to Club Nintendo. Ironically enough, to this day I’ve never opened the game’s package.

Metroid Prime 2 released just before Christmas 2004. It would be the last Metroid game to release for the GameCube and the first to include multiplayer. Even with its few deeply loved games, the GameCube still finished last in the previous console generation war, unable to meet the minimum amount of sales Nintendo desired.

But a new generation of consoles were on the horizon, and Nintendo knew for it to be a success not only would it need to have something to set it apart from its peers, but the full backing of all their beloved properties, and Metroid Prime 3 would need to release for it, taking full advantage of the new Wiimote controller. When Nintendo was ready to release it, they were sure to make it a major staple of the Wii’s marketing blitz.

The Nintendo Wii was selling out everywhere for well over a year after release thanks to its proper marketing, great games, and unique control system. Nintendo released a limited edition of the three Metroid Prime games, called the Metroid Prime Trilogy, to take full advantage of the Wii’s control scheme, and released it in limited quantities for the same price of Metroid Prime 3.

With the Metroid Prime Trilogy complete, Metroid went dark at Nintendo. Retro Studios was now working on other projects, but Metroid would not be gone forever, and during an E3 press conference, the head honchos at Nintendo of America announced that a new Metroid game was coming, and it would be developed by Team Ninja, the company responsible for Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden.

Metroid: Other M was a different kind of game that people were not expecting. This was not another Metroid Prime game. It went back to the original game story of the original Metroid games, but also touched upon the expanded Metroid Universe only previously seen in print. A lot of people criticized how Samus Aran was depicted in it, but I had an appreciation for the game that other critics didn’t. It wasn’t as overwhelming as the Metroid Prime games had been, (with the overwhelming desire to scan anything and everything) and the linear nature of some of the levels actually helped with exploration. I had a lot of fun playing this game, I enjoyed the CGI cutscenes a lot, and I thought the ending was very satisfying.

Now that the Nintendo Wii is on its way out, what is next for Metroid and its hero Samus Aran? The Wii U is going to be Nintendo’s first strike at the next generation of the console war, which is currently unanswered by Sony and Microsoft. Currently, there has not been a Metroid game announced for the platform, but Nintendo knows they have one of the most recognizable property catalogs of any game studio in the world, it would be a shame if they were to let it go to waste.

Could the Release of the Playstation Vita Kill Sony’s Memory Stick? August 11, 2011

With the advent of digital photography, having a memory card you can store all your camera’s data to has become a very common practice.  However, there isn’t a definitive standard for memory card designs, and the type of card you will need is usually dictated by what memory card type your camera requires.  Because of this, there have been all kinds of different memory card types ranging in different sizes, speeds and capacities, and they are not universally compatible with each other.  To deal with this, photo devices and memory card adapters have to include multiple different slots for the different memory card types.

Right now the major three memory card types are CompactFlash (CF), Memory Stick (MS) and SD.  If you buy any kind of photo printer you’ll likely find a socket for each of these cards.   Stores that allow you to print out your digital photos also will have individual sockets for each memory type.  Even the launch version of the Playstation 3 had sockets for each of these cards so you could view your digital photos and videos on your HDTV.

If you have a Sony camera bought within the last few years, chances are definite that you use Memory Stick Pro Duo to take your pictures.  By having their own proprietary media type for their devices, Sony has been able to keep the Memory Stick business thriving for them and their third-party manufacturers like SanDisk.

But probably the biggest device that uses the Sony Memory Stick is the Playstation Portable handheld.  With the launch version of the device having no internal memory of its own, savegames, downloadable games, demos, music, and videos have to be downloaded to a Memory Stick.  With the ability to easily swap these things out, gamers have been able to continuously upgrade the PSP’s storage capacity as more downloadable content is made available to them.

Recently, Sony cameras have been shipping with dual sockets which will take either a Memory Stick or SD memory card.  Because SD is used in most cameras, many users have chosen to use SD cards to ensure compatibility with a wider range of devices like Blu-Ray players and the Nintendo Wii.  However, since the Playstation Portable still has only one socket that will only accept a Memory Stick, the Playstation Portable has become the major Memory Stick selling device.

However, the Memory Stick may be going the way of the dodo and the MiniDisc.  With the Playstation Portable on its way out, the Playstation Vita will be Sony’s major portable games system.  When I demoed the Playstation Vita at E3 this year, I was able to get a few technical questions about the device answered.  Game saves are going to be stored on the internal flash memory portions of a new proprietary game stick format, and the Vita developers have assured me that the device will have its own internal memory capacity, although they have declined to tell me just how much internal space a Vita will have at launch.

However, what the Vita does not have is a Memory Stick slot.  This was a really bad decision.  Without Sony’s cameras or handheld devices encouraging sales of new sticks,  Sony is basically handing the entire market to the SD card, which is used in a wider array of devices.  With Sony’s digital cameras now all coming with dual sockets, and the launch of the Vita likely bringing the retirement of the Sony PSP, there is no killer devices that will encourage the purchase of Memory Sticks.

Likely there will still be a market for a while for legacy devices (the PSP and Sony cameras without dual sockets) but once the PSP gets phased out for the Vita the sales for the Memory Stick is going to just dry up.

Playstation Network Now Pre-Ordering DLC, Why? August 10, 2011

Sony has started to take pre-orders of online downloadable games through their new Playstation Network PLAY inititaive.  Four games, including Bloodrayne: Betrayal and Street Fighter III Third Strike Online Edition are being offered for prepurchase.  Other than the fact the games are discounted to Playstation Plus members or by downloading all four of them you’ll get a free gift, there really is little incentive to preordering a digital game.

The concept of preordering something digital, opposed to retail, is quite different.  In this day and age, preordering a physical copy of something actually does make sense.  Someone is going to put a pre-order down for a retail item in order to reserve it for themselves.  There is a physical limit to the amount of retail games that can be sold.  By reserving the game early, you gurantee that you will have your game set aside for you in advance so on release day you can simply pick it up without any hassle.  But in the digital world, an infinite amount of copies of something can be sold.  There’s no concern all the copies are going to be sold before you get the chance to buy it.

I have talked in the past about this subject.  GameStop was offering preorders for the first Halo Reach downloadable Map Pack a few months ago.  They were offering Power Up Rewards Members a free avatar goodie as an incentive.  While this option for purchasing DLC turned out to be much slower than someone who simply purchased the content through Xbox Live the second it came out, it did provide players who didn’t have access to a Credit Card a chance to pay cash for the content, and gave users a free goodie to boot just for preordering that one map pack.

I can only think of two valid reasons why someone would want to preorder something online.  Pre-Orders through STEAM, for as long as the service has existed, has allowed the user the chance to download the game in advance of release.  With the content already downloaded, the user could literally have the game the second the game released, which, trust me, when Half-Life 2 released, was a really big deal.  If Sony decided to release these games the same way, preordering would be a good idea.

The other valid reason is used by Telltale Games with their episodic game releases.  Instead of buying all six episodes of a game series individually, you could buy all of them in one lump sum at a fairly reduced price, and be e-mailed whenever the new episodes came out, so you could download them immediatly upon release.  Now, Sony isn’t going the episodic route with these games, you can only buy them individually, and you’re only getting a discount if you’re a Playstation Plus subscriber, so this won’t be an option.

My guess is that anyone who preorders any of these games will have them unlocked in their download queue upon release, so you can download and install them the second its released.  This is what Sony did for subscribers to the Playstation Qore Magazine before it became a Playstation Plus incentive.  Really, if they do it like that, you’d have the same experience buying it the second it comes out.

This Halo Life August 6, 2011

With Bungie wrapping up their ties with the Halo franchise that they created after ten years of development, I decided to take some time out this morning and finally write the article I should’ve written a month ago when the last Bungie Day took place.  So without further ado, I present you with my newest featured article for the site, titled “This Halo Life”.

Ten years is a long time, and a lot has happened to me personally and professionally over those years, and through all of it, Halo has been a part of it in some way.  So I decided to write a new featured article about the impact that Halo has had in my life, and everything I’ve done because of the game.  I also included some little seen clips of the game and their developers that I’ve been able to find online.

You can check it out on one of the upper tabs on the top of the page.  I hope everyone enjoys it.