What Happened to Captain S? May 24, 2011

Back in 2007 a group of people got together in New York and, heavily influenced by the tv shows of their youth such as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad, and Saved by the Bell, created a web series of their own to pay honor not only to those shows, but the games of their past, called The New Adventures of Captain S.  It was done by a production company called PBC-Productions.

A teenager named Chad Bellmont buys a used Sega Genesis game from an unknown gypsy during a tag sale.  When he plays the game for the first time, he’s imbued with the X-Code, the code that allows him to travel between our world and the world inside of video games.  With the help of his friends, and of a mysterious floating head, he has to stop a former friend who has been seduced by an evil entity who plans to take control of all video games and eventually our reality.

The series was cheesy but it had a great heart to it.  It was well written, fantastically acted, and the special effects were fitting of the series.  It brought me back to an earlier part of my life, which were the tv shows I watched as a kid, which really was the only good thing about my own childhood.

I will gladly turn on any of these episodes when I’m feeling bad.  If you must know, my favorite episodes are Episode 3, where Chad’s friend Becky discovers he’s a superhero and we learn Becky has a crush on him while Chad is blindly falling for the school babe Stacey Newfeld, and Episode 9, where Chad, Lunk and Stacey Newfeld have to survive a day of school, when all their classmates have been turned into zombies, and save Becky from the Game Genie.  Finally, and as you know, I make it a tradition to watch Captain S’s team-up with The Angry Video Game Nerd every Christmas.

The first season wrapped up and a second season was promised, coming very soon.  Sales of the DVD were going to fund a highly anticipated second season, which was promising to be bigger and better than the first.  A webcomic was even running which was going to bridge the gap between season one and season two.

Then, in one of the darkest days of my life, May 31st, 2009, this video hit the internet.

Specifics weren’t gone into why they had come to this conclusion, and it left a lot of people floored, but they assured the public it was no hoax.  I really don’t need to say anything further about the decline of the company since this announcement was posted, I already covered it a few months ago.  The webcomic ceased production before it came to its conclusion.  There was another series the company was working on, called Little Miss Gamer starring Lindsey “Z” Briggs, but new episodes of that series stopped being posted around March of 2010.  It seemed like real life was indeed catching up to them.  Being a fringe internet sensation was just not paying the bills and real life and real money was taking up their time, preventing all the principal team members from continuing with producing content.

I mentioned a few months ago that even though the company hadn’t posted a video since April of 2010, they had not yet posted any kind of announcement that the company was in fact shutting down, or if they had any interest in creating new content.

Well, it’s official, their goodbyes were posted on their official message boards this past week.  It was marked in a lenthy podcast interview with the two principal guys behind PBC Productions, Chad Williams, (who was the creator of the series, the voice of the Game Genie, and the face of the giant floating head) and Brett Vanderbrook (who played Chad Bellmont, better known as Captain S).

After a long time coming, someone who really wanted to know what was going to happen with the series got the means to ask.  Racketboy.com was auctioning off the chance to control an entire podcast and it was won by a guy who went by the name of Flake.  Flake’s choice was to get podcast host Dave Heineman to interview PBC-Productions and ask them just what happened with that second season of Captain S and what was in store from the company.

After listening to this full interview with the two principal guys who operate PBC, I have concluded the fact that this second season was never produced is truly a travesty.  Money was on the table, and the ideas for the second season were brilliant!  It just seems that the timeline for release was just impossible.  They do answer a lot of the questions about what was going to happen with the series, if old characters were going to return and what was going to happen to them, and what new characters were in store for us.  At least three villains were on paper, including a guy with the last name of Jaguar, a video game programmer who went mad, and the huge surprise was going to be the resurrection of the Game Genie.  There was even going to be a third group of characters who were not evil and yet not good which a character we thought was dead at the end of the first season was going to be a part of, who fittingly enough were going to be called “The Third Party” and they were led by the third defender of the X-Code, the Gypsy who sold the Genesis cartridge that turned Chad Bellmont into Captain S.

Alas, it seemed the schedule was just not right, and the money was not worthwhile for such a difficult production cycle.  The band, as it seems, has broken up since then, although they seem to still be on good terms with each other, some of them are no longer living in the same city, which would make their participation difficult if not impossible.

Farewell Captain S.  You will be missed.  Anyone want to go out for one last shake?

Splatterhouse, Review Travesty of Decade? April 21, 2011

At the end of last year, a remake of the cult classic game series Splatterhouse was released for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.  It received scores ranging from below average to abysmal and these reviews generated a lot of negative press for the game.

For those of you unfamiliar or unaware of the history of the famous video game series Splatterhouse, let me forward you to some very insightful history courtesy of Derek Alexander, who calls himself The Happy Video Game Nerd.

He even did this cool little video about the differences between the classic arcade version and the Turbo Grafx 16 CD version of the game, the only home console port of the game released in the US.

Like most people, I was faintly aware of the game series from its history as an arcade game.  After I inquired, some of my peers were also familiar with the sequels of the game released to the Sega Genesis.

I started catching tidbits about this game back when promotion was being done for it while it was in development.  When it was released, I remembered watching Yatzee’s review of it (and his standards are higher than a kite for what is considered good) and that was pretty much all I saw of it at release.  Because I was pretty broke after buying a dozen collector’s editions over that year, and I hadn’t heard much about Splatterhouse after it came out, I didn’t give it a second thought.

But then I started to see reviews of the game from people other than mainstream reviewers, and they were painting a much different picture of Splatterhouse than what the reviewers were.  Here’s the HVGN’s take on the new game.  My apologies for constantly referring to him in this article, but his videos were what brought this to my attention and I think he deserves a lot of credit, and his opinions about the game are shared by many players.

Then I read THIS article at the West Mansion (post dated 1/14/2011, sorry it doesn’t have a dedicated page yet), considered by many to be the biggest Splatterhouse fansite on the web.  You guys may think I’m controversial whenever I post something, take a gander at what the webmaster of that site had to say.  The short of it is, he was pretty sure the reviews were unfavorable because Namco decided to pull advertising for the game from sites just before release.  He figured, without ad revenue to warm reviewer’s stomachs the review sites had no reason to be generous to the game and they universally destroyed it.  So even though the game was fun to play, the review scores were abysmal, the bugs were exaggerated and hopes of sales of the game were destroyed.

But he had some evidence to back up his claims.  According to actual people who played the game, the review scores (and comments) about Splatterhouse were completely unmerited at best or outright wrong at the worst.

Now there are games out there that I personally enjoy which are not by a lot of means perfect, but they’re still a ton of fun to play.  The typical term for these kinds of games are usually unpolished gems that just need a little love.  They’re games that despite the flaws that a little more development time could’ve fixed were still really enjoyable.  A personal example I would consider fitting that description would be Troika’s 2004 swan song Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines.  That is a game that despite its performance issues, control bugs, memory leaks and cliffhanger endings, I happily play each and every summer because it’s still enjoyable to play, and fans have done everything they can to fix and modify the game to give it the polish that Troika never could.

Of course there is always the inverse of that, the game that is bad no matter how much polish it did or didn’t get.  Alone in the Dark (2008), was that kind of game.  It did receive abysmal scores across the board and I can tell you personally looking back on my playthroughs of the game, they were merited.  The bugs and glitches HINDERED the game being fun, instead turning completing it into a chore (making the scene skip menu, something that I normally would never consider using, SERIOUSLY tempting to use through the whole game).  The claim that it just needed some extra time for polish was quickly tossed as the one version of the game that got the extra six months of polish the game reviews thought the game needed (The PS3 version) was still an awful buggy mess, only it was now a little bit easier.

So these guys looked like they had fun playing the game, and the low scores from the reviewers was looking more like there was a fix in place.  The major tell to this was that some of the glaring problems reviewers had with the game, particularly framerate issues, were not actually in the game.

In all, the webmaster of the West Mansion, the BIGGEST Splatterhouse website on the internet for the past 10 years, has announced he will retire in two months but there’s a mention that someone else will pick up the site after he leaves.  Namco has shut down the American development house that made it, making seeing any further games highly unlikely.

It’s kind of reasons like this that have made me hesitant to start doing full reviews for games on this site (micro-reviews for odds and ends are different, but I still haven’t officially reviewed a full game on this site yet, although I have been considering it for some time).  I believe that a game should be fun above all else, and I am able to overlook issues I’m having with the game if I’m enjoying the game regardless.  The real tell for me is if I’m able to REPLAY the game repeatedly even with all these issues.  I also will take price into account since no one has ever sent me a video game for free (and I don’t expect them to).  I just haven’t been comfortable enough to do a full review (video or written), since some people who visit this site think I’m opinionated enough as it is.  However, if someone wants to send me a new game with the hopes that I’d review it, I would be more than happy to oblige them.

I’m writing this all to tell you all in general, don’t put 100 percent faith in the review system.  If you’ve waited years to play a game that has gotten bad reviews, don’t let that deter you from picking it up and forming your own opinion about it.  Don’t let some paid intern who gets tons of free swag sitting behind a computer all day tell you how you should feel about a game you’ve never played.

So the question stands right now, is the game as bad as the reviewers say?  Well, my copy is coming this weekend, and I’ll be able to see for myself.

The New Wave of Marketing Part 2 March 22, 2011

I started an article last week where I talked about all the pros and cons of traditional marketing trends that have started over the past five years all to get a  player to buy your game as close to day one as possible, so you can sell your game as close to the release price as possible.

We discussed options like traditional media advertising, collector’s editions, and day one goodies for those who preorder.  They all have their pros and cons, and I talked about all that in my previous article.  Now I want to talk about some of the games that bucked the trends and were the most creative at promoting the release of their game to the gamers.

Now, a small disclaimer here.  A lot of the games that I’m going to talk about did in fact do a lot of the traditional advertising paths I discussed in the previous article, but they complemented this advertising with something truly unique (or unique at the time).

Without further ado, I decided to start this series with the mother of all groundbreaking games.

Doom (PC) – id Software was about to release the biggest game for the DOS platform which was going to revolutionize gaming as we knew it.  They had developed a first person shooter in a 3D environment, which would allow its user to use their modems or network cards to frag their friends.  It was the first true deathmatch game.  They needed to get the word out about this game and they weren’t going to do it through the traditional channels.  They were going to follow the shareware model that had been pioneered for gaming by men like Scott Miller at Apogee.

They first released the shareware on a system controlled by David Detta, who let them use it.  Within hours gamers swamped it to download the shareware, and Detta’s computer crashed. They also gave out free copies of the shareware to many game stores and told them to take the money from selling it and put it into marketing the full game’s release.

By the end of it, there were more copies of the Doom shareware on PCs than copies of Windows 95, and Microsoft had done a multi-million dollar traditional marketing push for that operating system.  These were the first inklings of the power of digital distribution and the strength of the online community in promoting something.

In the end, the first Doom was a massive financial success for id Software, and cemented their reputation as the most groundbreaking game development company of the time.

Keep checking back here for later parts, each detailing the most creative promotional methods in game development history.

What is Professional? March 21, 2011

Funny Story.  I fix computers on the side since I’m really good at it and twice a week I go to classes for training in computer certification.   I was told in class last week that the guidebook clearly states you’re expected to look professional when you go out to a computer repair job and I just laughed hysterically.

I’ve been fixing computers most of my life, but mostly just for my own personal amusement.  I hadn’t discovered until recently (my family was always against me making profit from my computer skills, they rather I stay in college until I died) that fixing computers could be a lucrative business if you had a customer demand for it in your area.  With only my experience and no formal training to inhibit my expectations, I would go to these computer repair jobs dressed how I normally dressed, with a video game t-shirt and zip up hoodie (weather appropriate).

In fact I told my A+ Certification class about a time when a private school called me in to look at some laptops.  I went to diagnose and fix them wearing a Doom 3 shirt.  None of the staff batted an eye at my appearance, I was treated with the utmost of respect, and a lot of the students (who averaged around age of 6) were extremely curious to what was my experience and how they could get a job fixing computers as well.

I was told by the instructor that was just AWESOME.

I think that the times have changed, in that people expect real technical experts to dress like how I normally do, instead of dressing how Best Buy does commercials about how their technicians look.  The times of the MIT graduate IBM engineer wearing a button down white shirt and black tie, armed with horned rim black glasses and a pocket protector have passed and people have come to expect a computer expert to come wearing a video game or rock band t-shirt. Dressing like a stereotypical geek is not professional anymore.  Ironically, dressing in a Halo shirt actually makes you look more like you know what you’re doing.

Obviously it’s a bad idea to wear long dangling chains, especially if you’re working inside a pc, so things like dog tags cannot be worn, but even something as professional as a tie can also easily get in the way of your hands when you’re building a new PC.

From what I’ve been told by my peers, the corporate level still expects their employees to cater to their stereotypical dress codes, leaving personal individuality to when they leave their homes.  Other than basics of cleanliness, there is really not a good reason for these policies to be in effect, espessially when a guy like me looks like more of an expert to a typical person than someone depicted in a Best Buy commercial.  More progressive software companies like Google, eBay, and Apple have bucked this trend without incident, to say nothing of the dozens of game development studios in the US alone.

Something that I’ve noticed, especially in the computer games industry is that you can’t judge anything about a person just by appearances anymore.  I think for the most part people still will judge others by appearances in every other field (business especially) but in all my experience, for technology they expect the out there to be the norms.  This might have something to do with the exposure a lot of people have had to technology enthusiasts as depicted to them in movies and on television, or it could be expectations formed from people they have in their own families who have technical backgrounds.

I think that’s one thing that A+and compTIA is behind on, maybe someone should inform them to update their manual.  Has the games industry influenced this trend, or has the media been more responsible?  I’ll leave you to decide that, and also what you should look for when you need help the next time your computer breaks. 

The New Wave of Marketing March 18, 2011

So you’re a development house with a pedigree of games, and you decide you want to make your next game an entirely new IP that no one up to this point has heard of before.  You’re releasing in a time where the market on all the current-generation consoles are flooded, with tons of games already out, many of them contenders for best game of the platform, and plenty more to come that year.  You need to sell your game, and sell them as close to release day as possible.  Because brick and mortar retailers don’t like keeping inventory on shelves that isn’t selling and after a few months they will start to mark down the price of something they want to get rid of, regardless of what price point you’re telling them to sell at.

You could market the game through the usual channels, like through television ads, billboards, and magazines.  However, marketing on TV and in print costs a lot of money, and your core demographic doesn’t really pay any attention to advertising that way anymore.  They’ll usually just ignore them, change the channel or have them deleted from their recordings.

You could offer your customers something to get them to preorder, like a physical promotional item or day one DLC.  By telling your customers to preorder at a certain chain store, you can offer them exclusive downloadable or unlockable content as an incentive.  Retailers like this because it can get them guaranteed customers when the game finally releases, and money paid for games that aren’t even out yet.  It also gives them a good barometer of just how many copies of each game to stock on the day of release.  The problem is that this will make a lot of customers who didn’t preorder feel penalized, and make them think twice about paying full retail price for a copy of the game that doesn’t have the DLC offered with it.  Also it can really anger customers if you offer different promotional items spanning over many different retail chains, making many completionists wary of the value of their own Day 1 DLC when there are other items for a game out there they can never have.

You could release a Collector’s Edition (CE) of your game and charge a premium price for it.  You can fill it with little in-game trinkets or include things of actual substance like a documentary disc and art book.  The low quantity of those at release could bring out a lot of preorders and day one purchases getting you full price sale on each game, on top of the extra money from charging a premium price.  However a CE costs more money to make and your publisher might not be interested in offering one if they don’t see a demand for one.

So what do you do?  You have to be creative.  Coming soon I’ll be talking about the most creative marketing campaigns for new IPs I’ve seen over the past few years.  If anyone has any ideas they’d like to pass along to me, post a comment!

Award Shows, Do We Need Them? February 14, 2011

If you’ve known me on a personal level long enough, you’d know that I think of most Awards Shows as farces.  That gladly includes organizations such as the Academy or Golden Globes.  Over the entire span of my life, I’ve not only disagreed with their decisions on what makes a good movie, actor, song, or director but the very people and movies I believe should win an award for Best (Insert Award Here) of the Year not only don’t win, but  don’t even receive a nomination.  See it happen enough times and you start to look down upon the Awards Organizations in general and start to think, “What’s the point of having a Best Award for anything when the actual best of the year aren’t even up for nomination?”  I know a lot of people were thinking along those lines when the Academy spat in the face of Christopher Nolan in 2008 by not nominating The Dark Knight, the actual best picture of that year, for Best Picture.

You could say, “Oh you’re just being egotistical again by thinking your opinions of what makes a good film is better than anyone else’s.”  Now, normally you’d be right.  But seriously, if the movies that I believe deserve the awards aren’t even nominated, and a lot of my peers are listing off names of their own favorites of the year which aren’t getting nominations either, you slowly come to the conclusion there’s a fix in place somewhere, and if you’ve continued to see a downward trend where lousy movies you’ve never heard of not only get nominated but win awards they have no business winning, you lose faith in a system which claims to declare a true BEST.

Then there’s the Grammys, which are awards for music, not movies.  I’ve seen parts of a few of them.  I have always wondered why most of the awards don’t actually get presented to the winners on stage, and instead just have their names called out, and why the majority of the awards aren’t mentioned or given out on the actual awards show.  Steven Colbert learned that one a few years ago when his self narrated book didn’t win a Grammy a few years ago.  They never even broadcasted the section of the show for category he was up for.  He had to find out he lost online.

But, something surprising happened at the Grammys this year.  A song which was made specifically for a video game won an award last night.  “Baba Yetu” by Christopher Tin won “Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)”.  This is a fantastic song I first heard accompanied by a full orchestra on the Video Games Live Level 2 Blu-Ray.  I am ashamed to admit I was never a Civ player despite the heavy classic gaming pedigree that goes with that franchise (and it’s Game God creator) but I was just blown away by this song.

It is my guess that the Grammys had absolutely no idea that this game was originally designed for a video game theme, as it was introduced in this year’s Grammys for Christopher Tin’s Album Calling all Dawns, which released on CD in 2009.  Although games have had fully composed scores on the level of movies for the past ten years, Best Video Game Score is NOT a category the Grammys recognises, and because of that a lot of fantastic scores over the last ten years have gone ignored by the Grammys, which is seen by a lot of musicians as the award only the greatest of them can aspire to.

If you’re a fan of the song as I am, here’s the official music video for it made for Civilization IV.  The game has been out for five years now, so you might be able to find yourself a copy if you wish.  If you don’t want to play, you can buy his CD Calling all Dawns, which is what got him the nomination in the first place.  The game is also featured on the Video Games Live tour, and it is one of the songs on the Video Games Live Level 2 DVD and Blu-Ray concert. 

Congrats to Christopher Tin and the makers of Civilization.  Your win has broken down a barrier of hypocrisy that deserved to be trampled.

UPDATE:  The Video Games Live Official Site states that Calling all Dawns won the award for Best Classical Crossover album.  So that’s two for Christopher Tin.

My Ode to Palm February 11, 2011

HP has announced their first set of devices that will use the software engineered by Palm before HP bought them out.  With HP giving no credit to the company they have apparently completely absorbed, this looks like the end of Palm as we know it.  Now say what you will about the Palm Pre or the Palm Pixi (it’s already been said before, and there’s nothing at all I can contribute further about either device) but I have plenty about the company that I wish to say.

All this recent talk about hint books, guides and E3 got me to thinking about just how our society has evolved in just the last ten years, and just how powerful the computers in our pockets which call themselves phones have become.  I’d like to think that Palm is partially to thank for that, especially since a lot of what my iPhone can do is what my old Palm Pilot could do almost ten years before the iPhone hit a single shelf.

In 2000 I got a PALM VII as my first ever PDA. In the years before I had a cell phone, this thing was a serious precursor to the latest smart phones such as the Droid or iPhone.  It had tons of useful programs you could write notes with, or if you preferred you could use an optional keyboard attachment to type files up.  But its main draw was the wireless palm.net service you could pay fifteen dollars a month to access, and you could get e-mail or make use of free internet connected applications (apps!).

Now you’re probably going to tell me if you want to look up a phone number nowadays you just simply can download the White Pages app to your iPhone, run the program, and look up the address and phone number of whoever you’d like, what the Palm VII could do was certainly no different and nothing special.  Well, let me stress I was using this hardware across the country in 2001, this was easily 6 years before the release of the iPhone and 7 years before smart phones started to be used by the masses.

I took the VII everywhere, in 2001 the Delta Application had all my airport information ready for me when I flew out to Florida.  I took it to California, Nevada, and Massachusetts.  It worked everywhere and never had bad reception.  I could check my e-mail for the first time without needing to fire up my Personal Computer.  I could get the address of any business I needed on the go as well as their phone numbers, and I could even find out what meal I was getting on my flight before I even got to the terminal.

One of my favorite Palm programs at the time was an app that allowed me to download the headlines from gamasutra.com and read them on the go every time I synced my Palm to my computer.  However, when GDC was about to happen for that year, they included something special along with their headlines.  By tapping a new GDC specific option in the program, I could access a whole new area.  The new area provided the whole GDC schedule, and it was now on my Palm!  If I chose to attend, I would know exactly where everything was all at the tap of a stylus.  The entire schedule, a map of the show and a bunch of interesting interactive tidbits was at my fingertips.   This was my first exposure to what technology would eventually be capable of.

The downside was that it couldn’t make phone calls and it couldn’t play games, music or videos.  The processing power and the fact that it was a monochrome screen didn’t make me feel all that bad about it.  I was trading off that for the ability to have mobile internet functionality for the first time in my life.  Also, cell phones had not yet taken off in the States yet.  My mom’s was still very big and bulky with a large antenna, and the LCD display could only display what a simple pocket calculator could, numbers and that was all.

Palm would eventually start ushering in a new series of smart phones (the Treo) which offered Palm’s software along with phone capability.  They were manufactured by a company that would later be bought by Palm, but they would use Palm’s Operating System.  However they would eventually be competing with more than just the Blackberry.  By 2007, phones had become an enormous business.  Everyone had one, and even though the US was slower to adopt more advanced phones than the rest of the world (the cell phone companies held us back pretty good) a new company was ready to give the consumer the future, and it was Apple, who would eventually release a heavily functional cell phone with a consumer price in mind.

Being the first affordable major consumer device to market REALLY helped out Apple a lot.  Unlike PDAs or MP3 players, people are only going to want to have one cell phone.  The Pre released some time after the massive popularity of the iPhone 3G release, where many iPhone owners were unable to change their phones and cell plans without bringing about massive fines.  Their customers were people who were willing to wait for Palm.  By the time the Pre came out, they did in many ways have a superior phone to the iPhone (built in keyboard and OS level multitasking), but they also really shot themselves in the foot by making themselves exclusive with just one provider.  They also got a TON of bad press among many groups for the way they went around iTunes syncing, by falsely getting iTunes to identify it as an Apple product.  They solved most of these problems with the Pixi by the time of its release but it was too late, and the company was too far in debt.

With the purchase of Palm has come its end.  Its software will continue to live on through HP, who will be using it to power their new handheld devices.  Rest in peace, Palm, knowing you were the catalysts to ushering in the future.

The New Trend With Guide Books January 30, 2011

For as long as there have been games, there have been guide books.  In the early Nintendo days, they would be a part of each issue of Nintendo Power.  In 1993, I was seeing trade paperbacks full of tips in my school library for many popular games bundled together.  By 1997, in the golden age of PC CD-ROM gaming, official and unofficial guide books would be posted for all the latest games.  In fact, there were so many of them, a lot of bookstores would have their own little section on the shelves devoted to them.

Guide Books can offer a lot more than what an online cheats site can aside from the fact that you can read them on The John.  Now I will be the first person to admit I’ll just look up an FAQ for a simple answer I need when I’m playing through an older game, but I’ll also admit that a Guide Book has a lot of advantages.  They’re out on day one of a game’s release, well before some of the more in depth FAQs can be written.  They also have more of a visual and artistically appealing look to them then an HTML loaded TXT file.  They are printed on glossy paper with quality inks and will include every secret, code, hint, biography, and storyline explanation a curious gamer requires.

About a year ago I did a piece on the cousin of the Guide Book, the Video Game Art book.  Artwork, developer interviews, and a beautiful (usually hardcover) book to read it out of. And the really nice ones are bound just like coffee table books.  If a gamer was really lucky back in the old days, and the game was big enough, a seperate art book would be released for a game, it happened with Halo 1 and 2, Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and The Force Unleashed.

Here’s a video so you can have a good idea what I’m talking about.

As time progressed, the Guides started to get more elaboriate, and then (as you could see in some of the examples I showed in the video) they started getting bound seprately with the guide book, like for Mass Effect 1 and Alan Wake.

Over the past two years, a new trend has started with these books.  Now, instead of releasing a guide book and art book seperate, they seem to be going for creating a single big book of everything and releasing it at a premium price.  A lot of the newer releases (Halo Reach, Dead Space 2) have some FANTASTIC looking Collector’s Guides that as a game collector and coffee table enthusiast I couldn’t ignore.

Now, the downside of this is that these guides can cost almost twice as much as a regular guide can.  A traditional guide book can cost about $19.99 US, a price that a lot of people believe is far too high.  These new Collector’s Books can cost anywhere from $29.99 to $39.99.  Also, the art portions are integrated with the guides themselves, preventing seperate resale (and making them much bigger on a shelf).

Time will tell what will happen to these monoliths of a physical era in a digital age.  Will they continue to be published, or will the popularity of free information on the Internet finally overcome them?  Until then I’ll still be taking that guide book of this year’s E3, thank you very much.