Hole in the Net

I was just perusing Gamerankings.com and noticed that Lair was averaging a 60% rating after nearly thirty reviews. Guess that pretty much kills any potential it might’ve had as a PS3 system-seller, and as looks to me like a major setback to Sony’s bottom line this year. Lair is one of those games that really needs to do well to bring the spotlight back to Sony for year-end console sales, but it seems to me that the PS3’s just gonna hafta wait until 2008 for a chance to take center stage once again. Lair sits in the unfortunate shadow of both Bioshock and Metroid Prime 3, and I was kinda thinking that it and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune were going to be the double-header that got Sony back in the running for 2007. I guess Lair’s spot will have to be picked up by Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction, but Ratchet and Clank is hardly a system-seller, and Uncharted, being a new IP, may run aground if Sony doesn’t hype it to hell and back.

Rough times at the Sony camp through the end of fiscal 2007, it appears.

The old Nintendo, I mean…I can’t put my finger on it, but the Nintendo that brought us the Wii seems to be quite a different Nintendo than the one that brought us Super Mario World. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Wii is a great system, but despite what I’ve played on it so far, I’m not heartbroken that I don’t own one. Maybe it’s too early in the system’s life, or maybe my gaming tastes have changed too much over time, but it’s really telling when today’s release of Metroid Prime 3 should have me lamenting the fact that I don’t own a Wii, yet I’m not. This is the first Metroid title I won’t be playing, and oddly enough, I just don’t care. I thought the last two Prime titles were amazing, but why hasn’t that same sense of excitement and anticipation carried over to this new title, I wonder?

Gaming has changed a lot over the last ten years, so much so that even Miyamoto himself seems to think that the games of the ‘old Nintendo’ may be a thing of the past. I suppose I should get used to the fact that things change, but that still won’t take away the nostalgia of Mario flying around in a yellow cape, racing the timer in Super Metroid, or tossing the latest Zelda cartridge out of a second story window.

Oh yeah, I hate the Zelda series. We’ll go into the hows and whys another day.

It seems that the rumored PS3 version Of Bioshock may in fact be nothing more than that; the 360 version of the game now has a slipcover that says ‘Only on Xbox 360 and Windows PC’. I thought for sure that this would be a shoo-in for a PS3 port, but I guess Microsoft knows a good thing when they see it. Smart move, as Bioshock thus far is looking to be a serious Game of the Year contender, and MS needs every feather they can stick in their hat through the end of 2007 if they hope to impede Sony’s marketshare.

So I downloaded the Eternal Sonata demo on LIVE earlier today, and I have to say that after spending a good hour or so with it that it trumps the Blue Dragon demo in pretty much every damned way conceivable. Let me give you a little backstory about my relationship between myself and JRPGs: by and large I consider the vast majority of them to be utter garbage. Play one and you’ve more or less played them all, but even so there are a scant few that stand out in my memory as being phenomenal and well worth experiencing: Phantasy Star, Phantasy Star 2, The Shining in the Darkness, Final Fantasy 2, Final Fantasy 7, Thousand Arms, Skies of Arcadia…if the demo is anything to judge Eternal Sonata by, I have every confidence that I’ll be adding it to my fairly short list.

Skies of Arcadia has long been my favorite JRPG followed closely by FF7…we’ll see if Eternal Sonata ends up rounding out my top three.

Looks so, as these are some of the comments piling up as reviews start creeping in:

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“A Perfect Score: That’s what BioShock deserves as it is one of the most original, haunting and memorable shooters to come along since Half Life.”
-Alternative Press

“This is the really bewildering thing about it: it succeeds so stunningly on three different fronts. Not esoteric ones, either, these are the big challenges developers have been struggling to master for decades: narrative, emergence, a sense of place. If another game did just one of these as well as BioShock, it would immediately qualify as a classic. When a game comes along that does all three, we can only be baffled and thankful.

I spend my career, and my gaming life, waiting for a moment when a game just astonishes me, when I can’t believe what I’m seeing, what I’m doing. BioShock has five.”
-PCG UK

“BioShock is a novel compressed into a first-person shooter. It manages to be both a tricky, exciting action game, a fascinating creation of an enclosed world and a deep enquiry about what it means to be human - a trick most action movies and books fail to achieve. It also plays with you at every stage, confounding your expectations and your control over events repeatedly, from your control over your weapons, Plasmids, plot, self…

And this is where we have to stop ourselves - we don’t want to spoil it. What we can tell you is you’ll be playing this game for months to come, exchanging story elements to build up the bigger picture, and arguing about what it all means. Come, join the argument, play the impossible game.”
-OXM UK

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I have to admit to being a bit skeptical myself over the course of the game’s development…we hear lots of promises but often are left underwhelmed by the final product. Still, comments like these are reassuring, and it seems as though I’ll be taking a second look at BioShock myself when it hits store shelves later this month.

Hard to believe I know, but damn if the franchise hasn’t been around for a decade now, and if the sales of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl are any indication, it’s a good deal away from losing steam. No doubt the franchise’s popularity is in no small way attached to the advertisement…er, animated series, and the new Diamond and Pearl is what we’re going to take a brief look at to discover why it is that despite being the bad kind of repetitive that Dragonball Z only wishes it could be, the show still manages to be a phenomenon. In a world where parents get up in arms and decry the type of violence found in video games such as Grand Theft Auto, I find it curious that an animated children’s program that, at its core, is about the entrapment and forced combat of frequently dangerous wildlife by pre-teens with zero parental supervision has been allowed to be as successful and influential as it has…then again, I was raised by parents who bludgeoned me with a tree any time I didn’t trim the grass properly (with rusty pinking shears, of all things), so my perspective on parental allowances is a bit skewed.

Pokemon has been both the target of ire from die-hard anime fans as well as a source of endless, shall we say, creative artistic interpretations posted to innumerable internet art sites, but love it or hate it, the creativity and energy that undoubtedly has both Japanese and American children bouncing off the walls like Pikachu in a bottle still permeates the series. Pokemon: Diamond and Pearl follows the story of Dawn, your typical Pokemon protagonist, who on her tenth birthday begins her journey to become a Pokemon coordinator (which, I must admit, sounds a lot like someone who matches Jigglypuff drapes with Weepinbell bedspreads) just as her mother was before her. Still, names, faces and motivations are irrelevant; if you’ve seen any of the other umpteen iterations of Pokemon, you already know that the plot is a threadbare attempt to string together saccharine-blasted cockfights (of the rooster variety, thank you), and in this PDaP succeeds in delivering. Of course, poor Dawn is just a bit player in her own series; not but a scant episode or two into the series, she and her ear-searingly annoying Piplup (creatively named ‘Piplup’) find themselves supplanted by energetic but egotistical Ash and perennial favorite Pikachu, along with stoic but girl-crazy Brock. Fortunately for Dawn, nicer-than-Misty-but-twice-as-weepy May and Brock-chaperone Max are out of the picture this time out, giving her more than ample time to develop her second-banana bit player skills to their utmost. Outside of the Pallet-swap (see what i did there?) and roster changes, everything here is by-the-numbers Pokemon, so what is it about the series that gives it such long legs?

I personally give much of the credit to the Pokemon realm’s resident ‘villains’, Team Rocket. Their predictable but humorous meddling has become increasingly elaborate as each new series unfolds, and they are the portal through which parents of the show’s target demographic are drawn in. Jesse, James, and Meowth are not so much evil as they are perpetually broke, and all they really want to do is make a buck and finally succeed in something in life (in other words, they have the same hopes and dreams as most of the people you know), and who can’t relate to that? As is often the case, the villains have greater depth and are far more well-rounded in their motivations than the protagonists, and its their flaws that make them far more easily identified with. It’s clear that Team Rocket’s voice talent are still having a lot of fun with the characters after so many years, and the localization provides for some of the best self-referential and satirical lines the show has to offer. Ash and Co. may drive the show’s success, but Team Rocket is what gives it gas.

Considering Nintendo’s penchant for choking franchises until they cough up cash, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Team Rocket spin-off game or series somewhere down the line; I’d be even less surprised to discover that TR’s lovable-loser stylings and humorous self-depricating banter finding a much broader audience amongst children and their parents than the show that spawned them did.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear (though I suspect that large amounts of alcohol and/or illegal substances may have been involved) I was recently invited to join WotG due to my somewhat religious dedication to all things animated. Though the fact that I haven’t changed my TV tuner from Cartoon Network in over two years isn’t the sort of thing that I’d normally associate with “prior job experience”, I suspect being the world’s oldest living teenager has its merits on the geekier side of things, and so thus I find myself one of the newest additions to the WotG roster. Both of you who may already be familiar with my online comic ‘The Polymer City Chronicles” (likely by someone who told you how awful it was and how you should avoid it at all costs) are also aware of the other time-waster that’s very close to my heart: video games and the game industry as a whole. You’ll probably hear me frequently rant about how the PS3 is STILL too expensive despite all the stuff that you get with it, how Nintendo is intentionally dragging it’s heels to artificially inflate Wii demand, and how Microsoft’s ability to buy exclusive content could eventually do them more harm than good…but these are topics for another night when it’s not after 2am, and back-to-back Inuyasha episodes aren’t emptying my mind like a freshly-flushed toilet bowl. On that note, just in case the programming director at Adult Swim happens to buzz by here: more Futurama, less Inuyasha (NO Inuyasha if we can get away with it). I’m not sure what audience you’re aiming this show at when it’s airing at between 1:30-2:30am, but it sure as hell can’t be the same demographic that thinks TAG body Spray and T-Mobile are the phattest, yo.