Archive for March 4th, 2010

The game begins when the main character is asked to try out a new device of Professor Oak’s that is used to talk to Pokémon. The player soon meets a wild Pikachu and befriends it. The Pikachu’s trust must be earned by the player and eventually it will come and live in the player’s house. There are three different activity days: Pikachu’s Daring Days, Discovery Days, and Play Days. Each day has a different objective (ie collecting food, going fishing) and the player can earn Pika Points, which is the currency used at Abra’s Shop to unlock new items. Eventually, if the player reaches day 365, Professor Oak appears and says that Pikachu has to be released, as it is a wild Pokémon. The player has to go to the woods where Pikachu was found and say “goodbye” several times, upon which Pikachu realizes he can’t live with the player anymore, and, sadly, leaves. After the credits, while the player is looking around the front yard and reminiscing about Pikachu, it returns, and the game continues as if Pikachu was never released. Video game review aggregators like Metacritic and Game Rankings gave the game mixed reviews. Some complaints included the simplistic music and graphics, the controls, and the limits of the voice-recognition technology, which only understood about 200 words. Because of this, and due to the many different languages in Europe and other territories (and the huge variation of regional dialect in the UK, significantly more than any other anglophone region), it was never released outside of Japan and North America. A spiritual sequel to Hey You, Pikachu!, Pokémon Channel was also developed by Ambrella. It was released on the Nintendo gamecube.

Review by Kyle Anderson

Spring training games are underway, and that means that baseball video games are also back in our gaming systems. I absolutely love America’s pastime, and yet throughout my video game playing life I have never enjoyed a baseball video game. The balance just never seems to be right: Either it’s too realistic (and thus sort of boring) or has too much of an arcade feel (and then doesn’t authentic). “Major League Baseball 2K10″ has some high points, but it won’t convert anybody who hasn’t played a bat-and-ball game since “RBI Baseball.”

The Basics
As they said in “Bull Durham,” “This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball.” “2K10″ is basically that, plus some augmented pitching controls, a stylish presentation and a home run derby.

The Highs

Showdown Science
“Major League Baseball 2K10″ centers its action around the head-to-head battle between the pitcher and the batter. It’s a smart move, as the game of baseball is sometimes so sprawling that it’s hard to do everything at once. For players who really want to get nerdy with numbers and probability (like me), there are any number of statistics available to you while you’re either pitching or batting. Pitching is the most fun, as you have (perhaps slightly unrealistic) control over the ball’s placement, spin, curve and speed. The learning curve on the controls is sort of steep (expect to throw a ton of wild pitches in the beginning), but once you get the hang of it the feel is nice and smooth.

Everybody Loves Home Runs
Steroid culture is still alive and well in “Major League Baseball 2K10″ — or at least in the “Home Run Derby” portion of the game. WIth so many stadiums, players and statistics to keep track of, there isn’t a whole lot of room for bonus games or alternate modes, but “Home Run Derby” is pretty sweet. It’s a more arcade-esque atmosphere, but the thrill of the Derby doesn’t diminish. Plus, the ball absolutely flies out of the stadium — I played as David Wright (of my beloved New York Mets) and hit 32 dingers in one Derby. Wright’s total for all of last year? 10.

Shiny Things
For some reason, I can never get over how great modern sports games look and how well they replicate the feel of watching actual game broadcasts. They’ve been steadily evolving for years and yet I’m always pleasantly surprised. “Major League Baseball 2K10″ does the job extremely well, giving the games a big-time feel with killer play-by-play, replays and transitions. Plus, you don’t have to listen to stupid Tim McCarver prattle on about nothing.

The Lows

Playing The Field
WIth all the focus on pitching and catching, the fielding controls sometimes feel like an afterthought. The game is pretty forgiving of catching and throwing miscues, but the controls sometimes feel sluggish and there sometimes seems to be no difference between the skills of an excellent fielder and those of a middling leather man.

Getting The Runaround
See the complaint above, except insert “base running” instead of “fielding.” It sometimes feels impossible, the controls are inexact and speedier players are thrown out by miles.

Itchy Trigger Fingers
This is basically a problem with all baseball games, but the pace of baseball is deliberate, and there’s no real way to speed it up the way you can in football or hoops games. My video game-playing mind doesn’t want Sunday afternoon leisure in its digital entertainment, so the joys of the back and forth between pitcher and batter are often eaten by the need to keep the action going. Baseball is a wonderful, poetic game; video games should be a little more intense.

All told, “Major League Baseball 2K10″ is very well-made and designed, but honestly, I’d rather just watch the Mets lose on cable.

The two recently-ousted studio heads of Infinity Ward, Jason West and Vince Zampella, have filed a lawsuit against Activision for breach of contract. The pair, who were fired earlier this week after claims of insubordination, are stating that Activision was scheduled to pay them significant royalty payments and terminated them before those payments would go into effect.

In a statement, the attorney for West and Zampella, Robert Schwartz, said the following:

“Instead of thanking, lauding, or just plain paying Jason and Vince for giving Activision the most successful entertainment product ever offered to the public, last month Activision hired lawyers to conduct a pretextual ‘investigation’ into unstated and unsubstantiated charges of ‘insubordination’ and ‘breach of fiduciary duty,’ which then became the grounds for their termination on Monday, March 1st.”

Apart from financial restitution, West and Zampella are also suing for control over the “Modern Warfare” brand.

It’s highly doubtful that this case will ever get to trial, and Activision isn’t giving up one of their most lucrative franchises anytime soon. Likely that the case will settle out of court and Activision will help fund West and Zampella’s next development house and project.

The developers behind “Blur” at Bizarre Creations designed a few new multiplayer tricks for their game when it launches this May. In addition to taking competition outside of the game into direct messaging and Twitter challenges, the action/racing title will compile statistics based on popular settings choices over periods of time and use them to generate community event playlists.

“When people set up custom games, it sends all of the information on the settings to our game’s server, and the server analyzes the most popular settings for about a week, and they go into the community playlists,” lead designer Gareth Wilson told MTV News.

Basically, these spotlit races will update like Billboard charts of the racing options players select most often, adapting to network-wide trends. Wilson used an example.

“What’s cool about that is say, we find out that everyone is playing Motor Match, but with no power-ups,” he suggested — Motor Match is one of the selectable race modes. “Maybe that’s the most popular game that we’ve got — then that would be on the community playlist.”

Watching those settings will also give developers insights into how gamers play and create challenges for themselves via combinations of modes and limitations. Players, meanwhile, can keep tabs on which trending sets of options others are using while going against the grain to try and set new ones.

Do the Community Events playlists in “Blur” sound interesting to you? What kinds of options would you like to be able to control? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

“Six Days in Fallujah,” the war game set in Iraq that Konami cut ties with last year, may still see publication after all. After giving the press a peek at the project, which was intended to be more compelling than fun, Konami decided “Six Days” wasn’t exactly its cup of tea, and its fate has publicly been somewhere between limbo and deceased ever since. A new report, however, claims it’s complete.

“I can promise you that game is still coming out and it is finished,” an unnamed source told IGN.

The context of this news is more than a bit murky, given the source’s anonymous nature, but “Six Days in Fallujah” became a controversy magnet from the time it was announced, and if there’s a publisher willing to navigate the kind of criticism and mainstream talk-show bludgeoning that any Iraq war game will be bound to receive, there is publicity to be had. If the game turns out to be as insightful as its creative team initially intended, there may be notoriety in the deal as well.

Much like EA’s Afghanistan-set “Medal of Honor” sequel, the politics associated with “Six Days” in concept alone will be inextricable, but that doesn’t mean the game can’t break some new ground if it’s done well.

Are you glad to hear that “Six Days in Fallujah” may have found a publisher? Do you think the game deserves a shot at being released? Sound off in the comment section below.

Some video game marketing campaigns target the lowest common denominator of their fan bases, and others, like the one embedded in a Steam update for “Portal” this week from Valve, respect users for the calculus-savvy problem-solvers they are. Encrypted images found in the new download included a lineup of security camera photos that were nearly as mysterious, but with Gabe Newell scheduled to appear at GDC 2010 next week, many are assuming the scrambled pics have something to do with “Portal 2.”

A new Steam achieved surfaced in the update titled “Transmission Received,” and it didn’t take long for users on the Steam Users Forum and elsewhere to decrypt sound files added to in-game radios and discover that Morse code messages found therein could be translated into image files. Those of us with I.Q.’s under 300 were left to marvel at these intelligent data crunchers’ intuition and speculate about what the scenes contain.

Subsequent explorations through a rabbit hole of encoded phone numbers and ASCII art produced more images, according to Kotaku, and about all I’m sure of is that they contain robots and references to Aperture Science.

This may be the one time since I graduated college that I wish I’d gone ahead and taken Calc II, as I have little more to say in response to these findings than, “Wow, good show, message board posters, and Valve, you should and Gabe Newell deserve every inch of that GDC Pioneer Award this year.”

What do you think Valve mysterious “Portal” update means? Would you like to see “Portal 2″ released this year? Share your responses in the comment section below.

Activision and Blizzard don’t necessarily believe the end of “World of Warcraft” is nigh, but they do feel that their current product’s potential to become “obsolete” might be of interest to shareholders. The same SEC filing that mentioned Infinity Ward “insubordination” suspicions this week also contained a cautionary message about their industry-leading MMO, and it speaks volumes about the company’s view of the industry.

“Future increased consumer acceptance and increases in the availability such games or other online games, or technological advances in online game software or the Internet, could result in a decline in platform-based software and negatively impact sales of our console and hand-held products,” the Activision wrote in their Annual Report. “Newer technological advances in online game software may also render products such as ‘World of Warcraft’ obsolete.”

That ominous terminology included hunches that smaller companies may be better equipped to compete in coming years, due to Internet distribution.

“Additionally, direct sales of software over the Internet by competitors could adversely affect our distribution business,” the report stated.

Given that “Warcraft” conquered RTS gaming before moving on to produce an MMO, it’s not unreasonable to believe its destiny might lurk elsewhere — probably in some motion-controlled virtual dating simulator or something of the like that no one has even thought of yet.

Do you agree with Activision’s outlook on the future of ‘WoW’? What other genre would you like to see “Warcraft” branch off into? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

“Tecmo Bowl Throwback” was already an official release in the eyes of the ESRB, but now Tecmo publicly considers it to be legitimate as well. The tricked-out remastered edition of “Tecmo Super Bowl” for the XBLA and PSN will launch this spring if everything goes as planned, and sports gaming nostalgia will reign supreme as we all split time between it and the new “NBA Jam.”

The retooled SNES classic will come courtesy of Swedish game developers at Southend Interactive, according to Kotaku, who also confirmed that the sports-bra-clad cheerleaders will fall within the E rating bestowed upon the game by the ESRB.

An online multiplayer mode and alternative 2-D and 3-D graphics will be a part of the package when “Throwback” hits, along with customizable teams, online leaderboards and classic Preseason, Season or Pro Bowl gameplay options.

I know the original NES “Tecmo Bowl” is available on the Wii virtual console, it’s too bad there’s no Wii equivalent out there for “Throwback.” Perhaps the 3-D graphics are just to powerful, but at the very least, a “Tecmo Super Bowl” addition to the VC might be nice.

Do you plan on downloading “Tecmo Bowl Throwback”? What other retro sports titles would you like to see retooled? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

The “Halo: Reach” beta continues to creep towards its May release date, and Bungie is really starting to open the vault on the game, as evidenced by today’s trailer. The footage above is comprised solely of “Halo: Reach” beta content, which means we’ll be seeing a whole lot of new gameplay elements when it launches.

Prime among them? Load outs. The trailer seems to imply that you’ll choose, before starting a match, what special abilities you’ll have. These range from the ability to sprint, go invisible or (gasp!) fly around with a jet pack.

Also added are new “assassinations.” Instead of smacking someone on the back of the head to take them out, you’ll now be able to get up close and personal with a military-issued shank.

There’s plenty of additional info to absorb from the trailer above, so be sure to check it out.

I have a short list of demands for a modern RPG. “Risen,” an Xbox 360 port of a 2009 PC title, doesn’t seem to meet any of them.

The Basics

“Risen” kicks off when a nameless, and shoeless, adventurer washes up on a tropical island beach, after his ship was smashed by a kraken. Two other people lived through the disaster: A vapid woman and a voodoo man with a ruby-eyed monocle. The latter is the more important. He’s out to save the world from another big scary monster. You’ll be participate in his scheme.

The Highs

‘Farangian’ Immersion
The fantasy isle of Faranga is open and yours to explore at will. Tons of hidden treasures and oddities lay above and below its foliage-laden earth, which is spotted with numerous crypts, caves, forgotten temples and castles.

At points you can become immersed in this strange environment, a cog in a machine-world designed to never leave you wanting for something to see or do. But this is the game’s only real strength … and a tenuous at best.

The Lows

Getting Yanked Out
For all its scale and curious nature, Faranga’s pull is not stronger than the game’s technical and design issues. In this sense, immersion is a fleeting thing. Copious amounts of pop-in and texture issues are roadblocks. The game’s tedious pace, unreliable auto-saving system, sputtering frame rates, senseless AI, muddy visuals, and spotty navigation are few of many more.

I’m Tired of Tapping This Button
The hack-and-slash combat is crucial; it’s a means to progress and a key to exploration. It’s also not very good. Connecting is the issue. Most enemies auto-detect melee attacks, parrying or evading 90% of the time, making the already dull all the more tedious.

Making matters worse, the ludicrous action camera needs to be baby sat, the frame rate often takes dives, and there are no useful options for crowd management.

Your Level Up Doesn’t Matter
The fact that you leveled doesn’t matter until you see a trainer, pick an attribute to bump up, and then pay some gold. This means you’ll need to kill, loot, steal, and look about for an NPC in order to buy rewards you should have already earned by doing the billions of pointless fetch quests, culling Faranga’s beasts or even just using a skill. It’s a spot of design that makes you hoof it even more than you already have to.

Terrible UI Makes for Bad Adventuring
Still a PC game at its heart, you’ll notice the dizzying amount of menus in the game are not only hard to access, but also hard to navigate as they require you to jump between numerous and redundant panes with the right stick. It’s hard to use, unless of course, you have a mouse and keyboard.

Quests and HUD
Differentiating between what is relevant in a mess of missions tossed out by unimportant and important (but all flat) NPCs alike is nigh impossible. A simple fetch quest is often crucial to advancing the game’s five-chapter narrative.

Finding where these quests start and end is also muddied. The meager HUD doesn’t help you find quests, and the map’s red dots are often wrong or simply not there when you need guidance the most. Even the quest logs blow.

What’s Up Yellow Screen?
Technical issues riddle “Risen.” The game will freeze, the frame rate will take unplayable dives, and worst of all, there are game-breaking bugs (like missing items) that will force you to restart the entire game.

The Verdict

It would have been nice to stay in “Risen” when I was drawn in, but all the bad design choices, from the leveling to the UI to the quests (coupled with the technical issues) obliterated my ability to be entertained. This is a bad port of an unpolished game that doesn’t cater to the user in any respect. Stay away.