Let’s change pace.  Who loves basketball?  I do.  Did you hear?  Electronic Arts is digging up the corpse!

Though not exactly surprising, EA finally officially announced an NBA Jam revival on the Nintendo Wii. The game is due out sometime in 2010, and promises a nostalgic basketball trip, along with “new game modes, characters, and gameplay depth.” As predicted, the game is in development at the Vancouver studio. Mark Turmell, the creator of the series recently brought on at EA Tiburon, is likely to be taking an advisory role in the series reboot.

“NBA Jam is one of the most recognizable franchises in video game history,” said EA Sports president Peter Moore in the press release. “Diehard fans of the original game have been asking for a remake for more than a decade. We’re very excited to give them their wish this year with the return of this iconic franchise.”

You’d presume I’d want in?  Hold that thought.

I’m not annoyed that eight-bit nostalgia is giving way to Generation Y’s Super Nintendo fetish.  I’m not annoyed that the game is rekindling the franchise’s visual deficiencies.  See, this isn’t about brand revival.  Gamers didn’t care the last time that now-defunct Acclaim tried to exhume NBA Jam.  This is about a casual competitive game (and consumer recollection of the title) mirroring the populsarity of its brand name.

Bo Jackson’s legendary Tecmo Bowl running accolades were the nature of simulation sports games in the eight-bit era.  Video game tech could not handle the intricacies yet.  So fuck it, let’s have the basketball catch fire.  Midway’s NBA Jam was a casual in-road to the arcade gaming scene of the early nineties because it never tried to be Street Fighter.  And it didn’t need to be.

But allow me note an important piece of information. NBA Jam came out in 1993.  How was that year in NBA basketball?

The second Golden Age of Basketball came to a close with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls capping their first three-peat on one of the league’s greatest moments.  But that sort of basketball couldn’t possibly explain the success of the most visible basketball game in the history of American gaming, right?  A game built for those with passing interest in the product?

And five years later, the formula was so tired that “NBA Jam 99″ was a simulation basketball game.  Yes, NBA Jam was dead.  Don’t remember that part, huh?

Any sports game predicated on game mechanics (as opposed to accurate rosters) is going to have difficulty maintaining popularity.  But the NBA was not helping.  The Michael Jordan phenomenon was breeding a swath of imitators to lacked the talent to assume his offensive moxy or the will to play his defense.  Thus, breeding a league of one-man offenses that were getting stomped by excellent defenses.  What, you’re surprised a league dominated by the San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons wouldn’t be conducive to shilling a no-defense basketball game?

In its place, Electronic Arts’ embraced Allen Iverson’s crappy shot selection with NBA Street, one of the most playable sports game franchises of all-time.  Both games emphasized offense, but Street let you play both ends of the ball in a way NBA Jam never allowed. So even if Kobe Bryant was the do-it-all first option, Shaq was just as critical for eating any object thrown at the basket.

How popular was Street?  It did go on to sell millions.  And in 2003, Acclaim published an NBA Jam game to capitalize on its rival’s success (and failed spectacularly).  But Street got little press in the mainstream because it wasn’t fighting on favorable terms.  Madden was replicating the surging popularity of the National Football League at the same time the NBA was showcasing its most unwatchable basketball of the last half-century.  And the control scheme?  Real basketball is simpler than Volume 2’s control scheme:

Gamers complain their journalism overlords are there to push the message that’s best for business.  And then gamers demand sequels they already got.  This isn’t a matter of Deus Ex: Invisible war failing to match the accolades of its predecessor.  When people complain they haven’t gotten a sequel to Kid Icarus, they’re really saying “They made a Kid Icarus sequel for the Game Boy in 1991?  I never knew that!”

But if your passion for gaming wasn’t as pathetic as mine, you’d buy Peter Moore’s “asking for a remake for more than a decade” bullshit.  News flash to the target audience:  You got several sequels to NBA Jam.  You just didn’t care.  The only difference in the seven years since the last NBA Jam game is that the league has returned to respectability, where people are almost interested in watching NBA basketball.  And along the way, the video game industry sucked in enough casual games to justify the reboot of a franchise that disappeared for a reason.

So when you said you wanted NBA Jam to return, you meant to say “LeBron James is pretty damn good.”

Continuing my quest to never get laid, I spent a Saturday cross-checking GameRankings review scores against VGChartz sales numbers.  As of January 15th, 213 games have sold one-million copies on the three seventh-generation consoles, reception ranging from dreadful to legendary.  Armed with this data, I ask: What can we learn about the seventh generation of video games with this data?

Bad games can be purchased for any console.  Many sell.  But never have so many sold irrespectively of “quality”.  And the majority of this business is taking place on the Nintendo Wii.

Yeah, reviewers have biases.  They enjoy Microsoft’s wallet.  They would have married Grand Theft Auto IV if they were allowed to.  But on a “compiling thousands of reviews for hundreds of games” basis, I’m willing to hear the opinion of those who enjoy the medium for a living.

(more…)

From yesterday’s Electronic Arts press release, detailing the future of their alliance with Hasbro.  Bold added for emphasis.

“Our first wave of Hasbro-licensed games did extremely well at launch through the holiday season and we’re excited to push that momentum even further with the stellar wave of titles that we have on deck for the next six months,” said Chip Lange, Vice President and General Manager of EA Hasbro. “We’ll have something for every gender and generation from G.I. JOE to TRIVIAL PURSUIT and LITTLEST PET SHOP. This is just a glimpse of what is to come for 2009 in terms of stocking the ultimate EA-Hasbro virtual toy and game closet for hours of fun with family and friends.”

The “greatest games” debate summons the hissy-fit in all of us. Enter a 2007 blog entry from CNet’s Don Reisinger. When Edge Magazine’s readers voted Ocarina of Time as the greatest game ever, he was “appalled”. Reisinger’s choice of words won’t resonate with the guy who works two jobs to keep a roof over his head, but I’ll hear him out on his choice.

Super Mario Bros. ushered in a new era for video games. The days of stick figures running around on the screen while they shot at another illegible object had finally given way to an Italian plumber named Mario and his twin brother Luigi. The Super Mario Bros. gameplay was truly second to none, and if you were to pick up the game today, you would still consider it the most rock-solid gameplay experience of your life. The story was, well, Mario-ish, but we didn’t play that game for the story; we played it for the experience. In one fell swoop, one video game (one!) raised up a crippled video game market, and set the stage for an entirely new experience playing video games.

Super Mario Brothers strikes me as a curious pick. It was a decent game that thrived on an innovative concept. As a result, it became a wildly-successful introduction to a famous franchise and became the world’s best-selling video game.  It gave Nintendo a commanding market share.  It spawned a disgusting amount of imitators.  Ultimately, it became the face of gaming for its generation.

Know why it strikes me curious? Because I just described Wii Sports, and nobody’s discussing that game’s place in the Pantheon.

Go ahead.  It’s okay to talk about them in the same conversation.

For fourteen months, this blog has been a sound-off on that evil Nintendo console. Am I worried for the future of the product when a game console wins its generation with a gimmick whose potential hasn’t been utilized? Absolutely. The history of video games suggested this was impossible. But my opinion won’t change the course of what has been a revolution.  If Nintendo hadn’t made the decision to ship their console with a fun tech demo, it’s possible this decade would be the return of an American console manufacturer to the throne that Atari vacated twenty-five years ago. Coming into the decade, Nintendo was the kid-friendly, out-of-touch game giant that got their ass kicked by Sony. Instead, Nintendo redefined family game night and Wii Sports became the most important game of the decade.

Minus the Time Magazine review that mentioned “it might be the greatest videogame ever made” (but not before mentioning “other [launch] games, such as Legend of Zelda…looked okay”), few have gone on the record to make the claim. Casual gamers aren’t going to get on the internet and make an impassioned defense of Wii Sports. Core gamers aren’t making the comparison because the Wii stands for everything they hate. If you don’t believe placing Mario and Wii Sports in the same sentence is borderline blasphemy, Don Resinger struck again last month.

I’m more than a little upset by the news of Wii Sports taking the top sales spot from Super Mario Bros. Suffice it to say that in my mind, regardless of sales, Wii Sports will never compare to any fine franchise and to compare it as such is an insult to those titles.

Yep. “[A] little upset”, “an insult”, “will never compare to any fine franchise”. Give Reisinger credit: He is fluent in fanboy.  Considering that the top-fifty-selling games of all-time are a “Who’s Who” of both casual gaming and the greatest games of all-time, it’ll be interesting to see when the top-seller gets its due.

Sandy Duncan, the former head-of-business for Microsoft Europe, has a bold statement: consoles have five to ten years before they’re an ancient business model. He pins most of the blame on evolving technology, but its implications are interesting:

“[Look] at how quickly Popcap or Oberon are growing, or look at what has happened to World of Warcraft in the last 3 to 4 years as so many more homes have easy access to decent broadband services. Maybe you’ll see YoYo Games competing with EA in 5 years… [and] why not ?”

Casual gaming’s behemoths given a chance to usurp console gaming’s Nazi Germany? May seem absurd, but Wikipedia’s article on the Game Crash of 1983 presents a similar, actually-did-happen secnario:

[Since console-makers were unable to restrict third-party production of games for their systems], [t]he release of so many new games in 1982 completely flooded the market and most stores did not have, or decided not to allocate, sufficient space to carry all the new games and consoles. Inside Mattel, one Intellivision sales executive explained the problem: “Two years of products have been pushed into the channel in one year, and there’s no way to re-balance the system.” As stores tried to return the surplus games to the new publishers, the publishers had neither new products nor cash to refund the retailers’ money. Many publishers, including Games by Apollo and US Games (the ill-fated Quaker Oats games unit), quickly folded.

Unable to return the unsold games to defunct publishers after Christmas 1982, toy stores marked down the titles and placed them in discount bins and sale tables. Whereas the typical game of 1982 cost US$34.95 — about US$75 in 2007 when adjusted for inflation — the discount bins quickly settled on the price of US$4.95 per game. By June 1983 the market for the more expensive games had shrunk dramatically and was replaced by a new market of rushed, low-budget games. Consumers’ trips to the store often began and ended at the discount bin, the uninformed customer seeing cheaper games as more appealing regardless of quality. After a while however, the consumers began to tire of the substandard quality of the cheaper games, and rather than pay the high prices for the dwindling number of high-budget, quality games, they quit gaming entirely.

Budget games have destroyed interest in the quality product once before. It’s happening again for PC gaming, where Epic’s Tim Sweeney argued the little guys got help from those at the top:

The industry, he says, has changed dramatically over the last decade, and that the constant advancements in technology have given game creators an excuse to cater specifically to the tiny portion of PC gamers who own high-end systems.

This shift leaves all those with lower specifications — what Sweeney calls the “mainstream PC” — out in the cold with computers much better suited for “Facebook, MySpace, pirating music or whatever,” and as a result, that becomes those computers’ sole function.

As of today, Civilization: Revolution isn’t slated for a PC release, but it will be on the Nintendo DS! I’m not trying to be the bearer of the gaming apocalypse, but budget games have already found a way to compete with the pay-to-play PC product. With console gaming the only ship above water, what happens if they can compete with the X-Box and Playstation 3?

Don’t say it can’t happen.