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.”

I blew a gasket during E3 because Microsoft tried to convince me the X-Box was a revolution in graphics and online play that hadn’t already occurred.  I lamented that the era of PC gaming that built the modern video game industry was in the process of being forgotten.

If you’re looking inward at the PC gaming community, you’d have the perception that I’m a crazy internet nergin who can’t stop living in 1997.  You know, when PC gaming meant something.  This is why I act that way.

The following is our list of the top 10 innovations in console video games that [emphasis mine] revolutionized the industry within the past 10 years.

And the author lists away: Storage capacity that computer game makers have exploited since the advent of the hard drive.  Physics that pushed the limits of the first video cards.  Downloadable content conveniently monopolized by console game developers.  And most importantly: Online, head-to-head competitive play over the internet.

Thank our gaming overlords.  Without the video game console, we may be doing things the personal computer pioneered in the decade before this one.

To nobody’s surprise, Modern Warfare sold many copies.  When I read the sales tally, it reminded me of a certain game published in 2007.  You couldn’t escape it.  It was a follow-up to one of the prior year’s top games, a genre-defining experience.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare?  Nope.  In a world where Call of Duty 2’s legacy was confined to personal computers, it was a surprise hit on the consoles.

The game in question was Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. It didn’t witness a ridiculous first-day launch like Grand Theft Auto or Modern Warfare 2, but it would move nearly fifteen million units across five platforms.

And what does Guitar Hero offer us two years later?  Not a single nice thing can be said about it.  And here we are in 2009, Activision is once again publishing the biggest game of the year, a phenomenon that cannot be stopped.

Yes, in terms of finished product, Guitar Hero III isn’t in the same league as Modern Warfare 2.  But no matter how good the follow-ups are, the public will perceive this as the high point in the Call of Duty franchise.  Remember the runaway success of Super Mario Galaxy?  On principle, it had zero chance to dethrone Super Mario World or its brethren.  Why?  There’s a Simpsons quote for every situation:

“The thing is, there’s not really anything wrong with [Call of Duty], it’s as good as ever. But after so many years, the characters just can’t have the same impact they once had.”

Just remember: Two years is a long time.  And in the upcoming two years, we know of one certainty: “The incredible follow-up to the most successful entertainment launch of all-time” will fall in the hands of Treyarch.  Good luck selling that to the red states.

Know when you were a kid and your cat died?  And mom explained it went to kitty heaven, where the biggest, most awesomest scratching post awaits?  That’s the game industry.  In a world where The Dark Knight wins fans with anti-heroes and morality redefined, Starcraft II won’t have LAN functionality because Battle.net is so amazing, you wouldn’t want to play the game offline!!1

In a world where the average gamer is 29, your overlords treat you like children.  That’s why I waited to judge the Modern Warfare 2 clusterfuck.  Now I can judge.

On November 3rd, Best Buy hosted a question-and-answer developer chat.  It only took a few thousand keystrokes for Infinity Ward to bury a platform and the consumers that made Call of Duty the biggest gaming event of the year.

Modern Warfare 2 would be capped to nine-versus-nine matches, a pleasant surprise for 100-plus-player clans that rely on sixty-four-player dedicated servers.  The InfinityWard.net matchmaking model uses player hosting, presumably granting hosts a significant latency advantage.  The game will not feature a console (programming prompt) because the company “would like you to play the game the way [they] designed and balanced it.”  The ability to lean, once a critical gameplay tactic, won’t be included because “the game is not balanced for lean.”  There will be no ability to record replays, likely cut in favor of the console development cycle.

And that 196,000-signature petition?  According to an Infinity Ward rep, Robert Bowling (the company’s community manager) signed it four times, so who gives a shit what you think?

The people who work for Infinity Ward (or those who tell them what to say) bought their own Kool-Aid.  Modern Warfare was the epic, fuckstaining, Halo-killing, babypunching opus for video game gun fetishists.  They thought PC gamers would throw up their arms and play it anyway.  No lean?  You’ll get used to it.  No server model?  Look at the pretty matchmaking system!  No console?  It’ll be fine.

And then you look at X-Fire’s daily stats, where 2005’s Call of Duty 2 fights it out with 2007’s Modern Warfare while 2008’s World at War barely registers.  (Yes, I am aware Treyarch developed World at War.)  But I guess if Infinity Ward is to abandon the platform that made them famous, we can at least thank you for the previous installments.  Your once-benevolent fan base will play those instead.

Note: Edited for general flow.  Thanks, Littlesaltz.

You already made up your opinion on the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott.  I did it several months ago.  The mere premise of the boycott was bad enough.  Turns out the mere premise couldn’t make it to release day.  On Wednesday, Agent of Chaos (one half of the boycott leadership) announced on their Steam community web site that:

We have accomplished everything we can on our manifesto. We’ve been dealing with Valve ever since our group started, then we met them in-person and now we’re at the point of concluding our discussions. Our goal wasn’t to steer people away from L4D2, it was to get Valve’s attention and have them support original L4D. We succeeded and that’s where our mission ends; nothing more or less.

That’s correct: The goal of the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott wasn’t to harm the sales of Left 4 Dead 2.  It was to make sure the original game continued to receive support.  This was a stark change from two months prior, when Agent of Chaos criticized the support the game was receiving.

Who is actually excited about this? Sure, I believe they’ll be well made (coming from Valve of course). BUT with a load of professional custom campaigns in the works, it’s only a matter of time this DLC would easily get overshadowed by them. Now my point is – how about something valuable that can extend L4D’s replay value in a broader way? New special infected, and weapons? 4v4 matchmaking? Bug fixes? Personally, I’d take any of the aforesaid over two new chapters anyday.

Pretty simple what happened: The boycott leaders found out that it’s much easier to make demands from behind a computer.

Last month, Valve paid out-of-pocket to ship the boycott leaders to the Valve office complex.  Assuming it doesn’t spawn copycatters looking for a tour of their dream game studio, this was brilliant.  Fucking brilliant.  Believe me: The awkward would be ramped to eleven in any room Karune and I share.  But even I profess a love for Blizzard software.  Try to look Gabe Newell dead in the eye and explain why you’re campaigning against the purchase of his games–while he takes you on an office tour to address your concerns.

Or maybe they just caught whim of the pre-order numbers:

“Based on the strength of pre-orders, Left 4 Dead 2 will be the fastest-selling product in Valve’s history,” said Gabe Newell, president of Valve. “Left 4 Dead 2 has consistently run at 300% of Left 4 Dead’s numbers.”

…

“We’ll be supporting Left 4 Dead 2’s launch with a $25 million campaign,” said Doug Lombardi, Valve’s vice-president of Marketing. “Left 4 Dead 2 has already set the record for greatest number of pre-orders in our company’s history, and we’re still over a month out from shipping.

The death of Nintendo’s market share during the 90s owes credit to the cartridge format. Despite a massive advantage in storage capacity, Playstation and Saturn loading times proved awful enough to be a substantial negative for CD-based consoles.  Nintendo was happy to point this out, as cited in a November ‘95 edition of European Stars and Stripes:

Unlike other recent game machines, Nintendo’s new model will use plug-in type game cassettes rather than CD-ROMs.  Nintendo said it decided against CD-ROMs, despite their higher storage capacity, because of the longer time it takes them to access data.

Oh, it’s true.  The short loading times were a huge sell.  But now, we know Nintendo stuck with cartridges in order to stymie piracy.  They were terrified of it.  It’s not difficult to understand why.  PC software developers were screaming bloody murder since there was a market for home software.

But primarily, this was an anti-piracy tactic to fight “emerging markets”.  American tweens growing up on the Super Nintendo were oblivious to the concept of piracy.  When I installed PC games on my friend’s computer, I didn’t think of it as piracy.  For all I was concerned, I was letting him borrow the game.

So in 1998, the advantages of the cartridge would be lauded by Nintendo fanboys, a trump card in blasting those “dumb enough” to own a Playstation.  Raise your hand if you think 2009’s hardcore gamer would buy Nintendo’s line of bullshit.

Know what we’d say?  “My games are going to be tagged with the cost of manufacturing cartridges because you’re worried about piracy?  I already pay fifty-to-sixty dollars a game.  Because you want to protect your profits, you’re going to kick me in the balls?  Fuck you, Nintendo.”  Give or take a couple of swears, that would be the story.

Earlier this morning, Lee Yun-Yeol (NaDa) and Jang Jae Ho (Moon) played the bestest, most awesomest Starcraft II game of all-time.  Too bad nobody saw it.

Starcraft II: Where I Can’t Tell What’s Going On, They May Be Playing Super Metroid Happens

Yup.  Someone put the kibosh on a Moon/NaDa live stream.  Minus two minutes of cameraphone footage that might as well been scrambled porn, no footage of the matches has surfaced.  As the contestants fought to a 1-1 draw, I grabbed my Moon plush doll and cried myself to sleep.  When I awoke to Google for the culprit, I found a curious tidbit: Sans NaDa, KESPA (the Korean E-Sport Association) barred other Starcraft talent from competing in the night’s exhibition matches.

(Remember eighteen months ago, when the Starcraft fan base threw a hissy-fit over multiple-building selection?  And they used Korean pro gamers as their star witness?  And I explained that people would be opposed to a core game mechanic that threatens their ability to play video games for money?  Yup.  Nothing’s changed!)

Let’s speculate: Professional Starcraft, no matter how trivial in the course of human events, is a business.  In the event Starcraft II sparks a boom for e-sports in the Western World, KESPA will become the gaming equivalent of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.  For those of you who don’t follow the UFC’s business practices, Dana White is the perfect asshole to run that company.  In video game news, the company told potential UFC fighters that if they signed on for EA’s mixed martial arts game, they would never work for the company.  Not long before, Jon Fitch was fired by the UFC (though subsequently rehired) because he would not grant the company lifetime rights to use his likeness in the company’s future games.

The UFC is the company at the head of a boom with room for more than one competitor.  They are a business that touts boxing as a “dying sport” and proceeds to pay their main-event talent far less than main-event boxers earn. To date, there has been no mention of forming a union for the fighters.  On the other side, KESPA is an organization that makes its meal ticket from Starcraft.  In the event that Starcraft II is the e-sports revolution, there will be room for more than one competitor.  KESPA oversees a salary structure where B-Team players are lucky to earn 30,000 dollars a year.  The gamers do not have a union, either.  And when I hear this organization prohibited its talent from playing Starcraft II exhibition matches, what would you like me to think?

You would be insane to believe KESPA is looking at Starcraft II and would not go underhanded in order to preserve their product.  Salaries are stable and their market share is good.  Do you think they want to fight a bidding war with Major League Gaming and threaten the stability of a scene the South Koreans have a monopoly on?

Yeah, I’m running a lot of speculation through the filter.  But at best, we just had the first dream match of Starcraft II’s young future played without a single camera rolling.  And when you can’t get a straight story on the surrounding events, and you want to convince me that this is the competitive game of the future, this isn’t a good start.

Crispy Gamer, a site “dedicated to the serious videogamer”, used this week to answer an important question: Are mainstream gaming blogs (Kotaku, Destructoid, Joystiq, etc.) the root of all evil (yes), and do they provide original content for their readers?  After liberal use of Microsoft Excel’s spreadsheet capabilities, writer Kyle Orland concluded:

I’m not trying to absolve gaming blogs of all their sins. They’re often too glibly snarky, too poorly sourced and too focused on quantity over quality of posts. But I hope this little study has proven that they’re not the leeches they’re often made out to be. In fact, the largest gaming blogs are starting to resemble full-service gaming sites in their scope and depth.

Fine with me, Mr. Orland.  That ain’t the problem.

I’m fine with blogs borrowing from each other.  Even I do it.  If Microsoft needs to recall X-Boxes because they’re filled with live spider eggs, I don’t discourage the powers that be from Ctrl-V.  Breaking news isn’t intellectual property.  The problem is that the current state of “original content” invokes the economic concept of systemic failure.  When you dissect a single flaw in gaming journalism, you realize the bigger issue is a top-to-bottom, cyclical mess with no easy answer.

I’m not saying game journalism needs to be a cavalcade of serious business.  In my off-time, I pretend to be the head of a Russian gaming clan that thinks hacking is no different than wall-jumping.  That said, my writing is good because I take it seriously.  Today, gaming journalism brags about its mediocrity.  Because print media spent the last two decades refusing to prepare for the rise of the internets, we now have a form of journalism reliant on pay-per-click Digg whoring.  “Original content” is now a metaphor for the abortion debate: You’ll read it, call people retarded, realize no ends will come in this fight, and move on with life.  Works for Limbaugh, why not a consumer base that defends game consoles as though they’re political parties?

When I began this entry, Digg Gaming’s most recent front-page item was “Ten Games You’ll Probably NEVER See on the Virutal Console”:

You’ve got your popular games (Punch-Out!!), your obscure ones (Milon’s Secret Castle) and some that you NEVER thought you’d see on the Virtual Console (Sin and Punishment). But then, you have your games that will probably also never see the light of day on the VC, and that’s a shame. Some are for obvious reasons, but there are some others that I’ll never understand why they don’t get the regal treatment and put on the VC already. Below are a few of my favorite games of all time that I’m sure I won’t be playing on the Virtual Console anytime soon.

If you remove every occurrence of “this game won’t be on the Virtual Console even if I masturbate ‘til I’m sore”, this article is nothing more than “Ten Games I Like”.  What did it accomplish?  What did it do to benefit the consumer?  Was he entertaining?  Past nostalgia, I don’t think so.  While your friend’s crappy list of Super Nintendo games circulates the internet, Tim Rogers and Alex Kierkegaard bust their ass to create discussions we should be having.

(more…)

New Rule of Video Games: If you announce that you are going to create a video game, someone out there will take offense to it.

It has been only a day since the news broke of Konami’s plan to publish Six Days in Fallujah, but the game is already sparking anger as well as calls for a ban.

To be sure, releasing a video game based on one of the bloodiest and most controversial actions of the Iraq War is a public relations gamble for Konami and developer Atomic Games – especially since the war is still going on.

Early negative reactions to Six Days in Fallujah have been both sharp and diverse, with a decorated British Army officer and a representative of a U.K. peace group both expressing outrage over the game.

Let’s forget that the United States Army commissioned a first-person shooter that will become an historical statement for the country’s military fetish.  Forget that Call of Duty 4 allows players to fight each other in recreations of these war zones.  Forget that during the leadup to the Second Gulf War, SCi published a game set during the first Gulf War.  And in this game, you had the option to give Saddam Hussein a warm glass of “bullet to the brain”.  And Six Days in Fallujah is the game that has people livid?

“I haven’t played it” has rarely stopped video game critics, but “announced one day ago” is fairly new.  The only information we know about the game bodes well for its success: It’s labeled as survival-horror.  Resident Evil didn’t win fans with its gameplay.  It won fans by combining a crappy control scheme with the possibility of death around any corner.  In the race to make an authentic war game, “survival-horror” sounds dead-perfect.

Here’s my hypothesis for this most recent outcry: During the Golden Age of Video Game, the primary objective was to get the highest score possible, and then brag about it on the predecessors to the internet.  During the eight-bit era, storyline and setting were introduced to the very large audience that wasn’t acquainted with PC adventure games.  These paper-thin plotlines reflected a cultural climate where Reagan teamed with God to fight Communism and baby rape.  So Bowser kidnapped the Princess.  How did she get kidnapped?  Why was Mario rescuing her?  None of that mattered, you accepted that Bowser was evil because the game told you he was.

In the eyes of the general public, those two eras are their perception of video games.  Now, Konami has announced a video game that will be based on one of the most controversial incidents of the Second Gulf War.  In the eyes of these particular critics, Six Days in Fallujah is going to be a military shooter where good-guy Americans kill bad-guy Iraqis in the name of a high score.  They fail to realize that video games have taken significant strides in becoming accepted as an artistic medium that can convey the message of a skilled producer or director.  For now, let’s see if the game makes it to shelves.  If it does, then we can go ahead and have a debate on its value to society.

World of Warcraft is an MMORPG, the class of a genre notorious for wrecking lives.  Contrary to previous Blizzard titles (sans Diablo, perhaps), it emphasizes “dangling the carrot” instead of “easy to learn, hard to master”.  Combat is dependent on weapons and armor, the quality of which are related to how much time one spends with the game.  The gameplay is layered upon game rules that minimize the butthurt, and it does this while being a personal parasite.

I play Warcraft III, the class of modern real-time-strategy games.  Some play it like a first-person shooter, the other ninety percent play Defense of the Ancients.  I prefer to play Warcraft III as a strategy game.  I lack the reflexes of players on my skill level, so winning comes down to outsmarting them.  I enjoy trying to win through wit, and that’s a good reason I enjoy the game so much.

Two years ago, a classmate of mine got on my case for playing “Warcraft”.  (Yes, she was a girl, but her Ron Paul fandemonium canceled out any interest in love.)  As I soon learned, she had a friend who was addicted to World of Warcraft.  As it later turned out, that ended up killing their friendship.  To try and make the point Warcraft III was different, I offered to show her how the game was played.  What better to explain the ins-and-outs of a strategy game to someone who had just picked up the game of chess?  Her response was, give or take a few words: “I know what Warcraft is, and nothing you say is going to change that.”

Let me explain something to you morons:  Warcraft III is not World of Warcraft.  It is Warcraft III.

When you generalize me as a World of Warcraft fan, you are calling me a brain-dead idiot.  You are placing me in the same bracket as the millions of people who treat the game like a second job.  Do you think libertarians enjoy being lumped in with conservatives?    I spent many hours with Asheron’s Call, and I came face-to-face many various horror stories.  There will never be a period that I cannot walk away from Warcraft III unless I’m getting paid to play it.  That’s the story I’m going with, and until people stop generalizing, I’m gonna keep calling them fucking idiots.