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…)

Let’s bring some context out of the gate.  Old-Wizard is a retro gaming site where people brag that they haven’t bought a video game since 1996.  Their most recent website update is what you’d expect: A community that has spent their lives with a Super Nintendo mocking modern games for “appealing to 12 year olds”.  What’s one of their “Top 10 Ways to Tell if a Game is ‘Hardcore’”?

If a hardcore game is anything, it’s not original. Why bother? The best way to make a sale is to just update the graphics, change the story slightly, make it WW2, or if it’s already WW2 make it the future where robots have taken over the world (or are at least giving their best effort), and if it’s already the future make it the ancient past, where you have to battle giants of some sort. Then add in some new weapons, change the color of the armor, or make the main character shave his head. Of course, if his head is already shaved then grow his hair out.

Yup.  They’re the radical side of modern gaming’s critics.  Gaming was better when difficulty levels were designed to inflate a bad game’s playtime.  3-D sucks, and it has nothing to do with a childhood indoctrination to 2-D games.  Video games are no longer creative, which is why they’ll ignore original titles like Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil, just like everybody else did.

It’s also why you won’t buy Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure for the Nintendo DS.  It’s the story of a golden outfit only the world’s most cultured man can wear.  Can Henry Hatsworth, British “Professor of Treasure Hunting”, beat rival Weasleby to the prize?  It’s a satire of rich Brits that is totally worthy of the gameplay system.  The top screen is a platformer where slain enemies fall to the bottom screen and must be disposed through a puzzle game inspired by Tetris Attack.  It’s the story of two average games becoming one of the most original I’ve played in years.  If you enjoy puzzle games, and enjoy platform games, it is incumbent upon you to purchase this.  If you don’t, you are killing video games and support incest.

When you name a game that exemplifies what’s wrong with the industry, you’ll get something between Halo and Madden.  I’ll propose something different: Henry Hatsworth is what’s wrong with video games.  It’s challenging, has a great atmosphere, and features original gameplay.  It is everything the the holdovers from the 16-bit era crave.  But since it’s not a sequel to Mega Man or Mario, people won’t play it. It will not be a financial success, and I will not get to see a sequel.  It will be lucky if it sells six-figures.  Meanwhile, the worst core Mario game since Super Mario Land has long-passed the ten-million sales mark.

I won’t even have critics to fall back on.  I usually rely on their merits, but they got this one dead-wrong. The end of AtomicGamer’s review summarizes the hilarity of all hilarities: The consensus amongst reviewers is that the game is too hard.

On the surface, Henry Hatsworth comes across as something casual gamers will enjoy and it is, for the first 25% of the game. After that, in spite of the casual puzzle element, cute story and creative characterization, enjoyment of the game can be seriously undermined by levels that feel like they were designed by sadists. Ultimately, the game requires more skill and frankly, more patience than many gamers, casual or otherwise, will be able to muster.

The most ironic thing?  You may have caught it on the box art: Electronic Arts published this game.  Yes, that Electronic Arts.  It only seems fitting they will be the ones to grind out the underappreciated game that goes nowhere on the sales charts.  And while this is one of their best efforts to rectify their reputation as a game mill, it won’t mean a damn thing.