Bad Timing

This was going to be a post about the five games I plan on purchasing this fall.  That could sound a bit slim, but really, with the amount of unplayed / unfinished / unopened games I have, it is the only rational thing to do.

But as soon as I realized that I'd be listing "Yakuza" - coming out next Wednesday - as the first game on the list, it occured to me how pitiful many companies are at timing release dates.  For the amount of time it takes western developers to finish games that have been repeatedly delayed, eastern developers seem to make up for it by delaying North American releases for months, just to have some really, really crappy voice acting and localization thrown in.  Europe gets it even worse, and that is becoming the largest game market.  This at least shows some forward thinking on the part of a company like Konami that releases Metal Gear Solid titles in the larger market firsts.  It also probably helps that some crappy non-games will outsell quality titles in Japan, so why rush into a crap pile when you can make the money first elsewhere.  Anyway, starting with the most recent, Yakuza, here are some genuinely bad moves in releases timing:

1. Yakuza - I am one of the few who enjoyed the Shenmue games, and this seems like the olive branch to fans of the series for having it killed at the hands of Sega of America (more on that below).  But this game was finished and released in Japan quite some time ago.  It is all Japanese characters, in Japan, doing Jappy things.  Why delay this so long just to add lousy voice acting?  Once again there is a summer devoid of really great console releases (PC and PSP were actually pretty good in this regard) and when do they release it?  September 5th (or 6th since nobody ever actually sells the games the day they are shipped), the very first day of my autumn semester.  Great work Sega.  Maybe I'll get around to playing this in December, and hopefully the price drops by then.  If you can't release the damn game when I have time to play it, you're not getting full M$RP on it.
2. Resident  Evil 4 - For the amount of (over)hype this game received, you'd think it has sold five million copies in the U.S. alone.  Much like the actual quality of the game, "not even close."  The release date in January on Gamecube worked because there was absolutely nothing else out that month, as GTASA, Half-Life 2, Halo 2, and MGS3 had just been released about eight weeks before.  Releasing it on the PS2 at the same time as The Warriors, Shadow of the Collosus, and Soul Calibur 3?  Dumb.  I bought it right when it came out in one of those Toys 'R Us 3-4-2 deals, but I wish I hadn't. 
3. Soul Calibur 2 - This is another case of a localization that took way, way too long.  It came out in March 2003 in Japan but took nearly six months to get it out in the U.S.  It takes that long to translate some text and one-liners in a fighting game?  Further ruining the release timing on this game was the useless crap it had, and its pricing relative to a superior product.  People think Soul Calibur 3 came out too soon and was a rush job, but that is not the case.  Soul Calibur came out in Arcades in 1997, and then the superlative Dreamcast version came out in 98/99 to coincide with the Dreamcast launches in each territory.  Soul Calibur 2 came out in arcades in early 2002 and should have been a console release later that year.  But thanks to Nintendo, Namco went and added a useless character to each console version, plus a genuinely awful Todd McFarlane character in addition to Spawn in the Xbox version.  The game was unbalanced, the extra characters sucked, and it took too long to come out.  Soul Calibur 3 coming out in 2005 was not the problem - three installments in eight years does not even come close to milking a franchise, particularly for fighting games.  But it took them so long to get SC2 out, and it came out two weeks after VF4 Evo which was far superior in gameplay, had a ton more features (and they were actually useful features), and cost $30 less.  SC2 ended up being one of the most underwhelming software releases ever.
4. Shenmue II - Only Sega could be this stupid.  Take a franchise that cost a lot of money to make, and cancel the Dreamcast release in the one territory where it could sell decently - North America.  This was the final blow that proved how little Sega cared for their fans, and ultimately ended up as a hilarious backfire on them.  It came out a year later on Xbox with no worthwhile upgrades, horrible voice acting, and released on the same day as one of the most anticipated games ever - GTA Vice City.  You could write essays on this one, but hey, I had already played it a year before then since it actually cost less to import the European PAL version and all you needed was a utopia boot disc to play it.  Nice work, dumbasses.
5. Devil May Cry 3 - I just remembered this one out of order, but it is easy to list what was wrong:  they released it sandwhiched inbetween Gran Turismo 4, Tekken 5, and God of War.  This is one of those cases where you'll say you'll pick the game up later and then never get around to it.  Maybe if I see the SE for $9.99 somewhere.
6. Onimusha 2 - Take the sequel to a high sellling, original IP and release it on the same day as:  Madden NFL 2003, SOCOM, the network adapters that worked with the two aforementioned titles, and Super Mario Sunshine.  Brilliant timing.

Capcom dominates the list, with Sega a strong second.  Woefully unsurprising, this is.

Delay Game

It is 2003 all over again.  If you remember, that was year devoid of big releases, because they all got delayed.  Halo 2.  Gran Turismo 4.  Half-Life 2.  Doom III (not that it mattered since it was boring crap once it came out anyway).  Unreal Tournament 2004.  None of them came out on time, and only one of them (UT2004) even saw release before the following August.

Welcome to Delay Year II:  The Sequel.  It was already known before this week that Unreal Tournament 2007 and Quake Wars Enemy Territory were going to be delayed into 2007.  People keep saying Crysis was delayed, although that is the case just yet, as it was always a Q1 2007 game.  But you can now add the Half-Life 2 Episode 2 / Portal / Team Fortress 2 combo from Valve to list of delayed games.  I pretty much knew that once Valve announced simultaneous release on PC / PS3/ XB360 that we wouldn't be seeing those games before 2007.  They never get anything out on time when it is a single product on a single platform (HL2, DoD Source, HL2EP1 on the PC), so three products on three platforms getting delayed is about as surprising as a Molyneux game being boring and that moron saying something stupid in an interview.

Who benefits here?  EA.  Battlefield 2142, which looks retarded, now has no competition as the "new multiplayer FPS" of the fall. Activision and Insomniac also benefit a great deal from this, although Call of Duty 3 and Resistance are going to sell based on the single player campaigns, so they're not competing for the player's time in the same way that BF2142 is.  People will go through a good single player game and then get back to their multiplayer game of choice.  When your product is just multiplayer, you are drawing from the same pool of customers, and ultimately, the same pool of people that you need to play the game regularly to keep the community busy and made the product appealing to future purchasers.  One of the unintended results of UT2004 having so many features, modes, and mods available was that finding a particular server hosting the exact game type and map you wanted became a crapshoot.  You can wonder why Counter-Strike source still had the same two game modes and remade a lot of the same maps, but the answer is simple:  those two game modes are what people want out of Counter-Strike, and they want to play it on the maps they are familiar with.  CSS has never had a problem when it comes to finding a ton of other people to play online, in any given map.

The funny part here is, and this is speculation more than anything, Quake Wars, UT2007 and Team Fortress 2 are  probably now on a mid-March collision course for hitting retail.  Then again, if I read in January that EP2/TF2/Portal were delayed again until June, I would not be surprised (lack of surprise in delays seems to be a recurring theme lately).  All three games are now not only missing out on Christmas sales, but the fact that December through January and when people have time to get involved in those sort of time consuming games.  College semester breaks.  Holiday week-long vactions.  Snow giving people reprieves from school and work.  To have all three of these games coming out in the spring now puts them up against each other in terms of usage, and the amount of time people have available to simply play games to begin with.  Seems like the ultimately losing situation.  TF2 will fare fine because it has a very unique look and play style to it.  It is also, as of now, coming bundled with EP2 and Portal for only $20.  Can't beat that.  I've now got at least six months to hold off on a video card purchase and get that POS steam working again.  UT2007 will have higher system requirements to contend with, but people jump on next gen engines when the game attached to it is good, and if Crysis is as good as many videos make it out to be, the hard core PC gamers will all be buying new hardware before UT2007 hits.  This is probably going to leave Enemy Territory as the odd man out.  It looks to have the most interesting gameplay of all three, but it gets stuck in the middle:  it is not as scalable as TF2 on Source engine will be, but it is not cutting edge like UT2007 will be.  It isn't going to have the price advantage that TF2 has, and it isn't going to justify hardware expenses the way UT2007 will.  The last thing to hurt it will be the mod scene.  UT2004 and HL2 have completely destroyed Doom III engine games for modding, because the engine focuses too much on worthless lighting effects that make the system requirements higher than they should be for the amount of entertainment any of the games provide (or in Prey's case, a complete lack of entertainment).  Splash Damage did a brilliant job with the freely distributed Wolfenstein Enemy Territory though, so they at least have a chance of carving out a following for Quake Wars.

This also brings up the most hilarious point of all:  it is really, really ease to move on from a hobby when companies are constantly delaying products like this.  When I have time over Christmas break to play games like this, none of them of will be here.  When they come out, I'll be in my last semester and probably not have much time for a single one, let alone three of them.  Between the retarded handling of all three consoles to these software delays, autumn 2006 went from being what looked like the most expensive season of all time to one of the most affordable.  I'll be getting Yakuza on PS2, Vice City Stories on PSP, and maybe M&M Dark Messiah on the PC this fall.  Other than the "good stuff cheap" games you can find a lot of on each platform, those are my only planned purchases for the fall.  The game industry is making it way too easy to lose intersest in this hobby and get into other things.  Brilliant work, fellas.

Arms Race

Maybe I'm falling for it by even linking to it, because there is so little to it that you'll notice my link goes directly to the third and last page. Summary: the "console war" is not good for gaming, and the rapidly growing "arms race" is going to result in another Soviet Union - of the gaming kind. I'm not sure what the gaming equivalent of the Soviet Union could be, perhaps Chinese Lineage II players.

Overlooking the fact that this guy probably got the article linked to on Slashdot just to increase the ad views crammed into the three pages of text (which in a word processor document would amount to maybe 3/4 of a page) and the other fact that the article says a whole lot of nothing, there is the question you can ask: are consumers benefitting from competition?

While I'm not sure where the author got the idea that Sega had anyone else to blame for Dreamcast tanking, or that N64 and Gamecube were like nuclear bomb blasts (the systems' software lineups were as remote as Los Alamos, but Nintendo doesn't care and they made a lot of money on those products) I will say that competition is certainly a good thing. All you have to do is look at the sorry state of portable gaming or how bad the pricing is on music CD's to realize how bad monopolies are. That is to say nothing of the computer software market, because lets face it, that is a bit of a "duh!" statement.

Competition is always good. Or at least it should always be good. Which brings me to this very facietious statement: "It is a good thing all this competition is providing us with low software and hardware prices." Think about it. The video game industry is in the unique position of being a three horse race - or maybe a 2.5 horse race (I'll explain later) - but who is benefitting? This November I could go out spend $1,200 on two new and one repackaged console, and I still have all of one NFL game to chose from over the course of the generation. There will probably be more handball games to chose from, and that is quite a bit less popular than the NFL, unless you have a particular perverted definition of "handball." There are no longer any good NBA games (which I guess makes sense seeing as where the quality of the league has gone), the fighting franchises that are good now are the same ones that were good ten years ago (or were crappy ten years ago if you count DOA and Mortal Kombat). You're going to see a lot less in the way of quality platform games, and to be honest, I can't blame the developers on that one. There is no incentive these days for Naughty Dog or Insomniac to make them when they can put out generic games where you shoot people and sell many more copies. I'm a fan of FPS, but really, there are enough teams dedicated to that genre. "Resistance" and ND's currently untitled project will no doubt be great games, but it is sad that such good developers had to climb onto such overly crowded genres to get any attention at all. Speaking of competition - when was the last time any other than FPS got some attention at the now defunct E3?

So with three companies making consoles, the choices are a system that is pathetically underpowered, a system where a majority of the games will be missing content so it can be sold to you later, and a system that is trying to do too much. One thing really needs to happen for competition to really benefit consumers: the companies involved have to competing for the same goal. None of them have the same goal. Microsoft wants microtransactions. Nintendo wants you to pay for the same crap warmed over twice. Sony wants to win the hi-def movie format war. I'm not going to criticize the business plan of any of these companies. It is not my place, and anyone who is a gamer should not care. There are already plenty of people who do this, some from within one of the companies itself. But is really is amazing to look at where games are going: hardware that wasn't that great in 2000 from one company, charges for content and services not worth anything from another company, and a murky sense of who they are competing with from the market leader.

Old hardware. Outlandish service charges. No clear goal. All this "competition" has done is hand out three shovels to dig a ditch we were trying to avoid in the first place. You don't need to scrawl "monopoly" in the dirt once you've covered up the corpse, but at least leave some of that fake looking funny money near the plot. Somebody in D.C. decided ugly money was a good idea, and you're going to need it if you want to benefit from all of this wonderful "competition" we're seeing.

Patty Cake

Last year, the Patriots' schedule was nightmarish.  That comes with the territory, having had back to back, 14-2, division winning, Superbowl winning seasons, adding up to three titles in four years and every win streak record on the books.  What was not expected, at least in the rate of occurence, were the injuries.  Nothing new.  Bledsoe went down, and uh... well you know what happened.  No Ty Law?  No problem.  That Pats shut down the competition with Troy Brown and a Gay man playing conernerback.  But last year was just a bit ridiculous.  Losing Rodney Harrison was by far the worst part.  Bruschi came back mid-season and played find (ofcourse, he now has a wrist injury - go figure).  But the offensive line injuries (Koppen, Light) along with unmeasurable crappiness of Duane Starks not being injured led to bad things.  They still won the division.  They still secured the record tenth straight playoff victory.  But they still went out in the division round as I predicted, although you lay half of that at the feet of the refs in what was by far the worst weekend of officiating in the history of professional sports.  But give credit where credit is due - the Steelers got screwed even worse than the Patriots did, but won their game, and went on to win the AFC Championship against the unsurprisingly combustable Broncos and then the Superbowl against a team that could only muster ten points in the biggest game of the franchise's pathetic history.  Had the Pats not been screwed by the refs against Denver, they likely would have beaten in front of a home field crowd by the Steelers in an ugly work of revenge for the way Brady & co. pants them in front of Pittsburgh a year and a half ago.  The Steelers were the best team in the playoffs last year, and deserved to win.

Barring a second consecutive season where the team has a completely ridiculous number of injuries, things look a bit different this season.  The only AFC team that is certifiably better now than they were six months ago is The Dolphins.  That can be a concern since they are a division rival that the Patriots play twice, but much of hype surrounding them hinges on Daunte Culpepper's knee.  He probably has rehabbed it quite well - his injury occured much earlier than Carson Palmer's.  Unforunately for him (and god forbid - Tom Brady), Kimo Von Kneediver now plays for the Jets.  One bad hit and Miami is back to being a decent 9 - 7 team but not much of a playoff contender.

The Steelers are simply not as good now as they were in February.  The Bus has retired.  Gentle Ben smashed his face on a windshield.  Randle El left for the 'Skins.  Doubts linger about how happy Cowher is regarding his contract situation and whether or not he'll even be back after this season.  This is by no means a "poo-poo" on the Steelers chances of repeating.  The Patriots are also worse on paper now than they have been in the past.

The Colts lost Edge which would seem like an enormous blow, but Peyton Manning can shoulder the load - no pun intended.  Having Vinetari is 1000x better than having Vandershank, although as luck would have it, both of them are hurt right now and may not be there for the start of their respective team's seasons.  If Adam's ankle problem really is serious, than it will be hard to lament the Pats letting him go to an arch rival.  He was #1 in pay last year but #19 in accuracy, and probably needs to be in a dome to get the numbers back up.  Having gone on a tangeant I'll simply say the Colts looked unstoppable last year and managed to stop themselves in the playoffs as usual.  They don't look as tough this year.

The Bengals are not a team the Patriots play very much, and their first trip to the playoffs last season ended in the worst way imaginable.  A questionable knee (or what is left of it) on Palmer and a bunch of criminals on the rest of the roster - that is a recipe for disaster.

Now my official predictions on the schedule, keeping in mind that injuries or alien invasions could ruin it at any given time:

Bills @ Home:  Easy win.

Away @ Jets:  Easy win.

Broncos @ Home:  Broncos win, creating hype that they are now primed to get the Superbowl.  During said hype, everyone forgets that they haven't done shit in the playoffs since Elway retired.

Away @ Bengals:  Palmer's kneed and Marvin Lewis' complete lack of control over his team let the Pats get out of this one with a win.

Dolphins @ Home:  The Patriots seem to schedule one boneheaded division loss every year, but this would be a bit early.  Pats win a close one.

BYE WEEK:  Ditka - 1,033 ; Ricky Bobby - 5

Away @ Bills:  Easy win.

Away @ Vikings:  The Vikes finished last season strong, but looking at the Koren Robinson situation shows me they haven't learned much since Randy Moss and ticket scalper Mike Tice left... or since the Love Boat incident.  Pats win in prime time.

Colts @ Home:  Manning got his revenge last year, and this year will just be an ordinary win.  Pats lose by ten or less, fueling speculation that this is the year the Colts finally do it - just like last year and the year before.

Jets @ Home:  Easy win.  Mangina cries.

Away @ Packers:  Bretty Favre is pretty much the worst quarterback of all time.  Pats win in the blowout of the season.

Bears @ Home:  Last year's most overhyped team got exposed in the playoffs and still have lousy quarterbacks.  Seriously, who the fuck is Rex Grossman?  Pats win, and people watching the game wonder why anyone thought the Bears were Superbowl contenders to begin with.

Lions @ Home:  Pats complete the sweep of the crapfest that is the NFC North.  Cassel gets cleanup duty before it turns into a Packers-esque bloodbath.

Away @ Dolphins:  I see a lot of people remarking on how the Patriots don't have to play in Miami until after the heat has died down.  Remember December 2004?  The Dolphins win, otherwise they are this year's Chicago Bears.

Texans @ Home:  They continue to pay David Carr and passed on Reggie Bush.  If the Patriots couldn't win this with blindfolds on, I'd stop watching sports entirely.

Away @ Jags:  Even with the injuries, the Patriots destroyed them in January.  The Jags of last season were quite possibly the worst 12 - 4 in a long time.  Pats win.

Away @ Titans:  Vince Young, if not injured at this point, will scramble and make some nice plays.  David Givens will  play well.  Lendale White will spit on somebody and get his ass kicked.  How much effort even goes into this one probably depends how close Miami is in the standings.  If this game means something, it is a win.  If it doesn't, it should still be a win because the B-Squad is still better than these bozos.

Projected Record:  12 - 4.  Yeah, I just picked them winning 13 of the games, but I will admit now that things could pile up on them in weeks 3 - 5 if they lose against Denver.  Going into the bye week 3-2 is possible, and if a nasty injury occurs, maybe even 2-3 could happen.  But last year, the Patriots had the toughest schedule ever, with the worst number of injuries ever, and they went 10-6.  They actually would have been 11-5 if it had not been to their advantage to throw the B-Squad in and let Miami take the final game of last season.  Taking those facts into consideration, and seeing match ups against AFC South and NFC North, they really should be winning 12 games.  They're not aligned with the AFC West, NFC South, or NFC East this year.  They aren't even playing the Steelers, Cowboys, Panthers, Giants, Chiefs, or Chargers.  Win 12 games fellas.

The other thing I'm looking forward to this season is a little drama known as Dallas.  I have never liked Terrel Owens.  I respect how Drew Bledsoe handled himself in 2002 and now that he is out of the division, I wish success for him.  But kick me if the idea of T.O. causing Bill Parcells to have a nervous breakdown is not the funniest thing ever.  T.O. dissing Terry Glenn.  T.O. publically disclosing Vanderjerk's sexual orientation.  It's all there folks.  Make it happen, Mr. Owens.  Make.  It.  Happen.

Flexible Protection

NBC gets "flexible scheduling" during weeks 10 - 17, sans week 16 (holiday weekend). This means if you were planning on watching a game at 1PM or 4PM between two good teams, NBC will try to take that game from the other networks because they are really desperate for ratings!

The catch is that CBS and Fox can elect to "protect" up to five games during that stretch, no more than one per week. Games that are played on Thursdays (NFL Network starting Thanksgiving), Saturday, or Monday Night can't be taken by NBC so the host networks have nothing to worry about in that regard.

I see four main advantages to this:

01. A game earlier in the day makes the beer drinking situation less invasive on Monday morning
02. You don't have to listen to John Madden
03. Doesn't interfere with HBO Sunday night shows
04. NBC misses an opportunity to promote their horrible prime time TV shows. 4th place, suckers!

The Protection List ™:

All times EST

Week 10

CBS: Jets @ Patriots / 1:00 PM
FOX: Bears @ Giants / 1:00 PM

Week 11

CBS: San Diego @ Denver / 4:15 PM
FOX: Falcons @ Ravens / 1:00 PM

Week 12

CBS: Steelers @ Ravens / 1:00 PM
FOX: Bears @ Patriots / 1:00 PM

Week 13

CBS: Jaguars @ Dolphins / 1:00 PM
FOX: Cowboys @ Giants / 1:00 PM

Week 14

CBS: Patriots @ Dolphins / 1:00 PM
FOX: Giants @ Panthers / 1:00 PM

Week 15

CBS: Steelers @ Panthers / 1:00 PM
FOX: Eagles @ Giants / 1:00 PM

Week 16

N/A



Week 17

CBS: Dolphins @ Colts / 1:00 PM
FOX: Falcons @ Eagles / 1:00 PM



I can't say I would too pissed off if some of the Patriots games on FOX were shuffled over to NBC. FOX is horribly biased towards the NFC and their broadcasts come of as if they resent the fact that they cover the weaker conference while CBS gets the good AFC games. Troy Aikman is good, but Joe Buck sucks (stick to Baseball, douchebag) and Terry Bradshaw is enough enough to save the pre-game show. Howie Long - how long can somebody from Charlestown continue to be such an oaf?

If you have having trouble finding a league-wide schedule that actually has the tentative T.V. coverage listed, ESPN has got you covered.

Three Years

This is a half-coherent, half-intoxicated discription of how there is a "three year effect" in gaming. 1995... 1998... 2001... 2004... 2007. Read on for some more drunken chunks of genius:

Diminishing returns on the qualty of games? Yes, we are hitting that wall. 2004 was the Pinnaccle of gaming releses. I don't expect there to be such a clusterfsck every fall, but they could spread releases out some. Nothing in August but Madden, and then the week I go back go class Yakuza and Dark Messiah come out. Great timing, assholes.

There are three year trends in releases when it comes to games.

1995
first fully 3D consoles released in the states
Warhawk, Twisted Metal
NFL Gameday kicks Madden to the curb
Ride Racer
[TOSHINDEN HAHAHAHAHA SHIT GAME]

Sega had out Panzer Dragoon, Daytona USA, Virtua Cop, Sega Rally, and God's game delivered to the heathens of earth: VIRTUA FIGHTER 2

plus you could mess around with a JPN model N64 at Cybersmith. Broadband really killed places like those off.

1998
If not the best holiday season, than the best calendar year.
Tekken 3
Ridge Racer Type 4
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit (this was before they got into the rice rocket shit)
Tenchu - Stealth Assassins
Resident Evil 2
Metal Gear Solid
Zelda Ocarina of Time
Gameday and Shootout showing how 3D sports are done
SHOGO - Mobile Armor Division
SiN
Half-Mutha-Fuck'n-Life!

that was the best year

But for the best fall:

2001 - A Gaming Oddysy
Ico
Grand Theft Auto 3
Metal Gear Solid 2
Halo
Devil May Cry
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 (this was the template for which billions of gallons of milk would be produced)
Final Fantasy X

And that was on top of GT3 and Twisted Metal Black having already been released in the spring.

But for a fall release steel cage match, this tops them all:

2004
Doom III
Halo 2
Half-Life 2
Metal Gear Solid 3
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas
Tribes Vengeance
UT2004 collector's edition
Kotor 2 (ugh, but was a big release at the time)
Dragon Quest 8 (jpn)
Ratchet & Clank 3
Metroid Prime 2
Burnout 3

Next year potentially:
===============

VF5 - March
UT2007 - March
Heavenly Sword - Feb/March
Quake Wars ET - Feb/March

later in the year:

Metal Gear Solid 4
Halo 3
BioShock
Grand Theft Auto IV
Mass Effect
Half-Life 2 - Episode 3
SiN Episodes 3
Mercenaries 2


EVERY THREE YEARS, BITCHES. EVERY THREE YEARS.

That is the first time I've changed the font for a block of quoted text. Looks nifty.

More Screws

Should have figured that leaving content off of the disc and selling it afterwards wouldn't be enough. Now 1UP (a.k.a. the "other" Microsoft Network) has word on "consumables" - items you purchase ingame, but do not receive until you've paid actual cash in the Xbox Marketplace:

Another thing Microsoft intends to add to the Marketplace is the ability for vendors placed in videogames to allow gamers to buy from the Marketplace. Say, there is a vendor in an RPG selling a rare sword and that sword is available on the Marketplace, players will be able to put the sword in a checkout cart and then return to the Marketplace later to complete the download. For now, the in-game Marketplace will bring the Marketplace experience into the gameplay, but the transactions, for now, will still need to be completed on the Marketplace and not in-game.

The sad part is that only half of the blame lays at Microsoft's feet on this one. The other half goes to the idiots that keep bending over over for it, all with a dumb smile on their face.

Loud Mouths

I'm not going to call this a "chicken and the egg" scenario because anyone paying attention knows the egg came first. But this particular question remains unanswered: are the loudest, most pretentious game developers such idiots because they cannot release games on time or of good quality, or are the games delayed and of poor quality because they never shut up? A quick look:

Lorne Lanning: Never shut up, got humiliated by Ed Fries on a Discovery TV special ("nobody wants to play as a fish"), Microsoft dropped publishing rights, his studio goes under. How did someone who created such an irrellevant series of games get the idea that anyone really cared what he had to say about anything?

American McGee: The fact that this guy gets his name on the front of a box is pretty much the largest insult imaginable to talented developers everywhere. Bad Day L.A. is going in the same bargain bin scrap heap as Scapland.

Crater face pedophile @ Tecmo: Makes a career of deriding Namco and AM2, yet his joke of a fighting game franchise wouldn't exist without Virtua Fighter 2 and the Model 2 arcade board. Can't face (haha can't face) direct competition in the arcade or on console platforms. Sales of DOA4 have bottomed out and leprosy will encompass the rest of his frame before he makes a fighting game as good as what AM2 and Namco produce.

Denis Dyack: I'll start by saying that unlike the previous three, his team actually has made a good game: Legacy of Kain - Blood Omen. Eternal Darkness was by no means a bad game, but was a total mismatch for the Gamecube audience. But then he somehow manages to ruin a game that was already great with Twin Snakes, and he somehow spends more time talking up "Too Human" rather than just working on the game. Now his team is ditching the Unreal 3 engine because it is a nice scapegoat for the fact that his game has been in development since the original PlayStation and will now not likely see release before 2008. He's not exactly the next name on the list as he can actually ship a product from time to time, but even 3DR was a good developer once...

George Broussard: Again, this guy has shipped a good game. In fact, he's shipped a few great games. The last of which came out a year before the frog paparazzi killed Princess Diania in a Paris car crash. Seriously. TEN YEARS. Remember when (the most aptly titled game ever) Duke Nukem Forever was supposed to come out at the same time as Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life, and Ocarina of Time? Remember when it was switched from the Quake 2 engine to Unreal engine and would be out in 1999? Remember when it was supposed to be out in 2001? Just think about this: Half-Life 2 was not even announced until four and half years after the release of the original. It was subsequently delayed, delayed, and delayed. It finally came out in November 2004. It won "Game of the Year" all over the place. It has sold millions of copies. The first expansion episode has already been released, with the second one hitting before the end of this year. The other terminally delayed PC games, Team Fortress 2, will be out with that expansion pack. For as badly as Valve bobbled the released date of Half-Life 2, it is still going to be at least three years and three expansion packs ahead of Duke Nukem Forever. They also managed to bring Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat to their new engine in the mean time, develop a new content delivery system, design a 3D engine themselves, and have another dormant franchise (SiN) released on their deliverly platform. Oh yeah, they've also got Portal coming out at the end of the year as well. This reminds me of the phrase "The Germans were so bad in WW2 that the Soviets were one of the good guys." Valve, one of the most perpetually delaying developers out there, is still light years ahead of 3D Realms (who, hilariously, have yet to ship a game that is actually 3D). Before this name alone turns into an endless essay, I'll defer your attention to the Duke Nukem Forever list. It is truly extraordinary how inept they are. Oh yeah, Prey had to be handed off to another developer completely in order to be finished - nay - redeveloped from the ground up, only to became a pale immitation of what it was supposed to be in the first place.

There are many more that could go on this list, but it illustrates the question well enough: why not just shut the hell up and start making some quality games? Or in 3DR's case, ship a game every decade.

Live Writer

This is a quick test to see how well the just-relased Windows Live Writer blogging tool will work.  They must have realized that people don't care about MSN Spaces, because it automatically configured itself to work with my Blogger account, a service run by arch-nemesis Google.

Should this work, it will make updating the blog for the remainder of the month much easier.  There is also a blogger plugin for MS Word but I can't be bothered with it, and I may look into the OpenOffice blogger plugin if this does not work as well as I hope it does.

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3.