The Gamers’ Temple Oracle

There are a couple of cool tracks in the latest set of tracks announced for Guitar Hero III, but there are others I’m not so sure about:

· Miss Murder (by AFI)
· Through Fire and Flames (by Dragonforce)
· Number of the Beast (by Iron Maiden)
· 3’s and 7’s (by Queens of the Stone Age)
· Suck My Kiss (by Red Hot Chili Peppers)
· Raining Blood (by Slayer)
· Reptillia (by The Strokes)
· Paranoid (as made famous by Black Sabbath)
· Cities on Flame (as made famous by Blue Oyster Cult)
· Mississippi Queen (as made famous by Mountain)
· La Grange (as made famous by ZZ Top)

In case you forgot, here are the first announced tracks which I think are a stronger set than the second. Except for the Beastie Boys that is. Since when are rappers of dubious talen playing sampled music considered guitar heroes?

· Slash’s Original Boss Battle Recording
· Welcome to The Jungle (by Guns N’ Roses)
· Paint It Black (by The Rolling Stones)
· Cherub Rock (by Smashing Pumpkins)
· Sabotage (by Beastie Boys)
· The Metal (by Tenacious D)
· My Name is Jonas (by Weezer)
· Knights of Cydonia (by Muse)
· Even Flow (by Pearl Jam)
· Lay Down (by Priestess)
· Cult of Personality (by Living Colour)
· Rock and Roll All Nite (as made famous by Kiss)
· School’s Out (as made famous by Alice Cooper)
· Rock You Like a Hurricane (as made famous by Scorpions)
· Slow Ride (as made famous by Foghat)
· Barracuda (as made famous by Heart)

One final note: it looks like My Name is Jonas and Paranoid have the distinction of also making it into Rock Band.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the games that I’m really looking forward to playing after seeing them at E3:

Guitar Hero III
Rock Band
Fallout 3
Call of Duty 4
Unreal Tournament 3
Army of Two
The Simpsons Game
Bioshock
The Orange Box
Mass Effect
LittleBigPlanet
Tabula Rasa
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Killzone 2
Timeshift

About the only thing noticeably different about the E3 press conferences for the three console manuafactures this year was that the audiences were about a third of the size as those of prior years. Otherwise it would be pretty hard to differentiate them from conferences past…
Off-site locations? Check.
Charts and graphs demonstrating market leadership? Check.
Loud music? Check.
Giant video screens? Check.
Seizure-inducing game footage video montages? Check.
Welcome to the new E3, same as the old E3.

Microsoft:
Microsoft’s conference focused almost exclusively on upcoming game titles. Of course the 800 pound gorilla in the Xbox 360’s upcoming game lineup is Halo 3, but surprisingly Microsoft didn’t provide much of a look at its gameplay. The company also announced a new gameshow buzzer controller consisting of a paddle with a giant button on one end and a row of smaller buttons along the handle. The first game to make use of the controller will be Scene-It which is based on the DVD party game series of the same name. Microsoft also unveiled a new Halo edition Xbox 360 with comes in a military-inspired olive drab color with a matching controller. This announcement is sure to cause some dismay to gamers who recently purchased an Xbox 360 Elite. Lastly, Microsoft announced a deal with Disney to bring their catalog of movie titles to the 360 in the form of HD movie downloads from Xbox Live.

Nintendo:
Nintendo’s conference was once again part press conference, part pep rally. The company seemed to feel the need to emphasize once again that it is targeting non-traditional gamers with the Wii and DS . After showing a number of videos demonstrating how much casual and first-time gamers love the Wii, Nintendo announced a new controller designed for the first-person shooter crowd. The Wii Blaster is more of a controller holder than a new controller, and it uses the Wii remote as the gun barrel and the nunchuck as the gun’s stock. The Blaster will help you feel like you’re holding an actual gun while playing first-person shooters and light gun games on the Wii rather than killing people with a remote control. Nintendo also introduced a new weight and balance sensitive controller for the Wii that looks like a bathroom scale. The controller is designed to be used with a fitness program that will help people get into shape by performing a variety of exercises mixed in with a few mini games. The controller has some obvious potential for use in skateboard and snowboard games in the future.

Sony:
By the time their conference began the news of the PS3 price cut and the new 80GB model was already a couple of days old, but Sony had a few more announcements in store for the press at their conference. Sony announced a new PSP model for the fall which will slim down the portable, improve battery life and load times, and come with a video-out jack so that you can use it to play UMD movies on a TV. The new model will also come in a new silver color in addition to the traditional black, and there will be a special Star Wars edition that comes in white with Darth Vader on the back. The rest of Sony’s conference focused on the new games in the pipeline that will be available for sale by the end of this year. Sony also demonstrated some of the capabilites of Home, including the ability to launch multiplayer games directly from within Home and the ability to import pictures taken with a cell phone into your personal space on the service.

This week marks the debut of the “new and improved” E3. If you missed all of the controversy last year, in short some of the larger game publishers announced after last year’s show that they would no longer support E3. According to them, the problem was that the show had become too loud, too big, and too expensive for them to effectively connect to the media and retail buyers and get their new products noticed. (Do I need to mention that it’s pretty much those companies’ fault that E3 got so loud and big in the first place?) So the E3 sponsors completely revamped the format, significantly cutting the number of invited attendees, moving it from the LA Convention Center to a collection of Santa Monica hotels, and moving it from May until July. (I would like to know who was responsible for the brilliant idea of scheduling a major trade event the week after a major holiday weekend, by the way.)

As I ready myself to hit Santa Monica this week I can’t help but think that E3 has gone from a loud, manageable mess to quite simply a complete mess. This year E3 will take over the Barker Hangar at Santa Monica airport to use as a space for companies to showcase their games in a low-key, user-friendly environment. Not a bad idea at face value, but in reality it makes things a lot more difficult. First of all the game publishers are not showing all of their games at Barker Hangar. To get a look at all of the upcoming games attendees will need to schedule appointments at the publishers’ hotel suites which are spread among six or so hotels in Santa Monica. What’s the point of having a shared space to preview games when the companies won’t be showing all of their games there? Making matters worse, Barker Hangar is on the other side of Santa Monica from the hotels being used to host game demos. This may not sound like a big deal to you if you’re unfamiliar with LA traffic, but by early afternoon attendees will have to brave one of the heaviest traffic corridors in LA to reach the Barker Hangar. The E3 show is providing shuttles between the hotels and Barker Hangar, but those shuttles will have to sit in the same traffic as everyone else. Making matters worse is the fact that the hangar is not open during the full show hours, forcing attendees to try and squeeze in a few hours in the afternoon or evening in which they must make a whirlwind tour of this “casual” gaming environment - and they have to try and get over there at the height of the traffic crush.

Scheduling appoinments this year to see the publishers’ suites has been a nightmare. First of all, all of the show’s press conferences except for Microsoft’s are scheduled during show hours on the first day of the show. In prior years the conferences were scheduled the day before the show itself opened, leaving you free to see the show once it started. This year, a year in which you pretty much need to schedule an appointment with every single game publisher, the press will miss out on almost an entire day of the show and will need to cram all of their appointments into a two day period. In previous years you needed at most about five to ten minutes to make it between appointments since everything was in one place. This year you’re required to waste half hour chunks of time in your schedule just so that you can get between hotels. There’s no room whatsover in the schedule to let anything slip or to spend a little extra time with a game that looks like it stands out from the crowd.

I’ll let you know what the new format show is like as it plays out this week. However, I have to say that I’m not looking forward to it in the same way that I have E3 shows in the past. I can tell by my schedule already that I will see fewer games at this E3 than ever before, and will spend half of the time worrying about logistics when I should be thinking about games. This new show format was supposed to make it easier for companies to get their games in front of the press and to help give writers more time to learn about the games in a more relaxed atmosphere. This year’s show’s format couldn’t be any further off target.

Did you know that Dead or Alive 4 is available on the PC? And that it is an E-rated game? Neither did I, but according to the website for the new Championship Gaming Series pro gaming league it’s one of the games that they’re using. They’re also using the non-existent Project Gotham Racing 3 for the PC. It makes you wonder just how much the people behind Championship Gaming Series LLC know about games. Conspiracy buffs will be intrigued by the Xbox 360 and Dell logos that cycle through the partners section on the lower left part of the screen. Only one of the official league games is not an Xbox 360 or PC exclusive (FIFA 07), and that one was probably chosen to give the league more global appeal. Don’t be surprised if Shadowrun is the next game added for league play…

The first Vista-only game from Microsoft arrived in our offices a few days ago for review. This distinction went to Shadowrun as a production delay slipped the Halo 2 release to a couple of days after Shadowrun. One of the interesting things about Shadowrun is that the box clearly indicates that it’s for Windows Vista, but required or recommended system specs are nowhere to be found. Vista introduced the Windows Experience Index (WEI) which is supposed to help gamers benchmark their systems and determine which games are supported, but the WEI required for Shadowrun is not even listed. A check of some of the major online retailers revealed that not a single one of them listed the WEI required for Shadowrun, or even the minimum required system specs to run the game. Some retailers even failed to note that Windows Vista is required! It wasn’t until after installing the game and attempting to run it for the first time that I was informed that the minimum WEI required is 4.0, and I only learned that because the system scored below a 4.0.

Now here’s where things get even more confusing. It took some serious digging, but I was able to find the minimum and recommended specs for the game:

Minimum system requirements:
CPU: P4 3.2 GHz processor or higher
Video: ATI X800 (256 MB or higher), NVIDIA 6800 (256 MB or higher)
Memory: 1 GB RAM

Recommended system requirements:
CPU: Intel Core Duo CPU or AMD FX Dual Core CPU
Video: ATI X1800 (256 MB or higher), NVIDIA 7800 (256 MB or higher)
Memory: 2 GB RAM

If you have spent any time trying to figure out the WEI for your system, then you’ll know that the rating your system receives is equivalent to the lowest score received in the benchmarks that the WEI test runs on your system. Now the minimum required CPU of a P4 at 3.2 GHz will score below a 3.0, meaning that a system with the minimum recommended specs for the game won’t even be able to come close to the required WEI. What’s going on here?

Things went from confusing to just plain bad when I tried to run the game. The system I was using is about two years old, with a P4 3.4 GHz CPU, an NVIDIA 7800 with 256 MB VRAM, and 2 GB System RAM. This is a machine that began life as a Windows XP gaming system and has never had an issue running even the most demanding PC games to date. However, attempting to play Shawdowrun on this system (it was recently migrated to Vista) was a nightmare. Even with the game settings set to the lowest values across the board, the game stuttered and paused constantly during the more action-packed sequences making it practically unplayable - and this on a machine that exceeds all of the minimum specs and hits two of the three recommended specs!

This whole experience has me worried for PC gamers. Vista is such a system hog that it can turn a rig perfectly suited to running system intensive games under XP into a stumbling dinosaur. Making matters worse, if you run a Vista compatibility check before upgrading everything will indicate that your system will do just fine under Vista, and if you look at the packaging or product pages for Vista-only games there’s no indication that P4 systems will have issues with the games.

If you spend several thousand dollars on a new system that can handle Vista and play games, then you run the risk of not being able to play your older, non-Vista compatible games on your new system just so that you can play Shadowrun and Halo 2. If you decide to pass on the new system, then you may find that you’re kept from playing more and more new games as Microsoft pressures game companies to move to Vista only production. However, with Microsoft’s push to integrate Xbox Live and Windows gaming you can also expect there to be far more games debuting on both PCs and the Xbox 360 in the future. This means that you can still play those new games without spending a few thousand dollars on a new PC by spending a few hundred on a new Xbox 360. Perhaps this was Microsoft’s strategy all along, to increase their share of the console market by throwing a big roadblock in front of PC gamers and hoping that many of them would take the detour to the Xbox 360.

As I played through yet another movie-based platform game filled with jumping puzzles that shall remain nameless, I began to wonder if there are any gamers out there that actually enjoy jumping puzzles. Do game companies do market studies in which the gamers polled overwhelmingly ask for more jumping in games?

Jumping sequences are quite simply lazy puzzle design. A short mediocre game can easily be padded out to a long mediocre game by throwing in a bunch of jump sequences and calling it a day. That this is a lazy approach to game design is further evidenced by the fact that jumping puzzles aren’t even implemented well. How many times have you had to make a blind jump because the camera wouldn’t align itself to let you see where you were going? How many video game characters have died because of poor edge detection or shoddy button response? Please, a moment of silence for the fallen…

I’m not really sure what can be done about all this. Game companies will continue to try and exploit movie licenses with hastily produced games filled with jump sequences, and as long as people keep buying these games this will never change. As a game reviewer I can only warn people about what they’re getting themselves into, it is up to the game buying public to stop all this inane hopping about. Remember, every time that you buy a game simply because it has a green, flatulent movie star on the cover you’re asking for more … and dooming intrepid game reviewers to long and frustrating hours repeating the same jump sequences over and over again.

I recently had the chance to review the Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver for PCs. In case you’re not aware of it, it’s a small device at the end of a USB cable that allows you to use any Xbox 360 wireless controller with your PC. I like the Xbox 360’s controller - it looks like Microsoft learned from its mistake with the Xbox’s terrible behemoth of a controller - and it is nice to be able to use it with your PC games. It also lets you use any wireless steering wheels or other special controllers for the Xbox 360 on your PC.

Several things struck me as strange about the receiver, though, and I’m not sure if they were just oversights or conscious decisions on Microsoft’s part for some obscure and nefarious reason. The first and most glaring is the like of included Vista drivers. With Microsoft’s push towards Vista-only PC gaming this is a pretty amazing gaff and I have to chalk this one up to poor management. You’d think Vista drivers would have been developed for it well in advance and included on the disk in the package, but instead Vista owners are forced to go to the Microsoft site and hunt down the drivers on their own.

The next oddity is that no game profiling software ships with the device. This means that if the game you want to play doesn’t support a gamepad you’ll have to hunt down some third party software to map the controls to keyboard strokes. It also means that even with games with gamepad support you may be forced to spend some time in the configuration screen mapping buttons. This seems to be something that may be more of a deliberate oversight by Microsoft. Since Vista only games like Halo 2 recognize an Xbox 360 controller and instantly map the buttons for you, Microsoft is probably pushing developers to include this support in their Vista games and providing incentive for PC gamers to start investing in Xbox 360 peripherals.

Lastly we have the little issue with recharging the Xbox 360 wireless controller. The rechargeable battery pack relies on a USB cable for charging, but when you plug this cable into a PC it won’t recognize the controller. You’d think that the drivers would at least recognize that you are trying to charge your controller and just let you go about your business, but instead every time you charge the controller you need to let the PC know that you don’t want to install any drivers. I’m not sure where to file this one. It seems pretty incredible that no one at Microsoft thought about gamers actually wanting to charge their wireless controllers, but it’s also hard to think of a reason why they wouldn’t want to make the recharging process more seamless. I’m sure that someone has a good conspiracy theory about this one though…

I’ve been holding out as long as possible, but I’ve finally had to bite the bullet and upgrade one of our gaming PCs to Windows Vista. Vista just hasn’t struck me as a necessary upgrade. The next time we need to get a new PC we’ll certainly order it with Vista installed, but Windows XP Pro has been doing its job well enough around here and the thought of breaking numerous vital apps (i.e. games) by making the move filled me with dread. That all changed with the arrival at our offices of an innocuous little package with a certain game called Halo 2 for Vista inside. Now I actually had a reason to go for the upgrade and I picked one of our Dell XPS PCs to be our sacrificial guinea pig (I had nothing against this computer, it’s primary qualifications being that it was not the PC I use for my day to day work and it wasn’t the one I used to play World of Warcraft).

The first step in the upgrade process was to download Microsoft’s Vista Upgrade Advisor application to the PC and verify that it would play nice with Vista. Other than a few warnings regarding incompatible apps (the antivirus program, CD burning software, etc., no surprises there), the application seemed to be happy with the PC and so I went forward with the upgrade. I chose the Ultimate version because I wanted the benefits of the Business edition without losing the multimedia features. I prepped the PC by removing the anti-virus, firewall, and other incompatible utility software and then running the disk defragger on the hard disk. After that I was ready to take the plunge and popped in the upgrade disk.

There were a couple of minor prompts to click-through at the beginning, but after that the whole process was automated. This is not a quick process by any stretch of the imagination, though. The install program warned me that it could take “several hours” to complete and it wasn’t kidding. I can’t say exactly how long it took because I didn’t stand over it through the whole process, but it did clock in at over four hours. Once it got through all that there were the standard timezone and clock type of settings to enter, and a short reboot later I was in Windows Vista. This was not the end of the process, though, as the first thing it did was go onto the internet and determine that there were ten or so updates that I needed to download. After the downloads and another reboot I was back into the Vista desktop. However, I was still not ready for Halo 2 as I had to take care of the lack of anti-virus protection in Vista. It comes with a firewall but when it comes to anti-virus protection all you get is an informational warning informing you that you have none. After locating a Vista-compatible anti-virus package, downloading it, and installing it I was ready for the next step, which still was not running Halo 2. The Vista installation did a great job of detecting the machine’s hardware, but it did a woefully inadequate job of providing the latest drivers for some of the hardware such as the graphics card, even after it went on the internet to look for updates. I had to at least go to the vendor sites for the video and sound cards and get the latest drivers before diving into Halo 2. More installation programs, more reboots. Lastly it was time to add the Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows so that I could use an Xbox 360 controller with the game. Guess what? The installation disk that came with the receiver didn’t include a Vista driver, so it was back to the internet and another download and install. Finally, five plus hours later I was ready to play Halo 2.

It took a lot of time and expense to get a PC running Windows Vista and ready to play a game, and I was lucky enough not to run into any issues bigger than some outdated drivers. I haven’t had a chance to try out some of the other games on that PC under Vista, but I did try World of Warcraft and found that the patcher had issues at the very end of its process which left the game in an infinite state of trying to patch itself each time I tried to load up the game. I’ll have to defer my overall opinion of whether or not the upgrade is worth the trouble until after I’ve had some time to put Vista through its paces and try out some of its new features. I can say that the interface is pretty slick, but a spiffy interface alone is not worth a couple of hundred dollars.

Oh, and what about Halo 2? Well you’ll have to read my review of the game after I’ve had the chance to play my way through the game…

Welcome to The Oracle, the weblog of the Excutive Editor of The Gamers’ Temple, namely me, Ned Jordan. Here you will find my editorials, observations, musings, and such about the video game industry and video gaming in general. I hope that you enjoy reading about this crazy and fascinating industry as much as I enjoy being a part of it… and remember, it is all fun and games around here.