The Gamers’ Temple Oracle

Our site recently received a notification from YouTube that 20th Century Fox had demanded that the trailer we had posted for the game Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer be removed because it was in violation of copyright laws. YouTube immediately complied, served us with a warning, and left us to prove our innocence. Prove our innocence? Isn’t this America, where you’re innocent until proved guilty? Adding further insult to this injury is the fact that apparently no one at Fox or YouTube even bothered to watch the video. If they had, they would have seen that it was a videogame trailer and did not contain any movie footage whatsoever. Had they bothered to ask, I would have been happy to inform them that the video was provided to us by 2K Games with full permission for public display. Instead some corporate lawyer from Fox screamed guilty and YouTube immediately cowered.

It seems strange to me that Fox would be so protective of what it mistakenly thought was a movie trailer. Trailers are essentially free publicity for movies, and you’d think it would occur to them that this is a good thing for their business. However, it is within their right to be boneheaded about this and jealously protect distribution of their trailers. Yet in this case it’s not even their trailer. They are scouring the Internet for copyright violations and the people that are doing so on their behalf aren’t even that good at it. My guess is that some keyword search popped up our posting of the trailer and immediately triggered a threatening letter to YouTube. However, in under a minute of searching I was able to find this same trailer all over the internet, including YouTube itself (www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjNnjKMCv8g). How did their internet goon squad miss all of these other copies of the trailer? (Hey Fox, those little numbers on the bottom page of the search results mean that there’s more than one page. ) If copyright protection is so important to Fox, why are they so bad at it?

So thanks to Fox, I had to waste my time and send a formal letter to YouTube contesting the allegation. I hope that YouTube bothers to watch the trailer this time and has the integrity to inform the Fox corporate giant that it was mistaken, but we shall see. I’ll follow-up on this blog entry with the results. I may now be guilty until proven innocent, but at least I still have my right of free speech.

Here’s another classic line from a review found on a major videogame site. Apparently the author didn’t pay enough attention in English class to know that adverbs end in “ly” or in math class when the commutative property of addition was covered…

“TR: Legend is primary 70 percent adventure and 30 percent action, in that order.”

Hmm, come to think of it, if the game is primarily 70% adventure and 30% action, that leaves 0% for its secondary characteristics…

Manhunt 2 was in the news again last week. Rockstar resubmitted the game to the ESRB and was successful in getting the game’s rating changed from AO (Adults Only) to M (Recommended for ages 17 and older). There was of course some controversy over this new ruling, particularly since the ESRB does not make its findings public. The press and the anti-videogame forces demanded to know just what was changed to make the game deserving of a gentler rating. I’m curious too, but for a different reason. I think what everyone has missed here is that the real difference between an AO and an M rating is whether or not the content is suitable for 17 year olds. What exactly was removed from the game that would have warped the minds of 17 year olds everywhere? Is the entire purpose of the AO rating simply to protect 17 year olds? I sincerely doubt it. The AO rating exists merely as a PR tool of the ESRB so that they can point to it and say that they are sincere about protecting youth from disturbing videogames. It is almost never actually used and the fact that it was applied to Manhunt 2 was probably more of a PR stunt by the ESRB that backfired than a genuine attempt to protect 17 year old innocents. The Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee incident was a serious black eye for the ESRB and they thought that they could use the AO rating of Manhunt 2 to kill two birds with one stone. First, it was a bit of payback to Rockstar for embarrassing them in the first place. Second, it was an attempt to show the public that they are not asleep at the wheel and that they have a vigilant eye trained on the industry and on Rockstar in particular. Too bad all they succeeded in doing was punching themselves in the face and blackening their other eye.

If you’re familiar with the large corporate game sites you’ll know that all of their writers have the word “Editor” in their titles. This is ironic because these sites are also notorious for their lack of editorial oversight. Articles regularly contain misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and even repeated paragraphs or sentences that are missing their endings. I find it amazing that professional writers can’t be bothered to even spellcheck their work before displaying it to the public. Perhaps its just laziness, but I sometimes fear that in a text message crazed society grammar and spelling are being left by the wayside. There are, however, some people that still care and as such I will from time to time bring to your attention the more egregious mistakes posted on the corporate websites.

Let’s kick things off with a particularly mistake-filled review of Jeanne D’Arc posted on a certain large game site. This review is filled with such poorly constructed sentences as:

“Unified guard kicks when your characters are adjacent to each other drastically increases their defense against physical attacks. ”

Obviously this article was never read by its writer or anyone else before it was posted to the web. One sentence in this review struck me as particularly amusing. I think it pretty much speaks for itself:

“The sound is up tot he same quality standards. ”

Here’s an interesting bit of news that was released today - Bret Michaels, the lead singer from Poison, will appear in Guitar Hero III. When you play the Poison song “Talk Dirty to Me”, Michaels will appear in your band as the lead singer. However if you look carefully at the news release you’ll notice this tidbit:

“Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock will feature the song “Talk Dirty to Me,” as made famous by Poison…”

“Made famous by” is Guitar Hero lingo that means that the version of a song appearing in the game is actually a cover and not a recording by the original artist. This means that Bret Michaels’ character in the game will effectively be lipsynching to music sung by an anonymous singer trying to emulate Michaels’ voice!

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…