Sunday Supplement – 26th February

Comic courtesy of Fat Gamers.

More crap floating around the air…

This week the City of London Corporation (which actually covers little over a square mile of richness and posh people having dinner) announced the area will get complete WiFi coverage via The Cloud. Great for us Londoners (although, in reality, it will probably only benefit tourists and suits) you would think. But, as British Gaming Blog noticed, The Cloud are also in partnership with Nintendo, providing free WiFi access to DS owners.

So, great for DS owners who get lost while sight seeing and stumble into one of the million or so Starbucks in London. And it’s great for gaming. But it’s also another w00t for Nintendo, in more ways than one.

Nintendo’s partnership with The Cloud is evidence of their commitment to providing free online access to their fans. But it also ensures they have jammed a dual screen foot in the door to free online gaming in the area. Surely we can expect The Cloud to work on expanding their boundaries of coverage to encompass most of London. Then Nintendo’s reach will be naturally extended. The beginnings of world domination?

Nintendo has traditionally been weary of online gaming, not seeing the benefit to their fans (most Nintendo games are sold on their amazing single-player experiences) or potential for profit. But their moves with the DS, this one being one of them, show how their focus has changed. Online play could well become a huge part of any DS owner’s gaming repertoire. Where Microsoft charge for online play, Nintendo is making it free.

I’m not a fanboy, but Nintendo is really showing courage in what most commentators agree is the most risk-averse time the industry has ever seen. Surely that controller is evidence of that. Free online play, across London, shows the Japanese legend still loves us, at least a little bit.

A hero to stand on the shoulder of heroes

My first memory of Link is not a good one. It was in the early Nineties, when I was a wee baby (not literally folks), and perhaps didn’t have the patience I have now in my older, wiser days. I was struggling with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, on my SNES. I got stuck just as I was about to access the Dark World. My strongest memory is spending hours travelling the map looking for an area I had missed, an entrance or exit. I couldn’t find any. Instead of persevering, I quit, slating Link and all his adventuring as pure console crap.

How wrong I was. This week the gaming community celebrated Link’s 20th birthday. The Legend of Zelda was released for the NES on 21 Feb 1986. The series has spawned my favourite game of all time, and, I suspect, most console gamers’ favourite game of all time, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, on the N64.

As of September last year, the series had sold 47 million units. Despite a dodgy outing in Wind Waker (yes, it wasn’t as good as it should have been), Twilight Princess is the most anticipated game of 2006. Even after 20 years, Link has gamers old and new salivating.

It’s all down to Shigeru Miyamoto of course. When the great man retires, The Legend of Zelda series should go down as his greatest achievement – even greater than the Super Mario Bros franchise. Did you know that Miyamoto found inspiration for the Legend of Zelda series as a child while exploring the caves that surround his home town of Sonobe in Japan? Genius.

Happy birthday Link… to twenty more fabulous years.

Rubbish is rubbish

This is what Marc Ecko said in an interview with New York Metro about poor sales of his game: “I would say there are gamers that have a predisposition to have a bug up their ass for anything urban. The fact that there was a black character on the cover of this game, right away there was a dismissiveness that this was just another ‘GTA: San Andreas’.”

I’m sorry Mr Ecko, but I have to take issue with this. I propose that most gamers didn’t look at the cover and dismiss it as another GTA clone, because there have been many previews and reviews talking about what the game is. I would suggest it didn’t sell fantastically well because it is just an average game, and astute gamers checked out those reviews before shelling out.

There are other factors involved of course, including gamers not sure about buying games on a current platform when the next-generation is upon us, and Mr Ecko shows a keen eye to point them out in the interview, but he seems to be suggesting, however subtly, that the sales might have something to do with race.

Well it has nothing to do with that. If games don’t sell well, it’s usually because they are not great. Sometimes throwing millions into marketing can compensate for quality, but with Ecko’s game, no amount of publicity, negative or otherwise, has saved it from being labelled “average” by the gaming community. Maybe Mr Ecko should play his own game before insulting his customers’ intelligence.

Not what it seems…

I remember EA’s television advertisements for Harry Potter a few years ago. They showed no in-game footage, but pre-rendered shots of Harry flying about on that broomstick of his and battling a beautifully animated dragon. I remember thinking then that there was no way that was in-game. I was even dubious about it being a cutscene.

This week Activision’s television advert for Call of Duty 2 was removed from the airwaves because it contained pre-rendered footage that wasn’t included in the game. There is currently no breach with the authorities if non-in-game footage is included, as long as it appears in the code somewhere. For their part, Activision say they didn’t realise they were doing anything wrong. Well of course. Why should marketing in this way be wrong?

It should be a breach of regulations not to include any in-game footage in an advertisement for a game. There needs to be a percentage of on-screen time devoted to in-game footage, perhaps 50 percent. This will give the prospective customer a real sense of what the game might be like to play. Nobody plays games just for cut-scenes (unless you buy MGS2).

Imagine an advertisement for a movie that had no shots of the movie, or an ad for an album that had no clips of tracks. Wouldn’t happen. Shouldn’t happen in the game industry either. The rules should be changed.

This week on Pro-G

It’s been a rather dull week for reviews on Pro-G, with We Love Katamari being the only title that is really worth your hard-earned cash. The Katamari Damacy series is a little overrated in my opinion, and this sequel is rather overpriced in the UK, but it’s got a certain charm that’s hard to resist.

Reviews

Loco Mania

Nanostray

Stubbs the Zombie

Dead to Rights: Reckoning

Super Monkey Ball: Touch & Roll

We Love Katamari

Preview

RF Online

This week’s new releases

Black is undeniably the biggest release of the week and with EA’s marketing muscle behind it, it should clean up in the sales chart next week. It’s certainly an impressive current-gen title (when can we officially start calling the Xbox 360 current-gen?), but it’s also damn frustrating. After a while with the game you’ll think you’ve turned into the painter from the classic BBC comedy The Fast Show.

TOCA Race Driver 3 from Codemasters should satisfy the sim fans among you, with its huge collection of racing types and impressive online play, and horror fans will no doubt lap up Project Zero 3 from Tecmo. Lula 3D is probably the game that must be avoided at all costs, despite the game’s claim to use “Bouncing boobs technology.”

• America’s Army: Rise of a Soldier (Xbox)
• BLACK (PS2 and Xbox)
• Castlevania: Curse of Darkness (PS2 and Xbox)
• Crashday (PC)
• EverQuest II with Kingdom of Sky Expansion (PC)
• Ford Street Racing (PS2, Xbox and PC)
• Lula 3D (PC)
• Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play (PSP)
• Project Zero 3: The Tormented (PS2)
• RF Online (PC)
• Suikoden Tactics (PS2)
• TOCA Race Driver 3 (PS2, Xbox and PC)
• Trapt (PS2)
• Trollz: Hair Affair (GBA)
• Tycoon City: New York (PC)
• Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble (DS)