Author: blueZhift

Heh heh! First let me say that I must be the kind of customer that Amazon just hates! Back in August I put in a preorder for Halo 2 Limited Edition just to make sure I would be able to get a copy when it came out. Halo 2 was released in the U.S. yesterday with hundreds if not thousands of gamers lining up at midnight across the country to be one of the first to get a legitimate copy of the game.

I checked my order on Amazon and noticed that not only had it not shipped, it actually had an arrival date of November 8. So I guess they had meant to get it to me by release time, but something had gone wrong. Well, the nearby Virgin Megastore had Halo 2 including the Limited Edition, so being fundamentally impatient, I cancelled my Amazon order and high tailed it over to the Virgin store in the closing minutes of my lunch break. I got the last copy of the limited edition! 🙂 Not only that, it cost me $4 less than the Amazon price with shipping! So I could even brag to my wife of my frugality! 😉 If Amazon did have shipping issues, I wonder if they saw a lot of cancellations yesterday?

As for the game itself, I’ve only had time to put in a hour’s worth of play and have died about a half dozen times, but I must say that I like it! There’s a lot of debate online about mouse keyboard versus console controller for first person shooters (fps). Most PC gamers believe that mouse and keyboard are best, and I tend to agree. But for Halo at least, getting used to using the controller is pretty easy. So don’t let controller bigotry keep you from playing this game! Oh so why have I died so much? Well, I suck! At least for now, and I haven’t read the manual either. I used to be a crusader with regard to manuals, but these days I like to just jump in and see how much I can pick up just playing. People generally won’t read manuals anyway, which is something I keep in mind when designing and writing software for my own projects and work.

Anyway, if you like fps games, this is a good one to get. The graphics and sound are very good and the control scheme is easy to get into, even for old school fps gamers. Hey, it even has a decent story developing. So that’s my one hour review! I’ll add to this later, I hope! The real fun won’t begin until I try it on Xbox Live! Here are some links to other reviews.

GameSpy

1up.com

Yahoo! Games Domain

Yesterday Sony revealed more details concerning their upcoming portable games console, the Playstation Portable (PSP). The PSP will launch in Japan on December 12 for 19800 Yen. If U.S. pricing is similar, then this means the PSP will cost less than $200! Sony also said that battery life will be between 4 and 6 hours between charges depending on use.

Now first of all, the price is unbelievable. Obviously this is meant to be competitive with Nintendo’s upcoming DS which will launch at $149 in the U.S.. But there’s no way Sony will be making a profit on the hardware at $200 a unit. You can’t get a low end iPod for that much, and arguably there’s a lot more going on in the PSP relative to the iPod. So a wild eyed guess says that Sony will be losing $200 or more per sale! Granted, losing money on the console hardware and making it up on game royalties is standard in the games industry. But this is a lot of money to lose on an unproven console going against a very successful and entrenched competitor like Nintendo.

The other unbelievable thing is the 4 to 6 hours of battery life. Like laptop battery life claims from the manufacturer, this must be taken with a huge grain of salt. If the PSP video display sucks power anything like the one on my kids’ Leapster, cut Sony’s claims in half. At 2 to 3 hours, the PSP could prove to be a bit frustrating for the hard core gamer on the go. On the point of battery life, Sony had better be telling the truth or else they could become quite a laughing stock and the butt of jokes, much as the Apple Newton’s much touted handwriting recognition became when it proved to be less than advertised.

All of that said, Sony, you’re killin’ me! I still think that of the two new handhelds, the PSP is the sexier/cooler/hipper one to have. And at $200, it’s well in range. But Sony, why no movies until 2005? The Playstation 2 launched in Japan with very few games, but the ability to play DVD movies. That movie playing ability really supported early sales of a console that was rather difficult for developers to work with initially. And since Sony owns movie studios, selling more DVDs still helps the bottom line. So why no movies at PSP launch? Writing movies to the new UMD format shouldn’t be any more trouble than writing games to it, so I’m guessing that they haven’t got all of the bugs out of mass producing UMDs yet. So they simply made a choice to go with games over movies. Still, a few block busters from their library should not have been too much trouble.

Well, both Sony and Nintendo are taking big risks with their new handhelds. Sony’s seem to be primarily technical, while Nintendo’s is more of wtf to do with the second screen. This should be an interesting Christmas.

A story on Gamesindustry.biz states that Bill Gates will be the keynote speaker at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. He is expected to make the formal announcement of Xbox 2 at that time. Lately, news coming out of the Xbox camp has been pretty good. Peter Molyneux’s action RPG Fable was released for the platform and went on to become the fastest selling game in Xbox history. Though this record is not likely to stand as Halo 2 has surpassed 1.5 million preorders for its November 9 release date.

And to that good news, I would add that the likelihood of backwards compatibility on Xbox 2 has increased with the recent release of Microsoft Virtual PC for MacOS X. Why? Because today’s Macintosh computers are built around the a PowerPC (PPC) architecture similar to that is rumored to be at the core of Xbox 2. Well this is more than rumor since early development kits are also based on PPC. So it is more plausible that backwards compatibility can be achieved using Virtual PC-like emulation. This could also get them around the challenge presented by going from Nvidia to ATI for the graphics chip set. Backwards compatibility would go a long way towards supporting the launch of Xbox 2.

So far from being dead, Xbox 2 is alive and kicking. This probably due in no small part to Bill Gates’ personal involvement or at least interest in the project. Gates didn’t make his money being stupid. Perhaps he realizes that if Microsoft is going to thrive in a post-PC, post-Windows era, it needs to get into other markets. Games are a natural progression and a huge growth market rivalling movies and television. If MS can get a piece of that pie, it won’t hurt so much when Windows and Office shipments start to drop off.

Well it looks like Playboy: The Mansion won’t be under the tree this year! Citing quality issues, developer Groove Games has pushed the game into early next year. Now why is this here? Why do I care? Well actually, I don’t care about the game itself at all and had no plans to promote or buy it. What I have is the morbid curiousity of one passing a traffic accident in the all too common gaper’s delays we have here in Chicagoland. When hyped up games miss the crucial Christmas shopping season, the best time of the year to release any game, it usually means something catastrophic has happened.

So this leads to the question of, just how badly does Playboy: The Mansion suck at this point? There’s been a bit of a flurry of titillation games released lately. There’s the Guy Game, a new Leisure Suit Larry game, and you even throw in the Sims 2 for that matter. With the exception of the Sims 2, I wouldn’t expect very much since the main selling point of these games is boobs, boobs, boobs! So why the delay? screenshots of the game look pretty good, so it must be play mechanics, or maybe the bounces are not just right. Or maybe the thing just isn’t any fun… Polygonal vixens alone do not a good game make! This reminds me a bit of Showgirls, a movie so bad that even the gratuitous nudity could not make it interesting! Could it just be the curse of the licensed game? Games based on movie and tv licenses are notorious for sucking big time, cough! Matrix! Cough! This usually happens because the game is rushed out with the idea of making a quick buck off of naive fans of the property the game is based on.

Well, perhaps Playboy fans should rejoice. If promises of quality are delivered on, they may just get a good game afterall.