The inevitable result of too much Rock Band drumming. That’s the little finger on my right hand, with blisters on the finger itself and on my palm. I think perhaps I hold the stick too loosely.
A few weeks ago, I was frantically drumming away when I was confronted by a really loud CRACK from my foot. These Rock Band pedals are basically a pretty weak design; the return spring pushes against a point about halfway up the pedal, and the orange plastic insert (see the picture) weakens the black plastic baseplate because it fits into a cutout. Lots of people report the pedal snapping at that point, and the v2 Rock Band drums have a steel reinforced plate instead of plastic.
Fortunately, mine was only cracked, not broken right off. Lacking the time (ok… the patience) to return it, I bought a £3.08 mending bracket from B&Q and forced the self-tapping screws into the pedal with some brute force and ignorance. In the foreground of the shot you can see the Victorinox Swiss Army cybertool I used. Et voilà, one reinforced pedal!
The subject of Star Control II came up in conversaton recently and it prompted me to go and check up on The Ur-Quan Masters. For those not in the know, the original producers of the game released all source code and game assets to the 3DO version (which had full voice and enhanced graphical assets compared to the other 16-bit versions). The only thing it doesn’t have is the name, as that’s trademarked by Activision. Following that release, a project sprang up to get the game playable on a number of platforms; that project is called The Ur-Quan Masters.
Well, turns out UQM is basically complete; it seems to be a perfect version of SC2. All downloads are here for Windows/Mac/Linux. I however have been playing the PSP port which, although suffering from a streched screen ratio, seems otherwise perfect. And more compelling than any of the PSP games on there.
And now, in further excellent Star Control news, Stardock are apparantly trying to get the rights to produce a sequel. Fingers crossed, that could be excellent.
If you don’t know what Star Control II was, for shame! IGN named Star Control II the 17th best game of all time, and Gamespot named it one of the greatest games of all time. It’s excellent! Star Control I was a top-down space fighting game; you chose a ship and fought, one on one, with another one in an Asteroids-ish playfield. Strategic depth came from the choice of ships and how you used their weapons, which had varying effects and powers against specific other ships.
Star Control II then did something completely bonkers, by taking that entire first game and making it just a part of a sprawling space epic. In SCII, you travel the galaxy, exploring star systems, conquering planets, juggling resources, and interacting with alien species in frequently very funny dialog trees. In many ways it was years ahead of its time — for example, it has real consequences; piss off an alien race with poor diplomacy choices and they won’t join up with you in rebelling against your slave lords. Well worth checking out.
As an experiment, I scooped up a pile of no-longer-played games and took them to four major stores to compare their trade-in prices.
The games:
The quotes were (total for the six games):
Firstly, I think it’s interesting that Game came out ahead of Gamestation. Historically I have always found Gamestation to give better trade-in prices, and I expected the firms to normalise when they merged last year. But today, at least, the prices were not only different, but Gamestation was the lower of the two.
Secondly, I wasn’t surprised that CEX came out on top, as they specialise in trade-ins and have always offered the best prices I’ve seen. They are also the only firm to publicise stock levels and trade-in prices on their website, which is very useful. However they didn’t have any stock of the game I wanted to get in return for the trade-ins (Dead Space). This is always a weakness for CEX; as they only sell preowned games, it’s never going to be the place to go for very recent releases.
Thirdly, HMV’s prices are interesting. HMV only launched their trade-in and preowned service, Re/Play, last week and I theorised that they would be very competitive, at least initially, because they have no historical pricing information to derive trade-in prices from and so have to guess. I suspect they are guessing (deliberately) a little high in order to create a good first impression. Also, I suspect their pricing algorithm has a stock level weighting built in, and of course they have very little stock right now. It will be interesting to run some more price comparisons in the months ahead to see how these prices change.
In the meantime, if you are trading in games (or DVDs for that matter), you should certainly consider at HMV. Note that the service is not available at all HMVs though, but only 160 of the larger stores.
Hey, this is fascinating — it seems that WipeEout HD uses dynamic resolution to maintain 60fps. So, when the action is too hectic to manage 1920×1080x60, rather than drop frames or slow the game down, it scales the resolution then passes it out through the PS3’s hardware horizontal upscaler. That analysis has seen it vary between 1920 and 1280 horizontal pixels on a frame-by-frame basis. The linked article says overall it is less visually intrusive than the alternatives; if I get around to buying it I’ll have a look for myself.
I think that’s a very neat solution to a difficult technical problem.
This really made me laugh. Not just for the puerile (but still funny!) “go pick my bums” but also the really enthusiastic response, “One desperate workforce, coming up!”.
Regular readers will know all about my borderline obsession with rhythm games, so will be unsurprised that I was glad to see details of the import process from Rock Band to Rock Band 2 has been detailed. It costs £3.40 and will allow you to import 55 of the songs on the Rock Band 1 disc into Rock Band 2. This is awesome — the first time that a rhythm game has allowed you to do this without swapping discs. In my experience, Rock Band comes into its element when you have a bunch of people together and having enough variety in the songlist for everyone to find something they know is crucial.
Now the bad news, missing from the import are three of my most favourite songs; Run To The Hills (Iron Maiden), Enter Sandman (Metallica) and Paranoid (Black Sabbath). Presumably Harmonix couldn’t get permission from the rights holders to allow these to be carried from one game to the next. On the other hand, in addition to those 55 songs, you can also bring any downloaded songs you might have bought with you. Added on to all the DLC yet to be released and the songs on the Rock Band 2 disc and you could have 500 to choose from by Christmas.
Which brings us to the ugly finale: would Harmonix/MTV please hurry the fuck up and announce a UK release date? Preferably sometime this year, although I accept that’s just a fevered dream. I might have to buy Guitar Hero World Tour just to carry myself over. RB2 is out in the States in a matter of weeks, but with no announced UK release date we can’t be getting it before next Spring at the earliest. I cannot explain how angry I am about this. I am praying the DVD won’t be region locked, which will at least open up the possibility of a grey import.
My boss brought my attention to this post by Mark Allan Roberts at the Pragmatic Marketing blog. Mark makes some interesting points, but I think he’d be better off applying his analysis to the Nintendo Wii rather than Guitar Hero. He doesn’t seem to be familiar with the history of the product and I think it has lead him to some wrong conclusions.
First, a potted history. In the late 90s, Konami release a series of coin-op arcade games in Japan, Guitar Freaks, which was an entry in their long-running Bemani series of arcade games (which also brought the world Dance Dance Revolution). As these were exclusively arcade games, and gaming arcades are now pretty much extinct outside of Japan, they never made any serious attempts to export them. I saw one once in the Trocedro in London, in about 2001 I think, but that’s the only time I’ve seen one over here.
Fast forward to 2005. Red Octane, a tiny hardware firm, was doing some business making Guitar Freaks controllers for importers but wanted more. They partnered with Harmonix, a games studio who had made some rhythm games for the PS2 (FreQuency and Amplitude) which were critically applauded but sold relatively poorly. Together, the firms produced the first Guitar Hero, then the sequel, which actually turned out to be not a video game at all but a small money printing device that started spewing $100 bills around the clock. Who knew?
Fast forward again to late 2006. Harmonix was acquired by MTV Networks, who saw in Guitar Hero a lucrative way for music promoters to access new markets. Red Octane was acquired by Activision, who promptly assigned another dev studio they own, Neversoft (creators of most of the Tony Hawks series of games) to produce Guitar Hero III. Meanwhile, Harmonix released Rock Band, putting the two former partners into competition which will continue throughout this year with the releases of Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour.
So, now you can see the first issue I have with Mr Robert’s post is the numerous mentions he made to Activision identifying gaps in the market — in fact, Activision were not on the scene until Guitar Hero was a very well established franchise. However, this is a relatively minor mistake and not the main problem I have with the original article.
No, I think Mr Roberts has misidentified the target market for the early Guitar Hero releases. GH didn’t chase this “family friendly” demographic early on — in fact the two-player mode in GH1 is quite slim compared to later games, and the game is brutally hard from about halfway up the difficultly level solution. It’s true that Guitar Hero tapped into something elemental, but that wasn’t group gaming; it was rather anyone who has ever played air guitar with a tennis racket or even tapped out a rhythm on a car dashboard, which (in turns out) was quite a lot of people. The party games market grew naturally as the guitar shaped controller tends to encourage drunken showboating (not that I would ever do that of course, ahem), and as it grew the developers quickly expanded the two player modes. They added several extra game modes in Guitar Hero II and then further expanded Guitar Hero III to add bass guitar for player 2. The ultimate evolution of this is Rock Band and Guitar Hero World Tour, which allow four players (vocals, lead, bass, and drums) to play the entire song between them, and jolly good fun it is too.
Mr Robert’s analysis of a firm that ruthlessly identified a huge untapped demographic, in the form of families that play together, is much more accurately applied to the Nintendo Wii. It’s a cliche now to say this, but every aspect of the Wii, from the low price, the accessible games, the revolutionary controller (careful to resemble a TV remote rather than a typical button-strewn gamepad) and the advertising (always with the reverse angle shots from the TV to the players in a plain white room, always with more than one player, often with an entire family) was ruthlessly targeted to that demographic. In return, Nintendo have made a money printing monster, and good on them for it.
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