This week on Hit or Miss: Sony delays their still-nameless motion controller that still doesn’t have any officially announced software (shocking, eh?); Hollywood wants to make a Mass Effect movie; Criterion ends the greatest run of downloadable content of the past, present, and (depressingly) probably future; and Activision admits they suck at making games.
Spider-Man games, that is. Oh, I guess I should have mentioned that in my last sentence. Was that misleading?
PS3 Motion Controller Delayed to Fall
Did this surprise anyone? Spring is, like, three frickin’ months away, and we don’t even have a name for this thing yet (my money’s still on Sony Nutsack Defenestrator 5000 — you gotta play the odds with a bet like this).
Hell, we haven’t even gotten an announcement of the lineup of compatible games. That should have been the biggest tip-off, because it clearly wouldn’t have left enough time for the inevitable subsequent announcement of some of those games being delayed too.
All of which is to say I’m glad Sony delayed the Nutsack Defenestrator 5000 and gave themselves the time to get it right. The only thing worse than a prematurely launched game is prematurely launched hardware, and Lord knows Sony doesn’t need to fuck up another motion controller. I’m pretty sure all the Sixaxis is still good for is tricking old people into thinking they can play Wii Sports bowling with it.
BioWare Getting “Tremendous Interest” in a Mass Effect Movie
Dear BioWare: Please do not let anyone make a Mass Effect movie. I can’t think of a game less suited to being adapted into a film than Mass Effect.
OK, definitely Asteroids. But then that’s not even an adaptation, that’s making up an entire movie out of thin air and putting the name “Asteroids” on it.
Side note: I think we need a word for this insane process. I submit “Flurbitation.” For example: “Atari and Universal have announced a deal to make a film flurbitation of the video game Asteroids. As is standard with film flurbitations, it will be 99% made up bullshit with the name ‘Asteroids’ stuck on it.”
Anyway, Mass Effect movie. Terrible idea. The entire point of Mass Effect is that choices matter, letting players create personalized experiences. Lose that and you’ve lost a great deal of what makes Mass Effect special.
So unless they make two Mass Effect movies, one starring a Paragon Shepard and one a Renegade, and play both at the same time in different screening rooms and let viewers sneak in and out of each at their choosing, then I don’t see this working. And if you think that’s a ridiculous idea, well, someone’s making a fucking Asteroids movie. You tell me what makes any damn sense in this world.
Criterion: Seriously, No More Burnout Paradise DLC
To give you a sense of how awesome Criterion’s downloadable content support for Burnout Paradise has been, chew on this nugget: Their three years of consistently good and fair-priced DLC for the game has eclipsed the previous record for Longest Consistently Good and Fair-Priced DLC Support for a Game, which I believe was a tie between 130 games with a span of two months.
Seriously, their Burnout Paradise DLC support has been so strong and so lengthy (ahem) that fans are actually getting combative about their sense of entitlement: “Please stop asking us for Burnout Paradise DLC. There will be no more! Sorry everyone! But we did WAY more than everyone else…”
That’s what Criterion actually had to say to these ingrates. Seriously people, when the only other free DLC that exists outside Burnout Paradise is used as a baseball bat to kneecap used game buyers, you gotta know when to be satisfied.
Activision’s Kotick Admits Past Spider-Man Games “Sucked”
Folks, I am a gigantic Spider-Man fan. Like, gigantic. So what concerns me about Activision CEO Bobby Kotick admitting their past Spider-Man games sucked is that I don’t think he knows why.
“It’s about web-slinging. If you don’t do web-slinging, what is the fantasy of Spider-Man?” he asked. Yes, it is about web-slinging…but there’s so much more than that. So instead of belittling, disparaging, or kicking anyone while they’re down, I instead offer three tips for making the Spider-Man game the world deserves. This is for you, world.
1) Make the Combat Unique to Spider-Man
And by that I mean make the major battles into puzzles.
If you ever read some of the original Amazing Spider-Man comics, you know almost every fight is about four pages of drawn-out fisticuffs followed by Spider-Man finally figuring out his enemy’s weakness and quickly defeating him in three panels. Spider-Man has always been the thinking man’s superhero, and I want to see that reflected in his games.
For this, I say take inspiration from BioShock: Create environments filled with possibilities, and then leave it up to the player to figure out how to manipulate them to beat Sandman, Electro, Rhino, etc., using all their innate weaknesses against them — just like in the comic.
2) Give Peter Parker Screen Time
Ultimately we care about Spider-Man not because he web-slings across the New York City skyline, but because he’s worrying about his escalating debt and increasingly neglected schoolwork while he does so.
That’s why I say give Spider-Man’s alter-ego a bit of the spotlight — let us play as Peter Parker. Imagine this: What if the next Spider-Man game was open-world like that last few, but you could change between Spider-Man and Peter at any time, and were forced to navigate both worlds seamlessly?
One moment you’re in the dating-sim portion of the game, trying to woo sweet college gal-pal Gwen Stacey, and the next you notice Dr. Curt Conners’ radiation experiment has gone horribly awry, transforming him to the fearsome Lizard!
Now — what are you gonna do? Make a quiet exit but risk Gwen thinking you’re a coward? Try to make up an excuse to sneak away (insert dialogue trees here)? It’s the sort of classic scenario Spider-Man built its fan-base on, and it’s about time a video game worked these elements in.
And 3) Let BioWare Make It.
No offense, Activision, but I’m pretty sure they’re the only ones who could pull this madness off. Pretty please?