Just another nerd.
WoWInsider has a preview of a World of Warcraft addon from PopCap Games that puts Bejeweled into WoW. This is apparently going to be completley free and I guess I could see someone playing this while on some flight to Darkshore or something, but really . . . why??
Staci Kramer wrote an interesting take on the fact that Spore was apparently the most heavily pirated game in history — there were an estimated 500,000 downloads of cracked versions of the game from BitTorrent sites. At $50 apiece, Kramer’s take is that Electronic Arts left $25 million on the table in its efforts to make the DRM as draconian as possible.
Normally I’d take something like Kramer’s analysis with a grain of salt. I suspect a very large percentage of folks who downloaded the game from BitTorrent would have done so regardless of the DRM scheme that EA had in place. Moreover, aren’t anti-DRM folks always making the case that illegal downloads can drive real world sales, so EA may in fact pick up customers who download the game, try it out, and decide its worth $50.
That said, it was nice to see how quickly EA backpedaled. First they caved on the ridiculous three install limit. Then they had to switch gears on their one account per registration key nonsense. If they’re smart (and this is EA we’re talking about so who knows) they’ll wait until December and announce a Christmas present patch that removes the Securom DRM which obviously caused so much trouble to all those folks who uploaded crack versions to BitTorrent.
Given the bad publicity, EA would be smart to rethink its approach to DRM in time for the Sims 3 release (currently scheduled for February 29, 2009). That and maybe get WIll Wright to actually finish Spore so its actually a playable game rather than a half-assed tech demo for an amazing set of content creation tools.
Considering the hype and how much Electronic Arts has banking on it, Spore is getting hammered in some reviews to the point where MTV did a story on Will Wright’s reaction to the negative reviews.
Having played it for about 10 hours on Sunday, I can understand some of the negative reviews and Wright’s reaction to them. More than anything Spore reminds me of another game I play all the time — the 2005 update of Sid Meier’s Pirates. Like Pirates, Spore is essentially a bunch of mini-games thrown together in an attempt to make them one coherent whole. Pirates pulls that off, IMO. With Spore, however, sometimes it works, but mostly its boring and unchallenging.
You start out with the Cell level which is basically Pac-Man on steroids. This is actually fairly fun but in a casual games kind of way. My six year old son, for example, had no problem beating the Cell level several times and he still doesn’t quite get the mouse click targeting scheme the game uses.
Once you’ve built up your cellular creature enough, its on to the Creature stage. This is an simplified 3rd person action RPG. That means running around the world and either befriending or killing other creatures. Again, it was fairly entertaining but not much of a challenge.
After disposing of or befriending enough fellow creatures, its on to the Tribal stage which was a pain in the ass. Again, this was easy but it is essentially the worst RTS you’ll ever play. Halfway through this stage, I had to just stop and let my kids play because it was so maddeningly annoying.
Once I beat that, though, it was on to the Civilization stage. Again, this a very basic Civ-style game with just a handful of military units and a 6 or 7 basic structures you can put in your cities. Somewhat enjoyable, but trivially easy to beat.
Which pretty much sums up the entire game before the Space Stage. Anyone looking for any sort of challenging gameplay will be sorely disappointed. In fact, other than to earn the various achievements for various accomplishments at those levels, I’m not sure why anyone would ever go back and play them again. Getting to the Space Stage is a lot like grinding your way to level 70 in World of Warcraft — its a necessary evil, not something you look forward to going back and doing over and over again for the sheer joy of it.
The Space Stage is a mashup of games like Star Control and Elite. Run around the galaxy, take on missions, fight off pirates, establish trade routes with other species, terraform and expand your empire.
Along the way there are all of these wonderful creation tools built in the game that you could spend days tinkering with, from the creature creator to similar tools that let you design buildings, vehicles, and military units all with the same sort of control the creature creator gives you. Hell, there’s even a built-in musical creation tool so you can create a national anthem at the civilization stage if you’re so inspired. Ultimately, though, this is all very pretty window dressing that has zero impact on the gameplay itself.
Personally, I like these kinds of games, but I think the New York Times was on the money with its summation of Spore,
Beginning with all manner of outlandish creatures — want to make a seven-legged purple cephalopod that looks like it just crawled out of somewhere between the River Styx and your brother-in-law’s basement? — and proceeding through various buildings and vehicles, Spore gives users unprecedented freedom to bring their imaginations to some semblance of digital life. In that sense Spore is probably the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced.
But it’s not a great game, and that is something quite different.
Audiosurf is a neat little music/racing game. You select a song from your collection, and Audiosurf builds a track and sets the tempo based on the music. The goal is to run over colored blocks on the track and rack up a big score.
This is a Steam-based game so it also tracks how other people have done on the same song (though my musical tastes are obscure enough that no one else had played with any of the tracks I used), and there are medals and achivements to be won.
For only $9.95, this is an excellent casual game.
Id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead tells GameIndustry.Biz that PC manufacturers are happy that piracy is rampant on the PC,
Q: It’s the barrier-for-entry thing isn’t it? It’s really easy to pirate PC games whereas console games are much harder to pirate so the returns are better. What can PC hardware manufacturers do to make it harder for pirates?
Todd Hollenshead: There’s lots of things that they could do but typically just they just line up on the wrong side of the argument in my opinion. They have lots of reasons as to why they do that, but I think that there’s been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content – even if you’re supposed to pay for it on PCs – is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games.
Q: You think they’re secretly happy about it?
Todd Hollenshead: Yeah I think they are. I think that if you went in and could see what’s going on in their minds, though they may never say that stuff and I’m not saying there’s some conspiracy or something like that – but I think the thing is they realise that trading content, copyrighted or not, is an expected benefit of owning a computer.
And I think that just based on their actions…what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I’m talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they’ll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit. You can make philosophical arguments that are difficult to debate, but at the same time you’re just sort of ignoring the enormity of the problem.
Of course one of the reasons piracy continues to flourish is that the same cracks needed to pirate a game are also needed by legitimate users half the time to just get the damn game to run.
Stardock has shown that you can have enormous sales and make a lot of money in PC games without treating the customer like the enemy. Clueless hacks like Hollenshead will never get that and wonder why their games don’t sell.
Also, Hollenshead also mentions a bit about World of Warcraft sayin,g
It is a big problem – people even say it impacts the World of Warcraft stuff, but obviously not to a great extent, and I think that the subscription is one proven economic solution to the piracy situation on the PC. I think part of it is that, to me from a market standpoint, I think of WOW as eBay: the reason eBay wins as the auction site is that’s where everybody goes, so that’s where everybody want to list their items so that’s where all the buyers want to go to shop. WoW is where everybody plays, so that’s where everybody wants to play, so the cost of entry there is insignificant relative to what the whole experience is about – playing with all these people.
In Blizzard’s case, though, World of Warcraft is more like a Stardock product than an Id product.
First, World of Warcraft will play on an enormous number of computers — you don’t have to be running the latest graphics card in SLI mode to have a decent experience with WoW.
Second, Blizzard makes it easy for me to play WoW on whatever computer I am. Hell, I can log into my account and download the original game and the expansion and run it anywhere. Same thing with Stardock — I install Sins of a Solar Empire on my laptop and go.
Contrast that with the typical games where a) you have to constantly have the CD/DVD in the drive while playing, and b) you have to wonder what the hell problems the copy protection is going to cause to your system. WIth a game you’ve bought at a store, you’re better off buying it and waiting until someone’s releases a crack to remove the copy protection — and after doing that repeatedly with games you spent $60 or $70 on, you start to get the point of wondering why bother with buying it in the first place since you’re breaking the law removing the copy protection anyway.
Music Catch is an odd little casual game published by Reflexive. As music plays in the background, multi-colored shapes and notes timed to the music pour out on the screen. The goal is to roll your cursor over as many of the shapes as you can, while avoiding any red shapes.
Music Catch has some built-in music, but it also lets you use any MP3 you want. I pointed it to my Buffy: The Vampire Slayer musical MP3s and played for awhile. It is a strangely captivating game, but gets old very quickly. On the other hand, the registered version is only $9.95 and the idea of music-based games that let the player use his or own MP3s is intriguing even if the execution here is excessively simplistic.
