crouton days

A former mid-level manager (of whom we do not previously know) has got in touch with us to potentially expose what is a very disturbing alleged occurrence in the games industry. On the condition of anonymity, he has revealed attempts of Montreal gaming studios to fix salaries of employees and rampant spying by Ubisoft Montreal on all emails to and from its competitors. The source (he was responsible for setting up the e-mail spying) forwarded us along an email between former director of HR at Eidos Montreal (Tremblay) to the Vice President of HR at Ubisoft Montreal (Baillet). In the email, Eidos note there is no benefit of raising salaries and hope the two companies do not so for competitive reasons and EA must be convinced to do the same.

I wonder where else this is taking place.

Related Links: Gamasutra, GamesMontreal

• Dead Space Un-rented it, didn’t keep hope alive.
• Mirrors Edge - Rental Queue
• Fable 2 - Rental Queue
• Fallout 3 - Engorssing seems like the right word. Switching from Macbook -> PS3, but I really wish my 360 wasnt so fucking loud.
• Left 4 Dead - Here’s the deal. If you finish the demo in ~10 minutes, switch to expert difficulty. Also, do you think 6.6 hours on a demo qualifies me for a day one purchase?
• Spore - Yeah, that’s “old” now and I just got into the civilization phase.
• Little Big Planet - Got some great ideas for levels, just no time.
• Gears of War 2 - Rental Queue - Also poked at it at work, meh?
• Midnight Club:LA - Hiring a vehicle dynamics designer 2 months before ship? I wanna meet that Titanic.
• Red Alert 3 - Not good enough to play for the cinematics. Youtube?
• Need for Speed Undercover - Reviews site tons of technical issues and lackluster gameplay
• Resistance 2  - Beta’d this. Suckfest.
• Call of Duty:WoW -  Received - More of the same for the most part.
• Wii Music - Queued 
• Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm - Queued 

Jesus.

Just 1 push-up

Maybe I have really low expectations for anything LucasArts publishes, but Fracture isn’t bad. Terrain deformation turns out to be a fun gimmick. Of course everything else about it is highly derivative; the visual style reminds me of the Tribes series, UI is like Gears and the now ubiquitous regenerating health bar is present. But Fracture nails the basics; it has a solid framerate, tons of physics and a nice level of polish. I did notice one big sticking point, (at least on the PS3 version) they forgot to implement rumble. No rumble in a game where you can erect a column of earth with a grenade?

I hope this game turns out to have at least a few fatal flaws, that way Fracture won’t have to survive the injustice of being good and ignored while Force Unleashed sells a million.

In theory, the thought of weilding the force is is every nerds wet dream. In practice however, the force unleashed (demo) is a mix of boredem and compromise. The biggest disappointment has to be the compromises that took place in the game’s big selling feature, the technology. The combination of Havok, Euphoria and DMM that earned the game some buzz last year just doesn’t add anything to the gameplay. Yeah, it’s pretty sad when a game’s selling point is tech but Star Wars the Force Unleashed gets worse.

if only it were 10% that cool

Of course, it’s been close to a decade since a Star Wars game had really compelling gameplay (the Jedi Knight games being a possible exception). Force Unleashed’s gameplay is a combination of poorly immitated God of War combat, force powers lifted from the JK games and god awful quick time events. That in itself isn’t a problem because I will excuse a game for not having awe inspiring gameplay when it offers me god-like superpowers. No, it’s the fact that not a single feature has been giving any attention to detail that disappoints above all. Everything about it feels last minute and underdeveloped. The Force Unleashed might make an action packed movie, (the story sucks too) but as a game it fails to engage on even the most basic level. I suggest anyone looking for a good Star Wars game play Rebel Assault 2.

Reminder to self: remove all instances of (demo) next week.

Updated: The Force Unleashed is so bad I can’t continue. Even if I wanted to keep playing it there are two things preventing me: the refresh rate/frame rate is so broken it makes my eyes vomit and the audio levels peak so often that my receiver might be dead. Man I feel awful for the talent that spent years bringing someone’s over ambitious abortion to life only to get canned. Hey LucasArts staff, was there a guy in your meetings who made dissenting remarks like “we don’t have space for 200 more staff.. ..wait a minute!” or “2010 has a nice ring to it” or “can we really get this done in time?”. Remember that guy? He was a good guy, wasn’t he. The Force Unleashed’s painfully ugly achievement icons now serve as a permanent reminder (jerks scarred my gamertag) that LucasArts is going right back to Game Jail. Though I can’t erase the embarrassing proof that I actually played it, I certainly won’t spend another minute with Star Wars the Force Unleashed.

Remember a good star wars game? [youtube]

How bout that, Mercenaries 2 is out! In its opening week gamasutra reported that it was on top of sales for both PS3/360 in the UK and third/second in the US. I didn’t see the PC/PS2 versions in the top 5 listings but I’m not sure if those games are out yet. It’ll be interesting to see how the sales numbers progress into a month with some potential heavy hitters. Attentions are likely to be focused on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed but I see Spore, Brothers in Arms and Rock Band 2 as potential distractions. As of today, the game has a metacritic weighted score of 74 with 37 reviews listed. The TV ad seems to have created the biggest impact for the game’s marketing. The youtube version of the Ad has spawned about 3 million views including re-posts, remixes and making-of’s. 

3 player co-op?

As for the game itself, the consensus seems to be “fun but greatly lacking in polish”. In Tuesdays gamers with jobs podcast, Ken Levine (Bioshock director) emphasized Mercs2’s need for a few more months in the oven. Then, Geoff and I found some hidden fun while playing co-op. The “unintended feature” we stumbled upon manifests itself when you have Ewan deliver a helicopter to your location and you destroy the helicopter at just the right time, instead of fading into the distance, Ewan becomes your AI buddy. Ewan looks hilarious when he runs and responds to honking vehicle horns. Ewan requires a lot of babysitting for someone in godmode. Eventually we stopped caring about our mission at all and spent our time collecting Ewans. 

My thoughts. To be added at a later date.

Related Links:

Mercenaries 2 Tops UK Charts [gamasutra]

Mercenaries 2 Reviews [metacritic]

Gamers With Jobs Podcast #100

Castle crashers is out and I can finally talk about it in great detail without the guilt of spoiling behemoths muffins. Not that it matters, since apparently CC is off to a great start on live. So what could I possibly have to say about Castle Crashers that is negative? It was nice of behemoth to add an XboxLive item to their menu, but I don’t know how I feel about developers showing unimplemented features to the player, that might upset some folks. Maybe behemoth should have tested their game on partnerNet for more than a few hours.

The other feature I would have loved to see is drop-in/drop-out multiplayer. Now I think there are some technical restrictions with signing on/off xbox profiles. But crashers is one of the biggest XBLA games. Behemoth and microsoft should have worked something out. These issues aside, I’m not the only one that still loves the game and I can prove it:

I snapped this photo of two dudes playing the castle crashers in a coffee bean in westwood..

Castle Crashers is Racist [youtube]

Behemoth Announces Castle Crashers Kinda Numbers

It’s finally real: a box, a manual, xbox live, tv commercials, in game ads, a players guide, posters and a gas station.. rad. Playing online last night, I got a little insight from looking at our leader boards: roughly 2000 scores had been uploaded by 9pm and 3 users had already uploaded billionare scores, holy crap! And three days before the game is even out, that’s diehard. I imagine the smaller retailers regularly try to gain an edge by breaking their street dates. Though, I wonder what people think about the game’s releases being on a Sunday before Labor day.

For anyone planning on picking up Mercs (officially available Aug 31st), I may have a present for you. Xbox Live is holding a special ‘play with developers’ session where a dozen or so Mercs developers will be playing co-op with joe public. Anyone lucky enough to play with us will be among the first to add our viral achievements to their gamercard and can subsequently spread that achievement to their friends. The play session will be going on between 9/5/08 – 9/13/08. As we get closer to that time, I’ll post up some more information.

The time is here, but my Xbox Live friends list is full! If anyone reads this and wants to snag some achievement points and/or talk to a mercs2 developer just leave a comment with your gamertag and I’ll add you.

Links:

Mercs2 Gas Giveaway [1up]

Mercs 2 Commercial [and youtube remixes]