WINKY!

I don't have anything video game related to say - right now...but it is high time to revive this blog. John has interesting things to say, and I make a fantastic straight man, a la Ed McMahon (even if I have very few of my own brainwaves). Can this thing be made to breathe again?

Maddening 2009

Madden NFL 2009. I bought it. For the first time in my life I gave EA cash for a football game. Why? How did this happen to me? And how do I feel about it now, one week into ownership?

I first encountered the Madden series on the Sega Genesis way back in the day. I never had to buy into the series back then because my sister's boyfriend did, sparing me the expense. The PS1 and PS2 eras were all about modding (one of the reasons, I contend, that those systems achieved their popularity, defeating Nintendo). There were very few games that I did purchase and Madden wasn't among them. Nowadays, consoles seem much more difficult to crack and I'm too lazy to bother anyway. 

I'm also impulsive, and when I saw a copy of Madden '09 for a slightly reduced price at Costco, I grabbed it, tossed it in my shopping cart, and hated myself almost instantly for doing so. I hated myself for buying into the EA Sports treadmill, which amounts to a $60/year subscription to games that never evolve. Every year, EA adds features and removes features. They fix one problem and create a new one to take its place.

I've since dumped a few hours into Madden '09 and I think I'm hating myself a little less for buying it. Here's a list of impressions: The graphics are too crisp. The environments feel artificial. The crowd is still a bunch of 2D-looking sprites painted onto a slope, gyrating in simple animation cycles. There are displeasing stutters in player animations during cut-scenes, though the game's frame rate seems solid during actual play. The audio commentary is average fare. The menu music is awful. Load times are frustratingly long. Gameplay is largely unchanged from the beginning of the series, except that this time around I find it incredibly difficult to establish a decent running game.

Hmm. That sounds like a big ol' mess of negativity. So why do I hate myself a little less? Despite rubbing me wrong in many ways, Madden '09 somehow adds up to an entertaining game. I have fun playing it to some degree. The online play seems to work pretty well. I didn't experience any major lag, at any rate. There are some interesting online features. You can manage a fantasy football team from within the game (though your initial fantasy draft must take place via the web). You can receive sports news in both text and video formats (the latter worked well until day one of the regular season, when all of the video content seemed to have disappeared except for one clip that crashed my PS3 when I tried to play it). I have settled into playing Superstar mode almost exclusively, which allows me to play a quarterback I created and to sim my way through moments when he isn't on the field. This is good because playing defense is still a terribly boring exercise.

End result: If you like football, this is a decent iteration in the annually revised but never evolving Madden series. You might hate yourself a little for buying it, but I doubt you'll immediately send it to the used bin. If you aren't much of a football fan but still have a passing interest in checking out the latest release, definitely go the rental route here. EA has failed to offer anything out of the ordinary that deserves to pick up new fans.

Segue.

In other news, I still don't own a PS3. Or an X-Box 360.
I recently came upon a modest windfall of cash that was earmarked for a console purchase...but I can't decide which way to go.

X-Box 360: Great, full library of games; brilliant on-line interface; cheaper hardware; more used games available cheap due to the amount of time it's been on the market (a big plus for me); backwards compatibility to X-Box games. Downsides of course are the notorious and still very real Red Ring of Death and Microsoft's sad customer service response, and a lack of support for a viable high-definition DVD medium.

PS3: Blu-ray support and a whole lot of potential which has yet to be tapped. Downsides are the very limited library of games, the higher cost of...everything, and the fact that so many of the games thus far are bad ports of the PS3 versions.

I have loved - and burned out - one each of the original PS and the PS2, and while I have an X-Box I've spent more time with the Sony product(s). As great as the X-Box 360 is - and it really is great (or...would be if not for the RRoD) - it's much closer to the end of its lifecycle, and the full capabilities of the PS3 have barely been scraped.

My pragmatic side says to get the 360 and a stack of second-hand games.

My remaining techie/gamer genes say to find a good deal on a PS3 (as though they go on sale).

What to do...

Music Games and Their Anemic Libraries

Here's the problem with Singstar (and Rock Band, for that matter): Their music libraries are too small. Music games need variety or they die on the vine.

Where is our iTunes-sized library for Singstar? Rock Band? Open the flood gates already.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Alive!

I've logged a few hours on GT5P and here are some initial thoughts.

This new Gran Turismo is everything you'd expect and not much more. You've played this game before, only now it looks prettier. On one hand, there is a certain comfort in the familiar. On the other, you can't help but want for something fresh.

The online play is technically functional but not very fun because in on-line gaming, as in real life, idiots abound, and while you're driving your perfect lap, passing others in a legitimate, skillful way, some ass-hat will inevitably hit you from behind and send you careening into last place. Frustration at its finest.

GTTV is in its infancy, but internet video is not. YouTube, Vimeo and several other companies have been streaming video for years, but GTTV forces you to download each video in its entirety, and on my 1.5kbps DSL connection that translated to over an hour of download time to watch an 11 minute piece. Not good. GTTV is a promising idea and I hope it evolves to include some of the rudimentary features we've come to expect from modern video delivery systems.

Graphics. Yes the game looks great, but not as great as I had hoped. There are problems with anti-aliasing here and there, especially with shadows falling across your car, and strange blurry zones can be seen around vehicles in certain camera angles. The major success graphically in GT5P is the in-car dashboard camera. It's the best of its kind that I've ever seen, going all the way back to the first Test Drive on the c64. I only wish I had a way to pan smoothly around the interior during a race.

The track selection is lackluster at best. Eiger Nordwand was lifted straight from the earlier (and free) Gran Turismo HD demo. All of the other tracks are old standards, except for one: The London course. Each of these tracks look great and offer different challenges, but for $40 I was hoping to see something new.

Speaking of that $40, the pricing feels a little high for what amounts to a well-developed demo. The downloadable, especially, should be $29.99 maximum. It just isn't full-featured enough to warrant a price-tag on par with, say, Warhawk.

End result: Buy it knowing you'll be playing Gran Turismo 4 in HD. There is nothing new here.