This Title Sucks (I'll patch it later)

Battlefield: Bad Company garnered a bit of controversy a little while ago when Electronic Arts announced that you could buy extra weapons online. The sin being two-fold; one that you can "buy power" and the second being you just paid full retail price for the game but they still want to squeeze some more money out of you. There was a call for a boycott of the game by Sarcastic Gamer that was echoed around for awhile. They also put a parody video up which you can find here. Then I guess they got a little boycott happy and called for a boycott of their boycott. Funny stuff.

Well, then it turns out that you don't actually have to pay for the weapon unlocks. IGN talked with Karl-Magnus Troedsson, Senior Producer at DICE, about what marketing hoops you have to go through to get the extra weapons. I still call foul. But hey, Jeremy bought the game not me.

But that's not why I called you all here today. Jeremy pops it into the console and fires it up but can't play it because it requires a firmware update to the console. That is something which they expect you to download via XBox Live. Unfortunately, we don't have the XBox hooked up to the internet. Granted the game does have the XBox Live logo on it, but it isn't online only, it also features the single player campaign which is what he wanted to play.

We do have an internet connection in the house; so we could hook it up, sign up for an XBox Live account and get the update. What about the poor smuck who doesn't have an internet connection? I guess you could take it to some place that does repairs and get the update. Does that seem right? If my PC game requires some new version of DirectX it is included on the disc. Should you expect the same from your console game?

The whole situation reminded me that ages ago we were talking about how console games were such higher quality than PC games; because, once the game was released you couldn't patch it. The game had to be extensively tested because it really had to ship bug free. Not really had to as in what we all say to each other when we are developing the game, but really as in no bugs. When Microsoft announced the first XBox we all joked that because they were Microsoft, they would try and patch the games. Ha ha ha... ahem, I don't remember the actual jokes, but I'm sure they were amusing.

But look what has happened! We are here now! Console games are just like PC games expecting you to download not only patches to the games but to the system itself! On one hand, "Yah, we can fix problems" but on the other hand my Nintendo Entertainment System never required a patch.

Prince of Persia Classic

There have been several times I have asked in interviews (job & media) to name the worst video game I have ever played. My answer has always been something along the lines of:

I won't say E.T. on the Atari 2600 because that would be too easy. Instead I'll say Prince of Persia on the Philips CD-i. I played Prince of Persia when it first came out on the Apple II. I remember being surprised that a game of this quality was launching first on the Apple II because at the time the Apple II market was almost completely dead. It had such great game play and those beautiful rotoscoped animations. Then it started to get ported to other platforms and it seemed that with every port it got a little worse. It was a CES show in Vegas where I played it on the Philips CD-i and was just amazed at what an unplayable piece of crap it was. Not only did it play like crap, the animations had been cut down so much that they looked like crap too. And Philips was trying to sell this system as the latest and greatest new system and it couldn't even play a game that had launched on the Apple II.

Now granted there were some versions of the original Price of Persia that added some cool touches, the Super Nintendo version was pretty cool if I remember correctly, they added better boss fights and some other things. I remember feeling completely ripped off with the PC VGA version as it was just a thin coat of paint over top the DOS EGA version.

But now it looks like the classic version is getting a complete face life for XBOX Live Arcade and it looks pretty sweet.



Just hope you didn't mod your XBox 360 if you want to play it. See: Modded Consoles Blocked from XBox Live. If I had an XBox I would have modded it to get around region locking on games. I've said it a 100 times, I am not willing to buy a next generation game system here in Australia and then be screwed if/when I return to the U.S. I brought my XBox, PS2 and Gamecube with me from the U.S. and if I want to buy new games for them I have to have somebody in the U.S. buy them for me and ship them over because of region locking.

Battlestar Galactica Site Live

The website for Auran's upcoming XBox Live Arcade version of Battlestar Galactica is now up in running.

I havn't gotten an XBox 360 or any of the new generation systems for that matter. At first I didn't miss not having one. Fueled by my anger with region codes I was able to avoid them. But now as more and more cool games are starting to come out I feel the loss. Or maybe it is just that there is no really cool PC games I am looking forward to in the immediate future.

Like Football with Swords

I know I said wasn't going to post every little Fury news article from now on, but I really liked the analogy. Can you imagine it? First down would go from being a good thing to "Oh man poor Bob... he was first down!" Though in Australia with Australian Rules Football first down does kind of work that way. BAM! Cheers mate!

And to be fair I said I wasn't going to post all the Gamecock links and this is actually normal media not even specifically video game media. Speaking of that, you can expect to be blasted by Gamecock 'pimping' Fury here real soon as we are going to be their first game to market and GDC is rapidly approaching.

Anyway this was on the front page of the theage.com.au's technology section. Nothing new at all and it talks more about Auran the company than specially about any of our games.

And while I’m at it here is an interview Tony did with IGN last week where he talks about Fury, Xbox Live Arcade Battlestar Galactica and Gamecock Media Group.

Auran's Battlestar Galactica game

Just a quick little post about this announcement that went out over the weekend:

Officials from Vivendi Games division Sierra Online officially announced plans to release Battlestar Galactica over Microsoft's popular Xbox Live Arcade service, as well as the PC this fall.

The space combat simulation, which is based upon the hit series airing on the Sci Fi channel, is being created by veteran Australian developer Auran (Trainz Railroad Simulator), and will feature both single and multiplayer gameplay as either the humans or Cylons.

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Stayed tuned for more incoming information...