Tag Archives: Rock Band

Madden 13 Improvements Call Into Question the Franchise’s Current Model

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Madden 13 Improvements Call Into Question the Franchises Current Model

EA Tiburon yesterday began to reveal some of what will be different about Madden NFL 13‘s gameplay. The big focus of this year’s title is the passing game, which makes sense both because the NFL is becoming more pass-centric and because my team (the Jets) is increasingly reliant on the rushing game. The changes sound good in theory, though as someone who still plays last year’s game a few times every week, I can’t help but take issue with the post-release support Madden 12 received.

A new Madden is released each and every year like clockwork. Call of Duty may be the target of gamers wanting to lash out at annual releases these days, but Madden was doing it more than a decade before Call of Duty 1 ever hit store shelves. Years ago it made more sense; while there have always been criticisms about too little changing from one game to the next, with no better way to get new rosters into the hands of players, a full retail release was the way to go. Nowadays that feels like an archaic method of delivering content to players, yet it continues to happen — and the game suffers for it.

Those concerned enough isn’t changed from year to year aren’t encouraged by EA owning the exclusive rights to the NFL license, meaning any competition has to come in the form of something like All-Pro Football 2K8. (Considering that is the most recent such title, the ’2K8′ should clue you in on how well that worked out.) It’s an unfortunate situation; ESPN NFL 2K5 was superior to Madden, and it was made available at launch for only $20. Following this, EA gobbled up the league’s exclusive rights — a move you can’t blame the company for, as it only made good business sense to do so considering it could have lost the ability to continue producing Madden — and the following year’s game, Madden 06, turned out to be a joke. Part of that can be blamed on the developer’s attention being focused on the generational leap to Xbox 360, although the past half dozen Madden games haven’t exactly reinvented the wheel. Many football game fans continue to cite NFL 2K5 as the best football sim of all time.

The direction of Madden 13 is being attributed in part to Tiburon’s new general manager, Cam Weber. Weber is said to have “brought with him a new philosophy stressing the importance of gameplay,” something you would think should have already been a top priority. Regardless, Weber’s hiring has led to the studio’s Core Gameplay Team, which contributes to both Madden and NCAA Football, doubling in size. The result of this is the team being “able to incorporate the most changes to gameplay thus far in the current console generation.” Of course, every year brings with it some promise about how the latest game will be the deepest/most realistic/most accessible/etc. entry to date, so a promise of more changes than the past seven or eight games means nothing on its own.

Madden 13 Improvements Call Into Question the Franchises Current Model

Luckily many of the changes being shared at this stage do sound good. An enhanced system for leading receivers with the left stick should provide you with a chance to complete a pass that would be batted down in the current game. New pass trajectories mean no more ridiculous, time-consuming lobs when trying to toss the ball to a wide open player in the flat. Additional control over the type of passes you throw will make it easier to loft a ball over the heads of linebackers who, in Madden 12, intercept passes at an alarmingly high rate. Shovel passes, revamped defensive alignments, improved pump fakes, receivers not always looking for passes to be coming their way, and easier user catches all sound like positives, too.

Some of the changes address my and many other players’ biggest problems with Madden 12. For instance, defensive backs no longer will swat away balls or make plays if they can’t see the ball. (As it stands, balls coming in their direction are routinely knocked down even when they should have no idea the ball is coming their way.) Play-action fakes will now play out more quickly. More importantly, players will have the ability to abort the sequence in case a blitzing defender gets free and is barreling towards the quarterback. (In Madden 12, opting to use play-action is almost a guaranteed sentence to be sacked, thanks in part to an inability to break out of the excessively long animation that plays out before you assume control of the QB.) And Madden’s control scheme will no longer be at odds with NCAA‘s — the pump fake and throw away buttons will no longer be assigned to opposite buttons in the two games.

Many of the improvements Tiburon is talking about — 430-plus new catch animations, for example — are the sort of things you’d expect to find in a sequel. Other issues Madden 12 players will be excited to see fixed are things that should have been resolved in a patch for the current game. I play in an ongoing league where we’re forced to have rules in place so the game can’t be abused. Quarterback sneaks, which are an all-but-guaranteed way of picking up a first down in short yardage situations, can’t be used excessively. Banned outright are nano blitzes, a defensive tactic many consider to be an exploit that ensures the defense gets an unblocked player running at the QB.

Madden 13 Improvements Call Into Question the Franchises Current Model

Keep in mind these aren’t measures put in place in the weeks after the game’s release until an official fix can be delivered. The game came out in August and these are problems which remain as we approach May. A fix isn’t coming for nano blitzes, psychic defensive backs, linebackers being far too capable of crazy interceptions, or even the illogical control scheme disparity with NCAA Football 12. It’s an accepted fact that many of the problems Madden suffers from each year will go unresolved, and at best all you can hope is for a fix to be included next year. And that’s wrong — players should not see something terribly wrong with a game and think, “Oh, I guess I’ll have to pick up next year’s game so I don’t have to deal with that anymore.”

This is not some niche game made by a few people who can’t afford the costs of updating a game. Obligatory roster updates aside, only two title updates were released for Madden 12. That lack of long-term post-launch support makes it difficult to feel good about dropping $60 on the game every year.

It’s a point that has been made in the past, but it bears mentioning again: in this digital age, is it really necessary for a boxed version of Madden to be released every year? Guitar Hero and Rock Band eventually learned their lesson about annual releases, and the latter is living on through the release of downloadable content. It would make a lot of sense for Madden to come out less often and be supported through downloadable content and title updates in between releases, at least from a consumer perspective. Rosters could still be kept up-to-date and each new release would be far more substantial. The reason EA doesn’t go this route is obvious: it’s far more profitable to have a $60 product out each year. The built-in excuse of coinciding each release with the start of the new real-life sports season only makes it less likely EA, or any other sports game maker, will stray away from this schedule.

However, if Madden ever does move to a sort of subscription model where players pay to play a constantly evolving game, I could see that helping to make the game much better. Rather than buying a new game each year that receives fixes and improvements for only a few months after launch, we could instead have a Madden that is being iterated upon year-round — not one which is forgotten by the time the Super Bowl is over, if not sooner.

The Age of Peripheral-Based Games is Fading

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The Age of Peripheral Based Games is Fading

Majesco has announced a new basketball game for Xbox 360 today that doesn’t have to worry about competing with the latest NBA 2K game, and not because it uses Kinect. NBA Baller Beats is a sort of hybrid rhythm/basketball training game that has you bouncing a real-life basketball in front of your television set. It sounds very gimmicky, and in this day and age there may not be much of a place for that sort of thing anymore.

Such a premise automatically limits the potential market for a game. Kinect games require more than just the hardware itself: Players also need a clear playing area for them to dance, jump, mime, and whatever other actions are required by the game in question. That can be problematic for some people, as not everyone has a wide-open living room like those seen in trailers for Kinect games; I had to delay getting one myself until I moved because there was not enough room in my apartment.

Baller Beats, while novel, doesn’t have an especially big market to sell to. The demographic for this game is basketball fans who own an Xbox 360, have room for Kinect, and own a Kinect sensor. And just as importantly, we can’t forget the need for players to live somewhere that they can freely dribble a basketball on the floor. That rules out anyone living in an apartment on any floor but the first, and even on the first floor the sound of a basketball being dribbled for extended lengths of time might still be an indirect way of soliciting death threats from unhappy neighbors.

USA Today suggested Baller Beats “could be a game-changer.” However, I can’t imagine it being anything more than a videogame that changes your real-life basketball game for the better.

Baller Beats may be unique for its incorporation of a real-life sports item, though it’s hardly the only game to make use of physical items beyond the controllers we’re used to holding in our hands. There has been a wave of super-popular peripheral-based games in the last half-decade, though you can go back much further for examples of games using accessories: the NES Zapper and Duck Hunt (among other games), Donkey Konga and its drums, the Dreamcast fishing rod for Sega Marine Fishing, dance pads for Dance Dance Revolution, etc. Many of us have become so accustomed to them since the launch of Guitar Hero in 2005 that they’re no longer thought of in such terms, but guitars and other plastic instruments for music games also fall into this category. Another recent example is the Tony Hawk series with Ride and Shred, each of which used a skateboard peripheral meant to more closely simulate the real-life act of skateboarding.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band were a major craze for a period of time; venture into GameStop or the videogame department of Walmart or Best Buy and you were sure to see boxes filled with plastic instruments stacked feet high. Over time, as these boxes grew in size to accommodate drums, microphones, and keyboards in addition to guitars, these piles came to represent not the popularity of such games, but the fact that they were no longer selling in the large quantities they once did. Nowadays, where do these franchises stand?

Guitar Hero, along with spinoffs DJ Hero and Band Hero, have been shelved by Activision early last year. There have been no indications of when we will next see a game brandishing the Hero name.

Rock Band, meanwhile, has cooled it on the annual releases, with 2011 being the first year since the series’ inception in 2007 that a new game was not made available. As with Guitar Hero, players tired of the gimmick, and those who have not left the entire fad behind are happy to continue fueling their habit with downloadable content, not annual disc-based releases accompanied by a wave of new-and-improved peripherals.

The Age of Peripheral Based Games is Fading

Realizing there is still money to be made from the genre, if not from the plastic instrument business, Harmonix, unlike Activision, has not relegated Rock Band to the back burner entirely. Instead, its rhythm game roots are being embraced with Rock Band Blitz, a downloadable game played with a standard controller. It is by no means meant to simulate the experience of playing music; players swap between as many as five tracks representing a different instrument, each of which has only two note paths.

Tony Hawk had far less success when it turned to peripherals to liven the series. While Guitar Hero and Rock Band achieved massive success for a period of years, Ride and Shred were both mediocre games with sales to match — Shred, for example, sold only 3,000 units in its debut month. Activision was insistent Tony Hawk remained relevant to gamers, and while I’m not so sure he does, there undoubtedly remains a lot of enthusiasm (or nostalgia) for the earlier games in the Tony Hawk‘s Pro Skater series.

That’s clear based on the response to the announcement of the newest Tony Hawk game. Like Harmonix taking Rock Band back to its Frequency and Amplitude roots, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD is a downloadable skateboarding game with content pulled from the first two THPS games (with the potential for content from later games to be added via DLC). Most importantly, it ditches that skateboard controller in favor of going back to its roots for a more standard experience using a 360 controller or DualShock.

These are not the only examples of sequels to games with peripheral or interface gimmicks that opted for a simpler setup. The most recent one that springs to mind involves Steel Battalion, a game which infamously launched for $200 and featured an enormous controller. The upcoming Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor ditches that setup in favor of a Kinect/standard controller combo. It was in 2009 that Nintendo last released a Wii Fit game to take advantage of the Wii Balance Board, although it’s hardly alone in not supporting the board lately — take a look at the games which use it and you’ll notice a distinct lack of anything released since 2010. To some extent that’s because the number of Wii releases over the past 16 months has been very low, but another part of it is developers realizing they’re better off using the Wii remote/nunchuk and little else.

Particularly when you take a look at the paths taken by Tony Hawk and the music/rhythm game genre, the lesson is that players are not hell-bent on having 1:1 simulations of real-life activities in their videogames, nor are they keen on forking out extra cash for pricey peripherals they’ve experienced before. While those things may fly for a period of time in some cases, going back to basics would appear to be the way to sustain these series long-term.

OP-ED: Where Do Gamers Draw the Line Between Creator and Creation?

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38244 207 OP ED: Where Do Gamers Draw the Line Between Creator and Creation?

Nearly five years after its initial announcement, Polytron’s Fez arrives on Xbox Live Arcade this week. It’s a great game that delivers on its unique premise, proving well worth the wait. And yet, many gamers have expressed their intention to forego playing Fez despite having followed its development avidly for so long. Quality and anticipation be damned; to them, Fez is simply off the table.

Why take such a strong stand about such an innocuous game? The issue isn’t with Fez itself but rather its lead designer, Phil Fish, who has earned a reputation for brashness and outspoken opinions. While abrasive personalities are hardly uncommon in the independent game development scene to which Fish belongs, he earned himself considerable notoriety last month when he roundly condemned the sum total of Japanese game design as “terrible” in response to a question during his panel at Game Developers Conference 2012. Regardless of whether or not his was a fair assessment of a nation’s collective creative output, what many potential customers took issue with was the tone of his remark –delivered directly to a question posed by veteran Japanese game developer Makoto Goto — and Fish’s subsequent defensive (occasionally hostile) rants in social media. Though he did eventually apologize both to Goto and the gaming community at large several days later, by then the damage was done and many forumgoers had turned their back on both Fish and his game, even after it won the Independent Games Festival grand prize for 2012.

38244 209 OP ED: Where Do Gamers Draw the Line Between Creator and Creation?

Ideological boycotts are fairly new territory for video games, but anyone who follows more established media — be it print, film, or music — should be well familiar with them. Roman Polanski has directed award-winning movies, including The Pianist (which won an Oscar in 2003); yet to many the shadow of Polanski’s arrest for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in the 1970s forever undermines his creative integrity and renders his films unwatchable. And it’s not just personal breaches of ethics that instigate boycotts; politics are equally turbulent. When members of country-western band The Dixie Chicks spoke out against George W. Bush and the war in Iraq several years ago, a significant portion of their audience took a stand against the band’s music and the women themselves; some radio stations even pulled their music.

As video games establish themselves and gain acceptance as mainstream entertainment, the people who create them are gaining visibility, becoming public figures in their own right. Promoting game creators is hardly a new concept, of course; both Activision and Electronic Arts (perhaps somewhat ironically, given the way both companies are viewed today) launched three decades ago with the intent of giving developers the credit that had previously been denied them by corporations like Atari. And key creators like Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto and John Romero (formerly of id) have long enjoyed “celebrity developer” status through both merit and aggressive public relations. As the medium matures, more and more creators find themselves thrust into the spotlight — and that means more and more creators have the opportunity to let their bad behavior and personal convictions come between them and their audience.

But where do we draw the line? At what point does the person behind the game overshadow the game itself? Do we apply different standards for a small game like Fez (whose four-man team means Fish really is the dominant driving force behind the game) versus a large-scale production like Valhalla’s Devil’s Third (whose executive producer Tomonobu Itagaki was accused of sexual harassment while at Tecmo but ultimately represents only the most visible of dozens of designers and programmers working on the game)? Gamers have long been quick to call for boycotts to defend their consumer rights when publishers make unpopular business decisions, but dealing with the more nebulous question of what creators do and think and how those stances affect their creations will only grow more common as developers become more visible.

38244 210 OP ED: Where Do Gamers Draw the Line Between Creator and Creation?

Where do we draw the line? Consider the Dragon Quest series: The great-granddaddy of console role-playing games, Dragon Quest has defined the baseline for the genre and exerted a tremendous impact on pop culture at large for more than a quarter of a decade. Yet the man responsible for the series’ memorable music since the very beginning, composer Koichi Sugiyama, is an avowed Japanese nationalist who denies his nation’s World War II-era crimes in China and Korea. Sugiyama published a paid advertisement in the Washington Post disavowing Japanese war actions including the Rape of Nanking and the use of “comfort women.” Does that mean gamers should abandon the Dragon Quest series? Do the extreme political stances of one person among the hundreds who have worked on the series over the years negate the value of Dragon Quest? If the issue seems too foreign to be trifled with, consider an equivalent (theoretical) scenario: If a German developer took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post denying the Holocaust and portraying Dachau and Auschwitz as falsehoods, would you still support his game?

Or consider something closer to home. Lorne Lanning played a prominent role in developing the classic Oddworld series. On an episode of EGM Live several years ago, Lanning espoused unpopular conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001 attacks. Regardless of whether or not a video game podcast is the appropriate venue for that sort of talk, should Lanning’s coming out as a 9/11 “Truther” affect his game for people who refuse to subscribe to that viewpoint?

38244 208 OP ED: Where Do Gamers Draw the Line Between Creator and Creation?

Should developer politics matter at all? The GamePolitics blog reported the 2008 campaign donations of several notable industry figures. Is it fair to let the fact that Will Wright (the brilliant creator of classic games like SimCity) donated to John McCain’s campaign affect your view of his work? Is it fair to let Harmonix boss Alex Rigopulos‘ massive $32,000 donation to the Obama campaign color your opinion of Rock Band? As private citizens, these men are well within their rights to participate in the American political system… yet the money they’re donating to these causes ultimately comes from the pockets of consumers.

And what of sexual politics? Is it fair to write off the work of the developers at Eat Sleep Play simply because the studio’s former boss, David Jaffe, made some ill-considered statements around the launch of their latest game that many branded as misogynistic? Electronic Arts is currently under siege for depicting same-sex relationships in games like Mass Effect 3; a couple of years ago, Chair’s Shadow Complex came under fire for its connections to author Orson Scott Card, who is politically active against gay rights and gay marriage.

38244 211 OP ED: Where Do Gamers Draw the Line Between Creator and Creation?

Where do we draw the line? As with other mediums, it’s probably a matter best left to the individual. Personally speaking, I don’t let a single individual negate the value of game. People are entitled to their opinions, wrong-headed as they may seem to me, and the majority of games are a collaborative process by many people whose contributions shouldn’t be overshadowed by the public exploits of a single team member. A decade and a half of writing reviews has fostered in me a preference to separate creator from creation and judge games on their internal merits. Reviewing is a subjective enough process without involving individual social and political views — though even that’s not a cleanly drawn line. There’s a place for personal beliefs in critical writing, such as Ryan Winterhalter‘s withering, subjective excoriation of Duke Nukem Forever.

I wouldn’t expect everyone to share my perspective, though, and that’s where the need to be an informed consumer comes into play. Gaming news blogs and social forums exist to bring these matters to the public conscious. Advocacy sites like GamePolitics highlight the socio-political factors behind games, while industry-facing sites like Gamasutra open a window on the creative process and the real people responsible for creating games. Whatever your politics and morals, and however you feel these should affect your behavior as a consumer, you have the tools to act on your beliefs. And as games continue to insinuate themselves as a mainstream form of entertainment, you’ll find yourself forced to make these choices more and more frequently. Fez — a great game surrounded by a few intemperate comments — is only the beginning.