Columns

3 Comments Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

Canada is a Gaming Powerhouse

canadian-gamingOne thing that I’ve realized as working on our Canadian Gaming Week is that the Canadian gaming industry is currently in great shape. Sure, Vancouver could use a little bit of help and the once great BioWare has been on a down swing but to parrot a Don Cherry line about Canadian hockey, we are the best.

If you look at last week’s Canadian Videogame Awards, the nominees and winners lists look like most major year-end awards lists. Three of last year’s biggest triple-A games, the best-selling sports game in the world and two of the best reviewed indie games of 2012 were all developed on Canadian soil. Canadian gaming isn’t just a powerhouse but is thriving hotbed for the games industry.

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1 Comment Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

Despite Its Faults, I Still Love Mass Effect

I couldn’t go the whole of Canadian Gaming Week here on the blog without writing one more Mass Effect column. The reason that I write so often and at such length about Mass Effect is that the series is what brought me back into proper gaming after years of spending my time in a rut of playing sports and music games.

I’ve written a lot about the game over the last year. I’ve dug into that terribly unsatisfying ending. I’ve decried the horrible DLC practices that saw parts of the game cut out to sell separately from the main game. I’ve even promoted the Indoctrination Theory which might be my greatest sin against the franchise and common sense.

And despite how disappointed I was in the ending of the trilogy, despite how angry I was at having to pay for an on-disc “DLC” that was locked out behind what was effectively a $10 paywall and despite the fact that I have to make the conscious choice to end my playthroughs at the Citadel DLC to get the ending the trilogy deserves, I still love Mass Effect.

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2 Comments Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

Forget the Silver Screen, Put Mass Effect on TV

mass-effect-the-movie-posterHollywood and the video games industry don’t have a very good track record of adapting the other’s work. A quick look at the movie adaptation of video games shows a track record of consistent critical flops with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within scoring the highest Tomato Meter score of 43%. Video games based on movies and TV shows haven’t fared much better as good licensed games are more the exception than the rule.

As the week’s go by, I hear more and more about the planned Mass Effect movie. It’s not just Hollywood’s terrible track record in turning video games into a live-action dramatic presentation that worries me. It’s that Mass Effect can’t be turned into a movie without removing its soul.

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6 Comments Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

Console Wars: A Battle No One is Trying to Win

nintendo-vs-sony-vs-microsoft-console-warsOne console has a sharing feature that nobody wanted and unveiled with a slightly underwhelming line-up. Another console is strongly rumoured to mandate a permanent connection to the internet to play games and is likely to prevent playing used games. The third console is so underpowered that some third-party publishers have abandoned it less than six months after release.

For as excited as everybody was about this generations console wars, it sure seems to be shaping up to be a race to the bottom and a case of not survival of the fittest but survival of the least weak.

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5 Comments Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

Can We Still Trust The Gaming Press?

nerd-rage-comic-phantom-painedThe ongoing concern of gamers over whether they can trust the journalists who write news and reviews has been at a near boiling point for the last year or so. There was the battle between gamers and the press over Mass Effect 3’s ending. Journalists at the Games Media Awards were encouraged to tweet about Trion’s upcoming Defiance with a reward of a PS3 being available for one lucky winner. Then there are the regular accusations of good or bad reviews for certain games being bought by publishers.

What brought this issue to a head for me was the recent revelation in a GameTrailers interview that Hideki Kojima had run his marketing plan by Geoff Keighley some two years ago at Comic Con. While it’s okay to play along with Moby Dick Studios and The Phantom Pain, what Keighley did and what the rest of the press did is different. It’s one thing for outlets without inside information to connect the dots to give us the likely scoop. It’s another for Keighley to withhold information when he knew the real story of Moby Dick Studios and The Phantom Pain and hype a fake interview on his show that was just a marketing sham.

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2 Comments Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

eSports Won’t Go Mainstream Anytime Soon

mlg-dallas-2013On a whim, I watched part of the recent MLG Winter Championships. I’ve never watched MLG before and never played StarCraft 2 or League of Legends. As such, I was, naturally, completely lost at first. Over the course of the couple of matches that I watched, I was able to grasp the basic concept of the SC2 games was to kill all the opposing units but that was all I was able to grasp.

This made me think of stories and columns I’ve read over the last year or so that speculated that competitive gaming and eSports could break into the mainstream as a sport with sizable interest and possibly make the transition to TV.

While it’s entirely possible that competitive gaming might make it to TV, it’s not going to evolve past the niche audience and break into mainstream consciousness anytime in the near future.

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4 Comments Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

Caveat Emptor: What Rights Do You Have as a Gamer?

simcity-2013-connection-errorIn the last couple of months, we’ve had some very bad experiences as a gaming community. There was the abysmal Aliens: Colonial Marines that left gamers and fans of the Aliens franchise dissatisfied at best and angry at worst. The SimCity launch was a disaster of the highest proportion. It was probably worse than the Diablo III launch since EA and Maxis couldn’t be bothered to plan for a worst case scenario that we all saw coming. While, not a major issue, Tomb Raider had some serious issues on certain NVIDIA graphics cards.

The problem is that, unlike customers of most products, you have virtually no rights as a customer of the video games industry. Have you ever read the terms of service that you agreed to for digital distributors like Steam and Origin? If you have, you should ask yourself why you would ever buy a game from these people.

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1 Comment Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

Why March is the New Video Game Christmas

gamestop-black-fridayIt used to be that all the big products were launched in time for the Christmas shopping season (or your religion’s December equivalent). This included video games. Last year wasn’t much different with big releases in the run up to Christmas including Far Cry 3, COD: Blops 2, Hitman, Assassin’s Creed 3, among several other triple-A releases.

The reason for releasing games in the fall in the run up to Christmas is obvious. Christmas is the biggest shopping season of the year. Everyone is asking for and looking for Christmas gifts so what better time to get your big products out there than when people are spending scads of money anyway.

So why do I bring up March? If you’ve checked the release calendar, you’d have noticed that this month has more noteworthy games coming out than seemingly any single month in the past year. We’ve already had reboots for Tomb Raider and Sim City start the month and BioShock: Infinite will close it up. In the intervening time period, there you can buy StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, prequels for Gears of War and God of War, and The Walking Dead cash in from Activision.

So why has March turned into such a hotbed for big game releases?

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1 Comment Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

Uncharted 3 and the Future of Triple-A Games Going Free-To-Play

uncharted-3-multiplayer-free-to-play-bannerI must admit that I was quite surprised to find out that Uncharted 3’s multiplayer component went free-to-play earlier this week. I couldn’t quite make heads or tails as to why Naughty Dog and Sony Computer Entertainment would release a part of a game for free or who would want to play such a thing.

But when you think about it, giving away a part of the game that isn’t the core component that’s the reason why people by the game on release day actually makes perfect sense. That’s because Naughty Dog’s play isn’t your standard free-to-play model of funding the game using solely the minority of gamers who provide microtransaction revenue.

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The Death of the Arcade Sports Game

blades-of-steel-01Growing up, I got an NES when I was about four or five years old. I had that console all the way until I was 11. Naturally, I logged a lot of hours on the dozen or so games that I did have for that system. Perhaps no game got put through its paces like Blades of Steel. I wasn’t the only one who did, though. Hockey fans all know about the classic game that had hitting everywhere, slap shots ricocheting off the boards and more than a few fights.

If you’re a child of the 90s, it might not have been Blades of Steel but there was certainly a classic sports game that was simple yet fun that you poured hours into. Football fans had Tecmo Super Bowl. Basketball fans spent their time on fire playing NBA Jam.

But look at the sports games released now. How many noteworthy sports game releases are what could be described as arcade-y? Not since 2010’s remake/updated NBA Jam released on the Wii have we had a new arcade-style sports game that wasn’t kart racer. It certainly seems as though a genre that has spawned quite a few cult hits is now all but dead.

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