I'm not sure how far into the first actual act I am right now (just met up with the cute berzerker - eek!), but I'm enjoying it. Performance is good, the game is gorgeous, and the checkpoint system means I can play the game at my pace.

I simply cannot tell you how important that feature is to me.

I'm not playing for long stretches at a time, rather, a bit here and there as it suits me. I'm getting more adept at controlling the game; roadie rush, covering, switching positions, etc. Its been so long since I played a shooter I'm actually going on Casual, and its good. Very nice.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8803359@N08/2294574669/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8803359@N08/2292991341/

By the way, I've mentioned this before, but I'll say it again; Gears runs well on my computer. I'm very happy with it. I can't remember what my current settings are, but its good looking, at 1280x1024, and plays pretty smoothly over all.

Want a new Mac Pro? I do. Want a video card in it that's actually good for gaming? Apple will sell you a GeForce 8800 GT for $349. Nice, huh?

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=7E4EB91E&nplm=MB137Z/A

Only problem being is you can get PNY GeForce 8800 GT that's identical to it for $244 at Newegg. Pity it probably *won't* work in the Mac Pro, since Mac video cards historically want a different BIOS. I'm sure, when they and their partners can get away with this kind of robbery, Apple has seen no reason to change this when they made the jump to x86/Intel.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133205

KILL, see what I mean by Apple-gouging? Their top of the line Mac Pro (8-cores!) comes with a video card that costs $90-150 depending where you go. Gag.

Anyhow, no I'm not getting a Mac Pro anytime soon (and that makes me sad), but when it comes to gaming? Sheesh, I'm staying with Windows PC's - companies not having fanatical zealots and actually having competition seems to keep prices sane.

Holiday season, mind you!

Too Human, Halo Wars, Ninja Gaiden 2, Fable 2, Gears of War 2 are all scheduled for 2008. Add that to a bunch of the other games on the 360 (ME, DMC4, VF5, etc), some of which should be entering into the "Platinum Hits" lineup and the library is looking good. I'm *really* hoping that Microsoft gives me what I'd consider a substantial price cut off their hardware line-up. For instance a $300 Pro might be tempting, but I'd rather see $250-275 - I would like to see about a $100 price difference maintained at all times from Sony's comperable offerings. Do I expect the PS3 to go down again in price this year? Yes, or at least offering a bundle (and I'll probably factor that in depending on the game).

If I don't go with a 360 this year? Well, an extra gig of RAM and a new video card might be in order, especially since Nvidia's GeForce 9 series is coming out any day now, and the GeForce 8 series of cards are very solid as is.

Waiting. Its good for the soul and the wallet.

And for those of you wondering why I'm not looking at the PS3 in the same way? Great system, make no mistake, but I can wait for it to go down in price more too. I didn't buy my PS2 until it hit $200, after all (got VF4 with it, too!). I'm in no rush what-so-ever. Hell, my friend (now living in South Carolina) who's a huge Sony fan didn't get a PS2 until his wife got it for him for Christmas for $129 (Sony TV, Sony stand-alone DVD player, etc). He did get a PSP brand new, though...

I'm pretty stoked for both games. Cryptic seems like its taking the big wish list they never had time, staff, or money to work on and are making a new game with all that stuff built in from day one. I love the art style being used, and the thought of Jack Emmert (Statesman) getting a chance at basically a "do over" is pretty thrilling. Cryptic gets to benefit from everything they learned from City of Heroes; what went right, what went wrong, how to make life easier for themselves in the future, etc.

NCSoft, since buying COH, has committed themselves to reinvesting into the game with more money, new servers (just online recently), and more staffing. Since Matt Miller (Positron) and company really took over last year (when Jack left to go work on MUO), the game has improved by leaps and bounds. Items formerly on the wish-list such as the ability to do missed content, customizing powers, ways to improve level 50 characters and more ways to get Respecs have been either addressed or have started (Ouroboros, Weapon Customization, IO System plus Purple IO's, Respec IO's). I'm very excited to see what else is coming along for 2008 and 2009 for City of Heroes.

I plan to get apply for CO's beta as soon as I can, but at the same time I'm trying to remind myself that I need to keep my expectations realistic. While CO is going to be a 2nd generation super-hero MMO, its going to have growing pains of its own. Technical issues, balance problems from doing things differently than COH, comparative lack of content and players, etc., are all going to be present, and will be there for at least the first year (if not longer).

Meanwhile, City of Heroes is going to be a very mature, well developed game with established player groups/communities, most of the major kinks worked out (we'll never see another ED level nerf again), and 4+ years of goodness behind it. On top of that, remember that the COH development team used to be part of Cryptic as well, and they might well have plans to work on more of those "wish list" issues in the future. While CO and COH will never match feature for feature, NCSoft can certainly do what they can to not only improve on their strengths but address their weaknesses too.

I'm very excited. Very very excited. Some of my favorite games are the result of competition from two companies competing; competition helps inspire a higher degree of excellence. CO might well be the best thing that's happened to COH, pushing the devs to make COH even better than it is now. Likewise, CO has to try and hit the same high-water mark that COH is at when it launches; doing the job halfway isn't going to work. This is freakin' awesome :D

http://www.champions-online.com/

http://www.cityofheroes.com/

And if you're curious about the RPG that CO originated from? http://www.herogames.com/. If you want to try the game system out, I can highly recommend HERO Sidekick, available in both dead tree and PDF format. Its an amazing system. It won't be everyone's cup of tea (you have to use basic math, and there's a fair bit of crunch early on), but its great.

Story here - the cross platform DMC4 is the fastest selling installment in the series.

Insomniac publicly discussing leaving their options open when it comes to multiplatform development.

Guitar Hero breaks the $1 billion mark.

Assassin's Creed breaks Gears of War's first month sales only through the combined sales to the PS3 and 360.

David Jaffe notes that big-budget games will need to sell at least a million copies just to hope to break even.

Konami says they need, minimum, 1 million copies of MGS4 to be sold the first day its available due to development costs. Sony is sympathetic, expecting the end of 3rd party exclusives, with Peter Dille saying, "We understand publishers are needing to recoup their investment...From our perspective, as long as the games aren't going exclusive to other platforms, PS3 gamers are not actually losing anything."

Ladies and gentlemen, in what I'm going to dedicate to Peter Dille, I present to you the coffin for 3rd party exclusives. Costs are too high, the rewards too great, and the smell of freedom from being constrained to any single platform holder too appealing. While there will be, and always will be, special 3rd party exclusives, on the whole they will be the exception, not the rule. No longer will developers and publishers be stuck with a de-facto standard, where they have no real options other than to develop for a platform, like it or not.

If you love 3rd party games, the "platform penalty" is going away. And I love it.

So, the coffin. Feel free to choose your next console based on the 1st and 2nd party exclusives that matter to you, the only strategy that appeals to you more, whatever. Things that matter, not because all the developers have to make games for the system like the NES, Gameboy or PS2. The tyranny is over, at least for this generation. One console will be decalred the winner, but its reign will be nowhere nearly as one-sided as in previous generations.

http://www.quakelive.com/

Quake Live, you ask? What's that? As I understand it: Quake III. Online, free, and ad-supported.

I've played one deathmatch-type shooter that was free to play (Gunz), but to be honest it didn't keep my interest that long. Quake III? I used to really enjoy that game. Most computers these days should be able to handle it with little to no problem, its pretty much been "paid for" a while now, and is still a very good game. Smart move for id, really - they're taking an older but excellent game and finding a new way to create revenue from it. Its good to see companies actually doing something with their older properties rather than letting them rot away. Better still to make money off of them rather than complain how people are stealing their old games.

Very much a win/win for id and players.

Oh, I had to laugh at this.

It was pretty funny when Windows 98 crashed during a demonstration way back in the day.

History repeated itself; a 360 red-ringed during the GDC. Live and onstage.

Well, at least its a known problem that MS has been working hard towards both fixing but taking care ofcustomers about. Hey, I'll take that 360 if I can get it covered by the 3-year warranty!

*sighs*

Too funny...

$50 at Wally-world (since Gamestop here tends to add a bit of a premium to all their games. Thanks guys). Will let you guys know how it runs on my machine later.

I'll be playing with the keyboard and mouse rather than the 360 pad (gave it to a friend).

I'm really looking forward to messing with the map editor, too :D

Story from Gamespot.

Okay, some of you might be wondering, "What is Champions?" Champions is a super-hero role-playing game from HERO Games using HERO System. Champions/HERO is also a game that some of the City of Heroes developers (including Jack Emmert, aka Statesman) used to play, and was cited as an inspiration for City of Heroes!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champions_%28role-playing_game%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_system

Now, Saturday nights I take a quick drive from my house in Wailuku to Pukalani to for a game night at a friend's house. About 11 or so of us get together, eat a LOT of amazing home cooking prepared by the host, talk and hang out. Around 8 p.m. we settle down and play role-playing games using HERO; we've played games ranging genres from Westerns, X-Files/Men-In-Black conspiracy, pre-Napoleanic era British Naval and even Viking mythology. It can be a lot of fun, although combat can drag when you've got 11 people plus NPC's doing tactical combat (ie, using hex-map, considering range, line of sight, etc).

Anyhow, "what's the difference between HERO and any other role-playing game?" you ask?

1) Its levelless. That's right, no levels. No trying to earn another 234,343 XP so you can be a level 15 Chicken Farmer.

2) Its free form. You're not constrained by race, profession, whatever. You're given an allotment of points to create a character however you want to.

3) Has two forms of damage; Stun (non-lethal) and Body (lethal). By doing this, you can adjust the fatality of a game pretty easily, and it helps scale attacks. A fist fight can knock you out without being lethal unlike many other games which don't differentiate - to them damage is damage.

4) Its effects based. Instead of pouring through books to find the description of a level 3 Chicken Nugget Morph, you create powers, spells, equipment, etc., by deciding how it works, then building it from there, getting a point cost when done. If you want to, you can give it additional advantages or perks but giving it a higher cost, or you can give it a lower point cost by giving it disadvantages or limitations. Example:

Ronald McDonald wants a power to turn people into Chicken Nuggets by touching them, and wants it to be damned powerful mojo. It has 5d6 Major Transform into Chicken Nugget, which is 75 points (15 pts. per 1d6). Well, that's a bit expensive for the King of Value Menus, so he makes it All or Nothing, Requires Two-Hands, and has No Range (touch). I'm a bit fuzzy on how that part of the system works, but it gets the cost price down to 30 points.

You don't have to do all that to play, mind you. They have plenty of pre-made items, spells/powers, etc., so you don't have to mess with it. But the simple fact of the matter is if you need or want that kind of flexibility? Its there in a mature, well made system with tons of details, examples and even warnings (ie, "this can be abused"). The HERO Revised 5th Edition book (that has all this madness) is 592 pages and can stop small caliber gunshots.

Okay, great, so why is this so facinating? Because if Champions Online keeps all these traits, it will be the single most customizable MMO, even role-playing game, I've ever heard of (would it be the Elder Scrolls games? Maybe...). It would also break away from a lot of the conventions out there most MMO's hold dear; strict levels, ****s, damage is damage is damage, etc. It could be pretty freakin' amazing, to put it mildly. And since Champions uses HERO system, that means future expansions could easily tap into the the other genre books that HERO Games produces for Fantasy, Space, etc.

Wow...

Some rumors about Insomniac getting bought out just got crushed.

Well, in an interview with Insomniac CEO Ted Price, there was one interesting tidbit:

There were a lot of acquisitions in the news last year. You are still an independent studio, but so far are exclusive to Sony this generation. Have you considered development of - if not a Wii or Xbox 360 title - perhaps an Xbox Live Arcade title?

One of the challenges that anybody has during this generation is developing...Cross-platform technology is tough. All three platforms are very different in terms of their architecture.

For us, it's an issue of difficulty and bandwidth. We currently don't have the bandwidth to be able to do that anyway. But it has been impressive to see some of the sales numbers for people who are going cross-platform.

But you wouldn't rule it out in the future if you developed the technology?

Being an independent developer means we always have that choice.

----------------------

This is... interesting. There's no grandstanding, no "we'll only work with Sony." Its not saying they will go multiplatform only, either (I'm assuming by "bandwidth" they mean "staffing"). Now, Insomniac is completely independant; nobody (not even Sony) owns any stake in them. Being independant means you have to do what's best for the company's financial well-being; Capcom is a great example of this.

So, my question is this; if they did go multi, how do you think that would look? Completely platform agnostic (like EA), or a mixture of exclusive and cross-platform titles (like Konami)? What types of games would make the jump, and to which platforms? Insomniac is a superb, top-tier developer that any console maker would be happy to have producing games on their system - so feel free and dream a little ;)