| Set On Stun |

Yeah I'd like AC2 and ME2 with some large fries to go

Up until now if you were a Mac gamer then you did not have access the to catalog of games that was offered up by Valve’s Steam service. Although we did report here last week that there’s been rumblings about Steam adding Mac to their subscription service. Well until they stop dragging their mice to get that rolling Onlive, a startup game-on-demand service will launch their subscription service for Mac and PC in June.

With a catalog that’s set to compete with Steam, OnLive will serve up a slew of top-notch games from a variety of publishers for a monthly fee. A big plus is that you don’t need a G5 or Alienware CPU to run the software as that will be taken care of from the Onlive side. Announced at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, this throws down the competition gauntlet as this service brings Mac users into the fold and gives PC gamers a chance to get their hands on top titles a lot sooner than they usually do. OnLive CEO Steve Perlman for just  $14.95 a month gamers will have access to titles from EA, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros just to name a few.

The launch promises 12 to 25 titles and depending on how well their deal making goes that will surely increase. The big edge here is unlike Steam, OnLive is looking to give gamers fresh titles that haven’t been around gathering dust. So how exactly can the run these high end games from their servers?  Simply put — compression baby.  Game data stuffed into  a tiny package that gets transferred  over a broadband connection to a server, where the data is computed. Then a video is sent back over the broadband line to the user’s computer. So that’s how.

For Mac users this service  is a big boon because up until now even if they could get a game like Mass Effect 2, they would have to wait a really long time. The big launch is set for June 17 just around E3 time. It’s a good guess that if Steam is really going to compete with this, then they now have a deadline.

So word has it that not only is Sony looking to push their motion control peripheral into the fray before Natal even has a chance to start running ads, but they’re doing it on a franchise that well — they doing it for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11.

You know, they guy who is not only one of the world’s most well known athletes but now he’s also one of the world’s most well known players. I guess EA is sticking by Tiger and his game hoping by the summer that other people will want to play with Tiger besides waitresses and escorts. Even weirder is that the cover will be shared by Irish golfer Rory Mcllroy.  In the 11 years they have made this game, Tiger has never shared a cover. What? Have a looksie.

Please play with me?

But that’s not the head scratcher? The game will be embedded with motion controls  in advance of the allegedly-named “Playstation Arc” peripheral which by the way has no official drop date

WTF??????

Questions
Why announce this at all? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to tell people after Arc drops that “Hey everybody, here are the games we’ve already coded. No waiting.”  This method is like buying Wii Sports without owning a Wii.

Two words — Tiger Woods? Really? The game is slated to launch in June for all three systems but who will be brave enough pick this up as a family game while explaining to their kids that just because the actual Tiger Woods is a douchebag cheater, the videogame version is way cooler. Is this the game you want to pin your first test of new technology on Sony?

Where’s Natal? EA did not mention Natal at all in the release. So that means one of two things.

1. It hasn’t been developed yet so they figured why be a boob and announce something preemptively like Sony
2. Or Natal was not a factor for the 360 version because maybe they want a game without a Scarlett Letter on it as something people won’t feel embarrassed about playing

So with every advertiser this side of Doritos dropping Tiger like an anvil on Wile E Coyote’s head it’s amazing that EA decided to launch this game before Mr. Woods officially returned to golf.  This dude’s actions were and continue to be big news. No one is going to forget this by June! In any case kudos to Sony for greenlighing the Arc game announcement for no reason other than to get press. Nice work.

As in most games of this period, the boxart looked better than the game

As we approach the release of Final Fantasy XIII it’s hard to imagine all this started …wait for it .. in 1987.

It’s still Square Enix’s most successful franchise and has been made and remade so many times (the first game was remade and repackaged with FFII) that at some point and time in the last 23 years even if you’ve never played this game, you’ve heard or seen some reference to it. The visual presentations and characters may have changed but the game at it’s core has maintained a consistency like no other game before or after basically laying the groundwork for other RPGs to follow. Confusing at times to keep track of,  all the FFs are not sequels but individual stories is this candy colored/bananas Chocoba filled universe.

But how did it all begin you ask?

The very first game debuted on the SNES in 1990 (Japanese version came out in ‘87) and the pitch if you want to jump in the Delorean for a minute (or now the Hot Tub) sounded something like this …

“So we have these light warriors and they have these, um orbs, and their are these — four fiends or bad dudes who make the orbs dark. So the warriors have to travel around fight them, make their orbs brighter and also save the world.” And scene.

Did I mention it was 1990?

Anyway this was considered a graphics masterpiece back then (laugh if you must) although the game itself involved a lot of meandering and turned based fighting where you never actually saw any fighting other than numbers changing. Yet with this type of gameplay the die was cast for RPG elements we now take for granted. Things like leveling up, magic powers, regular attacks, XPs (experience points), HPs (hit points) yatta, yatta, yatta.  If these things sound familiar it’s because this game was the major influence in this type of role playing becoming the norm.

This universe filled with all kinds of creatures, magical folk and even robots took place on three different maps (or continents depending on how geeked out you want to be) where you roamed around during this adventure. You engaged battles, talking to people and getting clues, finding dungeons and building your inventory, finding treasure and so forth. An all consuming  game, it took a huge amount of time to complete and involved not just adventuring, but character and party management as well.  Even the turn based fights involved a lot of assigning weapons and skills that would be best suited for each battle. So scoff if you will at how ridiculous it looked games like World of Warcraft and Mass Effect owe their existence to this franchise.

Final Fantasy was more than just ahead of its time, it was a pioneer developing  key videogame elements like a character development, team management, an actual story, and even musical score. The epitome of a long lasting franchise, it’s one of those games that if you played it back then, you would now talk about it with wonder and awe.

New on the Wii -- The failure game

First of all this is not something I came up with. The buzz on the intertubes is out there. There is a growing belief that the Wii will meet it’s demise this year. Even Nintendo is saying that they expect sales to drop this year — they still think they’ll beat the PS2 as the most successful console ever? Ay but there’s the question — most successful according to what?

If we’re looking a raw sales data then sure (how much of those sales are the console and not the games) — and beating the PS2 is no easy feat. This behemoth was still selling years into the release of the PS3, it’s still out there and there are people, believe it or not, still playing PS2 games. Need I remind you God of War 2 came out for PS2 …  and that was after the Ps3 was released. But I digress. Back to the Wii completely sucking this year.

It’s no secret that many refer to the Wii as the kiddie console. Some may call it the great equalizer bringing young, old, families, casual and hardcore gamers all into the fold of gaming. Marketing wise it’s one of the easiest consoles to market because if you’re running campaigns for something like Wii Resort or Smash Bros. you’re dealing with innocuous spots and trailers and something that resonates with a large audience.  That then translates into parents buying games not just for their kids but for themselves or for “the family.” In fact that was one of the big things you heard this last holiday season  — “We go a Wii” or “We got Rock Band for the Wii.” Yeah that’s great but here’s the thing Wii isn’t delivering beyond that point.

Think of it this way — We currently have three consoles.

• Two of them are high-end multifunctional CPUs with advanced graphic cards that also play games. One of them — plays games. A majority of those games are gimmicky in the sense that they have some feature that panders to the Wiimote.
• Two of them have evolved to a level of performance that allows us to see videogaming like we’ve never seen it before with unprecedented graphics and gameplay the likes of Uncharted 2, Heavy Rain, Mass Effect 2 and Gears of War 2. Developers relish in pushing these systems to their extreme in terms of what they can produce. One of the consoles is not a big fan of third party software, doesn’t have the capability of running the aforementioned games on its platform and  developers of these big budget games don’t even factor the Wii  in their plans for a typical multiplatform release.
• Back in the Gamecube days, the playing field was much more level because you had essentially three gaming consoles. Microsoft and Sony upped the anti in the next round (as did Nintendo with motion control) and having gone past the benchmark of the 5-year gap between consoles both Sony and Microsoft say, “We don’t need new consoles just yet,” knowing they can get a couple more years out of their machines. The Wii typically becomes a novelty shortly after it’s bought

All you Wii lovers and Wii-loving parents can raise your fists and yell about the last bullet point but that’s the truth. Anyone who owns a PS3 or 360 and a Wii will tell you — we play the Wii when friends come over or the kids use it. The rest of the time these gamers default to their primary console.

So why are Microsoft and Sony making motion controllers then? Good question. The biggest reason is to tap into that casual gamer/family market. Notice though that these are peripherals and not entirely new consoles. They know full well exactly how these device will be treated from the developer side. Sure there will be a whole slew of folks looking to make cool motion-control, fun games and figuring out how to retrofit old games to mod with the new device. But  you’re not going to see a developer like Bioware spend time making Mass Effect 3 compatible with Natal or the Arc. You just won’t. That’s why the Wii gets left out so often for the A-list titles. And since they can’t match up to the caliber of games we have seen in the last year and are bound to see this year what’s left for Wii to do? Make more of the same, which ultimately spells — S  U C  K.

Nintendo’s sinking feeling that this year sales will slump is not far off.  As the system consistently keeps getting left behind by developers or the last console you pick for your team, we end up with games that people want to play except not on the system that everyone can use.

Crowbar? Yeah I've got an App for that!

Take at look at the picture above — you see the little apple on Gordon Freeman’s chest? You have to look real close — it’s obscured by the crowbar. Yeah. WTF? Not that anyone would scream bloody murder if Valve made the big switch to the Mac OS for future games but what does that mean for the PC folks? Up until now it’s been a fairly solid split of PC and console offerings. And does this have anything to do with the distribution service Steam gearing up for Mac support? The question here is what’s with all the subtlety?

So many questions but seriously what is going on Valve? Look it’s not that it’s would be a bad thing for Valve and Steam to get Apple-friendly but why go with this ambiguous strategy that more vague than messages from Half-Life’s G-man? Especially since in 2007 we heard this from Valve about why they didn’t want to work with Apple. This was around the time of the Orange Box release

..We have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go “wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming”. And then we’ll say, “OK, here are three things you could do to make that better”, and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. Those words from the mouth of Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell.

To anchor that quote was this from Newell — “They seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there’s never any follow through“.

So you can see, there really was no love for the Mac OS back in ‘07. What changed in three years? Well for now we have no idea. All we know is this Sam Fisher sneakfest coupled with some weird things going on on the Steam site means change is a-coming. It’s highly possible that Valve will spill the beans at next week’s GDC but until then we have to sit around and wonder.

could you be more obscure?