Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster Preview

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s an educational game based on a popular kids’ property that doesn’t really bring anything to the table. It’s one thing to try and teach kids something they don’t know about, but how you do it is just as important as getting the lesson across. For years, so many games have failed to do this, starting with the Sesame Street games on the NES (“I don’t think that’s a word!”). It continued on with Barney’s Hide-and-Seek, a Genesis game that was so practically bad that it played itself, which I believe would discourage kids worse than letting them discover the solution for themselves.

I’m going off on a tangent here. Kids’ games aren’t really that bad anymore, though there are still a number of releases that are aimed at younger players (mostly on Wii, like Sesame Street and – gag – Smurfs Dance Party) while shutting out older players from having any fun. However, Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine could very well change how this formula works with its upcoming release for Xbox 360/Kinect, Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster. This isn’t your typical foray down the familiar license – Tim and his team are actually doing something genuinely new, and something that…wait for it…all ages can seemingly enjoy.

The game is presented in a storybook format, telling a tale that involves a series of monsters that just want to have fun with their days. The two main stars are familiar characters from the Sesame Street lexicon – the sweet-eating Cookie Monster and the high-pitched, red-furred Elmo. They appear in this monstrous world and guide the player through the actions of a newly created monster character named Marco. You’ll start out coming upon this creature, as he’s the only attendee at his birthday party (insert sad face here), but rather than discouraging him, Elmo and Cookie Monster engage in a number of mini-games to help perk him up, eventually getting to a birthday party he truly deserves. This is just the first part of the game; other chapters in the story tell different monster tales.

So how does this manage to involve adults along the same lines as kids? Well, keep in mind that this production is the work of Double Fine, the same savvy studio that produced Brutal Legend, Stacked, and the recently released mech game, Trenched. It’s got his style of humor in it, but never to the point that it’s raunchy or questionable for younger gamers. Tim worked very carefully to make sure that the tone stayed in the Sesame Street realm, but by the same token, also made sure that entertainment went hand in hand with education, without the latter overshadowing the former. As a result, a number of Once Upon a Monster’s mini games are quite entertaining. One, for instance, has Marco taking part in a tandem race while Elmo playfully rides on his shoulders. Utilizing the Kinect, players must move left and right to avoid colliding with objects that could slow Marco’s momentum, while also ducking so that Elmo doesn’t hit his head on a passing tree branch. It’s never to the point that the activities are impossible, and young and old players alike will actually get into them more than you would’ve expected. Other activities include dancing (not hardcore Dance Central style either – we’re talking playful jumping around) and blowing out candles on a birthday cake. The game is packed with all kinds of enjoyable music, so kids can dance along to it, while parents won’t be worn out by it being loaded with thematic messages. Double Fine is making sure it’s fun all around, and not for a certain kind of audience. That’s where Once Upon a Monster’s main appeal lies.

To assure that the game had the same likable tone as the popular public television show, Double Fine worked closely with the teams at Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Sesame Workshop to assure that the new monsters fit in with the classic ones, while the stories reflected the kind of proper tone that would be expected from the world of Sesame Street. Considering that many Double Fine staffers were fans of the show when they were growing up definitely helps, as their memories help fuel the events that occur in the game. We still have yet to see what later stages have to offer, but you can bet there will be some sort of fun motion activities that everyone can easily get into. Maybe we’ll even have a cookie-eating mini-game for good measure. I mean, Cookie Monster IS in the game, after all…

As far as presentation goes, the game features the authentic voicework of both Cookie Monster and Elmo, and the new creatures sound great as well. What’s more, the small monster universe that they dwell in is never to the point of being threatening. In fact, it’s quite comfortable, with its relaxed design and its fun, little atmospheric touches, like the mini swamps and the forests. Being able to check it out through the eyes of the Kinect is definitely a smart move, as it simply wouldn’t be the same experience by using a routine controller.

Okay, so maybe we’re a little bonkers previewing a Sesame Street game right after the release of the ultra-violent Gears of War 3. But what can we say? This isn’t typical licensed fare where the point of education is hammered into skulls. This is a delightful take on a classic franchise, going in an unexpected direction thanks to a devoted studio. We’re actually interested to see how ends up when it hits stores on October 11. We’ll be back with a full verdict then, along with a desire to eat a bunch of cookies. Actually, we feel that now. OM NOM NOM!!

Oh, and there will be a demo available next Tuesday on Xbox Live. Check it out if you can.

Source : gamezone[dot]com

Opinion: It's Time To Switch Off The Hype Machine

Notice anything strange about this year’s E3? Stranger than usual, that is? More than any other show in recent memory – even E3 2011, which was similarly afflicted – it was dominated by games that we’d already seen many, many times before.  One of the only notable exceptions was Watch Dogs, one of the biggest excitements of the show – but if the recent spate of delayed games is anything to go by, it probably won’t be anywhere near us before 2014, which means another year at least of following it pre-release.

Increasingly, we have to stew in our own juices for a near-interminable length of time before we get our hands on titles which we already know, or think we know, a lot about.  This is as much to do with publishers’ marketing approach as it is with the age of the Internet putting all imaginable information about a game at your fingertips.  And the problem is that having to wait a number of years for a game you want usually leads to the accumulation of mountainous unrealistic hopes for how it will play on release.  This wealth of expectations that games companies are allowing to develop unchecked in their customers isn’t helping anyone.  It’s time for a change.

The past few years have been littered with titles that have spent a long time in development, before being released to heartfelt disappointment from even their most ardent supporters.  Whether you look at Final Fantasy XIII, Resident Evil 5, Mass Effect 3 or the beleaguered Duke Nukem Forever, all these titles met a rather sour reception from many gamers, especially considering the high hopes that were held for them pre-release.  Whilst some commentators have attributed this to the rise in perceived “gamer entitlement”, another potential cause is the manner in which publishers build hype relentlessly whilst the game is under development.  The longer this gestational period goes on, the higher expectations can get – and the more bitterly disappointed players can be.

One of the most pertinent recent examples of this phenomenon is Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Whilst the initial reaction to the game when it launched in December 2011 was positive, it’s since seen its sub numbers crumble as fans increasingly admitted to feeling let down by the title.  When the game was first revealed in October 2008, gamers united across genre-divides to share their joy and speculate on what the final product would offer.  Some were hoping for a title based on earlier builds of Star Wars Galaxies, the now-defunct MMO that was also built on Lucas’ IP.  Others had no interest in the multiplayer component, but instead wanted a continuation of the events depicted in the Knights of the Old Republic series.  Still more began chanting about the imminent arrival of the fabled “WoW-Killer”, praying at long last that Blizzard’s behemoth would be dethroned.

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Who in their right mind would admit to fans: "That thing you're really excited about? It's not going to happen."

At first, these conflicting viewpoints weren’t a problem - but then this continued for four, long years. Expectations were allowed to snowball relatively unchecked; after all, what company in its right mind would openly admit to fans: “That element you’re so excited about?  Well it’s just not going to happen.”  Through omissions, Bioware hyped up story, customisation and companions while implicitly suggesting the game could be all things to all men.  If players had only been getting psyched for a year, it probably wouldn’t have been so bad.  But that wasn’t the case and, as a result of the overhype, many were left feeling bitterly displeased.

Bioware is far from the only company to have misjudged the benefits of hype in the age of the Internet.  Amongst a myriad of others, Blizzard also fell foul of heightened expectations with the release of Diablo III.  While it’s admittedly hard not to disappoint people with a game they’ve been awaiting for 12 years, the stakes were raised further by announcing so far ahead of release.  If the company had only revealed the game a year before it hit shelves, perhaps expectations from fans of the original titles would have been kept more restrained.  But that isn’t what happened.

After it was announced in June 2008, details of Diablo III were drip-fed to the slavering masses over four entire years.  For a title of this magnitude, the gaps between new information being released were agonisingly large for fans.  So, naturally, many began to speculate about what they wanted, what the game needed, and what Blizzard would surely do to make this the best game EVAR.

In these periods where hype wasn’t shaped by Blizzard, players were building an image of the game that awaited them even whilst some of its fundamental aspects weren’t set in stone.  You could argue that premature reveals such as this are irresponsible, like letting the horse bolt from the barn unchecked. When Diablo III eventually launched, it rocketed off shelves, but there were problems.  Partly due to the franchise’s history and partly due to the fact that so much time had elapsed since the game was announced, a chunk of fans were expecting a different title to the one they received.

There’s a difference between building awareness and building hype, companies too often pursue the latter to their eventual detriment.  Whether it’s by opting not to correct gamers’ assumptions, or by allowing expectations to snowball through premature announcements, the end result is a disappointment for all.  It’s a not a phenomenon unique to games either, as the reaction to Ridley Scott’s long-awaited Prometheus shows.

On top of this, knowing too much about a title can wear out its appeal thanks to over-exposure.  The companies out there that seem to recognise this, such as Nintendo and Apple, surely owe at least some of their success to the air of secrecy surrounding their products until shortly before release.  Nintendo doesn’t really participate in the preview cycle; we traditionally see a game once or twice before it hits shelves, although multiple showings of Skyward Sword and New Super Mario Bros U suggest that the reticent Japanese giant might be getting at least slightly more generous.  (It’s still far from the two-year-long series of marginally differing demos that Square-Enix chose to show for Deus Ex: Human Revolution.)  Apple, too, shows us fully functioning hardware, then launches it swiftly after; the first iPad was announced in January 2010 and was in shops by April that same year.

So what’s the solution?  Should publishers only be announcing their games when a launch date is fixed and within sight?  Should there be an increase in honest dialogue with customers to excite them more responsibly?  Or do we, as gamers, need to check our expectations every now and then and appreciate that maybe a game won’t be everything we want it to be, and that it’s not the end of the world if it isn’t?

“

It's possible to go too far in keeping games under wraps

We already know it’s possible to go too far the other way when it comes to keeping games under wraps; the concept of ‘Valve Time’ is well known. Valve was also the recipient of a fan petition in January over their continued refusal to discuss the future of the Half Life franchise.  Such silence fosters resentment in those getting excited about the title, and leads certain gamers to feel justified in pirating; a poor decision that ultimately hurts anyone who truly cares about the medium.

Talking about “gamer entitlement,” meanwhile, is a sure way to polarise people, but it’s at least partially relevant to this discussion.  The issue at hand is not so much whether we feel we deserve more from a company we admire, or whether they’ve misled us; it’s how we deal with a game that doesn’t quite manage to tick the boxes we thought it would.  Going forward, that’s what we need to take away from the recent string of disappointments we’ve had.

But then, it’s not entirely gamers’ fault that we get so caught up in the ultra-hype.  The solution has to be bilateral: publishers and platform holders need to rethink how they manage expectations, even as we need to work on managing our own.  Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime recently said that gamers are insatiable, always wanting more regardless of how much we’re given.  It’s easy to see where he’s coming from, but that hype cycle is something that the games industry itself has created.  If it’s going to change, it has to change from both sides.

Source : ign[dot]com

Are the Next-Gen Consoles Coming Too Late?

Microsoft and Sony really want you to wait a while before playing their next generation systems. They want you to sit tight.

Before launching anything new, they want to hold off until the last possible moment. They want to skip out of the tottering, crumbling edifice of the current generation just before it comes crashing to the ground.

Their anxiety about making the move is so great that they are prepared to allow Wii U a free run at the market for at least year, and they are even happy to wave each other through as first-to-market. Disappointingly, there has been none of the mind-games or competition on launch timing that we've come to expect (and enjoy) from hardware warfare. There is no sense of an arms race -- of two mighty rivals manfully striving to beat each other to the punch.

The reason is simple. The current generation is finally making money and declining at a seemingly manageable rate, adding much-needed loot to Sony and Microsoft’s coffers. In contrast, the next generation will cost a great deal of money and will continue to do so for years. And with both technology and consumer behavior changing fast, launching games consoles has never been riskier. In short, Sony and Microsoft have too much to lose by rushing to market, while Nintendo has nothing to gain by waiting.

Microsoft and Sony are seeing returns on their huge investments of the last decade. Game sales are declining but the businesses are largely predictable and clustered around big, profitable franchises. Also, they have finally reached a critical mass of online subscribers who are willing to buy highly profitable digital-only games. This is a situation both firms have invested heavily in achieving. They are not about to screw it all up by rendering their lead products obsolete.

As Microsoft’s Phil Spencer told me at E3, ”Our business is really in a sweet spot if you think about the installed base and the number of people -- the addressable audience -- of a platform like Xbox 360 right now. So as somebody who's running a publisher, a first-party publisher, but still, an entertainment publisher, it's a great time to be on Xbox. We've got tens of millions of people out there, so when we put out something like Minecraft, we sold two million units. That's a great business.”

And Sony Computer Entertainment America boss Jack Tretton is equally good at spinning positive on the company’s reluctance to move forward. He told Gametrailers, “We have never been first [to launch], we have never been cheapest, it is about being the best. If you can build a better machine and it is going to come out a little bit later, that is better than rushing something to market that is going to run out of gas in the long term."

Credit: Gamasutra

It’s interesting that the third-party publishers are in no rush for their first-party cousins to make the leap. Given that their sales are declining, you might expect some sort of call-to-action. Not so. One leading exec told me that he is “delighted” that neither Sony nor Microsoft had anything to say about new hardware at E3. The publishers do not want you saving up to buy a new console next year, based on fancy promises and lush previews. They want you buying their current-gen AAA games this year. They don't want you thinking that there's something better around the corner. They want you to be happy with your lot.

Of course, they are seeing serious declines in games retail sales in 2012, but they still don’t want the market to do anything rash, like introduce exciting new products. Because that would trigger an expensive third-party arms race of polishing and marketing all that new IP they’ve all been secretly working on. For now, the game companies would rather manage the gentle stroll of decline than face the extreme challenge of a new generation.

But this conservatism is risky. Downward trends have a habit of seeming predictable right up to the point when they are not. If Malcolm Gladwell is to be believed, it’s the trend-setters, the most knowledgeable consumers, who make the difference, who change behavior so sharply that it precipitates calamitous consequences. In other words, people like you make all the difference.

The gaming industry relies very heavily on trend-setters, just the sort of gamers who are most impatient for new hardware, and most likely to set buying trends for games on old hardware. The whole strategy relies on you continuing to be excited about the current generation, and continuing to influence the mass market by your enthusiasm. And sure, there are lots of things to like about the games coming out on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. But should that excitement wane, the consequences are dire. The big games season of 2012 looks dandy, but 2013? Maybe that's a year too far.

Right now the business is relying on the millions of people who’ll go out and buy the new Call of Duty. But the people who really matter are the first million who bought the original Call of Duty and put the whole thing in motion. And, by the end of 2013, these guys will have been playing the same console for an unprecedented seven years (PS3) or eight (Xbox 360) without a new generational introduction.

Let’s just come out and say it. The current generation is old.

Meanwhile sales of retail games are dropping, fast. Earlier this month, in his excellent regular column for Gamasutra, statistics-analyst Matt Matthews made this startling observation:

“In each of 2008, 2009, and 2010 the 50 million annual unit software point was crossed sometime in March. But in 2011, it fell back into early April, indicating a significant slowdown. This year, unit sales just crossed 51 million units at the very end of May.”

Source : ign[dot]com

E3 2012: Lord of the Rings Online: Riders of Rohan

I don't know anything about Lord of the Rings. I watched The Fellowship of the Ring a year or two after it came out but retain none of the events. My knowledge of the films begins at "You shall not pass" and ends at Liv Tyler. Naturally, my E3 appointment to look at Lord of the Rings Online's new expansion, Riders of Rohan, had me a bit nervous. I may not connect to the world and its lore the way the developers at Turbine do — and trust me, they do — but the expansion still impresses, even for someone with limited knowledge of Lord of the Rings.

Riders of Rohan introduces mounted combat, something I have long felt was missing in most MMOs. As you enter the expansion content, you gain access to a special mount that doesn’t shy away from danger the way older steeds would. Mounted combat is exclusive to specific areas in the expansion and can only be done on the specific mount that allows it, but adding variety to MMO combat is always welcome. Turbine assured me that classes would maintain their distinctions even while mounted. A mounted archer won't play the same as a mounted minstrel, for example. Details were up in the air for how mounted group combat would be handled, but it is something Turbine is interested in pursuing. They want to nail down the solo mounted combat first before becoming too adventurous with the mechanic.

Your horse is more than just a mount that won't get fussy under attack, though. The horse is uniquely yours and can be customized in a multitude of ways including different manes, tails, sizes, and armor. My request for zebra skin armor was met with head shakes and groans, so you won't have to worry about the customization of your horse going too far. Thankfully, you can use your Rohan mount outside of the expansion content, and all your customization comes with it. What fun is having a sweet looking steed if you can’t brag about it to everyone around you? Your horse doesn't just have cosmetic changes either, it gains experience, levels up, and even has its own skill tree. A horse skill tree! If that isn't awesome, I don't know what is. As a loot junkie, horse customization may be my favorite aspect of the new expansion.

Because mounted combat is so integral to Riders of Rohan, the landmass has expanded to let the player explore on their trusty steed. The land is at least twice the size of their second largest expansion map, so don't expect to see it all in a couple hours. Turbine has also included mead halls in all the towns that are unique and related to the thane of each town. In addition to atmospheric storytelling, Turbine mentioned a deep quest line that involved meeting up with Gandalf and Treebeard at some point during your adventure. There's a lot of exploring to do in Rohan; just make sure you don't miss anything.

Riders of Rohan is more focused on the single-player MMO experience than typical group combat. This is Turbine's fourth expansion and they decided solo players deserved content tailored to them for once. There are no instances or raids in the initial release of Riders of Rohan, but those will come out some time later. Instead, the top level loot is earned through rebuilding a part of one of that towns that has caught fire and burned to the ground. Through a series of daily quests, the player will rebuild homes for people in the town and be rewarded with great loot for being such a good Samaritan. This is the first time I've heard of an MMO expansion focusing on a solo experience, and it’s refreshing to see such a large shift in focus.

While there isn't any new content for low-level players in the expansion, Turbine always keeps an eye on the lower levels and re-balances them via patches whenever things feel out of whack. New players willing to try out Lord of the Rings Online can expect a strong MMO experience drenched in Tolkien lore, free of charge. Even parts of the Rohan expansion, such as the mounted combat and storyline quests, are still available to free-to-play gamers. If you have even the slightest interest in trying out the Lord of the Rings MMO experience, there's nothing stopping you.

I still feel a little bad knowing so little Lord of the Rings lore. It's a rich, vibrant world that I ought to dive into it at some point. Turbine has submerged themselves in Tolkien imagery for the past five years and their dedication and knowledge shined through during my demo. They know what they're talking about, and they love being able to do it. I may not know a lot about Lord of the Rings, but maybe could change that.

Source : gamezone[dot]com