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Last time I’ll mention the piracy thing (for the forseable future.)

EA, of all people, has absolutely no excuse for not having their own digital delivery system up and running. Shit, that medium-sized developers aren’t doing this themselves is a fucking travesty as far as I’m concerned. Valve’s given everyone the ability to make their own Steam, if you’ll recall. It’d just take an extra guy to get it up and running, I’d imagine.

Often retailers (and even renters,) will break street dates. When this happens, retailers who haven’t broken the date contact the publisher, and say “So and so broke the date. Check it, because we’re going to as well. We can’t afford to lose all of our sales to them, because their math says they’ll come out ahead by breaking the rules.” The distributer/publisher then checks to confirm the story, and if this is true, they give the okay for everyone else to break the date as well (and often punish the initial violator.)

I just can’t be convinced that EA can’t publish games online. They’re a publisher. It’s what they’re supposed to do. What am I missing here? Hell, Microsoft and Sony should be doing this. The moment the ‘download date’ was proven broken, EA should have had Spore online on their EA Shop for everyone everywhere to download. That headline would’ve dwarfed the news about the cracked version available online. “Why bother pirating it,” gamers would ask “when I’ll probably end up buying it anyway? Go ahead and save the re-download time by buying it the first time, and have my friends already in my gamer list for auto-downloadig of their creatures.” Besides, I’m betting Valve games have a much lower rate of piracy than most PC games, and gamers are (by far and large) okay with Steam, now that the kinks have been worked out for a few years. And I’ve heared nothing but good things about Direct2Drive. Though, honestly, developers should be doing this for themselves.

I just can’t feel overly sorry for a developer getting hurt by a publisher forcing them to put anti-piracy tools in their game. It’s the bed of their own making, really. Last post I mentioned gamers downloading shareware off of BBS’; the original digital distribution. Well, it’s 2008 and developer distribution has never been easier (now bedroom coders don’t even have to physically mail disks to users.) Refusal to make self-publishing a priority, or even demanding the power in the developer-publisher relationship, gets developers treated like the lesser in the relationship, and that’s just a lessong they need to learn. I mean, Valve? They get it. If another developer can’t prioritize their publishing deals, then let them falter, and let them fail.

Though, the first person to use Steamworks to create an online publisher? That person will make some serious money.

Okay, done with that topic for the foreseeable future, enough armchair-CEOing over Riccitelo. Next up? MMO payment plans! Yay!

So, days before Spore hit store shelves, with its controversial DRM, it’s been cracked. Whoops.

To continue to harp on a previous point of mine, the Games Industry needs to figure out how to better commodify their art (that being ‘interaction’.) Gamers, moreso than any other group of media consumers, are technologically savvy. TV, film, music… Every other group’s lower savvy presents, relatively, a higher collective barrier for its consumers to partake in piracy and the likes. Gamers? We STARTED this shit by downloading shareware off of BBS’. Torrents are as easy as a TV remote, p2p is laughable, and even newsgroups are child’s play, to be honest. If you want to stop gamers from pirating your product, then you have to figure out a way to make games impiratable, (yes, I just created a word (at least in the English language.)) Good luck with that.

On the other hand, consider how many gamers have heard about Spore’s DRM and will now say “Eh, I’ll just pirate it.” I mean, the online component of downloading animals can be ‘gotten around’ by just downloading the thumbnails of pals’ creations anyway. It’s silly, how developers insist on shooting themselves in the foot like this.

Okay, there is no “skate. club,” but there should be.

I feel the need to preface this by saying that I loved the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games. LOVED. Of course, being as I loved them, I didn’t care for THUG, and didn’t play THAW or Project 8. Pointing out my love of THPS (and rebuke of its later iterations) is required because I feel like I’m cheating on it’s spirit by enjoying the skate. demo so much.

The game by EA Black Box (Black Box Games) has a demo on Xbox Live. I was impressed that someone, even EA, would challenge Tony Hawk for this crown. I was even more impressed by the fact that this game may just do it. I think the new control method presented in Skate is far more intuitive. While it has some problems, it seems likely that they will disappear with more time playing the game, like timing exactly when I should stop pushing and prepare for my ollie, or occasionally tweaking my board doesn’t go where I expect it leaving me feeling like I’m button-mashing.

What I loved was the presentation of the game; you’re a new guy learning to skate at the skate park, and that the entire purpose is to put together your own tape. Even the gameplay camera seemed to be through the lens of a viewfinder, though that would’ve worked better if it were explicitely stated. Maybe establishing a ‘friend’ carrying the camera and speaking to you, shouting words of encouragement/mock as he skates behind you, recording and instructing you?

I’m nit picking there, but it comes from the fact that I really enjoyed that in-game tutors explain things in mostly in-game terms. They tell you why the given instructions work as a skater, in addition to explaining how it works on an Xbox controller. I enjoyed it so much I think they could’ve taken it a bit farther and not had the in-game tutors explain how to manipulate the controllers at all, rather solely using in-game explanations like “put pressure on the back of your board, and then pull up quickly, causing the board to go airborne.”

When they introduced a new skater, a short “In your face! I drink Mountain Dew and eat Doritos!” style clip is shown, and while I didn’t mind a small clip to show him skating (it could’ve been used to add character,) I do think they squandered a tiny bit of goodwill by taking it overboard. Showcasing that skater’s board brand surprised me, his wheel brand puzzled me, but his shoe brand? Instantly annoyed me. Watch any skate show and they’ll occasionally mention who the guy’s skating with, but his shoes? Come on, we’ll never hear Sal Masekela say “Those Nikes are really holding him back this year!”

The tape editor that lets you creat your own ‘skate tape’ is a great thing, even if it isn’t what I’d call the most user-friendly thing in the world. More than once I found myself confused as to what the hell button I had just pushed, but I’d imagine most problems with it would be cleared up simply by spending more with it. I love that making tapes is apparently “what it’s all about,” but I do have one major complaint against it. There is no movable camera; you’re able to cycle through a few fixed views, and this hurts the feature. I’m not sure if the decision to not include free-range was by design (nah,) or technical (my guess, they were running out of time,) but I think the decision was wrong. In the real world tapes are often not only about kick-ass tricks you pull in crazy-ass locations, but about the way you show them to people. A movable camera is truly missed.

Overall I was very impressed. The new control scheme is exactly what was needed in a skateboarding game and they pulled it off (largely) just how you’d imagine it would work. Sure it’s not easy, but it shouldn’t be easy. It’s challenging in a correctly-fun way. In fact, I’ll go so far as to call it the Guitar Hero of skateboarding. Skate was built from the ground-up to to emulate skating as best possible with a controller, rather than being a video game first with a skating context added later. Proving Ground may have the big name behind it, but that doesn’t guarantee anything after playing this demo.

If this game were not published by EA, I would be buying it on the demo alone. Yes, I’m one of those people who sticks to a boycott. I suppose it’s time I reevaluate my years-old position as I already know I’ll be buying Spore… I mean, we haven’t had any more EA Spouse-ish stories for some time… Though, EA were dicks about removing that from their Wikipedia page…