Spiderman Arkham Asylum

A new Spiderman game! This looks pretty interesting mainly because it appears to be borrowing a bit from Batman Arkham Asylum, which came out with a lot of critical acclaim last year. Evnthough I'm not a big fan of games that rip off others (Dante's Inferno) this might actually be a good thing since Spiderman has been needing a shot in the arm on the video game front for a few years now.

I'm curious to see what the other two dimensions will be!

Play some games!

Here are some neato games to play while wasting time! Be sure to turn your sound down first if you need to be secretive!

Infectonator
In this game you play as a zombie plague trying to take over the world. Its actually really fun and challenging.

SHIFT
This is a neat platformer where you turn the level upside down to complete the objectives. Cool...shift...on typical gameplay.

Red Remover
You have to remove the red blocks and save the green blocks! Those blocks sure are cute!

That's all for now but I'll put some more up when I find them.

Why preorder a game?

Recently a avid reader and loyal fan of my blog asked me to do a post on video game preorders and why they are such a big deal. This was such a great idea because preordering video games is one of the biggest topics in video game business at the moment.

Preordering a video game essentially guarantees you a copy of that game when it comes out on whatever day it is supposed to arrive. You go into a store and ask to preorder Splinter Cell Conviction for example and then give your name and phone number in order for the store to contact you when the game comes out. The most important thing however is you have to put a deposit down on the game, typically a minimum of $5. You can put any amount you want but you have to put something down. It won't end up costing you anything extra either so for example if you put $5 down today and Splinter Cell comes out on April 14th you will just pay the rest when you pick up the game. Pretty simple.

So why do companies do it? Well there are a few reasons but the most obvious is they want to get you to buy the game and when you commit some money down on it you are giving the company a good idea of your intention. This allows them to monitor sales weeks or months in advance which helps them to know how many games to ship to each store on release days. It also helps the publishers know how well their game will sell and if their marketing is working and how they can improve upon it. While thats important, there is a much more interesting motive behind why they push preorders so much.

Lets use Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as an example. In its first week of sales it brought in $550 million. Now of course they were not all preorders, however we can assume that at least half were, which is not perfect but a pretty safe estimate for our example. At ~$60 for each game we can kind of round the numbers to say roughly 9 million games were sold. If we wanted to assume half were preorders you're looking at about 4.5 million. Now if the deposit is at least $5 you are looking at about $22.5 million in the video game retailers bank accounts BEFORE the game is even released. Now lets consider that MANY people put much more than $5 down on their preorders and some even pay them off completely. Also many, many people put their preorder deposit down many, many months in advance. So the incredibly rough estimate of $22.5 million in just preorder dollars could have in fact been much higher as many people would be putting down more than $5. Now the OTHER factor that makes preorders so lucrative to companies is interest. If a massive video game retailer has even a slight portion of that worldwide $22.5 million pie then that money is in their gigantic preorder bank account making even more money for them and they have done literally nothing whatsoever.

So why should I, as a customer, preorder? Well in order to get people to give up their money months in advance a lot of retailers and publishers offer gifts. They might include in game things you can unlock only by preordering at specific retailers. Another reason is sometimes retailers simply can't keep popular games in stock so if you preorder you WILL get the game so if you need to play the game right away preordering really doesn't have many downsides except you might be out $5 for a few weeks.

In the end there really was chaos!

So the God of War trilogy is sorta kinda "finished" at the end of God of War 3...mostly. I won't spoil anything so here is my quick non spoiler synopsis of the game. Kratos is really angry so he goes on his quest to get his revenge on the greek gods and titans and everyone else that did him wrong.

Overall the game was really fun and a lot of people were big whiners saying the second half isn't as good as the first but they are just big babies because the whole game is equally good. That however is kind of the problem. The game is really just "good", not great or awesome even. They do everything right, such as Kratos being really really angry and theres lot of blood and violence and other things associated with a god of war but thats about it. They didn't really raise the bar much with anything. The graphics were fine but I thought they could do a bit better with the PS3's cpu power and blu ray's storage capabilities (however no installation was a nice touch). The story was good but predictable except for the ending which was a nice end for the series, even though more whiner babies didn't like it. The controls were almost the exact same as the previous games in the series which was nice but again it was already done before and mostly just button mashing. This was fine five years ago but isn't it time for a change up?

In the end God of War was good and I recommend everyone with a PS3 to play it but just don't go expecting anything revolutionary. Its a super high quality game with excellent production values and the game truly knows what it is. The trouble just comes from the developers being too scared to evolve the game from what it used to be and change it with the times. I don't blame them for wanting to give the fans the game they expect but it would have just been nice to play something that felt fresh as opposed to "here we go again!".

My recommendation is to play it, but rent it. Once you finish it you've pretty much done everything with it.

The monster you created has returned... to kill you!

God of War 3 is out and I'm playing it. So far it's pretty good but I think it is supposed to get better a little further in than I currently am.

Cool things so far:
-Kratos is perhaps even more angry this time around if that's even possible?
-Controls are tight and responsive. The quick time events (where you press the button on screen) are better now because they show up on the side of the screen according to where the button on the controller is so you can watch the action better.
-Cool story so far. I'm guessing in addition to killing the greek gods I'll be taking out the titans too since I was just betrayed by them. Kratos gets betrayed by everyone in these games sheesh, trusting guy.
-The sense of scale is incredible. The titans really are gigantic and there have never been any bigger "things" in a video game before really.

Not so cool so far:
-A couple of the larger fights, such as Poseidon were more straight forward than I was expecting which was a little disappointing.
-Graphics are good but I thought they would do a little bit better.

That being said I think it's pretty awesome and I hope that this is a satisfying end for the trilogy.