Xbox Originals

*sigh*

 Guys, what are you doing?

Look, I’m a PM, I understand that things get cut and you don’t always get to produce what you’d ideally like to produce.  That’s the reality of the situation.  I’m okay with the producer’s logo being a little choppy on the way in.  But if you’re essentially licensing out back catalog IP, is it really that much work to disable menu options that will cause the game to crash?  What if Word shipped with a big red toggle button on the ribbon that said “More Magic” on it. 

Do you really want to field all those calls with the answer that the player is just ’supposed to know’ not to push those buttons.  That’s not a good experience story.  In fact, it’s such a fucking terrible experience that it may threaten the viability of the platform.  I already have way, way too many awesome games coming out right now, I can wait until the mid-winter slump for my third copy of Psychonauts.  Go fix it. 

Even More Digital Delivery

Steam, I still love you, but we’re moving into an open relationship.

After replacing the misbehaving video card in my frankenstein-esque laptop (Replaced the keyboard 3 times, case fan twice, hard drive, batteries, and now the graphics card), I decided to celebrate with a purchase from the bargain bin (Evil Genius, which then proceeded to eat my weekend. I’m a sucker for a short fat guy with a monocle). Having firmly planted myself on the side of the people who make the things I love, I absolutely cannot stand going to GameStop/EB Games/The Den of Despair. If I’m forced to due to exclusive packages, etc., I will always buy games new, even if they cost more, so as to support the publisher and developer. Gamestop’s draconian policies around pre-ordering and the fact that their business model of making massive profits on the secondary market at the expense of the people who actually are responsible for the content they sell makes digital delivery all the more appealing. Unfortunately these same retailers have a lot of power to essentially extort publishers by threatening not to stock their games, or to carry less copies when the publishers try to work around them via the digital route. One gets the impression that there’s a lot of cloak and dagger going on between publishers and retailers.

At any rate, I’ve already purchased every game Steam offers I have any interest in with a metacritic rating above 70. This has led me to Warcry. The deal is similar to Steam, only instead of a client, you download the game installer manually (and unless you have a download manager, potentially multiple times, as browsers don’t like massive file downloads via http). The good side of things is that once you install the game and validate your account with the installation, you’re done, the game acts just like the retail copy does, and no further DRM is in place.

In other news, Microsoft has announced that it’s going to add a new digital delivery service to compliment Xbox Live Arcade. The service entitled “Xbox Originals” will allow players to download through Xbox Live games for the classic Xbox including Psychonauts, Crimson Skies, Fable, and the original Halo (Maybe not as good as Nintendo’s back catalog, but I’ll take it). The service will kick off December 4th.

Looks like I’ll be buying my third copy of Psychonauts. Tim Schaefer must be making matresses out of my money.

Erik Wolpaw

When I played Psychonauts, I knew that the writers for that game were some of my favorite people. After playing Portal, I decided that perhaps Valve had some writers who were actually my favorite people, and I just wasn’t aware of that fact at the time I played Psychonauts. Now I’ve discovered that in fact a union of the two above groups exists and I can stop getting all emotional about it and crying in the bathroom at work every half hour. Seriously.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an interview with Erik Wolpaw, who is clearly sane in the same way that John Cleese is. When I eventually decide that I have manacled to the evicerating chain of corporate too long and start my own company, you have a standing job offer from me.

P.S. Ben Croshaw, you’re welcome to join too. I hope you two will play nice together in my future nation-state of gaming.

P.P.S.  If you were under the impression that perhaps you, dear reader, were my favorite person, or that I “Like you the best”, you’re wrong.