Apple opens the door for monetized in-game DLC on the iPhone/iTouch

Article by Cory Satermo

(UCC Host)

OPINION—Apple recently revealed the new 3.0 software update for the iPhone, and with it comes a whole slew of new tools for developer to use with their games and apps, one of those tools being the option to charge for in-app content.

Now don’t get me wrong. I do think that developers/publishers should get paid for the content provided, but some of the demonstrations shown at the iPhone 3.0 press conference suggest the same gouging and ‘testing-grounds’ that gamers experienced with the launch of the Xbox Live for the 360 (then again with Wii and PS3).

Take for example Sims 3 coming soon to the iPhone. Electronic Arts demonstrated the option to purchase in-game furniture for a nominal fee.  EA showed purchasing a stereo set for your sims to enjoy that can play music from your iPhone’s library. Wow! Is this reason enough to charge your consumer? Should be free EA! This instantly struck a chord with me. This is the same kind of crap were seeing in Sony’s social service, Home. In Home, everything is a’la carte shopping. Want a T-Shirt? gonna cost yea. Want to buy some new furniture for your virtual home? Yup! Prepare to dish out the dough. Electronic Arts please don’t follow Home’s lead. Everything in Sims 3 should be free, and then four weeks down the road release an update pack (DONT charge for individual items). The game is not even out yet and EA is already dividing up an unfinished project to be ‘nickeled and dimed’ to death. This is absurd. I hate it when gaming companies take advantage of the consumer and no longer release a complete package.

Tomb Raider Legends and Prince and Persia are two recent games that come to mind that intentionally had content lined-up, more so with Tomb Raider because you’re forced to purchase the DLC to get a fulfilling ending. I can understand partially in this example that levels were cut to make the release date, and it’s still better than buying a lame costume or *cough* horse armor.

Now the news is not entirely troubling.  NgMoco, iPhone developer behind such games as Ronlando, has the right idea of charging for additional levels to their already released games in order extend the life of them. Then again, NgMoco is also considering charging for costumes in their Nintendo Dogs clone game for the iPhone.

Basically what I’m trying to say is I hope DLC for the iPhone doesn’t turn out to be a return to the same stupid decisions developers/publishers made when the DLC started on the current home platforms.

Gritty/Gorgeous – Killzone 2 Review

By Matthew Dykstra

(UCC NEWS)

Imagine every other video game as a 2009 Nissan. You like your Nissan, it’s nice. But one day somebody hands you a key to a 2010 Porsche, and you realize just how much driving that Nissan sucked.

Playing Killzone 2 for the first time is a little something like that.

Now that 2008 is out the door, I am pleased to announce that the first competitor for 2009’s coveted Game of the Year award is here. Killzone 2 offers a visually groundbreaking and realistic war experience set against the backdrop of the planet Helghan. From shooting your way through the futuristic inner city ghetto to exploring the outskirts if the planet’s nuclear ravaged desert, Killzone 2 offers the year’s first taste of immersive, brutal and violent warfare.

Setting the bar for themselves at 2005’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, developer Guerrilla Games showed a video of what they had in mind for Sony’s PlayStation 3. Killzone 2’s debut set the internet on fire with speculation about whether or not the team could actually set a new standard for video game console graphics. Four years have passed and the only thing that would have been surprising is if Guerrilla hadn’t delivered on their promise.

Campain for the Ages

Killzone 2 continues the story of the first game. The Interplanetary Strategic Arms (ISA) invade the planet Helghan to prevent the advancement of the evil Helghast forces into neighbouring planets. The Helghast, led by their fascist leader Scholar Visari, are viciously defending their planet at any cost. You play as Sergeant Thomas “Sev” Sevchenko, an ISA soldier tasked with recovering the Helghast’s nuclear weapons as well as arresting Visari. Meant to be a metaphor for the war in Iraq as well as a fictitious retelling of WWII, the story keeps the player interested enough to fight the Helghast all the way through.

But that won’t be what keeps a player’s eyes glued to the screen. The game looks and handles magnificently. It rivals the best shooter games with its intensely beautiful display of shiny explosions and war ravaged cities. Guerrilla triumphs in setting a new industry standard for graphical power on a game system. Each and every bullet is rendered in wonderfully lifelike detail.

Firing them is just as fun. The weaponry is expansive, adding a layer of tact and choice in the players arsenal. Do I want to use the submachine gun to quickly splatter every enemy in the room or am I better off using the electro-gun to shock them all into a coma? Can I use the flame thrower or is the room so small I’d be more likely to set myself on fire? It’s choices like these that make the player think about how they want to proceed and stretch themselves to outwit and outgun Guerrilla’s impressive artificial intelligence.

As if that wasn’t enough, Killzone sounds awesome. The audio track is impressive, making the explosions and gunfire feel like it’s shaking your living room. And I’m sure with the right stereo equipment, it could. The sounds of the battlefield are brought to life in the frenzied combination of loud enemies, thunderous tanks and canon fire. The game is as much fun to watch as it is to listen to.

Things that Suck

Killzone isn’t without it’s flaws. While running and gunning has never been more fun, the action can get congested when your enemies are actually smarter that your allies. The rest of the your ISA squad mates are constantly shot down, forcing you to risk your own neck to save them after they’ve foolishly walked into an enemy bullet. To make things worse, if you’re pinned down but your ally needs you to flip a switch or retrieve some data, you’ll be constantly taunted and berated by choruses of “Sev! Get your ass over here!” or “Sev dammit! Help me out!”

If you thought that dialogue was hard to swallow, the game is filled with it. Your entire team is a bunch of foulmouthed, macho soldiers who walk and talk like a ragtag group of Hollywood clichés. By comparison, the enemy Helghast soldiers actually sound more proper and focused, making you feel like a one man army when you leave your horribly irritating allies to take them on alone. While it’s mostly annoying, sometimes their conversations are laughable in their ridiculousness, setting a lighter tone in the often bleak urban environments.

While those are problems in the game, what’s more bothersome and confusing is what was left out. Killzone 2 suffers from a complete lack of cooperative play or 2-player. You can’t invite a friend over to help you take down some orange-eyed Helghast scum. This is a no brainer for other top shooters like Call of Duty or Halo, so any reason it’s missing here is kind of aggravating.

Online Perfected

Despite not being able to have a friend on the couch next to you, the game does offer a fantastic online multiplayer experience that will keep anybody hooked for long after the story’s credits roll. Gamers from across the globe can team up to fight each other for the online rank of 1st place. While you get used to the mindless waves of enemies in the story mode, facing another person online is a refreshing. frenzied and unexpected battle.

Players are rewarded for their online gusto with points that are used to rank up so that they can be more useful to their team on the net. You can advance from a lowly soldier to an engineer who places turrets or a tactician that plans the troop movements of the entire team. These different classes keep gameplay fresh as well as reward the player with new abilities.

Communication is handled through headset channels so that everyone can coordinate, which is especially useful for staying alive. Responding to an online player saying “Anybody around to heal me?”, I used my medic class to zap him back to life and into the action. He shouted back at me with glee, “Thanks for the revive, baby!” and sauntered off to another firefight. Encounters like this make for a special community experience you can‘t get in the story mode.

Final Thoughts

Killzone 2 is a full shooter experience akin to coming for the meal and staying for the dessert; meaning while most players will shoot through the single-player story in six to eight hours, the online mode will give them a reason to keep the disc in the machine. Despite some dumb allies and a lack of 2-player, Killzone rises above the haze of other shooters to deliver a fun, and engaging story mode as well as a challenging online experience.

With the eerie combination of gritty and gorgeous warfare, Helghan will remain a popular place to blast through enemy lines. Killzone 2 is a sure-fire game of the year contender that shouldn’t be missed.

Rating:

A

Flower Review

Reviewed by Cory Satermo

(UCC Host)

Flower for the Playstation 3 is truly a unique experience that separates itself from the standard notion of what people come to expect with video games, and delivers more of an artful presentation.

Gameplay

The premise behind flower is that you control the flow of the wind in a large field of grass. You start off by leading a single petal from a just-bloomed flower, and push it towards other flowers, in which bloom, and release another petal into your wind-stream. As your flow of petals hits each flower, a musical note is played, and depending on the colour of the flower, the chime is different. Strokes from a harp, pings from a xylophone, keys from a piano, all play together harmoniously when swooping from flower to flower.

Once you have bloomed a certain set of flowers, a scene will occur where an area of the field absent of grass and flowers will then bloom full of life. Once these absent patches are all fulfilled, the stage is over.

There is no game over screen, no way to lose, no on-screen instructions or score points. Flower is designed to not feel like a game at all. Instead Flower is more of an entertaining experience, and achieves this for the most part. It is not till the end when Flower begins to feel more like a video game.

Even the controls are not what one would come to expect. Flower takes advantage of the Playstation 3’s ‘Six-Axis’ controller, where the built-in accelerometers are used to tilt and twist the controller much a like plane’s flight stick, manipulating the direction of the stream of wind. You only have to push one traditional button to speed up the flow of the wind. The control layout works perfectly with flower. You never feel like you have to wrestle with it, or twist and turn it like a maniac. It just works, though when caught in a strong current, it can get a bit chaotic.

Graphics and Sound

One of the first things you’ll notice is that this game is gorgeous, especially in high definition. The visuals really add to the experience. Every blade of grass is rendered independently and sways in the wind, as it should. The environments are fully rich in vivid colour, and your stream of petals flows in the wind is like an extension of a painter’s brush.

The sound and music are just as important to the game’s artfulness. Calm and peaceful music, similar to something one would hear when meditating, plays in the background. In later stages, as the wind current becomes more violent, the music adjusts accordantly.  The beats chimed after hitting each flower coincides with the background music to give a complete musical theme; each stage sounds different.

Presentation

As mentioned before, Flower is not your traditional video game; presentation is key. The usual dialogue and tutorial one expects in the opening segments are absent, and player is left only with a simply diagram displaying the controller and arrows of gestures on how to manipulate it. This means that the player is force to deduct how to play the game for him or herself.  There’s no explanation to what you are supposed to do, or why you’re doing it as just about everything in this game is up for interpretation. Therefore one should expect an initially disjointed experience.

But once you’re in the environment for several minutes, and figure out the game’s purpose, that disjointedness is replaced with a sense of feeling open and free. You’re in control of the flow of the wind, and rarely in a game do you feel such Zen. The whole experience is made to make one at peace, as if one is apart of nature. There are no signs of life, no animals or insects, no human interaction (at least at first), just one gigantic field of grass and flowers.

It is not till the final stages does this experience degrade into a more traditional video game.

Before each stage begins, there are a few short scenes showing an urban city bursting with activity. These scenes don’t make any sense at first, and only when coming to the game’s finale that it does, in which the moral meaning behind the experience changes towards a more interpretive message on today’s society.

Without ruining what that message is, the final stages acts out more as an objective, punishing you for making mistakes. Gone is the feeling of just going with the flow of the wind, and instead the stage becomes more of a tactical game of manipulating the current without losing all your petals. This is where the game falls apart. But the game’s shifting plot twist will leave the player so empowered that one has to finish to restore that initial sense of nature.

Final thoughts…

The later stage’s plot twist puts everything into perspective, and rarely does a game have an underlining meaning. It won’t take you too long to finish, but anyone with a love for art and presentation should definitely try this game. Shortcomings aside, the game really nails what it’s set out to be. Flower is simplistic and peaceful; A treat from a medium that is so often set in artificial challenges and mindless gameplay.

Rating

A-