How Multiplayer Should be Done.

From time to time a game developer takes an existing series and totally revamps it. Sometimes the result is a disaster, other times the game emerges with new found life and gameplay value. Call of Duty 4 falls into the latter category. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is quite simply the definition of a well made game. Activision has completely regeared the gameplay style of earlier Call of Duty games and produced a game that has stunning performance in both single and multiplayer.

For starters no game can be called praise worthy without having a solid single player campaign to start from. CoD4 comes through in the single player realm with flying colors. Unlike so many shooters out there CoD avoids falling into the regular issues that plague so many FPS games today. Players will never find themselves running through endless corridors alone outnumbered a thousand to one, nor will they be left feeling helpless in the face of 50 tanks engaged in combat with 50 other tanks. CoD almost always puts you in a squad that requires the participation of you and other crew members to achieve stimulating goals.

Aside from the actual gameplay the campaign story line is also sufficiently complex to engage players. The plot jumps between your typical American gun slinging marine corps and a band of special ops British guys who have the moral integrity of a gun wielding monkey. The swaping between the two groups with their different play styles ensures that no gamer will ever have time to become bored.

In addition to playing as either a British or American ground soldier the game breaks things up occasionally by allowing you to man a helicopter gun, shoot a cannon of an airplane, and even go deep behind enemy lines as a sniper to assassinate an evil Russian guy. Really, who hasn’t wanted to play out a hit man style scene that didn’t completely suck?

In all, CoD’s single player alone is something that Activision could have hung its hat on, but they didn’t stop there. The multiplayer is where the game really shines.

From the first moment i entered an Xbox live CoD matchmaking server i could tell I was truly going to enjoy the game. No more would I wait 15 minutes for a suitable match, the server had me paired into a game within seconds. Halo 3 has a long way to go before it comes anywhere near the speed of CoDs matching.

First impresions aside, the further a player progresses into online play the more hooked they become. At first its all about the deathmatch, but soon players are unlocking new weapons and attachments that correspond to level (and in theory skill as well). Stage layouts are learned quickly and before long players progress into more tactical games that press their skills to the brink. There is so much more depth than the simple deathmatch and CTF gametypes of most shooters, its hard to describe the endless gameplay potential in CoD’s online play.

Players do not need to take my word for the greatness of CoD, its awards and achievements speak for themselves. Recently the game received awards for best overall game of the year and outstanding achievement in online gameplay from the 11th annual Interactive Achievement Awards. On top of the many game of the year awards CoD4 has received, last month the game even outdid Halo as the most played game on Xbox live. Halo has since regained the title, but when you consider CoD4 is multiplatform and PC based the number of people realizing that this game is so much better than any shooter out there is incredible.

The replay value and RPG style online gameplay of this game are sure to make it a favorite of many gamers far into the future. If you haven’t bought CoD already, you should. People are going to playing it for a good while.

~Skyler Dowling

Electronic Arts’ purchases are a two way street

The news that BioWare and Pandemic studios were both recently acquired by Electronic Arts is a big deal to gamers out there. If it isn’t to you, I question why you are reading this.

Either way, this is a key moment for the future of the videogame industry. Whether that future will be good or bad is debatable.

EA’s acquisitions of two young and promising development companies is likely a response to the merging of Activision and Vivendi Games to form a new powerhouse in Activision Blizzard. What made the moves different is Activision Blizzard was a true merger, EA simply bought intellectual property.

BioWare, the creators of Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Pandemic, the team behind Mercenaries, Destroy All Humans, and Star Wars Battlefront, both have some major projects that they are working on. EA now owns the rights to publish and make profit from future games like Mercenaries 2, Saboteur, and Jade Empire 2. They now have the rights to amazing intellectual property, and two of the best developers in the business.

Worse yet, EA also has the ability to control what BioWare and Pandemic create. Half of the reason these two studios have come to prominence is due to their innovation. If Electronic Arts decides to stifle those creative forces, they may have just wasted their money.

We see EA’s in house studios regurgatate its sports games every year (Madden only sees significant changes every 4 years or so). The Burnout series has started to, well, burn out. EA Sports Big has produced sequel after sequel, with the quality of the games deteriorating over time. Not to mention the Medal of Honor series, which has fallen to superior WWII shooters in Brothers in Arms and Call of Duty, both made by rival companies.

However, there are times where EA has helped those who produce unique experiences share them with the world. Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath was a fantastic, quirky and creative game without a publisher until EA stepped in last second to put the game out on the original Xbox. The Orange Box would have never made its way to the PS3 without EA. Crysis took the PC gaming world by storm, with much due to EA for publishing a game that has such insane hardware demands.

This is where the line is drawn. Does EA force it’s newest development teams to create endless sequels to Mass Effect and Mercenaries, therefore running those series in to the ground much like Burnout? Does EA step back and let BioWare and Pandemic do their thing and just be there to distribute it to a mass audience?

Say what you will about Electronic Arts and their business ethics, but the only way to get the most out of Pandemic and BioWare is to be their publisher, not their developer.

- Drew Quandt | Online Editor

High Definition Television Breakdown

The new wave of console gaming systems has added a new, and ultimately necessary, tool to the video game player’s already lengthy list of expensive accessories. High definition televisions have gained impressive popularity within the last year largely because of improved availability of high definition programming, falling television prices and the stunning graphics provided by next gen console games.

People tend to be a bit scared when they go to buy a high definition television because there are several different kinds with labels that lack any sort of explanation for comparative quality. On top of that it seems like every salesman working in an electronics department anywhere in South Dakota failed out of high school 30 or more years ago. This post is created largely in disgust that I actually heard the words “720p resolution is the same as 1080i resolution” come out of a salesman’s mouth.

Perhaps the quality of the image in his local news show was nearly identical with both resolutions – but when it comes to gaming the difference in the two types – and thereby there performance under video game stress is similar but not “the same.”There are basically 3 major types of high definition resolutions: 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. The Native resolution on a 720p television (the actual number of pixels displayed) is 1,280 x 720 the 720 in 720p standing for the number of vertical lines of resolution. Similarly both 1080i and 1080p televisions have a pixel resolution of 1,920×1,080. The difference in “p” and “i” resolutions is where thing get a little more complicated. The “p” stands for progressive scan, televisions with this capability refresh each line of resolution from top to bottom every time the frame is refreshed. The “i” denotes interlaced refreshing. With interlaced refreshing only every other line is refreshed at the beginning of a refresh cycle, the remaining lines are refreshed in the next pass. 720p and 1080p televisions are known for their preservation of motion over “i” televisions due to their complete frame refreshing each refresh period.

With all that technical jargon out of the way its important to note that resolution when comparing high definition televisions is not generally recognized as the most important quality. According to CNET reviews contrast ratio (difference between lightest light and darkest dark) is the most important quality of televisions once a high definition resolution is achieved. Resolution is certainly somewhat important, but do not get tricked into buying a 1080p television with a poor contrast ratio.

~Skyler Dowling

Blizzard Tainted by Huge Profits

Long has Blizzard Entertainment been the premier developer of PC games. Blizzard has been responsible for many great titles including Starcraft, Diablo, and the infamous World of Warcraft. Throughout its history Blizzard has produced games that challenge current computer hardware and press the envelope of creative gaming development.

Recently, however, Blizzard has devoted all of its energies into its cash cow - World of Warcraft. Wow, as the game is affectionately known, boasts nearly 8 million users, each paying a monthly subscription fee of around 15 dollars. With that kind of money rolling in its hard to blame Blizzard for neglecting its former role of producing new and innovative titles.

Obviously Wow will not maintain its current subscription rates indefinitely, and the rumors about Blizzards next developmental project are already circulating around the net. Despite many peoples’ hopes for new titles that focus on stepping away from blizzards current obsession with Massively Multiplayer Online Games that require a monthly subscription, it appears Blizzard will be developing another MMO title. Recently the World of Warcraft forums displayed a blizzard post that announced the new job postings the company had were intended to fill positions needed for the development of a new “unannounced” next-gen MMO.

Blizzard has found its niche in massive online games, and as long as astronomical numbers of people continue to play it seems unlikely Blizzard is going to provide gamers with the groundbreaking titles they crave.

~Skyler Dowling

Pac-Man Falls to Capitalism

Yesterday I was feeling a bit bored and certainly not up to doing any homework, so I logged onto Facebook to play one of the greatest games ever created – Pac-Man.

I scroll down the application list and – what is this?!?! – The Pac-Man application has been replaced by U-arcade or some such nonsense.

There is a message from the application creators that can be read once the “arcade” is opened up. Basically it sounds like Bandai/Namco, the company that owns Pac-Man, gave the application creators 24 hours to remove it from Facebook.

Pac-Man is closing on 30 years old; it is about time Namco realizes the game is too much a part of public domain to be regulated so obsessively.

Practically every kid who has taken a programming class has made some sort of Pac-Men emulator, the game is no longer a marvel of human ingenuity, it is a simple game that people like to pass the time with.

Namco should be happy websites like Facebook support their game, it provides free advertising for Namco’s Pac-Man games designed for consoles like the Gamecube. . No one is going to go spend money on an original Pac-Man title when there are so many knock offs on the market. Allowing third parties to use their signature game will only bring acclaim to Namco’s image and boost sales of new Pac-Man titles.

Pac-Man is an American icon, no one wants to see him slip into oblivion, but if Namco continues to try pulling profit out of a 27-year-old game indefinitely people are going to stop playing it altogether. Then Bandai/Namco will really have trouble saving its failing image.

~Skyler Dowling

Another Sequel?

In the video game world there is always one game that everyone wants to own. Every console has had a groundbreaking game somewhere in its past. The Atari had Pong, original Nintendo (NES) had Super Mario Brothers, Nintendo 64 had Goldeneye and the Zelda games, and the list continues all the way up to the next generation consoles. Until recently most would have agreed that no next-gen system had any game to hang its hat on. Then Halo 3 hit the market and everyone went crazy buying it up with proclamations of the greatest game ever made.

Halo 3 is not the game players need to look for to define the Xbox 360 in the history books; it is hardly different from any of the older versions and lacks the groundbreaking innovation that great games of the past displayed.

That is not to say Halo 3 is a bad game. It posses a finely tuned balance that Halo one and two lacked, but you cannot make a great game just by creating a better version of an old one The older version of a tuned game is clearly the innovative one. “Tomorrow Never Dies” for Nintendo 64 had far superior mechanics and graphics than “Goldeneye”, but everyone knows (well maybe not everyone…) “Goldeneye” was the better of the two.

Like so many areas of entertainment, video games are falling into a dangerous cycle of repetitive sequel production. Game developers fear branching out and trying new game production techniques for fear of creating an unmarketable product. Gamers are left with games that repeat themselves over and over. Seriously, Halo 3 uses some of the same maps that halo and two had (Blood Gulch or Lockout anyone??). Where is the innovation? Where is the originality that comes with game production? It is a sad day when the only thing to look forward to is ANOTHER sequel to an ancient game.

If Xbox live matches me three times in a row with slayer on Guardian again there might be trouble. I am ready for a new game that blows my mind without building on something I have seen or played before.

- Skyler Dowling