Time-Exclusive Patches Suck!

Do you play Call of Duty 4 on the PC? Earlier this week, Nvidia was granted a 24 hour exclusive on the recent 1.6 patch for CoD4, which includes 4 new maps that the console players had to cough up money for. The reason conjured up was that Nvidia was sponsoring the new maps. Well, normally it wouldn't matter all that much because this being the age of the Internet and all, once something appears on the net everyone else will just grab it and distribute it on their site as well - nothing is truly exclusive.

So this is all well and good for your Call of Duty 4 players, right? Well, no. If you purchased the game digitally, you're fucked. Steam and Direct2Drive customers have to wait for their vendors to be allowed to release their versions of the patch. As of this writing, Steam still does not have the patch released.

Now, doesn't this really defeat the purpose of releasing the patch in the first place? Isn't the basic function of a patch to make a player's experience of the game better, not worse? Instead of playing a couple rounds of multiplayer with my buddies, all of whom have version 1.6, I'm stuck waiting around watching the time pass by while I'm not shooting virtual people in the face.

If sponsored patches are the way of the future, then I'd be very worried as a digital distribution customer. Why should I be forced to wait for something that everyone else gets immediately? Didn't I also pay hard earned money for the same game that retail buyers enjoy? I think I should be entitled to the same rights to a patch as they are.

Echochrome and a little Metal Gear Online

I tried out the Echochrome demo that is available for download on PSN today. Needless to say, I am impressed with the concept of the game, but not so much with how the controls are set up. For those who don't know, Echochrome is a puzzle game based on the physics of impossible objects where the goal of each level is to guide a walking figure through the impossible object to collect its shadows. In a similar fashion to Super Monkey Ball, you don't control the figure but instead you rotate the stage (though it can be argued that you directly control the camera and not the stage).



As I said earlier, the concept for the game is quite original and intriguing. However I have to complain about the controls. You're given two ways to move the stage/camera - you can either just use the left analog stick for slow precise movements or hold the L1 button and use the Sixaxis/DualShock 3's motion sensing controls. To put it plainly, the motion based controls don't work at all and using the analog to move is painfully slow causing the player to continually pause the figure's movement so you can rotate the camera to where you want it to be. It would have been nice if they gave you an option to turn off motion based controls and map L1 to speed up the analog controls.

In any case, the Echochrome demo is worth checking out. I'm glad there are still developers out there trying something new.



I've been playing a lot of the Metal Gear Online beta since it's release on Friday. It basically feels the same as the MGS3 Subsistence release of MGO and there's not too much to say about it other than that the MGS4 engine looks gorgeous and I'm really enjoying playing MGO again. My only complaint would be that I've only been able to play Team Deathmatch. Once people start losing in TDM they leave the server before the other game types rotate in. I would really like to try out the Capture Missions and Base Missions before the beta ends. Most likely, though, I'll have to wait until MGS4 comes out.

Also, Mario Kart Wii comes out tomorrow. I've played a bit of the Japanese release and was quite impressed by how well the Wii Wheel felt with the game. Battle Mode online is gonna rock. I can't wait!

Quick Time Events In Games

I don't know about you, but I have never liked the notion of the quick time event in video games.

For those of you that do not know, a quick time event in a video game is a sequence in the game where you have to press a specific button, of which is normally displayed on screen, within a given amount of time. Press the correct button in time and you are allowed to advance; failure results in something bad.

To my knowledge, the quick time event (QTE) first appeared in the game Dragon's Lair, a widely popular title even to this day. I never understood the appeal to that game. It's QTEs had you guessing every step of the game since it didn't have any onscreen display of what button to press. More recent games like Shenmue, God of War, Drake's Fortune, and Heavenly Sword make use of the QTE in a less stricter fashion than Dragon's Lair - namely you don't instantly die when you press the wrong button.

Now, QTEs have never bothered me this much before but thanks to the efforts of the huge success that God of War was, QTEs are finding their way into more and more games. God of War itself had pretty relaxed QTEs, giving you enough time to understand that a QTE is happening and plenty of time to react accordingly. God of War also has the benefit of giving the player a reward of some sort for successful completion. Heavenly Sword, however, is a different story and the reason why I'm writing this post.

I felt that Heavenly Sword's QTEs were brutal and felt like they were tacked on to add some kind of depth to the gameplay. First, they didn't allow enough time for me to react after first popping up onscreen. Secondly, when you failed the QTE the punishment usually screwed me out of the time I just spent getting up to that QTE section. Namely, when you failed during a boss fight, the boss would regain their entire health bar. The whole damn bar! Now that's just wrong and needlessly frustrating. If this is the way that QTEs are gonna be in games, I'm just going to avoid any game that has them.

So to any developer out there that is thinking about putting quick time events in their game, please do it right. Don't make it so frustrating and punishing to the player. Make them fun and rewarding - not just to be there as a means to an end.

Finally, True HD

Things do look better in 1080p. Mass Effect looks gorgeous.