Mongo Nation

Can MAG’s ass cash the checks that Sony’s been writing with their mouths?

By Jeremy Azevedo

Modern Warfare junkies are going to balk at this, but having played MAG (Massive Action Game) for myself at CES last week, I think I can safely say that it’s the closest thing to actually being in a war that anyone’s ever experienced in a video game.

The one problem with this, is that being in an actual war most likely isn’t half as fun as the stylized gameplay of Modern Warfare 2 and Killzone 2 would lead you to believe.

Obviously the big selling point for MAG is it’s 256 player games. I can’t really comment on how the servers will keep up or how difficult it will be to populate matches, but in my limited experience everything ran smoothly enough. There was one point in which I got stuck in the lobby fiddling around with my loadouts for a couple of minutes, but the matches themselves are pretty long so it’s not too big of a hindrance.

In order to keep 256 players from running around like a bunch or disorganized assholes, individual soldiers are broken up into teams of 8. There are, in turn, 8 such squads in each platoon, so that’s 4 platoons of 8 squads of 8 soldiers per side. Each army has designated squad and platoon leaders for each group, with an “Officer in Charge” calling the shots and setting objectives for the entire group. Just like in real life, if your OIC is some kind of yahoo then you’re all pretty much f**ked. I believe there’s probably some sort of hierarchy as to who can be a leader and why, so you better make sure your shit is together if you want to rise through the ranks.

In addition to all this organizational crap and objective based squad combat, you’ve also got multiple character classes and weapon load outs to choose from, all of which are pretty fluid. So far as I can tell, if you want to be a sniper/bomber/medic/janitor, then nobody’s stopping you. There’re plenty of skills, vehicles and airstrikes to call upon as well, so things keep pretty interesting, if nothing else. There’s almost too much stuff going on, to be honest. In one game, some dick called an airstrike on my ass every time I left my stupid base, which isn’t exactly my idea of a good time.

The control setup is where things really started slipping for me. Hopefully the controller is customizable, because mine was programmed to shoot and aim with the inner bumpers instead of the outer triggers like every other shooter in the known universe. The first few times I tried to shoot somebody point-blank with a shotgun, I instead found myself brandishing a goddamn medical syringe or some such bullshit at them. Very frustrating. Also, when you’re sniping, there is an assfull of kick every time you shoot, no lock on and no real visual reference when you score a hit. Worst of all, you have to click in the left stick to run, but half the time your guy just stops running all of the sudden for no reason. This is something I don’t understand about modern video games: I always want to run. Make that the default. In older games, you used to have to click the thumbstick to walk, not to run. Stop making me walk everywhere, assholes, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people are f**king shooting at me.

Not to put to fine a point on it, because I think there’s enormous potential to MAG, but at the end of the day, it’s like playing the free online shooter Combat Arms, only you have to pay for this and some jackoff is yelling at you telling you to do stuff all the time when you just want to get out there in the shit and pwn some n00bs. As a tech demo, it’s great. If they make it work, maybe we can repurpose the technology for Left For Dead 3 and have 200 player-controlled zombies running around or something awesome like that. But MAG is just overly complicated and unpolished IMHO. I’ll take my shooters with wisecracking protagonists and alien laser beams and shit like that. F**k teamwork, I like to be the star of my own pre-adolescent power-fantasies, thank you very much.

By Jeremy Azevedo

Last night Sony hosted a preview event for the majority of their exclusive triple-A titles, including God of War 3 and Heavy Rain. Having not had the pleasure of getting my hands on Heavy Rain at this year’s E3, I was eager to drink as many free drinks as I could.

Oh, and also to play the game if at all possible.

The first title I grabbed was Socom: Fireteam Bravo 3 for the PSP. I know people always like to use the backhanded compliment that “this game looks really good… for a handheld game”. Truth is, the game just looks good. It’s a little hard to get used to the controls, which are very advanced (again, “for a handheld system”). But once you get the hang of it, it’s like playing a full-featured FPS on your PSP, an experience that I’m most certainly lacking on my DS. More of this sort of thing might influence me to finally buy Sony’s competing handheld device.

We checked out Fat Princess next, which was a bright and colorful affair, with lots of blood and force-feeding. I didn’t know much about this game other than that you had to feed cake to your princess, making her heavier so invading armies were unable to make off with her without a struggle. In practice, it’s a very well done tower defense game with different character classes, tons of different strategies that can be implemented and the added bonus of being borderline offensive to hardcore feminists. Win! Read the rest of this entry →

CraveOnline’s gonzo journalists hit the E For All videogame exhibition.

Fellow editor Dante Maddox and I spent around 5 hours at the E For All exhibition today, checking out some of the newest games and weirdest nerds the industry has to offer. Following is a play-by-play of the day’s events…

A typical scene at the videogame nerd exposition.

12:00 – We check in, and somehow I don’t have a pass waiting for me. To compound the problem, I forgot to bring business cards with me. Dante name-drops our contact and I have to show them articles I wrote on CraveOnline to prove that I am a member of the press and not just some punk kid, which is a subset that I also belong to. Somehow this gets straightened out and we head for the first booth we see.

We play a little bit of “Sword of the New World” a pretty cool MMORPG developed in part by Izumi Hamamoto, who also developed the Shadow Heart series. There is a “booth babe” there dressed as a pirate, but she claims to be a “musketeer”, whatever that is. Dante is afraid to have a picture taken with her, so I take a picture of her by herself.

Believe it or not, this was one of the only costumed booth babes in the joint.

Someone tries to get me to come up with a pose for the model that no one else has thought of for some contest but I can’t think of anything that isn’t NSFW and don’t want to look like a creep so I make a lame excuse and run away.

1:00 – We play Mario Galaxy, and it is awesome. It may be the coolest platformer ever. The controls are amazing, and even though platforming games are sort of a relic these days, all that may change when this game comes out. I notice that Nintendo has hired about 1,000 hot babes in matching outfits to work their booth. Not one of them has probably ever played a video game before.

Nintendo had more jailbait in mini skirts than an R Kelly concert.

We also have a look at Fire Emblem, which was vaguely gay but Dante seemed to enjoy pretending to like it so that he would have an excuse to talk to an engaged 19-year-old booth babe for like 10 minutes. I had a go at Battalion Wars, which is like a kiddy war game but sort of bitchen nevertheless.

Dante: “So, do you come here often?” Hot girl: “Talking, like, costs extra, okay?”

Dante and I wander the floor checking out all the booths and taking pictures. I am taken aback by how few people are here compared to my expectations. Dante thinks that it is because the tickets are so expensive, but I counter that videogames have become somewhat of a privileged media, with the fans sporting some pretty deep pockets, so I’m not sure that this is the case.

2:00 – Barry Caudill from 2K games explains to us why Civilization is awesome on consoles. We play test it and I have to agree. I’m not much of a computer gamer, but I found that the strategy elements and weird humor made for a surprisingly fun game.

A couple of freaks dressed up like historical figures to promote “Civilization”.

The first real tragedy of the day comes when we discover that the Gordon Birch brewery is closed, and there is not one place serving alcohol in the entire establishment. A somber lunch period follows, in which we masticate overcooked burgers and I try to drink a bottle of water that is frozen almost completely solid.

Delicious convention center food.

Dante wanders off to check out some hentai or something, and I learn to play the piano in like 15 minutes with this rad Piano Wizard game. Whatever company makes Piano Wizard obviously didn’t get the memo about having hot chicks at every booth, and a 50-year-old dude hovers over my shoulder as I rock some Mozart and “Piano Man” by Billy Joel. I didn’t pick the songs, by the way.

The Guitar Hero of the home schooled, puritanical Christian demographic.

3:00 - Just in case there was any doubt, I can assure you that Guitar Hero 3 is amazing on every console. The battle mode in which you can mess up the other player by cutting their strings and flipping their guitar is a scream. I pick Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” to battle some chick that thinks she’s hot stuff. She tells me that she was born the year that song came out, which makes me feel old. But that doesn’t stop me from kicking the shit out of her at the game. Next, a dude that not only plays better than me, but also does so on expert mode emasculates me. (Sigh)

Some overweight otaku with a pac-man head shredding at Guitar Hero 3.

Dante is getting his ass handed to him at Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, and every other FPS in the universe. I wander off to the Nintendo shooting gallery, which is more my speed. I play Ghost Squad, Medal of Honor Heroes 2 and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. I wonder to myself why the zapper ever went away, as I am having a great time blasting away zombies, Nazis and terrorists like there is no tomorrow. Twenty minutes later, my arms get tired, reminding me of the obvious answer to my question.

A familiar sight throughout the day.

I wander the floor taking pictures. Suddenly, a marching band comes out of nowhere, followed by a nerd parade! At least two-dozen cosplayers stand at attention, begging for my merciless criticism, which will follow in a separate article, I promise. It deserves it’s own piece, really and truly.

Bonus points if you can guess the genders of any of these kids!

4:00 – Dante interviews Abe Zarran, who works for a company that promotes pro gamers as if they were professional athletes. I wonder to myself if the general public will ever accept gaming as a viable sport. I am almost certain that this will never happen, but I smile and nod anyway.

These dudes are like the kings of the nerds, apparently.

We go to get coffee and I hallucinate that a table full of Nintendo booth babes are smiling at me. I think that I hear robot rap group 8-bit playing somewhere, so we head back inside and sure enough, they are up in some kind of tower inciting game nerds to “suck their robot dicks”. Which is, of course, awesome. Then we steal all the magazines that we can carry and head back to the office. On the way back, we discuss religion and politics for some reason.

8-Bit, rocking the latest in hipster robot fashion.

Check back here tomorrow for more info on the E For All videogame nerd conference!

What does Sony have in store for the coming months?

So far this month we’ve seen the release of three of Sony’s much-touted PS3 exclusives, Lair, Warhawk and Heavenly Sword. Unfortunately, reviews for these games have ranged from “nearly great” (Heavenly Sword) and “pretty good” (Warhawk), on down to “just awful” (Lair).

Heavenly Sword: Like God of War, only with more tits and less personality.

If Sony is going to have a chance of making a comeback in the current console market, they are going to have to have the kind of exclusives that blow the competition out of the water. It’s going to take the next GTA or Metal Gear to justify the added expense of a PS3, and I’m not talking about a sequel. I mean a new intellectual property that will have widespread, worldwide appeal.

PS3 is in desperate need of another pop culture phenomenon like it had in the golden days of GTA: Vice City

It certainly doesn’t help matters that Sony has lost exclusivity for such high profile titles as Beautiful Katamari, GTA IV, Virtua Fighter 3 and Assassin’s Creed. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a sliver lining out there for PS3 owners and Sony stockholders. Dozens of hotly anticipated exclusive titles are scheduled for release on PS3 over the course of the coming year.

Oh no! Sony fails to retain exclusivity of Beautiful Katamari, now set to come out only on XBOX 360!

First let’s start with the obvious ones. Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII. If any two games are going to get PS2 owners to make the jump to next-gen, it’ll be these. Strangely though, there are surprisingly few RPGs in development for the PS3 other than FFXIII and Folklore (formerly known as Monster Kingdom). Let’s hope that this core Playstation user base is not overlooked, as RPGs have always been one of Sony’s strong suits.

FFXIII finally ditches the effeminate male lead in exchange for an ACTUAL FEMALE, seen here wielding a reasonably sized sword.

A few other familiar franchises will be making a return as well, with Ratchet & Clank, Devil May Cry, Tekken, Wipeout and even God Of War making return appearances. Anybody that played the previous God Of War games would probably tell you that they were among the best they’ve ever played. Just imagine that experience accelerated by the PS3’s accelerated processing power, and it’s pretty easy to see why someone might be excited about that.

Is Kratos the new Mario for a bloodthirsty, sadistic generation of murder-crazed children?

Sports and racing fans will have something to look forward to as well. Grand Turismo and Ridge Racer will have new installments coming exclusively to the PS3. NBA 08 and MLB 08: The Big Show will also be exclusive. Sports fans make up another core audience of Playstation players, so it will benefit Sony greatly if these titles become the definitive sports games of the year.

Actual, honest to goodness gameplay pic from Grand Turismo 5. I SHIT YOU NOT.

What about shooters? Sony is going to have its work cut out for it facing off against Microsoft’s Halo 3. Sony is prepared with the latest installments of SOCOM, Killzone and Time Crisis (complete with a newly redesigned lightgun!), as well as a new property designed by Sony called The Agency, which is something like an MMO, only with assassins and gunplay instead of elves and magic.

Sony promises that The Agency will be at least this bitchin’, if not more so.

Sony may even have a few tricks up their sleeve that could potentially shake up the industry with a few of their upcoming, brand new exclusives. One of our favorites is Little Big Planet, which allows users to easily create their own platformers and play them online with friends in a sort of online gaming community. Infamous challenges players to take on the role of a budding superhero (think: Unbreakable), deciding whether or not to use their powers for good or for personal gain. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune also looks good with it’s action packed take on the exploration-heavy Tomb Raider formula. Finally, there’s Afrika, a safari sim and The Eye Of Judgment, a camera based game that has you physically acting out your attacks.

How badly do you want to stomp on those little buggers? Not at all? Just me? Okay, suit yourself.

Will any of these exclusives help Sony to take back its long-held throne in the battle for console supremacy? Only time will tell. And if not, hey, at least we’ll be able to play most of ‘em on our XBOX 360s six to eight months later!

Play TV: Because your new PS3 isn’t expensive enough as it is!

In a move that may send shock waves through the gaming console industry, Sony has unveiled a new add-on device for the PS3, dubbed “Play TV”, that will allow users to record live television and store it on the console’s hard drive. The programs can even be transferred wirelessly to the PSP! Finally your dreams of watching hardcore porn on your PSP can become a reality!