News:Bioshock trophies, Siren: Blood Curse PSN debut, KotoR MMO & a little E3
A little news & opinion…
E3, Play LIVE & Develop in Brighton
With E3 over for another year, there’s been plenty to digest but there have also been a few moans & groans about the importance of the event & how it is run. Could it be that as an event, E3, is now far too big for it’s own boots?
In the UK, there’s normally very little to look forward to in the summer months with regards to gaming shows. Earlier this year, Play.com did run their Play LIVE event at Wembley Stadium, which was fairly successful but suffered from a location too small to house everything comfortably. Public interest was high for this event & maybe Play.com misjudged the volume of people who would want to attend, when initially booking the venue?
Maybe a point that can be taken from all these discussions, is that the bigger these shows become the more consumer based they generally are. Some would also argue that this makes them less relevant. We could see as a reaction to this, the smaller & more intimate independent events taking more of the spotlight in the future.
This brings things nicely around to the Develop Conference and Expo in Brighton that begins next week(July 29th-31st). There’s to be some great talks covering a multitude of gaming themes & tracks; from Coding, design, Art & Animation to World Vision & Business. More on this event, as it happens, next week.
PSN download day for Siren:Blood Curse
So will you be buying Siren:Blood Curse from the PSN today? There’s been talk that a blu-ray release is also on the cards at some point but until then you have the option to download the full game or download the 12 episodes in packs of 3.
Pricing:
Full PSN download: £19.99
1 Chapter (containing 3 episodes): £4.99 EDIT:£6.99, £2.00 more on release than Sony originally quoted.
Look out for a full review of Siren:Blood Curse, here at Sweet Flag, sometime next week.
KotORo MMO – still a rumour?!
Looking more likely to be a truth than a rumour, a number of sites have carried the comments made by EA’s John Riccitiello at E3.
John’s ‘yes’ was the one word everyone wanted to hear…well at least EA aren’t going to announce yet another fantasy MMO! (ah OK, they already did that with Warhammer Online) It does make you question did John mean to release this information in such an informal way while the whole world was listening?
Bioshock PS3 trophies
After the death of my PC last week & the much needed purchase of a much higher spec. one, I am given the opportunity to load up the PC version of Bioshock again. It will also mean I will now be able to play it without any of the frame-rate & lockup issues that I had in the past.
Nicely timed, the Playstation Blog thought to detail in depth the Trophies that the PS3 version of Bioshock (released October) will contain. Said Trophies will be organised into a very Olympian-bronze, silver & gold collections, with a Platinum Trophy for those players able to stare down a Big Daddy without shivering.
While on the topic of FPS, gamers have always seemed split over which platform handles this genre of a game the best. Some boast that the PC always runs the game quicker & handles the controls better while others side with the console as the best, unambiguous platform for gaming. Later in the year, Sweet Flag will look at this topic in more depth & will use Bioshock as the lead example in the discussion.
July 24, 2008 at 8:47 am
DM do you think that the addition of trophies and achievements is good for games? Originally a console phenomenon I have noticed recently that a lot of PC games now include these too.
On the plus side I can see how the pursuit of trophies adds replay value to a game. However for games that rely on immersion (and Bioshock is a prime example) I think that the pursuit of trophies can become a distraction from the game world.
I guess the ideal way to deal with trophies would be to ignore them totally on the first play through so that you can fully savour the atmosphere of the game. However I suspect that there are many players like myself who get distracted by trophies even on their first and only play through. Once you start focusing on the “hopping on one leg 500 times challenge” game immersion is irretrievably busted.
July 24, 2008 at 11:01 am
For me mbp, the jury is out on Trophies. I will be keeping a keen eye on Trophy news for the PS3, as more titles are patched/released with them in.
Immersion for me is a big deal breaker in what makes a good game or not. A good MMO can be broken by grinding & repeatitive questing while FPS may suffer from poor HUD design, week sound/visuals etc. Until I get mixed into some of the games that contain Trophies, I really couldn’t say what effect they will have on immersion.
Thanks for the comment.