EA's Less-Than-Thrilling Gameplay
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Electronic Arts seems to be stuck in another time and place.
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New M-rated, non-NFL game will feature off-field political fallout, on-field unnecessary roughness, and post-play partying. At least one sports video game publisher in the industry isn&#39;t bothered by the exclusive
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Tycho:  Gamespot is saying there's a reproducible crash in the new Tiger Woods for the 360, and that the Gamernet functionality doesn't work there either.  PS3 version sounds clean.    Next year, can you guys make sure you put your crash bugs into the demo, too?  It would really help the consumer make an educated decision.    It's so weird; we had problems with the last one, but it never occurred to us that the next one could be worse.  That is to say, I expect inertia.  I don't expect it to break before I even get the Goddamned thing home.      (CW)TB
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This season&#39;s blockbuster video games give players the opportunity to hijack cars, mow down the walking undead with heavy artillery, shoot police officers and ogle topless women.
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Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar proves that a product doesn&#39;t have to be completely original to be very good.
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Outrun 2 looks great, plays great but ultimately offers too short a challenge.
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Tycho: Two things: first, I forgot to mention one of the game's coolest features. When you wreck another person, their camera snaps a shot of them. And it's exactly the shot you would expect! The best ones I saw were from a guy who had a friend over, which showed him clearly frustrated and his cohort cackling with joy. It really added a lot to a game I was already really enjoying.Also, in a radical reversal - like you might see in a wrestling match - the Playstation 3 version is clearly the better of the two. Clearly. People can talk about the contrast of the comparative images all night, if they would like, slight texture differences and so forth. Both look excellent. The 360 version quite simply doesn't have it in the performance department. It runs, and well, but once you've played it on the PS3 you start to notice performance dips and lost frames that used to just fade into the background. Also, this is the rare case where the 360's consistent UI is actually a hindrance to a cohesive experience: PS3 owners pull up an entirely in-game menu to select friends to play with. 360 owners get the same experience up until the end, when you leave the game UI altogether while this huge blade thing sweeps in and obscures the game. Typically, joining and invites occur outside the actual game experience. It's only jarring here because the distinction between single player and multiplayer is so liquid. Still, I thought it was interesting, particularly if that becomes a trend. (CW)TB
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When you first pick up Star Wars: Battlefront, if you&#39;re a seasoned gamer, it will be hard to get a three-word description out of your head.
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PROVIDENCE, R.I.  - Was absenteeism a little high  on Tuesday among the guys at the office? EA Sports would like  to think it was because "Madden NFL 2005" came out that day,  and some fans of the football simulation are rabid enough to  take a sick day to play it.
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I want to pay my respects to LeBron. But the one-man game, even his majestic version, doesn't thrill me.
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The next game controller could be your gray matter. Also: Online bells and whistles for the PS3.
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It's been a long year for PlayStation 3 owners with very little in the way of new, exclusive content. As good as they are, "MotorStorm" and "Resistance: Fall of Man" are wearing thin for me.
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Tycho:  When I started reading articles about Senator Brownback's bill - the one that would require that the ESRB play through games in their entirety - I expected to agree with it in principle, but take issue with its execution.  The shrill phase of the site, where I would don armor and ride under the aegis of the true gamer no matter how mild the incentive, now rests in the reliquary with Xbox Controller Jokes and Jabs At User Friendly.  I had chosen a singularly poor moment to become reasonable.  Upon further examination, the Senator's plan (which I think may be rightly called a machination) is the sort of thing one might forge in the fires of Mount Doom.
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Tycho:  Having already purchased two fifths of The Orange Box over the last few years, the level of value I have derived from it is "fantastic" but not "supernatural."  For Gabriel, who never finished the second Half-Life and never purchased the first episode, the aforementioned Box represents an intimidating and possibly even brutal level of content for one's holiday dollar.  It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the games that are coming out, but when you start putting more than one game on the disc the difficulty is compounded.   We're lucky, then, than the best thing on there can be completed in only a couple hours.     I've tried to make my rounds through the disc, but I kept coming back to Portal until I'd completed it.  I expect every part of this strange collection to be full of virtue, in the way that Valve's anomalous position in the games industry allows: self-funded development in their sky-high Bellevue commune until each product sings.  But Portal is strange, even for them.  Risky on every axis, we may now say that the "first person puzzle comedy" has now been proven out as a genre.  The gameplay is strong, but Portal's unique combination of hilarity and menace elevates it, resulting in a few perfect, indelible hours of gameplay.          My TeamFortress 2 experience so far on the console has been fairly uneven.  Coming from the PC beta, where I sometimes battled with stability concerns but the games played smooth, I'm now grappling with the reverse.  I love the play experience, as I've already expressed, and I'm rarely of the opinion that having more players automatically improves a game - so the differential between the PC and 360 platforms isn't as important to me as it might be to others.  No, the problem with TF2 on the 360 (and likely the PS3, as well) is that peer to peer hosting just ain't cutting it.  There are games that seem to manage it better, but with Vista PCs authenticating into the service now peer to peer games should be an option.  This needs fixed overnight.     I'll try to complete the second Episode over the weekend, interleaved with finishing the writing on my own game, which has become more difficult since completing Portal.  I'm starting to think that Precipice needs a greater concentration of synthesized ladies.      I would be abdicating my duty if I neglected to mention the EA thing, which is really the EA/BioWare/Pandemic thing.  I was under the impression that BioWare and Pandemic had merged precisely to give themselves leverage over monolithic publishers like Electronic Arts, but who knows.  The biggest fallout in the short term is that, beyond the first Mass Effect, a multiplatform release is almost certain.  Of course, I wholly endorse that kind of thing, but I imagine that Microsoft might hold a different opinion.  After spending years promoting the series, enduring delays, and now having spent months beating the shit out of it in test, it's fair to say that MS was investing in a larger trilogy - one that gamers would associate exclusively with their brand.
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How can you beat the market? Play a different game.
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Calling this one a statement game doesn't do it justice.
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John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, admits he's blown it with his handling of talented developers in the past. But he's learned from his mistakes and that EA is a better company for it.