GameSpotting

Bob Colayco
associate Editor

Now Playing: NCAA Football 2004 (PS2), Mario Golf (GC), NBA 2K3 (Xbox), NBA Live 2003 (GC), Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII (PC),
Now Reading: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Moneyball

Schizophrenia

None of the topics I thought about this week really deserves its own GameSpotting, so I thought I'd just smash them all together in one big, schizophrenic column.

I never imagined it would be the case, but the recruiting mode of NCAA Football 2004 has rapidly become my favorite part of the game. It's almost like its own turn-based strategy game hidden inside of a sports game. Now that I've led Cal to become the three-time national champion, I find myself simulating nearly the entire season of games and bowls just so I can skip ahead to the next recruiting season. Though an entire subculture exists within the sporting world dedicated entirely to college recruiting for football and basketball (yes, people actually pay money to read premium articles about how fast a 17-year-old wide receiver can run 40 yards or about the explosiveness of a 16-year-old forward's vertical leap), I never dreamed I'd spend hours poring over the bench press and squat numbers of fake football players. I should probably feel ashamed of myself.

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The more I play it, the more I love this game.

I spent part of my Labor Day weekend at a friend's barbecue, and by far the most popular game we played was Mario Golf. Though some golf game fanatics might sneer at Mario Golf's lack of analog swing control, the ease with which I could teach everyone how to play made it an instant hit at the party. Within a few minutes everyone was trying out topspin drives and backspin approach shots, while using English to curve around stands of trees. It was also nice of Nintendo to allow you to use only one controller to play a four-player game. We were able to all relax on the couches while passing my Wavebird around. It seems odd, then, that this is the same company that forces every player to have a Game Boy Advance and link cable to play multiplayer Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles--but that's another issue entirely.

After reading Michael Lewis' book Moneyball over the weekend, it got me thinking a little bit about the gaming industry. For those of you who aren't familiar with the book, it talks about the general manager of Major League Baseball's Oakland A's, Billy Beane, and how he's adapted alternative ways of evaluating baseball players. Moneyball cites the work of baseball stats fanatics called sabermetricians, who talk about how the process of scouting and evaluating young talent has become institutionalized and too set in its ways. Has it become the same with game publishers and how they choose which games make it out to market? Sure, we still do see some wildly creative and original games that become commercially successful, like Pikmin, Animal Crossing, and The Sims. But how many other quirky and original ideas for games die at the conceptual stage because a developer can't sell it to the publisher? How much of the blame for sequelitis should be laid upon the consumer for not buying original games like Moonbase Commander and for continuing to buy every single sequel of Tomb Raider? At any rate, I'd be very curious to see what kinds of original ideas never made it out of the meeting rooms of publishers like Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and Activision.

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Come on, you know you want to play a game as Arnold, the gubernatorial candidate.

With all of the hullabaloo surrounding the gubernatorial recall situation in California, I think it's high time someone created an election game, based on the wildly interesting and imperfect American electoral process. You could start out the game as a fresh-faced young man trying to win election to your own city as mayor, catering to the interests of small business competing with big chain stores and local schools running out of money. You could work your way up to state legislature or governor and deal with larger issues like affordable electricity, clean water, joblessness, and crime. Along the way you'd have to deal with the dangers and pitfalls of lobbyists, special interest money, and slimy newspaper reporters digging up dirt on your sordid past. I think it would make a great game if a creative developer could put it all together in one cohesive package.

Finally, what is the deal with all the karaoke games coming out on the PlayStation 2? At E3 we had Jennifer Love Hewitt pitching Konami's Karaoke Revolution, and in the past week, we've had announcements about another karaoke game called Karaoke Party and one from Sony called Sing. I don't have a problem with karaoke in general--believe me, I'm all pumped up and ready to sing "Bizarre Love Triangle" and "Mambo No. 5." The problem is that these karaoke games, just like the rhythm games Amplitude and Frequency, are all limited by their own playlists. The bottom line is that if you don't like the songs, you obviously won't like the game. So you can limit your market to a single niche of music lovers like Frequency does, or you can try, like Amplitude and Karaoke Revolution, to include songs from several different genres and give everyone a little something. The problem with that tactic is that most people will only like three, four, or five songs in the whole game, and that's just not cost-effective entertainment. I'd be a lot more excited about karaoke games if they were released on Xbox Live with support for downloadable booster packs of songs, so you can tailor the game to your own tastes. I suppose it would be way too much to ask that the game support user-created MP3s.

So there you have it--five entirely different topics that all relate to games, at least tangentially. I'll be getting back on my medication now.

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