• 14Apr 07

  Why fanboys think the Japanese EA makes exclusives

  It's time to hit the history books again, kids. Just like I tried to clearly explain Nintendo's relationship with innovation to clear up fanboy arguments about who stole what from who, now it's time to discuss why Capcom's recent Devil May Cry and Lost Planet ports shouldn't have been the shocking surprise they were for most fanboys out there.

  Capcom used to be two things in the early days of home consoles: the Mega Man guys and the Street Fighter guys. Mega Man wasn't as big as Mario, but fans of tough platformers loved the little blue guy. Plus, he could shoot, which was a cool feature in the NES days. Just shooting straight. It looked cool. Seriously. One could say MegaMan aged poorly, but in a different sense than most other classic franchises. MegaMan ages poorly because it failed to evolve. Every game is still a remake of the first, great NES game. More on that later.

  MegaMan was a Nintendo franchise. There was no doubt about that. It was a NES game. Not that it mattered much, NES already had Mario, and games back then were too similar to each other for a single game to make you feel you were being left out. Then came Street Fighter II, and Capcom as it is today started.

  SF2 was out in the arcades for a long time before we started hearing rumours about a console version, and people like me, who owned a Mega Drive/Genesis but not a SNES felt it was bad news. Final Fight was a SNES exclusive and, even though I preferred Streets of Rage myself, Street Fighter II was the best fighting game around, no matter how you looked at it. Sure, the Genesis had scored a hit with the superior Mortal Kombat version a few months earlier, but Street Fighter II? How could you fight THAT? All over the place (not the Internet, an actual place, or magazines. There was no internet, but there were already fanboys) SNES owners bragged about their superior hardware being able to move those huge sprites while the Genesis would probably explode trying, and their console having six buttons while the Genesis couldn't even fit all of SF2's attacks on its 3 button gamepad. And we all thought they were right, too. The SNES version came out and it was all everybody expected it to be. Huge characters, good animation, tight controls (even if the shoulder buttons were a bit hard to use for special moves)... the Genesis was humbled.

  Until the Genesis verison came out, that is.

  Sure, it was months later, but it still felt good. The characters were a bit smaller, but the gameplay was all there. You could even play with your three button gamepads. Hitting start switched the three buttons between punch and kick. It didn't matter much, though, because there were six button Genesis gamepads out there by the time SF2 came out. And even though the SNES version looked a little better, having the six buttons in two straight rows, just like in the arcade, instead of those awful shoulder buttons was a huge advantage when comboing and pulling off special moves. Plus, the Genesis version was SF2 Turbo, with all the extra characters. People who had bought the original SNES without controllable bosses or extra characters felt ripped off, even if Turbo came out on the SNES, too, since buying the same game twice was even less usual back then. My house was the main hub of fighting game glory once again, as it had been with Mortal Kombat. Everybody had SF2 for the SNES, but I had the ultimate SF2 lover's wet dream: a huge Genesis joystick with six buttons I had bought during a school trip to the UK. That thing handled just like an arcade joystic and it had a huge, very stable base that would remain perfectly level even if you rested it on your knees. I let my friends use the joystick and prove my SF2 supremacy by beating them to a pulp using a 3 button gamepad. Good times.

  That was the start of Capcom's multiplatform strategy.

  Think about that for a second. Street Fighter 2. That's ancient history. Most fanboys today weren't even born when I dropped my first coin in a SF2 arcade machine. Yet here they are, making a fuss over a 360 version of Devil May Cry.

  The trend continued in the next generation, but nobody cared much. Capcom was stuck putting out barely revised versions of SF2, MegaMan and Final Fight, and though money seemed to keep flowing, their image as a developer was suffering. When they got the Marvel license and started putting out superhero fighting games people found it cool, but it was hardly a system seller or a betrayal that the Saturn version was a bit smoother (the Saturn was well over the PsX in 2D games, but nobody cared about those at that point), or that there was a PSX version out there, too.

  Then came the PS2 and something happened. It was called Devil May Cry.

  When DMC first came out there were two things we had yet to see: good PS2 games and competition for Sony's black beast. The Dreamcast wasn't doing well and, while early PS2 games looked like crap, they were still obviously something that the DC couldn't even dream of (well, the PSOne could probably do things like Dark Cloud and Ephemeral Fantasia, but you get my point). Some people still thought that quality games like Shenmue, Rez or Soul Calibur could save Sega, and even that the two consoles weren't that far apart in horsepower. Then Gran Turismo 3 came out and Sega closed shop. GT3 and Devil May Cry. Those were the first two games that proved that the PS2 was in a different league. GT3 was pretty much reality turned videogame, and that was cool, but DMC was fantasy. The Matrix wasn't just one more action movie yet, you see. DMC was the second coolest fight coreography we had ever seen in any medium. We went crazy for it. Capcom was back on the map. And now, for some reason, despite a couple of Capcom 2D fighting games on the Dreamcast, everybody thought Capcom was a Sony partner.

  It was no such thing, of course. There simply was nothing that could run DMC out there besides the PS2. Even PCs couldn't do that. That's the truth of why DMC has been a Sony exclusive so far. That, and DMC2 being a critical and commercial failure that didn't need porting. Capcom did put out a Chaos Legion PC version, though, which was good enough for PC fans who hadn't played DMC yet, and a DMC3 SE on anything that could run it. They made Resident Evil ports, too. Up to RE:4 coming out for PCs and Wii this year.

  And that, of course, takes us to the Capcom 5.

  Capcom signed a deal with Nintendo when the Gamecube came out. Again, Sony fanboys managed to block out everything I've told you so far and freak out over the fact that Capcom was going to do 5 exclusive new games on the Nintendo Gamecube. This was back when the Cube seemed to be a viable option and everybody thought that the Xbox was going to end up like the Zune. Now, three things happened here: First, the Cube died. It became obvious that it wasn't going to be a PS2 killer (it did tie with the Xbox 1 worldwide, though, despite common belief that it was a total failure). Second, the Capcom 5 ended up coming out on the PS2 as well. This time it was Nintendo fanboys' turn to be outraged... with slighty better reasons than the rest, since there was plenty of media hype over the exclusivity of those games. Third, Capcom didn't release 5 games, but 4: Killer 7, Viewtiful Joe, Resident Evil 4 and Viewtiful Joe 2. Whatever happened with that deal legally, it seems to have lived more in the hype machine and the minds of the fans than in real life. In the end, Capcom's strategy remained consistent with its previous history. The games were better than usual, though, thanks to the bunch of radical artists in Clover and Suda 51's Grasshopper Entertainment.

  And that takes us to this generation. Capcom has been working all over the place. Dead Rising was a 360 exclusive (I predict a PC port in the future, though), and so was Lost Planet... but both were developed in the year hiatus between the 360 and the PS3's launch, so again there was no other system that could have run them properly except the PC, which is going to get a Lost Planet port after the usual 9 months wait, now. DMC 4, announced or assumed to be a PS3 exclusive is now a multiplatform game. Again, a PC port wouldn't surprise me at all. Rumours of Microsoft buying Capcom arised when two "exclusive" Capcom games appeared on the 360. Capcom was a Sony supporter in the minds of those who spread the rumours. If they were working with MS and having financial problems, that surely meant they were going to be taken over my MS. Of course, as so many times before, Capcom was just doing what it's been doing for 15 years: make games for any platform that will turn a profit. What else? Trust me, the only reason why there's no Wii port of Okami is that Capcom closed Clover before they could contractually force them to make one.

  Then again, as long as the games are decent, who cares about them making a buck? If EA or Ubi managed to keep the average quality standard of Capcom games I wouldn't hate them half as much. But that's another story.

  • Posted Apr 14, 2007 7:12 am PT
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• 12Mar 07

  On GS's 10 Things Sony can do...

  What Sony can do to make me buy a PS3, eh? Well, they could give me a job so I could pay for it. That'd be a start.
  
  Other than that, I do think the PS3 is a nice deal that will only get better with time. If and when BluRay becomes something I'm interested in (more or less at the same time I buy myself an HDTV), the PS3 will have become a bargain. But the one thing Sony needs to improve and market better, I agree with the GS staff, is their free multiplayer.
  
  Let's be honest here for a minute, I'm not going to pay a single cent to MS to play online over Live Gold. I'll be caught dead before I pay a fee to play Need for Speed or FEAR online when it's free on the PC. Gear of War? Yeah, it's nice, but it's already 60€, I'm not going to add more money ont top of that for the online portion. Maybe if MS gave me back my fee in Live Arcade stuff I'd think about it, but turns out I have to pay for that on the side. I'm a pay once play forever kinda guy. I don't like microtransactions and I don't like monthly fees. Much less monthly fees to unlock features in games. I'm not the only one, either. By MS's own accounts, 40% of 360 are online but just below 20% pay for Gold. That means 80% of 360 owners don't want to pay to play online or don't want play online at all.
  
  Now, Sony gives me that for free. That's good. But nobody's mentionng it. Sony should be there yelling "You know? By the fourth year you own a 360 you'll have paid them the price difference in monthly fees, so save up a bit, buy a PS3 and stop wasting your money every month". But they're not. They just come out and babble about Home and how rumble is last gen "cause I say so". Of course, their online service isn't nearly as good as MS's at this point. If they fix that AND keep it free, that'd be a major selling point in the US (not so much in Europe and Japan, I think). Maybe they should learn from Nintendo, not Microsoft. Nintendo kept their systems easy on the DS, and it seems the Wii one will be identical. Basically, they stopped trying to manage huge user databases and matchmaking. They gave players a big red button with the word "Online" on it. You hit it, you're playing online. No lobby, no nothing. Of course, the prize to pay was friend codes to play with specific rivals, but that annoying, unreasonable detail aside, that model works for me. Instead, Sony seems to have tried to do everything MS is doing without knowing exactly how. They'll probably get there, eventually, but the time it'll take will probably work in MS's favor.
  • Posted Mar 12, 2007 7:08 am PT
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• 9Mar 07

  Lucas strikes back

  LucasArts has been showing off its new toys every chance it gets. They now have physics and procedural animation technology beyond anything else out there. Good for them. The only problem with Euphoria and DMM? They're being used in Indiana Jones and Star Wars games, and only in those games.
  
  Of couse, the tech will spread, it looks impressive, but right now Lucas could do everything they wanted with it... and they're using it to do another cookie cutter, franchise milking licensed game.

  Whoever manages IP at Lucas needs to be replaced. Disney is back from the dead thanks to a pirate movie trilogy and what is Lucas doing about it? Sitting on the only pirate comedy IP that's well known and loved out there, doing nothing with it; or rather failing to do anything with it, despite having tried in the past. Letting Telltale finally appear on the map with Sam&Max episodic content after wasting resources trying to develop the same thing twice, only to get shut down by internal politics. Of course, they're making money. People buy the SW,  Indy games, almost regardless of their relative artistic qualities, but Lucas could have become a main player in the industry, had they known how to adapt after the demise of the adventure genre. Instead, they outsourced development and became a small publisher with a couple of nice licenses doing with them exactly what Activision, Ubi or EA would have done.

  One way to prove my point is this: I could name a whole bunch of people working for LucasArts (LucasFilms Games, back then, actually) even when I was 13 years old. I knew who Ron Gilbert was, or Tim Schaffer. Lucas was actually one of the first developers to prominently and properly credit their developers and writers, both in the box and in the game itself, in a time when Japanese designers were alienated and forced to use aliases.

  Today? I'm pretty much an expert and I couldn't tell you who was the lead designer in Lego Star Wars if you gave me half an hour on the Wikipedia.
  
  EDGE magazine started talking about a "Lucasarts rebirth" months ago. I'll believe it when I see it.

  • Posted Mar 9, 2007 4:54 pm PT
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