Critics Lash Out at ‘Shoddy’ Final Fantasy XIV

Videogame critics are universally panning Square Enix's new MMO Final Fantasy XIV.
Image courtesy Square Enix

The reviews are beginning to trickle in for Final Fantasy XIV, and critics are unanimously panning Square Enix’s MMO.

Final Fantasy XIV fell through the cracks here at Game|Life; reviewing a massively multiplayer online game is always a daunting proposition and nobody had the bandwidth to take it on. Judging by what the major game enthusiast sites are saying, though, it’s probably for the best that we elected not to put ourselves through the wringer on this one. While reviewers note the game’s pretty graphics and stunning cinematic scenes, they also agree that all the fundamentals are broken.

The MMO is “an arduous experience that, in its current state, isn’t worth playing,” writes Charles Onyett at IGN, who gave the PC game a score of 5.5 (“mediocre”).

“I can’t help but feel that FFXIV is cosmic punishment, meted out by some avenging massively multiplayer online deity for my years of complaining about the state of modern online RPGs,” writes Rory Manion at GameSpy, who gave the game 2 out of 5 stars. “It is the definition of obtuse: poorly designed, aggressively underexplained, and shoddy in almost every respect that matters.”

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Review: Wonky Physics, Nasty Levels Ruin Sonic the Hedgehog 4

Sonic blazes down another level, probably toward instant death, in the disappointing Sonic the Hedgehog 4.
Image courtesy Sega

Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The new downloadable game for Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (reviewed) seems to make all the changes that Sonic’s fans have been clamoring for: It brings the series back to 2-D. It gets rid of Sonic’s crappy friends and makes the iconic blue critter the only playable character. Cute little birdies even pop out of enemies when they explode, just like in the good old Genesis days.

Sonic 4 nails these superficially nostalgic elements, but crashes and burns when it comes to what’s really important.

That’s unfortunate, because the quality of Sega’s biggest series has declined so much over the past decade that fans like me were pinning their last, best hopes to this game.

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PS3 Netflix Update Monday Ditches the Disc

Sony said Thursday that it will release a new version of its Netflix streaming video software for PlayStation 3 that does not require a disc be inserted into the drive.

Hallelujah. I’m sure Sony’s more excited than anyone that it is no longer markedly inferior to Xbox 360.

The software will be available on Monday. Full details on Wired.com’s Gadget Lab.

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Final Fantasy XIII Creators: We Lacked ‘Shared Vision’

Characters Snow and Lightning taking a break from the tube in Final Fantasy XIII.
Image courtesy Square Enix

Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIII broke tradition in many ways, discarding conventions and challenging previous definitions of the role-playing game genre. But where did it go wrong?

On Thursday, Gamasutra shared a developers’ postmortem from the October 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine. Square Enix executives Motomu Toriyama and Akihiko Maeda penned the article, which details some of the miscommunication that occurred within the Final Fantasy XIII development team.

One example lies in the game’s conceptual trailer, which was introduced at E3 2006. Toriyama and Maeda hoped the trailer would capture the vision of Final Fantasy XIII for the rest of the team, but not everyone was on board.

“There were actually very few members [of the development team] who saw the trailer as a representation of what we wanted to achieve with Final Fantasy XIII,” the article says. “This lack of a shared vision became the root of many conflicts that arose later in development.”

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The 12 Most Expensive Videogames in Tokyo

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Time Gal

TOKYO — Some Japanese videogame collectors won't settle for perfect copies of titles they played in their youth. For a handful of devotees, it's all about getting their hands on the rarest retrogames in the world, some of which were manufactured in batches of just a few hundred.

Some of these singular games graced store shelves for only a moment; others were given out as contest prizes. But Tokyo game stores will hand them over to you — if you've got a wallet bursting with cash.

In the United States, game prices can rise and fall based on "hype and demand," but in Tokyo's Akihabara electronics district, a retrogame's relative scarcity drives pricing, collector Jason Wilson told Wired.com in instant message.

"When only a handful of games are made, they can charge what they want for it," said Wilson, who lives in Nashville. "It won't necessarily sell — but if you have to have it, this is where you would get it."

Such retrogames used to be spread all over Akihabara, but these days the rarest ones have funneled into three specialty stores: Mandarake, Trader and Super Potato.

Feast your eyes on 12 of the most expensive game cartridges in all of Akihabara, photographed in the three retrogame superstores. If you bought the full dozen, it would cost you 1,248,150 yen — about $15,250.

Above:

Time Gal

The Price: 68,250 yen (approximately $833)

The original Time Gal was a 1985 arcade game released by Taito. Like Dragon's Lair, it used animation clips stored on a laserdisc for graphics. Home versions were released on platforms like the Sega CD and PlayStation, but the most faithful translation was this version for the laserdisc-based Pioneer LaserActive platform.

Games on LaserActive can sell for upward of $100, but Time Gal is by far the most expensive. This copy is actually a bargain — the piece of paper in the lower left corner says the paper obi wrapped around the left side of the disc has slight damage, resulting in the price being lowered. (Said damage is apparently invisible to anyone who is not an anal-retentive Japanese store clerk.)

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Photos: Robert Gilhooly/Wired.com

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Valve Revives Defense of the Ancients RTS in 2011

Valve’s next big project is Dota 2, a sequel of sorts to the popular competitive real-time strategy game Defense of the Ancients, the publisher said Wednesday.

Dota 2 will “take the unique blend of online RTS and RPG action that has made Dota popular with tens of millions of gamers and expand upon it in every way,” said Valve in a statement. It will release the game in 2011 for the PC and Mac.

“Dota” is the preferred abbreviation for Defense of the Ancients, which was first released as a fan-made mod for Blizzard’s Warcraft III in 2003.

This variation of the game allows players to control powerful hero units in the midst of a full-scale conflict between two sides. As heroes, players can collect items, build up levels, and turn the tide of battle by stomping on weaker computer-controlled units or other players’ heroes.

The original Dota can support up to ten players, which often leads to all-out five-on-five brawls as teams duke it out for dominance of the map.

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Buggy Medal of Honor Is Superficial Slaughter

You'll find yourself staring down the wrong end of many gun barrels in Medal of Honor.
Image courtesy Electronic Arts

I’m crouched behind an open window in an Afghan village. One of my fellow soldiers stands in front of me and chucks a grenade at the al-Qaida fighter headed toward us.

The grenade bounces off the wall in front of him and falls at our feet. “Grenade!” the computer-controlled character yells, diving out of the way. I shake my head and sigh as the ordnance explodes. That shouldn’t have happened.

Medal of Honor, released Tuesday for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, is full of nasty bugs like that one, many of which force you to restart checkpoints or reboot your Xbox 360 (the version I played). That’s a strong indication that Electronic Arts’ answer to Call of Duty was rushed out the door.

And yet my virtual war buddy’s mistargeted grenade escapade was the only time that Medal of Honor’s single-player campaign took me by surprise. Otherwise, it’s an utterly predictable adventure without a modicum of real conflict.

I didn’t imagine this game would be a thoughtful, introspective look at how war affects human beings, but I expected it to be deeper than Virtua Cop.

Instead, al-Qaida and the Taliban are reduced to a virtual shooting gallery, a limitless font of moving targets. Our guys are no less one-dimensional: Everybody likes one another (except for one bristly general). It’s a story with no conflict and therefore no plot, so why have a story at all?

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NPD Group: No More Free Game Sales Reports

The research group NPD will no longer publicly report its data on videogame hardware and software sales, it said Tuesday in a statement.

NPD Group’s numbers are the videogame industry’s premier source of sales data. Of late, NPD had been pulling back on the amount of information that it released free of charge to the public — it used to release the sales data for the top 10 games each month, but had rolled that back to the top 5.

The information it will now release to the public will include a list of the top 10 best-selling games of the month without hard numbers, and no hardware data at all.

The decision of whether to release hardware sales numbers will be made by the individual console makers, NPD said.

NPD will also update its press releases to make clear the fact that its numbers only represent the sales of new packaged software, not downloads or social network payments. NPD said it would release a report on total industry sales, including downloads, to the press each quarter.

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Fan-Produced Videogame Concert Is $60,000 Labor of Nerd Love

Performers at the 2006 Tribute concert of videogame and anime music in San Luis Obispo, California. The producers of the concert will debut a more lavish production called Hideo on Saturday at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley.
Photo courtesy Blair Baker

Seeing your favorite music from videogame soundtracks in concert isn’t the hardest thing to do these days. With the constant international touring of shows like Distant Worlds: Music From Final Fantasy and Video Games Live, odds are good you’ll be able to see a symphony orchestra pluck out the theme to Super Mario Bros. somewhere close to your hometown at some point.

Blair Baker, a 26-year-old sound engineer from San Jose, California, has seen a few of these shows and found them wanting.

“They take an orchestra and they say, ‘Alright guys, we’re going to play this music,’” she says. “They bring in a conductor, the orchestra plays and they flash some pretty Final Fantasy pictures on the screen, and that’s it. It’s not very engaging. It doesn’t tell a story, it doesn’t present anything that I as a fan haven’t already seen.”

Baker thought there was a better way to showcase the music of videogames and Japanese animation live onstage, and decided to make it happen. In 2006, she and a crew of volunteers staged a show called Tribute in San Luis Obispo, California.

This Saturday, the dedicated superfans present their second show, called Hideo, at the Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley. It’s a much more elaborate production, one that has cost Baker and her fiance $60,000 of their personal savings.

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Roll Your Own Mutant in Silicon Knights’ X-Men Destiny

Screengrab: Wired.com

NEW YORK — X-Men: Destiny will let you experience all the joy and pain of living life as a mutant.

Previous videogames based on Marvel Comics’ long-running superhero series have often been relegated to simple beat’em-ups that don’t convey the published works’ emotional depth. X-Men: Destiny, developed by Silicon Knights (Too Human), could be the role-playing game that changes all that.

The upcoming game will place the player in the role of a young mutant as he discovers and learns how to deal with his burgeoning powers, with a heavy emphasis on the choices he makes.

“It’s about finding out that your powers aren’t a dream come true,” said the game’s writer Mike Carey at New York Comic Con on Saturday. “There will be people who will hate you, people who will fear you. It’ll be about the process of finding a community, a family.”

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