If you are like me, you are already tired of Too Human. Early previews were disappointing, news lately has been hit or miss. Now, however, the game is coming soon. It’s due out 8/19. Microsoft seems to be a believer in the title, which is a good sign.
Why should you care? It has 2 player co-op (better than no-player co-op) and promises a lot of replayability.
Here’s a video from Microsoft. The first 3-5 minutes are very good. The last 10 are silly fake oops fan fiction crap that is like a bad Lost rip-off.
Michael Hollick, the voice actor for Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto IV, blames his union for not protecting the talent.
According to a New York Times article, Hollick was paid roughly $100,000 over 15 months for his voice acting and motion-capture work on GTA IV. He complains of the fact that he will not receive royalties or residuals as he would for work on television programs, films, radio shows or albums.
“The first GTA IV trailer generated something like 40 million hits online, and that’s my voice all over it, and I get nothing,” Hollick said. “If that were a radio spot, I would have. Same thing for the TV ads.”
Contracts between the actors’ union and the entertainment industry make no provision for videogames and the Internet, classifying them as “Electronic Media”.
“Obviously I’m incredibly thankful to Rockstar for the opportunity to be in this game when I was just a nobody, an unknown quantity,” said Hollick. “But it’s tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don’t see any of it. I don’t blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games.”
I dissagree with Mr. Hollick. GTA IV sold 500 million copies in its first week, true, but if you believe for a second that any of those sales had anything to do with fans of Hollick’s voice then you are sadly mistaken. Aside from the rare chance that his mother bought a few copies. Its the game content that drives the sales of the titles, not the voice over actors. From what I can gather from most gamers out there it could be Michael J Fox doing a poor russian accent playing the role of Niko, as long as they can speed down a crowded sidewalk and mow down innocent pedestrians while listening to the “Intellegent Agenda” on the radio.
“What drives videogames is not Tracy and Hepburn; what drives it is the conception of the creative director,” said a former Hollywood executive who is now an entertainment lawyer, Ezra J. Doner. “The actor whose appearance or voice is used is more analogous to a session musician for a band. The session musicians don’t get residuals on the sales of the CD. They get paid a session fee,” he told the New York Times. “It’s not like the star quality of Tom Cruise that’s getting people to buy that videogame.”
Ryan Johnston, the voice actor who portrayed Irish hood Patrick McReary in Grand Theft Auto IV - at a pay rate of $1,050 a day,(about 50 per cent higher than the general guild-negotiated rate) said he believed it was just a matter of time before actors’ financial participation in games caught up with their popularity.
The difference between payment for traditional entertainment media and electronic media is expected to dominate negotiations between Hollywood and the actors’ guild this summer, with many predicting an actors’ strike to parallel the writers’ strike last year. A writers strike that revolved around many similar issues.
You know those PC guys have it made. Frequent free updates to TF2, mouse and keyboard, tiny PC speakers, ahhhh the life.
Us console folk are left on the outside looking in.
Fortunately, it looks like the DLC for Team Fortress 2 is coming to the 360 after all (not PS3, sorry). What’s in the DLC? At least a new map, new gametype, and new character-dependent achievements that unlock new weapons a la COD4.
Sounds awesome, eh? Time to re-buy the game and get ready for the retro nights.
EA is up to their usual tricks. In a lame effort to inspire high pre-sale numbers, they are offering early access to the Battlefield: Bad Company demo to those who pre-order the game. For the record, the demo is out 5/29 for those who pre-order and 6/5 for those who don’t.
If you’re like me, you’re thinking, I could give Gamestop $5 for the chance to play the demo a couple weeks to decide if it’s worth a buy. If it’s not, I can always cancel my pre-order and get my money back.
BTW, this game looks exactly like COD4. Don’t we already have that game?
You may have already heard about VP2. Good news: ships September, has some form of co-op play, has some form of cam support. Bad news: what are they going to add to make it more funner?
According to joystiq tipsters, EA is conducting surveys related to Rock Band 2. In the past, these surveys frequently tip off a game’s features. So what’s Rock Band 2 purported to add?
” New additions to World Tour mode are said to include online play, the recording of music videos and hiring of staff members. Other new features include Battle of the Bands, competing against other bands in daily and weekly battles, setting challenges to progress through your band’s discography in increasingly harder setlists, as well as a drum trainer mode.”
I still want to know how they’re going to handle my DLC. If they can make my DLC work with the new modes, however, I’m definitely interested. Sounds like a good DLC pack for $30 to me.
I have a lot of anger in my heart towards Madden. The feeling must be akin to the feelings one has towards a former spouse. You have those great memories - the good times - but you also have the bitter breakup and angry feelings from when the relationship went south. I guess I’m the sucker who is willing to give that ex another chance. Some quotes from a producer that make me want to reconsider:
“you choose to go to the holographic training center and you have a bunch of training drills for you to practice. You can do things like work on pocket presence, you can work on receiver timing, focus on defense. I believe we have a total of 12 different drills that you can try. The mode looks really nice — the players are holographs, you’re in a holographic stadium — it’s pretty cool looking. And coming out of that mode, we actually assess your Madden skills, giving you a Madden IQ. Obviously, you want to do as good as possible in those drills, and from your Madden IQ, we actually set your game skills, so if you have a high score, we’re going to make the game really challenging for you”
“As you’re playing the game, when the game recognizes that you’re doing something improperly, we’re going to break the moment down for you. It’s a higher, nicer version of instant replay with the graphics laced on the field. We actually showcase guys with colors and arrows — very cool. So if you take a sack for example, when there was a receiver wide open in the field, we’re going to tell you that. We’re even going to show you why he was wide open and how he ran into the space between the zones. And for those who have a high Madden IQ, we even add another layer of information where we break down the actual plays that were used, the hot routes that were called, and we show you on a statistical basis how successful that play typically is versus that defense. And the nice thing with backtrack, we don’t want to just tell you what you did wrong. We’re actually letting you rewind a play now. We call it EA Sports Rewind, and by just hitting a button, that situation actually rewinds and you’re able to try the situation again, and hopefully take the game’s advice.”
“For the first time ever in Madden, you’ll be able to get together with 32 of your friends and participate in a league where you can play through a schedule, play through the playoffs, play your own Super Bowl. There’s draft support, there’s trade support, and we actually implemented flex scheduling in the online leagues. We’ve had tournaments before online, but the problem with tournaments is that having more than two or three people together at the same time to complete a series of games is very, very challenging. So with flex scheduling, you can actually play your games in any order. It’s more like a round-robin style. We did this because it’s online and we wanted to make sure people can actually play through their seasons. If you and I are scheduled to meet in Week 10 but we’re both online today, we can just play our Week 10 game now.”
Web support is a big factor and we definitely want you to be able to go to the Web and take a look at league statistics, but a lot of the interaction will have to take place using the product itself.
Typically in Madden, when the play is dead, we give control over to the AI, but now when you score a touchdown, you still have control and if you run to one of the hot spots and hit the Y button on the 360 or the triangle button on the PS3, he’ll do a celebration depending on where you are. So if you’re under the goal post, he might dunk the ball or if you run to the hot spot by the wall and you’re in a stadium that supports it, you can do the Lambeau leap. Hit the button and jump up in the crowd.
The biggest thing is bobble catches. We had a lot of drops in the game last year and it’s no fun when you drop a pass. We’re going to turn a lot of those drops into bobbles. It’s definitely cool when you see the ball hit a guy’s hands then it goes flying into the air and then he goes and tries to make that catch.
Anybody else up for an online league? Dibs on the Colts.
This sounds so stupid I hate to even comment on it. Upper Deck, the company that ruined the previously fun hobby of collecting baseball cards by upping the price of waxpacks to $1 in 1989 is now threatening to enter the field of misguided CCGs based on FPSes. I can’t believe I just typed that. Lots of details here.
You know, you’re right. Guitar Hero is where it’s at. Rock Band suxxorz. Oh, BTW, GH4 is adding drums and vocals. It was totally their idea. You know, it might make the game more fun, but you’ll have to wait until November to find out. Can you imagine how sweet it’s going to be to play teh drums? OMG.
BTW, EA is rumbling about releasing Rock Band 2 this fall (probably no new instruments). If that MF’ing game doesn’t play my DLC I am going to write a lot of mean posts about them. And they better fix the dumb ass online bands. I need those 2 things, or no sale.
You might remember Quartermann from back when you actually bought game magazines and cared about them. Anyway, in the new issue of EGM, the infamous rumor mongerer who is known for accuracy has this to say about teh n3w Ha10:
“After shipping last fall’s blockbusting Halo 3, revered developer Bungie stunned the world by announcing plans to liberate itself from Microsoft’s ownership. Allegedly, that path to freedom requires that they develop a few more titles for Microsoft, and we’ve heard rumblings that the first one will be a Halo spin-off due in late 2009. Our spies tell us to expect a third-person action/adventure shooter hybrid that takes place before the original Halo, chronicling early skirmishes between the ODST troops and the Covenant. This may or may not be the oft-mentioned “Peter Jackson Halo Project” — though apparently Microsoft is hiring a seperate team for that — but WETA is definitely involved in some capacity. Look for a massive reveal around the time Gears of War 2 ships this fall…”
