It’s been a busy few months for me.  With the real job keeping me very busy, as well as the triple duties of websites, my free time has been limited.  I also managed to pick up some contract work, and have been working on setting up promotions and advertising for Evil Avatar and Co-Optimus.

On top of all this I was traveling for 2 weeks, one trip to Seattle for the MVP Conference and then off to Disney World with the wife.  It feels great to be home finally, but the workload hasn’t lessened any.

With the release of GTA IV tomorrow I plan on catching up on my gaming BIG TIME.

DeaconBlade over at Unscripted360 wrote up a nice little article about being an Xbox MVP and some common misconceptions about it.  If you didn’t know, I myself am an Xbox MVP, so this sort of plays into things on this site and others I run.

  XMVPs are paid by Microsoft to spread Xbox love across the interwebs - Although I could use more money with the pay increase, the truth is that this is a myth.  We’re not employees of Microsoft so we don’t get to collect a check.  There are former XMVPs that have ended up gaining employment within Microsoft but that’s a different animal.  Being selected doesn’t bring any bacon home to daddy.

Be sure to head over there and read the full list.

See…this is what happens when you have SEBS (Sudden Electronic Buying Syndrome).

I guess I know what I need to buy.

As you can see after 2 years or so I’ve finally spruced things up around here. The theme is changed, it’s a bit simpler, but it’s also a bit classier. The chatroom and webcam should now work together quite nicely during EvAv Radio nights!

Things have been busy as Co-Optimus has really started to do well, and I’ve been trying to promote and tweak the hell out of it to give it some serious exposure. It’s amazing what you have to do to get yourself a decent search ranking. What’s especially interesting is if you search for co-op games the results you find aren’t nearly as useful as the content available on Co-Optimus.

My gaming is finally starting to pick up again, having just completed Turok for a review that I’ll be posting in the next few days. I also started Devil May Cry 4 on the 360. I had received the PS3 version, but after hearing about the 25 minute install time I figured I might as well stick it to the man and show support for the game that you play on an actual console. Ya know, the one that doesn’t require PC like functionality.

I’ve been looking at the upcoming months and it’s going to be another insane year for trips with the Microsoft MVP Conference, a Disney Vacation, E3, a trip to Colorado and finally PAX in August. I’m gonna be racking up some serious airline miles!

Finally it looks like I’m going to enter the world of Macs soon, and I think I’ll be snagging either a Macbook or a MacBook Pro before the end of the month. Anyone have any tips for a newbie?

Continuing on the list…I give you the top 4 games of 2007 for me.

4. Halo 3 (360)

The game with the biggest hype of 2007 didn’t disappoint…most. The trilogy came to a solid conclusion, and it took you on some interesting twists and turns along the way. The beauty of Halo though can only be experienced by exploring the lore that surrounds it, which is masterfully expanded in books, comics and other literature. It’s especially well noted in the excellent advertising campaign for Halo 3 in which they depicted real life actors as veterans of the war in which the Master Chief fought in. The multiplayer modes are the richest and deepest we’ve ever seen on a console, and tools like Forge and the Replay Viewer are going to be new staples in console gaming. Did the game live up to the hype? No, of course not. No game could ever do that. But god damn was it a fun as hell ride.

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Welcome to part 1 of my top 10 games of 2007. I’m going to work my way backwards from #10 to #1.

10. Rockband (PS3/360)

Rock Band is a recent release of the year, but it’s one that should be on everyone’s list. Rock Band is the ultimate party game. Combine Karoke Revolution, Guitar Hero and drums and you’ve got something for everyone to play. The music selection is varied, and the presentation is absolutely top notch. I expect this game to have a lot of legs well into next year, especially with the weekly support of downloadable content.

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I’ve had a revelation recently. Nintendo makes good games. I know, that doesn’t seem like much of a revelation, but what I found was that while the games are good titles, they are never excellent titles.

Nintendo has been around the video game industry now for well over 20 years. Those of us in our late 20’s and early 30’s fondly remember the NES System. Packaged with the all-time best selling game Super Mario Brothers, it became and instant and life long addiction for us all. The game featured the Mario and Luigi on the quest to save Princess Peach from the evil Bowser. But the game was never about the story, it was always about the gameplay. Four Nintendo systems later, we have Super Mario Galaxy, which as it stands now is currently the #1 reviewed game of all time. I’ve played the game, I’m playing the game, and I agree it’s a great title. But after a few initial marathon sessions, and several stars later, I find myself with little incentive to go back.

I’ve been trying to answer this question. How can the #1 game of all time not hold my interest long enough to want to complete it? Recently I’ve been playing a lot of really solid titles. I’ve completed Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and Mass Effect. All exceptional titles. All different titles. All titles with a unique and fresh story. And I think that’s the answer to my question.

You see, Mario has had the same story now for countless iterations. The princess is captured, and it’s your job to save her. And that’s fine and all. But as an almost 30 year old male this doesn’t drive me. The story doesn’t captivate me. So after getting over the initial wow factor, and after discovering all of the game play mechanics in the game, there was no real incentive for me to continue playing.

This kind of thing carries over to other games on the system, though maybe not to the degree that is Mario Galaxy.  Wii-sports is another example.  After you get over the initial wow factor of the controls, things begin to get stale.  That’s not to say it isn’t fun to pick up and play every few months, but overall the game just loses it’s spunk.  Even great titles like Metroid Prime 3 and Zelda: Twighlight Princess seemed to fall flat.  And while they were both reviewed really well in the media, I don’t exactly agree.  I really enjoyed the titles for the first few hours, but after that I lost interest.  What’s unique here is that while these games have different stories than their predecessors, the same basic theme is present.

I know a lot of people get all uptight when someone says Nintendo makes kids games, but you know what?  It’s true.  When you get right down to it the stories in their first party titles are extremely shallow and repetitive.  My guess is that if any of the above mentioned games use any other characters that weren’t Nintendo characters they’d be 5-10 points less on average.

I guess my point in all of this is I guess I’m a little sad.  The games and characters that I used to hold so dear to my heart no longer can do the same.  It’s a bit like watching your favorite movie again that you used to love when you were 10.   You won’t believe how bad that movie is, yet when you were 10 you could have sworn it was the best thing ever.   I still enjoy the games Nintendo makes, I guess I just enjoy them for different reasons.

By now you’ve all seen the whole Gerstmann Controversy. I’m not going to go into details about it, if you want to know what happened just Google it and you’ll find the millions of entries. These events really have brought to a boil something that has been happening for years, that is the changing state of the games industry and their relationship with the ever changing media. In fact, N’Gai Croal of NewsWeek has a pretty excellent write up regarding it.

We all know the internet has changed since the late 90’s. After the great bubble burst at the end of the century, the uses of the internet began to change. Slowly over the next 5 years terms like MySpace, IM, Blogs, and social networking became mainstream and common place. The buzz of the internet wasn’t necessarily the information itself, but rather the sharing of said information with each other. As the accessibility of creating your own pages became easier, more and more people began posting thoughts, articles and opinions on the internet in various forms. This was the first time the Joe and Jane Smith could read actual direct thoughts from a large scale of consumers on wide scale about products and services. That’s not to say it didn’t happen before, but the way the blogging network was built it now had a trickle down effect that mere minutes after some piece of news happened, that hundreds if not thousands of sources of that information were available.

So what does this have to do with one guy getting fired over a bad review of an advertiser’s product? The point here is that for years people haven’t been trusting corporate sources for their information. There was always the shadow of a doubt when reading a review posted alongside an ad for the same game. When this whole controversy broke, people immediately jumped to conclusions and assumed it was publisher pressure that caused Gamespot to fire their Editor-in-Chief and employee of 11 years. The fact remains we’ll never know exactly what happened, why it happened, or if it will happen again. What we DO know is that in 1 day Gamespot became one of the most hated and distrusted sources for game information on the internet.

It’s a fact that sites like IGN, Gamespot, Gamespy, etc all have huge corporate backings with lots of big bucks. They get some insane traffic. Even the most popular gaming blogs today like Kotaku and Joystiq don’t do 1/10th the traffic of a Gamespot. But that also doesn’t change the fact that there’s a shifting trend from publishers and developers to put some serious marketing and other resources behind Blogs and Community Oriented sites. In the past 2 years these companies have finally realized that social networking can be used as a tool to further promote their product. One that most likely gets them more bang for their buck than paying some huge marketing campaign on an IGN. They’ve realized that the word of mouth from trusted personalities becomes more important than a faceless author at a magazine or website.

Here is a quote from the NewsWeek article linked above.

One would have to be naïve or foolish not to understand that there has always been a mutually beneficial relationship between journalists who cover consumer products or entertainment and the manufacturers or publishers of the goods in question. The journalist and his or her outlet gets a story that is of interest to their readership, while the company gets exposure for whatever they’re trying to sell, and this remains true today. The Internet, however, enabled the metrics generated by that longstanding process to evolve from indirect measurements of how readers were engaged with a magazine (i.e. circulation and pass-along) to direct ones of how viewers were navigating a Web site (clickthroughs, page views, downloads and the like).

It’s pretty odd to think of it like this, but it’s true. To promote your website and to gain traffic you need to promote someone else’s product to gain them traffic and exposure. It’s free advertising for the publisher, it’s free content for the website owner, and it’s a way to gain paid advertising for the website owner. It’s an incredibly dependent chain that if any one piece breaks, the rest falls apart. This is why something like the Gamespot controversy is so visible and vocal. It affects a fine balance that everyone has enjoyed for quite some time.

I’ve had a lot of people talk to me about this entire C|Net/Gerstmann controversy. I can’t deny that I’m in a unique position, having a prominent role on a fairly popular gaming community and news site. I won’t pretend to know anything about what it’s like writing for a major gaming site with corporate backing. But what I can tell you about is what it’s like to write for and manage the content of a site that is supported by it’s own people. I’ve been writing and posting news for Evil Avatar for almost 5 years now. This will be my 3rd year in a role where I manage the content on the entire site. I’m sure my experiences dealing directly with publishers, developers and PR folks differ vastly than that of say, a writer for IGN.com. This doesn’t mean though that these companies put any less pressure on myself or our site.
For us, we simply write what we want to write. We aren’t a site that is solely funded by advertising, in fact the majority of our income comes from user donations which in turn goes right back into the site itself. What we do get from publishers are games and swag. We’ve also gotten invites to events from time to time, and sometimes these events are even paid for by the company. Some people think these kind of things are bribes and bring into question the integrity of what we do. And while it IS nice to get these things, go on these trips, and meet all these people it doesn’t change the fact that what we want to do at Evil Avatar and what I do is talk about games. My philosophy when writing a review is to write the review as if I’m telling a friend about the game. If a game excites me and I want to excite my friend. If a game bores me, I’d want him to ignore it. The fact that I get some $50 game for free doesn’t change the fact that my friends and our readers (the same ones that keep the site running) still need to purchase said game. And those people trust me. In a fall when 300+ games are released they look to their social network for recommendations on where to put their money. That’s a big responsibility for me to have, and it’s a much stronger relationship than one I have with any company.

So do we have publisher or developer pressure if we come out with some low scores for a game? Honestly, for the people I’ve dealt with… not at all. In fact, most time it’s been the opposite. A lot of times after sending the link to the appropriate person that we’ve posted a review I’ll get a reply with them admitting that it might not have been their best effort, and to look forward to GameX or GameY from them. Look, for the most part, people KNOW when they have a bad game on their hands. They’ll admit it, they’ll move on. I’m also sure these companies get pissed when they read a bad apple review. You know, one of those reviews that give a game a low score just to go against the norm, to drive up site traffic. I know I’d push back if I was in their shoes.

So was Jeff Gerstmann fired because he wrote a bad review for a poor game that was advertised predominantly on their site? Probably not. Did it play a role in it? Was it the catalyst for it? Probably so. All of this is probably better for Jeff in the long term. The hardcore community knows this guy has integrity now, and he can use that to his advantage. He can start his own Gerstmann Game Reviews.com Blog and tell it how it is without fear of repercussion. More so though, Jeff has made visible (inadvertently) the shifting trend in the gaming media. I’m really curious to see where things stand around the time of E3 this year. Things are going to get very interesting in the next few months, and I hope I’m right in the middle of it.

I know we are only a year into the current next-gen, a term I loathe to begin with, but I was reading an interesting article over at the Washington Post regarding Verizon’s new open wireless standard.

Verizon Wireless’s new policy also opens the network to a host of other devices, such as video game consoles, digital cameras and home appliances equipped with special chips, a system similar to the WiMax network proposed by Sprint and the WiFi-enabled service touted by T-Mobile.

What’s cool about this is, in theory, Sony or Microsoft could integrate Verizon’s chipset into their console and build a constant always on connection.  Think of it like Xbox Live, but available anytime, anywhere with no cables or setup.  Out of the box you’d have millions of console gamers connecting to the same network to play games, download demos, and interact with each other.  Not only that, by guaranteeing that everyone is on a network, it opens that network up to be a standard feature for developers like a hard drive or a certain type of display.

Hopefully we’ll see more Cell phone companies do this as it really opens up a lot of potential on not only gaming, but tons of other fronts.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know my life has been a bit of a rollercoaster for the better part of 2 years now.  I’ve found myself smack in the middle of the games industry writing for a popular website, participating in podcasts, and taking trips around the country.  I’ve found myself responsible for generating an “appropriate” opinion of games to share with the community.  I felt pressure to get the reviews right, and also felt the pressure from publishers to get them out quickly.  We always had a policy at EvAv that you should at least complete the game, or put significant time into it, before writing a review.

And with a fall littered with so many good games I found myself with stacks of unopened games, and long hours at night playing games I didn’t even care for just to keep publisher relationships good.  A few days ago I crashed though.  I didn’t even want to pick up an Xbox controller, or look at my PSP.  I took an entire day off and didn’t even touch a game.  I began to put things into perspective.  There was some encouraging posts on the MVP Xbox forum from some fellow MVPs who were feeling the same thing.  And there was encouraging words from a member of the Xbox team.  Hopefully he wont’ mind if I reprint it:

You don’t have to prove anythign to anyone.  If something is stressing you out - don’t do it.  If you don’t want to play Harry Potter because you hate it - don’t!  Don’t waste hours, and force yourself to stress to get a review done of a game you hate - it’s not worth it!

And he was right.  It wasn’t worth it.  Then I noticed that Gabe from Penny-Arcade just had a similar experience with Assassin’s Creed.

I think the biggest complaint I saw was that the missions become repetitive and boring. I actually didn’t understand this complaint at all until just the other day. I had gotten an early copy of the game just like everyone else in the media but I was just playing it for fun. I’d cracked into it over the weekend and when I got into the office on Monday I started seeing these negative reviews. When I saw the low scores I was actually really upset and I wanted to talk about the game here on the site. I wanted to tell everyone that these guys were full of shit. However, since so many of the complaints were based on the ending I wanted to beat it first so I was sure I wasn’t missing anything. I attacked the game again but this time with the goal of beating it as fast as I could. I was determined to get a post up on Tuesday and I was pushing through the game as fast as I could. I went from finding every high perch in a district to only getting the ones I needed to advance the story. I stopped saving every citizen and avoided any unnecessary confrontations. The informer missions that I had really enjoyed before, I now avoided because I knew they took too long to complete. I did the bare minimum of missions to progress the story and anything that “hindered” my progress was frustrating. Monday night after skipping over another combat (something I used to really enjoy) I stopped myself. What the fuck was I doing? I wasn’t playing the game because I wanted to I was playing it because I had a deadline and I needed to beat it. I stopped immediately and decided I’d write about the game whenever I got around to beating it. I spent another day and a half with it and during that time I hunted for hidden flags and explored the cities again. I came in this morning and finally did beat it but I did it at my own pace and I enjoyed every part of it.

That sums up beautifully what was happening to me, but not just with one game, with many.   The fact is, I play games to have fun.  I play games because I enjoy them.  If I review a game, it should be because I want to, not because I have to.  Sure I’ll play a bad game, there’s rarely a game I play that I don’t find some redeeming quality in.  But I’m not going to force myself through it anymore.

It was very refreshing to pick up Mario Galaxy and just play and enjoy it, knowing I wouldn’t have to review it if I didn’t want to.  I even played some Scene It! with the wife, something I had reviewed already but still enjoyed.  Last but not least was some online gaming with my buddy in Guitar Hero and NHL08.  It was a damn good night of a gaming.