MAG is a 128-aside first person shooter exclusive to PS3 out in Europe on the 29th of this month. And basically that’s all you need to know, along with a 7 day open beta available on PSN from Monday 4th. But before you rush to order PS3 slims/preorder the game humour me for a minute and hear it out. I am (puts on best fanboi expressive tones) super excited with this title. More so than MW2. MW2 was formulaic. MW2 ignored the failings of it’s predecessor. Meaning
MW2 has lost my interest.

128 a side? I’ll sign myself up for some of that right away sir. And, since I completely failed to get in on any previous beta action, it has a completely clean slate in my mind. Minimal hype (beyond the obvious collective jaw dropping at the 256 number) and of decidedly sketchy quality hopefully means a tasty morsel of gaming history can hit team-oriented console fighters without the usual obscene rendering of bunny hopping, noob tubing Modern Warfare nuts.

That’s right – the thought has occurred that perhaps this release has hit the perfect release date; in the relative gaming calm following the pre-Xmas hype of biblical proportions surrounding Infinity Ward’s latest shrink-wrapped ‘epic’, a team oriented shooter on a scale never attempted before for consoles may well just get the audience it needs to be a success.

Because let’s face facts; Modern Warfare is a heat-sink for the Chuck Norris shooter philosophy. More kills for the individual bring more ways of adding to that count via killstreaks. It epitomises the exact opposite of team based gameplay – that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In MW2 if a player is good enough to call in an AC130 the whole opposition team is pretty much fucked for a set period of time. With Nukes you can literally win the game on your own. Rambo on steroids.

MAG’s company v company formations by contrast break down into individual troop and squad roles, recreating that extra dimension missing from the CoD franchise – true teamwork dynamics. While they may be nothing more than BF2 style point at target and scream ‘KILL’, the fact these pitched battles will be happening all over the map and in different stages is what the fog of war is all about.

Gamers need to understand this differentiation. Those who jump into a MAG game need to know killstreak’s are irrelevant if it’s not contributing to your squad’s overall mission. What’s more, to provide an immersive experience teammates will have to recognise decisive moments in the battle and how to impact them. Players will need to work together, keep a close eye on eachother’s actions and respond accordingly. This isn’t an easy skill and it plagues the console team-based multiplayer experience. If Modern Warfare acts as mothership to the killsteak collectors leaving MAG to a more discerning shooter clientèle a richer experience will surely result.

Ultimately this highlights the point that in the race to provide the gamer with a more immersive, deeper playing experience there are two routes designers can go down – tweaking game mechanics to encourage the adoption of more co-operative tactics or tweaking the brand to encourage the take up by a specific ‘level’ of gamer competence.

Btw there’s 3 factions in MAG – in real terms Americans, Austrians & Slavs. So for me the choice is between my ex Austro-Germanic clan buddies in Raven or the always cool roosky alternative SVER – SVER are edging it right this moment due to already being equipped with both gutties and hoodies. Check out the SVER corporate Facebook page – leaving aside the fanboi craptalk – from the vehicle & location images it evokes a graphical style very reminiscent of BF2.

Played single player reg through til completion and while it was as polished as you’d expect from the Modern Warfare franchise it failed to eclipse the heart-pounding immersive nervousness of the original’s ghillie-suit level. Also the kablamo’ed White House scenario seemed to be lifted straight from COD5’s Reichstag finale. Ditto with the staggered progression as seen from the eyes of US Army Rangers and their SF counterparts. Personally I find that sort of storytelling disjointed and a distraction.

The storyline didn’t really hoick me in either. I’m mega into the Roosky-Arab underworld conspiracy stuff but found thrashing around the Favellas and the White House a bit too Generic Shooter III.

But I’m ignoring a certain 0-day elephant in the room here too – because as polished as the single player existence is, Infinity Ward released a patch that had the side-effect of refusing to award me any trophies. They’re working on a fix. I’ll be blunt – this sucks arse.

But I did get to use the LSW (with optional SUSAT) and a bunch of Zodaics. So that was nice.

Next up was the Multiplayer element and I am not enamoured with Infinity Ward on their ‘work’ here at all. It feels like a COD4 Add-on Pack. Sure there are lots more (ridiculous) customisations to be proffed but it’s the same game. Maps seem to be slighty larger but complete with the same failings:

So there you go. I’ve now got MW2 and it feels the way I would if I was into football titles and bought two successive ProEvo/FIFA releases: They’re great games in their own right, but over the course of a year nothing evolutionary has happened to the franchise.

And that’s a real pity.

I had hoped to discuss some numbers taking both leading Facebook & App Store games as a jumping off point. But one look at my Twitter homepage this morning aroused some angst.

To their credit the realtime stream networks have opened up their far-reaching update networks to 3rd party developers without holding much back. Photos on facebook and throttling search on twitter are by and large minor holdups which would presumably have grave performance issues to overcome first anyway.

But this power in the hands of developers doesn’t come without responsibilities.

Unfortunately there has already been what I would call a serious breach of both the twitter and facebook reason d’etre – communication amongst the network. Check out this post from back in 2007 for a critique of what makes a good facebook app – and this from a marketeer of all things. Now fast forward to today’s Twitter and check out one of the trending topics – ‘pirates’. Not because of the ongoing web meme – no this Pirates refers to Zynga’s social network app available on FB & MySpace.

The lead graphic shows the gorey details – users are now encouraged to cross post their in-game achievements onto their twitter accounts. And because a bazillion of us play these games (& are willing to do anything to get special items, including filling out marketing forms on anything from insurance to mobile phones) this created enough buzz through either direct postings or the predictable but similarly idiotic “why is pirates trending?” postings now proping up numerous worthless ‘trends’ on Twitter these days.

But the value of trending topics once they have got onto the user’s twitter homepage is for another day. As is the dubious lengths some social gaming apps will go to in supplying advert networks with Facebook user data. These automated updates from gaming platforms need to be nipped in the bud right now.

One such tweet on the left here. When I think of why I have a Twitter account – to connect with interesting individuals whom I have nor might ever physically meet and to follow breaking news in near-realtime – this guff frankly does not appeal to me. It’s polluting twitter no doubt about it. As you can see Zynga have created their own special client to deliver inane bs direct to your homepage.

Personally I have a policy of immediately unfollowing anyone who feels it necessary to add such content to their account. Dealing with manual spam especially connected around trending topics is a more nuanced problem.

But mass auto distribution by gaming platforms can be nipped in the bud right now.

Here is mine as an example

This gucci Portable ID that displays trophy count is only available from Playstation’s EU community site and so this is why Gamer Tag instructs the user to register there. The process is quite labourious but to help there is a great step-by-step guide at iTrophies.

As my first Facebook app I was surprised at the incomplete nature of documentation available, especially on the official dev site itself. Although concepts became less hazy by the time I fleshed out the full application life cycle it took a while for the building blocks to fall into place. The multi-dimensional nature of developing for the Facebook platform – i.e. working across 3 domains each with their own specific script or markup language – made for a trial and error development experience.

There are a lot of different paths into a facebook app and thus the challenge comes in creating a bullet-proof application that will withstand the many methods users will find to get to my little app. Storyboarding the various steps in signing up users helps immensely and can be safely broking down into a number of discrete steps.

This is definitely something that merits further discussion so look out for a tutorial somewhere in the not-too-distant future.

You can try it out for yourself here.

• COD4 has spent a large percentage of it’s lifetime in the “Downloading game settings” state.
• Battlefield:BadCompany refuses to allow me to invite or join would-be squad members
• WipEoutHD’s brittle save files corrupt themselves if stared at too long

 Some days it really is a pain.  That these kinds of amateurish problems still present themselves is a sure sign that for all the talk, the industry has not yet matured to the quality or stature of other entertainment business.

Far Cry 2.  Never played the first, but mercenary activities in the African savanna?  TIA Danny, TIA.  Does no harm to run the Black Hawk Down soundtrack over the demo either

The black market in GX4000 is not new, supposedly beginning in Poland where games that never made an official release to cart eventually found their way onto the platform by unofficial means.  But hopefully all this will stir up the availability of a few more (legit) Pang carts in the coming weeks…

I’ve started a thread over on cpczone’s forum about it, although I’m sure they’ll be as bewildered at the build up in action as I am.

Survival is an ongoing issue.

Things have changed since then though – I’ve taken to consoles for my online shooters, specifically COD4 on the PS3. BF has a history on the Sony platform, BF2: Modern Combat released on the PS2, but it was an abysmal conversion of the popular PC title. The coming of Battlefield: Bad Company to the PS3 in Europe yesterday has something to prove then. I’ll be getting it and I’ve already played the demo. In short, the single-player sucks but the online play is very reminiscent of the original BF1942 on the PC all those years ago. Gazala comes to mind, damn I can still hear the DC_Final mod theme tune blaring out it’s Arab rhythms. Ok so the latest effort mightn’t be a COD4 beater, but it takes me back to my own Golden Age of gaming, so it’s a worthy addition.

What I dislike intensely is this arse-sucking review from GameSpy.

Granted I don’t click through their daily email to the site everyday, but I hope this fluffy review isn’t typical of ‘independent’ thought on gaming today. The author practically apologises for Dice on graphics (admittedly the BF series was never at the forefront of shooter FX) and drones on and on about the single player plot. You’d think it was some kind of movie. And this in a series famed for one thing only – it’s online experience, where massive maps ensure the fight turns into a series of running private pitched battles, each one having an effect on the overall outcome of epic encounters.

Sigh – maybe it was just all a lot better when I was young…