My rant against NHL 09 and EA Sports

(There is nothing concise about this entry.  If you’re going to read it, it’s going to take a while.  I may break it up into parts.  I probably should.  I don’t know how, but I should.)

On October 21, 2008, Electronic Arts’ sports division will unleash upon salivating PC gamers its most recent installment of NHL 09 for $49.99 MSRP.  “Winner of 7 Sports Game of the Year Awards,” the NHL series as brought to us by EA Sports has, over the last 17 years, has been one of the best reviewed franchises in video game history, as well as one of the most beloved.  However, not is all as cheery or as optimistic as EA would make it out to be.  For the past 2 years, PC gamers have found themselves in unfamiliar territory: having their favored version of NHL 07 or NHL 08 be, in many ways, an inferior version to those on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles.  I, and many like myself, are crying foul; some of us privately, some of us on whatever medium we can, such as EA’s official “NHL PC” boards.  The uproar has gone unaddressed by Electronic Arts since the complaining began shortly after NHL 07 was unveiled and the truth of the matter became that we PC gamers were about to be left in the dust for no apparent reason.  Here I am going to personally investigate the matter as best I can, because I for one would prefer that the facts be made apparent and public.

First, I’m going to address the main question at hand: why doesn’t Electronic Arts update the PC version of their NHL series to the level the current generation consoles (X360, PS3) is on? Here’s my quick list of theories, each of which I’ll address:

• Poor PC market
• Piracy
• Laziness

The first two are theories very commonly used by the denizens of EA’s NHL PC forums, and the last one is my own.  Before I get to them, I want to get into a brief history of the NHL series, as brought to us by EA Sports.

The first three NHL games Electronic Arts published and released (NHL Hockey, NHLPA Hockey ‘93, and the immortal NHL ‘94) were and still are considered today to be landmarks in not just the sports gaming world but overall.  Many people bought Sega Genesis consoles in the early-90’s simply because of at least one of those three games.  Yet, on the whole, each game was not entirely different from the other.  Yes, there were certain features added that made big impacts on the series and improved them dramatically (from Hockey to ‘93, NHLPA licensing; from ‘93 to ‘94, slap-shots and compiled stats for playoffs), but early on this set a tone that would become all too familiar for those who have followed the ascent of the EA Sports brand.  Sure enough, from one game to the next there were a few changes here and there (aside from the obvious roster changes, logo changes, etc.) but nothing the really marked an innovative paradigm shift in the series that would make people stand up and say, “Hey, that’s worth buying this game for!” Of course, at the time, the concept of annual releases for games was barely new.

In 1993, however, while NHL ‘94 was making waves on the console market, Electronic Arts also released NHL Hockey for MS-DOS.  While lacking the vaunted one-timer, this began the long tradition of the PC version of EA Sports’ titles being the standard to which the other versions would be compared.  Though it’s unfair to compare the differences between the Genesis version of NHL ‘94 to the MS-DOS version of NHL Hockey (particularly since the ROM size of NHL 94 for the Genesis is 1 MB and NHL Hockey for DOS was on a CD), here’s a sample of the key differences between both games:

• NHL Hockey featured a full, 82-game NHL season, with full stat tracking and league leaders, as well as the ability to export and import rosters and stats.  NHL 94 had only the Stanley Cup playoffs, and tracked stats only for your team and your opponents.  No support for exporting or importing anything, as it isn’t technically possible with the Genesis anyway.
• NHL Hockey featured higher-resolution graphics and textures, as well as more animations, than its console counterpart.
• NHL Hockey had more in-depth intermissions, and you could even save games in the middle of playing.
• NHL Hockey also had the capacity for better sound.

Again, I realize it’s an uneven playing field, but it helps secure my point: for 12 more years you could this sort of leaps-and-bounds comparisons between the PC versions of NHL whatever-year and the console versions and say, “There’s a big difference between them.” Now, and for the last 2 years, the shoe is on the other foot.

So why, all of a sudden, did EA Sports make their abrupt change to give the consoles more respect than the PCs? It is here where I should note that PCs are entirely capable of matching wits or parts with any console on the market, and that there are games out there that are not only PC-exclusive but challenge systems as well.  In fact, one of the most recent and most well-known of which is an EA-produced game: Crysis.  I wish I was joking, but the fact of the matter is that PCs are far more suitable for the sort of annual release practice that EA Sports indulges in due to their adaptability.  But, here we are, NHL 09 is out on the PC in one month and EA has no defense for its actions.  It’s so difficult to fathom that EA hasn’t responded that fans of the NHL series are making up reasons as to why they didn’t bother updating NHL 09 for the PC (which I’ve already posted above).  The first one:

• The PC market is too poor, or is poorer as compared to the console market.

This one is a no-brainer: false. If EA truly thought the PC market wasn’t feasible for new releases, they wouldn’t be coming out with NHL 09 for the PC at all.  And EA is hardly out for the niché market, either.  EA makes games that are popular, good and they sell.  Since they sell, they continue to publish them.  Whether or not they or their developers put enough effort into the games they make…that’s another issue to be discussed shortly.

A counter-argument would be to point at EA Sports’ vaunted Madden series.  On April 1, 2008, EA Sports’ new president Peter Moore announced that a PC version of the game would not be released in 2009, stating:

…I’ll reiterate what I said a couple of weeks ago in this space…the PC presents some very serious business challenges to us in the sports category, particularly because so many of you all are playing your favorite sports games on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. (link)

(Peter Moore, of course, was a big name in Microsoft’s Xbox division and, before that, was president and COO of Sega of America during the rise and fall of the Dreamcast.  That’s mostly irrelevant, certainly, but that’s why I have this all in parenthesis.)

To be fair, EA Sports does have “some very serious business challenges” in its PC market, primarily due to fans doing their games, but not their business, a service.  For example, every version of NBA Live, MVP Baseball, NHL Hockey, FIFA Soccer and Madden NFL as been modded in some way, shape or form by fans, primarily graphically and with rosters.  EA has unfortunately missed the message, which is “Improve your games so fans don’t have to.”  I don’t see Konami bailing out of making Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 for the PC, do you? The PES series (and, before that, the Winning Eleven series) has been one of the most fan-modded games in recent memory, and is year after year better-reviewed and well-received than EA’s FIFA series (which plays a role in this, more later).  Or maybe the “very serious business challenges” have more to do with…

• Piracy is destroying the marketability of PC games.

On January 12, 2008, community manager for Infinity Ward (Call of Duty 4) Robert Bowling said this on his blog:

On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn’t fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online). (link)

Welcome to 1999! We have a special gift for you! It’s called Napster.

I’m a self-proclaimed pirate.  I don’t advocate it, but I do it because it’s cheaper than buying something I may not love enough to have been happy I paid $50-$60+ dollars for.  Piracy has been an issue for the major media (TV, movies, music, software, books, etc.) for as long as there’s been a way to copy them and distribute them for cheaper than what their actual owners do.  In the 2007 documentary Good Copy Bad Copy, MPAA CEO Dan Glickman even states (paraphrasing), “Piracy will never be stopped, but…they will try to make it as difficult and tedious as possible.”  The music industry has seen a major reform since the days of Naptster, with many bands now trying to sweeten their music offerings with other downloads, and iTunes making things more approachable for many.  Of course, the video game industry made USD $9.5B in 2007, so maybe the comparison isn’t fair.  Unless you can’t ignore the fact that the film industry raked in USD $9.63B in the same year.  Piracy is an issue for all and an issue for none simulatenously.  Improve your product, lower your prices, or lose your business.  That’s capitalism.

Unlike numbers for sales, numbers are piracy are near impossible to collect.  In the case of Call of Duty 4, apparently not so much.  In general however, when I read about people complaining about piracy, I think they’re complaining about below expectations sales, which could also be due to a crappy product.  But piracy is the best scapegoat in the media industries because no one likes to argue when the law is bandied about.  However changing attitudes in the music industry may ultimately change opinions on that matter.  Or maybe not, when console game prices have gone up $10 apiece and Blu-ray DVDs have done the same.

Regardless, NHL 09 wasn’t updated because EA doesn’t want another game to be pirated.  That’s false, and ridiculous.  If they were that worried about piracy they wouldn’t have released NHL 09 at all, or FIFA 09, or Tiger Woods 09.  They would’ve stuck with the tougher-to-pirate console versions.  No, I think they didn’t update NHL 09 because of the next theory, which I’m introducing to the argument:

• They’re lazy.

EA Sports made this theory moot a month before I even made it, by announcing the FIFA 09 will be “next-gen” for the PC.  WHAT?!

Sure enough, I’ve played the demo and it plays and looks like it will be very similar to the console versions, if not the same.  This blows me and my theory away.  However, one very reasonable counter argument to this would be that EA isn’t as concerned with the competitiveness of the NHL series as they are the FIFA series.  Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 was next-gen and has been stealing EA’s business away year-after-year, fan-made modifications and all.  One thought is that EA had no other choice but to remain competitive with its FIFA franchise and their only choice was and has been for years to try and keep up with Konami.  Fine, that’s a pretty good counter-argument.

I still think they’re lazy.  As I’ve stated before, NBA Live is modified constantly by the community, and this year, like Madden NFL, there will not be a PC version.  All this points to is EA giving up on trying to make things better so that PC gamers don’t have to pirate their games.

Now, if there is an argument in favor of EA, they would be more than glad to point out that there have been some updates for the PC version of NHL 09, which I’d be also glad to point out:

• Jerseys, graphics and rosters (yawn)
• Be A Pro

That’s two things.  Sure, I’m ignoring Rookie Mode and all the European Leagues, but I and all my fellow NHL fans don’t care.  If they hadn’t done the typical jersey, graphics and rosters updates, we’d still be playing NHL Hockey.  That’s the biggest gimmie ever.

Be A Pro mode, however, is a gigantic slap in the face.  Instead of a full-fledged update to meet or beat the features on the consoles, we get this? A piece, a taste of what we could’ve had if we got a nice, new console? Bullshit.  EA Sports, you’ve been doing this sort of crap for years.  You wonder why people pirate your game.  It’s because no one wants to spend $50 on one new major feature every year.  Not anymore.

Frankly I can’t come up with a solid answer as to why EA Sports didn’t update NHL 09, primarily thanks to their treatment of their other franchises.  They aren’t releasing Madden 09, despite it being their #1 franchise, even though it’s probably the least modified of all their franchises.  They aren’t releasing NBA Live 09, which the fans would probably update to the standards EA would anyway.  They are not only releasing FIFA Soccer 09 but bringing it up to speed with its console versions, but probably only because PES09 will be taking away more of its business.

I’ve got it.  It’s a combination of laziness and lack of competition.  But, wait.  EA never really had much competition on the PC.  Plus they are came out with a widely-panned Tiger Woods 09.  Shit.

(The irony in all this is that the console versions of NHL 09 will see a landmark update: the EA Sports Hockey League.  An MMO.  Which dominate PCs.)

The Need For Speed (future video game concept)

I’ve been kicking this concept around for a few months now, and it’s finally started to take some form so that I could ably describe it to people. Given where technology is today and given where most people see technology going in the not-too-distant future, I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t already in the pipelines.

The game (which I’m calling The Need For Speed), will obviously be an Electronic Arts title, and will be a next-gen game, if not a next-next-gen game.  It will be a massively-multiplayer online DRIVING game, and the concept is one that few games have ever touched on: normal, everyday driving with underlying racing elements.  By the time this game would be released, technology will already have advanced far enough that all the world’s roads and geography will be able to be loaded onto a single disc, or streamed from a central server (cluster).  Your driveway, the unpaved mountain roads of Bolivia, and the German Autobahn are just a few examples of roads you can instantly travel to and drive on.

Upon first registering the game, your avatar is dropped into a construct of sorts (think The Matrix) and up out of the ground sprouts thousands of vehicles.  Hopping on a Segway, you get to ride around to any vehicle you wish (sorted alphabetically by car make, then model, then year, then class) and pick out your car…as long as it is street-legal in the country you wish to play in.  It is bare-bones at the moment; not even the optional stuff is included.  Colors are limited, external parts are limited, even the stuff inside the car are limited.  But you can upgrade it later.  And, the more you drive, eventually you may be able to take even the cars that aren’t street-legal out for a spin.

Being an MMODG, your world is populated with both the most intelligent (or dumbest, depending) driving AI and the other players around the world.  From the construct you are dropped into the world in your own driveway, and you can drive freely around from there if you want.  This would be the wisest thing to do to get a feel for the controls, of course, but you may want to get moving and collecting and unlocking things.  There are a variety of time trials, but short and long, that are immediately available to you, and you may want to set some time aside for some of the longer ones.  The gameplay and driving are about as accurate to real life as it gets, so distances travelled and speeds driven may force you to play for a while.  A handy pausing mechanic, just in case you need it, will allow you to step away from the game.  (Though I can’t decide if I’d rather you be able to immediately do a rolling pause, or have to pull over in order to pause.)

Of course, the ultimate purpose of this game would be racing.  But real-world “racing” is not sanctioned or legal for the most part, and this is what you have to deal with.  You’ll get in-game money for completing tasks, but you’ll have to keep an eye out for state and local policeout to make sure you obey the law.  Like in real life, they may be everywhere, or they may be sparse.  They may come after you, they may come after someone else.  And if you think this is like previous NFS iterations where you lose a “life”, you’re wrong.  Real-world laws apply here, and you may be suspended (or banned, if the terminology makes more sense) from the game for serious infractions.  You’ll have to learn, just like regular drivers, how to bend the laws and when you can break them…or use others to your advantage.

Just like in previous NFS games, sometimes you can take control of the lesser appreciated aspects of the vehicular world for “regular” drivers.  Bonus driving sessions will allow you to drive limos, taxis, big rigs and, as usual, emergency vehicles and maintenance crews as you can even go and help resolve accidents and pile-ups and get traffic moving again.  Special conditions will allow you to take part in these missions, and certain unlockables will only be made available by completing these missions.  It’s all very standard stuff for both RPGs and driving games, but when combined it makes for an experience which applies more to the average person than slaying monsters to get gear that everyone else has.

The big point of having a Need For Speed game as an MMO is the community.  Buy/download custom made graphics.  Real-time leaderboards to compare your times.  Voice chat with people you’re driving along with (a la CB radio) or use your “cell phone” to chat with your online friends.  (Maybe they can help you find out where the cops are?) Drivers clubs.  Your friends can come with you while you both try to take out those long accomplishments/road trips.

Now, you may be asking: why would anyone want to simulate driving? It can be boring, and you could just do it in real life, and the long drives may not be worth it.  Well, that all depends on your point-of-view.  I seem to remember playing some instances in World of Warcraft for a couple of hours…and people have played some instances and dungeons for much longer.  If fantasy isn’t your thing, I also remember the hour-long downhill race in SSX3 at the end of the game.  The point is that, given enough time and enough incentive, people will be willing to do something for a long time if you give them the opportunity.

This is all pretty much a wish list for a future Need For Speed game, which I regret isn’t all too likely.  Electronic Arts has rarely shown they have the cojones to spend their money to make a major, innovative game.  It isn’t like a game like this couldn’t be made now if they really wanted to try it, but it will take a lot of time and a lot of foresight for a game like this to be made.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably my girlfriend.

In the void of time between blog posts that I have, things happen. I mean, I don’t live underneath a rock. The world never stopped because one person wasn’t around to take part. So, when I say things have happened between this blog post and my last one (wherever it was, be it on LiveJournal or MySpace or Gamingforce) you can probably imagine that there are a lot of things that could happen. This doesn’t make for very exciting reading, sadly. Personally, I end up reading virtually every blog post my girlfriend, Danielle (or Sassafrass, as she’s known to our online friends) because she makes things interesting with pictures and BIG TEXT and humorous subjects. I once had a dream to become, among other things, a journalist. Suffice it to say, while I’m good at English, this does not automatically qualify me for English-related or writing-related occupations.

While I’ve previously had blogs that I could wish I had better maintained in the past, I suppose it’s now or never for me to resolve this quandary of whether I’m a good enough writer for anything writing-related. Otherwise, I’ll be stuck doing pharmacy work or other retail work. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I had delusions of grandeur, of doing something important that affects those around me in a positive way. Not like curing cancer or anything significant, but just being able to live with and know that people appreciate the things I’ve said or done.

I’m sure this sounds kind of sad, if not a little endearing, but I go with the expectation that I will someday find something that both makes me happy and allows me to impress upon the world at large that I have something important to say. I’m egotistical. Moving on.

Danielle is a force, sure enough. If her words don’t scream FORCE, then her actions do. Sometimes you read the things she’s written and it’s as if she’s raped your mind with words, forcing you to accept and believe what she’s just written to the point where you aren’t sure if you were there or not. Pictures have a lot to do with this, too, and I should interject here that while she’s doing, I’m recording, for the most part, photographically our little adventures together. I don’t have a camera myself, but I seem to have an eye for it. And, thankfully, I’ve stopped drinking Pepsi regularly so that caffeine shakiness I once had is now just a slight tremble. I hope to have my own camera sometime in the not-too-distant future, but for now I’ll have to suffer.

So, the title of my blog may sound a little obvious but you’ll have to understand who I am. But I’m not going to give it all to you at once, primarily because there isn’t enough time in the day and I have about fifty minutes before I have to get ready for work, and secondarily because that would make things way too easy for you, dear reader (unless you’re someone who knows me, in which case you don’t have much further to go).

My father has always been a big Pink Floyd fan, but I never really adopted them into my heart. Time, Money, Another Brick in the Wall (Part II). We all know these songs, whether we’re young or old, because the radio plays them all pretty much daily and our parents generally couldn’t avoid buying their albums because the psychadelia of their music (particularly, of course, from Dark Side of the Moon) fit the time so well that it seems the CD was probably handed out to high-schoolers as they came through the front doors in 1973. You had to have that CD, and know the songs by heart, just like teenagers in the fifties needed to know Elvis by heart, or sixties teenagers reciting The Beatles like they were the Apostles. Of course, there were “bigger” bands out in the seventies (The Rolling Stones, for one), but if your impression of the 1970s is one of drug use and misidentification then Pink Floyd’s seventh album are a perfect launching pad for reminiscing about that decade.

So when Danielle professed herself as a big Pink Floyd fan, like most situations where someone I know likes a particular sort of music, I immediately became a fan. I didn’t own a single Pink Floyd album six months ago; I now own four (DSotM, The Wall, Wish You Were Here, and Echoes, which encompasses the rest of the albums quite nicely). Of course, for her, Pink Floyd was her big thing when she was in high school. (I’ll note here that she’s 25. I’m 22. I’ll get to the big subject, which involves this fact, shortly.) So while she was losing interest in Floyd, I had nowhere to go but up.

Music, for me, has been a part of my life for maybe 13 years. Until high school, the majority of the music I had listened to was Michael Jackson, the Lion King soundtrack, and Raffi (no Bananaphone, sadly). Then I came of age where I had to start knowing what music was and I latched onto what was popular at the time (thanks MTV). In no particular order, but based mostly on memory:

• Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill
  
• the Batman Forever soundtrack
• Boyz II Men – II
• Mariah Carey
• Korn
• Limp Bizkit
• (rap)
• Linkin Park

This leads into when I got out of high school and started attaching myself to whoever my Circuit City buddies were listening to, particularly Disturbed (Believe still sounds awesome to me) and Evanescence (which fell out of favor with their newer album). But then, I regressed, and I landed myself Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys and that was it. That pretty much set me on the path to listening virtually exclusively to anything classic rock. Then Danielle made it worse.

Now, today, my MP3 collection is heavily fortified by music before my birth in 1984: Floyd, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Doors. (Still only popular music, but that’s what was good then.) It doesn’t show my age, whatsoever. You’d think I was a thirtysomething who loved rock and roll. Which brings me to the story of the title of this blog.

Danielle, her friend Sarah and I went bowling someplace near Auburn, MA a couple of weeks ago. It was Cosmic Bowling, which defaults to being worth twice as much as a normal game of bowling, but we paid like idiots and all had shitty bowling games. But the experience was fun anyway because we ruined everyone else’s experience. See, in case you hadn’t noticed, the majority of music that comes out these days SUCKS. It’s either some bastardized form of alternative rock, pop-dance music, or the shittiest hip-hop/rap ever produced. But, luckily, this particular bowling alley had one of those digital jukeboxes (which look absolutely shitty) and this particular jukebox had more music I had seen in a digital jukebox.

So, with a couple of bucks in hand and the mood to have a good laugh, I interrupted the defaulted Pink, put on Pink Floyd (the Meddle version of Echoes, at 23 minutes and 31 seconds, and the Echoes version of Shine on You Crazy Diamond, which clocks in at 17 minutes and 32 seconds) and hoped no one would notice the subtle artist change laughed my ass off with my two Floyd-loving compatriots.

(At this point, I openly hope you know the two songs I’m referring to, and can maybe guess what kind of music today’s teenagers listen to, and be able to laugh along with us.)

Nothing could’ve made the next 41 minutes any better. Bowling the night away between saxophone and synthesized screaming and, of course, good old seventies rock and roll that no one had heard of, joyous that, at least for those 41 minutes, we would be able to listen to music that we didn’t hate and give those kids an education. (Danielle and Sarah paid for other songs, but the jukebox allows people to pay extra to intercede into the playlist, making their songs next.)

The point? I’m only five years removed from high school, but you can already see the generation gap materializing like the away party returning to the Enterprise. I listen to old music, I play old video games (only Genesis and Super Nintendo, not THAT old…). Pretty soon I’ll be begging for Social Security. Worse yet, I’m out to make young whippersnappers suffer to old crone music while lasers and fog and black lights round out the experience fairly perfectly.

And that’s all I really have the time to talk about today. I’ll do as usual and promise to maintain this blog, but, like I’ve said, I’ve gone through enough blogs that I didn’t maintain so don’t hold your breath. But I’ve got a good feeling about this one.

(edited for paragraphs)

• Money
• Get away
• Get a good job with more pay and you’re OK

(11s;11s)