“GTA4″ reviews start rolling in

The early reviews of Grand Theft Auto IV are trickling in, and all indications are that not only did Rockstar hit a home run, they knocked the freakin’ ball into orbit.

Metacritic so far has the Xbox 360 version scoring a perfect 100 based on 13 reviews. If that holds, it will finally knock BioShock (which “only” scored a 96) to second place. I’m not quite sure how Metacritic is getting the perfect 100 since two reviews gave GTA4 a 98 and one came through with a mere 95. It proabably has to do with Marc Doyle’s weighted system that has the views of more influential outlets count for more.

I will say that the circumstances surrounding the reviews are certainly odd. Typically, embargoed reviews are lifted all at the same time. Such was the case with Halo 3, the game that probably most parallels GTA4 in terms of hype and gamer reaction.

But Rockstar seems to have assigned staggered embargo times for various outlets. IGN was the first out of the gate with its “exclusive review” earlier this weekend. Kotaku told readers it would post its review at 9am Pacific on Sunday, and stuck to that (posting an hour later, even) despite that IGN’s piece was already out. Tonight I see GameSpy, but not GameSpot, has a review out, and The New York Times has its review.

Variety’s Ben Fritz calls the ethics of the whole enterprise into question. While I’ll leave that topic to in-person discussions over a mug or two of beer, I will echo his sentiment that if someone else is already running with news you have agreed to hold until a later time, then any embargo is effectively broken and you should be clear to run your story. In most cases this does require a phone call to be placed to the source of the news, first to ask about the circumstances of the early report, and second as a courtesy to inform them that you now plan to run your story. The only situation I can envision in which you might hold back is if the terms of the embargo you agreed to explicitly stated that other outlets may be running reviews earlier than you, but you must hold yours until the agreed-upon time anyway. 

The other major implication of all these positive reviews is that I may be compelled to go to my local GameStop tomorrow at midnight to procure my copy. I am seriously contemplating buying it, coming home, and playing it for 7 hours or so until I have to get back to the office. Grand Theft Auto? More like Grand Theft Good Night’s Rest. 

Because everyone loves carjacking

The week in review

Wow. What a busy week. I’m going to just do sort of a link dump here, with additional comment exclusive to you Command-K subscribers. Premium stuff, and worth every penny you pay for it. This should also mark the resumption of regular blogging, now that I have a couple days to breathe and collect my thoughts.

There is this little companythat makes these cute little digital music players. And computers. And something called the iPhone. Everyone was wondering how they had held up amid the worsening economy. Pretty well, as it turns out.

Oh, and in the meantime, they boughta microchip design firm. That sort of threw everyone for a loop. The initial reaction was along the lines of “WTF does Apple want with a semi design shop?” Some of the speculation was that P.A. Semi’s low-power microprocessors could be modified for the iPhone or iPod. As it happens, I was briefed by these guys more than two years ago in my former life as semiconductor beat reporter. Ironically, their chips are based on IBM’s Power architecture, which Apple dumped from the Macs a while back in favor of Intel’s x86 chips. P.A. Semi’s products are aimed at hi-po computing: servers and supercomputers and the like. Not too likely that those will end up in an iPhone any time soon. But apparently, Apple does employ a number of chip designers who work with partners to tweak features to meet certain capabilities Apple’s product engineers have in mind. Still, it’s a curious play since if they wanted a bunch of chip designers, why not just hire them from the job market. Why pay a couple million per headcount to buy a whole company?

As if Apple wasn’t enough to handle, there’s a little game coming out next week that might just be, oh, only the biggest single entertainment property of the year. The Halo 3 launch last year opened the eyes of many reporters and editors to how big A-list video-game properties can be. Not only is Grand Theft Auto IV big business, it’s a game that has as much cultural relevance as The Matrix or Harry Potter.

My main preview story of the game is posted below, but before I get to that, I want to highlight two other pieces.

First is my Gameworld column on Sony’s Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. It’s a gorgeously realistic driving title, but only a fraction of what is promised when the full game comes out next year. Racing fans will love it, but I’m sure many consumers will see the $40 price tag as too high. 

What really interested me about my interview with Taku Imasaki, the U.S. producer on the game, was the vision that the title would become a platform for all things automotive: a driving game at the core, but augmented with videos of races and information about cars. 

Sony plans to add more features and pipe a steady stream of video content into “Prologue” in hopes that gamers’ interest will be redlining by the time the full game is released.

“Our goal is to become another medium for car companies, like magazines and TVs. We’re the perfect game for that and ideally we could become the MySpace or Facebook for auto enthusiasts,” Imasaki said.

Along with Rock Band and possibly Guitar Hero, it’s an example of how these connected consoles with gobs of processing power and storage are enabling games to become destinations/portals/aggregators for certain topics. Rock Band and GH do it for music, GT5 is doing it for cars. I’m sure there are other areas where it makes sense. Sports comes to mind. Take Madden football as an example. They already have a scrolling sports news ticker in Madden, why not buff that up to include highlights of the week’s games, interviews with athletes, and tutorials that show you how to use the video game to enhance your appreciation of the actual sport (I would love, for example, some breakdown of defensive schemes, which I only dimly understand).

The second piece I’ll highlight is an analysis of GTA4. Everybody knows this game is going to sell a buttload. The only question is it going to be serious buttload or just a regular buttload? Estimates from several Wall Street analysts range from 9 million to 12.5 million units by the end of this year, with most looking at about 10 million units. At that scale, analyzing the game’s sales is a little like speculating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Let’s just call it “a lot” and leave it at that.

What I found more interesting was the question of what effect the game will have on console sales, and which console stands to benefit more, the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3? My expectation was that most people would say the Xbox 360. After all, Microsoft having locked in the exclusive downloadable content for later this year, combined with the superior implementation of online capabilities in Xbox Live, makes a pretty compelling argument for the machine.

It turns out that most people, from Wall Street analysts to industry observers who know far more about this stuff than me, figure the PS3 will get the biggest hardware sales boost. It basically boils down to two reasons: the hardcore gamers who dig GTA4probably already have an Xbox; those who aren’t hardcore gamers but love the GTA series probably got into it on the PlayStation 2, and are likely to stay loyal to Sony.

If you’ve made it this far, bless you. Hopefully it’s been worth it. I’ll leave you with my preview of Grand Theft Auto IV. Hit the link or go below the fold for the whole thing. It was a fun story to research and write.

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO, April 25 (Reuters) – Beatings, carjackings, drive-by shootings, drunk driving and hookers. For video game fans, it can only mean one thing: “Grand Theft Auto 4″ is here, arrving with all the subtlety of a shotgun blast.

The latest chapter in the wildly popular and controversial criminal action franchise from Take-Two Interactive Software Inc is poised to be the biggest entertainment product of the year, with expected first-week sales of up to $400 million — dwarfing Hollywood’s biggest box-office openings.

The handiwork of Take-Two’s Rockstar game studio headed by British brothers Sam and Dan Houser, “Grand Theft Auto 4,” which will be launched next Tuesday, promises to crank up the thuggish drama that made previous installments the equivalent of “The Godfather” for Generation PlayStation.

“We also felt over the last few years there hadn’t been a great standout gangster movie. Maybe we could do something ourselves that would live alongside that stuff,” Rockstar’s Dan Houser told Variety magazine in a recent interview.

EA: The repentent Borg?

As the drama over Electronic Arts’ play for Take-Two drags on, one question is whether EA, should it be successful in its bid, would end up ruining “Grand Theft Auto”, cranking out yearly updates with an ever-lengthening list of ill-conceived features and steadily declining quality.

A year ago, the answer could easily have been yes. Today, though, there is convincing evidence to show that CEO John Riccitiello is out to rehabilitate EA’s reputation in the eyes of gamers. Two weeks ago, I wrote an analysis laying out the issues. Read on to see what EA has in common with ancient Greek politics, alien menaces, and whether shareholders will smile on his efforts.

   By Scott Hillis
    SAN FRANCISCO, April 4 (Reuters) – As it pursues its $2 billion offer for Take-Two Interactive Software Inc, Electronic Arts Inc is trying hard to prove it won’t drive the “Grand Theft Auto” video game series to mediocrity, a fate that has befallen some of its other acquired franchises.
    It’s an important theme in EA’s current takeover drama with Take-Two, home to some of the industry’s leading lights, including Rockstar, the crown jewel studio behind the upcoming “Grand Theft Auto 4.”
    The company has a spotty history in getting hard-won talent to stick around. Its 1990s acquisition of well-regarded studios such as Bullfrog, Westwood and Origin led to mass defections and the marring of once-proud franchises with ho-hum games.
    Chief Executive John Riccitiello, who rejoined EA a year ago after heading private equity firm Elevation Partners, acknowledged as much at an industry conference in February.
    “I would state simply that we at EA blew it, and I was involved so I can say I blew it,” Riccitiello said of past acquisitions that ended badly. “The command and conquer model, the command and direct model, doesn’t work.” 

Three things about Bay Area drivers that drive me nuts

1. The constant running of red lights. This is such a major hazzard I always pause a second or two before proceeding from a stoplight or crossing the street. Every day I see multiple instances of cars blowing through intersections when the cross-traffic light has already turned green. I amazed I haven’t seen any wrecks yet.

2. Habitual failure to use turn signals. Okay buddy, why are you going so slow? Why are you slowing down now? Did your car break down? Do you need some help Oh, you’re turning. Well, how about using your signal next time. This is extremely frustruating in Albany, where many intersections don’t have left-turn lanes or dedicated left-turn signals. When, approaching a line of cars stopped for a red light, I’ve learned to avoid the left lane even if nobody has their blinkers on. That’s because invariably, some idiot will crawl up to the middle of the intersection and stop, waiting to make the turn but not having bothered to use the turn signal switch two inches from his left hand.

3. Motorcycles driving between lanes on the freeway. This gives me absolute heart attacks because I’ll be driving along peacefully on the Bay Bridge listening to Megadeth, when suddenly a rrrrrrRRRRRRROOOOOOWWWWW drowns out the soft strains of Dave Mustane’s axe-shredding and some nutter zips by in the 4-foot space between me and the next car over. All it would take is me swerving one foot to the side to avoid something in the road, and that cycle jockey is going to be using his face as a boogie board on the asphalt surf.

Back

Today was the first day back at work after a long, sunny week of Spring Break. In other words, it was not a happy day.

It does mean that regular blogging should resume over the next couple days as I get back in the routine. Funny how when my day is filled with work, I somehow find time to blog, but when I have all this time off, writing never seems to get done.

It was a good vacation. Forests were hiked, beaches were walked, new bands were discovered, and beach parties were had.

Not five minutes ago, I finished Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, and all I can say is, wow. It’s the first PS3 game I’ve played all the way through, and it was amazing. Think Indiana Jones meets Tomb Raider meets Far Cry. Uncharted is simply an eloquent refutation of the idea that video games can’t compete with movies for story-telling, or that game writing isn’t important. 

I’ll probably write more later about Uncharted as it was, for me anyway, a pretty ground-breaking experience. Most importantly, it was just a hell of a lot of fun and captivated me for about four nights running (much to the chagrin of Tala and the delight of Harlan).

Vacation

I’ve been taking my first vacation of the year and my folks are in town, so posting has been light lately.

Yesterday we did a 4-mile hike through Muir Woods and then followed it up with some refreshing surf and sun at Muir Beach. Today we went to Haight-Ashbury. Did the dirty hippie thing. Went to Amoeba Music, which is so edgy, even the clerk who took my money was complaining about the weird stuff piped over their music system. Bought a CD.

Having my parents in town means, of course,  that we get free babysitting for the duration. We’ve finally saw a couple movies we’ve been dying to see: There Will Be Blood and Juno. Both were excellent. Blood was a lot more subtle than I’d expected. I was figuring on an in-your-face, over-the-top, Bill the Butcher-style role, but there were a lot of interesting and even admirable aspects to Daniel Plainview’s character. I may write more about it later.

The best MMORPG

There was a blog post making the rounds today reviewing the outdoors as if it were a massively multiplayer role-playing game. Some clever bits:

The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player’s ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players’ tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely “survive”. What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.

 This instantly reminded me of one of my favorite piece of gaming journalism, a GameSpot article reviewing real life as if it were a game. I believe the GameSpot piece is from 2003 or so and is the earliest example I’ve seen of this sort of satire. It’s almost too good to excerpt, but here are a couple samples:

This example is evidence of some of the amazing depth offered by real life–there are so many different options and viable decisions for a character to make that it’s just about impossible for any one character to see everything and visit all the colorful and sometimes dangerous locations. Unlike in other MMORPGs, combat actually isn’t a major factor for most players in real life, though players are bound to engage in a few skirmishes early in their lives. Interestingly, though, real life does offer an amazingly intricate combat system, featuring complex hand-to-hand and ranged combat options that a character may learn and even specialize in.

And:

you’d think more players would be drawn to combat in real life, and in some territories, they are. However, the PVE (player vs. environment) aspect of real life is relatively unpopular, and the PVP (player vs. player) portion, while interesting, is far too risky for most of the population. That’s on account of the game’s very strict death penalty and punitive system–you may freely attempt to harm or kill any other player at any time, but you will then likely be heavily punished by the game’s player-run authorities. The punitive system has loopholes and other problems, allowing certain players to elude punishment and continue to engage in various player-killing activities.

GameSpot scored the game a 9.6.