There's an Ender's Game movie burning somewhere on the seventh level of Development Hell, which if it ever comes to fruition almost guarantees the eventual existence of Ender's Video Game. This may not suck, but it probably will, so before it does, I'm positing my vague ideas for what it could have will have been (that's present-future-imperfect-subjunctive-aorist tense, in case you're wondering -- only time travelers and prognosticators use it)

Really this would be a sports game, with a wild field and weird rules. I'm being reminded of HyperBlade even as I type. This is a woefully underpopulated genre , and most of those are cosmetic re-imaginings of modern sports anyway. Perhaps this is because developers don't think gamers are interested in learning new rules. They may have a point.

For instance, the rules of the "sport" of FPS are pretty similar across the board:
1) Shoot
2) Don't get shot (or kicked by a goat)

That could be Halo 1, Gears of War 2, or Super Noah's Ark 3D. The cosmetic differences are greater than any others. Noah's Ark was a Bible game anyway, so "the Covenant" and even "the Locust" wouldn't be out of place. (Gnats? Frogs? Darkness? Screw those sissy plagues. I bet Pharaoh would've let the Jews go pretty damn quick at freakin' gunpoint.)

That's why we need the tie-in. Not to free the Hebrews, but to get people onboard with a new set of rules. Ender's Video Game would be the perfect property to create a fully fleshed-out microgravity FPS/sports sim. The heart of the game would be based on the space combat training exercises the children carry out in the micrograv environment at the center of the rotating-space-station-cum-orbital-West-Point they call home. They're issued what are basically laser-tag guns, and special suits that react to being shot by said guns by immobilizing the portion of the body that got hit. The playing "field" was a large ellipsoid arena that would, at different times have big inert objects called "stars" floating in it for cover. The object is to get a small object (or person) into the enemy's "Gate" -- the portal through which the entered the arena -- which is at the opposite end of the space from yours. I'm doing all this from memory, so it is certainly wrong in many places, but you get the idea.

A game that worked on a vaguely similar principle but with constant thrust instead of environmentally limited thrust was Rocket Jockey So play that (or it's open source equivalent) to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

Instead of thrusting around with jets or rockets like a space fighter sim, or running and gunning like an FPS, the gameplay would center on pushing and drifting, with grappling and slinging via grappling-hook-gun later on. Other additions could be magnetized footwear, so one could stand on "stars" and walls, or even run along them to get momentum. The mechanics (if not the graphics) could even be fun on the Wii.

And that's the critical point. A game like this could be fun if executed well. It's not exactly likely that it would be, given the track record of movie games, (there have been so few book games there's no track record there to speak of). On the Wii, skilled MotionPlus programming (which cannot exist, since developers didn't even know MotionPlus existed until rather recently) would be prerequisite for this to result in anything but a WiiMote-waggling travesty. Controls and animation timing would be just as crucial on a gamepad-based version on the PS3 or 360. This is just a flight of fancy, so feel free to shoot it down to reality.

Until then, remember: the enemy's gate is down.

In the future everyone will have broadband, so they may just stop selling tangible games on any kind of media at all. Everything would be DLC and that would be that.

If not, we're oughtta go back to cartridges.

After a fashion, that is. Nintendo got criticized for sticking with the bricks when Sega and Sony went to discs, and we won't debate on the rightness or wrongness of that, but could there really be a profitable way and reason to go back to solid-state storage for console games? Dang right, there is.

What makes me say that? Look in your USB drive. Nothing there? Look on your keychain. Odds are you've got at least a gig in either one of those places. Granted, most games are more than that, but bear with me. A DVD has about 17 gigs of space, max, and a Blu-Ray disc currently offers 25 gigs but could even get up to 200 gigs by the time the next next-gen consoles are out. Seems like a no-brainer which console-makers would choose, right?

Wrong.

Flash memory is going to get even smaller and cheaper. Sure, a BluDisc will hold a whole lot, but unless writing technology advances you'd have to erase the whole thing to rerecord new data on it. Flash memory works like a hard drive. How does this affect gaming? Imagine a console with several hundred gigs of built-in storage, let's call it PS4 because it's a shorter acronym than Twii or XBOX 720. Now imagine a flash memory-type device with encryption built into it (obviously) which only allows it to be played in the PS4. Not only is the entire game on it, running at the same speed as it would if it were on the hard drive (shorter or no loading, compared to an optical disc), but there's extra space for DLC -- map packs, patches, save files and so forth. It goes with the game, so even if you take it to a friend's console, you've got all your data. Forget futzing around on your hard drive making room. It's only for the occasional overflow, or more likely online "virtual console" games you downloaded.

Also available would be a blank cartridge with encryption, which you can copy those downloaded games onto and play on someone else's console, or a computer with an emulator. Yes, they would make and sell their own PS4 emulator for PC use, since the download-only games would likely be performance-light enough for an average PC to run. Thus, they would cut into the PC gaming market. You could only get the PS4 downloadables on PC, not the major PS4 titles (unless the developer ports them), and you'd still have to pay for the emulator and all the games, so really it's expanding their market, not cannibalizing console sales.

Of course, this future hinges on really cheap flash memory to compete with the staggering capacity and rock-bottom cost of BluDVDs. Flash memory may not go down in price and up in capacity enough by the next generation, and by the time we get to the generation after that everyone will be downloading. Meanwhile, with a couple hundred gigs costing only a few bucks, the incentive to stick with vulnerable, scratch-prone (especially in an XBOX) optical discs is strong. Hopefully, one console will go the way I've proscribed, and one or more of the others will stick to discs, and we'll see who wins. Piracy will be a greater danger with flash memory (unless they use a non-PC-compatible plug), but such is the danger of uncharted waters. After all, it's not like you can't put a disc in a computer already.

Found this thread at the Mass Effect forums while checking to see if there's going to be an ME PC demo. Like the froggie Francaise poster jbaudrand, I'm really only interested in a demo for testing how the game would run on my PC, "2GB download" be damned. I'll just delete the thing when I buy the full game! What does it really cost the company to bang out a brief demo for what amounts to benchmarking? Didn't they already make the damn game? I'll admit I don't know everything that goes into porting from console to PC, but they sure as hell MADE the game on a PC (or Mac) so it can't take THAT long--surely they can set aside some interns or something to lop off a couple areas and make a benchmarking demo out of them.

My real issue, however, isn't with Bioware, but its mini-legion of slavering fanboys defending corporate laziness.


Argoyne says:
"Demos can be a poor reflection of a games actual content and performance a poorly done one can harm sales of a good game and a well done one can sell rubbish." Never happened to me, since, y'know, I have a brain, but perhaps it could... no, no, that statement is just "rubbish".
He continues:
"I've never had a game that has had an issue that a demo would have highlighted."
Argoyne is described as a "game owner". Apparently that's not plural, since if he owned more than one game he'd have run into that. All those titles listed under his name must be for show.

But the crowning piece of mind-blinded buttspeak comes from :
"I think if the game is good enough, it's worth buying without testing"
Mayyyyyyyyyyyybe on a console, where if the thing don't run there's nothing the companies can expect you to do beyond blowing in the CD slot. The rest is up to them. They've either got to put up a patch PRONTO, or face replacing thousands of discs for free (except in the case of Microsoft, whose awful console will destroy your discs if you make the mistake of trying to play them, and they'll charge you 20 bucks to get a new disc with information on it YOU'VE ALREADY PAID THEM $60 FOR; a disc which costs them $2 to make) On PC, you sure as shirt can't take that disc back to the store if it runs like crap. Nope, you've got to invest a couple hundred more bucks in improving your PC and then, maybe, it'll run. If it don't, then OOPS, you must have and nVidia instead of an ATI or whatever other card manufacturer the developer was in bed with. "Tough luck," they say, "but there's 'known issues' with your card. Sure, they're 'known', and have been AT LEAST since we put together the readme, but we didn't do a damn thing about 'em. Enjoy, clocksuckers*!"
BTW, that means people with sucky CPU clock speed. Not people who perform fellatio on Cogsworth cosplayers. Like Tim here.


PC Games need demos. They don't have to be great -- in this marketplace of wildly differing system setups, PC gamers just need to be reassure that the damn thing will run. There are more than enough video reviews, previews, and DE-views (don't ask) for us to find out what the game is really like. We'd just like to be sure we can play it before we pay you.

*Sigh* But in the end, these are BioWare's own forums, doubtless infested with fanboys of varying levels of rabidity. I doubt they'd espouse the same views on demos if the were burned by an undemoed, misleadingly sys-req'd game from..., well whoever's the opposite of Bioware. VUGames? They suck pretty bad. Point made.

It's a Chinese-made IBM ThinkCentre Adding Machine. Might be a Difference Engine, too, I'm not sure. Even after Vista came out I've still been sending in those error reports to Mircrosoft after a program or OS crash. I wonder what they do with them. Nothing ever got fixed, or when they DID make a patch it caused EXACTLY as many problems as it fixed, so I'm guessing they just look at those error reports, laugh their asses off, and go back to abusing themselves over a pile of European currency. Seriously, shine a black light on a 500 Euro note and shudder in fear.

Also, that thing in the lower left is not a coffee mug, it's a sippy cup.