The dead of summer

So it’s August 1, 2008… and I’m sitting here thinking to myself “self, you should write a blog post.” So my incredibly gifted mind was like “dude, you should preview the big games coming out in August.” I know, I’m groundbreaking with my thinking. Where else can you find ideas so OUT THERE!?!??

I headed over to the EB games site and went to the coming soon section to see what’s still on track for an August release. To my surprise August is a really, really, really terrible month for new games. Well, let me put a caveat to that. Both Madden and Tiger Woods come out this month, so if you are a sports gamer you will be happy. But other than that the only release that I found that holds any interest, even if it is only a morbid interest, is Too Human.

So, yeah…. August is Madden, Tiger Woods and Too Human. How did this happen? I mean I think even March had a better lineup than that. How can you let March be better than you, August!?!? Socom: Confrontation was supposed to be an August release, but it got pushed back to the end of September (edit:  pushed back again until the middle of October – ARGH!). Also, in the coming weeks EA is releasing a free content pack for Battlefield: Bad Company which will include the conquest mode that has been a staple of the Battlefield games since the series inception. The good news is that this add on pack is free (FREE?!?! FROM EA!??!?!). The bad news is that the conquest mode will only include 4 maps, which are just recycled versions of 4 gold rush maps. But it should add a new wrinkle to an already super fun game, so I’m definitely looking forward to it.

The Madden demo was released yesterday for the 360 and PS3. The Madden team claims to have taken some serious strides this year, and it shows in the demo, but the demo itself is terrible. Let me try to clarify that… The demo starts with you doing this virtual reality simulation to figure out what your Madden IQ is. It puts you through a number of drills to see how good you are at each facet of the game. The general idea is that if you suck at pass defense, the AI will knock down its difficulty level when you are playing pass defense. It’s an interesting idea, and not as new as EA would like you to think it is, but it also is rather boring and as a hardcore sim football fan, I just can’t get myself to give a shit about this. But I completed it, was basically All-Pro level for each thing (not surprising since that’s what level I’ve always played Madden on…. thanks for the simulation wasting my time to tell me what I already knew). So then the demo proper starts up. And this is where things get really good, and bad.

The demo is you, controlling the Giants, starting on a 4th and 1 with about a minute 20 left in the Super Bowl, down 4 points, against the Pats. Being a New York Giants fan I was like “cool.” But then I played it, and the game really seems to play great. The controls are tight, the AI seems solid, I have no major complaints about how the game plays…. not to mention that the graphics got a really nice overhaul and the game actually looks really, really good. But the problem is that the whole demo is just that 1:20 minute drive. You don’t get to play defense. You don’t get to see special teams. You don’t get to do anything other than one drive as the Giants against the Pats.

What a weak ass demo. I mean, I guess it did what it was supposed to do, it left me wanting more, especially since the game play actually does seem like a big improvement over the last few years. But NCAA’s demo had a full game with 2 min quarters and that left me wanting more also. I spent the majority of the day downloading this 1gig behemoth (not sure why, XBL was just really slow for me) to only get 1:20 seconds worth of game play, on only one side of the ball. So the final verdict is that the game seems like an improvement, but the demo doesn’t allow you to figure that out fully. A bad job by EA, if I do say so myself. Which i just did. Like nine times.

And that brings us to Too Human. Denis Dyack, the krazy kook that is a lead developer on the game has been all over the internet the last few months acting like an idiot, all apparently to drum up excitement for this game that has been in development for somewhere between 4 and 4058 years. So he has gone around to message boards picking fights with idiot 12 year olds, he has done interviews where he talks about how groundbreaking his game is, and how awesome the story is, and yada yada yada. Well, the demo for that came out a week or two ago, and it’s amazing in its mediocrity. The game deserves neither praise or scorn. It’s just a really average game in just about every way possible. The graphics look ok, the game plays ok, the animations are ok. But nothing screams out quality. But neither does it fail like so many Dyack haters wanted it to. Overall the game looks like a solid Diablo-type dungeon crawler, with a sci-fi setting. It’s a loot pinata, so if you are into that type of thing it will deliver. But personally, I found it rather boring. You just sorta slide your character around from enemy to enemy with the right stick (and yeah, your character literally does slide there, for unknown reasons). And the story is so overly complicated and convoluted that I found it hard to give a crap about any of it. So, uh, yeah, this one isn’t on my list of games to buy.

Tiger, Tiger Woods Ya’ll, on the other hand, should be a fun time for us video game golf enthusiasts. There is no demo up yet, so I have no idea how it plays, but it promises a host of improvements, especially in the online department. But in the end, it’s Tiger Woods. You already know if you are going to get it months before it comes out. You either like it or you don’t. There isn’t anything I or anyone else can write to convince you that video game golf is fun or not fun.

I hate August. Well, I hate summer. I hate sweating. I hate months with only 3 big video game releases. But the good thing about August is that after it is September, and September is awesome! It’s gets cooler. I sweat less. More games come out. Man, I can’t wait for freakin September.

Warhammer Online. Spore. Socom: Confrontation. The list goes on. Only one more month, folks.