Tuesday, September 23rd, 2003
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Tuesday, September 23rd, 2003 |
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Urgent Files
More Hot Files
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This Week's Patches
Download Complete: A Plea for Better Game Trailers
You are not playing the best first-person shooters. Sure, you may go out and buy the latest and sexiest shooters the first week they appear. You may even download every demo and trailer to make sure that you don't miss any blockbuster. But the odds are pretty slim that you are actually playing many of the games that will be regarded as groundbreaking classics in the not-too-distant future. All too often, great games slip away into obscurity as gamers simultaneously clamor for the next blockbuster sequel and bemoan the lack of original, new games.
It saddens me to see outstanding games not getting the respect in the check-out aisle that they garner from the gaming press. Many gamers would probably include games like Dues Ex, Thief, System Shock, and No One Live Forever in their personal Top 25 list of best FPS's of all time. Painfully few of these same gamers actually have a copy of these games sitting on their shelves, however. What do these games have in common? Lots. All of them were games with a strong, and remarkably deep, storyline that was carefully crafted over the course of the game. They all broke new ground and expanded our understanding of what a shooter should be. Most appear on Warren Spector's impeccable resume. Almost all sold fewer copies than the number of people playing Counter-Strike in the last 12 hours. And, unfortunately, the true genius of each of these games cannot be truly appreciated in a one-level demo or 60-second trailer. When I finished Tron 2.0 this weekend, I was suddenly struck with the realization that Monolith Productions is one of my favorite game developers. Monolith is a solid developer, but I don't usually include it in my list of uber developers. I did not fully appreciate how misguided my prejudice was until I started to count all of the great Monolith games that I've played from start to finish. Tron 2.0 is an outstanding game. So were both of the games in the No One Lives Forever series. These are games that I not only played in their entirety--I devoured them. I savored them for the rare and precious treats that they were. And I probably would not have played any of the these games based solely on their demos or trailers. The demos for Tron 2.0, for example, revealed only the most superficial elements of gameplay. A level or two of gameplay cannot adequately convey the deep story and engaging gameplay of a game like Tron 2.0. If a demo can't do a game justice, the next best thing is a long, high-quality, well-crafted trailer that showcases the story. A trailer of the size and scope of our Enter the Matrix video is good example of this type of video. Instead of wickedly detailed and impressive trailer, however, most publishers release 5-10 MB, 30-second videos as the "high-quality" trailer for their games. I guess not everyone has seen the almost 400,000 downloads of the 600 MB Half-Life 2 gameplay video as a sign that broadband gamers are ready and willing to watch bigger and better videos. Let me speak for all of the file junkies on FilePlanet: We are Ready. Bring it on! Guess the Number, Win a Prize Last Week: Paul T. Carrington won the free month of the FilePlanet Subscription for having the best guess on the number of Media files downloaded from FilePlanet. Paul's guess was only a few hundred off the actual number: 1,779,686. Good job, Paul! This Week: This is the FilePlanet Weekly newsletter, but I think the time has come for me to include some other GameSpy features in this weekly contest. For the first non-FilePlanet contest, I direct your attention to the beauty of The Naminator. This little service has been putting together randomly-generated nicknames for games for year. How many times has The Naminator created a nickname? I'll give a free month of the FilePlanet Subscription for the closest guess. Send in your guess and you could win big. -- |
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