Features// Another week in Games - X05, Nintendo online, drugs and more

Welcome, loyal readers, to this week in games as viewed through the glassy third eye of SPOnG’s staff. We spent a lot of time last week making rubbish puns, talking to posh people in museums about posh things, arguing with PR people and making jokes about wanking.

The biggest event last week was Microsoft X05 in Amsterdam, a press jaunt on which nobody managed to die. We found this quite amazing, as previous X0s have seen near drowning, naked rock fighting, blood-puking and one person getting badly eaten by ants after passing out on the floor of a Spanish theme park toilet. We assumed that, given Amsterdam is a city made up of drugs, dangerous people and deadly canals, we’d be writing our first obituary today. You can catch up with our somewhat (well, entirely) fictional take on this year’s event right here: X05: Drugs, Whores, Fighting and Limited Edition 360 Hardware

This year’s X0 event wasn’t the news bonanza we’ve come to expect in the past, with Microsoft already playing most of its cards close to its chest. The Xbox 360 is now so close to launch that there’s little left for the software monster to tell us. We found out that Peter Jackson had been signed to co-produce the Halo movie (which incidentally is said to be shaping up rather well); Electronic Arts is making a Superman game; and Crackdown, Too Human and Mass Effect were announced.

Perhaps the important thing to come out of X05 was Microsoft’s message and its confidence. It has a games console and is ready to launch it. What’s more, it has games. Lots of them, and some of them are actually very nice indeed, with Kameo and Perfect Dark finally silencing most doubting voices. And most importantly – it has first-mover advantage backed with a huge pile of cash, a recognised brand name and Peter Moore, who’s been in this exact situation before. Time for a story. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin…

Once upon a time there was a company called Sega. Sega was independent and made some very good arcade games and some really rubbish home consoles. It had once made really good consoles but had forgotten how. It wasn’t sure what to do for a while. How could it use its good arcade games to make its rubbish home consoles better? The answer was to make a home console that was an arcade machine! Soon, the Sega Dreamcast was born!

The Sega Dreamcast was based around the Naomi arcade platform, a platform that everyone agreed was very good indeed. Sega managed to make a home version that was quite cheap to buy and had lots of great ideas. It also had online play out of the box, loads of great peripherals, incredible graphics, its very own portable console link-up buddy and, most importantly, loads of great games. And it was going to hit the market before anything else. What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, Ken Kutaragi was watching Sega’s progress from the highest tower of Castle SCEI and he was very angry. It seemed that nobody had told Sega that the games industry now belonged to Sony’s PlayStation. And even though Sony kind of borrowed a lot of what the PlayStation became from its dealings with Nintendo, that didn’t matter anymore. The PlayStation 2 was a long way away from launch and had no real games to show. No matter, the public needed to be tricked out of buying the Dreamcast.

Sony began a wait-and-see campaign, promising all kinds of things it wasn’t going to deliver. It also showed FMV shots from games like The Bouncer and claimed they were in-game, showed photographs from games like The Getaway and again claimed they were in-game stills. The less said about Toy Story graphics, the better.

So, to cut a long story short, everyone believed Sony, didn’t buy a Dreamcast, and suffered a couple of years of terrible next-generation gaming, as Peter Moore sacked everyone at Sega of America. Though Sony made a big pile of money.

The end.

Back on track, the above strategy employed by Sony isn’t a secret anymore. A lot of Sony’s claims regarding everything next-gen are taken with a grain of salt, not least those regarding launch software and graphical might. And Microsoft knows this. Various executives have pointed out that the PlayStation 3 has still to show any real software (they, for some reason, don’t count new Metal Gear) and the fact that it doesn’t have air holes. And the fact that the controller looks like a banana.

But the important point is that Microsoft thinks it has Sony beat. Not dead, but the first round is won. Microsoft will launch Xbox 360 in a matter of weeks. It will probably prove one of the better console launches in the last decade and although the firm may have to field claims that 360 software isn’t ‘next generation enough’, most analysts have been convinced and all but the most blind of fanboy converted, at least to the extent of considering a purchase.

So what we were saying is X05 was a bit dull on the news front but a great success as an event designed to underline and reinforce Microsoft’s core message.

And remember Peter Moore? SPOnG has spent some time with Mr Moore. He doesn’t like Sony very much. He witnessed what happened in the past and we very much doubt it’ll happen again without at least one bearded Liverpudlian making a lot of noise about it…