Features// SPOnG's Review of the Year '09: July

Following Yves’ pondering about the state of Ubisoft’s games, the company’s CFO, Alain Martinez, has also chipped in by saying Ubisoft originally expected Assassin’s Creed II to perform worse than the original at retail. Well, it was certainly an original way of building hype for the game (“Ubisoft: “Assassin’s Creed 2” PSP Bundle to Save Sequel”, 28th Jul 2009).

Whereas most sequels are destined to sell more copies than its predecessors, there was one thing that was stopping AC2 from beating Altair’s adventure - a PSP version to coincide with the sequel. When it was announced that Ubisoft were making Assassin’s Creed Bloodlines for Sony’s portable, things couldn’t have looked brighter for Martinez; “We now think the game should be selling 15% more units than the first title, while our previous guidance assumed it was going to sell less.”

Speaking of sequels, Bioware did some rounds for the press and spoke about Mass Effect 2, and how the whole series will play out. Essentially, lead producer, Casey Hudson, wanted the Commander Shepard trilogy to thread nicely into each other, rather than be three games that just follow on from one another (“Mass Effect 2: How the Trilogy will Work”, 24th Jul 2009).

“It was always the plan to be able to import your character, therefore we included all those variables in the save game. We try and work the trilogy story from both the high level and the detail level,” Hudson explained. “The save game has every variable that you’ve set as a player, and as we delve into the detail levels of things like actual words that are spoken, art that appears in levels... how they compromise the world of each sequel can be affected by your choices in the prior [games].”

The developer behind Flower and flOw had also been contemplating its third, unannounced game in July, and at the Develop conference thatgamecompany’s co-founder, Jenova Chen, said that the studio may have to “rethink” its direction. The game is likely to appear on PS3 though; “They still keep funding our project, and that’s really, really nice.” But talk of the “future is coming much faster than I expected”, referring to motion control, sparked questions as to whether TGC will consider Natal development (“Will Flower Dev Move to Natal?”, 16th Jul 2009).

July was also the month we got to learn when we can see a trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game (hint: August 21), thus giving everyone reading the news on the 24th July a lot of thumb-twiddling to do until then.

SPOnG thumb-twiddled with a couple of games this month, with Wet and Alien Breed Evolution seeing previews along with a favourable review of the Summer time activity game Wii Sports Resort. We also wondered - what with the Wimbledon on telly and everything - which tennis game was truly the best on the Wii. Besides such scientific experiments, we still found time to speak to Martyn Brown of Team 17 and Quantic Dream’s Guillaume de Fonaumiere (fantastic name) about Heavy Rain.

Finally...

For our final piece of the July roundup, more conspiracy theories regarding the whole Hulu blocking fiasco that saw the PlayStation 3 getting blocked from the US TV streaming service in June. Seems that foul play following a deal with Microsoft wasn’t the cause after all, as mobile phone users also got blocked (“Hulu Blocking: Not Just PlayStation 3 Now”, 17th Jul 2009).

Which begged the question, just what was Hulu playing at? The service is owned by NBC Universal, News Corp and Providence Equity Partners - basically, three old, traditional media dogs that are slowly learning to paddle in this troublesome “new media” that keeps sucking up their revenues. Restricting content seems to be a last resort when traditional media wants to control something in a manner that doesn’t make sense in a digital, internationally-connected world.

Hulu’s explanation for the blockings was thus; it was all down to “maximizing the content you can access as conveniently as possible... in a way that “works” for the content owner.” Aha.

Bless them. They might get it, sooner or later.