With E3 right around the corner, it would definitely make sense that a company like Microsoft would eye this as a perfect opportunity to drop the price on their popular hardware, the Xbox 360. Not only would it increase interest in the slew of upcoming titles for Microsoft’s gaming machine, but it would also boost sales through the rest of the summer months and ensure that consoles are in homes before the insane launch of their Fall lineup (which includes huge titles like Fable 2 and Gears of War 2). Just today, a member on the webforum NeoGAF leaked scans of an “alleged” K-Mart advertisement flyer that showed that Microsoft is indeed slashing the price of their Premium Xbox 360 console from its normal retail price of $349.99 to $299.99 -a $50 drop. The reduction in price is significant, but will it be significant enough to boost sales?

While a $50 price drop may not be enough to tempt consumers in parting with their hard earned cash for a new video game console (especially with gas prices so astronomical and the economy in recession) it certainly does put a little more pressure on the competition. Sony’s Playstation 3 is retailing at $399.99, $100 more than the Xbox 360 after the price drop. Even with the Blu-Ray player as a built in function, the price drop will indeed highlight the now significant desparity in cost between the two products, and may help sway the decisions of potential, but indecesive, consumers. The Nintendo Wii should still be relatively safe. It’s managed to carve a niche in the market that makes it immune to the rivalry shared between Microsoft and Sony. Even with the Xbox 360 only $50 more than the Nintendo Wii, the Nintendo Wii’s mass appeal and family friendly games will ensure that Nintendo’s console will still be a sold out commodity throughout the summer in North America.

I also believe this price drop (if real) is not going to be exclusive to K-Mart only. In general, retailers are not legally allowed to modify the price on set-price items like gaming consoles, Ipods, etc. The manufcature sets the price (which retailers then buy from them for roughly 10% below normal retail cost) and while retailers are allowed to create incentives like free accesories, games, gift cards, etc. to attract customers, they’re not allowed to advertise their product as being cheaper than the competition. The reasoning behind this is so that corporations like Best Buy or Walmart can’t strong arm smaller retailers out of the market. Refurbished and used gaming consoles are the exception to this rule, and it’s part of the reason why retailers like Gamestop have managed to thrive in a time when most retailers are hurting.

So, if you’re thinking about getting a Xbox 360, keep an eye on the advertisements over the next few weeks. Who knows what might happen.

With the latest iteration of the Battlefield franchise only hours away (or days away depending on the reliability of the United States postal service….so most like days) I often take a minute or so to reflect on exactly why I’m so willing to part sixty dollars to buy a new game. Video games are hardly a cheap hobby anymore, and the average consumer, like myself, rarely has the luxury of buying every new thing that comes out. At sixty dollars a pop, video games are more of a long term investment rather than a cheap, transient entertainment. You want a game that’s not only enjoyable and fun, but something that will keep you occupied long enough to make you feel as though its purchase was justified. Longevity plays as integral of a factor as its graphical prowess and fun factor. For instance, you would not buy a car that runs fast, looks sexy, but ultimately only will work for a year, right?

The Battlefield series (most notably Battlefield 2) for the PC always seemed to be worth its price tag. Not only did it have impressive graphics, but simultaneously simple and yet in depth design has kept it spinning in my PC consistently for the last several years. Battlefield: Bad Company looks to continue that trend in excellence, and from the demo I’ve been playing religiously for weeks now is any indication, may even raise the standards not only for the Battlefield series, but for all First Person Shooters as well.

The Graphics and Sound are Amazing!
While this generation of video games (particularly the shooters) are no stranger to good graphics, not only do the character models, environments and textures meet up to the standards set by beautiful titles like Call of Duty 4 or even Metal Gear Solid 4, Bad Company mixes things up by introducing its new Frostbite graphics engine, a new technology that essentially mimics what Red Faction began on the PC years ago, but takes it to the new level. Whatever you see can be blown up, torn down, or shot apart. Concrete walls can be demolished with a well aimed tank shell, and trees and concrete barriers can be crushed underneath a tank’s treads. The realism that this limitless destruction allows injects into the game is much welcomed, and will undoubtedly become a staple of the genre in months to come.

The sound in Bad Company is almost as good as the graphics. Gun shots, explosions, the grind of spinning wheels or the clatter of destroyed tank armor sounds authentic and varies depending on the player’s surroundings. For example, a sniper rifle will echo if you’re sitting in a cave, but dissipate quickly if you’re in the open. Similarly, if an explosion comes off near your character, expect all the game’s sounds to be strangely muted and filtered through a constant ringing -just as if your ear drums had been blown out in real life.

The Single-Player Campaign Actually Could be Fun
The Battlefield franchise has never been known for its single player component. Their efforts at creating an experience suitable has amounted to really nothing more than tossing a player in one of the multiplayer maps only with retarded computer opponents to keep them company. In Bad Company, however, the single player mode is a full length, fleshed campaign that puts you in control of a rag tag group of renegade soldiers who are in search of a cache of gold that will allow them to retire rich and, hopefully, alive. While the story may sound like a rip off of the movie Three Kings, the story itself has a quirky, dark and sarcastic sense of humor that’s portrayed in a large part by your incessantly chattering team mates. They may not contribute a whole lot to the gun fight, but they’re endearing and genuinely contributes to creating a unique gaming atmosphere.

The Multiplayer IS Awesome
Just based on the online demo alone, I already love Bad Company. While it may lack the depth that Battlefield 2 for the PC had (no jets, smaller squads, smaller battlefield, etc.) the integration of the new experience and rank system allows players to be rewarded for being awesome. The more you kill, the more you achieve objectives, and the less you betray your team mates in order to get to fly the helicopters first, the more points you’ll earn towards unlocking the various weapons and gadgets for each class. The infantry combat is substantially refined over previous iterations, making your role as a sniper, specialist, support, etc. all the more crucial to the battle. It’s not all about just driving tanks and jeeps (though admittedly that’s awesome too) but creating a perfect balance within your team so that each player and their chosen weapons and special gear compliments the other. Or you can just run around and shoot everything. The game is fun both ways.

Just from the limited exposure to Bad Company in the demo (which only allowed me a few unlocks and only one map) I ended up playing it for hours on end with my roommate. With the full retail game coming packed with guns and more maps (plus a new game play mode in a few months) there’s a lot of reasons to be excited about Bad Company, especially with the lack of other major shooters out on the market this summer.

All squabbling about video game console superiority aside, one decisive factor in Sony’s marketing strategy has relied heavily on the new “Blu-Ray” disc format, a bold ambitious move that has since paid off in spades ever since Toshiba so apologetically bludgeoned, and murdered their HD-DVD format without so much as a “sorry guys,” to the early adopters of the format who all found themselves with obsolete pieces of rubbish and lots and lots of discs to go with them. On paper, Blu-Ray discs look brilliant. They’re like normal discs only coated with blue paint that holds alot more information (allowing better resolution and cleaner, multi-channel audio) and is composed of material that could withstand the treads of a rolling tank.

In actuality, Blu-Ray is still pretty brilliant when it comes to movies. It’s only when I’m watching movies like Into the Blue do I really appreciate having spent thousands of dollars on a home entertainment system, and it’s all thanks to Blu-Ray’s ability to broadcast 1080p signals. And Jessica Alba. Perhaps more the latter than the former.

But what about when it comes to video games? Sony’s golden child is also used on the Playstation 3 gaming console for gaming purposes, and the boast is that it’s ability to store high capcities of data translates into developers being able to make their games bigger, better, load faster, etc. without having to worry about multiple discs like back in the Playstation era.

The real problem is up until recently there have been few titles on the Playstation 3 that the Xbox 360 (which uses standard DVD’s which store only a fraction of the data that a Blu-Ray disc can hold) couldn’t also do. Devil May Cry 4, Grand Theft Auto 4 -multiplatform titles that are as visually impressive as their gameplay is complex all seem to run just as well on a normal DVD as they do on a Blu-Ray disc. Additionally, while Playstation 3 owners have had to endure lengthy installation times before they can even begin playing the game, Xbox 360 users who are still using an archaic disc format can begin playing immediately. These installations, while an annoyance, are bearable, but it’s unfortunate when these installations don’t even up significantly improving the gameplay experience as one would naturally assume.

Enter Metal Gear Solid 4.

A game so visually intense and impressive in every single aspect of its production, Metal Gear Solid 4 was supposed to be the first game to truly take advantage of the Blu-Ray disc. In fact, director and producer, Kojima, said that Metal Gear Solid 4 was so demanding that even a Blu-Ray disc might not be able to house it all. If Kojim was having trouble getting it on one disc, than certainly the only way the Xbox 360 could manage it was if it came on like ten discs.

As humorous as the idea of game taking up ten discs is, I’m not sure where this stigma of using multiple discs has derived from. We used to do this all the time when playing lengthy RPG’s like Lunar, Final Fantasy IX, or Legends of the Dragoon. Even the original Metal Gear Solid came on two discs, and gamer’s had no problems swapping discs then. Perhaps ten discs is overkill slightly, but I can’t help but think we’ve become so jaded to the point that anything more than a single disc per game is viewed as an inconvience and annoyance.

Now, I’ll be the first to confess an undying love for Metal Gear Solid. While I may have been more skeptical than most after the tragedy that was Son’s of Liberty, I still enjoyed Metal Gear Solid 4 immensely. Solid Snake ranks up there on my list of Old Cool guys (second to only Sean Connery) and even with the sixty minute long cut scenes, I was still impressed by the gorgeous graphics and the enjoyable gameplay.

One thing I wasn’t a huge fan of, however, was the installation times. While Playstation 3 owners are no stranger to installation times, Metal Gear Solid 4 has tons of them. There’s an initial eight minutes to install the game, another three minute install after Act One, then another three minute long installation after Act Two, followed by a two minute installation and rounded out with a one minute installation to complete the package. And worst, these installation points are tossed in at the most inappropriate times. For instance, one takes place right in the middle of a chase. For being a game that relies so much on cinematic presentation and immersion in the story, these install points are more damaging to the experience than swapping discs ever were on the Playstation.

And worst, once the game installs data from an act and you want to load a game save from a different one, the game has to reinstall the data all over again. My roommate and I were both playing Metal Gear Solid 4, and while he was at work, I would play. Unfortunately, this meant I often ended up in a different act than his game save meaning he would have to wait several minutes for the game to reinstall data before he could play again.

While I’m sure there was a reason behind all of this that ultimately benefited the experience more than detracted (for instance, perhaps the visuals, audio, and gameplay were only possible because of the installations) I couldn’t help but be incredibly annoyed.

What really bugged me is there’s a conversation in the game where Otacon says:

The irony is overwhelming. You’re totally right, Otacon. Instead of taking the time to swap a disc, I’m forced to wait for two minutes to wait for the Playstation 3 to install data for the next act. Brilliant!

The Xbox 360 is no stranger to having multiple discs. Developers have realized the limitations of the hardware, and games like Lost Odysee and Blue Dragon have come on several discs. Now, for the sake of experimentation, I went ahead and saw how long it took me to swap discs while playing Lost Odysee (which was necessary once every six hours or so).

Ten seconds to swap discs. Now, even if I had to do this once every two hours for Metal Gear Solid 4 (which is a pretty solid guess seeing as the game is only at most 15 hours long) I think I would still prefer getting up and spending ten seconds swapping discs rather than being put through the inconvenience that Metal Gear Solid 4 makes me endure. On top of that, whenever you want to return to a certain save point, instead of waiting for the game to install more data, you just pop in the corresponding disc and off you go.

While I understand there’s a certain appeal of only having one disc, in the case of Metal Gear Solid 4, I’m not sure that was really the best path to go. The install times are lengthy, periodic, and remove gamer’s from the otherwise gripping experience. It may be a case of where the storage capacity of Blu-Ray comes in handy, but far from championing the Blu-Ray disc’s capabilities, Metal Gear Solid 4 is really a prime example of how much work still needs to go into it before it becomes the ideal gaming format that many have claimed it to be.

I loved Metal Gear Solid 4, don’t get me wrong, but if sitting around waiting for several minutes for my game to install itself (when I could have just swapped a disc) is a representation of the future and the true power of Blu-Ray…

….I think I might almost prefer the past.

Haze was supposed to be the next big exclusive title for the Playstation 3. After all, it was being made by Free Radical, the developers behind the awesome Timesplitters franchise and, of course, Goldeneye and Perfect for the Nintendo 64. They certainly have the pedigree of excellence, and gamers have been eagerly waiting to see what Free Radical would do with the technological prowess of the Playstation 3. Apparently, if Haze is any indication, the technological power of the Playstation 3 can go screw itself because it hasn’t amounted to a whole lot.

In short, Haze is officially the first huge disappointment of 2008. It fails as a game on so many different levels, and the worst thing is, it’s almost as if the plethora of glaring flaws marring Haze were intentional. At a variety of points I can identify where, if the developers had just left well enough alone, Haze would rest peacefully on the plateau of mediocrity. It would certainly be no Game of the Year, but at least it wouldn’t make me weep in my sleep about its wasted potential. Instead, Free Radical poked and prodded Haze mercilessly with stupid design decisions until the game finally fell off the cliffs of average and face planted horribly in a steaming pile of crap.

That’s how bad Haze is. It’s almost as bad as that last analogy.

From a graphical stand point the game looks like rubbish. Character models look muddy, textures are bland, and the graphics glitch periodically with comrades appearing and reappearing at a whim like some low budget Playstation 2 game. Whenever you’re not fighting in the jungle (which actually looks decent) the environments look like crap too. At times, if not for the special effects and periodic good looking explosion, Haze could probably pass off as a good looking Playstation 2 game .

However a crap looking game doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad game though usually it’s a pretty good indication. Haze plays about as badly as it looks. From start to finish, the game is incredibly generic. Find guns, shoot people, go from one bland, uninspired linear objective to the next. Hurray! The computer AI is atrocious with enemies standing mindlessly around, begging for you to shoot them, and your comrades were apparently educated in the same school of stupid because they do the same damn thing.

The game does support four player co-op and a slew of online gaming options (you can also add computer controlled opponents) too which is a nice inclusion, but honestly, I can’t think of a reason why anyone would want to play this to begin with.

There is the concept of Nectar which is Free Radical’s vain effort at trying to keep Haze from being just another cookie cutter shooting game. Basically, it’s a chemical that makes you go crazy and lets you special abilities. Sort of like using “primal” powers in Far Cry for Xbox 360, only Nectar isn’t incorporated half as well. Instead of Nectar making you feel like a complete badass of Sylvester Stallone proportion, it just made me feel like a cheap bastard. It just allows you to circumvent the game’s horrible AI, making it permissible to take advantage of your powers to effortlessly pick off the opposition without any real danger to yourself. It also makes the game incredibly easy. While walking around with a big stick may seem like an attractive proposition, it becomes substantially less so when your enemies are so mentally challenged that sitting around and patiently waiting for you to euthanize them is their only form of resistance.

Don’t expect anything from the story line either. Despite being one of the key selling features of Haze, the story is ridiculously bad, and worst, pretends to be intellectual and profound with philosophical psychobabble about morality, life, death, and war thrown in for some confusing reason because its pointless, boring, and is just plain stupid. It tries so hard to be deep, but at the end of the day, it comes off as being pretentious and distracting. The basic storyline premise is this: you’re a Mantle soldier (essentially a complete heartless, child punching, no pants wearing, steroid pumped jerks with a gun who takes drugs) but then discover the light and become a rebel. That’s not even a spoiler or a plot twist either. Throughout the game you also have to endure some of the worst writing ever in a video game. Dialog is over dramatic and cliché. Your comrades spout the stupidest one-liners and phrases. I don’t know if Free Radical was desperately trying to tap into the awesomeness of 80’s action movies or something, but far from eliciting high fives and manly grunts from the audience whenever they’re spoken, it’s more likely to cause groans of annoyance.

Haze’s largest crime (aside from the aforementioned laundry list of flaws) is being so disappointing for being made by a company that helped define the FPS genre on consoles. They made Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, titles which are almost a decade old and yet still are more enjoyable to play than Haze. Maybe if Haze wasn’t made by such a prestigious developer I wouldn’t be so disappointed and mad at how lackluster and terrible Haze is, but I am. Free Radical has a reputation to live up to, and their first FPS on the Playstation 3 wasn’t supposed to be junk.

Think of it this way if you will. You have two children. One who sits in the front of the class and the other who sits in the corner with a big dunce cap on their head. If the latter child were to bring home a F on their report card, you’d probably sigh and remember that this was one of the reasons you had turned to alcoholism, but that’s pretty much it. Now, if the former child were to return home with a F, you’d be shocked and horrified, beat them and reassure them that you don’t love them anymore. It all boils down to expectations. Like it or not, they’re always present, and if you set the precedence of exellence, you’d better live up to it.

We can only hope that the upcoming Timesplitters 4 (also made by Free Radical) isn’t as bad as Haze. But then again, Timesplitters has ninja monkeys. We can only assume the best.

Yes. You read that right. Ninja monkeys.