New Releases for the Week of Quick Skates and Flashy Tights

CB Droege 12 Jan, 2011 at 10:19am ET Article published in Gaming

Jam City Rollergirls

I’m not usually one for sports simulation games, but Jam City Rollergirls is not some dumb football game. Women’s roller derby is a more interesting sport, which makes more sense as a spectator event than something slow and boring like baseball. Also, it’s hot. Of course, this game does not realistically depict the sport. The players in Jam City have lots of special powers and interesting abilities, and each arena they compete in functions a bit differently, with things like boosters and dangerous obstacles.

DC Universe Online

The Icrontic spotlight this week ricochets off the dancing pectoral muscles of DC Universe Online. This is the first MMORPG to use properties from well-known DC Comics. The gameplay is intended to be “more interactive” than other MMORPGs, like the stupidly successful World of Warcraft, in which players have only limited actual interaction with the environment or characters, and upon which, sadly, almost all modern MMORPGs are based. Players of DC Universe Online will craft a new superhero, and choose a famous DC hero to be the character’s mentor. The mentor is essentially a class choice, determining the characters starting location, skills, and opening quest rewards. Most of the game is intended to be PvE gameplay, with most PVP reserved for special instances and quests. The game, unfortunately will not be following the more intelligent micro-payments model, and will instead charge players $15/month, which is dumb. As much I would like to see this game do well, it’s not going to. It simply will not be able to pull audience from WoW, which is what it must do if they expect people to pay out the nose each month.

Following is a full list of this week’s announced North American releases:

Windows

• DC Universe Online
• Drakensang – The River Of Time
• Gunstar Heroes
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2
• SpellForce 2: Faith in Destiny
• Streets of Rage 2
• ToeJam & Earl

Wii

• 101-in-1 Sports Party Megamix
• Jam City Rollergirls
• JellyCar 2
• Soccer Bashi
• Exed Exes (VC)
• Ghosts ‘n Goblins(VC)

DS

• EJ Puzzles: Hooked
• Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
• Kingdom Hearts Re:coded
• Petz Catz Family
• Surfacer+

Xbox 360

• Hyper Button
• Venetica
• Zeit 2

PS3

• DC Universe Online
• Venetica

PSP

• Prinny 2: Dawn of Operation Panties, Dood!

Comments

1. 
   13 Jan 2011 ~ 12:24pm Malpercio I'd really be interested in giving DC Universe Online a try, but it's hard for me to get into a MMORPG that follows the monthly payment model, when in the past I have always just played games based on the free-to-play, micro-transaction model.
2. 
   13 Jan 2011 ~ 12:28pm Thrax Let's use this thread to guess the date of DC Online's closure.
3. 
   13 Jan 2011 ~ 1:27pm Cliff_Forster

   Thrax wrote:

   Let's use this thread to guess the date of DC Online's closure.

   
   I read an article not too long ago that had WOW estimated as earning a TWO BILLION dollar a year profit (not revenue, PROFIT ), when you account for account fees, merchandise, everything. It is financially the most successful product in the history of video games.
   
   Now, has Blizzard fully tapped a niche market for all its worth, or is there a more mainstream audience for this kind of product that is just looking for the right game? One thing I do know, people that are hooked on an MMO, don't seem to have room for a 2nd one. So, how big is the market for MMO's?
   
   The Star Wars Old Republic game will at minimum get a trial run from me, and that is saying allot, I'm not real committed to the idea of MMO gaming, and Galaxies, well, it was stupid, nobody wants to fight butterflies and bunny rabbits with fangs. The game on the horizon though, it looks like it could have real Star Wars Fan Boy appeal, but are those the same guys playing WOW?
   
   DC universe has this kind of generic feeling to its created Hero and Villain in the ads. Nobody want to be a sidekick or minion, my guess, its done in about nine months.
4. 
   13 Jan 2011 ~ 4:54pm kryyst Had DC Universe gone Micro Payment it'd be a shining success. The monthly model has doomed it's life span or just delayed the inevitable jump to Micro Payments - Champions Online anyone? It's a very - very similar game mechanically and it's going Free To Play January 25th.
5. 
   13 Jan 2011 ~ 10:22pm Gate28 I'd rather pay 15 bucks a month than play a game with micro-transactions any day. That way, everyone is on an even playing field and the 12-year-old punks who steal their parents' credit cards and buy all the cool stuff don't beat my ass in everything.
6. 
   13 Jan 2011 ~ 10:25pm CB A game that gives players actual advantages through micro-payments is poorly designed. DDO is the one to model off of here. They sell only expanded content and convenience items.
7. 
   14 Jan 2011 ~ 12:05am Bandrik Excellent weekly writeup CB, as always.
   
   Jam City Rollergirls caught my interest, mainly I can't help but be reminded of the terribly fun game Jet Set Radio. I can see Rollergirls as either being lots of fun, or just plain crappy. Just depends on how fun they made it without resorting to just gimmicks and pretty colors.
   
   As for DC Online, that's a tough one. The $15/month will 100% keep me from even giving it a try. I simply cannot commit to a game that costs a subscription fee. I have precious little time to devote to gaming as it is. I don't need a game to penalize me with subscription charges that make me feel like I'm wasting for the 10-20 hours I could spare a month playing it.
   
   Plus, my estimation is that WoW can only get away with the monthly subscription because they are so large. People play because there is such a large user base (including their friends/guildmates) that the cost of leaving the game behind seems too high, so the monthly rates are "worth it". That, and they're already addicted to Warcrack; I can't see them opening their wallet to a new experience that hasn't proven itself yet (which is a sad reality). If it were free-to-play with the microtransactions for premium experience items (WITHOUT breaking the game, so costumes and other aesthetic-type things only please) then it would have a MUCH smaller barrier of entry.
   
   In the meantime, I find Minecraft to be more rewarding while costing $0 a month while still getting frequent updates (also free). Yeah, it's not a massive multiplayer experience, but then again that's a good thing for Minecraft. Getting ganked in WoW is bad enough. Imagine if ganking/griefing was a common daily threat in Minecraft from thousands of teenage neer'do'wells. Ugh.
8. 
   14 Jan 2011 ~ 12:00pm kryyst

   Gate28 wrote:

   I'd rather pay 15 bucks a month than play a game with micro-transactions any day. That way, everyone is on an even playing field and the 12-year-old punks who steal their parents' credit cards and buy all the cool stuff don't beat my ass in everything.

   
   Micro-payments aren't what makes other players better. Other MMO players are typically better for the same reasons they always are - they are unemployed people who live in their parents basements and can spend 15hrs a day playing them.
9. 
   14 Jan 2011 ~ 1:40pm Bandrik That's what I love about games like Minecraft. There isn't level grinding and nobody has to spend months to get an epic mount. It's generally easy for anyone to get the best equipment (just dig till you find some gems and get some wood. Bam, ultimate item pick, minus the random drop quest bullshit)
   
   What I'm wanting is more MMO games that AREN'T RPGs. Perhaps a 100 vs 100 FPS or RTS. Or even an action game like Zelda or Mario games where it's more about running around and exploring together and only a few items you unlock as you progress (the hookshots and double-jumps these games have).
   
   Maybe some day MMOs will be more than just level grinding.
10. 
    14 Jan 2011 ~ 2:22pm CB

    Bandrik wrote:

    Maybe some day MMOs will be more than just level grinding.

    
    RPG style grinding/leveling is the easiest way to design a game that takes up lots of time, which is what you want when your players are paying monthly.
11. 
    15 Jan 2011 ~ 4:36pm RootWyrm Y'all really missed the point on DCUO to say the least. Sorry folks. You're once again making the fatal mistake of comparing every MMO to WoW. Which is just flat out wrong.
    
    One, DCUO is the first and only MMO to go multi-platform meaningfully. The PC version is not just a crap port of the PS3 version, and vice versa. Each build was paid attention to and tweaked appropriately. The only competition is has on PS3 is the unreleased Final Fantasy XIV (if it ever comes out, that is. That's up for debate.)
    
    Second, DCUO targets a different audience. Not everyone is going after the WoW crowd, period. If everyone went after the WoW crowd there would be nobody but WoW left more or less. And just because someone isn't as big as WoW doesn't mean the MMO has failed. People who play WoW are not going to play DCUO, and the people who play DCUO probably don't play WoW. The competitors for DCUO are and remain City of Heroes (~250K subs with fanatical loyalty) and Champions Online (~Who Knows, See Next Paragraph.) NOT WOW.
    
    Champions Online didn't fail because of any of the reasons above. CO failed because of bad design, worse implementation, failure to understand the customer base, failure to respond to customer complaints, and a laundry list of other reasons. The finished product was considered by their CORE target audience, to be complete crap. There were huge changes to the gameplay repeatedly, it was extremely buggy, servers had constant stability problems, client performance was completely unpredictable, and so on.
    Second, CO was literally a throwaway game. It was intended primarily to be the beta platform for Star Trek Online, and investment in CO was stopped even before release. They only pulled a 180 when they realized that STO wasn't raking in the billions they expected, and have been flailing about trying to find some way to make CO profitable. The capital and operational expenses for it are ridiculous when compared to the subscriber base.
    
    SOE isn't stupid, and they're not going to measure success by the yardstick folks are expecting them to. They're going to measure it up against City of Heroes/City of Villains, Champions Online (which failed to release on Xbox360 as promised), and upcoming PS3 MMOs. Since my NDA's expired, I can tell you for a fact that this game is not after WoW players. WoW players will probably hate the way this one is played. It plays more like a fighting game than anything else, with blocking, combination keypresses for special moves, and a single action button relating to quests. (Drawing comparisons to CO aren't unwarranted there, though CO failed miserably at it.) Leveling is also much, much slower than WoW and there's more of a focus on appearance than gear.
    
    Either way, whether or not DCUO succeeds won't be determined by comparing it to any other MMOs. It's going to depend on whether Sony gets and keeps the target audience they've gone after.
12. 
    15 Jan 2011 ~ 8:03pm Thrax You just made the fatal mistake of thinking that an MMO--<i>any MMO</i>--doesn't have to contend with WoW, the ruiner of all other MMOs.
13. 
    15 Jan 2011 ~ 9:09pm RootWyrm

    Thrax wrote:

    You just made the fatal mistake of thinking that an MMO--any MMO--doesn't have to contend with WoW, the ruiner of all other MMOs.

    
    No, the fact is that the only reason WoW "ruins" other MMOs is the insistence of "analysts" (otherwise known as "idiots who don't play MMOs") and people who play WoW in comparing every MMO to WoW.
    The cold hard fact, like it or not, is that if what people said was true then there would be no other MMOs period. There would be no EverQuest, no EverQuest2, no Final Fantasy, and so on.
    Besides MMOs being a distinct market from, for example, "other games" (see also: Halo/CoD/etc,) there are segments within MMOs themselves. Yes, WoW is an 800 pound gorilla that churns profit like nobody's business. If developers and publishers listened to this kind of talk and judged success by measuring up against the behemoths in genres, then we wouldn't be here discussing the merits of games. We'd be going "meh, another Blizzard MMO the same as every other, another EA FPS that's the same as every other, meh another Square-Enix RPG that makes no sense."
14. 
    16 Jan 2011 ~ 11:08am CB The difference between WoW and other genre behemoths, is that unlike other genres, most people only feel they have the financial resources to pay for one pay-per-month MMO.
    
    While there may be a segment of the population who would play DCUO, but would never play WoW because of their themes, fo the most part, these two games have the same target audience, and DCUO cannot succeed unless it draws people away from WoW, which it will have a very difficult time doing, no matter how sweet it is on its own.
15. 
    16 Jan 2011 ~ 1:47pm RootWyrm

    CB wrote:

    The difference between WoW and other genre behemoths, is that unlike other genres, most people only feel they have the financial resources to pay for one pay-per-month MMO.

    
    Absolutely agreed, especially since I consider myself among them. Though replace financial with time in my case. There are a number of people as well who for some reason or another - usually character slots - have multiple accounts for the same MMO.
    

    While there may be a segment of the population who would play DCUO, but would never play WoW because of their themes, fo the most part, these two games have the same target audience, and DCUO cannot succeed unless it draws people away from WoW, which it will have a very difficult time doing, no matter how sweet it is on its own.

    
    That's the thing. DCUO might pull some from WoW, but that's not likely, nor is it the intent. It's been pretty clear from very early on that their primary target audience is CO based on playstyle, and CoX based on genre. That said, these players are very different from WoW players. They stick around longer, there's much lower subscriber churn, and they tend to be more evangelistic.
    The point I'm making though, is that everyone is insisting that DCUO must be measured for "success" against WoW. That's not true at all. SOE wouldn't have bothered with DCUO if that were true; it could only ever be considered a failure.
    An MMO does not need 10M+ subscribers to be a success; it only needs to sell enough and maintain enough subscribers to become profitable. Past return on investment, it's up to SOE what "success" is defined as. Given their relative costs, it may be as low as 250K subscribers combined. They may be looking for 75/25 PS3/PC. Either way, we don't know what SOE is looking for. And they're the only ones who know the actual yardstick for success.
16. 
    16 Jan 2011 ~ 2:00pm Myrmidon Call me a troll, but http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6wqKb8EUxI&feature=player_detailpage#t=143s
    
    FATAL MISTAKES