Uncategorized | The VidZone Network Blog

July 13, 2009

E309: Split/Second impressions


In a nutshell:
It’s Burnout where you can blow up the environment.

What I played:
Three laps around an airport.

Like:
Action indicators: The game tells you when a rival car is near a triggerable trap and informs you what button to press to activate it. The window in which you can activate the trap is generally of a fair length, so you won’t ever feel cheated.

Traps: What the team says is true, there will be plenty of traps to activate throughout the duration of the race, keeping the playing experience fresh. Also, as the race goes on, larger traps will become available for activation.

Tight, arcade control: Just like Burnout, it feels like you more or less have full control over your careening two-ton machine. This is especially important for maneuvering your way through the tracks as the debris piles up.

Frame-rate: Even at this early stage, everything moves along at a brisk rate and all the post-processing blur effects were turned on.

Dislike:
Not much really: Hopefully the amount of traps available per trap aren’t so limited that each progressive playthrough results in the same sequence of events.

Carl @ 7:33 pm
Filed under: Games,Uncategorized — Tags: , , , ,

April 16, 2009

BOOM! There goes the namesake.

Big news today that John Madden’s retiring from broadcasting.

My friend in EA Tiburon called me today to ask how the job hunt is going, and I asked him about the office reaction with the announcement, if they knew the big news in advance.  He’s not on the Madden team, so he told me he only heard about it on SportsCenter.

Will this shake things up for EA’s biggest US franchise?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  It’s complicated, but either way, a change won’t be seen for years.  John Madden and EA renewed an unspecified multi-year contract most recently in 2005.  Unspecified in length, unspecified in compensation.  That said, he takes in at least eight figures.  Yeah, that still a pretty wide-open range of numbers.

Everything else written from here on is hearsay and cannot be attributed to any individual employee or representative of the opinion of the company as a whole.

There are many within the organization who want to oust Madden from the game series.  He’s expensive, and many football fans see him as a joke who doesn’t contribute anything worthwhile.

However, John Madden is the brand.  The football game series is one of the most mainstream and most recognizable in not just the US but the world over, and I can assure you there is a sizable enough fan base who, despite the in your face branding, is ignorant that EA has anything to do with the game and only know the “Madden” brand.  It would be a tremendous risk to remove his name from the franchise and thus confuse millions of potential buyers who may not understand that an “EA NFL Football 20XX” game is a direct continuation of the series they’ve always known and loved.

But!  EA holds the exclusive rights to the NFL until 2012.  If, at any point between now and then, they care to experiment with rebranding, there would still only be one choice for an officially licensed football game on the market, Madden name or no.

February 7, 2009

Pretty fair assessment of why the internet is such a life-draining place to interact

Carl @ 10:54 pm
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