I’ve never hidden my disdain for Metacritic (and GameRankings, but mostly Metacritic), the Web site that aggregates review scores for video games (and movies and so forth). It’s an insane concept: let’s round up all of these ostensibly separate opinions, throw ‘em in a blender, and come up with a single, solitary number that conveys a game’s entire worth. Balderdash, I say. Review scores aren’t a standardized measurement—a 9.2 over at IGN doesn’t mean a 9.2 at Edge, or an A over at 1UP.

This latest news pleases me. The Cowen Group (one of those fancy research companies whose analysts are always quoted in news stories) has released the details of a study that shows, plainly, that a game’s review score is the least important barometer that people pay attention to when shopping for games. That is to say, whether a game gets an 8 or higher (or lower!) matters very, very little to a person when they’re at Wal-Mart or Best Buy, or cruising the latest releases on Amazon or Steam.

The study found that people pay attention to the following items, in order of most important to least important, when shopping for video games: genre; whether or not it’s a familiar game series; price; word-of-mouth; advertising; publisher reputation; and, lastly, Metacritic score.

Let’s look at this.

• Genre Obviously. If you don’t like FPSs, odds are you’re not going to like Modern Warfare 2 or BioShock or Left 4 Dead 2. If you are a fan of the genre, then it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll derive some entertainment out of said games.

• Familiarity This helps explain why all the big games for the past few years have all been sequels. If you liked Left 4 Dead 1, you can pretty safely assume you’ll enjoy Left 4 Dead 2. Well, unless you’re one of the boycotters. It’s merely more of the same. New Zelda? Sign me up. Final Fantasy XXXIV? I loved the other thirty-three!

• Price Well, yeah. How many people enjoyed all those Guitar Hero games, but then bailed out when it became a yearly $150+ affair? (Not that you have to re-buy the instruments every year, no, but you play one of these games and you’ve played them all.) Remember when PlayStation games were $40?

• Word-of-mouth You’re at the store with your friends, “Oh, don’t buy that, I heard it sucks.” Or, “Dude, did you buy Game yet? The multi-player is wicked awesome.”

• Advertising I readily admit to being susceptible to advertising. I had zero interest in buying Assassin’s Creed II until I saw that slick Justice trailer on TV. A few days later, and I’m jumping around the rooftops of Renaissance Italy.

• Publisher reputation Remember a few years ago when everyone hated EA? You know, ea_spouse and all that. (By the way, what publisher do we all hate now? My guess is Activision.) I’m going to assume that only the “hardcore” gamers give a turkey what company publishes (or develops) a video game. Why haven’t I bought Call of Duty: World at War? Because it was developed by “the other guys,” Treyarch, and not good ol’ Infinity Ward.

• Score Who honestly walks through a Best Buy and says, “You know, I was going to buy Game 2: The Sequel, but IGN (or whomever) only gave it a 7.3”? The number itself is meaningless, and if you’re even remotely interested in a game you’d do well read every single review you can stomach. And by read the review I really do mean sit there and absorb what the writer is trying to convey; don’t just skim it and say, “eh, looks neat.”

In conclusion, review scores are dumb; aggregating review scores is monumentally dumb.

Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, is now part of spiffy Web site Kvittar—“does not matter” in Swedish, according to the Google. It’s a site that purports to do away with paper receipts. You need to sign up with a credit card.

The concept is easy enough to understand: you create an account on the Web site, linking your account to one of your credit cards. You then use this credit to buy whatever it is you buy—food, clothes, video games, etc.—then, instead of taking the paper receipt, you get an electronic receipt sent to your Kvittar account.

These electronic receipts are searchable, which should be handy when tax season rolls around.

One thing I’d like to point out: the snazzy video that describes the service, which is embedded in this post for your convenience, suggests that people are tired of killing trees. That’s fine, and they may well be, but then why does the video show a receipt being printed out, which the woman refuses? The tree still died, even when the woman had a Kvittar.

Yes, I’m being pedantic. It’s pedantic Wednesday.

I think this story will go around as, “LOL, do you really want to give your credit card number to The Pirate Bay Guy~!” You’ll notice that’s not how I presented it.

You’ll find that opinions vary with respect to Tekken 6’s netcode. I didn’t run into too many problems, but others certainly have. What are you going to do, right? Come November 26, you can, I don’t know, apply the update that will hopefully clear up some of those glitches. So that’s what you can do.

Namco (I’m not typing Namco Bandai more than once) will push the update in two days, and it will do a number of things to help alleviate any online issues you run into. For one, the game will better optimize your opponents based on location, ping, etc. to hopefully find a better match. The strength signal bars have been tweaked, making them a little more accurate. Oh, and “The fight data will be optimized in order to reduce the bandwidth load on the host’s console.”

So it sounds like it may help y’all.

You know what may also help, fellow Xbox 360 players? Smashing the controller against the wall, then buying either one of those MadCatz controllers or a full-on arcade stick. The standard Xbox 360 controller is rubbish at the game.

In other Tekken 6 news, the PSP version of the game is out today. I know nothing about it, but I can’t imagine the PSP being too wieldy when playing a fast paced fighting game.

Truth be told, I have no idea why I’m about to write this post, other than the fact that it’s in my little writing queue. You can’t fight City Hall. Here’s the deal: the Federal Government of the United States spent a bunch of money investigating various online marketing scams. How they work, what makes people fall for them, etc. Consumers lost some $1.4 billion to such scams.

The problem is that, despite the investigation into several businesses who engaged in these untoward business practices, companies that rely on them—Priceline, Orbitz, and Classmates.com are mentioned—haven’t shown any interest in severing ties.

Let me rephrase that: Sites such as Priceline and Orbitz utiliyze the services of companies like Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty. Its those companies (Affinion on down) that the Federal Government has a problem with.

What problem? Consumers are apparently tricked, in a sense, to sign up for certain programs (loyalty rewards programs, for example). Then “mysterious” charges start appearing on credit cards. Then people get angry: “Hey, I didn’t sign up for this nonsense!” “Oh yes you did. If you check the fine print, you agreed to give us the naming rights of your first-born son.”

An exaggeration, obviously, but that’s the basic give and take of it.

I have no idea how people fall for such things. Like I wrote a little while ago, a little common sense goes a long way when it comes to preventing scams, imagined and otherwise, from ruining your life.

Another Xbox 360 lawsuit? Oh, yes! Datel, which makes all sorts of video game accessories, has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft because it “has taken steps to render inoperable the competing Datel memory card for no visible purpose other than to have that market entirely to themselves.”

The lawsuit is intended to “restore competition.”

Microsoft hasn’t responded to Datel’s legal eagles.

I can think of a few ways to end this post. One is to say, well, Microsoft has the right to license accessories for its hardware, and if it chooses not to allow Datel’s stuff on there, then there you go.

(The lockout worked by disallowing memory cards above a certain size from being recognized by the Xbox 360.)

The other is to say, Datel provides a much needed service by offering memory cards of a certain size; Datel wouldn’t make them if people weren’t buying ‘em.

You’ll note that you can stick any ol’ hard drive inside the PS3, so it’s not like there’s an industry-wide conspiracy against being able to add storage to your system.

Not that I’ve ever had any use for an Xbox 360 memory card.

At least 2 million Xbox Live users have logged into Facebook this past week, which I guess means the feature is a bit of a success. (You’ll recall that Microsoft launched Facebook and Twitter to so much enthusiasm last week.) Mysteriously, Microsoft didn’t reveal the number of people who logged into Twitter. Is this the end of Twitter?

No, of course not. Maybe it just means that Xbox Live users don’t see any value in using Twitter when there’s no way to click all those bit.ly links?

In related “social” news, Microsoft says that around half a million Last.fm account were created with the launch of Xbox Live-Last.fm compatibility.

Needless to say, these applications weren’t a total waste of time on Microsoft’s part. I’m still not convinced of the value of using Facebook or Twitter from the couch—don’t you have a Facebook or Twitter application on your phone in your pocket?—but I’m decidedly non-plussed by all these newfound “social” applications. It doesn’t help that, generally speaking, I’m an anti-social jerk :-)

Now, there’s a larger point to be made here about whether or not we actually want our video game consoles to become little more than low spec PCs. If you had a top-of-the-line PC, why would you want to buy the PS3 version of, say, Fallout 3 when you can grab the PC version, what with all those mods and whatnot?

Maybe I should save my beans and buy a gaming-worthy PC in the next year, and actually play games like Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Fallout 3, and Call of Duty the way they were meant to be played? I’m very much considering it. Too bad I know *nothing* about what makes a good gaming PC these days.

World of Warcraft turns 5-years-old today. Back on November 23, 2004, a year before the current generation of video game systems even began (with the launch of the Xbox 360), Blizzard released the massively multi-player online game at a time when massively multi-player online games were still largely the haunt of hardcore gamers, people with fast Internet connections who were willing to pay $15 per month for access to a game that they already bought. Who can forget the message board threads: Why do I have to pay for a game that I already paid for at the store? How do you beat the game? What happens if and when I stop playing?

You won’t stop playing. Five years in, Blizzard has 11.5 million (as of December, 2008) subscribers all over the world. (Note: Not every region of the world has a pay-per-month regime. You pay by the hour in China, for example.) In these five years, the game has gone from plucky upstart, going up against other, well-established MMOGs, to the undisputed number one such game. Now, that may not necessarily be a good thing, but it’s hard to see someone knocking World of Warcraft off its perch. Well, someone other than World of Warcraft II.

I’m a veteran of vanilla WoW, but only just. I bought the game in September, 2006; The Burning Crusade came out a few months later. I bought the game because I was roped into some consulting session for a rather big company. “Hey, you’re young. Play WoW and Second Life and tell us how we can better reach young people through them.”

I don’t know if the company got what it wanted (surely it didn’t!), but it certainly set me on my current path of, oh, you know, playing the game for at least three to four hours per night on most nights of the week.

It’s pretty funny. When the game launched in 2004, I was a freshman in college, and one of my two roommates was all about the game. We’re talking stay-up-until-4am-every-night-of-the-week-to-play-it. I had no idea what the game was about, but I distinctly remember the day he walked into the dorm room with a box from Amazon: “Gentlemen, it’s here.” (Actually, knowing the kid, it was probably more along the lines of, “Yes, it’s here! Fucking A~!” Memory fades, I’m afraid.) I’m like, so what? Can’t you see we’re playing Halo 2? (Halo 2 was very big that year. I was a good sniper. It was the last time I played a multi-player game with any conviction.) I’d say we teased my roommate about his “addiction,” but I had no idea what the game was about. I had never played any of the other Warcraft games, nor Diablo. Again, I was not, and still am not, a PC gamer, so the entire Blizzard catalogue played no role in my life.

The point is, the game’s launch came and went, but my only experience with it was waking up at 3:00AM because my roommate yelled, “Yes! I can buy a mount now!”

Then September of 2006 rolls around, and I’m forced to buy the game for that aforementioned consulting session. I still had no interest in the game, and was only creating an account as part of my job. (Well, “job” only in the loosest sense of the word, getting paid to try to help a huge company better tap into the “young people” market.) So walk back to my room from the local Best Buy (I wasn’t boycotting it back then. You can listen to my ordeal as told on the podcast here.), and install it on my iMac. I create an account, and create my first character. It was an Undead Warrior named Rocktober—Undead because I thought they looked (and still look) the best, and Warrior because, well, Warrior is the noob class, right? “Warrior? I bet you get a sword and stuff. Count me in.”

I still have that character to this day.

I then set aside Rocktober, and created a Night Elf Warrior on a different server so I could play with a friend of mine. (I had casually mentioned that I was playing WoW now, and he flipped out. “Oh, dude, join my server and I’ll hook you up.”) I named the Nelf Warrior Zardoz, in honor of that godawful Sean Connery moviethat I had just seen in a movie class I was forced to take. (We all needed an “art” class, so to speak, and watching and critiquing movies was considered “art.” Fair enough.) I was able to get Zardoz all the way up to level 58—it was harder to level in those days—before growing bored of the game. The Burning Crusade was installed somewhere around this time.

A year went by without me really playing the game. Note that I was still paying for the game, just not playing it. I don’t know, I guess I never bothered to cancel my subscription. Maybe it was too much of a hassle, or maybe I didn’t notice such a small amount of money leaving my bank account every month. The point is, I’ve been paying my $15 per month non-stop since September, 2006.

I’m probably never going to stop paying, either.

So here’s to another five years (well, three years in my case) of unpredictable PUGs, guilds joined but not really participated in, Auctioneer-assisted money-making, and lost sleep. So much lost sleep.

You’ll recall that Microsoft recently banned a bunch of people from Xbox Live because they had modded their 360s. Modding is against the rules, don’t you know? Microsoft told VentureBeat not to believe the numbers being thrown around—the number most relayed is 1 million banned 360s—because it never releases numbers to anyone.

Again, the larger debate is: should you be allowed to mod your console? I think so, but that’s probably because my opinion on every single issue is, “So long as you don’t bother me in any direct way, do what you want.” You bought the hardware (the 360 itself) so if you want to whip out a soldering iron or flash its DVD drive with a custom firmware, be my guest.

At the same time, Microsoft has the right to say, “Look, Xbox Live is a service that we’re trying to keep as clean as possible. If you’re playing a game on a modded console, it’s much harder for us to ensure that the service is as clean as possible.” (Where “clean” means free from cheating, hacks, etc.) Plus, why should someone be able to play a pirated copy of Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live when everyone else paid for it? It’s not “fair,” if you will.

That a law firm is possibly looking to start a class-action lawsuit over the bans is sorta silly. The law firm may have something when it comes to Microsoft owing some of these people money for the remainder of their Xbox Live contract, but I don’t know what the EULA or TOS for Xbox Live says about service termination. If you’re banned for being a jerk, are you entitled to any money left over on the contract?

The moral of this particular story is, no, Microsoft didn’t ban “1 million” Xbox 360s.

A surefire way to avoid being banned? Don’t use your modded Xbox 360 on Xbox Live.

This is the worst time to be a gamer. Yeah, it’s great that so many good games have come out recently (take your pick from New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed II, Left 4 Dead 2, etc.), but it’s pretty difficult to shell out $60+ every other day in the span of two weeks.

This list may help. It’s a bunch of older Xbox 360 games for up to 75 percent off the regular price. Granted, I don’t exactly see Modern Warfare 2 or Left 4 Dead 2, but I do spy veritable hits like GTA IV and Guitar Hero World Tour and Lego Batman and TNA Impact.

I’ve listed TNA Impact primarily as a joke, because as we all know, nobody watches TNA. It’s a shame since so many of those wrestlers (Kurt Angle, AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Christopher Daniels, Nigel McGuinness, etc.) are pretty darn good.

Is saying “I play Modern Warfare 2 for the single-player” the new “I read Playboy for the articles”? It might as well be. But get this: I play Modern Warfare 2 for the single-player. I stink at multi-player, so why even bother? That said, I know that many of you bought the game merely to play the multi-player, and thus have no idea what the single-player’s story is about. Thank God for this video, then.

It’s a 60-second recap of the game’s single-player storyline, such as it is.

Red Dawn was more plausible, yes.

You’ll recall that CrunchGear broke the news regarding the leak of Microsoft Cofee, a suite of applications used by law enforcement officials for their own devices. The leak came from a popular BitTorrent site, and then spread to The Pirate Bay and all over the Internet. Needless to say, it’s “out there.” So good luck to Microsoft in trying to stop its spread.

The application suite made its way to cryptome.org, which is a site that’s “famous for privacy activism and exposing various hacking, intelligence and secrecy related information.” (Cryptome’s actually a fun site, and one I visit at least a few times per month. Check it out.) A little while goes by, and Cryptome’s host gets a take-down notice. The host complies because, well, maybe it’s not worth losing risking every single site on your server rack just to host one file that’s already floating around the Internet in perpetuity.

And that’s the beauty of this: Microsoft can try all it wants to hide Cofee, but it’s too late; it’s out there. It’s fairly pointless, especially now that The Pirate Bay has moved to a tracker-less setup.

And if you’re wondering, yes, it’s a legal requirement that for every time we write about Microsoft Cofee, we have to put a photo of a cup of coffee.

There really is something to be said about being the first to the dance. I’m pretty sure we can all agree that Steam was the first big digital distribution service for video games, and I also think we can all agree that it was something of a success. But how big a success? Stardock, which owns the Impulse distribution service (and published Sins of a Solar Empire), believes that Steam enjoys 70 percent market share of the digital distribution business.

It sounds impressive, and it is, but it’s important to recognize that digital distribution is still in its infancy. In other words, Valve has a 70 percent hold on a not-that-big-yet business.

Not that digital distribution isn’t the future. I rated the Sony PSP Go so highly partially because it represents a necessary step forward in the way in which we buy games. (I tell you what I’m not looking forward to today: walking into a GameStop, getting into a “conversation” with the guy there, when all I want is a copy of Assassin’s Creed II. I still haven’t forgiven Best Buy for violating my Civil Rights, so I’m not going giving the ol’ blue shirts any of my business. Unless there’s some indie video game store in Manhattan that I’m not aware of, it’s going to have to be GameStop. Shudder.) That Sony decided to nearly ruin it by only including an 802.11 chipset is another matter entirely.

Xbox Live has shown that you can distribute full, current-gen games to a console crowd, and PSN and Virtual Console prove that people are cool with the idea of buying and downloading older games to local storage. The days when video game = shiny disc are numbered.

I’m only now realizing there wasn’t really a point to these past few words, just reiterating, for the 100th time, that I’m fully prepared for an all-digital future.

Figures. Just yesterday we write about all the different e-books you can get your hands on this holiday shopping season, and then we get a bombshell:Barnes & Noble is 100 percent sold out of nook . The company says that it has exhausted its current supply, and will only have enough nooks to fulfill current pre-orders. In other words, if you were thinking about getting a nook for Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate) but didn’t pre-order one yet, well, too late now.

To throw some cold water on this volcanic story, Barnes & Noble says people won’t have to wait too long to get their nook if they order now. The expected ship date here on out is January 4, 2010, only a few days after Christmas day. So while the nook won’t be sitting under your tree, it’s not like you’ll have to wait months and months to get yours.

The big winner in all of this, of course, is Amazon, whose Kindle 2 is widely available. Considering there’s really not too much of a difference between the two readers, I think it’s safe to say that a few people who were prepared to buy a nook may now spring for the Kindle.

Bits Blog

It’s safe to say that we hear at CrunchGear think you should be able to do whatever you want with hardware that you buy. Let’s take console modding. You wanna flash the drive on your 360 for whatever reason? Fine, go ahead. But don’t think that you can log onto Xbox Live with said modded console, and play your misbegotten wares (or is that warez?), on Microsoft’s network. It’s against the TOS, it makes a mockery of the entertainment medium that you purport to support, and, well, is unfair to the other players.

That said, I can almost understand where this law firm is coming from. AbingtonIP (which seems to specialize in class action lawsuits), a law firm with offices all over the mid-west, has a form on its Web site asking if you were affected by the recent Microsoft ban hammer. The law firm is specifically looking for people who haven’t had their Xbox Live service prorated. That is, say you were six months into your Xbox Live subscription when Microsoft booted you off—are you entitled to roughly $25 in recompense? (An Xbox Live Gold subscription is $50 per year, so if you only received half a year in service, then you can argue you are due $25 for services not rendered.)

Then again, maybe somewhere in the fine print it says that if Microsoft catches you using a modded console on Xbox Live it reserves the right to ban you without having to pay back a single penny for any time you had left on the agreement.

Or you can be a cynic and just assume these lawyers are out for a quick buck. Whatever works for ya.

Sharper eyes than mine have spotted this little easter egg in the Google Chrome OS Demo video that Google published yesterday. (Or were you completely off the grid yesterday, and didn’t know that Google hosted members of the media to demonstrate Google Chrome OS?) Big Boss? An e-mail from Yoji, asking you to be on time today? Snaaaaake!

So yeah, apparently someone on the development team is a big Metal Gear fan. (Yoji Shinkawa is a character designer at Konami, and Big Boss hopefully needs no explanation.) Google instantly wins, like, 10 Awesome Points for the references.

And that’s all there is to say.

Looks like California approved the new energy standards for televisions. The Consumer Electronics Association is predictably upset, whinging on about “constraining” innovation and choice, while environmental groups are predictably thrilled. The state’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, hailed the decision, and said that it will make California a “world-leader” in “the fight against climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

The new regulations will require television manufacturers to cut the amount of power that TVs use by one-third by 2011, and by just less than half by 2013. That’s right: in just around three years all TVs sold in California will have to be 49 percent more energy efficient.

Consumers stand to benefit in the sense that, since their TVs will now use less electricity, they’ll be spending less money going forward. It’s not a huge amount—you’re looking at saving around $30 per year when the 2013 regulations kick in—but the main push behind the new regulations was more altruistic and not necessarily thrift.

As for the CEA, which represents TV manufacturers and the like (it also organizes CES every January), it says the new regulations will cost the state some 4,000 jobs and siphon off $46 million in taxes. It hasn’t ruled out filing a lawsuit, so we may well be in for many more stories in the future.

Flickr

It must be pretty darn easy being an analyst at one of those fancy Wall Street firms. Take this story, that Nintendo may well launch an on-demand video service for the Wii here in North America next year. Japan’s Nikkei reported the same thing nearly two months ago, but it’s only now that someone at Lazard Capital Markets has officially predicted such a store for the North American market.

Here’s what the analyst said, two months after the Nikkei said the same thing:

We expect Nintendo to continue experimenting with content delivery and eventually to launch a service in the U.S., establishing a family- oriented media hub in the living room, and providing a more competitive option to Xbox Live and PlayStation Home.

The Wii is a really strange system, no? Nintendo as a whole, too. While Microsoft and Sony welcome and promote violent games like Modern Warfare 2, Nintendo goes out of its way to promote New Super Mario Bros. , a game that’s going to be huge, yes, but is for a totally different audience.

Nintendo’s hasn’t really jumped onboard the online bandwagon, either. There’s no Xbox Live or PSN you can point to, downloadable content is rare (excepting the Virtual Console, which I wouldn’t really consider DLC in the traditional sense of the phrase), and there’s no emphasis on “extra” features, like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

All well and good, yes, but I have one question: where’s the new Zelda? Surely I’m not the only person who looks at Nintendo systems as Zelda/Mario-to-TV adapters.

Flickr

So this is reasonably exciting. Some super secret source told PlayStation Insider that Sony has talked to Mozilla about porting Firefox to the PS3. Note the wording of that sentence: talks about porting Firefox. Needless to say, if this is even true, then we’re at a very early stage of development.

It’s no secret that the PS3 Web browser isn’t the best one out there, and porting Firefox would give Sony another bullet point to put on a press release: “Runs Firefox (Does your Xbox 360? Thought not.)” I’m not sure how often people use their PS3 Web browser, so I don’t know if this will end up being a huge deal from a users’ standpoint, but yeah, I just see it as something Sony can have over its competitors.

I seem to recall the Xbox “scene” trying to port over Mozilla and/or Firefox to the Xbox1 back in the day, but the people were like, “The code base is a giant mess, it’d take many, many hours to get it to run on the Xbox.”

Of course, people have had the ability to run Firefox on the PS3 for some time—provided you install Linux on the system, which you can’t do anymore.

There’s some sort of video game developer conference going on in Motreal this week (titled, to use its full name, the Montreal International Game Summit), and an interesting charge was just levied there. The CEO of A2M (the company that developed Wet), Rémi Racine, said that some game publishers will go out of their way to deceive the ESRB in order to get a lower rating for their games. You know how Hollywood tries hard to make sure the summer blockbusters are rated no higher than PG-13 in order to ensure a large audience? Same thing with video games, apparently. Why release an M-rated game, and know that your limiting your potential audience, when you can eek out with a T rating?

Of course, this is the opinion of one man, and not to be taken as the gospel truth. But what he said makes sense, at least on the surface:

As a developer who has worked with a lot of different publishers, we’re aware of many that have tried to cheat the rating. They say to the ERSB that it’s a Teen rating rather than an Mature to try and sell more; you can do this just by sending them a video that doesn’t show the most violent stuff and then you’ll get the rating that you want rather than the rating you should get.

Again, we have no way of knowing if this guy is speaking truthfully, but it doesn’t seem too far-fetched. Of course, then you run into all sorts of issues that I can just picture some grand-standing politician exploiting i.e. the ESRB has failed us, so we need tighter regulations.