By all accounts, Square Enix's new sandbox game Deus Ex: Human Revolution is great fun. For one thing, it's completely non-linear - players do what they want when they want to do it. It's also fairly inventive in the sense that most of the time you can do things your way; you can accomplish the same objective by talking, by shooting your way in or by sneaking in the back door. Your character evolves along with your preferences for stealth or combat.
The average review is probably an 8.5 to 9.0 out of 10, which is incredibly good. Only a handful of games in any given year will score higher than that. If you're into expansive sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry and Just Cause then you will probably love it.
But the quality of the game was not the talk of the tech world last week, it was the revelation that GameStop - one of the leading game sale and trade companies with 4,000 stores across North America - was covertly opening packages of the game and removing a coupon that entitled purchasers to a free copy of the game through the OnLive streaming service.
OnLive is a newish service (it came to Canada in fall of 2010) that lets subscribers play high definition console and PC video games over the Internet through their computers or televisions. You don't need a console with OnLive's servers handling all the game mechanics and rendering, and you can access your games from anywhere you have a high-speed Internet connection. The cost of a subscription is $10 a month, which includes access to 115 top tier titles including Deus Ex.
GameStop's objection is that by selling the games with the coupons inside - which were included without their knowledge - they would be supporting a competing service that could one day (when OnLive subscription numbers go up), threaten their brick and mortar business and that competes directly with their own digital service - also selling Deus Ex.
You can't blame OnLive for trying. To get subscribers they need to be able to show people what their service can do and so far the service has been slow to take off. You also can't blame GameStop - expecting them to sell a game with a coupon to OnLive would be like expecting Tim Horton's to offer Starbucks gift cards in their Roll Up the Rim promotion.
The fault clearly belongs with Square Enix, which responded to the controversy by making apologies to pretty much everybody. They recommended that PC purchasers get the game online at GameStop.com. The also supported GameSpot's decision to withdraw the game completely (a move that could cost both companies millions) once people started to complain that their games were being tampered with. Square Enix also promised to provide the store with coupon-free copies in the future.
The big question is what was Square Enix thinking? Obviously they reached some kind of deal with OnLive that they felt was mutually beneficial and profitable, and to be fair the company was desperate to have a hit across every platform after its latest Final Fantasy game bombed. But this was clumsy. I'm actually surprised that Future Shop, Best Buy and others haven't threatened to pull the game themselves to protect their own game sales, even if they don't have competing digital download services.
GameStop has real reason to be afraid that brick and mortar video game stores could one day go the way of brick and mortar music stores, movie stores and book stores, which is why they're moving into digital distribution. The problem is that digital distribution only really works with PC games because console makers aren't about to share their captive audience with other companies. And with more people buying their games online - and consoles are coming with big hard drives these days to store them - the writing could very well be on the wall for games on DVD/Blu-ray.
But we're not there yet. According to reviews, OnLive is impressive but it's not there yet. The OnLive joystick is good by all accounts and the idea is solid - $120 a year for unlimited games is an unbeatable price point for customers - but the Internet just isn't fast or fluid enough for it to work. Most broadband subscribers do exceed the minimum 2Mbit/second download speed recommended by OnLive, but while connections are fast enough on average there's still some lag at times. The resolution is a solid 720p, but that's worse that the 1080p you can get with an Xbox, PS3 or PC.
The $99 tablet...
If there was a good day to live in Vancouver it was two weeks ago when HP confirmed they were discontinuing their Touchpad line of tablets and selling off their remaining stock at a heavily discounted price - $99 for a 16GB model worth $400 and $149 for a 32GB model priced at $499. I immediately went online - newegg.com, slickdeals.net, futureshop.ca, bestbuy.ca, thesource.ca - and came up empty. I missed the announcement by a day and all the inventory had been snapped up, unless you lived close enough to a store to go there in person. There is a possibility that more will be available as tablets on backorder at the factory come available - I recommend adding HP Touchpad to your Google Alerts so you'll know when that happens.
