Why Drive failed.

Drive is Fox's latest attempt at creating something new and interesting. Unfortunately, like many of Fox's projects, this one is being canceled before it's had a chance to catch on. I have to imagine that in order for a show to be canned in 3 weeks of airing, that the ratings must have been pretty horrific.

I wish I could defend the show, I love Nathan Fillion but I really don't have anything good to say. The show was average at best. Here are the reason why I personally think it failed.

The Plot was unexciting: A 32 million dollar winner take all illegal cross country road race? Fantastic! Except, the first two episodes had barely anything illegal in it. They were speeding, that's about it. What was the audience suppose to care about? The rules of the game within the story were so broken and vague that it was hard to follow, let alone cheer for someone to win.

Too many uninteresting characters: There were about 6 different plot lines for 6 different pairs of drivers. They were all characters that I couldn't get attached to. They were also all introduced at the same time with the same amount of effort. It's hard to convince an audience to choose someone to side with in a "winner take all race" when there are six equal contenders that you may want to win the race.

Too many ugly characters: If you're going to have a pair of racers where it's a father and his daughter, please make the daughter as hot as possible. I think Heroes is really setting the standard on hot teenage girl main characters. Please try to keep up. Besides that point, there are almost no hot girls at all. As superficial as this sounds, it's pretty safe to say that both male and female viewers want to see hot girls (hello Grey's Anatomy?), and it's pretty safe to say this show was made for men.

In hindsight: The rules of the game should have been explained in the first 20 minutes. It was too mysterious, too vague and hard to get attached to a show where you have no idea why people are doing stuff.

Only one character (or pair of characters) should have been introduced per episode. It's very easy to show the other characters without the focus being on them. I tip my hat to Lost and Heroes for being shows that do a fantastic job handling a large number of characters.

And lastly, give the audience a reason to tune in the following week. If you end an episode giving people a feeling like they can miss a couple episodes and not care, then they probably won't.

I'm sad that a series about cars and driving is gone.

Side Scrolling Shoot'em Ups

I always have high hopes that some game designer at some big company will randomly stumble across my blog and say "that's a good idea!". This then allows me to play games that I would like to play. That's it. I don't want anything else other than to play games.

Joystiq had an article today about a game coming to Xbox Live Arcade that seems very much akin to classic side scrolling shoot'em ups. I love these games. The game, Undertow, is compared to Geometry Wars, which is another XBLA game that I spent hours and hours on. There's no real point to the game, you just shoot things and stay alive. Think asteroids with updated graphics.

But what happened to classic shoot'em ups? Contra? 1942? Aero Fighters? These are all great games. I know Metal Slug is a recent game, but it's really just a continuation of an old game with classic graphics.

With systems like XBOX 360 and Playstation 3, there is insane potential to create a side scrolling game with intense graphics. And enough processing power for 4 players at the same time.

Imagine this, a space shooter with crazy explosions, realistically lit models as fusion blasters rip through enemy gunnercopters. Super powers that rip through the fabric of time, summon demons, or implode molecules. The potential for eye candy is insane, and the gameplay doesn't need to be extravagant.

Just make it easy to play, hard to stay alive, and extremely rewarding to beat.

Passion of a gamer

I built a new computer last week and have been playing games non-stop since. You can't imagine how big of a difference going from a 128 MB AGP ATI Rage 9700 video card to a 256 MB PCI-E NVidia 6800 GS card makes. Not to mention doubling my ram and switching from an AMD Athlon Barton 2600 + to a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.44 ghz.

My weekend was a marathon of installing games and seeing what games looked like on maxed out graphics (as opposed to the lowest setting just-meet-minimum-requirements gaming I've been doing).

What is worth mentioning is Steam. In my previous post (my first post on this blog actually), I talked about how Steam was setting up for a new trend in video games by releasing games in episodes, with Sin Episode 1 and Half-Life 2 Episode 1. What I didn't stress was how great Steam was as a game purchasing client.

Steam is getting larger. The last time I was on it (pretty much when I last posted about it), it had just made a deal with PopCap Games. PopCap makes very interesting casual games that are fun to play if you're just trying to kill 20 minutes. Steam also has Activision, Eidos Interactive, and 2K games, all major players that have made some very good games.

I like this direction. EA Games has also released a game purchasing client, EA Link. Though it's not as sophisticated as Steam, competition is always good. EA Link seems to only have games from EA though, which isn't really bad, consider how gigantic EA is.

Being able to centralize all games into one area is great. The best part is Steam knows what games you own, and you don't have to download and install it (if say, you built a new computer).

The direction I'd like to see Steam go in, is to work more like iTunes, where I can add my games into Steam, and thereby, use Steam as a game manager. As Steam gets more deals together with other publishers, they can then add the game to my account, and the next time I clean format my computer, all my games will be listed and ready for download.

Death to CD installations.