Welcome to Beyond Co-Op, a weekly piece that talks about industry stories that may or may not be related to co-op gaming.
The stories for this week:
- GameFly Wins USPS Dispute
- Playstation Network Down, Outside Attack Confirmed
- New God of War Coming September 2012?
- Portal 2 Feels Some Backlash from MetaCritic Player Reviews
- Relatively Quiet Week with Darkspore Releasing
GameFly Wins USPS Dispute
It’s been two long years, but GameFly finally won its argument with the United States Postal Service. GameFly had claimed that Netflix and Blockbuster got preferential treatment via hand sorting versus much of GameFly’s mailings being put through automatic sorters that would often damage the game discs in them or create an elongated shipping time for people to get their games and send them back.
There is no word of what exactly the USPS will do other than some talk of a “parallel setup” of some sort. I’ve been a GameFly member off and on over the years and have just recently thought about starting up again. Only the last time I was a member did I ever have problems with shipping. Usually it would take two days from being shipped off to get to me (I think the closest distributor to me is in Pennsylvania, used to get them from California) and the same in reverse. Last time it took almost a week to get to me and it took forever to get back to them. I knew this wasn’t GameFly’s fault, but I’m sure they take the heat for it from many people. Hopefully this will fix it so that things are more like with me and Netflix with nice, smooth transitions.
Source: Gamespot
Playstation Network Down, Outside Attack Confirmed
On Wednesday it seems as if the Playstation Network became unreliable and people could not log in. Well, turns out the Playstation Network was attacked from the outside. Sony is not commenting on how it was attacked or who attacked it (could be it Anonymous once again?), but the network is still down as of @10pm Central Time Friday as I write this. Sony said it would hopefully take a day or two, but it is looking like it might be longer than that.
Glad I didn’t pick up Portal 2 as I was planning to in order to also get in on a free copy of the game on PC that comes with the PS3 version. I probably would not be able to execute that maneuver at the moment. Instead I shall live without GlaDOS for a little while longer.
Source: Playstation Blog
New God of War Coming September 2012?
Much like the Wii 2 news came out last week, this week there is a rumor that Sony Santa Monica is working on a new God of War game that will come out in September of 2012. I’d say the rumor is a pretty good one, it will be over 2 years since the last one came out. It also isn’t that big of a surprise given how well the last game sold. Maybe it could be one of the last great games for the PS3 like God of War 2 was on the PS2, opening up the doors for the next console?
Source: Computers and Video Games
Portal 2 Feels Some Backlash from MetaCritic Player Reviews
Put this in the “this is totally nuts” category, but the early player reviews after release of Portal 2 on MetaCritic had been pretty poor. By now the numbers have been righted, but given the almost universal acclaim given by the press for the game this was a crazy thing to see. Most of the complaints revolved around the (inaccurate) statement that the game took just as long to beat as the first game, 4 hours. Most people I’ve read who have beaten the game have taken over 7 hours to beat. Another complaint is that a “free” game (Portal) now has a full-priced sequel and why couldn’t they get this one for “free” with a package like The Orange Box? Lastly, there were complaints about the PC version being a port of the console versions because at some point during the game it says to “not turn your console off” or something on the PC version.
I have a hard time believing Valve would not make the PC version the best it could be. The PC is the reason they are as big as they are today. With Steam, the Half-Life games and other things it is just crazy to think that they would make this game on a console and then port it over to the PC (and Mac I guess). Just crazy and although I haven’t played the game I have a hard time believing it isn’t great given all the reviews and even player experiences I’ve read.
Source: me
Relatively Quiet Week with Darkspore Releasing
It seems to be a snooze fest this week as I only see Darkspore as a somewhat major release this week. I think the game had a good bit of hype when it was first announced, but I don’t think it’s carried the hype through to now. I could be wrong though, but that last delay for a month didn’t help things very much.
Source: me