I wanted to give my condolences to the folks who are losing their job at NCSoft due to Tabula Rasa shutting down. Tough luck, guys, and I hope you bounce back. On the other hand, I can’t say I liked the game.

Actually I have two strong memories of Tabula Rasa from before it shipped. One was from an E3 many years ago, when Tabula Rasa was the darling of the show. Groups of four sat down together to play through a prescripted scenario. I played a futuristic warrior that blasted the enemies with my electric guitar, causing musical notes to fly at him and knock him down. As a group, we managed to take out a boss monster and clear a dungeon. It was fun. The cumulative thinking was, “Huh. Really odd setting, but it has fun gameplay.”

There was troubling talk, however. The presenter told us that they were going to add aspects of a Great War, and everybody was going to be fighting everybody else and it was going to be great. That didn’t seem like a very compelling addition to me. It looked like a fun future-space-opera MMORPG with nice dungeons and interesting set pieces. Having a big PK war didn’t sound like the secret sauce this game needed, but whatever. Still reasonably optimistic.

My other strong memory about Tabula Rasa came from the Last Real E3 Ever, a couple years ago. Tabula Rasa was not the same as before. Now it was all about the big war, I guess. Gone were the silly space opera aspects, and now it was a game where you run around as a marine shooting people but not aiming. I watched people play it for a while, feigning enjoyment before wandering away. The presenter asked me if I’d like to play it, and if so I’d get a free T-shirt. I turned him down. In other words, Tabula Rasa didn’t look fun enough to play it for free, even if they paid me with a free T-shirt. I played a lot of other, much more terrible games at that E3. But this was all about market. I didn’t find the “be a space marine!” hook to be at all interesting. And that combined with the “you don’t have to aim!” hook meant nobody was interested. The wacky vibe from the earlier incarnation of the game had actually been a decent hook — something new and fresh enough to at least get people to play it for a few minutes. But that was gone.

I think the moral is threefold:

1. Don’t re-make your game from scratch. There’s no surer way to fiscal failure than having to completely change the target audience of your game after it’s already through pre-production.
2. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. They redesigned Tabula Rasa so many times that it became a sterile and bland thing.
3. Have a target audience in mind AT ALL TIMES, and for God’s sake, spend a few grand testing to see if your target audience actually wants this thing you’re offering. They have companies to do this, they’re called polling consultants. Use them. They are not prohibitively expensive for an MMO company. $10k can get you a lot of really useful data about whether your $20m game is going to work or not.

Reader Niallalot saw me writing about “Tomb Raider: Underworld” in my last couple of Diary entries and wrote: “Now hold on just a minute - did Lara’s latest really leave you so non-plussed? For shame.”

Niallot, because you asked, here’s how I felt about “Tomb Raider: Underworld,” which I finished on Sunday:

Yes, it was my first “Tomb Raider.” I didn’t love it. The game had me cursing at my TV, even. Why? Since it was my first adventure with Lara Croft, it’s hard for me to say if my problem was specific to “Underworld” or to the series.

I wanted to play Lara as an athlete. She animates like one in “Underworld.” But I also hoped that her adventures would be as exciting as those of Indiana Jones. That’s where Lara and I stumbled.

Doctor Jones got to run away from rolling boulders, exchange idols with bags of sand and figure out what it meant that “Only the penitent man will pass.”

Ms. Croft, I’ve learned, gets to go to gorgeous caverns and sea floors where must shove three blocks so she can jump to two ridges, swing around six poles, clamber across a rock and dive through one closing door… so that she can find the first of four stones that will raise a staircase. That’s not a specific puzzle — hey, I’m sparing people a spoiler! — but you get the idea.

I wanted more of an adventure. Instead, I got a lot of interlocked environmental puzzles.

A funny thing happened as I neared the end of “Underworld” while playing on the Xbox 360. I noticed that my buddy from Joystiq Ludwig Kietzmann was also finishing the game. He cleared it about 15 minutes before I did, so I set up a voice chat to vent. He thought I’d gone bonkers. He told me that swinging Lara through a beautiful, lonely section of exotic terrain is the essence of “Tomb Raider.” Having to figure out which wall to leap to next and solving the puzzles of a temples blocks and ridges is the draw of these games. I told him I wanted either more exhilaration moving through the game world — as I got from “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time” and “Mirror’s Edge” — or a more exciting set of puzzles to solve in a set location — as I get from most “Zelda” dungeons.

What I didn’t want from “Tomb Raider: Underworld,” which I get too often from too many games I play, is a sense that executing a solution to a gameplay puzzle isn’t as fun as figuring it out. That’s the problem, for example, with block puzzles in 3D games, of which “Underworld” has a few: you figure out what you need to do at some moment before actually doing it. And those seconds or minutes between figuring it out and doing it are the least fun moments I can have as a gamer. Isn’t there a more fun activity I can be doing than pushing a block? Too many moments of “Underworld” felt like that to me. They didn’t feel like fun. They felt like work.

So maybe I’m just not a “Tomb Raider” guy. Or just not an “Underworld” guy.

Sorry, Ludwig. Sorry, Lara. Sorry, Alison.

Niallalot, sorry you asked?

Got something to ask me? If it’s about games or the people who work on them or near them, I’ll answer. What do you want to know?

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In preparation for it’s Dec. 4 release, Ubisoft has unveiled a new launch trailer for the upcoming Prince of Persia: The Fallen King. This new game arrives on the DS about the same time as it’s console big brother, but sporting some cartoony graphics. This is the first time I’ve seen some actual gameplay for this title, and for a DS side-scroller, the game looks pretty slick. It looks like they’ve actually translated the Prince’s signature acrobatics into 2D pretty well. Guess we’ll find out how the whole thing plays in a couple of days.

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Related Articles at Gaming Today:

• E3 2008: Trailer for Prince of Persia: The Fallen King Looks Pretty Fun
• Prince of Persia "The Hero" Trailer with Some Familiar Faces
• New Prince of Persia Has Something to Do With Ooze?
• Ubisoft Bringing Prince of Persia: The Fallen King Exclusively to the DS
• Interview with Prince of Persia's Jordan Mechner

Say what you will about Mr. Tallarico. I have gotten to know him very well these past couple of years, and he is without a doubt one of the nicest men I have met in the industry. On top of that, I’ve always loved his music! The soundtrack to Sonic Unleashed is actually really damn good…so Mr. Tallarico has his work cut out for him with Sonic and the Black Knight. As for the Mario franchise…I wonder if his dream could ever come true!

Link

You've got to love how videogame consumers reward originality. Here we have a fresh, brand new IP with an awesome gimmick and excellently implemented four-player co-op ... and people are too busy playing Halo 3 to care.

Left 4 Dead is not exactly breaking records in terms of how many people are playing it, coming in at only number seven in the Xbox Live activity chart. It has been beaten by nothing but established franchises with Halo 3, World at War, Modern Warfare, GTA IV and even Fable 2 charting ahead. 

Personally, I couldn't imagine passing up wave after wave of infected for a couple of crappy Spartans, but there's no accounting for taste, I suppose. Hit the jump for this week's Live activity.

A few weeks ago, Destructoid was lucky enough to get a Q&A session with Sonic Unleashed producer Yoshihisa Hashimoto. I got to ask him about fan reaction to the Werehog, whether or not Sonic needs an involved storyline, and just how he addresses criticism from Sonic fans and the press. 

Unfortunately, with Hashimoto being an understandably busy chap, the interview questions sent two weeks ago did not get back to me until today. As such, a few obsolete questions have been removed, while a couple of moments within the interview might still be a little out-of-date.

Also, please be aware that English is not Hashimoto's first language. Sega of Europe did a great job fixing up the answers, but the English may be a little off in some of Hashimoto-san's responses.

That said, it's still a pretty good interview and I hope you enjoy. Read on for our interview with Yoshihisa Hashimoto.

There is a bit of a value vacuum developing around today s PayTV offerings. Rising dissatisfaction with service value, the lack of flexibility implicit in tiered strategies, and a growing interest in watching online video on the TV have combined to create a unique opportunity for alternative video services -- an opportunity not at all lost on console vendors.

Microsoft and Sony know that today s console gamers are perfectly suited for new TV offerings. The segment is dominated by males between the ages of 18 and 35 -- a prized advertising demographic -- with little sense of loyalty to their 'local' cable or telephone company. They are also heavy viewers of online video and quite comfortable spending money for online digital media.

Simply stated, console vendors are inimitably positioned for success in the OTT (over-the-top) space because their gaming audience already owns the enabling device, and they are highly likely to already have an Internet-to-TV relationship with the vendor.

• Kaz Hirai: PlayStation 3's main premise is video games
• HD Netflix Streaming will hit Xbox 360 first
• Hancock flies to PS Store, brings Fred Clause and others in movie holiday lineup

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81f0JDkf714

I promised myself I wouldn’t get too excited about Jungle Beat’s impending Wii return on the Wii de Asobu (Let’s Play On Wii) label, but the above trailer has got my heart aflutter once more. There’s definitely some new stuff in there (around the seven or eight second mark I spotted a couple of sequences which I didn’t recognise) and it seems the controls will be pretty sensible, if still not quite as effectively primal and physical as the bongo controls in the GameCube original.

The end of the ad confirms which games we’re set to see soon - Pikmin 1 AND 2 will be making their way onto Wii, while Mario Tennis, Chibi-Robo and the two previous Metroid games are also appearing in the range. At 3800 they’re priced a fair bit lower than your average Wii title (which tend to range between 5800 and 6800 yen in Japan). Let’s hope they retail for around £19.99 or less when us Europeans get our hands on these new old titles.

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