free, ad-supported, Web-based platform. The Foxborough, MA, startup has spent the last several months in invitation-only beta test mode, and today it’s opening the game to the general public.
As Quick Hit founder and CEO Jeffrey Anderson—the former CEO of Turbine—explained to me back in May, the idea behind the game was not to compete with the “Madden NFL”-type console games, where the emphasis is on players’ dexterity with a game controller, but to enable competition that focuses on the fundamentals of football strategy and tactics. Players act as “coaches,” assembling teams of fictional athletes with various strengths. They can put their teams up against those assembled by other players, or they play solo against the computer.
Games last 20 to 25 minutes, with coaches picking plays to run against their opponents from an extensive playbook. Users get a somewhat schematic, bird’s eye view of the playing field—it’s a lot prettier than the X’s and O’s on the typical blackboard version of football, but it makes no attempt to simulate the blood and sweat of real football, the way the Madden games do. The point, Anderson says, was to create a game that was lightweight enough to run inside a Web browser, using Adobe’s Flash animation platform and its desktop Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) environment. Quick Hit makes money by showing TV-style commercials between each “quarter.”
You won’t see the names of any actual NFL teams inside Quick Hit, because Electronic Arts’ Madden franchise has the video game rights to the likenesses of NFL teams and players pretty much locked up until 2013. But you will run into a few familiar coaches and players. Quick Hit announced a couple of weeks ago that it has created automated opponents for single-user games modeled after five legendary NFL coaches, and it said last week that a few of the “starters” on these coaches’ teams will be based on active players such as Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Matt Cassel and Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis. (Apparently, involving just a few players doesn’t infringe on EA’s license.)
The Beatles: Rock Band
What more is there to say about this new videogame title from Cambridge, MA-based MTV subsidiary Harmonix Music Systems? The sequel to Harmonix’s Rock Band and Rock Band 2, this console game for the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, and the Nintendo Wii goes on sale today for $60, and has become the occasion for a frenzy of Fab Four fandom unlike anything this continent has seen since the Beatles’ first U.S. appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.
Boston Globe reporters James Reed and Sarah Rodman got an inside look at The Beatles: Rock Band and wrote up a nice report last week, and WBUR’s Tom Ashbrook interviewed Harmonix co-founder and CEO Alex Rigopulos about the game yesterday. This version retains the trademark Rock Band game play, where players must synchronize their guitar strumming, their drum beats, or their vocal lines with the colors, beats, and lyrics scrolling across the screen. But the songs, obviously, are all Beatles tunes, and the onscreen settings are meticulous 3-D recreations of
