Thoughts Of A Gamer

Video In Studio's Videogame Event

2006-06-06T16:24:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write about this for a while. About a month ago, Video In Studios put on an exhibition of old and new videogames. It was great. The lighting was suitably dark, the decor futuristic, and there were always places to sit down. There were NES', Dreamcasts, all types of Sega machines, all the way up to Resident Evil 4 playing on a PS2. All were hooked up to TVs and there were two controllers attached to each for competitive play. Their choices of games were brilliant: Tetris, Dr. Mario, Bomberman; all games that you could pick up within minutes and start kicking ass if if you knew how to think. They could have picked games like Marvel vs Capcom 2, where the fanboys who practised 7 hours a day would pwn every n00b who stepped up, but they didn't. So I spent an hour playing SNES Bomberman with a whole train of skilled opponents.

One thing apparent from that event, though, was why hardcore gamers tend to have relationship problems. There were too many girls there who just sat there and looked bored while their boyfriends played the games and ignored them. Come one, people.

Blizzard in cahoots with wannabe Satanists?

2006-04-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

I recently bought Opeth's Ghost Reveries album and it was one of the worst CDs I'd ever listened two. It was worse than bad; it was one song rewritten ten times with no meaningful variations between them. The lyrics were the usual unconvincing (and conspicously self-conscious) death metal schtick, and the tempo so slow that none of the songs could build up momentum.

Interestingly, though, the liner notes give special thanks to "Chris Sigaty at Blizzard Entertainment."

If Opeth gets the contract to do the soundtrack to Blizzard's next game, then I will boycott that game!

Wow, just WOW

2006-03-17T22:08:00.000-08:00

Now, I'm sure we've all seen Caught Whackin To World Of Warcraft, in which the cameraman walks into someone's room. There he finds a dancing naked night elf on the computer screen, and a fat dude masturbating to it.

Having played WOW for a short while, I can't relate to this. The first time I saw a night elf with nothing on, I said "nice outfit" and she responded by asking me for money about seven times in a row. The next time I saw one, it was in a town and she was literally shaking her booty nonstop like, like... she was controlled by a bot program. Now, when I see a nude night elf in WOW, I think “fourteen year-old boy at the keyboard”

I guess some people are easier to fool than I am.

World of Warcraft vs Street Fighter

2006-02-24T23:14:00.000-08:00

No, this isn't the name of an upcoming Blizzard vs Capcom crossover game, which will be a launch title for the Nintendo Revolution and make full use of that funky Nintendo Revolution controller (I wish). Instead, I want to discuss the current Gamasutra editorial, World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things, which argues that Street Fighter is like real life, World of Warcraft is not like Street Fighter, therefore world of Warcraft is bad.

The last time I played Street Fighter II, it was competitive and I did very well. I kicked ass in the game and got physically beaten up several times that night for winning. The tournament was held in a Church. Of course, the organizers encouraged everyone to meet for follow-up activities. The follow-up activity I attended was a rant-session where the Pastor roared about Jews wanting to take over the world. The fact that the last time I played Street Fighter II was at a recruiting activity for neo-Nazis speaks volumes about what kinds of of people really play Street Fighter. And the kids there? Well, it was obvious that their parents forced them to go to that Church for fear that they would otherwise end up in jail. The church later got trashed by Satanists, by the way. I swear I had nothing to do with it.

I started playing World of Warcraft last week. It was the first game I really got into since I finished KOTOR, and I'm quite liking it. The world feels solid, self-consistent, substantial. Like Blizzard's other games, it gives you dozens of things to think about at any one time. Walk into a new town, and twenty people ask you for favors. At this point, it's basically Diablo III: do quests, get treasure, sell it, repeat. At first you do everything solo. Form a small group if you want. Want money? Get a profession and keep practising until you get good. My friend, who you may know in the game as Rothgard, is at the stage in the game where you do everything as part of a large group. The guild he's in, the Primacy guild, is one of the most hardcore in the world. This seems like a good metaphor for real life, where you develop yourself as much as you can but eventually find that you need other people to do anything.

Which game sounds like it's better for you?

According to the Gamasutra article, it's Street Fighter. I happen to disagree.

Don't think I have what it takes anymore...

2005-12-19T00:02:00.000-08:00

I started playing Zelda: A Link to the Past today and now, I don't think I have what it takes to play videogames anymore. Why? Because I GOT STUCK ON THE FIRST LEVEL! Specifically, the East Palace, which is the first level past the tutorial level. I couldn't deal with the fact the game always started me off with so little health... health that gradually got chipped away by the masses of literally indestructible enemies, having to start over at the beginning of the level and then, after slogging and dodging my way to the point where I last died, dying there again in exactly the same way. After repeating this for 60 minutes, I would have thrown my DS through a wall of if my thumb wasn't burning so badly.

And this is considered one of the best games ever made? If so, then I'm beginning to wonder if I still have what it takes to be a gamer.

Thinking about a DS

2005-09-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

The Nintendo DS, hyped as a portable Nintendo 64, it has lived up to the hype in more way than one; like the N64 it only has a few dozen good games, most of which are entries into existing francises: Mario, Bomberman, Advance Wars, Kirby, Castlevania. Also, like the N64, it takes a common technology (stylus in the case of the DS, analogue control in the case of the N64), turns it into a gimmick and hypes the hell out of it. David Sheff, in Game Over, quotes Nintendo officials saying that the company plans ten years ahead, while a webcast of the unveiling of the Nintendo Revolution's highly “innovative” controller specifically cites the DS as marker for where the company is going.

Hence we see Nintendo's plans for the next decade; a world where proprietary technology locks Nintendo's games to Nintendo's hardware. Since the days of the NES, Nintendo has forced developers to sign contracts forbidding them to port their games to other systems. It has then been cracked down on piracy almost as aggressively as the RIAA and MPAA have, sending college kids to jail for hosting ROM sites. The proprietary mini-discs for GameCube games were intended to be, and have proven to be, (ahem) not be as commonly pirated as PS2 and Xbox games.

How can a game dependent on highly proprietary input hardware like the DS (two screens, stylus) or Revolution be feasibily ported to other systems? Who would bother to write, much less use, emulators for it?

The game library for the Nintendo DS has proven that Nintendo's plan for the next decade has nothing to do with innovation. Nintendo actually wants games developed for Nintendo's systems to never appear on anything else, and they're taking steps towards that.

To All Self-Righteous Pirates

2005-08-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

Ever pass copied software among friends, or download from a file-sharing network or newsgroup? Scan artbooks or rip DVDs for illegimate cut-n-paste arwork? Do you play ROMS? Unfortunately, some people who do this lose perspective. They convince themselves that what they are doing represents absolute good and that those who enforce copyright are Satanic. Witness, for example, how Napster creeps attacked Lars Ulrich when he stood up for his rights. And we all know of stores that charge you money to burn you copies of new games. They act self-righteous about it: tell you it's “fair use” or that CD-burning takes electricity.

The Torque brings us a wonderful satire on this attitude. It's here:

Chris Taylor Refuses To Sign “Copy” of Dungeon Siege II

Stole?! It took us six hours to download this game from a newsgroup. Does he think our high-speed Internet connection pays for itself?

"Video Games Made Him Do It", NOT!!!

2005-08-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

I want these links here for posterity. Devin Moore killed 3 cops and tried to clame that Grand Theft Auto made him do it. Well guess what? It didn't work. He's been found guilty, and the story has been documented by numerous high-profile news sites. Here are just a few:

CNN.COM - Jury convicts video game defense killer

'Grand Theft Auto' cop killer found guilty | The Register

Blaming video game fails for murder defense - MSNBC.com

History is repeating itself. In 1993, Ronald Ray Howard (his personal website) gunned down a policeman. He claimed he was listening to 2Pac at the time, and that 2Pac made him do it. It didn't work back then either; the jury ruled that Ronald Ray Howard, not 2Pac, had killed that policeman, and sentenced him to die. He'll be executed in October. From his conviction on, the media assaults against rap music began to decline.

If anyone ever claims that video games or rap music cause violence, tell them that the criminal courts are not on their side.

Why I Hate Microsoft So Much

2005-08-06T19:15:00.000-07:00

Checking my collection of RSS feeds, I saw something that blew my mind. Slashdot is reporting that Windows Vista, the successor to Windows XP, will implement OpenGL by first translating it to Direct3D code and then executing it as Direct3D code. This means that Windows Vista will run Direct3D games much faster than it runs OpenGL games.

OpenGL is an open standard supported on Macs, Linux, and many other platforms. Direct3D is a proprietary non-standard that works only on Microsoft Windows and Xbox. John Carmack, considered by many in the videogaming world to be one of the greatest programmers alive, has written about the superiority of OpenGL and how much Direct3D sucks. In his 12/23/96 .plan update, he wrote that “OpenGL seems to work just fine for everything from quake to softimage. There is no good technical reason for the existance of D3D.”

Writing a game to support both OpenGL and Direct3D means writing the graphics engine twice. How many developers will bother? Essentially, Microsoft is now forcing game developers to choose between having their games run at decent speeds on Windows and being able to port their games to other operating systems. Furthermore, a Direct3D games cannot even be emulated properly on an OpenGL-enabled operating system like Linux or OSX, because translating the Direct3D instructions to OpenGL takes a noticeable performance hit.

This is a deliberate move by Microsoft to destroy a technically superior open standard, and force developers to use its inferior proprietary alternative, simultaneously cutting off their ability to port their software to other operating systems. And this is why I hate Microsoft so much.

Video Games: The New Gangsta Rap

2005-07-20T16:46:00.000-07:00

One week ago, Patrick Wildenbourg released the Hot Coffee mod for GTA: San Andreas, which unlocks sexual content in the game. Let's jump forward a bit to yesterday, when CNN reported that Hillary Rodham Clinton has started pressuring the FTC to play a censorship role against the videogame industry. Forbes reported today that GTA: San Andreas has been re-rated Adults Only. Now an Orlando Sentinel editorial predicts that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has short-term plans to run for President, will reap a political windfall over this. And today, PatrickW pulled the Hot Coffee mod from distribution.

As I read all this I could not help but realize that videogames have become the new Gangsta Rap: the artform that conservative politicians from both parties trample on in order to make themselves look good. And the GTA Hot Coffee mod is the new Cop Killer:" the single example that these self-righteous censors attack to the exclusion of all else. The similarities don't end there; Ice-T, the singer of "Cop Killer," caved in and pulled the song from distribution too.

ArmJoe and Royal Edoma Engine

2005-04-24T16:56:00.000-07:00

| insert credit | has become my favourite videogame news site. This is partly because they're comfortable reading Japanese webpages and communicating their contents to us. Recently, they've found us two free games. The first is ArmJoe 1.3, an SNK-style fighter based on Les Miserables. The second, Royal Edoma Engine, is the most original isometric shooter I've ever seen. You go fly through what looks like many farms and you kill vegetables. The bosses are tractors and other farm equipment. It's very, very hard!

Why Text Based Games Are Still Better

2005-04-23T08:54:00.000-07:00

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie will premiere within days. I'm seeing a flurry of coverage of the text-based computer game, based on the same book, that came out in 1982; the BBC now hosts not one but two illustrated remakes and an interview with Steve Meretzky about what it was like to “implement” (as it was called back then) the original game for Infocom. I love the part where Steve Meretzky lists some of Douglas Adams's contributions:

like having an inventory object called “no tea” having the game lie to you; having to argue with the game to get past a certain door; having an object called "the thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is" which keeps coming back to you even if you get rid of it; having a player input... which couldn't be understood by the game... be the words which fall through a wormhole in the universe and start an interstellar war.

Yes, all of these ideas made it into the game. Try doing them with graphics and a point-and-click Sierra interface. I remember when Activision released The Lost Treasures of Infocom collections in the early 90's, amid a flurry of hype, many were reminded that text-based adventure games were better than graphical ones. Now graphic adventure games are dead too, and such sophistication will have to be found elsewhere.

FFXI Servers Under Political Attack

2005-04-22T20:48:00.000-07:00

Right now, Final Fantasy XI's servers are under relentless DDOS attack. PlayOnline's official press release tells us that the attacks are deliberate, and a post on an Allakhazam forum thread points out that they started on the same day that cataclysmic anti-Japanese riots started in China.

At least two blogs mentioning this (Terra Nova's Hit where it hurts and Ludonauts' Cross Straits relations in Vana'diel) conclude that Final Fantasy XI is being punished for being Japanese.

Twenty years ago, the hacker called The Mentor wrote that the networks could fight discrimination—

We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
—The Conscience of a Hacker

—and I'm ashamed for how far we've degenerated since then. The Internet, promising to break down social barriers (like skin color and nationality), has instead widened the divide and become a weapon for bigots. There's no evil worse than prejudice, and when when people vandalize a videogaming network because they feel it represents one country, then I wonder where we're going.

Three Love Songs

2005-04-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

The videogame scene is full of jaded people who have lost interest in their hobby. These people have made some of the funniest animations of newgrounds and they are also the troll who clutter up videogame newsgroups. Some, however, maintain a genuine interest even as they become experts in other things. The last crowd has bought us three moving tributes.

Hey Hey 16K is a memorial for the first generation of home computers. It covers so much: how the purported reasons for buying them inevitably gave way to games, the programming aspects, how these days you can't even fit a word processing document into the amount of RAM these systems came with.

After those computers came consoles. The system that started it, the NES, was considered a risky investment after Atari crashed so hard, and yet it defined a generation. Sega Fantasy VI takes us from the time of the NES to time of the PSP. It's ingenius; its creators took recordings of Final Fantasy VI's gameplay, painted out the characters and replaced them with game consoles. Some of the jokes here are very sophisticated, and it will also remind you of what a great game Final Fantasy VI still is.

Finally, obsoleet is the demo that won first place at Assembly 2004. It tells the story of a girl who becomes a programmer, starting from the time she codes her first starfield in BASIC. The 3D models and textures change to show the passage of ten years, and the design of the demo is a testament to how far graphics algorithms have come.

Uber!

2005-04-09T19:12:00.000-07:00

This is absolutely too cool.

Challenge: To what extent do you think it was photoshopped?

Adaptation

2005-04-01T10:25:00.000-08:00

Books and films based on videogames always suck. There have been no exceptions except, perhaps, for some obscure game based anime that have never been released in the West. Like, maybe, Kanon and To Heart.

What about vice versa? Amazingly, some designers have indeed met the challenge of going from a linear storytelling medium to a non-linear one. My circa-1990 Compute magazine collection gushes over the Dune games, Gateway, and Betrayal at Krondor, all of which are based on novels. More recently, X-Men Legends and the Xbox version of The Chronicles of Riddick has gotten very good reviews. And Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is better than any of the movies.

On early effort, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, adapted by the author himself, is still strong after twenty years. In fact, you can play a brand new illustrated version online. Or play the original at the author's website.

What makes them work? They borrow a milieu rather than a plot. They set themselves in the worlds created by their source material but their storylines are their own.

The Shark

2005-03-14T10:35:00.000-08:00

Synchronicity. From XBox-Scene News comes a story about Microsoft Seeking Acquisions. Apparently, Microsoft's executives are now actively looking for other companies to absorb.

Might Nintendo still be on their list? Trip Hawkins predicts that Microsoft will assimilate Nintendo within five years.

And so the corporate games continue.

Great new arcade emulator released

2005-03-05T20:48:00.000-08:00

Modded Xboxes RULE for for playing emulated games. The Xbox controller is so perfect for them. And MAMEdOX, which looks to be the very best arcade emulator for that platform, has just been released. I'm extremely excited.

It's based on Bendermameox. Bendermameox focuses on playing newer arcade games (it won't run the older ones) and therefore fills the same niche as fba-xxx. MAMEdOX is much more useful because...

I've ran its DAT file through clrmamepro and I'm extremely pleased to see that it runs tens of thousands of games from throughout history. Obviously, you're not going to burn them all to DVD-R along with the emulator. If you've added a second hard drive to your Xbox then you can put them all there, but not everyone with a modded xbox decides to do that. No, it's best to put this emulator the Xbox hard drive and add your favourite games as you decide to play them. And that, of course, is the way emulation should be.

The Best Things Are Free

2005-03-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

| insert credit | has been linking to some brilliant free games these days. There's EveryExtend and Dan! Da! Dan!, the latter a Super Star Soldier type and the former a genre-bender where you pilot kamikaze ships against a wall of scrolling puzzle blocks; Torus Trooper, a drive-down-a-tube-and-shoot game reminiscent of S.T.U.N. Runner; the English Translation of Planetarian, a haunting storytelling game whose sole stylistic equal in the West is Broken Saints. All of these games are free (the trial edition of Planetarian, anyway). All are by Japanese developers, and I know that some gamers will see that as extra coolness.

From The Ludologist we get web-based Lemmings and an AI to play it. Yes, that's Lemmings: one of the best games ever made.

Finally, Kotaku brings us both the world's greatest Nintendo DS ad and a very beautiful cosplay art exhibit that poses and juxtaposes cosplayers against all types of landscapes.

If you haven't seen any of these before, you're going to have a good day.

Competition

2005-02-28T22:40:00.000-08:00

CBS News has an interview with Jack Thompson in which he claims that video games don't offer legitimate compeition to their players. Actually, the phrase he used was “no sportsmanship.” Which is hilarious because 1UP.COM just ran an interview with Tomonobu Itagaki about the upcoming Dead or Alive tournament. Among the competitors will be the developers of the games. He urges players to become champions for their home countries and “I can tell you,” says Itagaki, “that those who wish to challenge me personally should step forward and speak up.” Now let me remind you that half a year has passed since the Evo2K4 SF3 Championship, where a Street Fighter III player won by parrying fourteen times (even once is incredibly hard) and driving the room wild. No sportsmanship my ass!

Incidentally, Joystiq's take on the interview and Jack Thompson's hidden message is one of the funniest things I've read all day. I'm not going to quote it. Go see it for yourself!

But how about competiting in the game of life? Like, say, getting into college? Can videogames help you there? Well, let's see now... Joystiq just picked up a story about how a Student Writes Essay on His CoH Experience, Gets Into College.

So I guess they can.

Want To Be An Artist?

2005-02-26T10:14:00.000-08:00

Anyone who wonders what's involved in 3D animation should head to G4tv, where there's a feature on Maya Modelling. It's not a tutorial, but it does tell you what's involved in each step. And if it's that sounds interesting then get a copy of the Maya Personal Learning Edition (it's free) and try it out. Maya is very, very popular among professionals.

Artistic fields, like the film and videogame industries, hire based on talent. It's not just whom you know or what you've done before, but also how cool your demo reel (portfolio) looks. I know a guy who used to work in a warehouse, but spent his shift time sketching rather than working. Well, now he's an animator working for EA! He showed me his production drawings for GoldenEye and they were mind-blowingly great. And the subject of GamaSutra's current Artist Gallery: Laura Schumacher (free registration required) spends her free time “doodling... to generate ideas:” art is something she can't not do.

So if you're already a good artist but know nothing about Maya, check out the G4 article.

And if you have no interest in doing art, check out the article anyway for an idea of just how hard it is.

Why Jack Thompson Is Wrong

2005-02-25T09:04:00.000-08:00

I think everyone who reads videogame blogs is familiar with Jack Thompson, the lawyer on a personal crusade against the entertainment industry (and that includes videogames). His latest project is the GTA lawsuit. Well, Salon.com Technology | Grand Death Auto tells the real story; the kids that are the subject of the lawsuit didn't even know what they were doing when they decided to shoot at trucks. They expected the shots to just bounce off. Yes, they were that stupid—one has an IQ of 91—but so much for Jack Thompson's theory that the games made them violent enough to commit murder. Meanwhile, Shaun McCormack has posted some Jack Thompson emails which show how small-minded the lawyer really is.

Well, Jack Thompson, if videogames train children to be killers then why would children's hospitals across America accept donations of videogames? And for their patients, no less? That's right; a short time ago, Penny Arcade held a donation drive to make that happen. Wil Wheaton covers the story here.

Thinking About Tomorrow

2005-02-23T21:14:00.000-08:00

A skimming of the past few day's news has me thinking about tomorrow. I'm not talking about the short term questions, such as Nintendo's DS vs. Sony's PSP (which no industy professional can predict); I'm thinking a little farther.

As CBC News' Viewpoint: Greg Hughes observes, the type of videogaming that started with the NES generation has grown up with its audience and these days, "an interesting story and characters means as much as a snazzy graphical interface." How wrong can he be, given that one of the most anticipated games these days is Final Fantasy XII? Even games aimed at the lowest common denominator are aimed at boys past the age of puberty.

These games already have global appeal. In the Arab world, for example, Video Games Thrill Some, Vex Others. Teenagers and students use them for social events, and the detractors there raise the same issues (pandering sexism, damage to eyesight, contributing to youth violence) as the games' detractors here in the West. Meanwhile, a special version of Unreal Tournament is being readied to train US troops in how to use their body language correctly and not get killed in Iraq. The game works because it simulates everything it needs to and responds as the soldier goes through it.

It's obvious that videogames are a valid artform. They transcend attempts to translate them to other media; the Guardian just published a blistering critque of the gaming press' inadequacy, and Game Brains' current feature is the crash of the Alone in the Dark movie. Greg Hughes mentions the narrativist model of videogame theory, which posits that they create a cyberdrama in which the player stars. How can any other medium even begin to capture that?

This is where we are. What's next?

Death of a modded xbox

2005-02-22T22:42:00.000-08:00

My Xbox just died. It was special to me because I'd modded it myself and immediately escaped into the world of homebrew console software. I played a perfectly emulated Super Mario Bros. on it just for the coolness of playing my favourite NES game on an Xbox. Another program, the Xbox Media Center, is based on the same source as MPlayer for Linux and MPlayerOSX for MacOS, and better than either because it supports the Xbox remote. Other great (but illegitimate) programs include xbomberbox2, the most beautiful clone of Bomberman ever released, and DVDX, which transforms the Xbox into a region-free DVD player.

The Dreamcast hacking scene is well-known, well-documented, and active. The Xbox hacking scene is that, times ten, because an Xbox starts out more powerful than a Dreamcast.

Well, my hacked xbox died today. When I turn it on, the reset button flashes red and green (what the Xbox scene calls "fragging") and I see nothing on the screen. I'd so stripped one of the screws the first time I opened the cover that I can't get it off to repair what's inside.

I'm not going to tell you what to think about all this. That you will decide for yourself.

It Takes Two

2005-02-21T08:55:00.000-08:00

Matthew Sakey's current Game Over column on the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) webpage argues for deeper games. To make this happen, he says, we need the support of the gaming press. “The press would do well to take note of that trend and include more coverage of, and applause for, what's happening thematically in some games. This means longer reviews, deeper analysis, and more editorializing.” If the gaming press embarrasses itself, he says, it embarrasses the entire videogame medium, taking it down a notch, and the quality of games goes with it.

Not in response to this, The Second Life Herald runs an article about how an Extinct Native American Tribe Finds Second Wind in a virtual museum built using the Second Life engine. The headline is self explanatory, the story incredibly moving. All games are simulations of some sort, and this is should alert people about what videogames can do.

The New York Times story about how the Story Line is Changing for Game Makers and Their Movie Deals, covering the opposite end of the spectrum, tells us how games based on movie licenses need to be rushed to market, and how games based on children's movies usually have low-budgets as as well. The article, oddly, does not mention Bioware's very good Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which was based on a movie. Bioware is now working on one of its most exciting games yet. As detailed at Gamespot's approving Jade Empire Limited Edition Q&A, the game will include “a very interesting character modeled after the classic monk out of literature and films.” I think Matthew Sakey will see this as a step in the right direction.

In with the old

2005-02-20T08:39:00.000-08:00

Blizzard Entertainment has released the 1.12 patch for Starcraft. It's still officially supported, still being improved, seven years after it came out in 1998. And people still play it. Professionally. In official competitions.

The Megaman Collection came out half a year ago. The Megaman X Collection is on its way. Meanwhile, the Sonic Mega Collection just came out and it's been getting good reviews. All of these are releases for current consoles (PS2, Gamecube, XBox).

We live in a time where re-released NES games, ported to the Game Boy Advance but otherwise identical to the originals, are priced as high as new releases.

And with Mario Cart coming to Japanese arcades, Shigeru Miyamoto says "he is honored to have Namco's Pac-Man as a guest in the game."

Why do these old games captivate us even after time has moved on? Are they simply the games we played back when we were really into games? Perhaps, but the the rereleases I mentioned aren't collector's editions with expensive packaging and memorabilia; they have similar packaging and seem to be aimed at the same market as every other game on the same shelf. No, I think what these games have in common is depth. They were so packed with content that you could find new things even after playing them for years. See the Tool-assisted console game movies for some examples of this.

When Worlds Collide

2005-02-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

Sony's launch slogan for the Playstation 2, “Live in your world. Play in ours,” now seems like the pinnacle of corporate responsibility. Sony sold a new experience that people would want to explore for days at a time, and at the same time warned their customers to maintain a life outside the game! I can't imagine Sony ever acting like that again, not with Everquest II as a hot product. Now, BBC News | Technology | Losing yourself in online gaming is full of stories of people who play Everquest (or Worlds of Warcraft) for eleven hours a day or more, cancelling their real lives to do so. “As gaming becomes ever more mainstream, and games ever more immersive,” says the BBC, “there will be no hiding place for social problems.”

Sony, taking advantage of this, has signed a deal with Pizza Hut whereby you can order pizza from the game interface, have the credit card you used to pay for the game billed, and have your dinner shipped to your door. All without having to even get up to pick up the phone. And this deal is only the beginning. Chris Morris' current "Game Over" column for CNN Money, quotes Sony: “We don't want to do anything that will take people outside the game experience. We don't want to create armor that has the Nike swoosh or you have to drink Coke for health.” In other words, Sony plans to introduce even more in-game advertising that works at a subliminal level, affecting the player without being noticed.

People, games are fun. "Addictive," even. They work on a deep enough level to influence you without you noticing it. I hope we'll all remember that while we play in their worlds, we still live in ours.

Why the PSP will fail

2005-02-18T08:39:00.000-08:00

From Engadget: Sony reveals pricing for first UMD movies as well as all of five launch titles: XXX, Hellboy, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and House of Flying Daggers. These aren't exactly the best-reviewed, most popular, or even cult classic movies of the past few years. Quite the opposite, in fact. The long-awaited "Final Fantasy VII: Advent's Children" is still vaporware.

Let me get this straight. The PSP requires movies in a proprietary format and costs more than a portable DVD player. It also plays games, but will only have 3 hours battery life (the GBA SP's lasts 16 hours). I've seen pictures of people holding it, and it looks at least as bulky as an Atari Lynx.

Look at the history of handhelds. Technically, TurboExpress and the Sega Nomad pwned the competition. Like the PSP, they had hardware comparable to their console counterparts (they had to; they played the same games). What sunk them was their poor battery life, bulkiness and massive price: the exact same weakness that the PSP now has.

If the past can tell us anything, it's that the Playstation Portable will fail.

Of Light And Darkness

2005-02-18T00:03:00.000-08:00

18 year-old Devin Thompson (who had previously been arrested for stealing cars) shot three police officers in 2003: When caught, he uttered a phrase that I should take for my email tagline: "Life is a video game. You've got to die sometime." Now attorney Jack Thompson is using the lawsuit bought by the victims' family as a springboard for his one-man crusade against the entertainment industry. As Grand Theft Auto sparks another lawsuit, Thompson will try to prove in court that the GTA games trained Devin to murder.

Doug Whatley's company, BreakAway Games, makes "serious games" for the vertical market. In an interview with Gamasutra he reveals that his biggest client is the US military. He mentions "Fortune 500 companies that will spend five to ten million dollars on a training games" and that "if you're teaching leadership skills to business leaders, there's a whole wide range of game types and styles that you could do." He has even worked on a VR project aimed at relieving the pain that cancer patients feel in chemotherapy.

This is where it comes together. No-one in the videogame world will ever look at Jack Thompson as anything other than a lunatic, while most who read Doug Whatley's interview will admire him. But doesn't Whatley's career prove Thompson's point? If videogames can train you to lead in business then what else can they train you for?

Come Walk With Me

2005-02-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

I believe that the first game with a warning label was Techno Cop for the Genesis. Titles like Death Duel and Slaughter Sport made it to that console soon after. The Genesis, after all, was a console for big kids and who didn't want to be as childish as those who still played the NES. Cut to the 90's. Eric Harris was a DOOM fanatic before he rampaged through Columbine High School. In 2003, two Grand Theft Auto III players acted out the game, killing one person and putting another in the hospital.

When I mentioned the GTA case to one friend (Rothgard on EQ2), he said, "well that's the audience that that game is aimed at."

Right now, the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association (IEMA) is fighting a bill that would restrict the sale of violent video games to minors, while yesterday, GTA creator David Jones talked about All Points Bulletin, his upcoming MMORPG about gang war. As quoted in the TeamXbox article, GTA Creator Unveils All Points Bulletin, Jones states that "it has been [his] dream to create an online game experience that provides the player with the ultimate freedom to do whatever he wants." I wonder what he sees the average player of that game as.

All art is aimed at an audience. Is it ethical, then, to design games that appeal specifically to an audience prone to real-life violence? The answer: I don't know.

This Is Where The Tech Is

2005-02-15T16:35:00.000-08:00

Steven Pool's Trigger Happy mentions companies that make their living programming physics engines to sell to video game firms. It gives the example of MathEngine, and mentions that MathEngine often has to tweak its work to make it less realistic but more conducive to gameplay. This mirror's James Cameron's comment (found on one of the supplements on the Terminator SE DVD) that you cannot mathematically determine what works in art.

Today, FileFront has a new article, F! True Project Story: The Havoc Engine, which profiles another one of these companies, Havoc. A previous version of their engine powers Half Life 2, which is one of the most amazingly realistic games I've ever played. Now, having released a new version of their engine, they intend to someday model the movement of hair and clothes.

What about simpler 2D games? Simpler? Only by degrees. Joystiq has a new entry, See how a computer thinks, and run away screeching, reporting on just how many things a computer considers when making a single chess move. It's mind-blowing.

This is where the state of the art is.