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I live in terror these days. Sheer, heart-stopping panic, unmitigated by reason. What, you ask, could terrify me so aside from the obvious (landsharks)?
The Red Ring of Death.
Those around me fall like wheat before the scythe, as a fourth close friend experienced the red ring of death that signals complete system failure for an Xbox 360. I don’t call too many people close friends so it is disturbing enough to know that the Reaper is stalking us. Still, I’m possessed of powerful Warranty Magic so the Reaper alone cannot chill my heart with this kind of foreboding.
Nay. The grim hand of dread that has gripped my soul this morning derives from the realization that were I to experience the foul Ring now, as did my CTO Chris last night, I would likely not get my console back until after September 25th. My god, just writing that has turned my muscles to jelly and is that a bit of wetness I feel dripping down my left leg?
Poor Chris (who went through four of the original Xboxs) has already resolved that he’ll need to purchase a new 360 because, “I will NOT wait to blast some motherfuckers with a Spartan Laser!”
So please, pray for me my friends. If there’s an ounce of humanity in you, pray that I am not marked by the red ring before the 25th. Pray to any God that will listen. (Try Hephaestus. His forges turn out quality stuff.)
And now, I am off to a local farm. There’ll be lamb’s blood on all the doors to stay the Reaper’s hand, and tonight Mr. Gates shall sup on a burnt offering of the finest organic, sustainably-raised Sonoma lamb.
Here’s the report. Note that the report only measures visits to websites so people playing games with a desktop client like WoW aren’t counted in it unless they visited the website (which I’d imagine a decent percentage of users do, but certainly not all).
Edit: Steven Davis dissects the numbers and comes up rightfully skeptical.
Gamasutra is reporting that the new GamerMetrics report from IGN Entertainment is out and that they predict that three games (Halo 3, Madden 07, and Grand Theft Auto IV) will account for 30% of game sales in 2007 all by themselves. 30%!!
Summary: A school in Texas has been expelled from his school for playing a Counterstrike mod that took place in a modeled version of his school. Coincidence that he’s Asian and this was so close to the shootings at Virginia Tech? Perhaps.
The police even searched the kid’s home, with consent. What’d they find? A hammer. Clearly, a terrorist. No charges were filed but the school is still refusing to let the poor kid attend graduation ceremonies with his classmates.
Someday I hope to have enough money to tweak the nose of jackasses like the school administrators there. My first reaction to reading this story was to be filled with a desire to pay people to create Counterstrike models of every school in that school district and then offer them up for download. Perhaps locate the blueprints for the houses of the individual administrators and do the same thing for their homes.
I’m not a fucking terrorist because I’ll be playing Spiderman 3 next week (takes place in a virtual NYC) and neither are the developers. This kid isn’t a terrorist and he should be praised for his creative efforts not expelled from school. I hope his parents sue the living hell out of the school district.
I am no fan of DRM as a consumer but support intellectual property owner’s rights to control how their property is distributed. While I think the RIAA are a bunch of antiquated goofs they’ve got the right to destroy their business as they please as far as I’m concerned.
This morning of course, Apple and EMI announced that the entire EMI catalogue, minus their biggest act - the Beatles - would be made available, DRM-free and at 256 kbps (most iTunes downloads are at an irritating 128 kbps, which has noticeably inferior fidelity vs. a CD, for instance). They’ll cost $1.29/song rather than 99 cents/song, but I know I’ll happily pay that premium. I’ve refused to buy anything but one-hit-wonder-type songs off iTunes thus far because of the low fidelity of their music but this will certainly make iTunes my preferred method of obtaining new music.
Emotiv went out of stealth mode today with the official announcement of their first product: technology to enable thought-controlled games!
Microsoft released some interesting stats today at GDC. A good summary of them can be found here. Some observations:
Halo 2 is the most popular Xbox Live game. I’m unsure if that is a testament to Halo 2’s yummy goodness or a lament for better 360 multiplayer games. Perhaps both.
As referenced in the previous post, I played in the ISM Charity Poker Invitational Tournament tonight. It was reasonably fun, and I ended up playing at the same table with Brian Robbins from Fuel Industries who is an experienced guy working in the online space. We’ve never met face-to-face but “know” each other from an email discussion list.
I’ve written a couple times recently about the WoW Glider controversy. To sum up, Blizzard is suing some guy that made a program that other people use to bot in WoW. Some of the Forge’s commenters seemed to feel this was ok.
I’m curious how those people would feel about Microsoft suing this guy if he sold his simple little device, assuming that MS had something in the Xbox Live EULA that prohibits automation? (No idea if they do or not. Consider it a thought experiement if not.)
After all, even if it’s just a simple little machine consisting of a couple of solenoids and drive belts, it’s still a “cheating” device, right? Aside from the copyright infringement claim with WoW Glider (which I’ve got no problem with), I don’t see any sort of real difference aside from DMCA-wankery. It’s a tool created explicitly to ‘bot’ and gain you points in Xbox Live, just like WoW Glider is a tool created explicitly to ‘bot’ and gain you points in World of Warcraft.
Taking it a step further, perhaps Microsoft should sue itself, since I used the cord for the microphone they manufactured to wrap around my dual joysticks on the 360 controller in order to automate my rise up the ranks in Rainbow Six: Las Vegas.
This is nothing more than a bitch session post. I do not understand why Microsoft, which has had years to get it right, cannot build a working online system. Most of us at Iron Realms have had a 360 since last spring, and we have had constant problems trying to play together online. We’ve had problems with Ghost Recon, with Burnout, with Rainbow Six, and so on.
At the moment, for instance, we were trying to have a spirited afternoon firefight in Rainbow Six. Instead, we’ve spent 45 minutes trying to find someone to host so that everyone can both connect to the game and hear each other. Either someone won’t be able to connect to the host, or some people in the game won’t be able to hear each other, though everyone else can hear them. This is the typical problem we encounter.
$50/year for Xbox Live Gold account gets us 45 minutes of wasted time. If Xbox Live was having network problems I’d understand. It’s a rampant, frequent problem, however, and has been enough to cause us to simply stop playing certain games online with each other (like Burnout) in disgust.
Rainbow 6: Vegas is a game that we at Iron Realms had anticipated for quite awhile, since we’d greatly enjoyed playing previous installments of the franchise on the original Xbox. It’s pretty good (if not brilliant), but I, and likely almost everyone else playing it, have a big beef: Advancing up rank means spending ridiculous amounts of time playing in PvP matches online. Everytime you complete an online match, you get points, which are applied to your rank. One starts at Private Second Class and moves up to Major or something. I’m unsure what the top level is.
In any case, because you get points just for completing matches (albeit less than for winning matches or drawing matches), and because the amount of time they expect you to invest is absurd (one of my co-workers estimated 12 days of consecutive play to unlock all the weapons and gadgets), many people have turned to gaming the system, including us.
Right now, even though my TV and AV setup are turned off, three of us are ‘playing’ matches of Rainbow Six over and over with the headset cord tied around the 360 joysticks to make your character run in circles and avoid the pathetically inadequate idle detection. We’ve been doing this for about 21 hours straight so far, and I’m pleased to report that I just checked and am up to “Staff Sergeant.” Everytime we tie (almost all of the time since nobody is at the controller), we each gain advancement points.
This is, obviously, a very poor game mechanic and shame on the designer (and everyone he works with) for not pointing out what a backwards system this is before launch. The only fun part of this is that every few hours I’ll hear my controller vibrate and know that one of my ‘friends’ has decided to actually play for a few minutes and has managed to track me down and kill me while I run in circles. It’s kind of funny to have my console ‘communicating’ with me even though the tv and sound system are off.
No need to elaborate, but good for all of them. I think it’d be fantastic if every single finalist pulled out, leaving Slamdance looking as silly as possible.
flOw, another finalist in the Slamdance competition, has pulled out in protest over Slamdance’s decision to remove Super Columbine Massacre RPG! as detailed here. Nice work!
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ecently, the Slamdance Festival, under pressure from sponsors, kicked out a finalist in the competition under pressure from corporate sponsors. That finalist was Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a low-tech game in which you play as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine murders in 1999. The game weaves dialogue together gathered from news reports, from Eric or Dylan’s journal, and so on, though the gameplay itself is fairly atrocious. Apparently the second stage of the game involves playing one of the two boys in Hell populated by cultural and pop cultural figures from present and past (ever wanted to hang out with Mega Man, Ronald Reagan, John Lennon, and Nietzsche?), but I didn’t have the patience to get that far myself. The game sucks, make no mistake, though the content is at least a little compelling.
I thought I’d make a list largely for my own edification, but figured I’d post it here as well. Note that these are MY top 10 games of 2006. I don’t care what year the game was made in. If I didn’t play it until 2006, then it’s eligible for the list.
- Guitar Hero 2 (PS2) - I can’t imagine anyone who reads this blog is surprised given how often I’ve written about the franchise. Just as Guitar Hero was before it, Guitar Hero 2 is, in the sense that video games can let you be something you aren’t, the best video game ever made. (Which isn’t to say it’s flat-out the best video game ever made. I don’t have an opinion on that.)
- Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (360) - Few games aside from text MUDs ever immersed me as much as Oblivion did. It probably would have been #1 except that I found that I ran out of new enemies to see and places to go long before I finished the main plotline, making the last 10-15 hours I played it feel progressively more tedious.
- Half-Life 2 (PC) - I don’t mean Episode 1 either, as I haven’t played it. I know this didn’t come out in 2006, but I played it this year and, predictably, loved it. I haven’t played the original, but this was a lot of fun. The gravity gun rocked.
- Viva Pinata (360) - First of all, the theme song permanently lives in my head. Second, it’s the cutest game I’ve ever played, and third, it lets me have a four-headed snake as a pet. Plus, my girlfriend loves it, which is a big bonus.
- Gears of War (360)- One of the only so-called “next-gen” games that feels next-gen to me (and when can we stop calling them ‘next gen’ now that they’re all ‘current gen?’). In fact, I think the ‘next gen’ label is a bunch of crap. Most of the 360 games look and play like the better-looking Xbox games, and I shouldn’t have to buy a new piece of hardware to play games that should have been running on my Xbox. Gears of War is a notable exception in the visuals department, and a small exception in the gameplay department. Yeah, there have been third person squad-based shooters before, but this feels different.
- God of War (PS2) - Another game that wasn’t released in 2006. Ultra-violent and over the top in every way. I loved it.
- Kirby: Canvas Curse (DS) - This was the first game I played on the DS I got given as a birthday gift last summer. It completely sold me on the power of the DS’s interface. For those who haven’t played, it’s a 2d scroller in which you play Kirby the Ghost. You control Kirby’s movement entirely by drawing lines on the screen, which form the platforms he rolls on. Make him do loops, go straight up, whatever. Never played a game that felt quite like it.
- Splinter Cell: Double Agent (360) - This was the game in the Splinter Cell franchise I’d played, and I was a bit hesitant as stealth doesn’t tend to be my thing, or didn’t used to at least. I found I enjoyed the stealth aspect of the game immensely, and the multiplayer, in which one side plays a spy and one plays a mercenary, each with completely different capabilities, felt unlike anything I’ve played online before.
- Geometry Wars (360) - The best Atari game that was never on an Atari. This is the game that Asteroids and every permutation of the 2d space-based shooter wished they could have been 25 years ago.
- New Super Mario (DS) - There was absolutely nothing innovative or even evolutionary about New Super Mario, but the devs did such a superb job of translating the feel of classic 2d Mario games that it didn’t matter. I loved every second of it, though my only complaint was that it felt too easy.
I’ve
always been somewhat dubious, as a player, about the 360’s Gamer Score paradigm. The temptation is to assess it as completely meaningless given that having a higher Gamer Score gets you absolutely nothing tangible but a higher Gamer Score. In one sense of course, it is meaningless. One gets nothing that can be tangibly measured from increasing one’s Gamer Score. You don’t get more powerful in Gears of War. You don’t unlock more animals in Viva Pinata. You get nothing.
This is a pretty amusing. There’s a Christian-oriented game called “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” based on the immensely popular “Left Behind” novels that take place during the run-up to Biblical Armaggedon. Apparently in the game you have to either convert people to Christianity, or kill them.
Clearly, this should have been an MMO, not an RTS. I want to get a raiding group together and go up against the Lucifer boss, with his horde of Muslims (many of the bad guys in the Left Behind game have Arab-sounding names), in the real Molten Core.
A
guy named K4rn4ge has achieved 360 million in Geometry wars. He says it took him over 30 hours to do, and that he intentionally stopped at 360 million. His next goal is going to be breaking 1 billion.
One billion! That will make him approximately 1000x the man I am in the world of Geometry Wars, where I have broken the one million mark precisely once (and felt pretty darn good about it, thank you very much).
I
rented Viva Piñata (it’s on the 360) this weekend expecting to pop it in, check it out briefly, and then send it back. Instead, Eileen and I have spent a good chunk of the weekend doing some virtual gardening, building our very own Eden. This is possibly the single cutest game I’ve ever played. I don’t have rugrats, but if you do, I can’t imagine any parent objecting to content in Viva Piñata, and I suspect most video game-oriented parents who play with their kids may find themselves at least as interested as the little ones are.
Basically, you spend time building your garden and attracting new kinds of animal pinñats to it, some of which are fairly wacky. You’re able to grow fruits, nuts, and vegetables (some of which are required to keep some types of animals happy), cause animals to engage in “romance” (G-rated) that results in the Stork delivering an egg. You can name your animals and buy various accessories for them from pirate hats to ‘yokel teeth’ (which Beth, one of our ‘Sparrowmints,’ has been running around wearing), and send them to friends on Xbox Live if you wish. Speaking of which, if anyone wants to send me something, I’m ‘Sarapis’ on XBL and my garden is ‘Eden.’
In an earlier post I gave a pretty mediocre review (aside from the quality of the graphics and sound) to Gears of War. I retract! I retract!
This game is simply awesome. No, it’s not innovative in any way, that’s irrelevant. Both the co-op and the multiplayer are a total blast. We had six people from Iron Realms playing PvP against each other last night and it was hysterical, barely-controlled chaos. Tons of fun. I still maintain that some of the enemies could have been made to have different visual profiles than you and your allies (I shoot at the wrong side sometimes as a result), but other than that, I really have almost no complaint with the game.
So CliffyB (Gears of War’s designer): I am sorry. You were right. I was wrong. Your game kicks ass.
“The Boondocks” has explained today
why the pro-censorship forces in Congress prefer to attack games as a cause of real-world violence rather than, say, going after the guns that fire them. Riley sums it up succinctly, “Who would you rather start beef with - some nerd who makes video games or some dude with a warehouse full of AK-47s?“
Gears of War is being touted by Microsoft as the “must-have” 360 game. Naturally then, I must have it, and have it I do. I played the online co-op mode for about an hour last night with a friend and came away with mixed feelings.
On the one hand, it’s simply gorgeous. The environments, in particular, are epic-feeling. The 5.1 surround sound is equally delightful. It’s easily one of the best-looking and sounding games ever made.
After a few months where I felt like I had to look hard for games I wanted to play, I suddenly find myself knee-deep in a vertiable corncucopia of games I’m excited about. Too many, in fact, as there’s no way I have time to play them as much as I’d like. Right now I’ve got:
- Splinter Cell: Double Agent (360) - Fantastic stealth game with a story I’m actually interested in. I’m playing on the default difficulty setting and it’s still hard.
I also end up getting obsessed with getting high stealth ratings, so I end up repeating parts of some levels many, many times to find a way to do what I have to do without getting caught. The AI is reasonably intelligent too, which means that there are some slightly emergent elements to the tactics you have to use, at times. (At other times, it’s quite linear, but presented so well I don’t mind.) - Read the rest of this entry »
This month-old small news article on Pacific Epoch caught my eye. Apparently, Beijing, one of the Chinese cities where it is hardest to get permanent resident status, is going to offer an expedited track to such status specifically for online game and animation talent. I just think that’s cool.
That’s all. Sorry for the short post.
Anyone know of good Settlers rule variations that can speed up a 5-6 man game a bit? Five of us had a board games night last night at my house, and had intended to play a game of Settlers w/ Knights & Cities expansion and then a game of Puerto Rico, but the Settlers game took seven hours to finish. It was fun, but most of us agreed at the end that that’s simply too long for a single game. I know there are a lot of various rules variations for Catan, but can anyone point me to one specifically designed to speed the game up a bit without employing timed turns?
Gamasutra has a piece on responses to a question they posed to games industry professionals regarding whether they buy new or used games. I’m not sure why they didn’t include renting games in there, but I’m including it in my question here.
Ian Bogost, 
an associate professor at the George Institute of Technology, has released a new “serious game” entitled Oil God. I have to say, I have never had much interest in what some people like to call “serious games” and my lord does this game ever do a good job of reinforcing that lack of interest.
Go ahead and click on the Oil God link above. Play the game. I discovered that I didn’t know what the goal of the game was, didn’t know how to tell if I was achieving that goal, and had no idea what the moves I was making did. If total confusion was the point of the game, consider it a masterpiece. A friend tried it out as well and had the same experience except that he somehow ‘won,’ much to his bewilderment. Oh, and for the privilege of this experience, you have to sit through a commercial before playing it.
You know what a serious game is to me? World of Warcraft. 7 million players and hundreds of jobs. That’s serious. Another serious game? Go. Very deep. Very serious. Fun, as well, which I don’t think is asking too much from a game.
Anyway, if you play Oil God and stick with it long enough to discover that there’s actually a decent game there, let me know.
As reported by Gamasutra, 
CMP, owners/operators of conferences like the Game Developer’s Conference and owners of Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, has acquired The Game Initiative, operator of the Austin Games Conference. It’s too early to say what the impact is going to be, but I am sure I speak for a ton of developers when I plead that the AGC attendance fees NOT be made competitive (ie very high priced) with the GDC fees, which are prohibitive for many indies (thank god speakers get free passes, as I don’t know if I’d shell out $900 to go otherwise, and I’m local!).
L
ast night, I broke out the Dreamcast for some old-school gaming with my friend Rodney. More specifically, we played our perennial favorite multiplayer game, Toy Commander. I can’t even describe how much I love this game. The single player game was quite good - a series of wonderfully imaginative mini-games played with toys. All the levels are in the house of the child Andy (you) who is the Toy Commander, and you control a wide variety of vehicles, depending on the mission, from fighter jets to tanks to firetrucks to an alien vessel, etc. All miniatures flying/driving around inside a furnished house, which makes for some very cool level design.
H
ell yes. Wargames comes to the PC on September 29th, titled ‘Defcon.’ Buy it. Heck, if you pre-order it, it only costs $10. Introversion is a small, indie development team that creates some of the most unique games around. I think everyone who liked the classic 80s movie Wargames is going to want to play this.
W
ith worldwide ratings of the United States at an all-time low, it is sadly unsurprising that American McGee’s latest game, “Bad Day LA” is being critically savaged, garnering scores as low as 10%. As a patriotic American, I find this outrageous. It is clear to me now that both the national and international gaming press are full of tree-hugging liberals just looking to do a little American bashing. Giving Mr. McGee low ratings is letting the terrorists win as surely as eating French Fries rather than Freedom Fries is.
The reviewers claim it is full of bugs, justifying their low scores by happening to mention that occasionally civilians walk around on fire without concern, and flying into the air a few seconds after they’ve actually exploded. WAKE UP PEOPLE! American is out there making the world safe for game players, and you complain about a few innocent bystander immolations and car bombs? Talk about missing the forest for the trees!
I swear, Greg Costikyan has to be the most well-meaning and yet ultimately self-defeating individual in the games industry. I’ve somewhat loudly disagreed with him in the past, but he’s clearly an intelligent and motivated guy. His new company, Man!festo Games just launched its website. The idea behind Manifesto is to be a games portal for indie games, near as I can tell. Problem is, unless you’re a developer or part of a very small group of fans, being indie isn’t an attraction. It’s a non-factor. It’s an attempt to make the creator more important than the product (Harley Davidson, for instance, whose motorcycles are overpriced pieces of crap compared to Japanese motorcycles, but command superior prices due to the power of the brand), but that takes a lot of money or just an extremely clever delivery, and Man!Festo has neither.
J
ust a short post to say how much I’ve come to love alternative controllers in the wake of Guitar Hero and the DS Lite Kirby game, in which you control Kirby the ghost by drawing lines on the screen. The 360’s been a bit of a letdown for me so far in terms of the games (though the hardware and Live service are both superb), and I have nothing but ill-wishes for Sony and the PS3 with its $600 price tag. On the other hand, when I think of the Wii with its lovely and accessible $250 price point and its revolutionary (for good or bad) controller, I get an almost child-like excitement. I cannot wait to see what kind of new gameplay I’m going to get to experience with the Wii’s controller. Bring on the Wii!
Edit: And Guitar Hero 2!
After I finally signed up for Netflix last year, I started thinking about signing up for the equivalent service from Gamefly. What finally pushed me over the edge was buying a 360 and going into my closet to get most of my Xbox games ready to take to EB Games and sell them. I had close to 50 Xbox games, at least half of which I had barely touched. That’s a lot of wasted money, even if buying video games is a tax deduction for me. I like to play a lot of different games to try them out, but shelling out $50 for a game you know you’re only going to play a couple times is galling. Thus, Gamefly seemed natural. There are other game rental services out there, but Gamefly is easily the biggest and thus, I figured, would have the infrastructure to do the same kind of short turnaround times that Netflix does.
There’s a major event going on in Achaea that is probably coming to a conclusion as I write this. I sit here, invisibly, in a room with Ugrach, the Lord of the Undead, being ‘possessed’ by Achaea’s producer, and roleplaying with some major players in the current Big Event, and helping to decide the fate of a major storyline.
I love this stuff. I look at who else is with us, and I see a few invisible Gods (who can’t see me), and a whole raft of players (who can’t see the Gods or me). I don’t claim that our games are better games than World of Warcraft or Everquest or whatnot. I don’t really believe in objectively better or worse content. It’s all a matter of opinion. But I tell you what: Those big guys can never, ever do what we and all sorts of other indie games do. They simply cannot, by their nature, provide the intense kind of roleplaying experience that text games can do. The combination of the freedom that text gives developers and the freedom that a relatively small userbase text guarantees is extraordinarily liberating and it is amazing to watch our players take these intricate storylines and run with them. Sorry to cheerlead, but as much as I admire the Blizzards of the world, I think there’s also something very cool about small indie communities, dedicated to preserving an intimate experience.
There’s always debate among both devs and players over which popular intellectual property’s specific characteristics and fan base make it most suitable for an MMO. I had a random thought earlier, however, that provides an objective way to measure its popularity among MMO fans. The hobbyist text MUD community (still thriving) tends to feel quite free about using popular IP without a license. Whether this is fan fiction or a copyright violation is a question for the courts to answer, though generally, owners of popular IP have taken a hands-off approach to text MUDs. The most notable exception is author Raymond E. Feist (whose work we licensed partly because he had prevented hobbyist MUDs from using his IP), though the Tolkien Estate has threatened action at least once, against a MUD that was selling mugs and t-shirts via Cafepress.com in order to pay its server bills.
Why, you ask? From a blog on Nintendo at About.com:
“Dr. Kimberly Thompson of Harvard University supposedly found during an independent analysis that the ESRB didn’t identify all violence. Of course, this is a matter of opinion based on what is considered “violence.” This problem is addressed in section 2’s, “Understanding Video Game Research.” The same study found that Pac-Man is “64%” violent“
Via PlayNoEvil comes an editorial on MMORPG.com that makes me want to cry a little bit. It’s about factions and what the editor thinks could be changed to be better. He writes, for instance:
First should be how one is able to join a faction. Let fellow players decide who can join their faction. More importantly, if a group of players is being dishonorable, allow the players the ability to exile them from their own faction. Have a certain election system implemented where certain leaders from each faction form a council where everything is discussed on the grand scale. This would create a truly faction friendly gaming system, where all members of the faction really have to work together in order to succeed. If one leader abuses his power in removing people that should not be removed, there is always the election system to remove them from that council, so someone better can lead.
I know someone out there has to know what this game is called. Chris Kohnert (our CTO), and Jeremy Saunders (one of our producers), and I were in the “AdventureDome” (a large indoor area with rides, etc) in Circus Circus in Vegas during one of our annual trips diverting ourselves until the sun went down. (The rest of the group was hanging around somewhere else in the AdventureDome.) Circus Circus is almost completely without merit, and I realize that, so please, no need to mock us for our presence there. In any case, one of the employees of the place was playing some sort of Japanese import video game I’d not seen before that involved somewhere between 6 and 8 buttons that you had to press beat-matching style to 6-8 lines of descending graphics on screen.
This guy was inhuman. I have never seen anything like it. His hands moved literally in a blur and he seemed to rarely-to-never miss a beat. We must have stood and watched him for 10 minutes before moving on. I’m sure the guy loved it. Arcade employees don’t strike me as having a lot to envy generally, unless job insecurity is a bonus in your life. I’d never seen the game again until today on Google video, and if anyone knows what it’s called, I’d be obliged. Thanks! (Incidentally, the guy in the video is not quite as good as the guy in Vegas.)
I’m not really a fanboy type of person, but if there’s one thing that gets my obsession juices flowing, it’s Tolkien. I’m certainly out-obsessed by many many people in this category, but for me, it doesn’t get any better than the history of Middle-Earth. I enjoy Lord of the Rings (I actually prefer the movies to the books, frankly), but I love the Silmarillion.
The print comic strip Fox Trot, by Bill Amend, is running a multi-day ’storyline’ where Jason, the computer geek kid, farms gold from World of Warcraft to sell. Nothing ground-breaking here, but even as tech-savvy as Fox Trot usually is, it was surprising to see on the same page as bland lowest-common-demoniator fare like Garfield and Family Circus.
I’m going to use this opportunity to officially announce the MMO we have in development, by the name of The Crusades Online (TCO, as it will no doubt become ubiquitously known). It is a fully 3d product in which you take on one of three sides battling for control of the holy city of Jerusalem in a quasi-historical (historical with some modern elements thrown in for the sake of gameplay) setting. Christians everywhere who long for days goneby can take on the part of one of the noble Crusaders, battling the evil Muslims to wrest control of Jerusalem once and for all, in the name of Jesus. Muslims are given the opportunity to play noble warriors, battling the evil Christians to wrest control of Jerusalem, once and for all, in the name of Mohammed. And finally, Jews get to play Jewish underground resistance fighters, battling everyone to wrest control of Jerusalem, once and for all, in the name of Yahweh.
I found myself extending my lunch by about 20 minutes today due to getting sucked into Hitman: Blood Money on the 360. I was just about to make the crucial mistake of starting a new mission when the 360 auto-detected my need to get back to work and generated a “Cannot read disc” message that it is so fond of giving me. Faced with either waiting to boot up the game again (as the disc is fine) or getting back to work, I chose the latter.
Thank you, Microsoft, for your concern for my personal schedule and for forcing me to adhere to it with your none-too-subtle reminders that work has to come first. Sometimes I think you allow buggy software or shoddy hardware to slip into your products, but moments like this make me realize that you’re just looking out for my best interests.
I just finished New Super Mario Brothers last night on my spanking-new DS Lite. What a great game. It captured everything that I loved about the 2d Super Mario platformers and added twists of its own to enhance the experience without corrupting it. My only complaint about the game was that it was a bit too easy. A few levels gave me trouble, but that was generally because I was going after all three big gold coins on that level. What’s funny is that it is pretty clearly the best game released for the DS, and it doesn’t really use any of the DS’s unique features: the split-screen and the touch-pad. It makes half-hearted attempts to use both, but the same game could easily be played on a single, non-touch screen with minimal alteration. I’m glad Nintendo didn’t try to use them more though, as they may have risked messing with the quintessential 2d platformer experience.
About half of my most cherished video game memories involve playing console games in a living room with good friends, and I feel like these memories have almost ceased to be freshly created.
It all started with the Dreamcast, and our ability to dispense with the inconvenient reality of having to travel to one another’s houses, though unrelatedly, the DC is also easily my favorite console for the physically-proximate shared video game experience. I still remember 9/9/99, the release day of that beloved console and how excited we were to break that thing out and play Soul Calibur.
1UP is reporting that MLG (Major League Gaming) has signed top Halo 2 team ‘Final Boss’ for $1 million to ensure they will only play in MLG tournaments. A million bucks to play Halo. I can almost hear the sound of 25 million hopeful teenagers simultaneously resolving to play more video games.
I just beat Texas Flood on expert in Guitar Hero! Woot! That leaves only four songs to beat on expert:
- Godzilla. Very tough because of two extended solos. Edit: Scratch that! Just beat it too! More cowbell!
- Frankenstein. Just weird. And hard. Edit: The monster songs are my thing lately I guess. This one went down as well, leaving only the last two.
- Cowboys from Hell. I don’t know this song at all to start with, and it’s ridiculously fast.
- Bark at the Moon. Ozzie’s guitarist kicks my ass. I’m unsure if this or Cowboys is the hardest song in the game, but they’re both exceptionally tough.
I love this game. Can’t wait for the sequel. Maybe I’ll have beaten all the songs on expert by then, but I doubt it.
I don’t know the man except by reputation, but I’m going to have to vote for ‘jackass.’ He’s got an interview with Gamasutra this week entitled “Video games are dead: A chat with Storytronics Guru Chris Crawford.” Here are some selected gems:
“What I meant by that was that the creative life has gone out of the industry. And an industry that has no creative spark to it is just marking time to die.”
“I haven’t even seen any new ideas pop up. The industry is so completely inbred that the people working in it aren’t even capable of coming up with new ideas anymore.”
“But I think that it is reasonable to expect that an industry that hasn’t produced any innovation in at least a decade is unlikely to change its spots.”
GameDaily Biz had an article last week entitled, “Where Have All The Game Gods Gone?” The piece’s main thrust can be summed up by this quote:
The big developer names that most often appear in the enthusiast press are still the big names we knew in the nineties: Molyneux, Carmack, Meier, Miyamoto, Wright, Kojima, and Spector are all still more recognizable than almost all of the developers that got their start in the last ten years. Furthermore, there is a very good chance the situation will be the same five years from now.