No Pants Kid

Beyond Natal

2009-10-08T19:32:00.001-07:00

It's been a while. In the time I got laid off from my traditional marketing and advertising position, and taken a full time job back in retail. Which sucks, in a certain way.

But I have to say, the one thing that sets my mind alive like fire is Project Natal. Natal sounds like fun for gaming, but what it really means is jobs.

In the weird part of my mind, I think that Natal is the platform of the future for communication. Something that follows you, is interactive in the way that they purport in their video here...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgWUtw0sbro

What can you do with this tech?

Well, you can do what many economists are hoping we do, but can't do right now... specialize. I think Natal may birth what we can call "The Communication App".

Using the software, homebrew producers could come up with programs to help people communicate. Then, for a nominal fee, someone buys the software, and is able to run a small business communicating with other people.

Some examples.

Tutoring
Nursing home adjustment
Medical checkups for sick kids
Physical therapy
Music Lessons
Cooking
Therapy

The ability to share information via Natal is different than it is with webcams, more intuitive. It can work in people's living rooms, which would have an appeal unlike a computer. It would get people the services they need at a fraction of the cost of what it would be to have the person live and in their living room. And for many people out there begging for an opportunity, this could be it.

It's a pretty farfetched dream, but dreaming has to stay alive in this economy.

The More Things Change… The Clink all the way to the Credits.

2008-11-13T17:29:00.001-08:00

As a fun rebuttal to the Angsty Gaijin’s take on the “wisening” up of game companies, I am afraid that the industry has shown that they haven’t wised up, in fact they pull the same old pony tricks.

Now, and this is hardly sentimental, I look at games with a very particular lense of my adolescence. I believe that the greatest period of games began with the coin clink at the beginning of Super Mario World and ended with Halo 2’s credits.

That’s a hell of a period, but I’ll explain why.

There were games of varying quality in this period, but I think you could point to any game of any merit (including Spyro, Final Fantasy 8, and even Super Mario World) and you could single out the faults. Looking back at the developer diaries and making of the games, you can definitely see that games had some cuts. You could see the rush.

Super Mario World has been considered rushed by its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto. But it is a fantastic game. Its color palate is still unbeaten, and you can see the tiny points where rushing may or may not have occurred. It’s not a game without its flaws, but in truth it was a semi-rushed release game that withstood any evident criticism. It also displayed Mode 7, in some very rudimentary forms at the end. But Mode 7 was the beginning of mature 3D console gaming. It showed an imperfect solution to a huge gaming problem…

great minds can overcome hardware limitations.

Steven Hawking would agree with that.

And if you look at most games from that era, be they on the Nintendo 64 with Star Wars: Pod Racer, or Final Fantasy 7’s numerous discs, there were few problems that couldn’t be solved with a little bit of spitshine and polish.

With the Xbox’ storage and horsepower, a lot went out the window. Gone were the ideas that you couldn’t have a massive game, gone were the ideas that online gaming on a console wasn’t a mere diversion, but a serious competition for the PC.

Also, with that game, it marked the first time that a well-made game would be considered irrevocably flawed. The criticism of game decisions was never louder, the flaws of the experiments never more glaring.

Now, if you have to change discs, it’s a crime (RE4). Or don’t have progressive scan. Or use and ship with a ridiculously expensive and poorly assembled controller (DDR). You can’t have a shitty camera (Ninja Gaiden II) the way you could with Ninja Gaiden. Even the big lads can’t escape. Since Halo 2, no Mario, nor Metal Gear, nor Final Fantasy, nor Smash Brothers, nor Zelda has been considered half as good as what came before.

Take it another way. Ico is a fucking brilliant game. Shadows of the Colossus is better in many ways. But most gamers harp on about Colossus’ length and pant heavily at the thought of more Ico.

Criticism… has changed.

There are things about Halo 2 that unleashed a different wave and mentality in the internet, the way no semi-perfect game had before. It raised the bar and made gamers more aware of a game’s flaws. Suddenly, the experience of a great game was jarred by deadlines. Choices were made that weren’t vetted properly. And it affected the game every single step of the way.

Spyro couldn’t cut it in this climate. The great early games of the Gamecube, the charm if imperfect world of the Prince of Persia remake. All those games of PS2 and PSX origin that you can smile about now (Ehrgheiz)… ah. Those were the days. Tony Hawk used to make great games. You wouldn’t know it now. In a post Halo 2 world, no Tony Hawk game has come close to the hype or plaudits of the original.

That’s not to say there aren’t great games. That would be a lie. It’s just to say that there’s a remarkable difference in the way a game’s flaws are perceived by the buying public that has made anything short of perfection forgivable.

Mirror’s Edge, as a hasty 3D Playstation 2 concept, would be forgiven for its poor mechanics 6 years ago. Banjo and Kazooie Nuts and Bolts would be forgiven for spending too much time not having fun. Metal Gear would be forgiven for its lengthy prose, and the Wii Codes wouldn’t be such a pain if we didn’t know any better.

But Halo 2 was the shifting point.

Now flaws are unforgivable, and concepts have to be perfectly executed. This falls in contrary to the publisher’s main goal of making money. They need to make shortcuts, but nothing ever captured the cheesy and acceptable charm of Bowser floating around in bad, pixely Mode 7.

Now games like Superman 64 existed before Halo 2; this is not an argument about bad games or the like. Bad games are bad. Flawed games are now bad, when before they were damn neat and maybe a ton of fun.

Part of the problem is that, yes, the economy changed. But gaming opinion took a more negative slant on itself faster than the financial markets. Games still sold, but suddenly store like Gamestop were considered a prime threat. Why would you ever want to sell our neat game?

The other part of the problem is that games in 3D, with such elevated graphics and story, cannot settle for anything short of perfection. Is marketing finally loosening its grip on the consumer?

No such luck, I’m afraid. Hype floats the Wii in many forms, and Motor Storm still sold a ton. If you took any of the recent Sonic games and push Spyro in his place, you wouldn’t sell half as many of the same game.

Marketing still works. Games will always have flaws and rushed cuts and deadlines, but until our mindset changes, it will be game over for more good ideas. Will it change? No clue, but I do know what Mario did. It began with a clink, opened a colorful world, and began a time where anything, truly, was possible. Even if it wasn’t perfect, it sure was fun. I hope we can go back there someday. That’s a fight we should finish.

DS Sigh

2008-10-04T08:47:00.001-07:00

Color me underwhelmed, but Nintendo has done a significant brush-off (again) to its loyal fanbase.

See, what Nintendo fails to realize is that some point in its illustrious history, many of its fans grew up. They bought big TV’s, and sound systems that handle fiber optic cables. They became jaded gamers who loved the retro lovin. I mean… LOVE IT. Mega Man 9 as a theory is what gaming is about.

The DSi is not about the evolution of gaming. None of its new elements (3 megapixel camera, SD compatibility) really do it for me. What they’ve managed to do with this device is create the perfect Christmas present for a young kid.

Imagine you’re a parent and your kid asks for several things for Christmas. A DS, and Ipod, and a camera…

Well, Nintendo’s got you covered, babycakes! As a retail worker, the DS age group ABSOLUTELY ASKS for those items every Christmas and birthday season. And for the low low price of 180 bucks (plus the cost of an SD card) you can give them everything they want!

And these aren’t kids who want Game Boy Advance compatibility! No! They don’t want/need that. Their Pokemon was never Red, nor was it Leaf! This new DS is everything that my generation doesn’t want or need.

And well, that’s a bit insulting. I really can’t blame this move on their part, but I can’t help wishing for more. The precipitous drop in battery life makes me sigh; I know how the original portable wars were won, and it wasn’t via color or speed, but how long the damn Game Boy lasted.

The lack of a graphic upgrade also makes me sigh. Arguably, if they want to put the PSP to bed, they should to it soundly. If the Wii is destined to be shovelware, then the DS should be known for quality. Sigh.

The camera… I have a camera on my cell phone. It’s used in those extreme situations, like a really funny license plate or when Cloverfield shows up. Other than that, it’s not a great camera and I don’t ever use it. I know what 3 megapixels looks like, and it’s not pretty.

The SD card reader… I’m really mixed on this one. I could write an entire essay on the effects of the SD card. It is the first near-ubiquitous memory card, the most adaptive and also the most inexpensive. Its potential is so insane that only the humble USB 2.0 spec carries more gravitas. The USB 2.0 spec changed the world, and I think SD cards can do the same.

Its inclusion on the DS begs… no… taunts pirates to abuse it. I furtively believe that Nintendo wouldn’t be presenting so suggestively if they didn’t see dollars, and I assume they see dollars in the way of Virtual Console. The changing of Wii Points to Nintendo Points is the greatest indicator of this. They see dollar bills, y’all, and they are going to make hits of their back catalogue work for them.

Sigh. But it’s not enough to get me excited. It doesn’t answer any glaring issues with the DS Lite, and it doesn’t add to the experience in a meaningful way for core gamers. If that’s not the point, then Nintendo is continuing its long snub of is core fans who dared to grow up.

If Nintendo sticks to its game release habits, we’re done with Mario, Link, and Samus in this generation. The new games were good, but the public likes to see what’s coming. If nothing’s coming, then either A. they don’t get how insane people are for these games or B. It’s not coming to the Wii.

And considering how many more games came out for the Gamecube in its life time (2 Links, and two adventures for Samus), this is more than a little disappointing. I have no doubt that Punch Out! will be fun, and Sin and Punishment begs someone to care. Nintendo takes a long time to showcase games, and I don’t think Punch Out or Sin and Punishment 2 can moves systems. Their progenitors sure didn’t.

The Force Unfinished

2008-09-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: A Tale of Two Video Games.

When it’s firing on all cylinders, this game is one of the best Star Wars games ever. When it’s not, it’s one of the worst.

Story

This is an odd juxtaposition. A story game in an adventure game. It REALLY plays like God of War in its mechanics, and its story is duly similar. The interesting thing about Star
Wars canon is that things only happen once. And the story that ties together the prequels and the original trilogy has this as a gap. It’s not always a sane one, it’s a book one. As insane as the movies are (and boy howdy on that note) the books are really batty. This is a decent bridge, but due to its role as being A STAR WARS video game it mirrors the two protagonists of each trilogy. For a video game, this isn’t bad. In fact, it’s one of the better told stories I’ve seen. As a piece that’s supposed to be (thus far) the definitive gap filler, it’s kind of a letdown. It’s interesting to people who care about Star Wars more than a little.

Design

The levels are fairly straightforward and uninteresting, but when they are big they aren’t varied. Critiques leveled are that the graphics are too simplistic or that the path is too linear. First off, few are the adventure games where the path isn’t linear. Sandbox style game play in a supposedly linear story doesn’t work either. It’s a platform adventure hack n’ slash. This is a rather solid genre. When games like Assassin’s Creed or a Spider Man game ARE open ended, the critique is that they are not straightforward enough.

It’s the most detailed Star Wars game on any console, and the best implementation of Force Powers. The practical considerations like not amputating opponents when you slash with your saber are a shame, but it’s a practical shame. While a lot of the levels are very… similar. There is a good deal more detail and nuance than your average game. Some of the levels are practically inspired design, others feel very average. Some of the levels feel too busy, but I’m fine with that. Star Wars can be messy, and I’m not sorry for that feeling.

Gameplay

This is one of the games that are geared towards the “Core” gamer. Its gameplay utilizes every button on the controller for combos and various moves. This is at times disorienting. This approach is necessary given all the choices the character has, but I can’t help but feel bad for the newly minted gamers who are going to be excited by this, but are frustrated by overly complex controls. They did the best with what they have, but it doesn’t change the fact that this game is sharply for the experienced hand.

Sound

It’s Star Wars. Greatest soundtrack ever. The sound effects are dead on (they even get in the Wilhelm, for goodness sake’s). My complaint here is the lack of more variety. Star Wars is a deep canal, and there’s plenty of music to go with, yet it seems the mixes here are smaller. Given that John Williams wrote specific themes for characters, their lack leaves the game an exhaustive mood. Everything is mood music or The March of the Empire. It didn’t work in the prequels.

Glitches and Bad Choices

Sometimes, the game takes a good idea and ruins it, and that does a lot of damage to its reputation. This is a game that many can be proud of, but the lack of polish or discretion in certain instances offer a counterpoint to the developer layoffs. It pains me to say, but some of the decisions and quality checks that failed really do warrant termination. Not an entire team, per se, but these are revenue-costing mistakes, and punitive actions are due.

This game is unforgivably insipid at times. It’s embarrassing, and it makes this a rental, not a buy. The Star Destroyer scene is really as terrible as you’ve heard. It’s embarrassingly glitchy, it’s unreliable and it hurts to do. For such a centerpiece of the game, it’s really awful. Took me over an hour and a half. How this ever got past testing, I’ll never know or understand. When you use the force so effortlessly (that’s kind of the point of the game) this section feels awful.

Boss fights are also poorly implemented. Imagine that you spend an entire game with a certain viewpoint and move reactions. Which you do in The Force Unleashed. Until a boss fight. Then you get these wide shots that are really hard to control in. It’s not what you’re doing 90% of the time, and while it does offer a wider venue, it throws you out of the game and your character’s health suffers for it.

That most enemies need a lightning bolt in order to inflict significant damage is also kind of sad. The environmental damage is minimal and takes too long to pull off. For a game built around the havoc engine, there’s a lot you can’t do. Penny Arcade’s comic tells a more interesting combo than any available in the game.

Glitch-wise, the most egregious errors are in general combat. At one point, my character froze up and couldn’t move. Got seriously owned. It took about 15 minutes to get to that same point in the level. Argh. Enemies would randomly spawn. Sometimes, my Nerf lightsaber wouldn’t even make contact on stormtroopers. It’s ghastly. Targeting is a damn joke in this game. It’s as bad as some of the Playstation 1 Star Wars games. It’s sad, because the enemies will kill you, lots.

I don’t know what kind of demands this game is to the hardware of this generation, but their menu system is the worst I have ever seen. Every menu needs to load up. If you need to add experience points or learn new skills midbattle, you will wait a while. Switching lightsaber colors, that’s a load. The menus and submenus are poorly arranged and use the top right-left triggers for switching purposes. It’s not an effective design. The wait times are unpleasant. Too many games have shown me it doesn’t have to be like this.

Releasing this game now is a curious move. There is no Teen rated mega-game for the holiday season other than the Rock Band/Guitar Hero stuff for the holiday season. This game could have used another month or two of troubleshooting. Core gamers, the kind most likely to buy this game, do read reviews and these errors will translate poorly in sales figures. Kids do not deserve a game that is hard to play not because the game itself is difficult but because the game design is poor. This game needed to bake a little longer.

Final Analysis

For everything this game does right, it does wrong. I recommend playing it, because going to the Star Wars Universe is always compelling. It’s really a wonderful, sometimes delightfully unpretentious world. There’s a lot to be said for craftsmanship, however, and this game makes mistakes that are inexcusable. This apprentice isn’t a Jedi, yet.

Oh won't somebody please think of the children?

2008-09-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

Delivering delight to a child, however small a wonder, is popular and profitable. Nintendo made a fortune and a near monopoly by utilizing older technology in new and innovative ways to make something new. The world sorely needs more of those kinds of ideas.

One thing that Nintendo has missed the boat on, as far as I’m concerned, is philanthropy. And this is frustrating because of their profits. It is a far cry from Folding@home, the Sony program which voluntarily utilizes PS3 horsepower to tackle real world problems. Microsoft’s creator has been most benevolent in his actions. Yet Nintendo always profits on their machines, and it's important to remember how hard it is for companies to make money on consoles themselves.

Literally, the actions by these companies can save lives, and has saved lives. These are not idle entertainment cogs, money invested in these machines has saved lives. Whether it is another cog in terms of publicity (and thus more money) is irrelevant. The point of the matter is that Nintendo has made the Wii.

The Wii is profitable. It sips power like a supermodel. It is rugged in comparison to its fellow systems.

And friends, it costs Nintendo next to nothing to make. What IBM (holla!) has done is created a chipset that can handle if not impressive gaming, then at least versatile programming from a variety of inputs. Nintendo has shown that a microcomputer can be profitable, because in essence they have a microcomputer.

The holy grail of today’s computer manufacturer is a computer that can be sold to countries where companies like Merril Lynch and Lehman represent more than the total combined income of all its citizens. It is these markets and these children for whom education is a survival mechanism. From Chicago to Haiti to Venezuela, information helps.

And then there’s one Laptop per Child. What a mess that thing is. Without going into too much detail, a bunch of Linux nerds build a computer on the cheap with the intention of selling it around the world. It has not approached profitability or reliability by any stretch of the definitions. It is a catastrophic failure.

Flash memory has decreased dramatically in price. Solid state hard drives for larger storage are still unfeasible, but the prices of storage needed to run the global standard efficiently (approx 10 gb of storage, and 512 RAM) with a decent bus speed are found in playthings!

I am not saying the Wii is the computer that could get into the hands of every child. It just baffles me when I see companies like HP and Dell and OLPC attack this market that IBM and Nintendo have built a working model of a quality.mini-computer and made more than a dime on it.

We have a unique opportunity. In the late 80’s and early 90’s Nintendo made a fortune buying off Sharp’s over-production of LCD’s, utilizing Gunpei Yokoi’s model for using existing technology in new and innovative ways. Today, we face a global market where demand for larger, clearer LCD’s is the technology standard, with production prices skyrocketing downwards. Companies such as Sony and Toshiba now outsource their screens to Samsung and Sharp, respectively. The cost of business has become so low for certain companies that it makes less sense for some of the biggest names in the industry to run their own screen production.

So when I hear about One Laptop Per Child, I look over at my Wii, as underpowered as it is compared to its competitors, and realize that for many children all over the world, we could use a little Gunpei Yokoi. Impressive amounts of tech stare me in the face, horsepower at the ready. It pains me to see Nintendo follow Apple into the realm of profitable bilking, compromising features for style, compassion for cool, and limited third party support. That’s less a revolution, and more just a game cube.

Rock the Castle

2008-09-14T23:44:00.001-07:00

It amazes me that most of the games I spend time playing are gorgeous games that take basic gameplay principles and apply them in HD. I have gotten more playing time out of more 15 dollar games than I have in 60 dollar games.

What’s more, I have had the distincy privilege of not just playing an obscenely violent and expensive sci-fi shooter across the country with my friends. No. I have had my chance to go back to the basements of our collective youth, to the days when we sat around and played something silly that Capcom or Tecmo or Acclaim used to make: a beat-em up side-scrolling brawler game.

It’s a miracle to accomplish this across such great distances. Such magic is usually reserved for time machines and teleporters. And here I was, tonight, playing a video game like I would have over ten, maybe even 15 years ago. With friends. Happily slaying throngs of enemies, laughing and joking and planning.

It wasn’t until tonight that I realized how utterly detached Nintendo was from its core audience. They may not release as many “core games”. They may have their reasoning for friend codes and other parental placations, but that an Xbox 360 has literally delivered me to the basement TV of my youth has showed how little Super there is left in Nintendo. That an entire system cannot do it, on the system that delivered such things. This isn’t Wii Bowling. This is STAYING POWER. No mere nostalgia; this is the stuff companies were made of.

Castle Crashers isn’t perfect, but it delivers the perfect experience. There are many hosannahs in the Live Arcade catalogue: Braid, (Portal to come), Geometry Wars, Lumines, and now Castle Crashers. These games show creativity, pushing games’ boundaries in ways that many of the big leaguers forget. The level of fun and attention to detail is born straight from the same purple and gray oven that baked my gaming experiences.

We are the better for it. Friendships are stronger for it. In gaming, you truly can win sometimes. I love Castle Crashers, if only because I felt like a kid again.

On Braid

2008-08-13T22:49:00.001-07:00

Braid is perhaps the most thoughtful game I’ve ever played. It easily has the most nuanced story. It is artful in what it does and what it doesn’t do. It’s also a maddening puzzler that drives your emotions. If this game has a spiritual cousin, it is Portal, another game about madness and puzzles and the meshing of interesting takes on traditional mechanics.

It is, in my opinion, also a reasonably adult treatise on villainy, and with its allusions to castles and the Super Mario Brothers series… that it’s really about Bowser. Why would a monster want a princess? Why would he build huge castles, engage in villainy, all for a princess?

This is one theme of many very good themes in the game, but it bears mentioning as I have seen nothing about it on Google. The allusions of the oft-posted Donkey Kong level shows an origin, a passing by on the way to something else. It feels almost chronological. When you see the green flag raised at the end I was reminded of when a green flag was lowered. Repeatedly, at the end of every level. By a plumber. I don’t think this is an accident.

They also reference the creation of the atomic bomb, throwing in a line that is actually a line of history. That quote was the summation of sane individuals who built the ultimate tool of self-annihilation. And I do think this is about redemption and deconstructing one’s fantasies to see the real reason a human can fail. These are heady, heady themes. Most books about redemption don’t touch the dirt. There’s scrappy, seldom blunt references to a person’s past in ways other than flashbacks. They don’t share the level of self pity and vice that can leave a man alone. By confronting as bluntly and yet artfully, they have successfully shown that games like Final Fantasy 5,7,8, and Legend of Zelda, and others have been unambitious as storytellers. I’ve thought this often; Braid’s the treatise. The new crop of American storytellers, creating games like GTA4, Portal, and Braid show that this medium has been irrevocably one-upped, and it will be to the detriment of studios looking to check-mark their way into a story. That’s bad news for companies like Nintendo and Square Enix, which do check-mark their stories. The proposition of Final Fantasy 13’s main protagonist being described proudly as “Cloud… but a girl!!” does little to allay my concerns, for one simple reason.

I’ve already played that game.

Braid offers something new, and we are the better for it.

Regarding Zelda

2008-08-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

I recently read a book by Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor who, when told he would soon die of pancreatic cancer, had made the decision to host a lecture, entitled the Last Lecture (also the name of his book) that goes away from his specialty of virtual worlds and into the infinitely more complex one of reality.

There is a line from the book, and anyone as downtrodden as I get will appreciate the quote that I think is rather good. It actually reminded me of the Legend of Zelda series:

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

Of course, there’s the implied romance part of it. But nowhere in the annals of game lore is there anyone so chronically cockblocked as Link. Only in the truest non-sequel does he get with the princess. The fat bastard Italian gets more lovin’. Link, whether he is explicitly interested or not, it’s a remarkable silent chivalry. How many games typify chivalry without the payoff?

In chivalry, the payoff simply isn’t the point.

Now this past summer I sat down with Grand Theft Auto 4, a magnificent game. It’s not for everyone, but the one thing that game got was scale. It got physics, and beauty. And when Nintendo finally drags itself into the HD era, I think what I saw was a true potential era for Mario. The gaming canvas was made larger by that game. No longer can you use the excuse of space, no longer can we argue that largesse sacrifices detail. To be blunt, GTA4 broke a lot of rules about how a big game is supposed to act.

SCALE

In that one game, they proved that Final Fantasy needn’t now be afraid of actual airships, of scalable land, rather than their current games modus operandi of linked-pre-renders representing less than 10% of the world the game inhabits. I always believed that was a poor choice for the series. Indeed, the game that has effectively de-throned Final Fantasy as RPG of the masses is World of Warcraft. And that game never lost its sense of scale. There isn’t an inch of impossibility in that game, just scale, awe, and immersion.

Zelda games have always had an impressive and expanding idea of scale, but really the kingdom of Hyrule has always been a bit on the small side. A fully HD Zelda, with far off venues that you can see and later touch, would return the game to the sort of epic scale not seen in its fullest since A Link To The Past.

And we know it can be done. Imagine a forest of that much detail. Link’s quest would feel all the more epic.

PHYSICS.

GTA4 has what I call “Thick rubber band physics”. Apply a small amount of force, and there’s nothing. Apply steady force, and you get one hell of a twang. Link should be hit so hard he gets knocked down despite his shield. Bomb blasts should devastate. Don’t cut away from the Dodongo cave opening; make me run like hell from it. By applying a bit more bounce in the world, the enemies become a bit more fun. It would be a bit more cartoonish in a way, but this has never been a studio to remand such ideas. The thick resistance on the low end of the two series is very similar; jumps are small, and speed carries a lot of nonfatal velocity. But the more violent entry understands that payoff, and infuses the situation with a bit more fun. There isn’t a need for cut scenes to show big events, you’re witnessing them. What could be more adventurous in an adventure game?

SPEED

First Person Shooters and others have taught us that enemies can shoot as fast as you can, and you can still win. It is time, I think, for the majority of Link’s enemies to be able to shoot as fast as he can. There will be an element of danger that has been missing from the series. Link got faster, his enemies have stayed the same speed. By increasing their speed, the game becomes slightly deadlier. But not, as has been proven, fatal. There would be a faster pace to this game.

THE CASUAL QUESTION

Of course, the logic-minded will argue, they could never try this. And indeed I have my doubts, too, that they will. Nintendo has shown that they are committed to the casual audience, and these suggestions (which are unabashedly gamer-centric) do not do that.

Until you look at the numbers. Let me explain. Grand Theft Auto 4 was bought by more than core gamers, it was bought by many. World of Warcraft isn’t merely played by hardcore addicts; there are people on there who rarely have the time to play the game. The numbers that these games support are staggering. In 2 years, World of Warcraft can generate over 2 billion dollars in revenue. In a single week, GTA 4 made more money than any of the summer blockbusters. Think about that. GTA 4 made more money than Indiana Jones, than Iron Man, than the goddamn Batman.

There is an audience with huge dividends, and it exists at the weird merging point between the casual gamer and the hardcore. Indeed, that has been where Nintendo has typically found a great deal of success. Look at any of their successful console or portable console portfolios. With their industry leading successes, it wasn’t just the hardcore. And even with the Wii, it certainly isn’t just the casual market. That’s the balance, and aping some of the physics and ideas of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, GTA4, and others would push this series into a new renaissance. It would discourage the continued use of the 3 then Master Sword then 5/6/7 other level model encouraged since A Link To the Past. It would mean more, and these small adjustments may inspire. And being inspired, being motivated, is what this series, at least in its early form, has always been about.

Even if you don’t get the princess.

A Girl’s Gotta Do What a Girl’s Gotta Do.

2008-07-22T19:41:00.000-07:00

Anyone who is shocked at Squenix move to release on the Xbox 360 with their marquis title is operating under the lovesick notion that business and loyalty are two intertwined things, and that Sony was caught off-guard by the notion that their title was going to go.

I’d disagree. I think they knew, but importantly they knew and kept quiet about it. As delays go, Square has given up on all methods of timeliness. They have grown beasts, with budgets and stomachs to match. They knew the options, and they knew that their chances of financial stability are hindered by exclusivity. Sony has merely to be quiet during the whole preceding. If Sony, in fact, got owned, it was something they were quite aware of, and their E3 showing of tight, game-centric focused announcements gives ample argument that they knew they would be embarrassed. If they want solace, they merely look at the Wii’s sophomoric offerings.

No, the real group that got owned were fanboys. Sony fanboys. FF Fanboys. Chocotards. Cloudtards.

As all fanboys must come to grips before slavishly planning out purchases years ahead of an actual release date, videogames are ultimately commissioned artists. You may love the art, you may love what it does, but ultimately the art exists as a medium by which to make money. And if you do not account for the economic side every step of the way, you will find no end of surprises and disappointment.

While the greatest success of Square resided on the Playstation, they have been no strangers to multiple releases. Final Fantasy 11, for example, was on the Xbox 360, and maintained a longer and more flexible shelf life. Every older Final Fantasy has gravitated, in some form, to the Nintendo DS. Final Fantasy 7 was released on the PC, back when that was a viable medium.

Exclusives, such as Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, and My Life As a King… Square Enix is not a Sony company. You associated it with Sony because of your experience, but this company has never shied from the quick, shrewd dollar. They would partner with anyone and everyone. Be it an American film studio, to a friend-turned-adversary, they simply do not say no. If they were

And with their bad bookkeeping and design philosophy, you can’t really blame them. Japanese studios seem notoriously bad at keeping robust portfolios and books. Capcom’s stock is an option for an American takeover, to give you an idea how bad it must suck if our fail-centric dollar can buy them out. Square seems constantly sidelined with debt and delays. Team Ninja is inadequately ran, and will suffer extreme consequences by result. Sega … well there’s a reason they don’t make anything other than Sonic and fanboy requests anymore.

Fanboys tend to overlook the financial side of things to their own detriment. They tend to overlook these statistics because they see the side of their goal that produced a ray of light in their entertainment experiences. This is not bad business or improper Japanese etiquette, it is simply how Japanese game companies rationalize spiraling development costs. It was when they took a sequel for FF6 and turned that into FF7. It will happen again.

There are no reasons to be surprised by the coup of non-exclusivity. It is standard, and has been the industry’s direction for the past 8 years.

I will let you fanboys in on the secret of how games stay exclusive. With this in hand, you can keep your favorite developer with you on your controller and logo of choice for all eternity. It is the one factor that ensures fanboyism, and the continuation of your particular poison in your preferred medium.

Long Term Financial stability

This is the sole, and I do mean sole factor in staying with a particular gaming system for an extended period of time. A few contrasting cases-

Nintendo has
A. A long history of continued console profitability, game license fees, and even in its missteps manages levels of profitability that are difficult for their competition to match. When all else fails, they own the handheld market with a near-iron fist.
B. A large wealth of games that turn a profit and have a longer than average shelf life.
C. Nintendo seldom loses money.
D. Nintendo only plays on Nintendo.

Bungie has
A. A long history of continued profitability, licensing, and even in its missteps manages levels of profitability that are difficult for their competition to match. When all else fails, their franchise’s marketing produces enough hype and enough quality to gloss any shortcomings.
B. A consistent lineup of best-selling games that turn a profit and have a longer than average shelf life.
C. Bungie seldom loses money
D. Bungie hasn’t made a non-Xbox game in over a decade.

Blizzard has
A. A VERY long history of continued profitability, licensing, and even in their missteps… scratch that. This is the company that made Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft. They invented and reinvented the idea of gaming crack addict. They have more money than any company has any right to, and their quality control, even to non-fans, is unparalleled.
B. THE consistent lineups of best-selling games that turn a profit and have an obscenely longer shelf life than is average.
C. Blizzard prints money.
D. Blizzard IS pc gaming.

Now compare the fortunes of those three with 3 fanboy-favorite companies: Capcom, Squenix, and Sega. The top 3 companies, and the bottom three companies, both have had games whose budget has ran amok. But whatever the reason, it is my argument that continued success and financial management has more to do with gamer and medium loyalty than any bit of Japanese etiquette or fan outcry.

Which makes fanboys, in their current state, completely useless internet twaddle.

Want to know the future of fanboyism, fanboys? Look at Trekkies today. They have absolutely zero say in the last 4 movies and 2 TV series. Only a hiatus, and an edgy reinterpretation are its only hopes, and Trekkies keep a machine afloat that for all intents and purposes has been diuretic for the past decade.

The Fanboy Revolution.

As much as I deride the fanboy, not all of their traits are bad. Indeed, their slavish attention to detail, company loyalty, and internet-addiction are all a strange brew that could be utilized towards better companies, more stream-lined management and a savvier economy.

Ultimately, fanboyism blunts the razor’s edge of failure from dancing along the throat of companies who deserve the scarlet neck fountain treatment. I think, long-term, it can work in reverse.

1. Boycott all gaming movies.
Why: Gaming movies are about taking a brand that is in the public eye and expanding on it. It’s Chex Mix: The Movie. Take something anyone is vaguely familiar with, and market it to death. But fanboys, don’t give in. Instead, ignore its existence. Don’t even compare it to the game. Don’t even talk about it. Let it slide off of you. Does that mean you won’t get to see Mila Jovovitch in all her ass-kicking glory?
End Result: Rent the Fifth Element and Super Mario Brothers: The Movie, and learn how movies are fun and how movies laugh at you and your steal your wallet. At the end of the night, you’ll have some perspective about the value of ideas over branding.

2. Buy Final Fantasy 13 for the Xbox 360.
Why: Sony made a system that is famously hard to program, on a controller that needs some reworking to be more modern, at a price which is unfeasible. Microsoft made a system that is a lot easier to program and adapt, has similar horsepower, and runs at a higher resolution than most PS3 games.
End Result- An embarrassed Sony would be a marvelous thing. Gone is their marquis franchise, with higher numbers. The money handlers would have an incentive to push for easier dev kits, and developer support, lowering the cost of game development and encouraging a rebirth. Buy now on the PS3, and you support an idea that really hurt game developers, artists, and gamers alike. There is no incentive to the PS3 game other than fanboyism, and Squenix will hurt as a result of your slavish decision.

3. Skew the demographics on Party Games.
How: I am going to describe two Gamer parties: The first has booze, Mario Kart, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Dance Revolution. Sounds fun, right?

The second party has lights rigged to the dance machine, other lights to the floor, a giant game projector that plays techno-themed music to the game of the moment, be it Tetris, Asteroids, DDR, Rez, or some random Japanese fighter. The small TV by the bathroom has Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES by the men’s, Puyo Puyo Pop by the ladies.

Now I can assure you, with utter certaintly, that you can tell which one kicks more ass. Too often do we let shiny, new, and populist take over the wealth of imagination and…well, wealth that our generation possesses. If we’re going to kick ass, we need to kick ass differently.
End Result: Companies with a vested interest in your continued purchase of peripherals have to up their game, not their microtransactions.

4. Put your money where your mouth is.
How: This has little to do with games and more to do with investments. The quickest and most effective way to have input in a decision is to own a piece of the company. If you believe in a company’s continued success enough to fag out for its every release, you should at least get a return on that love. If you feel your company has set itself adrift on a bad idea, your refined sense of quality gaming will allow you to detect trouble before the suits do, and you can get out while the getting is good and invest otherwise.
End Result: The executives answer to YOU. Ya know what’s more revealing than E3? A shareholder meeting.

5. Avoid Special Edition Gaming Boxes
How: Buy the regular edition. This strategy is working phenomenally with the movie industry. There will be less and less of a divide between the two, and with Blu Ray’s eventual succession, very little difference. Collecting them is a matter of oddness: As of this writing there are two unopened N64 Gold editions of Ocarina of Time going for above $200. The other hundred Gold Ocarinas? 99 cents. These are not investments so much as they are static versions of Warcraft armor or Xbox Live Achievement points. In other words, they matter to nobody that matters. The sixty some dollars, properly invested, would not have yielded a $333% return of the top two items, but certainly gained more than the -.01666% return yielded by the hundreds left over. Nothing “collector’s” is ever valued by collectors. They value the obscure, the broken, the woops.
End Result: More features at a lower price. Zero incentive for limiting supplies. More shelf space for more video games, not space taken up by a “making of” DVD that you watched half of once.

6. Let them fail… from a distance.
How: Mario Sunshine sucked. It made a lot of money, but not the usual megaton of money that Mario is usually known for. Result? A return to fundamentals and innovation, the cessation of the backpack and the freaky Jell-O creatures. Enough people stayed away. Imagine what Galaxy would have looked like if no one had bought Sunshine. It wouldn’t have ceased Mario, not with his brand strength. But THAT. GAME. WOULD. OWN. YOU. Now imagine if enough people had the courage to ignore Sonic… oh wait. You bought almost every recent Sonic game! Enjoy your knighthood!
End Result: Only the best survive. The bad will live on, but in ironic T Shirt form. You play better games, are less disappointed, and are stylin’. How do you not win???

None of the above suggestions take away from the essential love of (insert here) that makes a fanboy. But it is savvier fanboyism that leaves its mark upon the company, the series, and the industry. I purposefully avoided the typical fanboy suggestions while giving full in to one of them.

I avoided…
Suggesting you work for a video game company.
Cutting all ties with a company.
Buy small-budget games with the same fervor you buy the AAA games.

I could not avoid…
Blogging about it.

Still, avoiding 75% of the clichés will have to be sufficient. The only question is when/if will a real change take place. It will be a lot harder for your favorite company to ignore you. The world begins with you.

Another Futile Internet Letter

2008-07-15T16:39:00.000-07:00

Dear Nintendo,

This is a hard letter for me to write. We’ve been through so much together. But honey, darling, you need to seek help.

Let me open by saying I’m so, so proud of how far you’ve come. You have a hot console, a deliriously successful portable device, but your ego has spun out of control. I can’t imagine the sacrifices that it took to deliver such innovation to the market place. But you’re frankly looking a bit burnt out. In a moment I can only imagine was exhilarating, you changed your life for the better. There was a twinkle I haven’t seen in your eye since… well, since 2D.

I missed you.

But we never talk. You release Zelda after Zelda with no innovation in a decade. Sure, the games are prettier and the enemies bigger, but you’ve never retained the scope. And Mario? He’s good, but there was such an intensity in games like Mario World, in Mario 3, that spoke of absolute, impossible peril. He’s… cutesy wootsy, now, and it’s hard to look at him for very long. The edges are softened, and the giant realm of Mario has conflated to theme games. Galaxy’s theme was range controlling, and flying in an “open realm”. Sunshine’s theme was that damn backpack. Now look at Super Mario World; it gave you frenetic flight, a dinosaur, swarms of new enemies. But let’s not dwell on the past.

The point is, I think you forget what loyalty is. Loyalty is exciting. It does mean sequels. But sequels, and new things, are good! We love Mario, we love Link, we LOVE sequels. It’s important to have variety, too, but you should never forget your roots. It’s what made the Gamecube profitable.

I was there, Nintendo. I was there when the Xbox, the frigging XBOX!, was kicking your butt graphically. I held out when Square left you for lying to Sony, for when your games cost 20 dollars more than the others on the market for what was actually a worse graphics processor. I stuck with you when you unveiled a controller that looked, with no trace of subtlety, a woman’s uterus. I stuck with you. Not Sony, not Xbox. You. Not even Sega, whom I admit was cute, could draw my attention away from your pill-shaped logo, your charming fantasies.

But at E3, you embarrassed me. You brought out Shawn White. Shawn White! I don’t think there’s anyone left in this generation who considers Shawn White as anything but our happy go lucky ambassador to the suits to make them appear edgy. The rest of us? He reminds us of Carrot Top. Not his fault I know, but the fact is that if you exchanged goofy props for goofy endorsements, you’re just left with a creepy redheaded stickboy who really, really shouldn’t get as much work as he does.

Wii Music’s a cute idea, but see, this is the problem with consequences. Watching people play something? It’s not that fun. It’s not even close to fun, we see people acting like retards holding Nintendo products. And it’s not the bulwark of innovation. Games like Rez and Samba De Amigo were doing this before anyone made a Hero out of a Guitar.

I think I knew this conversation would happen when I took a look at Microsoft. There it is, it forced its way into the market, and has a product that the Japanese are A. Belligerent, and B. Indifferent towards. But here they are, the hot system, the best selling system, the system that can run anything, and releases (and steals) games that tickle gamer’s fancy. I took a look at the proud, gleaming (it gibes off a lot of heat) system, and wondered, where had our magic gone?

It’s not with Shawn White. Is he going to take you out and play with you when Square Enix won’t play with you and the new Game of the Year isn’t on you? What’s that? Shawn’s going to be on Halo, Nintendo, teabagging some son of a bitch that got between his base and his flag some 20 game yards away. You might not like to think about it, but that’s just who Shawn is.

Or maybe you’ll enjoy your little downloadable teensy Final Fantasy castle game. Would you like that? I admit I’m not the biggest fan, but I’ll be damned if I have to spend 35 dollars to play a game whereas I have not one but two choices on where to play the prettiest bit of render this side of Crysis. Which you cannot and will never run.

Oh, think the graphics joke was a cheap shot? Well let me tell you, Nintendo. I grew up. I grew up like the world grew up and we gained money. I don’t rely on my parents to give me money. I make my own, and I wasn’t content to watch you on a 27 inch tv with no right sound channel. No, Nintendo, I bought something pretty. It makes games beautiful again. And you? You pout on it. The writing was on the wall, and you couldn’t be bothered to do even a little upconversion.

Would it have killed you to put on a little HD? It would make you look a lot prettier, and I, I just don’t know what to say. Looks aren’t everything, but you just seem to only care what everyone else thinks about you. You attract your casual gamers and yes you’re making a lot of money. But you know what? Someday little Billy Wii Music’s going to grow up and make a ton of money. And he’s going to buy an Xbox because he wants to shoot some bastard upside his head and save the world? And you, Nintendo?

YOU’RE GOING TO BE AT HOME, COOKING. AND DOING YOGA, AND PLAYING RACE CARS WITH THE GODDAMN MARSHMALLOW STAR FROM MARIO GALAXY THAT NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT! Why won’t you grow up, Nintendo!?!? GROW UP AND LET’S GROW OLD TOGETHER!!!!

I shouldn’t have yelled. I just want a commitment, Nintendo. And today, on that stage, I think I found out where your heart lies. I think it’d be best if we distance ourselves. Maybe, we could be friends, and someday we’ll laugh about this.

But where I stand, it just can’t be the same way. You’ve changed. I’ve changed. This has been a hard letter for me to write. I want you to love me for me, not me for Mii.

Cheeseburger Logic

2008-06-24T20:24:00.001-07:00

Cheeseburger Logic

So earlier this month, I had the rare (get it) opportunity to have a Kobe beef burger. Now I’m not sure if it was beef just from the region of Kobe , or if it was simply beer-fed and butt-massaged cow from somewhere in the Union (probably the latter, due to FDA regulations). But this doesn’t matter, what matters is that it was perhaps the most delicious cheeseburger, transcendent on so many, many levels. It didn’t need ketchup, the natural aroma and flavors and juices were sufficient to tickle my senses and delight my palate.

So let’s think of a moment of cheeseburgers. There are these rare (get it now) burgers which are fairly expensive, and then let’s look at the McDonald’s cheeseburger. Both contain similar ingredients with remarkably different results. One costs a lot of money and is very good. The other one costs very little and isn’t so good.

The simple fact of the matter with video games is that casual games are selling better than hardcore games. Quantity is winning out over quality, which causes many in the speculative internets to decry the value of leaving the core gamer behind. This, as I am hungry for a cheeseburger, got me thinking about the mutual existence of the McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger and the Kobe Beef Burger.

The first and most obvious fact is that both exist. The other simple fact is that the double cheeseburger finds its way to many more mouths. There is an argument amongst food elites (aka the French/snobs/yuppies) that hot wax would be preferable to the taste of McDonalds’ offering, and that everyone should imbibe only the finest cattle when placating their palate.

They are wrong on so many levels, as are the doomsayers about video games.

The simple fact is that casual games, like McDonald’s Double Cheeseburgers, are initiates to the wider world of burgerdom/ gamedom. There is a marked gap in quality, but in a busy market (and it is very, VERY busy) not everyone can afford the Kobe Beef, the Playstation 3 80 gb with Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle. It is simply not in the budget!

Now to further complicate matters, gamers are reacting lividly to the current direction of the market by companies such as Nintendo. To the food snob this is akin to your favorite local bistro being razed for a Wendy’s. The quiet air, modern salt shakers, and keen lighting to be replaced by fluorescents, grease, and the squeals of children getting their Kids’ Meal.

But unlike the razing of the restaurant, Nintendo is finding the money, and is finding it in droves. McDonald’s has a core audience of regular customers who genuinely love the quality, texture, and taste of their offerings, but they also have a stable of people who just need a quick and cheap meal, and why not wash that down with some high margin Diet Coke?

In the world of food, we call this a success story.

What gamers fail to consider is that the cost of producing games is higher than ever. There is a lot of bloat, and not a lot of cost control. Games that should take on a medium role are given a much larger marketing budget, eroding profits and quality in the sake of deadlines. This is not a new phenomenon, it has happened in many businesses and will happen before. Game companies that could rely on one or two marquee titles to prop up their entire fiscal solvency will find themselves on the ropes should one of their products languish.

This is, to be quite honest, dumb. There is more money in a McDonald’s than in a custom eatery. The market is going to have to learn flexibility.

High end game companies such as Square and Blizzard produce products with longer than average shelf lives, and the key for them is to control costs comparable to returns. What they will find is that they, much like the chef who dreams of gourmands extolling the virtues of his/her kitchen, will have to have a level playing field of tools, product, and labor, and above all a higher but acceptable price point, in order to get people to spend money on their cheeseburger.

On the flip side, companies that produce a middling product (Ubisoft, Ubisoft, and Ubisoft) are going to concentrate on the more casual market because they, whether you like them or not, have many mouths to feed. They have more labor, and the high cost route has burned them. Granted, this is in no small part due to heinous marketing decisions, but the mold will fit their company better. More mouths to feed on aggressive schedules.

But No Pants Kid, the gamers are fickle and will tire of these games! They have no loyalty! Flash in the pan, one and done!

Except they do make games, and they make them cheap, and they continue to make money. These are not fun games, but they exist in the same craposphere (love that word) that filled the coffers of the Nintendo and Sega systems. If you had to show, to play those games, how many would you play? Probably no more than 20, because a lot of them are crap. They’re managing their costs and their budgets in a profitable manner.

Now for the jaded gamer, the market is rapidly shifting and they will, too, have to tailor their model with an efficient, lean, but high quality burger. And there will be fewer great games, but that’s fine. There weren’t that many to begin with. They are not system sellers; the current cost of product (ie: the console) has meant that the number of system moving games are going to diminish. Gamers are going to look for the longer term investment. If the restaurant was shit, the service was shit, the service rude, the margaritas room temperature, would your favorite burger joint be as great an appeal?

I would venture, no. Gamers, as in food lovers, will look towards the whole package to decide where to spend their money. The value of the cumulative portfolio of top tier games (Halo, Gears of War, Blue Dragon, Ninja Gaiden) is going to out weigh slighter portfolios.

Game companies are going to go through a rough transition of change, the rough, error-prone middle ground of the Playstation 1 and 2 era is going to end. Companies that can carve a niche in this rough ground will find their profits, and companies that do not will languish.

Judging on the sales figures for almost every game company to make this divide, they know what kind of cheeseburgers they’re making.

Nothings Perfect, but why not try?

2008-06-19T20:29:00.001-07:00

Metal Gear Solid and GTA: The fourth time is the charm

Let’s talk cinema. Gone with the Wind was filmed in Technicolor, on an inferior grade of film. Its sets and backdrops couldn’t hold water with even the simplest of Mel Brooks comedy. Now Casablanca? No color, there’s grain all over the place, the soundtrack is in mono, and there’s no blood when someone gets shot.

My point?

A perfect score does not equal perfection. It equals as close to perfect as anything can be, a pinnacle worthy of some hyperbole, the mark by which other movies may be judged. These aren’t perfect movies, it’s that in spite of their flaws they manage to transcend their banal medium of celluloid and glitz. That’s what sets them apart. When works of transcendency and wonder do occur, there tends to be a lot of hyperbole about how great a game is. People can and always will find a flaw, and proclamations of perfection is just that. Gamers are not the same group who all owned Super Mario 3 and fell in love with sidescrolling perfection. There’s too many games, too many choices, and too many nuances to ever achieve such universal acclaim. It’s naïve, but not a sin, for people who play video games to extol the virtues of games they consider near perfect. Time will stand up to the critics and the naysayers.

Metal Gear is a game that’s as cinematic as a movie, with engaging characters and enough humor to know when to just be a video game. It’s deep and nuanced for replayability if you have the patience for it (most people don’t). It’s long, but it’s merciful. The load times are amusing AND practical. If you don’t take breaks during the course of this game, well, your eyes or sex life are not long for this world.

Grand Theft Auto is a game that I always assumed as an exercise in anarchy. This game is an exercise in being a thick rubber band. It’s thick and hard to move, but with enough tension things explode and there’s a magnificent twang. There is no voice acting this good in any video game. There are few games that decide to create this kind of world. This game shows where Nintendo goes wrong. It’s not about the maturity level, it’s about the detail. It’s a hell of a ride.

Of the games that come out this year, when you train a designer what to appreciate from this era, when you need to play something that defines an era, this is what they’ll look at.

And that’s as close to perfect as we can get.

And that’s always a 10.

Iron Man

2008-05-02T23:23:00.000-07:00

Tony Stark is a dick.

You don’t hear much about that anymore, but it’s actually quite the American past time. When I saw Batman Begins, I thought I saw the perfect incarnation of page to screen. How wrong I was.

Nerds have a love/hate with the two big other superhero series, Xmen and Spiderman. You can see the movie choices overriding the judgement and character of people some people liked.

Now growing up, I never cared for Iron Man. Never owned an Iron Man comic, never had the action figure. Kind of a non-entity to me. He belonged to an older generation.

But what fun, this Iron Man is.

The movie may just be the one of the best examples of obsession, redemption, and raw talent. There are demons, there is baggage, but there is also a method. I was a comic book nerd who could play basketball better than someone of my height, and my ability to think hone by repetition. The constant thunk thunk of the basketball, the imperfect arc on the way to the hoop. These are all things. There is method. It is slow and frustrating. Eventually, you look a seven foot defender in the eye, post up on him, and drop it in the bucket. The first time you get beaten, and you look up and grin, for all the extra thinking, all the thunk thunk thinking and work that has gone in to it. That’s what Iron Man shows. It’s very easy to dig.

The best thing I can say for this movie is that the big final climactic scene is the worst scene. As others have pointed out, it’s too cheesy, too much like a comic book!

And so we have come that the movie is so good, so suave, and methodical that a Transformer’s-like showdown is made of pure camp. Of last year’s villains. It didn’t need a final showdown, because the things about the comic books that we grew up with were not the big victories over the grand schemes.

Because Magneto would be back, Doctor Octopus would be back, the bad explosive times come back. It’s in the smaller moments, those moments of discovering, enhancing, of overcoming one’s problems that often make very meek men dream of might. And that’s what this movie captures. It’s also a joy. It’s a movie that doesn’t skirt death, it shows that nice isn’t always right. And how cathartic in this time to find a movie where the government isn’t a complete choad. It’s not that it’s always the case in either direction, but it’s a refreshing angle in a world loaded with distrust. It’s also odd to see a movie where terrorists get their shit handed to them. We don’t always win, but we do hand over some shit. It’s important to remember that sometimes. It’s nice to see innovation,

The best movies in the Superhero genre are at their best without the official suit. Think about it.

The moment in Spider Man when he picked up Mary Jane, and her lunch tray, and her milk, as she slips.

Wolverine, in a fighers cage, circling and smoking and stalking. In the next movie, pinning a soldier to a refrigerator, nerves set to kill, the hyperventilated realization that the red haze is descending.

In Superman, having to be a clutz when every part of you is the best of you, and this is all just a show so that he doesn’t wake up to tanks or questions or both.

In Batman Begins, stripped of his suit, the anguish is clear at the beginning. Here is a fighter, relentless and anguished, the soul ragged and abused, cocky and arrogant. Nothing can stop him.

It’s to Iron Man’s credit how little there is of suit, and how much of superhero there is

Take Two Examples

2008-04-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

The more distracted your company is with creating a video game, the better the game will be. The more distracted your company is with money and shareholders, even your quality with be diminished.

I feel, with utter certainty, that this is a rule that is seldom seen. When shareholders are kept at arm’s length in defense of the artist, you begin to see true art take form in the way of perfection.

Take 2 cases.

The first is the Nintendo 64. The big N’s decision to remain cartridge-based has been called stunning, and perhaps their largest failure. 3rd party companies fled en masse towards larger disc space and admittedly better 3 dimensional implementation and support.

And what did Nintendo’s core teams crank out? Masterpieces.

Ones like Mario 64, which sets a benchmark for quality that, despite all efforts including their own, is brought up in every comparison.

Another was Ocarina of Time, which was a world as fully formed as you could get, and few which any game has the chutzpah or design qualities to be as subtly beautiful. Every game before and since is compared to this one by the legitimate press.

It took a long time to make that game, and the release date always seemed out of reach. But quality, gameplay quality, that’s what they wanted and would only deliver. Nothing else.

It took an IGN 10.00 rating.

Next we have Grand Theft Auto IV. For the uninformed, Take Two is a spectacularly retarded business. Their core revenue streams are few and far between, and their gaming experiments flawed both financially and in execution.

The heads of Take Two are resisting an attempt by Electronic Arts to buy it, which is an important thing to its major investors. EA is offering more for Take Two than it is worth, according to essentially every major analysis.

But they want to discuss if after the game. Whether that’s protracted arrogance, the fiscal insolvency of parent Take Two pales in comparison to the IGN 10 rating that Rockstar’s gem has just received.

Obsession wins in game design. Sacrifice of common business practice wins in game design.

It’s an important lesson, one Sega doesn’t learn, that Squenix and Sony and sometimes Nintendo refuse to learn. But it produces the bulk of critical and financial success.

The real question is when will the industry realize that.

Because people spend money on stupid stuff

2008-04-19T06:12:00.000-07:00

he next 20 years, look for a company that can produce content-specific (meaning game or movie-themed) pinball tables to be a niche market catering to affluent, aging gamers. They will run in the thousands, and the person who figures out this market will make more money than Coach makes on ridiculous purses. What motorcycles are to baby boomers, pinball tables are to Gen Xers.

Baby Boomers (the majority of them, at least) didn’t really enjoy motorcycles as a youth, but they’ll spend a ridiculous amount of monies on them because they are, ultimately, really cool and a symbol of their lost youth. While I believe there is a market for vintage arcade cabinets, the ready accessibility of those same games to be played on a multimedia box is here (also on a vastly superior screen) and will not go away. Truly digital mediums transfer easier and carry less niche appeal (examples: even your grandma has an iPod.) An experience you cannot transfer digitally to another medium carries both a fashion cache, as well as a market that likes niche products and is unafraid of spending money. A similar market admittedly exists for record players, but there are fewer opportunities for licensing and promotion.

I feel that this pinball company would have to make them better than Midway ever did, but if that's the greatest challenge then I'd hope I'm not the only one excited by it. A business like this can also act promotional vendor: why win a Batman 4 t shirt when you can play a Batman themed pinball game?

The market for gamers is wide open, and I don't think that's even partially understood by any company outside of Nintendo.

It's this or the Terminators...

2008-04-11T22:47:00.001-07:00

Some ideas aren’t meant to make money. That’s the problem with Facebook and Myspace and now Yahoo, apparently. Some ideas do not produce the profit margins that are sustainable in the old world economy. But instead of adjusting the map, the companies adjusted, largely for the worse.

And if disappointing profit doesn’t point to the end games, the exponential increase in computer storage will. While a 10 gigabyte hard drive wasn’t cutting edge in 2000, it was certainly huge. Now a 1 terabyte hard drive is not considered cutting edge, but it’s considered a good chunk of space.

What will the next 10 years bring? I think it will bring a new version to the web. As server bandwidth and storage increases, we’re going to be in for such a shock.

Because some smartass is going to put ten grand into a server. And he or she is going to put basic networking code in, exactly as Facebook does, exactly as Myspace does, to help you blog and sort and catalog your many friends, passer byes, and pity friends.

And he or she won’t accept money for it.

I know, I know, it sounds like herecy, but think about it. Everything that drove Facebook’s or YouTube’s mass appeal was done on the cheap. And there will come a point where the operating costs of the necessary server will creep closer to zero. As that happens, and I believe it will, that next generation will find itself drawn to the moth to the flame. Look how easily and readily we have embraced email, texting, online conversations and blogs. As the hurdles in bandwidth are slowly overcome, the lasting thought of a megacorporation holding the keys to your favorite entertainment is going to be less and less appealing. Indeed, that’s precisely what happened with the internet recently. There simply won’t need to be a justification for the upkeep of large corporations, or stock holders who care more about their dividends than the product. That way of business is not sustainable on the internet. Hell, it’s not very sustainable outside of the internet, really, but that’s another story.

The point of the matter is the concept of the world on a single server (or collection of linked servers) is fast approaching, and when the costs are later driven down the attempts of Facebook and YouTube to capitalize in the multi-billions will seem laughable.

This current generation sees the bloat of the music industry, how their expectations for profits are not realistic. We see that there is profit for the musicians and various media types to make money, but I can’t think of a single person who thinks that the sheer size of the music industry can carry its own weight any longer. Storage and bandwidth outpaced their sales models.

Websites carry that same potential, and businesses that find themselves working against comsumer interests with things like advertising clutter, obtrusive data tracking, and the cessation of appealing services will find themselves doomed by the next rond of technology. The talents of Silicon Valley and beyond have the talent to take the reins and pave a road for the next generation of talent. But here’s the thing. All those innovators are working on how to make shareholders happy, how to make advertising more effective. That’s what makes the news now. Unless there’s a paradigm shift in how they do business, efficiency will doom them. It doomed AOL, and it’s been a problem for Yahoo of late. There’s no reason it won’t happen again.

2.0 failed.

2008-04-08T21:02:00.000-07:00

The sad thing is that Youtube, or rather, the Youtube of such monumental power as to be swallowed by Google for hundreds of millions of dollars, is dead.

You see, Youtube has had some major hits with user-generated content. But you see a producer’s dilemma in sifting through Youtube. For everything worth watching, there was an almost unlimited supply of crap. Tribute videos, for example. You ever wondered what if they did a montage of Gilmore Girls clips to Linkin Park? Then have we got the website for you! Also, guys getting kicked in the nuts, which is always funny. And the “Leave Britney Alone” kid, who I’m sure the gay community is proud to have as a prominent celebrity. A few years prior, an excellent homosexual actor Ian McKellan thrilled the world as XMen’s Magneto and inspired magic in viewers as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings series.

This goes to show two things. The first is that there is a lot of crap. The second thing is that, by and large, the entertainment industry largely does it better.

The problem with current YouTube is that it’s not the old Youtube, which was filled with Daily Show clips and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that lost episode from that television show you watched as a kid. In the genesis of the high definition age, people were tuning in to watch a shoddy bitrate.

But then all the industry players got ligitation-happy, and the whole party went to crap. It’s a lot harder to get content. And they pointed out, quite furiously, that DVD sales dropped during this timeframe. While this is true, they have not recovered despite much stricter copy write enforcement since the lawsuits. It hasn’t worked.

On Demand Programming is said to be a nexus, but I do realize that much of what I enjoyed on YouTube will never be free again. It’s a shame, really, as quality entertainment pushes and exceeds boundaries, freeing people to take on new and challenging works that they denied themselves, but were now instantly accessible for the low, low price of free. The sad thing the industries never understood was how much free publicity a low quality feed was. Now the website is left with “Chocolate Rain” and “2 Girls 1 Cup reactions”. That is very disheartening.

I am a believer that people gravitate towards quality. The problem with entirely user-generated content is that, after a while, you create a culture of performers who do not watch other people perform. The problem with online journalism is also this: everyone wants to write, nobody wants to read.

I believe sites like the one being developed in Rochester, Minnesota put power both in the user’s hands, but also in the hands of the creators of content. Because they are separated and one in the same, just like old Youtube. The reviews and opinions are the users, and the scores are the users, but the content being viewed is by the big boys. It doesn’t make the pairing equal, but it does derive entertainment for the viewer and perspective, eyeballs, and consumer data to the content creators. It’s something akin to performance theater, which the internet is exceedingly good at.

Here’s a show, now the audience is involved. They can see where they sit, see the stage, and react solely from their seat. They feel their opinions and output matter, and game creators are forced into a position where they know, deep down, they ought to be. Whether in comments such as the ones by EA’s Vice President about the deteriorating scores of EA Games, or in the Gerstmann-gate debacle, it’s quite clear that the extent of marketing is understood, even if they don’t always like to admit it.

Back to YouTube, its best days, as the great content equalizer, are now behind us. Internet 2.0 websites are fascinating, because they are usually best in their initial incarnations. Once sites like YouTube and Facebook and Google have to become profitable rather than revolutionary, their edge (and a great deal of their appeal is lost). How they could ever maintain their stratospheric sales projections is beyond me. It may even be beyond a dramatic gopher.

3 Rants and a Confession

2008-04-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

First off, I want to say that I am insanely, intensely jealous of Angsty Gaijin and his wonderful vacation right now. Like so much, I could cry. It has me speaking like a Zelda NPC, to the point where I hope he doesn't forget that special item from the far Eastern land.

Cocaine and Waitresses

It’s a real shame when one of your favorite restaurants drop the ball. It’s like you know of a friend who, by chance, did a line of coke at a party once. It’s not habitual, so you don’t have to worry about good old Eric, for example. But when you hear that he was missing, or off by over five minutes to a party, it comes back to “I can’t believe that bastard is back on the blow, man” and “He’s really letting us all down” and “Eric, man! He was doing so effing well, too!”.

So now it goes with a favored restaurant served up a very unpleasant meal. Whenever I go back now, I wait for it to let me down. And they were doing so effing well, too!

Coffee.

The fact of the matter is, Starbucks doesn’t exactly suck. Their coffee doesn’t rock by any means, but you know what you’re going to get. This becomes apparent when you frequent an area that doesn’t have a Starbucks, where quality control and consistency is maybe, not as controlled.

Take for example, this example. Sometimes when visiting friends in a town, somebody (by which I mean all of us) get a sudden urge for some of the caffeinated stuff.

My initial reaction when traveling is “Where is the Starbucks?”

In certain towns and in certain circles, the reply sometimes goes like this “Starbucks?! Man, fuck that burnt bean shit. You have to try this place we have down here! It’s so awesome! Their macchiato?? Man, it’s the bomb. They percolate their coffee just right! This shit’s so good, it’ll make your d--- bigger. No lie.

Excited (how could I not be?!?) we drive to this local establishment. And I order a large drink. I put the drink to my lips/ It’s muddy, unflavorful, and the taste of this brew contains none of the exotic, almost fruity bouquet that I’ve come to expect from a $5 cup of coffee. Instead it has the liquidity of sludge, the grounds are unpleasant, and I grow sadder and a bit irritated. I’m too polite to say anything, but my expression works its magic.

The friend says, “Man, they’re a bit off tonight.” Now I’ve visited enough local establishments to say, maybe they’re not off tonight, but that a bit of the magic has worn off. Maybe my expression broke the spell of “being different” long enough for their tongues to think what their brains could not and judged the coffee on the grounds of flavor.

They recover their zeal by the next time I visit. Similar line about how awesome it is. Same line about how evil Starbucks is (Starsucks? How clever and original). I know one thing hasn’t changed: Somewhere, there is a thick iced coffee and full of rich aroma and more than a hint of dark chocolate. And here I am again, playing Columbian Roulette with my tastebuds.

Friend of a Friend of a Friend

Sometimes I don’t think weddings make sense. Not in the whole “two people being together and loving each other for their lives and beyond” but I sometimes think people spend way too much time worried about who to invite or who to uninvited that sometimes the incomprehensible happens. Sometimes, you end up at a wedding for people you never met, buying kitchen implements and carefully wrapping them for people you never met, and watch them stand before their maker for what has statistically become a coin toss whether they will still be paired up when they meet their maker.

I think weddings should be inflicted on as few people as possible. To the carefully selected, they are privileged to watch a beautiful union between people they love. When it’s a friend of a friend of a friend, you wonder about the food.

How beautiful.

Money Idea of the Day- The casual RPG

2008-03-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

Let’s get this out of the way now, because it needs to be said. Storage limits are no longer a major consideration. That doesn’t mean they don’t have to be contended with, but if you have the game, odds are you can probably swing it. That’s not always true, of course, but it’s worth noting that storage sizes are so large that we have a real opportunity right now to reinvent a few wheels.

Grinding drives a lot of people towards RPGs, and it also drives a lot away. As a market, the grinding, arduous, 60-hour plus RPG has done exceedingly well. And the 100+ hour RPG, has also done exceedingly well.

I spend a lot of time talking about World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy, mainly because I truly think they do a lot right and a lot that is deplorable. I think that neither Blizzard nor Final Fantasy could reinvent the wheel, because of how much they have loaded on to their cart. Make no mistake, if Square doesn’t feel it is pushing an envelope, you are likely looking at a sequel or spin-off. This means that any space considerations are always going to be a prescient concern as they will always run out of it. So right there, I have little faith that the big dawg would come after me. And Blizzard? Too big and successful to care.

Bioware gets it. They keep their grinding short, and I would argue that many future RPG’s need to keep it shorter? How do they do it? Content, content, content.

The traditional RPG was meant for a Japanese audience, and audience that loved leveling up, either by traditional methods or over the long slog of many hours on a tactile grid, exchanging various experience points, using items, and casting various versions of fire.

That audience is shrinking in its overall profitability, probably for a multitude of reasons. But the point remains.

A shorter RPG, could be epic. It would be an event. Make leveling not a goal, let the events be what gains you something. A Zelda strength model for RPG! Does this put the game and skills more on a rail? To an extent, but it also means that, if you make the world large enough, that you are rewarded more for your ingénue than for how long you spend on a couch.

And SPACE is less a factor than ever. Imagine if you could create a game 5x the size of a big game, without the leveling to get in the way? Take graphics down a notch; the best games do. Counterstrike never looked cutting edge. World of Warcraft looks antiquated. Starcraft 2 is meant to run on even simple systems. Size matters, but the potential right now is smearing on the gameplay, on the addiction, . You would attract gamers who feel jaded by the new RPG’s, who are bored with current ones, or who simply don’t have the time or dedication they once did.

So when thinking about RPG’s and video games, what else do people do? More to the point: are there people who watch movies every day? Of course, but there’s also a lot of people who only watch movies on a Friday night.

Aha.

There’s also people who play Dungeons and Dragons once or twice a week, and a considerably smaller number who play every night.

A-ha!

Event gaming.

Take a big draw of World of Warcraft such as seasonal or sponsored events, and make that a game! Make a giant world that you can only see once! Keep it simple, maybe use a template or software, but tell an entire story arc in one night.

Just don’t make it an episode! People love episodes, but this ain’t Tivo! Make it an event, make it challenging enough for real gamers, but make it accessible! Charge pennies, but make millions. Put in-game advertising in on billboards, in witty ways to subsidize development costs, not as an add-on. This would let people in on a world, or a couple worlds. Make playing the game the reward, not persistently leveling up until 3 am the cost. Episodic gaming means that people have to be in a certain time, at a certain place. Have multiple servers? How about multiple start times? If movie theaters can do it, why can’t game companies? There is none of the overhead and a fraction of the investment- people bring their own seats! Hell, you can even charge more for off-peak gaming. Matinee servers! Smaller companies could offset larger costs during peak hours by diverting traffic to other hours, and create a significant margin overage during those peak hours and invest that balance into better servers! IF you have a real story to tell, you can get people excited. Keep them hungry! Everyone, from release schedules, from Blizzard to Bungie to Squenix, to Disney to Dreamworks to McDonald’s to Nintendo KNOWS THIS WORKS. But for video games, no one has ever tried it quite like this.

Then, you collect, say, a season’s worth of content, sell it as an anthology, and reap more profits! This is entirely possible with today’s technology. It would be fun gaming, renegade creativity. There’s a place for Pixar, but there’s also a place for Daffy Duck cartoons. Before Toy Story, remember, there was a DVD worth of animated shorts.

There’s gold in them thar hills, and the only limit is when people say “no”.

On pwning

2008-03-20T22:29:00.001-07:00

The internet doesn’t forget. That’s the dangerous thing about it. You either control all of the information, or you control nothing.

As Microsoft and Sony find, as Apple wonks find, as the world finds out about China, the simple fact of the matter is… the uncontrollable factors are over a billion. China plays a fool’s game, as does any marketer. They all knew about the iPhone, they all knew about the Macbook Air. So too, now, does the world cringe at what’s going on in Tibet.

Recently, a European has filed a trademark for the phrase Pwnage. They did not create this euphemism for the truly eclectic and jubilant moments of gamedom. Rather, they suffused this mighty slogan for their own good. And the internet will choke their rivers with fervent antagonism. They have the worst kind of marketing now, contending with having to simultaneously live up to the name, as well as putting out the product that they had originally intended. On a sub-major development budget, it is unlikely that they can succeed. Not impossible, but the stakes have been raised.

So this European developer must contend not only with releasing a new product, but also in defending their taking for themselves a phrase that is very public, and certainly not of their origination. Even via the courts, or even an impressive game, can they suppress the fact that they subjugated and stamped on something the public sees as a gimmick.

After all, if Apple and China can’t figure it out, how can they?

A Brave New World, 20 years ago.

2008-03-15T15:24:00.000-07:00

I am on my 25^th hour of Smash Brothers Brawl. The really scary part now is not the content, which is egregious in its effects on my time management. The producer says this will be the final one, but we all know that’s shenanigans. But what on earth could they put in the next generation, a fully HD release? I shudder to think what Nintendo could fit on a Blu Ray disc… mere sunlight may not be a sufficient alternative.

Now the Wii has a problem, and that problem is pricing. The 360 and the PS3 have this to a lesser extent, but the greatest problem is that anything outside of a highly marketed game doesn’t do too well in this day and age. The Wii’s numbers are … mixed.

The success of the Virtual Arcade, Xbox Live Arcade, and the Playstation 2 Greatest Hits packages shows that value can be drawn from nostalgia, but value also arises from value. Games that couldn’t sell well at full regular price are marked down. And this is what the Wii shall do. We all know that Zack and Wiki (and I know what I’m getting into) won’t sell as many copies as Metroid Prime 3, so why not sell it at a lower cost?

Well, they did, and it still didn’t do so hot. But at the lower price, you can bet they moved more copies than they would if the MSRP was 50. And in the interest of the gaming companies, they may have to re-examine some of their figures. Most games on the systems that are less anticipated or hyped could be offered at a lower price. Said console company raises their certification and licensing marginally to offset any loss, and the manufacturers get a bigger piece of cake by way of gross sales.

Some would say this is already happening with the Wii, that many “lower” titles take up shelf space. This is true, but the quality there is lacking. The difference may be that we need to show companies a greater potential in margin. It makes no mistake that nominal budgeting for a girl’s horse game will make a return even on the largely mistaken customers.

It is important to remember Atari at this moment, and it’s also important to remember the Game Boy. The Game Boy has games that are Classics with a capital C, but it also has shit that you couldn’t give away. It didn’t destroy the gaming business. On the contrary, it grew by leaps and bounds, and preserved a handheld monopoly where competition is only a recent phenomenon. The Wii model isn’t broken; it’s been used for years to the tune of tidier profit than any competitor.

Independent developers will find themselves drawn to the relative cost-effectiveness on the Wii, and big time players may find themselves allocating more resources. What’s working against Nintendo is that production costs (unless your name is Squenix) is going down as companies learn the ins and outs of the high definition consoles.

So the solution? A much lower price point on capital games. Give away a Mega Man, practically. Show that a top tier game can be bnought at the Wii (and ensure a lower MSRP to make it tempting) and you’ll see the difference. No More Heroes, for example, is not a fifty dollar game. But a 25 dollar game? I’d wager even Japan could say yes to that. The notion that all games need to be priced at identical prices has been obliterated by PC gaming and years of remixes and reissues. The future isn’t microtransactions, it’s in selling small in volume. It’s hard for many to remember, but what really touched off the RPG video game genre on the NES wasn’t Final Fantasy, but it was the inclusion of a failure of a game (Dragon Quest nee Warrior) that was given away free with a marketing tool. It worked, sales improved, and Americans have enjoyed RPG’s of a similar texture (if not series) for the better part of twenty years. It wasn’t that the game was a hit, it was that it was affordable, acceptable, and paved a path for bigger, prettier things to come. I think a similar model could work with the Wii. It’s only up for someone to try…

Wow

2008-03-09T22:46:00.000-07:00

Without any reservation, the game of the year is Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Nothing can come close in terms of content. No game has made me feel like a kid again quite like this.

The closest I can come to this game is the HeMan Christmas Special. It’s a largely forgettable piece of schlock, but it was basically how all the rules come apart, and suddenly Skeletor is trying to save Christmas. That doesn’t make sense, but it does because it’s CHRISTMAS. That’s how Smash Brothers works, in an exuberant role where sense is made simply on youthful wonder. The pieces fit because our brain makes it so, and the writers make sure all the right moves are there. Suddenly, you cheer for HeMan and Skeletor.

Nintendo is on a role, and I realize how this game was made, really, for kids my age. My first Mario was Super Mario Brothers. My first Zelda game was The Legend of Zelda. We are well past the point where a seasoned gamer doesn’t necessarily have the same pedigree, but for them, this cake known as SSBB is no less dense, with no less topping. It is an exuberant love letter to gamers and especially those who can tolerate Nintendo. I say tolerate because, quite simply, there are those who don’t think these games matter.

Nintendo games are about pure joy. Immersive fun, the unexpected moments, and scope. Between this and Super Mario Galaxy, I feel I have two of the best games for gamers ever made.

I can’t get over how it felt when I fired up my Gamecube, and against all reason plugged in my Gamecube controller. The reason for this is simple- rumble. I want to rumble. I want to feel the game, as that’s a big part of what made melee so immersive. It works, it works like an old friend. A couple hours in, I discovered the game demos for old school classics. When I found myself, on a 1080p plasma, gliding and soaring and jumping through the first level of Super Mario Bros. demo, I felt like a kid again. A stupid, hurt kid who likes to imagine.

I don’t want this game to bore me. I never want to find every secret, find its missions borderline on the tedious. I want this game to excite me. And the best part? The game seems so full, so rich and so ready, that I can honestly say it never wants me to feel that way either. How many studios ever, ever aim for that? Not even Nintendo, not even Bungie, not even Blizzard. It’s so big.

I feel like I’ve been given a towering cake, loaded with candles and frosting for my birthday. I feel like any sort of review structure would hinder what I feel is a totally visceral game. I can find very few faults.

Reviewers fault the friend codes, the lack of online messaging, and a structured tournament. The fools… this game is about fun. The ire and languages and consequences of the regular online gaming community are not here. Nintendo has made too many inroads with families to risk the kind of language and people that Halo abides by. It makes perfect business sense, and the hassles are short-lived. Connecting online tonight was hard, but no system is perfect. Slowly, I started vs one other person. Then two, then four. Suddenly it was a friend’s basement again. A girl’s bed. The glow of the Christmas tree in the next room, the smell of forgotten pizza. It triggers emotions and memories. It’s the Yankee Candle of gaming.

If I have any complaint, it’s that the graphics have become too detailed in this game. Normally, that’s not a bad thing, but Nintendo characters have always had a bit of a singular color pop. By adding shading and graphics, it tends to make the character design look busy. It’s an odd point, but I do believe that many sort of games need simplicity. Pikachu looks especially terrifying: the added lighting and effects have made it look less like a cartoon and more like a possessed stuffed animal. Which is sad, because if you look at the Pikachu in Melee, you see the cartoon electric rat in all its bouncy happiness. I wish they had gone for a simpler, cleaner look with more polish, instead of more detail. The more real something becomes, the more fake it feels. Advent Children feels a lot more static than the Iron Giant, for example, despite the vastly superior visuals of AC.

But back to the game. I am so, so glad I bought this. I’m so, so glad I can literally play anyone in the world who has this game in the entire world (something not even XBL could fathom). I’m so, so glad I can share this with friends. What game could dare live up to that?

Joy

2008-03-04T23:51:00.001-08:00

People play games and this brings them joy. Mostly It will be true when many hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, open Super Smash Brothers Brawl next week and proceed to have childhood icons beat each other up.

Joy is a funny thing, and it’s so important that people see it and recognize it.

Today two things happened that remind me of joy.

The first is that Gary Gygax died. Gygax created Dungeons and Dragons, which had a profound impact on gaming of the past and today. Final Fantasy wouldn’t have been what it is without Gary Gygax. Japanese gaming was influenced by a Westerner’s tabletop game. How crazy is that? How impossible is that notion today?

From what I’ve seen of the man, he was happy. He enjoyed his game, he enjoyed tweaking it and he was a social, happy man in a Hawaiian shirt. And he dreamed of fighting dragons, orcs, and saving the world with your friends decades before World of Warcraft. As a gamer, you can’t help but tip your hat at a man who so defines what it means to dream bigger than the chair you’re sitting in. Remember that. Remember how dragons are made, not simply fought.

And what hits me closer to home is the retirement of Brett Favre. I consider him the perfect athlete. I have seen many people play numerous kinds of games over the years, but I’ve never seen anyone play as jubilantly as Brett Favre. My hometown team the Chicago Bears went through 21 quarterbacks in the time the Green Bay Packers had one. One! He did it, despite pain, despite the grind of a media-centric league.

Earlier this year I caught a bit of a game. He threw a touchdown, his team had left the field. He went up to a referee to high five him. The referee looked confused, but gave him a high five.

I grew up watching Michael Jordan dominate. And I liked it and considered him a hero. Looking back, he was a gambling chauvinist with a dark edge, arrogant to his core. I have been the fan of a team on the receiving end of a 17 year whuppin’, and I can’t bring myself to say one negative thing about Brett. The joy in which he played football is what I want my kids to have. It’s what most people wish they had in their jobs. I hate to see him go so much. Bears fans may say unkind words about the Packers, but I would bet Harry Caray’s glasses that if he ever expressed an interest in playing for the Bears, this city would move heaven and earth for our rival. He wasn’t just damn good, he was a damn class act.

When I play games, I want to play them like Brett.

Learning to play nice, completely by accident: The Soccer/Pokemon Principle 2.0…

2008-02-27T09:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the New York Philharmonic played in North Korea . This is monumental because this is the first cultural exchange in years between the two companies that didn’t involve the words “nuclear” or “failed”.

It’s being touted as an act of normalization of relations between the two countries, and I don’t doubt this. It was a very good thing. The United States uses military games as a way to simulate combat, and also as recruiting tools. There is no doubt, and no question, that video games involve egregious conflict. In countries where the world plays a game, we remain competitive. But they also provide some potential for normalizing relations far beyond the norm.

Anyone who says the culture of Japanese video games and cultures doesn’t pervade beyond a convention of teenagers hasn’t understood how swiftly and soundly our animation studios have been won over, how commanding the Japanese car brands have been, how well Sony is marketed. We couldn’t dream of hostile relations with Japan , and it was done over commerce and art. More than just a fad, this endurance shows a real, globalized and mutual cultural exchange. It didn’t change the game, it made the game bigger. Both countries are still competitive, many of our companies lost. That doesn’t mean Japan won, necessarily, as their recession last decade was violent, and the loss of the last great war reminds them.

It’s a lot harder to kill someone who played music for you. It’s a lot harder to beat up somebody you play Halo with. There’s a humanizing factor when you interact with someone. It goes beyond gaming, which can be competitive, but as Europe has shown… countries that fiercely play soccer with each other have a much harder time killing each other. When a country’s soccer team stops playing, you know what’s going to happen next. But the fact of the matter is, for those that care about soccer, you know where Manchester United are from. You know where the stadium is from Belgium . The world fills in slightly based on YOUR interests, not in spite of them. Largely, maps lack the entertainment value of Tetris or a physical sport. This is telling. In a gaming world, people of different nations and beliefs will be united under the belief that teenage boys on Halo are the greatest evil on the earth.

This is not a solution for world peace, but it is a blueprint for how our generation could be more competitive and more peaceful than the ones before. The protest folk singer/songwriter Pete Seeger said recently that unlike Vonnegut and other thinkers of the last age, he is very optimistic because the free flow of information has a truly revolutionary potential. This is not an opinion to take lightly.

And I agree. World of Warcraft is a great many things, but if you know you play with a fellow from New Zealand , you are more inclined to know the spot on the map. Know the spot, know the person, and your brain kicks slightly, you may look at the map. Knowing the various capitols of the world is important. Learning that you got a thumbs up from a fellow 7 year old for your fire lizard-possum creature from a small city outside of Moscow ? You’ve learned 4 things with the latter: Where Moscow is, where the ping came from, where you are in relation, and that a human noticed you. No classroom can teach that last part, the part that personalizes the memory, makes it more permanent. But games? They’re doing it right now.

It should come as no surprise that Americans lag with geography. And we can’t teach geography in the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego method. But with information and the internet (which my sister has navigated, if memory fails, since the womb) we have the potential for her to see where her friends are. You can’t make it about pen pals, because those are lame and would never work. You can’t make it into a map-based video game. You can make it about friends, and points, and colorful cartoon characters, and teach geography as some random accident. That’s the goal, in my opinion, the random accident of learning where your friend is, and having that spot in your mind. It is more effective and permanent memory encoding than a training program, and it doesn’t have that explicit warning sign kids see that learning is happening.. It doesn’t destroy a competitive nature, in fact games encourage it. When I look at sites like Neopets, you see the potential, the pervasive nature of the internet, and learn that we have the potential for a cultural exchange that wouldn’t make things like the New York Philharmonic any less important. It would make them a lot more expected

And that, my friends, may be quite impressive.

When you wish upon a star

2008-02-21T18:53:00.001-08:00

http://imagineerebirth.blogspot.com/2007/04/one-of-our-dinosaurs-is-missing.html

The link above is one of the most intelligent and disheartening posts I’ve ever seen.

I make no qualms about it that I think the Best Animated Picture is a complete farce. It was created by the MPAA because Beauty and the Beast came damn close to winning the Academy Award Best Picture. No lie. Look it up. A decent, artistic movie came along. It’s not my favorite Disney, but it is intensely beautiful and a hell of a fairy tale and any daughter or son of mine will grow up in a world where something like that magic exists on a bookshelf they can reach. But it’s not film. Not really, and this attitude will hold it back in this hemisphere long after South Park, The Simpsons, and Pixar thrash around this generation, challenging our assertions about what a cartoon is and does. Anime does this too, but as I’ve noted before they view animation on an entirely different level than we do. Attitudes change, and they will change slowly, but the ultimate prize of acclaim is officially off limits. Can’t happen. It’s not that an animated movie couldn’t be the best of the year, it’s just that officially it can never be.

When Ratatouille wins Best Picture, know that it simply is not being allowed to compete with No Country for Old Men or Juno or There Will Be Blood because it’s animated. Not because it’s less of a movie, but because of how it was created.

In video gaming, thus far, we have not reached this point, and that is reason enough to hope. So far, we don’t have to have that fear. This generation of gamers have embraced Guitar Hero so fervently, and Rock Band so feverishly, that games have changed. Where once something like Pa Rappa the Rappa seemed cute, the idea of a music game with a controller seems like slumming it.

What can gamers do? You can support change and reward quality, not name brands. Rewarding Sega for the latest stool they’ve squatted out with a Sonic brand, not good.

I’m thinking about this today because Metacritic just angered a shitbrick out of the chairman of EA, and it made the real world news of the Associated Press. Not because EA had a bad profiting year. It had an amazingly profitable year. It’s because games scores are down for the company.

And I like this man. He realizes something you don’t get in movies, that you don’t even get in music. He gets that before you begin to lose money, you begin to lose quality. That’s what goes first, then your marketshare drops out And it angered the shit out of him. Understanding the consumer, as well as the critics, is going to be an obsession for the game world, simply because they have to control quality AND volume.

And friends, that is, quite literally, where we come in.

The Sky's the limit

2008-02-18T21:51:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me lately, speaking of Sega and other acts of failure, how wondrous games are when they are happy accidents. If you look towards the best works of a particular studio, it is the result of happy accidents. Final Fantasy was named as such because of how doomed Square felt at the time. Mario’s body the result of the limitations of the Donkey Kong consoles. Masterchief was created to demo an overhead game. Somewhere, somebody thought the notion of a dance pad in front of notes moving up a screen would be a very keen idea.

Games thrive on creativity, and they also thrive on accidents. This article is about something that may, at one point, been an accident, but now I’m fairly convinced is a company policy.

Being sick will do odd things. The first thing is that I spent half the day sleeping, the other half reading books and playing video games. It would be relaxing if it wasn’t for the nausea, sidesplitting pain, and the inadequate bodily temperature control.

Today I played several games I am very fond of, and enjoy greatly. They are

-Super Smash Bros Melee

-Mario Galaxy

-Halo

And I was beating Super Mario Galaxy again, when the ending struck. The ending of the game feature’s an infant’s cry. What a unique choice for a video game, I thought. It strikes an optimistic tone, a vulnerable one, not something you see very often.

And then I thought some more, and I realized that Nintendo consistently has an open skies policy. If this is a happy accident, it speaks to their ideas.

Open skies refers to the ability to have large expanses of … well, sky. You can pepper the background a bit, but you get a near three-dimensional feeling. It makes things feel brighter, and it lends scope. The larger the scope, the greater the immersion. It’s this emphasis on scale that makes early Final Fantasy games with their overhead map so much more daunting than the most impressive CG render.

But if you look at Nintendo games, they almost always feature open areas. Sometimes there’s stuff, many times there is not.

This is not exclusive to Nintendo games, of course, but I believe they spend a greater deal thinking about how to expand the world with what amounts to very little.

When I play non-Nintendo games like Banjo-Kazooie or Sonic, or racing games like Gran Turismo, there is often sky and plenty of it. But there’s a sense that everything is cluttered and overly busy. Buildings on the left, cut off from the world and forced into a decidedly smaller area, there is a much more “on the rails” approach. Nintendo avoids this.

I think I first realized Nintendo cared about how to make a world seem larger when Ocarina of Time came out. How many games reward you with different noises, hues, and emotions as the sun sets over a lake? In a game where it has nothing to do with the main goal, the presence of such a beautiful mechanic only makes it seem more real.

When you look at Mario Kart, the worlds are open and free. Other racers, including other titles, their view doesn’t take into account scope. Everything is cluttered.

I realized this must be a policy because it’s so damn consistent. In games where scope is tightened considerably, such as in Metroid Prime 2, the world doesn’t feel as immersive, and it’s much more unpleasant. That half the game features unattractive color palates in both the Light and Dark world doesn’t help, but the point remains. There isn’t the sense of grandeur that was evident in the original Prime. With sky cities, and tunnels with useless amounts of room, Prime 3 pulled back. The sky appeared.

And then I get to Halo, which is a game series I like. Once again, there is a sense of scale in the large, open air world. When the game pulls in to a series of corridors, it feels more intense after having so much room before. I can honestly say I have no interest in Doom as a series. Too many damn corridors.

MMORPG’s can show this too. The wide open world of World of Warcraft is commendable in how well it handles the near and the far. The detail, the scale, it’s a world of decided beauty that feels rather realistic.

Obviously core gameplay, shrewd marketing, and overall quality help, but I can’t help but notice how many hit games feature scale so handily, and how many games that come close in quality (but never quite hit it) feel so stunted and restricted. Skies bring scale, and in an age of tremendous 3D capabilities, it’s amazing how few designers have succeeded at it, and how consistent certain companies are at showing it.

Achievement Unlocked. Now what?

2008-02-10T21:43:00.000-08:00

Achieved!

Perhaps the greatest moment in the history of videogames last year was on South Park. After Stan and Kyle reach a million points… they get.

Congratulations… you are both FAGS.

I know how to rock, and there is no achievement for it. I have destroyed and pissed off unholy good Halo players, I infuriate gamers who take my “button mashing” lightly.

Angsty told me part of it is as an epenis (more on that later) but the second part… because then other onliners will take you more seriously… well that’s a bit odd to me right there.

The idea that you want other games to treat you seriously is…vexing. My personal opinion is that you want them to bring their A game all the time. When I play someone, I want to face them and win, to hell with the rules. To hell with their score. This is the playing field, this is now. Why let anything else matter?

The other part with achievement scores is that they are indicative of nothing. A higher achievement score may be earned in first person shooters. Another example- does my elementary school spelling champ trophy have anything to do with my stats as a baseball pitcher? Both are in a forum of competition with my peers. The thing with XBLA is that they are equal… but are they? It’s not an indicator of what you do aside from play video games. Now individual medals and stats within a game, I fully understand. It’s the cumulative score, and the quest for the cumulative, that baffles me. The only thing it tells people, is that you play a lot of video games and want more achievements.

In terms of gaming… I don’t get it.

Then there is the domain of the e-penis. Penis contests in general, I have no desire to partake in. I have a big, awesome television, but I don’t rub that in. Do gamers need status?

That’s a difficult question. The old breed of gamers spent a good deal of their lives feeling the spurn of many peers. The hardcore gamers, of note in the MMORPG world, are not relented upon by their peers. While geek is indeed chic, the life of a gamer has often been one of the closet dork, a habit pursued whilst women were off somewhere being screwed. And liking it.

Status via e-penis, is just more flexing in a community that doesn’t need flexing. It needs and craves expansion, and e-penis hierarchy, for oneself or to show others, does little to assuage this notion that gamers are any different than the high school so many of them lament. Status was the death of them, why inflict it on an entire subset of games. Armor contests are the same. Have we gamers eschewed the Ambercrombie and Fitch label, the Air Jordans, for our own brand of status symbols?

It stifles me.

Now I get the point of points, of achieving the higher score, of acknowledging statistics within a game, but those specific stats, in their raw form or in a broader form (via a genre) perhaps. And a score is quantifiable and limited to a certain game. In King of Kong, we know who are the best Donkey Kong challengers, and we see their struggle within that one game. That one player is an absolute pro at DDR have anything to do with the story? Would it?

Status and games are destined to look silly. In the Wizard, poor Fred Savage, who loves video games and wants to achieve the very best (proto-Ash?) is intimidated by his competitor Lucas, who shows off his Power Glove. “It’s so bad.”

And some 19 years later, that clip is lampooned at every turn. Why?

Because it’s a fucking video game. And none of it matters. Attempts to look badass look ridiculous. Gamers don’t take you more seriously based on achievement points, individual statistics do. More, and perhaps most importantly, beating them makes them take you seriously.

Microsoft is on to something with the points system, but the effect some 2 years into the 360 is a bit too many miss than hit. If rankings came more into play, statistics in game, you could host tournaments to see who’s the best at Halo or Call of Duty 4, or who can have the best kill score in the first level of Devil May Cry. These stats are already there, but they are not pursued in any sort of quantifiable way that could lead to more challenges, to wanting to win.

I’d be fine if they had achievements that you earned over multiple games, given off by tags in the system that are already there to unlock what are currently known as achievements. A sniper badge earned over Call of Duty 4, two Halos, and Turok is more impressive than garnering points out of a rental of Katamari Damacy. The first way tells me to take your prowess with the game’s rifle seriously, the other one tells me you take yourself seriously. Which one is going to make the match better?

Which one is truly going to expand the gameplay, motivate, and challenge your skills? It would take more work and more money, but it would be the return of the arcade score post, to letting gamers puruse and track each other meaningfully, not with blind arbitrary number schemes that don't speak a wit about how this next match will go.
And that would be so bad.

Censorship and You.

2008-02-05T10:06:00.000-08:00

The important thing to remember about censorship is that for families, that boilerplate group that contains 2.5 kids, is that both parties want to court them. Whatever inroads the ESRB has made, or whatever a political wonk tells you, the simple fact remains that no mainstream candidate has any desire to court the gamer vote. However this may change in the future.

There are those who say that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in general is hostile to violent games. This is, in fact, true. It is also true that the past 8 years of a Republican presidency has led to more censorship in mainstream mediums such as song broadcasts. The conservative mouthpiece Fox News is trying like heck to issue an apology to EA, for facetious comments made about Mass Effect.

Politics are not good for video games. They are not, and have not, been good for movies or music, either.

The fascinating thing about American censorship is how cyclical it is. Unlike Germany , Britain , or Japan , who have very strict laws, the interpretation of ours are always in flux.

This is a good thing for gamers. Bill Clinton was also good to gamers. It was during his administration that the ESRB was founded. Games like Mortal Kombat pushed the genre into bloodsport, Doom was the FPS de rigeur, and Grand Theft Auto 3 was being programmed.

If you look at tv’s, movies and at music, right now they are enduring a greater push for censorship now than in the past 3 years. It is compulsory that something similar happen with gaming. The best news for TV viewers is that Michael Powell, former chairman of the FCC, and chief inquisitor behind Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, was effectively run out of Washington for his myopic views. The new chairman is much more concerned with hammering out the digital signal transition and cable’s various scheming.

What should further buoy gamers is that the strict sort of treatment towards gaming has been met with reliable support from the judicial system. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich famously tired to make a law prohibiting the sales of games to minors, which was struck down soundly.

My point, however, is that the government is reliably hostile towards gaming, and that is something we should be used to. True sea change will not occur at that level with this current generation of politicians.

And I wouldn’t worry too much, really. Movies survive, tastes are what change. A writer on Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles lamented that you couldn’t make that movie today. That is due more to cautious executives.

Now radio is being hammered, but not with any new legislation. The rules have a Reagan or pre-Reagan date, it’s only now that they are being enforced. The fines are higher, but that’s what the current dominating generation supports. We, as gamers, are not it. Yet.

And our tastes, in video games, often lean towards. As long as you can make the case that people will buy it, people will make it. Manhunt 2 may in fact have sold better because of its added attention, not in spite of it.

So don’t vote or think about voting based on video game legislation. Because no one is non your side.

My Evil Monkey Brain

2008-02-03T21:17:00.000-08:00

People tend to think of video games as a waste of time. I think that, for many lifelong gamers, there is a distinct difference between gamers and people who don’t game in the way they view the world. It has little to do with violence, or time management. It is a much simpler, much more sublime process. There is a lot to do with dexterity and concentration and aim, which are good points of fine motor skill which are, in general, the result of minutiae and the incorporation of training exercises into a form of enjoyable play.

My evil monkey brain sees a coconut. The coconut contains delicious coconutty goodness. So I try to break it with my thumbs. No good. I try a wall. No good. I try a big rock… and make a mess. I try a sharply angled rock, and the monkey eats.

Humans can problem solve, and this is a skill that many video games teach.

At Best Buy, a gentleman can come up to me and say his TV is not working. I’ll ask him if he tried plugging in the wires, and tried a different set of wires, was on the right input. All simple questions that most people cannot answer. Now a gamer, from the old console gypsie who moved the systems all around the house to the young kids whose TV’s are far easier, there is a consistency. We try everything to get the TV (or other problem) to work.

Video games are not the sole provider of good problem solving skills, but good games are. Games that are not… well, they’re becoming more common. My biggest problem with Guitar Hero is not that one isn’t spending those hours learning to play a guitar, it’s that you are learning a set routine. In games such as Sonic the Hedgehog, you are rewarded for your routine.

I am a reactive gamer, and my evil monkey brain dislikes learning repetition in a video game. This is easily seen in Guilty Gear matches with Angsty Gaijin.

I am accused of button mashing. It is true I don’t know what the buttons don’t’ do in some elaborate chain, but I do know what buttons hurt, what buttons block, and my goal is to hit somebody. I do damage, because my mind is not encumbered by patterns, it is only that I have a simple arsenal that no one expects because video game fanatics who learn games like Guilty Gear learn how to do moves. I simply learn how to hit somebody, and that makes me a threat because I am not picky about how it’s done. I know some combos, but I don’t care. I want to hit, and I hit.

There are reactive gamers, and there are system gamers. Angsty is a systems gamer. Do ____ without ____ and master ____ and you’ll probably win. This is the basis for games such as Guitar Hero, DDR, and any game where perfection is rewarded. It is satisfactory in the fact that you can master a very complicated string of issues with success.

To a reactive gamer, this is positively droll. Now games are systems. X then Y then Z and maybe a bit of A again to get to the final goal or score. Games that reward reactions… well, I tend to frustrate people.

Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, and Halo. I have a very limited amount of skill for memorization, but these are games with what we can call random events. A mallet from the sky, for instance, or the randomness of weapons combat in Mario Kart or weapon placement in an open may in the wider stages of Halo. In these environments, I am a juggernaut of pwnage. A reactionary gamer learns what they need to win, and how to use the environment to their advantage.

Systems gamers will play those games (particularly Halo and Smash) and learn the exact timing cues for many of the characters, grenade throws, etc.). I will admit this gives them a better chance to beat me, but not every time. Never every time.

System gamers weaknesses is that they are obsessed with the pattern and the execution. Always. If Angsty is a certain distance from the screen, I can almost be certain he’ll dash towards or execute a distance attack. I can beat him, and beat him into the ground, because I don’t care about what it takes to get the job done. It’s not a system of moves, it’s about the openings, and nothing, nothing else.

This is on my mind because tonight was the Super Bowl, and arguably one of the greatest football teams on the planet was beaten by a team with a considerably more reactive effort.

As watching the Super Bowl is not a matter of an event but rather one of avid interest, I shall put forth a few facts.

The New England Patriots are a better football team. They won 18 games. They drill and drill and drill and drill and can execute most plays better than any team I have ever seen.

So why did they lose tonight?

In the leadup to the game, there has been a lot written on sports pages about how each team plays the game.

Bill Bellichick is the coach of the Patriots, and he’s one of the first coaches to practice the art of metrics. Measure everything you and everyone else does. Find the perfect play. Memorize the moves. Learn the weaknesses, and execute.

His quarterback is a laser, setting and beating records. He has thrown more touchdown in a season than any big name, won more games in one season than Brett Favre, John Elway, Joe Montana, Dan Marino, or anyone else a casual passerby of this sport might recognize.

The Giants studied how to contain the perfection. Throw the other team off balance. Their quarterback is Eli Manning, who is good but often erratic.

Indeed, Tom Brady wasn’t on his best game, his throws were off the mark, but he’s still a laser, and coming into the last 5 minutes of the game, they were leading.

Eli Manning made the play of his life. He broke a tackle of about 3 defenders, composed himself, and fired a rocket downfield about 30 yards. That set up a touchdown that won the game. They beat perfection.

My point is that you DO have to learn the moves, but you have to learn how to adapt quickly in an open field. The other player will learn you, and that is fine, you have to learn how they’ve learned you. And then you find out what you want, you find the small leak, you compose yourself, and you throw. And perfection and the record books are soundly denied.

And that’s why I win at Guilty Gear sometimes, because it’s not about the system, it’s about finding that opening. There is no time for style, for the playbook. It is only a time for letting instinct and dexterity and to heaven or hell with the pattern. I like the moves I have. I don’t care for combos, or ultra super moves.

Tournaments have become the refuge of systems gamers because these are games and they do have high scores or a set speed, the master of which results in high wins. I can’t play Halo on Saturday nights because there are people who ALWAYS play Halo on Saturday nights, instead of having regular interests like girls, alcohol, and not being in your living room. Perfection is not for a video game. Discovery, inventiveness and cleverness, those are my gaming values, and it’s something that very good video games reward.

There is something to be said for rote memorization, and Guitar Hero sells millions. But in games of perfection, of excellence, being scrappy and direct is a bastard, and always will be. That’s enough for me.

Incidentally, I read this article and I think it is another good take on the game and talks about the differences in style. There is no right way to win. There is only your way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/sports/football/04rhoden.html?hp

Wii've got a problem

2008-01-31T19:09:00.001-08:00

The Wii lacks quality third-party games. In my opinion (perhaps the best/worst disclaimer ever), this is why.

THE FUTURE!!!...? Back catalogues used to mean a lot less than they do now, but in hard years, the viability of a Sonic Mega Collection, or Grand Theft Auto (coming to XBLA) means a lot of easy, easy money. The Wii is a different system. It’s controller is different, and the games are not in high definition. If you were to create a truly innovative, mind-changing game, would you want to tie it down to programming that, no matter how successful the Wii is, will need costly revisions the next time gameplay shifts?

As for High Definition, if you are looking at your back catalogue, you probably realize you don’t want to spend time doing costly revisions… why do them? Almost every last TV bought in every last profitable market on earth is going to be in high definition. You can’t change the past, but why would you antiquate your catalogue by 2008 standards, let alone 2028?

The other problem is not the kids who will buy anything. We have our notions of how great it was back in the old days, but there was a lot of crap on the market place, released by top tier companies. We owned it, and it should be no surprise that the kids today are buying the same crap we did, just with a different cartoon character on the front.

The other problem is choices. I am aware how tetchy Japan is about releasing most of their products on non-Japanese consoles, but for the most part companies like Konami (with one exception, for now) and Capcom have no problem whoring on the two releasing on the two big systems. In markets like Europe and America (where the profit comes from) there is no incentive in exclusivity. Because of the Wii’s considerably less power, you lock yourself in to one market. I’m sure many a game designer would love to play with it, but who’s gonna pay them?

Finally, as anyone who realizes just how much corn is going for these days since ethanol became a topical solution to high gas prices, necessity is the mother of invention. And here, there is no need to. Unless your name is Atari, this generation is treating game companies very well. Maybe you release nothing but crap (which is selling). Maybe you release the glut of your titles on the Xbox 360. Maybe your company who had an exclusivity contract had a megahit, and now you only have to go public, twiddle your thumbs, and wait for the money to knock, buy you out, and give you enough money to start your own “dream” studio. There is simply no need for any other company other than Nintendo to reinvent their “wheel”. The market is too good. Nintendo needed a change after the Gamecube and N64. But as this decade has gone, no one else really has to. Sony may be in a pinch soon, and Squenix’ profitability is going to be measured in the low single digits until they can produce viable and timely games that can attract new customers.

Sad? Certainly, but the nice thing about the Wii means Nintendo gets to fight to live another generation, and it means they have a license to print money. But so long as everyone else is printing money, they won’t be breaking down their door.

I smell something, and it's not chili dogs

2008-01-31T13:18:00.000-08:00

A brief addendum.

Sega is the one gaming company that delivers what gamers want, at least on a surface level. Their brands work. It may take the better part of a decade for them, but another sequel is always coming. One reason traditional Sonic games, and by extension the 3D ones, is that they rely on a gaming principle that is less and less excusable in each generation.

It’s the difference between “Aha!” and “oops, you missed”. Put another way, it is the difference between rewarding gamers for pulling the trigger, and accurately aiming.

Let’s step back from Sega and even consoles and reminisce about good old Commander Keen. Good game, that. It was an epic platformer with a large following. Puzzles were about placing yourself and jumping at EXACTLY the right moment. But, there were also plenty of “Aha!” moments. You could be running across a level, and oops something hit you in the head! Aha. It wore thin, and the styling never adapted, and the series languished. As in real life, people don’t like to be blindsided. We like a reason.

Back to Sega, every mainstream Sonic game from the 1^st to … and the Secret Rings relies on Aha!. The exploration factor, a larger world, is largely given. Even in Sonic Adventures, the “best” 3-D game, they pulled back the camera for some truly beautiful runs, but all the danger was up close. When you factor in the lack of smoothly going back in the latest game, when 100% completion is an imperative… you fail. Aha!

Mario games created a different strategy, and one that’s arguably better. When you miss, it’s usually pretty clear why. Very little is hidden in the way of an unexpected obstacle. Does this make for an easier game? To an extent, but it also lends to replayability, immersion, and fun. The game you are dealing with, the obstacles that you are dealing iwht, are completely on the screen that is in front of you, and each frame, each bit of game distance holds both a challenge and the solution for that challenge. In the “Aha!” style, the obstacle may be just out of the field of view. This is actually a less realistic model, because generally we can see what’s in front of us and react. Immersion lessens because you are dealing more with a flawed, less human game design that is likely to punish anything but rote memorization and repeated trial and error. In a Mario game, you deal with what is on the screen, and only what is on the screen.

Now some may say that it is simply because Sonic moves so fast, it rewards quick thinking and instinct. This is false. The vantage point is too close to react quickly in the old games, and in the new games, where the technology and level breadth is less an issue, the cameras in dangerous encounters are still tightly pulled in., something hidden, something new Aha!

How can I prove this is really an intentional part of the game design of Sonic? By taking out the Sega element. If you think and look at Sonic Adventures 2 for the Game Boy Advance, one of the best platforming games in a decade, you may notice it has more in common with a Mario game than a Sonic title. Thank Capcom! First and foremost, the points where speed and gameplay meet (instead of the faster speed of moving from one location to another) is greatly reduced. You face obstacles at a slower velocity. And what’s more, a good deal of the game is slowed down. You must react to what’s on the screen, and there is no “Aha” some indeterminately close distance away. You deal with what is on the screen. The vantage point for everything also shows a slightly pulled back camera from the earlier Hedgehog titles, to almost Mario scale. This allows you to see what’s going on, but it is also an issue of space management, garnering frames of location their individual challenges, not testing on how deftly you barrel on to the next one. As games become more immersive, even the two dimensional ones, consistently punishing the player for the unseen is a flawed strategy. And it’s dying.

And if it wasn’t for branding, I’d argue that this style of gameplay would be relegated to only the most misguided and mediocre of games. But branding pays off, although usually not for the consumer if the product is inconsistent. And it is woefully inconsistent, and to be frank about it, always has been with this company. But we love our cuddly wuddly cartoons!

An Inconvenient Truth

2008-01-30T21:54:00.001-08:00

An Inconvenient Truth

It is my unfortunate duty to try and help Angsty Gaijin end his own personal fairy tale. In his latest review, a pan, he is sorry that the company that he had to pan for phoning in a Wii-make was Sega. Well, I’m sorry to report this, but anyone who believes Sega is the same company as it once was is wrong. Sure, the name is the same, and they have a blue hedgehog, but more on them in a minute.

My point is that believing that Sega produces quality products is a lie you tell yourself because of the past. It has not produced a completely viable hit in a long time, longer than any development house currently still in business. They rely on brand cache, and unlike Nintendo or Square Enix they do not foster quality so much as shortcuts. This isn’t a shame. It is simply business, and whatever love you have of that house, it comes from the branding alone.

Sega once produced some great games, but now they cash in on remakes or innovative extreme versions. This doesn’t work.

Once recently I read on IGN that Mario’s shape and color scheme were made to fit the very basic constrictions of the game cabinet that would become Donkey Kong. Just think about that, this fat fuck of a plumber became the most recognizable icon in gaming, and it was created simply out of creativity.

Sonic was the product of marketing. Ok, ok. We need a Mario game, and uh, we need it to be MORE EXTREME! So what’s cool? Animals! What’s cooler than that? An animal in SHOES, fighting in levels of dramatic scope and zinging in and out. And it will be our mascot! We need a mascot to combat the plumber.

Sonic was birthed as an alternative, and the character was designed with the stated purpose of being cool.

The first thing about being cool is being yourself, and that is something that Sega only accomplished once, with the Genesis. Over 15 years ago.

The company had gone with the angle of “Let’s be the more extreme company”. The games were faster, Mortal Kombat was bloodier, the Xmen and Ninja Turtle games were better, and in Aladdin the title character carried a scabbard (whereas in the Super Nintendo version he was relegated to jumping and throwing apples).

And to top it all off, Sony soon decided to scream at consumers. SEGA!

The Sega Genesis was indeed an extreme system. Its brands worked, and its losers-don’t compromise approach to game design approach was in direct competition with Nintendo’s conservative mindset.

Now here’s where things get a bit tetchy for Sega. We grew up. And games demanded a certain level of quality.

As a person who has played many Sonic games and many Marios, well, let’s look at the list.

Altered Beast

Sonic games

Ecco the Dolphin

Nights

House of the Dead.

These are all common examples of what Sega is truly capable of. This perplexes me, because it is a list with holes.

Altered Beast is a short game with limited replayability. It was an early and heavily marketed bundle, but its length and gameplay wears thin.

Sonic holds a special place for many, but one has to let the story go. Mario games hold up better, they sell better, and the brand quality control is far more reliable. The level design, which punishes you for things not yet seen, is a staple that Sega never gives up. They like that “Aha!” even today. Gamers, I’ve found, are turned off.

Ecco- great idea, but looking at it now most gamers wouldn’t give it the time of day.

Nights- notwithstanding a mediocre sequel, this wasn’t a perfect game then, it wasn’t a perfect game now. Compared to the heavyweight titles that usually garner geek nostalgia, it’s merely ok. It’s fun and somewhat innovative, but the heart strings of geek gamers don’t pay bills. It didn’t the first time, it won’t on the Wii. The brand had a lot of marketing potential, but ultimately…meh.

House of the Dead is actually a fun game with a fair amount of universal appeal. The first problem is that arcades died. And somehow, inexplicably, playing Dam Dar Re Ram on Dance Dance Revolution was going to ensure you more female interest than headshotting a zombie. The second problem is a fairly weak peripherals. From the NES Zapper until the Dance pad, nothing caught on to an extremely marketable degree. That has since changed, but not for shooting games.

So right from the beginning, I would argue Sega had produced games that were fun, innovative, but stubbornly average. And as gamers got pickier, they would pick up on more nuance, see more seams. We were once gamers who played about 50 games. Now we have played hundreds. Small flaws then are unforgivables today.

And business happened to Sega too. The teams that designed these games are not the same, the company is not the same. This is perfectly natural, but somehow they never forgot to stop pushing the extreme angle. Even the system with the most sanguine and romantic name of all the consoles, the Dreamcast, was marketed and is still beloved by the hardcore gamers. Shenmue and Marvel Vs Capcom notwithstanding, the system and its games are niche items that need to stand on their own. The fans weren’t necessarily with them back then, there is little inclination for them to fall in line now.

So the company, needing cash, will pump out more Sonic sequels, and hope that the internets is right and more people will flock to their games. And they do this well, but the reason you see more mediocre products with the name Sega is because they are impatient, they go through cash too quickly, and if they ever asked gamers what they truly wanted fixed during game development, it doesn’t show.

The brand is done, guys. The company has churned out lots of innovation with no polish. Their old games don’t hold up. Their upper tier titles are decidedly mediocre (in sales and gameplay).Their filler titles do nothing more than pay some bills. This is not an impressive company. Wishing for that one perfect sequel won’t make it happen. Playing, rending, buying, hell, paying them any attention at all isn’t going to help. The brand needs to die, because they can do nothing but disappoint. Maybe the team will choose the Atari route and march on their way to becoming a failed license, or maybe overwhelming pride and arrogance will mean they’ll take their Sonic ball and go home.

Either way, I am of the opinion that Sega has not done anything good for gaming in quite a while. When your brands are more important than quality control, it is the gamers who lose. It’s the nerds who have fun memories clutching at foil. When we were kids, how it glowed in warm gold. But now, we can feel the material, hold it in our hands, and rip apart the magic. We were the element that made games like Sonic good, because we invested awe, and a need for some fast-paced, innovative fun. Then we changed, and Sega stayed the same. Relying on brands forever doesn’t win you any favors: Nintendo may bank on their big franchises, but they never rest on them. The company introduces a new and winning IP about every 6 years. When was the last time you could say that about any other company. The only other company that comes to mind is Blizzard, and again, quality breeds loyalty AND new customers.

Sonic was never for me, anyways. I preferred my games to let me react, let me explore. A few years ago there was this show that took Loony Toon characters like Bugs Bunny and made them into super anime-fied action heroes from the future. They were our same old lovable cartoon characters, but they needed to be extreme, in your face, and action packed for a more jaded viewership. Horseshit I say. They’ll never beat the happy accidents, the “Final” game with infinite sequels, the plumber whose pixels fixed on, the soldier who was created to explore a strategy game who got a paint job and a sexy computer program. You can’t create cool. You can only rehash and hope something sticks. And that’s where Sega is. And until gamers finally accept this, this will continue indefinitely.

So Naughty

2008-01-25T21:27:00.000-08:00

Confessions of a Gamer

- I never played an online game until I was 26.

- I didn’t beat the original Super Mario Bros til I was 21.

- I have never owned a traditional fighting game. Ever.

- I didn’t own an FPS until I bought Halo 3.

- Never owned a portable system.

- I think Banjo and Kazooie sucks ass.

- Tony Hawk’s original series is amazingly addictive

- Sonic the Hedgehog is a douche.

- Mario Kart was the only multiplayer game I owned until… Mario Kart Double Dash

- I’m fine with what Sephiroth did in FF7. Anything to shut Aerith’s whore mouth up.

- Cait Sith was a dumb idea.

- I consider Link’s pursuit of Zelda to be one of the greatest gaming morals.

- When playing through FF6, I always renamed Shadow into O.J. (“he’d slit his momma’s throat for a nickel).

- I freaking loved the Home Alone games and considered them brilliant

- I only ever beat half of all Pilotwings challenges

- I have never owned a racing game

- I have never owned a music game

- I think Guitar Hero is for faggots (burning bundle of sticks)

- I prefer any controller made in the past 10 years to the Dual Shock.

- I’d buy a PS3 if it encoded and sent out DTS HDMA. It doesn’t (yet) so I won’t buy one.

- Too many quarters of mine have ended up in a DDR machine

- I didn’t own a video game shirt until they made them fashionably awesome 4 years ago.

- Celes was hot.

- Rydia too.

- Terra bored me to death.

- I have never beaten or owned a Castlevania game

- Haven’t actively PC gamed since the orginal Monkey Island

- That won’t likely change.

- The only game I want for the PS3 is Flow. That’s it.

- Shadows of the Empire was an addiction. A SERIOUS addiction of mine.

- Thought Crystalis was amazing.

- Pretend Mario Sunshine never happened.

- My SNES controllers were made by asciiware.

- Never really wanted a single Sega system

- Really wanted a Turbografx 16

- Wishes Lemmings would make a comeback

On Heath

2008-01-23T09:30:00.000-08:00

So an actor not much older than I am died, and quite a few people are really sad about it. Whether it was suicide or not is unkown, and debating his motives, intentions are really unknowable. If it was suicide, he was a coward with issues. That's a big if at this stage, but I will say why this incident.

It is rare to find anyone so willing to try anything, and to use their gifts at their full cylinder. And to do so in your 20's is indeed amazing. To be performing at such a high level at the things you wanted to do... it is an amazing feat that more of us can say we envy than experience. Also because the guy was apparently gosh-darn likable. Affability is a quality that doesn't ensure success or happiness, but it is an important thing most people can't figure out.

He was really, really good. People may think his Joker is nothing like the Joker. But to the initiated to the darker world of graphic novels, that first trailer shows a Joker that would scare the crap out of the Joker from the early 90's. And given the realistic approach, that should tell you something. It looks to be an amazing performance, and when I see this movie with friends this July, we will wear black, only not because it's Batman.

On Monsters

2008-01-21T22:55:00.001-08:00

On Apple:

The user base of Apple has been labeled recently as more liberal, and diversity tolerant than the national average.

Which poses an uncomfortable question… how on earth did this happen?

As I said previously, Apple’s philosophy cannot get its hands dirty with the poor the way Microsoft or Linux does. Or more to the point: it hasn’t. You would think this would be a great concern to its user base, but oddly it isn’t.

Their great philanthropy push is the one that had potential, but ultimately they are slaves to fashion. I’m referring of course, to the (red) label. The idea behind the (red) label is clothing and accessories that, after manufacturing and other associated costs, a small portion of money is given to the Aids fund.

This fails for several reasons. The first is that it doesn’t work. At the Gap, which has also embraced the label… much of the clothing is marked down to clearance. It was initially more expensive. Most of it is butt ugly. It costs more in general. The crass pricing shows that Gap still wanted their profit, and failing that, was willing to liquidate in search of profitability.

The (red) label is the laziest and greediest form of charity in modern times. And Apple has signed up with the (red) iPod shuffle. This is lazy beyond lazy.

True charity comes at the expense of profit or margin. Tying most of the products down to a specific color, as many do, means that the popularity (and profits) of silver and black will never be in jeopardy. This sort of philanthropy is nutless.

Microsoft’s philanthropy is personal and also company-based. You can say that the company’s charity is publicity; its owners charity is decidedly not going to mark away years of hostile moves. It makes inroads that could be argued to lead to profit, and this is true. Every saved life that is later educated on a cheap Windows version may be a customer someday. The key here is the maybe. The key here is that something is being done.

Linux makes inroads because they are cheap, but their mission is also genuine, and also a form of marketing. Even Linus Torvalds admits that the system must make a profit SOMEDAY. But it is inroads such as this that are not cool, but will end up making fans the world over. It will help educate the uneducated. It will bring technology to parts of the earth that are as close to hell as you can imagine. You will NOT find the Macbook Air, clean and sleek and pure as snow, near such people. Linux is the antithesis of cool; geek may be in, but searching for the right wireless drivers is not.

I’m beyond caring about the fiscal reasons, the fact is that something substantial is being done. And those efforts eclipse those by (red). And thus, by Apple. The program itself is not a bad idea, but by the time companies have implemented it, it lacks any real tooth, relying solely on niche cache. The problem being that ultimately if people don’t like the product, they won’t be moved to buy it. And money isn’t given.

Apple loves to gloat and be abrasive and smug, but when it involves things that truly matter, they have zero bragging rights.

This is embarrassing. What concerns me is that so many people of a certain view turn a deaf ear, white ear buds in. Is this the price of cool?

It’s fine if Apple wants to run with the big dogs. It is fine if they want to compete aggressively. But this is the big issue for the next 20 years of computing, and they have been unwilling to step up to the plate. Ultimately, we vote with our money. And millions are voting against their ideals in favor of white shiny. And that makes me red.

Cloverfield confounds me. People complain about the shaky cam, but we are rarely spoiled by this good a shaky cam. The first thing about most shaky cam work is that it involves violent cuts. The action on Cloverfield is mostly seamless, so it is easier to focus. Watch the Bourne series’ car chase scenes- the effect of a bouncing camera and multiple split second cuts is jarring. In Blair Witch, you were talking about a low grade camera. This makes it harder to focus. No hand camera is as good as the one they filmed Cloverfield with, and few are as focused and stable.

My reaction to this movie is the most disturbed I have been by a movie ever. Ever. It got to me where I couldn’t sleep. It depressed me. And I never want to see it again. The only time I want to bear witness sheer terror like that again is if I’m actually there. The feeling of helplessness coupled by immersiveness of the story and camera work… it’s something that wasn’t enjoyable. But it was still good.

The creature is… hell. Whomever conjured this deserves an Oscar and a punch to the face. They have created an abomination, which no matter how impressive still offends me. I will never imagine anything like this, and I’m really, really proud of that. The spores it gives off are less frightening, but what they do to a cute girl is an image I can’t erase out of my head. My senses were offended. I am glad I saw the movie, but I will never, ever see it again. It will not sit in my bookshelf, and I will leave the room if it is on. There are just some things I have no desire to see.

Interwebs

2008-01-19T23:20:00.000-08:00

I was asked recently what I thought about the whole ethics thing that’s currently going on (such as Gertsmann-gate, et al).

This dismays me because I thought I had my point clear: the rating system is broken because of the internet. And only a bonafide internet solution can fix it.

Here are some facts that are lost in the hyperbole surrounding this issue.
1. The "money" is already firmly entrenched at every level.
2. You cannot, and will not change this.
3. No reviewer can safely do their job under the current environment.
4. Integrity pays the bills... to a point. Yes, Penny Arcade may make a killing and still being honest, but their annual budget is less than Grand Theft Auto 4's upcoming ad campaign. In a game of numbers, integrity loses to marketing's sheer number strengths. You use game reviews as either a sales percentage booster, or as a necessary write-down. And minimizing that write down is worth millions and millions of dollars.

Any viable solution is going to have to account for the money, and THEN it must address how fraught doing business on the internet is.

Let me explain. On the internet, you can find people who agree with you 100%. I cannot point to one thing on the internet (and that includes 2 girls 1 cup) wherein you couldn’t find somebody who shares the same viewpoints and interest.

Think about that. No matter how reprehensible, illogical, or batshit perverted the idea, you can find legion on the internet.

What does this mean? Well, from a psychological point of view, it means even bad ideas can find a place to grow. It means that you are UNDERSTOOD. There is something very final about writing down something. That more and more of people’s lives are being posted and portrayed on the internet, we find a simple breakdown.

When someone did something dumb in the past, the near universal peer pressure meant that, if sanity didn’t take hold, then usually the thought of being egged at the grocery store did. One is never as powerful as many.

Now video games are a small part of this, and it is to the genius credit of some of these shady companies that they have discovered it. A reviewer’s score doesn’t mean a hill of beans in any town. Marketing is all about numbers; and you can only hope to subtract numbers with people like Gertsmann.

Now to Wikipedia for further examples- Wikipedia is an awesome source of news and information, but you have to remember that ANYONE can post. And when anyone can post, anything can be valid. So my big deal with the internet is that everything can and will be valid.

So the dilemma of trying to appoint an integrity-based or revised hard score (such as stores for movies) seems to be applying a 20^th century solution to a 21^st century problem. Integrity can be profitable (see Penny Arcade), but to truly help inform and create, there has to be a lot of outside the box thinking.

Considering the services that a good reviewer can mete out to the reader, I find this issue important. But there is something about current scoring that offends people. It’s not so much that they disagree. They are OFFENDED.

And that’s the larger issue, I think, than advertising. Because disagreements are fine, but offense is what every last consequence regarding game reviews started out with. So you need to find a way to placate the advertisers, the journalism, and the public. You can’t do it with integrity alone.

So as I see it.there are two options. Fix the internet so people can learn to spot, vouch, and respect integrity and learn discretion, or fix the way people perceive reviews. The first is a foolish venture. The second way is to take the arbitrary scoring ball and go home.

Reflexive scoring matrices solve this problem the same way Netflix or Amazon helps guide decision making without ever losing the ability to change one’s mind. By eliminating the arbitrary number, you effectively take the main sting out of the reviewer bee.

But the stinger you gain is even more impressive. Suddenly, game companies cannot focus their ire on one or two dissenting reviewers; they have to be concerned with the public. A reviewer is free of the entirely reactionary scorn that has plagued them for a few years. Reviewers can still work because their opinions matter. If, using the reflexive matrices showed that they were not “in tune” with the average gamer, then business and nature would take its course. Jeff Gertsmann may be fired because no one on this planet may agree with him, but it wouldn’t be about advertising. In effect, you deal with the real issues and concerns that people have, all the while eliminating corruption. Not a bad affect.

My problem with the reviewing system is that it’s already fundamentally broken. The problem with the matrices is that it would rely solely on user input. And of that, there are thousands of ways to count,. What does your Xbox Achievement points say about your interests? What does your Virtual Console say? Your PS2 memory card? Your Gamefly queue? The amount of data that is available to create a broad, multi-faceted picture of an individual as a gamer is already out there in one form or another. Harnessing that effectively is tricky, but I believe it can be done.

Integrity is very important, but we are naïve to think we can simply eliminate the overwhelming pressure of money. Even Kane and Lynch sold a million copies, despite all the bad press. The only way you can change the dance is if you change the song. There is no quick fix to this, but the gaming industry needs to keep itself in check via sales and reviews. ET the Atari game bombed, and with good reason. It sucked. Unless you can redirect how money is spent (and it’s clear bad press isn’t enough), there will forever be influence. People might actually buy ET. There are too many jobs on the line to take this other than seriously. A review may not take into account the reader, and a reader may not take the reviewers point of view into account. If you change the way people look at both parts, you may have a fighting chance. Anything else is doomed to a constant battle.

this is why i need more math.

2008-01-18T10:48:00.000-08:00

Right now I am Pandora.com listening to music. The theory behind the song selection is ingenious: it uses metrics (and a hella back category) to find and recommend came based on those metrics.

This is one of the most fascinating bits of technology, and you can read more about it here at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project. I have no qualms endorsing this page (my roommate and I are pledging a donation). But this is solving a lot of problems in how to expand a category.

Pandora is one way that the music industry can do well, because it can expose you to new music acts and interests, and it’s clear from the mainstream advertising that it is viable. It’s not a perfect service, but what it delivers is greater than any competitor. And this is actually an article about video games, but Pandora is a good start.

Criticism of game news is a hot subject on the internet, so what the hell. Like any criticism, it’s flawed, the metrics are flawed (Twilight Princes 8.5 zomgwtfbbq). Yet the internet is at its best when transparency is prevalent. What if a game score never changed? Reviewers forever and always will have biases. I will generally trust a review from Angsty Gaijin when I take his biases into account.

But unlike Metacritic, which is the Rotten Tomatoes of gamedom, I propose a metric that measures both the critics response and the reviewers response. This way, a game’s score is constantly in flux; and ultimately, gamers can prevail. Game critics can say their peace, but their score will be waited.

What excites me more idea is about my thoughts on bias. I can’t ignore it. There is an average score that we all have in our mind. I consider Final Fantasy 7 to be a barely passable video game, Angsty Gaijin considers it the pinnacle of gaming.

Does that mean a score can’t be counted? Well, gamers take their shit seriously. The nice thing about metrics is that it can help with averages. I have to take Angsty’s RPG views with a critical eye, because I have a different point. He thinks Ocarina is ok, but to me it is the game my yardstick.

So the score will always change… yet a reviewers opinion remains valid. And sales remain sales, and it puts the power back in the hands of the consumer, the advertiser, and the reviewer.

And what’s the main idea of this. Person to person scoring. The score is like a dating site, almost. I may have tastes that match up with IGN editor Matt Cassamassina’s references and scores a bit more than angsty, so the score for Twilight Princess will reflect that (say a 9.3). Another person may take a dimmer view on the Zelda universe, and based on the metrics of past games their individual “predicted score” would change. Of course humans have free will, and they can fall in love with a game and change their scores. Maybe they’ll realize they’re falling out of love with an old genre, and it suddenly opens up new doors for gameplay. When everyone sees a different score, it means you can take what a critic says seriously, get your point across, and maintain a level of civility that is not existent using current scoring systems.

Invariably, a Halo lover may give that game their highest score. And a system recommends them Half Life 2 (a given). Say you rather detest that game, and the next game you recommended is Every Extend Extra. Suddenly you’re at Everyday Shooter, and then you’re at Guitar Hero, which leads a Halo player to Samba De Amigo.

Maybe it only makes sense to me. But I believe this system would guarantee higher sales on the increasingly digital catalogue of old games. It would push developers harder (never a bad thing) and critics are spared the venom and infamy of numbers, all the while remaining valid. It would make gamers better, make gaming smarter, and invariably lead to more money for gaming companies (even Midway and Ubisoft).

Try Pandora with something other than J Pop. It may become clear. I need more math…

The Cult of Cool

2008-01-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

The Cult of Cool

The Macbook Air is an absolutely fascinating case study, and I think, a metaphor for everything that people see negatively in Apple. But even moreso, I believe the Windows Guy/ Apple Guy ad exemplify this point better.

Apple is a dick.

People find the commercials funny, and sales numbers show that the stability of the OS, the admittedly pristine design choices, and the unprecedented marketshare of the iPod has paid off. Apple’s stock grows, and I hum along.

Apple existence in the public eye is of 3 things.

The sexy computers

The iPod
The computer “that guy” from work uses.
The love of journalists everywhere. It’s not so much that we use Macs, it’s just that, while Macs control a greater share of the market, it is disproportionate to the amount that is written about them.

And that last problem, I think, produces two problems. In smaller communities, Apple is “the big city thing”. The Apple stores are hundreds of miles away. The local stores don’t carry them. And the local paper has Walter Mossberg’s weekly tech column, provided to the local paper by the Associated Press. For the uninitiated, he is a Washington-based tech columnist, and every one of two articles he writes is about… you guessed it, Apple Computers.

All of this amounts to a great lack of show but plenty of tell when it comes to the big A. I would further contend that the journalists are doing Apple plenty of fiscal favors, but to the detriment of real journalism. The Apple fawning is becoming free advertising to a company that rather enjoys it but… well, it gets funny.

And not in the “ha ha” way. Journalists have made their position quite clear that they want the world to be running on Mac OSX. Some do want Ubuntu or another Linux variant, but they are the Sonic Burger to Apple’s Subway (and no one wants to admit they eat at McDonald’s).

But the dreams of journalists and Mac enthusiasts should be tempered with a simple fact.

Apple has a business strategy that makes Microsoft look like a soft kitten.

That’s not calling Microsoft gentle. That would be false, contrary to years of buy-outs, antitrust suits, and other bits of badness. Oh yea, the blue screen of death. We can never forget you.

But Apple can never, EVER, be as big as Microsoft. They can never, ever win. If they won, computing would suck ass. Apple as it exists now has the philosophy of the fascist, not of the greater good. The everyman image in jeans and grinning at the nerd is a lie.

First of all, they build their own hardware. While Microsoft was guilty of bundling software and choking competition, for the market to be OSX dominated would result in lawsuits contending that other companies would be forced out of the market. And it’s a valid point. The Fortune 500 companies like HP, Dell, Acer, and Lenovo would be left out in the cold? That won’t result in lawsuits. Nope, not at all.

And software bundling? Apple never got the memo that nations look very poorly on that. All the neat functionality and tools of Mac would have to be stripped in a Apple world, or face the hate of the European Union.

Apple’s business philosophy can never be more than the feisty, if arrogant and charming, underdog. They can never mount a serious challenge unless they abandon their cache. And they know this, and they exploit this.

Back to the new Air laptop, it is a system of intense simplicity. So much so, that things people generally like (optical drives, firewire, more than one USB) are left out in the cold. But it’s thin, and that is also in. It carries a great deal of appeal, and will sell like mad.

Ultimately, Apple can never win. They strive for better, but they need the big gorilla to make themselves look good. Without it, it would be discovered that they are no alpha male. They are a smartass, who may have some good ideas but trades business acumen and practices for smarmy marketing and products that a great deal cannot afford. Cheap laptops are a coveted benchmark for much of the world. As naïve as a Windows-based effort would be, it would be impossible to fathom OSX in such a way. It can’t. Even taking out the efforts of Bill and Melinda, Apple can never get their hands dirty with the poor the way MS does, the way Linux does. That wouldn’t be cool. They would have to deal with cheaper manufacturing. As for the semi-poor to the thrifty, Apple can’t go there either. Even the Mini mac cannot compare to what one gets with an E-Machine or a Dell. They are ultimately in a hard position.

So when Mac has a commercial showing how cool they are, I cringe. They may be cool, they may get many things right, but they can never dominate. No matter what the journalists say. Their marketshare and stock has a ceiling, and if they ever hit that ceiling, the company will be forced to change what people love about them, or it will stagnate due to a lack of growth.

In the 1980’s, Apple computers was lauded for the commercial that alluded to big brother with giant screens, and a defiant woman throwing some heavy rebellion at it, shattering the illusions. But Mac would be the worst big company, as their decaying relationships with music groups shows. They control the pricing, and they have demands of their user base with their price point (no screen on an iPod for the budget crowd, for example). Cool has become their control. And is cool more important than computing?

Ultimately, never. And the effectiveness of cheap computers, of a diverse marketshare, of philanthropy, workhorse models, can save lives, build economies, create jobs, and actually encourage competition. When I see Steve Jobs giving a presentation, the giant monitors behind him, the journalists drooling and dripping at his every “one more thing”… I’m reminded of an old 1980’s Apple commercial. And I despair, for there’s no woman in a speed suit. Just idiots drooling and falling over themselves obeying. Ironic? Sad. Bad business.

Maybe I’m missing the point about Apple. Maybe the point is never to usurp Microsoft. Maybe the point is just to be cool. But I can’t justify the consistent selling of cool computing to be the subject of journalism en masse. And if that is indeed the bias, we are not discussing business, we are not even discussing technology. They are accidental marketing, and the world can’t be let in on the joke. They are “better” without actually being better, and that unfortunate head is slowly beginning to show. If a stock does indeed have a ceiling, it is ultimately a bad move for investors, and for consumers. And I believe that it is coming.

At last, my arm is complete

2008-01-16T19:54:00.000-08:00

However long the road, I invariably find myself drawn to the cello. It has been 8 years since the last time I played the cello for as long as I have tonight.

It was one of the most singlehandedly gratifying things of my life. It is a sweet old habit, the quiet one I don’t brag about (unlike my writing, fashion, and athleticism. Haven’t you heard?).

And so this article is about how Final Fantasy lost me.

The reason we give things up are usually for at least one of three reasons. The first and most obvious is that we lose interest. The second is that our hobby is no longer profitable. The third is a lack of time. And as an age of Japanese gamers moves into the aggressive world of the working class, I don’t find it surprising that their overall RPG sales drop. The big games, of course, sell like hot cakes. But the big games? They don’t do as well.

All the old cliché’s are still as robust as ever. But today’s gamer is a busier gamer, on the whole. In fact, I feel as though RPG’s have been cleaved in two groups: the people with no time to play, and the people with too much time.

The people with no time to play look at the World of Warcraft with disgust. How on earth is it comprehensible that people can spend 30 hours a week in search of … fake armor? I have my ideas, but the crux of the people who are anti online RPG’s bring up the waste of time as reason number one. The latest Final Fantasy clocks in at about 120 to 170 hours, which is a fraction of the amount of time World of Warcraft can demand. Still, that’s an awful lot of time.

The second group with too much time, well, forgive my arrogance. This expanding group doesn’t have more time, but they do make it. Time is not wasted, it is borrowed against something else. And to many, this is an acceptable trade. The single player experience is far too… short. Unexpansive. The linear story format is cliché’. Sexy haired angsty guy with issues must save the world with girls in various states of vulnerability. Secondary characters are good, then they backstab you, then they are good, then they are dead. And 170 hours? You realize, that’s about a month of World of Warcraft, or Everquest. Totally not a good use of time.

And I would argue that these two camps have split firmly as lonely adolescence convaleces into various states of adulthood. And the middle group, obsessed with turn-based combat, impressive visuals, and expansive stories that would make Joseph Campbell proud, are largely left maligned. My associate and best friend, Angsty Gaijin, is in such a camp. Increasingly, he is in the minority. It never fails to shock him how mainstream the success of Final Fantasy 7 was. Indeed, the varsity quarterback of our high school claimed his favorite video game was the same one as Gaijin. Angsty will never believe me, of course. But the split happened, and it won’t go away. The problem is that, for all the pains of old school RPG’s and leveling up using archaic systems, there was never that long to go before you could go on to another event or large battle. There was simply too much to do, and the tedium was broken quickly. Final Fantasy 7 is where the line in the sand was drawn for gamers. It was the last stand. To truly beat the game was to commit to a time sink of leveling up. Every game after that is arguably shorter, the world smaller. Part of this is due to graphical constraints, but it doesn’t change this simple fact. The two dimensional world was more varied, more expansive, and gave you a greater sense of scale than the most impressively rendered Bahumut.

The later games are still impressive, but where once your imagination worked to fill in all the blanks, it is all drawn out in perfectly rendered scenes. There is a theory called the uncanny valley about advanced robotics. Go Wiki it. I think the more realistic these games have become, the more attention and scrutiny is drawn to them. The more two dimensional their characters feel less real because their personalities are that of a cartoon. Westerners excuse this as a simple difference in style, but anime succeeds on the emotions and personalities on display in a story, moreso than any robot or cliché.

There is a movement amongst RPG enthusiasts to blame the current black condition of the RPG on story vs. gameplay based roleplaying games. And while there is that disconnect, it does little to explain the international numbers. With games stamped with Squenix still veritable moneymakers, it is quite clear that even the old mainstays have a near universal appeal.

My final problem with final fantasy is that despite the technical leaps that have happened, the games are so much… smaller/

- no more world maps to surf an airship over: This is the big one. The sense of epic scale is lost.Why should I care if the world looks more real? The imagination does wonders to fill in the blanks. As the games have gotten more 3D, they have gotten smaller.

- The stories of the earlier games shows diverse story telling. It has gone formulaic. I understand that with more money and stock on the line, that it is better to build a decent game that sells rather than risk it all. But this is a lie. Throw your mechanics to the wind! Bravery is often rewarded in this industry. It just takes braver stockholders. Yes, many of the original characters were one-notes, but they were a lot more fun. Cloud is not fun. Locke is.

- Too much leveling, not enough eventing.

- You can’t cheat your way to better leveling. The earlier games would allow even a novice to find an enemy, waste a half hour, and play another 3 to 4 with no serious issues. Nowadays? Don’t make me laugh. That disconnect cost them casual gamers.

Final Fantasy forgot that it was scale, not graphics… story, not alleged epic sweep… that got many gamers going. The final drop of poison for many gamers is the leveling. Some gamers want a lot more, some gamers want less. The happy medium is not found in any recent Squenix game. And so, they’ll slowly suffer sales, each one slightly more disappointing than the last. Which will, of course, make them consider making a “Safer”, more like Final Fantasy 7 game. They’ll miss the point, the gamers, and eventually, the money.

Downloads Disturb Me

2008-01-15T10:02:00.000-08:00

At Appleworld 2008 today, Steve Jobs announced that iTunes was taking what I would consider a BAD route. Temporary downloads of movies from every major studio.

My problem with finite ownership is that it only fills the stopgap of storage. What perturbs me is that you have only 24 hours to rewatch something once you watched it. Even the hated Blockbuster is more generous with the length of time you can watch a new release in.

So are we trading rental time periods for perceived ease? I’m of the opinion that this is very unfriendly to the consumer. iTunes is successful when the product is given perceived ownership of a song in its replayability. Looking at the first incarnation of Zune, which dabbled in temporary song downloads, the idea was a veritable and embarrassing flop.

And this is where movies are headed? Say what you will about Blu Rays, confusing formats, or the problems in discs. The storage issues of downloads will be a scapegoat for the continuous revenue streams via short-term viewing windows long after terabyte drives are the standard.

Regarding region locks and my previous post:

-There are 3 region locks. America is actually in the same region as Japan. Thusly, the anime quandary is answered in this generation like never before.

-The thing that I always tell people in regards to business decisions is to follow the money and all the answers are clear. In the case of region locks, this is no different. Currencies cost different things, and the map for Blu Ray’s locks are fairly clear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Region_codes

The first zone contains major markets (such as Japan and the United States) where most movies are very profitable. These are also markets that are fairly strong despite the depreciation of all the currencies.

The second zone contains countries of burgeoning markets (such as the European Union) where the currency is growing at a fairly rapid rate.

The last zone contains all the areas where copyright e protections are largely unenforceable. It also contains the dirt poor. You couldn’t sell them a Spiderman 3 DVD for 14 dollars American. You could sell it for 2, and make 2 dollars over 0 dollars.

If you follow the money, Blu Ray region locks make perfect financial sense. If you had a product for several distinct markets with marked currency trends, it would be financially irresponsible to let the market devalue your product prematurely. No investor would touch you, which leads to less content. As frustrating as this is, it will get worse with downloads. Look at the disparate prices and availability of games on the Wii, which is a reasonable system, and imagine what kind of approach large Hollywood studios will take.

Feeling Blu

2008-01-14T17:33:00.000-08:00

And so the interwebs explode with the news that Time Warner has gone Blu Ray. This is no idle move. With this latest acquisition, the Blu Ray camp gains ubiquity with every consistent money making franchises, and the only two currently active moneymakers on the big screen (Harry Potter and James Bond).

Now it would be enough for me to say it's quits and done for the competition, and that this format war is over. And that would be enough to flame me incessantly.

But this article is not about how the Playstation 3 was a Blu Ray player 1st and a gaming system 2nd.

This is about change. No one, including myself, could ever posit that Sony was a kind, consumer-oriented company. But I do believe that they have made decisions that have made digital entertainment all the more accessible in ways that HD DVD never could. They have literally saved us from themselves.

The going consensus in the industry is that downloads are the future of entertainment, and for the large part, they are exactly correct.

There are benefits to digital downloads for us and for the media creators (let us call them MC's)

- The Consumer doesn't have to pay as much overhead costs for the content
- The Consumer doesn't have to drive to get the content
- The Consumer is fairly competent at downloading.
- The Consumer is paying for content, and has done so for the past 5 years with no hint of trepidation.

- The MC's don't have to pay large factories to churn out discs. The licensing rights (admittedly pennies) are nonexistent.
- The MC's, beyond the cost of a powerful server, do not pay much for doling out their media.
- The MC's get to set regional prices, eliminate disc-based copying, and effectively suffocate piracy by making access to a computer AND to content far easier than a DVD player and a "friend of a friend who knows computers".

And this, I believe, is where we are headed. But by the next round being Blu Ray, we delay the onset of pure digital downloads to answer some very fundamental questions, which MC's have unanimously failed to answer.

And moreso than the DVD player, I believe the flaws in their approach stem from looking at the iPod the wrong way.

When someone downloads a song from iTunes, it cannot be copied as easily as an mp3, or a DVD. Can it be done? Certainly. Is it as easy as copying a CD, or an mp3. For the population at large, that answer is no.

So we create content that we can sell a la carte, a la iTunes. If it sounds brilliant, it is, and it is going on right now, from Redmond to Tokyo and everywhere in between.

But the iPod is awesome because it is small, tiny, versatile, and portable. The problem with MC's is that they think you only wear earbuds.

- The iPod can be a DJ. Plugged into via a composite cable adapter, a special plug, or a compatible dock and the iPod is no longer a portable music player, it is THE music player. You can entertain 1 to 1,000,000 with a single iPod and a length of cable.

- The iPod can show movies. Not at a great resolution, but they go.

-Can go in the car. The sheer ubiquity of "iPod ready" stereo receivers should be a warning sign.

- You can take thousands of bits of entertainment with you.

The problem with digital downloads is that you cannot do any of those things that the iPod (or even DVD's, for that matter) do so well that no one even notices it.

Here are the questions without answers...

-How in the hell are millions of terabytes going to flow on a network that's tapped out as is? and more importantly...
-Who the hell is going to pay for the network upgrade?
- can you entertain an entire crowd?
- Can you take it in the car to entertain your kids? Yourself?
- is there a hard drive on this planet that could hold a decent high definition movie collection?
- Is your content goign to be restored by the MC's even if your hard drive breaks???

Whether it is Xbox Live, Valve, Virtual Channel, anything but iTunes... the answer is no. You cannot take it with you. It is not portable. Your ownership is not forever. It is ours and you rent it.

Until content providers can answer those questions, digital downloads are impossible at best, useless and constrictive at worst. And the signs are negative to the MC's realizing this.

Enter Sony.

Blu Ray can change the game because they are so damn big. The content on the disc is so great, so demanding, that if this standard does usurp DVD's it sets a very large (and largely unattainable) benchmark for downloads. The sheer gluttonous size, the excellent picture quality, the promise of a theatre master audio track... no cable company, satellite, or MC has had the madness to say they can approach it.

HD-DVD's... they simply set the bar lower. The transition would be a bit more seamless from discs to downloads. They also lacked region locks, which ensured that consumers would lap it up not knowing that in the minds of the MC's, this was a delay in exection, not a full pardon.

HD DVD was a technology that had reached its limit early. Transformers on HD DVD is a beautiul disc, but the video data was so huge that they had to compress away any next-gen audio track, settling for the same track as the regular DVD.

That is not to say Blu Ray is perfect, but it provides unreasonably high expectations for consumers with the benchmark in content, and provides MC's the thing they covet most: DRM, region locks, and money.

If you can imagine what the world will be like with current digital plans, you need only plug in the headphones on your mp3 player and say to yourself "this is all I can do".

Feel a disc in your hands. It is scarcely no more real than a file, except for the mass of trillions of atoms. But so long as the disc is in your hands, what you do with it is your choice. And that will make all the difference.