Slashdot Mirror
The Escapist Magazine Launches
A new online gaming mag has launched with an impressive array of contributors. Entitled The Escapist, the magazine appears to be going for gamer culture and commentary, as opposed to specific product information. Jennifer Buckendorff goes into what it means to be a gamer in Gamer Like Me, Kieron Gillen comments on the scapegoating of the games industry in Culture Wargames, and Tycho Brahe talks acceptance in The Mainstream is Coming! The Mainstream is Coming!. From Buckendorff's article: "Am I a gamer? I review video games for various sources, including a major metropolitan newspaper. In May, I made the rounds of E3 for ten hours a day. I have a carefully selected games library, and my adoration of GTA dates back to the London expansion pack, when I used a double-decker bus to evil ends. I grew up in the arcades, standing on tiptoes to feed quarters into the slots. I give game recommendations to friends and acquaintances as if I were reading their tea leaves. But, in the opinion of some, I am not a gamer."
Trying to read that site is making my eyeballs bleed. Gamers they may be, but the super-hip graphics and layout (not to mention TEENY PRINT) are not apparently the work of a web designer who intends the site to be read on a regular basis. Nice prototype, but bad execution.
Otherwise, the articles are hip and make for a decent read. There is obviously an editor involved, ensure some level of quality above blog. It'd be a great publication if I didn't need a zoom function and glare-reducing polorized lenses on my retina.
Nintendogs. Yes yes, I know. It's a huge hit in Japan. Does anybody honestly believe that that type of success can succeed in this (NA) market?
Who cares? As long as Japanese games keep coming out, I'm fine. I'm a snob, I know, but honestly, if American game makers fell off the face of the Earth tomorrow, I'd lament the loss of Retro studios and go about playing Fire Emblem. Even with an ailing Japanese economy, for cultural and economic reasons, Japanese game developers care about a Japanese audience.
More rationally, the yen that line Nintendo's coffers from titles like Pokemon and Nintendogs go into the same bankrolls that release Zelda and Mario here.
Furthermore, you don't seem to know crap about Nintendogs. Almost every import review of the game (certainly everyone I read) says the game is amazing. Famitsu gave it a great score and that means something.
Financially Nintendo is doing fine and that's the important thing. As long as Nintendo makes enough money, it's fine.
To some degree I agree with your assesement of the DS; there isn't any must have software yet. But the new Kirby game is deep and certainly as the spirit of the Kirby titles (and I say this having bought the original Kirby game for the original Gameboy). That, an acruement of Mario Club points, and the special edition DSes in Japan are putting me off buying one until the end of the year in Japan.
I have a 'Cube and PS2. While I love the PS2 games I have, I probably have 3 times as many games for the Nintendo machine as I do the PS2 (and the PS2 games are either from Square, Nippon Ichi, or Namco's Katamari Damashii). The 'Cube gets far more play. I'm playing through RE4 for the second time, my brother for the fourth. There's enough compelling software on the 'Cube to keep me busy - I don't see the need for more titles that I can't buy (I still have to go and pick up titles like the original Prince of Persia).
I don't say this as a blind Nintendo fan: I'm thinking about a PSP (12, LOTR: Tactics, and the Gundam S-RPG are sounding good), but, as previous articles have mentioned, the DS is the new PS2 of Japan. As more and more Japanese money goes into the DS, more cool stuff is going to come out. Nintendo is doing fine. They are the Apple of consoles and the DS is threatening to be a killer machine.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
A good movie critic can go and see a blockbuster and still say whether it's good for its genre. The main thing a critic is looking for is a plot. And that's what most movie-goers are looking for too.
Consider recent superhero films - the two X-Men and Spiderman films, for instance. Both feature well-constructed plots and good acting - plus the explosions and fights that you expect in a blockbuster. And they did very well by the critics. Matrix 2 and Matrix 3 though were panned by the critics, bcos they were plot-free and acting-free zones. Critics expect more than flashy SFX, and that's bcos most cinema-goers also want more than flashy SFX.
And games are the same way. The sets in Star Trek:TOS were state-of-the-art eye-candy, but now we have a higher standard of eye-candy we can look at them and see that the plots and acting were shit. Similarly Doom was state-of-the-art eye-candy in its day, but a simple run-and-shoot FPS doesn't hold up these days. So a good game reviewer should be able to tell what's just glossy eye-candy, and what's good gameplay. And the same game may feature both.
Good gameplay doesn't always mean innovative, it just has to be entertaining. Open-ended games like Far Cry are no more than a glossier Doom on the surface, but when you realise that you have freedom of movement to achieve your objective via just about any means you can think of, you see a bit more depth there. And Far Cry is very much just the beginning in real "immersive" games. Me, I look forward to MMOGs that allow building of your own structures, objects and realms, not just the preprogrammed ones that the game lets you have. Other people may want sports sims that allow alternative strategies for football, or whatever. So long as you find yourself immersed in the game, it's succeeded in its aim.
Grab.