How to evaluate: book, or game?
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Hotel Dusk Review
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Many reviewers of Hotel Dusk, even in positive critiques, have noted that the game ignores the precepts of PC adventure games, but because of the story, Hotel Dusk is worth playing. But taken as a novel, the story isn't that good. If we read this as a book, paper pages and earmarks and all, I think anyone would quickly recognize how horribly trite and uninpsired the story is. Frankly, this is dime-store trash.
Which doesn't mean that isn't necessarily "good," or that doesn't mean that Hotel Dusk is incapable of pulling players into its story; indeed, the art is superb, and I think that any amount of interaction makes any story seem more visceral. Kyle, the main character, is us, after all.
But that it can do so much with so little is really the big problem with Hotel Dusk. Hotel Dusk reminds me a lot of Farenheit, which I played on the Xbox. Taken as either a game or a story, it leaned too heavily on cliches from both formats. Yet, it was still - like Hotel Dusk - admittedly fun. Why? Because finally I am the one (mostly) pulling the strings.
I'm more inclined to support The Onion's negative review, because Hotel Dusk is really a wasted opportunity. Yes, yes, games should be fun, and there will always be a place for Mario & Luigi-like simple stories (which I am totally digging on the GBA), or ripoffs of existing genres. But I think we need to start being harder on games that aspire to greatness, particularly in storytelling, as Hotel Dusk does. We do not need antoher Sam Spade story. We need an LA Confidential or Maltese Falcon video game, something that, yes, nods to the genre, but also brings it to another level. (Hell, just one of these games would make me happy.) It's not impossible (Deus Ex comes immediately to mind). Allowing games to use interaction as a crutch to support a weak story rather than a ladder to elevate it to a whole new media form is ultimately doing ourselves - and the games' designers - a disservice.
Indigo Prophecy was fun. It was also unique, a rarity among games these days. I applaud David Cage for that much.
But if he wants us to judge IP on its story, and by reading this I think he does, than let's do just that.
Take any number of IP's branching storylines and turn it into a book or movie. Guess what: it blows. The characters are one-dimensional and predictable. They're not archetypes - they're stereotypes. The African-American is good at violence and dancing. The women need rescuing by men. It's as if the game's French creators had never really met either an African-American or woman; just based them on what they read in books and movies. Which is another major problem in IP: it is basically a collage of popular books and movies.
Taken as a story, IP fails. At its best it's one of those quickie movies the SciFi Channel puts out. Taken as a game, it's Dance Dance Revolution, or Choose Your Adventure the Video Game. Is it fun? Yeah. But it's not mindblowing, as I think Cage seems to think.
For all his talk of interaction, and players creating their own narrative, it's already happening in games like Battlefield and World of Warcraft, where players group together, create relationships, and then play out narratives. On a single player level, even the early SimCity let me create a city that rose and fell - you know, like a story.
In a way, I see Indigo Prophecy as a kind of video game "thesis;" it's not quite as unique as a dissertation, they're just borrowing and applying a new methodology. Indigo Prophecy is both an indictment for storytelling and an inspiration. The story, when considered apart from its video games, is poor. But that it is fun and interesting as a video game shows just how powerful interactive storytelling is. There's a big potential that Indigo opens but never steps through.
Actually, the reason their products have those things is precisely because of the width of the company and the amount of check and balance systems. Sony is at once a content producer and a technology producer, certainly more than the degrees to which Microsoft and Nintendo are. That means that somewhere inside Sony, all products go through some kind of check and balance that asks, "Could someone use this product to 'steal' Sony intellectual property?" Then they fix the engineered product so that it can't - hence rootkits, betamax, minidisc, etc.
And really, if you're talking about a snake eating itself, that's not gay. I guess it's monosexual, but screwing oneself is hardly homosexuality.
This is a prime example of the cultural divide between the West and East, which characterizes the long, entire conversation of video games. Xbox doesn't work in Japan because it doesn't translate. It is so American, from its ascetic design to its games, that the Japanese could care less. The ascetic of the Xbox, the first especially, is American, in its side mack truck grills to the failed controller-as-big-as-your head. Nintendo has declined in popularity and influence for the same reason, only in reverse. The company is too Japanese, has never really diversified into the West and "Wii" demonstrates that complete lack of understanding. When they have diversified, they have generally done well (Rare, Silicon Knights, the people behind Metroid whose name escapes me). The corresponding launch video for Wii looks ipod-y, and Wii sounds too like a Japanese attempt to capitalize on the short semantic simplicty and wordplay of "ipod." The GameCube looks too "cute," and I imagine that Wii will, like the xbox 360, capitalize on the ipod design wave to moderate the cuteness - but like the 360, with little success.
Playstation has worked so well because even though it is a Japanese company, there is a strong enough American component than there are checks and balances to prevent untranslatable things like the Xbox and Wii from getting out. Playstation, PS2, and PS3 aren't imaginative, but that's precisely their appeal as names. They're utilitarian.
I'm not saying that Wii will fail. But if this is representative of the Nintendo strategy, Wii as a name just demonstrates that it the system will more likely occupy a niche in gaming, a novelty, and probably nothing more, just as the Xbox does and will in Japan.
Microsoft and Nintendo are probably better off naming something "GameMachine," making it stylistically nondescript, and then hiring devs in each country to create specific - and f***ing good games.
This may be true for larger developers, but if we are to look at other retail merchandise as an analogy or model there is clearly room for other venues of sale. Target is doing particularly well, and I'll be damned if those clothing stores in every city's bohemian drags aren't always full.
What I'm suggesting is that Wal-Mart is unquestionably big, but it isn't the universe. If anything, it's a big black hole. Once game developers get into its leisurely spin they will inevitably find themselves crushed by its greatness. But there are plenty of other ways to sell games, not the least of which this thing called Internet, which I dare say in some form or other will long outlive Wal-Mart.
I think this speaks more to the cost of development than anything else, but that's best saved for another post.
You know, now that you mention it both Starflights had the same thing happening. In Starflight 1, worlds would disappear as the game went on, and in Starflight 2 the Spemin would take over systems.
You know though, I feel like somewhere between those types of games and Oblivion, games took a whole set of steps back, and we're just not hitting that point again. It seems that with the processing power we should at least be able to top something like Star Control 2 or Starflight in terms of open-endedness. ?
The world should keep spinning
on
Living In Oblivion
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This looks great, but like most open-ended RPGs, Oblivion still puts the main mission on hold while the player moseys around. What I want to see is a game where everything starts to fall apart, precisely because the player is cutting trees instead of saving the princess. Sure, it would be a very slow decay, so as to give the player the same feeling of open-endedness. But the more time you spent fishing, the less villages you'll have to trade with as they become overrun with evil.
The fact is that the people who really care about mhz and clock speed have either a) already bought an xbox360 and will not buy a Revolution, or, b) will buy all three consoles anyway. Talking about speed and graphic capabilities is useless. It all boils down to: is it fun?
basically people have a $400 machine and are dying to play something on it. no big deal. but for the time being, they need to give geometry wars most of the credit there.
The PS2 came out in the US in October 2000. GTA3 did not come out until the October after the PS2 launched, in 2001. Of course, neither did Halo, which came out with the Xbox November of 2001. But for nearly an entire the year, the bright shining stars of the lot were Onimusha (oooo!) and Madden (yawn). The PS2 was plagued with hardware shortages, then memory card shortages, and then people realized that setting the PS2 on its side and leaving the disc in scratched the disc to hell.
This is March, a mere 5 months after the so-called transition to the next generation, and they're calling it?
I've been using Gmail since 2004, and it has radically changed the way I maintain contact with people. It's clear to me that The integration of Google Talk into gmail is just another step Google is taking that characterizes their approach to email. Microsoft and Yahoo just don't get it, and they've spent their time merely trying to bring the desktop GUI to email. Google, on the other hand, is redefining email.
Not that they haven't already. The conversation view means that I can email, "What did you think of last night's Battlestar Galactica?" to five other friends on gmail, and each person can respond without flooding each other's inboxes. Emails through gmail tend to be shorter, a kind of proof of presence more than anything else. Some of our conversations distribute to 10-20 other friends with gmail, and we've broken the 150 message ceiling more than once. I'm not being trite to say that Gmail has brought me closer to friends I would not have otherwise had regular contact with. For example, we have some friends teaching in Thailand, and while the rest of us sit at desks, we can include them in our gmails knowing that instead of plowing through 100 new emails, they will see only one highlighted thread. The search and labeling/flat-hierachies enable us to send out entire cut and pasted articles from the web, with the potential of being able to find reference these later.
And now, Google is blurring the line between email and IM (aka "proof of presence") by adding in-browser google talk. It's brilliant. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Microsoft think they're cool because users can right click in the web interface.
Lots of people are complaining about privacy, and rightfully so. But we should also be discussing how Google is changing the way people perceive and use email.
I was 4 when Columbia launched on April 12, 1981. I remember having to wake early to watch it. It was 4am in Edmonton, and the living room and house were still dark. But when the shuttle's engines ignited, the bridal white smoke from the shuttle's boosters filled our living room with light. Those same boosters propelled Columbia upwards, leaving a bright yellow trail of still burning fuel in the sky and on our tv screen.
I was tired. It was magnificent.
I had probably seen a rocket launch before, and I'm sure its raw power impressed me. But I think what drew me to the shuttle was its streamlined, white grace.
STS-1 was the first full launch and mission of a space shuttle, and it is one my first memories.
I have another space shuttle memory just as vivid. I am at the part of my daily journey from school to home where the park's sidewalk meets the street's. I am staring up, wondering if I can see the white "horns" of the Challenger explosion from the blue of the sky.
I am afraid that a piece of debris will land on me.
My childhood is filled with references to space. I devoured space books. I vastly preferred space Lego to the plain city bricks. When my friends and I played, we imagined we were in space more often than not. My parents raised me on a steady diet of television and film science fiction, not the least of which were Star Trek and Star Wars.
I'm not the only to have a space-filled childhood. Look no further than the 1986 film Space Camp. The movie is really just a series of plot devices so as to create a childly plausible situation in which a few kids get to pilot a space shuttle. In the end, the boys get the space shuttle, the girl, and the robot. You can't argue with that. It's a horrible movie actually, but I remember my friends and I seeing it several times, and re-enacting its scenes. It was cool.
My brother believed he would turn his room into a spaceship. Even though I frequently teased him about it, I secretly admired his tenacity. He studied schematics of spacecraft, starcharts, and physics. He's still working on it.
This month's Wired features an amateur spy satellite tracker named Ted Molczan. He is older than I am, but his childhood sounds similar, only with Apollos instead of Columbias and Challengers.
There are many of us, to us space meant more than emptiness. It was an ideal. Space represented progress, hope, and nobility. To think about space was to wonder. Culture reinforced this. Star Trek was perhaps the best example, with its frontiered hyperbolic optimism. But even the fairly vapid Star Wars infused space with adventure and excitement. Planetside was filled with moisture vaporators and blandly colored sandstorms. Space was permeated with color and sound, excitement and destiny.
Last night I had another visceral memory. When I threw the newly-purchased baby clothes into the washer, time stopped. The collective white of onesies and soft blankets froze in mid-air and I realized that I was washing a child's clothes - my child's clothes - for the first time.
Having recently read the Wired article, my immediate second thought was that my son or daughter would never know the wonder of space like I did, like we did.
I was sad.
This is how it is: space is now empty, dirty, and dark. The space shuttle is an antique. The laptop that I write this blog post on is incredibly more powerful than the ones that control the space shuttle. NASA is a joke. Americans see space more as a source of tourist dollars than a place to find ourselves. Bush's announcement of a moonbase and a trip to Mars was more political foliage than inspirational provocation. Culture is either ignorant or apathetic of space. It is merely a place where things happen, a set, and little more. And, of course, we have no room for something as ridiculously triumphant as Star Trek. Fifty years of unrequited romance has fundamentally changed our perception of the big black.
You're probably right, but let me give an example of how E3 and retail works. Many years ago, one of our store employees (who is now a dear friend, and a store manager) went to the convention. We'll call him Z. So Z is wandering around with his friend and comes across the Anachronix booth. It's generally empty, so Z strikes up a conversation. The designer spends 30 minutes with Z, showing him features and talking about the game. Anachronix had its own share of problems, so the press had all but given up on the game, hence the empty booth. When the game finally came out two years later, the press had forgotten it even more. But Z hadn't. He sold - no joke - at least 15 copies of the game. That doesn't sound like a lot, but judging by the game's quick trek to the bargain bin I bet that was more per store units than any other EB in the country.
Anachronix did not have the marketing money to make it to the store conference (a kind of mini-E3) several months later. But if the Anachronix people had set up official meetings like this with retail employees, maybe they would have at least delayed the bargain bin abyss.
I don't know you, but unless you're buying literally 2 or 3 games a week, I'm not sure you know what qualifies as a hardcore gamer. I'd say we had at least 15-20 people spending $200 a month - outside of fourth quarter mind you, and maybe 20-40 we saw an average of once every three weeks buying a game. I think even second tier qualifies as hardcore. They played these games out. I knew this because they'd come back and give us a very extensive review. If they didn't finish them, we knew the game sucked. And we knew these people well enough to hear from their wives when they'd found a game that was too good. All of us at the store could not figure out how they managed to play as many games as they did and still have lives. For the most part these were regular people, as in regular, normal Americans. Some, sure, were stereotypical ubergeeks. But most had wives, kids (whom they played games with), and 40+ hour a week jobs to support their "habit."
It was pretty cool, and I miss it sometimes. We had relationships with these people (and those still at this particular store still do). We played with them on Xbox Live, or invited them to LAN parties and they invited us. I often thought of it as a type of old school, Old Towne hardware store. Not only a store, but also a clearinghouse for gossip. But instead of gossip about the Rogers family down the street, this was gossip about games. It was our job to know about games, and so we did. The people who dropped $50 a week didn't have the time to go through all the sites and find trusted reviews. We were their trusted source. We had the unique advantage of networking on a person-to-person basis. We'd see Frank come in and gush about Game X, and even though Frank might never have net Joe, we knew that they shared similar tastes. So we were sort of a proxy among gamers, a trusted source filtering buying information among gamers in the city.
What I'm saying is that it was more than them walking in and saying, "WHAT IS GOOD," and us replying, "X IS GOOD" (although it did sometimes transpire like that). We had conversations with these people, and we usually gave a fairly complex rendetion of the game ("X has great graphics but is really short, but it seems that people who like Game Y really like Game X.")
Sadly, our game store was probably unique among its peers (it was an EB), and I imagine that it's becoming even more unique as Gamestop tightens its reins. Even though I really miss getting to know really interesting people and getting paid to talk about games, I'm glad I got out.
I worked at an EB for three years as an assistant manager (an assman, we called ourselves).
First, I know game clerks can be nerds and, even, assholes. That said, I would say that ultimately we influenced at least 30% of the purchases from our customers, especially around Christmas time when the moms come in and want something for their kids. Sometimes they have an idea that we talk them out of, like buying GTA for a 6 year old. Other times they might have a choice of three, and we'd advise them on the best for their dollar. And when it came to the hardcore gamers, we had established enough of a repore that they would walk in, literally ask us what to buy, and walk out with whatever we suggested. Myself and the staff at the store prided ourselves on knowing the games, and it always felt good to see a customer come back and ask for more of the same. I know more about the Sims demographics than anyone at EA. I know more than I care to know why people play the hell out of MMORPGs. I can tell the GameBoy cover marketers which colors attract kids' eyes more than others. Although sometimes we entertained fantastical ideas like Rez selling really well, we could generally predict the total sales of every game that came across our counter.
Excluding gamestore clerks out of the equation is a bad idea. We're too important. Usually at least one of us would hit up E3 every year, and report back to everyone else. We'd run videos on the store TVs to show off what we saw to the hardcore customers. Even in the age of up-to-the-minute E3 reporting, being at the convention was always a necessary part of the chain. It let whomever went notice games the press often passed up on. I can partially understand why E3 wants to start barring clerks, but to suggest that "industry-only" excludes one of the most important parts of the selling chain is ludicrous.
Game clerks, or at least the professionals, the ones that try to do their job well, are the kind of people the industry should be courting, not ignoring.
Braben makes the oh-so-common mistake of comparing the development of film to games. But while there are certainly patterns to the development of a media format, their very format changes their maturation. Radio and TV developed very differently than film, for a variety of reasons. Likewise, so will (and have) games.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of Braben's argument for a "golden age" is that the type of games he believes will populate this golden age already exist. He writes that "[the] game character's objectives are defined rather than the overarching story narrative, to allow the story to unfold in response to the player's actions." He derides his own game, Elite, by saying it only hinted at this freedom. But I can think of other older games, like Pirates! or Ultima or Starflight or even Simcity, where the player does exactly what Braben suggests will happen in his next game.
Secondly, Braben chastises recent games for putting the player on "pre-defined railway-lines." Ok. Sounds good. But then the harbinger of this new age, his own The Outsider, apparently has its own railway-line: "This is a thriller where the player begins by being accused of a terrible crime but can respond in many different ways, from getting revenge, to proving his innocence, to joining the secret organisation that came after him." Seems like I was presented with similar choices in games like Elite or Pirates. So there are branches in the railway, but it's still a railway. What made GTA so fun for many was the player often created their own objectives. Maybe this was to kill as many innocents, or explore every nook and cranny, or make the boat jump onto land. But Braben has already up a set number of objectives. Ok, so there are 4 rather than one. Big whoop. So what makes this game better? Apparently, the very thing Braben prophesies against: graphical enhancements.
Elite certainly gives Braben some credence, and if The Outsider is anything like Elite it will probably be quite fun. But if it's open-endedness he's after, he needs to stop superimposing film onto the very different medium of the video game.
Instead of working 40 people 60 hours a week without overtime pay, now EA can work 20 people 60 hours a week without overtime pay! All hail that Buildthingy!
I loved BG&E, but like ICO and REZ it is almost always on these underdog/underrated charts.
Battlezone is a title I have not yet seen on any charts, and it was absolutely fantastic. The plot was stellar and original, the blend between action and strategy was as seamless as it ever has been up to and since, and the graphics and design somehow managed to pay homage to the original and still seem very new.
I'm actually quite amazed Atari never updated the sucker and brought it to the consoles. The UI would have ported very easily. The team that did Battlezone did some lame Star Wars game, but that doesn't count.
By that reasoning, aren't text adventures no less limiting than graphic-based games? The way you use the keyboard, the way the monitor casts light, the interface - all these things limit and define the adventure. Really, if you wanted to have a truly mind-pure experience, sit in a room and close your eyes and think of your own adventure or story....right?
I appreciate text-adventures and am very glad that people are keeping them alive. But honestly, I tire of this misconception that graphic based games are the stupid man's game.
I consider myself a pretty techie guy. But I'm not rich. I have an oldskool 26 inch tube tv (remember those?), a decent enough sound system ($250 at the time), and a sprawling DVD and video game collection.
While you generously provide the acronym meanings, that doesn't help me in knowing what the hell they are. What I'm saying Kaldaien is that you're a rare breed. I just don't see any of those acronyms and features mattering to that many people, especially the single mother looking for a video game system who just wants to keep her kid busy with video games while she cooks dinner, or any number of other casual gamers.
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Many reviewers of Hotel Dusk, even in positive critiques, have noted that the game ignores the precepts of PC adventure games, but because of the story, Hotel Dusk is worth playing. But taken as a novel, the story isn't that good. If we read this as a book, paper pages and earmarks and all, I think anyone would quickly recognize how horribly trite and uninpsired the story is. Frankly, this is dime-store trash.
Which doesn't mean that isn't necessarily "good," or that doesn't mean that Hotel Dusk is incapable of pulling players into its story; indeed, the art is superb, and I think that any amount of interaction makes any story seem more visceral. Kyle, the main character, is us, after all.
But that it can do so much with so little is really the big problem with Hotel Dusk. Hotel Dusk reminds me a lot of Farenheit, which I played on the Xbox. Taken as either a game or a story, it leaned too heavily on cliches from both formats. Yet, it was still - like Hotel Dusk - admittedly fun. Why? Because finally I am the one (mostly) pulling the strings.
I'm more inclined to support The Onion's negative review, because Hotel Dusk is really a wasted opportunity. Yes, yes, games should be fun, and there will always be a place for Mario & Luigi-like simple stories (which I am totally digging on the GBA), or ripoffs of existing genres. But I think we need to start being harder on games that aspire to greatness, particularly in storytelling, as Hotel Dusk does. We do not need antoher Sam Spade story. We need an LA Confidential or Maltese Falcon video game, something that, yes, nods to the genre, but also brings it to another level. (Hell, just one of these games would make me happy.) It's not impossible (Deus Ex comes immediately to mind). Allowing games to use interaction as a crutch to support a weak story rather than a ladder to elevate it to a whole new media form is ultimately doing ourselves - and the games' designers - a disservice.
Indigo Prophecy was fun. It was also unique, a rarity among games these days. I applaud David Cage for that much.
But if he wants us to judge IP on its story, and by reading this I think he does, than let's do just that.
Take any number of IP's branching storylines and turn it into a book or movie. Guess what: it blows. The characters are one-dimensional and predictable. They're not archetypes - they're stereotypes. The African-American is good at violence and dancing. The women need rescuing by men. It's as if the game's French creators had never really met either an African-American or woman; just based them on what they read in books and movies. Which is another major problem in IP: it is basically a collage of popular books and movies.
Taken as a story, IP fails. At its best it's one of those quickie movies the SciFi Channel puts out. Taken as a game, it's Dance Dance Revolution, or Choose Your Adventure the Video Game. Is it fun? Yeah. But it's not mindblowing, as I think Cage seems to think.
For all his talk of interaction, and players creating their own narrative, it's already happening in games like Battlefield and World of Warcraft, where players group together, create relationships, and then play out narratives. On a single player level, even the early SimCity let me create a city that rose and fell - you know, like a story.
In a way, I see Indigo Prophecy as a kind of video game "thesis;" it's not quite as unique as a dissertation, they're just borrowing and applying a new methodology. Indigo Prophecy is both an indictment for storytelling and an inspiration. The story, when considered apart from its video games, is poor. But that it is fun and interesting as a video game shows just how powerful interactive storytelling is. There's a big potential that Indigo opens but never steps through.
Actually, the reason their products have those things is precisely because of the width of the company and the amount of check and balance systems. Sony is at once a content producer and a technology producer, certainly more than the degrees to which Microsoft and Nintendo are. That means that somewhere inside Sony, all products go through some kind of check and balance that asks, "Could someone use this product to 'steal' Sony intellectual property?" Then they fix the engineered product so that it can't - hence rootkits, betamax, minidisc, etc.
And really, if you're talking about a snake eating itself, that's not gay. I guess it's monosexual, but screwing oneself is hardly homosexuality.
This is a prime example of the cultural divide between the West and East, which characterizes the long, entire conversation of video games. Xbox doesn't work in Japan because it doesn't translate. It is so American, from its ascetic design to its games, that the Japanese could care less. The ascetic of the Xbox, the first especially, is American, in its side mack truck grills to the failed controller-as-big-as-your head. Nintendo has declined in popularity and influence for the same reason, only in reverse. The company is too Japanese, has never really diversified into the West and "Wii" demonstrates that complete lack of understanding. When they have diversified, they have generally done well (Rare, Silicon Knights, the people behind Metroid whose name escapes me). The corresponding launch video for Wii looks ipod-y, and Wii sounds too like a Japanese attempt to capitalize on the short semantic simplicty and wordplay of "ipod." The GameCube looks too "cute," and I imagine that Wii will, like the xbox 360, capitalize on the ipod design wave to moderate the cuteness - but like the 360, with little success.
Playstation has worked so well because even though it is a Japanese company, there is a strong enough American component than there are checks and balances to prevent untranslatable things like the Xbox and Wii from getting out. Playstation, PS2, and PS3 aren't imaginative, but that's precisely their appeal as names. They're utilitarian.
I'm not saying that Wii will fail. But if this is representative of the Nintendo strategy, Wii as a name just demonstrates that it the system will more likely occupy a niche in gaming, a novelty, and probably nothing more, just as the Xbox does and will in Japan.
Microsoft and Nintendo are probably better off naming something "GameMachine," making it stylistically nondescript, and then hiring devs in each country to create specific - and f***ing good games.
This may be true for larger developers, but if we are to look at other retail merchandise as an analogy or model there is clearly room for other venues of sale. Target is doing particularly well, and I'll be damned if those clothing stores in every city's bohemian drags aren't always full.
What I'm suggesting is that Wal-Mart is unquestionably big, but it isn't the universe. If anything, it's a big black hole. Once game developers get into its leisurely spin they will inevitably find themselves crushed by its greatness. But there are plenty of other ways to sell games, not the least of which this thing called Internet, which I dare say in some form or other will long outlive Wal-Mart.
I think this speaks more to the cost of development than anything else, but that's best saved for another post.
You know, now that you mention it both Starflights had the same thing happening. In Starflight 1, worlds would disappear as the game went on, and in Starflight 2 the Spemin would take over systems.
You know though, I feel like somewhere between those types of games and Oblivion, games took a whole set of steps back, and we're just not hitting that point again. It seems that with the processing power we should at least be able to top something like Star Control 2 or Starflight in terms of open-endedness. ?
This looks great, but like most open-ended RPGs, Oblivion still puts the main mission on hold while the player moseys around. What I want to see is a game where everything starts to fall apart, precisely because the player is cutting trees instead of saving the princess. Sure, it would be a very slow decay, so as to give the player the same feeling of open-endedness. But the more time you spent fishing, the less villages you'll have to trade with as they become overrun with evil.
The fact is that the people who really care about mhz and clock speed have either a) already bought an xbox360 and will not buy a Revolution, or, b) will buy all three consoles anyway. Talking about speed and graphic capabilities is useless. It all boils down to: is it fun?
basically people have a $400 machine and are dying to play something on it. no big deal. but for the time being, they need to give geometry wars most of the credit there.
Oh, like the PC!
The PS2 came out in the US in October 2000. GTA3 did not come out until the October after the PS2 launched, in 2001. Of course, neither did Halo, which came out with the Xbox November of 2001. But for nearly an entire the year, the bright shining stars of the lot were Onimusha (oooo!) and Madden (yawn). The PS2 was plagued with hardware shortages, then memory card shortages, and then people realized that setting the PS2 on its side and leaving the disc in scratched the disc to hell.
This is March, a mere 5 months after the so-called transition to the next generation, and they're calling it?
I've been using Gmail since 2004, and it has radically changed the way I maintain contact with people. It's clear to me that The integration of Google Talk into gmail is just another step Google is taking that characterizes their approach to email. Microsoft and Yahoo just don't get it, and they've spent their time merely trying to bring the desktop GUI to email. Google, on the other hand, is redefining email.
Not that they haven't already. The conversation view means that I can email, "What did you think of last night's Battlestar Galactica?" to five other friends on gmail, and each person can respond without flooding each other's inboxes. Emails through gmail tend to be shorter, a kind of proof of presence more than anything else. Some of our conversations distribute to 10-20 other friends with gmail, and we've broken the 150 message ceiling more than once. I'm not being trite to say that Gmail has brought me closer to friends I would not have otherwise had regular contact with. For example, we have some friends teaching in Thailand, and while the rest of us sit at desks, we can include them in our gmails knowing that instead of plowing through 100 new emails, they will see only one highlighted thread. The search and labeling/flat-hierachies enable us to send out entire cut and pasted articles from the web, with the potential of being able to find reference these later.
And now, Google is blurring the line between email and IM (aka "proof of presence") by adding in-browser google talk. It's brilliant. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Microsoft think they're cool because users can right click in the web interface.
Lots of people are complaining about privacy, and rightfully so. But we should also be discussing how Google is changing the way people perceive and use email.
I was 4 when Columbia launched on April 12, 1981. I remember having to wake early to watch it. It was 4am in Edmonton, and the living room and house were still dark. But when the shuttle's engines ignited, the bridal white smoke from the shuttle's boosters filled our living room with light. Those same boosters propelled Columbia upwards, leaving a bright yellow trail of still burning fuel in the sky and on our tv screen.
I was tired. It was magnificent.
I had probably seen a rocket launch before, and I'm sure its raw power impressed me. But I think what drew me to the shuttle was its streamlined, white grace.
STS-1 was the first full launch and mission of a space shuttle, and it is one my first memories.
I have another space shuttle memory just as vivid. I am at the part of my daily journey from school to home where the park's sidewalk meets the street's. I am staring up, wondering if I can see the white "horns" of the Challenger explosion from the blue of the sky.
I am afraid that a piece of debris will land on me.
My childhood is filled with references to space. I devoured space books. I vastly preferred space Lego to the plain city bricks. When my friends and I played, we imagined we were in space more often than not. My parents raised me on a steady diet of television and film science fiction, not the least of which were Star Trek and Star Wars.
I'm not the only to have a space-filled childhood. Look no further than the 1986 film Space Camp. The movie is really just a series of plot devices so as to create a childly plausible situation in which a few kids get to pilot a space shuttle. In the end, the boys get the space shuttle, the girl, and the robot. You can't argue with that. It's a horrible movie actually, but I remember my friends and I seeing it several times, and re-enacting its scenes. It was cool.
My brother believed he would turn his room into a spaceship. Even though I frequently teased him about it, I secretly admired his tenacity. He studied schematics of spacecraft, starcharts, and physics. He's still working on it.
This month's Wired features an amateur spy satellite tracker named Ted Molczan. He is older than I am, but his childhood sounds similar, only with Apollos instead of Columbias and Challengers.
There are many of us, to us space meant more than emptiness. It was an ideal. Space represented progress, hope, and nobility. To think about space was to wonder. Culture reinforced this. Star Trek was perhaps the best example, with its frontiered hyperbolic optimism. But even the fairly vapid Star Wars infused space with adventure and excitement. Planetside was filled with moisture vaporators and blandly colored sandstorms. Space was permeated with color and sound, excitement and destiny.
Last night I had another visceral memory. When I threw the newly-purchased baby clothes into the washer, time stopped. The collective white of onesies and soft blankets froze in mid-air and I realized that I was washing a child's clothes - my child's clothes - for the first time.
Having recently read the Wired article, my immediate second thought was that my son or daughter would never know the wonder of space like I did, like we did.
I was sad.
This is how it is: space is now empty, dirty, and dark. The space shuttle is an antique. The laptop that I write this blog post on is incredibly more powerful than the ones that control the space shuttle. NASA is a joke. Americans see space more as a source of tourist dollars than a place to find ourselves. Bush's announcement of a moonbase and a trip to Mars was more political foliage than inspirational provocation. Culture is either ignorant or apathetic of space. It is merely a place where things happen, a set, and little more. And, of course, we have no room for something as ridiculously triumphant as Star Trek. Fifty years of unrequited romance has fundamentally changed our perception of the big black.
What kid wants to be an astronaut anymore?
I'd like to say mine, but I've changed too.
You're probably right, but let me give an example of how E3 and retail works. Many years ago, one of our store employees (who is now a dear friend, and a store manager) went to the convention. We'll call him Z. So Z is wandering around with his friend and comes across the Anachronix booth. It's generally empty, so Z strikes up a conversation. The designer spends 30 minutes with Z, showing him features and talking about the game. Anachronix had its own share of problems, so the press had all but given up on the game, hence the empty booth. When the game finally came out two years later, the press had forgotten it even more. But Z hadn't. He sold - no joke - at least 15 copies of the game. That doesn't sound like a lot, but judging by the game's quick trek to the bargain bin I bet that was more per store units than any other EB in the country.
Anachronix did not have the marketing money to make it to the store conference (a kind of mini-E3) several months later. But if the Anachronix people had set up official meetings like this with retail employees, maybe they would have at least delayed the bargain bin abyss.
I don't know you, but unless you're buying literally 2 or 3 games a week, I'm not sure you know what qualifies as a hardcore gamer. I'd say we had at least 15-20 people spending $200 a month - outside of fourth quarter mind you, and maybe 20-40 we saw an average of once every three weeks buying a game. I think even second tier qualifies as hardcore. They played these games out. I knew this because they'd come back and give us a very extensive review. If they didn't finish them, we knew the game sucked. And we knew these people well enough to hear from their wives when they'd found a game that was too good. All of us at the store could not figure out how they managed to play as many games as they did and still have lives. For the most part these were regular people, as in regular, normal Americans. Some, sure, were stereotypical ubergeeks. But most had wives, kids (whom they played games with), and 40+ hour a week jobs to support their "habit."
It was pretty cool, and I miss it sometimes. We had relationships with these people (and those still at this particular store still do). We played with them on Xbox Live, or invited them to LAN parties and they invited us. I often thought of it as a type of old school, Old Towne hardware store. Not only a store, but also a clearinghouse for gossip. But instead of gossip about the Rogers family down the street, this was gossip about games. It was our job to know about games, and so we did. The people who dropped $50 a week didn't have the time to go through all the sites and find trusted reviews. We were their trusted source. We had the unique advantage of networking on a person-to-person basis. We'd see Frank come in and gush about Game X, and even though Frank might never have net Joe, we knew that they shared similar tastes. So we were sort of a proxy among gamers, a trusted source filtering buying information among gamers in the city.
What I'm saying is that it was more than them walking in and saying, "WHAT IS GOOD," and us replying, "X IS GOOD" (although it did sometimes transpire like that). We had conversations with these people, and we usually gave a fairly complex rendetion of the game ("X has great graphics but is really short, but it seems that people who like Game Y really like Game X.")
Sadly, our game store was probably unique among its peers (it was an EB), and I imagine that it's becoming even more unique as Gamestop tightens its reins. Even though I really miss getting to know really interesting people and getting paid to talk about games, I'm glad I got out.
I worked at an EB for three years as an assistant manager (an assman, we called ourselves).
First, I know game clerks can be nerds and, even, assholes. That said, I would say that ultimately we influenced at least 30% of the purchases from our customers, especially around Christmas time when the moms come in and want something for their kids. Sometimes they have an idea that we talk them out of, like buying GTA for a 6 year old. Other times they might have a choice of three, and we'd advise them on the best for their dollar. And when it came to the hardcore gamers, we had established enough of a repore that they would walk in, literally ask us what to buy, and walk out with whatever we suggested. Myself and the staff at the store prided ourselves on knowing the games, and it always felt good to see a customer come back and ask for more of the same. I know more about the Sims demographics than anyone at EA. I know more than I care to know why people play the hell out of MMORPGs. I can tell the GameBoy cover marketers which colors attract kids' eyes more than others. Although sometimes we entertained fantastical ideas like Rez selling really well, we could generally predict the total sales of every game that came across our counter.
Excluding gamestore clerks out of the equation is a bad idea. We're too important. Usually at least one of us would hit up E3 every year, and report back to everyone else. We'd run videos on the store TVs to show off what we saw to the hardcore customers. Even in the age of up-to-the-minute E3 reporting, being at the convention was always a necessary part of the chain. It let whomever went notice games the press often passed up on. I can partially understand why E3 wants to start barring clerks, but to suggest that "industry-only" excludes one of the most important parts of the selling chain is ludicrous.
Game clerks, or at least the professionals, the ones that try to do their job well, are the kind of people the industry should be courting, not ignoring.
Braben makes the oh-so-common mistake of comparing the development of film to games. But while there are certainly patterns to the development of a media format, their very format changes their maturation. Radio and TV developed very differently than film, for a variety of reasons. Likewise, so will (and have) games.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of Braben's argument for a "golden age" is that the type of games he believes will populate this golden age already exist. He writes that "[the] game character's objectives are defined rather than the overarching story narrative, to allow the story to unfold in response to the player's actions." He derides his own game, Elite, by saying it only hinted at this freedom. But I can think of other older games, like Pirates! or Ultima or Starflight or even Simcity, where the player does exactly what Braben suggests will happen in his next game.
Secondly, Braben chastises recent games for putting the player on "pre-defined railway-lines." Ok. Sounds good. But then the harbinger of this new age, his own The Outsider, apparently has its own railway-line: "This is a thriller where the player begins by being accused of a terrible crime but can respond in many different ways, from getting revenge, to proving his innocence, to joining the secret organisation that came after him." Seems like I was presented with similar choices in games like Elite or Pirates. So there are branches in the railway, but it's still a railway. What made GTA so fun for many was the player often created their own objectives. Maybe this was to kill as many innocents, or explore every nook and cranny, or make the boat jump onto land. But Braben has already up a set number of objectives. Ok, so there are 4 rather than one. Big whoop. So what makes this game better? Apparently, the very thing Braben prophesies against: graphical enhancements.
Elite certainly gives Braben some credence, and if The Outsider is anything like Elite it will probably be quite fun. But if it's open-endedness he's after, he needs to stop superimposing film onto the very different medium of the video game.
. . . to start collecting Google CDs! I just hope they do no evil and use those easy to remove address stickers on the DVD case mailings.
Instead of working 40 people 60 hours a week without overtime pay, now EA can work 20 people 60 hours a week without overtime pay! All hail that Buildthingy!
welcome our new "I For One..." overlords, who will no doubt reveal themselves in this thread many times over.
I loved BG&E, but like ICO and REZ it is almost always on these underdog/underrated charts.
Battlezone is a title I have not yet seen on any charts, and it was absolutely fantastic. The plot was stellar and original, the blend between action and strategy was as seamless as it ever has been up to and since, and the graphics and design somehow managed to pay homage to the original and still seem very new.
I'm actually quite amazed Atari never updated the sucker and brought it to the consoles. The UI would have ported very easily. The team that did Battlezone did some lame Star Wars game, but that doesn't count.
Like this contest, you design a bridge no one will ever use. All you have to do is suck up to a politican. The prize is $2b.
query: what's good at the IF Comp 05? Lots of titles and no descriptions (that I can find). Top 5?
By that reasoning, aren't text adventures no less limiting than graphic-based games? The way you use the keyboard, the way the monitor casts light, the interface - all these things limit and define the adventure. Really, if you wanted to have a truly mind-pure experience, sit in a room and close your eyes and think of your own adventure or story....right?
I appreciate text-adventures and am very glad that people are keeping them alive. But honestly, I tire of this misconception that graphic based games are the stupid man's game.
I consider myself a pretty techie guy. But I'm not rich. I have an oldskool 26 inch tube tv (remember those?), a decent enough sound system ($250 at the time), and a sprawling DVD and video game collection.
While you generously provide the acronym meanings, that doesn't help me in knowing what the hell they are. What I'm saying Kaldaien is that you're a rare breed. I just don't see any of those acronyms and features mattering to that many people, especially the single mother looking for a video game system who just wants to keep her kid busy with video games while she cooks dinner, or any number of other casual gamers.
Since when does more accurate headshots = more fun? I'd like to see you play Katamari with a mouse and a keyboard. That'd be funny.