Friend Closet

Tycho said something on PA that I found notable. Not that there's a chance that anyone, anywhere would read this *before* seeing it on Penny Arcade, but still:

I love unlocking things, don't get me wrong, but God dammit when I buy a game with multiplayer features I basically expect to leverage those features in a non-crippled fashion from the moment I spin up your expensive game. If you want me to unlock different scarfs or whatever, fine. If you want me to unlock bonus courses or tracks, hey, whatever. But let us utilize the social functionality out the gate. Wipeout did it right - a handful of tracks upfront. That's some olive branch shit.

Seriously - WTF is with that? I started to notice it with some Japanese developers way back when (I think Zone of the Enders?) and it's only gotten more prevalent. Yes, I understand that you want me to play the single player version. Yes, I appreciate the need to learn the rules. But it's not like there is some friend closet available to pull players from just because you unlocked something (although, if any mad scientists are reading ... there's an idea).

If I rent a game that advertises two person play for the express purpose of playing it with my girlfriend upon receipt - you damn well better be sure that the game will be returned before I bother unlocking squat.

It gets better.

I tried to send the following email to Technology Review. If I didn't mention your name, please don't yell or anything - I was really trying to make more of a point than a shout out.

This is in response to Eric Hellweg's article on gaming blogs. It seems that Eric could have done a little more research on what blogs ARE actually out there, even if the Blogmaster of Google was out of office for a while.

So for his benefit, here's a quick primer.

Penny Arcade is a comic that posts also posts a blog with oodles of gaming op/ed: http://www.pennyarcade.com

Game Girl Advance is a fairly old gaming blog, infamous for it's Rez column on vibration (google it): http://gamegirladvance.com

One of my personal faves is gewgaw - the personal blog of Robin Hunicke, who studies game design at Northwestern: http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/blog/

Kotaku is part of the gawker group: http://www.kotaku.com

GameDevBlog is specifically from an insider's look at how games get designed: http://www.gamedevblog.com/

The Independant Gaming Source covers the indie scene quite well: http://www.tigsource.com/

Dreamy Gamer is also from a developer's point of view: http://dreamygamer.blogspot.com/ ... she may be moving her website soon

I'm missing tons here. Grumpy Gamer. The Ludologist. Costik's site. I mean, there's tons. There's buttonmashing.com and I personally write one from both the angle of both an avid gamer and hobbyist developer at http://cathodetan.blogspot.com ...

See, the annoyance here is that these blogs don't have a lot of exposure angles. By announcing that there's a dirge of them and then not even bothering to try and spotlight those that DO exist, Eric does an injustice to the game blog community that is out there.

Hope this is going to the right inbox ... wasn't sure from your contact page.

Now here is the punchline. The Contact Us page at MIT's Technology Review doesn't work You got that? It's broked. It returns nothing but "document contains no data". These guys are writing commentary on internet technology and they can't even keep an email form running.

Seriously, it could make a grown man weep. Or at least groan a little. Try sending Brad King, their Web Editor a message yourself and see what happens.

I do not exist

Found this interesting column on Technology Review decrying the non-existence of gaming blogs

OK, on a very very small scale there's a point to be made here. Gaming blogs aren't exactly a dime a dozen. Not compared to political blogs or "look what my cat ate last night" type blogs. But this guy just didn't bother doing his research. Does he mention Penny Arcade or Game Girl Advance? Did he bother googling, to see just what's out there? He mentions Joystiq ... and well ... Gamespot?

There's a pretty sizeable game blog community, it's just a little hard to see. Eric seriously misses an opportunity to do some decent digging and spotlight a few of them here, posting instead something of a fluff piece apparently based on some conversation he had at a bar:

The idea for this column came about as a result of a conversation I had at South by Southwest with Jason Goldman, chief of staff at Google's Blogger. He was very interested in the intersection of videogames and blogs. I pitched the idea to Brad and expected the story to revolve heavily around a conversation I would have with Jason to go on the record and learn more about his efforts. Unfortunately, Jason's on vacation for two weeks -- well outside my deadline.

What the? Hey Eric ... there's this marvelous research tool called the Internet you might be familiar with. Google even has a web interface, so you don't have to go all person to person to get information from them.

We're out here Eric. You don't have to wait for Microsoft or some other corporation to own the blogspace of gaming for us to emerge. We're here. Many of us would be happy to chat in fact.

EDIT: Funny thing is - that article has no trackback, comment post or even email link to the author. I think maybe Technology Review needs to do a little light reading on the last five years.

DDRPG

Points to this and simply mutters that I've got a similar idea, but without the 90% recycled goods. I don't normally talk about stuff until I have it working though, but the traffic here shouldn't raise much complaints about unfinished projects (remember Unreal Defense Squad? Right then.)

Anyway, my latest has been writing/adapting an XMLRPC server for iTunes called iSiam which would open the audio data for other apps to use. Most notably games. I've got two projects lined up for this tech, the first one with some game logic (using Torque) down.

It's just always neat to pencil out an idea thinking, "wonder why nobody thought of that" ... and then realizing that naturally someone has.

It's like being at Delphi

Stuff's been going eirely predictable lately, like some kind of bad Volkswagen commercial.

Tapwave is "transitioning", and surely the reasons are numerous but some kinda obvious. Gizmodo probably says it best:

But the Zodiac, for all its shortcomings (namely, not being the PSP), is a pretty neat device, especially if you just want a Palm PDA that can occasionally play games. What’s sad, though, is that this all happened a week ago and we just now noticed.

Cross Hip-Hop with Game Culture? I'll bite.

Add two turn tables, a canadian, some blokes and whatyaget? Head over to Intelligent Artifice for the read-see, yo. There is so much culture clashing going on here that I might have to get dizzy.

OK, I'll stop now.

I got Jak'd

One of the great things about Gamefly is the ability to rent something, beat on it for a while and then send it on home - all in about a night, fairly easily and with no guilt about wasting money.

I'm not sure why I wanted to try the original Jak and Daxter, I guess it's because I keep hearing about how the franchise has grown. The problem is - I hate platformers. Hate them. I liked Mario 64 and there hasn't been a single one to interest or entertain me since (I only played that game because at the time Nintendo left little choice ... though I found it compelling in the end). The thing is - platformers represent what I think is one of the worst user experiences in modern gaming. This is where the gamer knows what they're supposed to do ... knows exactly how they're supposed to do it ... and yet after twenty attempts isn't even close to completion because they haven't either a) figured out the lousy controls enough to accomplish the task or b) hasn't hit the random sequence of events to accomplish the task.

Take this as evidence. Capturing the "muse" on Misty Island is about as much fun as those old games where you try to make all the balls fall into a hole - except the latter has better camera control. I know the muse is a chase and that I have to beat the muse's time to a spot. I know I can use special moves to increase my speed. I found out there are shortcuts. Course - none of that matters when I can't see where I'm going because Naughty Dog apparently forgot to code in a way to force the camera to stay behind Jak, which means that the screwy circular path the muse takes is mostly a lesson in trying to see where you're going AND that the movement controls are so clumsy that at least four times I went past said muse instead of capturing it.

About a half hour of that was all I could take before I knew I had better things to do with my time. I was getting pretty close - but that was only making things more frustrating. It got down to that "keep trying until you hit that lucky moment where you accidentally succeed" part. Bah. Back in the sleeve ya go.

To it's credit - Jak's got some awesome design behind in terms of art production, story, and certainly an original bent on the platformer genre in general. Many of the mechanics work splendidly and for someone without a serious aversion to the platformer way of life would probably love it.

If you're that person - just do me a favor and wringe the muse's neck once you catch it.

Update: Oddly, the old GameDevBlog has some Notes on Psychonauts, which it decries as "the best Jak & Daxter-like game I've ever seen" ... so perhaps I should just be shooting for the pinnacle of the genre.

Post Post Script ... only now noticed that I typo'd the main character half the time. Need more coffee. Excuse me, I have to clean this egg off now.

Costik and the Meme

Oh, well. What I take away from both Dvorak and Elixir is that the meme is spreading; the lack of creativity in gaming is starting to bother a lot more people than me... Even if, in some cases, the people who adopt the meme strike me as a little off key.

-- Greg Costikyan

I think that kinda nails it. I've certainly been guilty of ringing the gloom bell when it comes to the dearth of innovation in games and how the "hollywood" influence is edging out the original design theories that pushed games forward. However, it's important to strike a balance when railing on about this. Dvorak's clumsy take on it somewhat shows that it's very easy to take a glib stance and decry that nobody out there is trying. And while it's easy to take the Elixir closing as a sign of gloom, it should also stand as a reminder that market pressures aren't conspiracy - they're a cold hard fact of any industry. Both Elixir and Troika had a fundamental problem with their games ... they didn't sell as well as they should have.

So we can't focus on just the meme. We gotta look at it from all the angles if we're to try and find a way out.

Question

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Zap! Interview

Zap! is this breakthrough game over at Garage Games which combines old school 2D gameplay with new ideas like capture the flag and deathmatch. I haven't played it as of yet, but it's definately on my todo list for when I get a bit of a breather. The interview itself is a bit flawed, making the easy mistake that Zap! uses the Torque 2D engine (it precedes it), but it does offer up some interesting points about gameplay versus graphics, blogging, etc., so you should read it.

Kotaku y Guild Wars

Kotaku goes all throbby over Guild Wars, making me seriously wish I had my PC working again. Well, no it doesn't as I just had some real success last night in my iTunes expirements and it's the last thing I need to derail me. The short version is that the game thoroughly impresses, but the lingering wonder of for how long hangs over like a cloud. As I hear about more and more people abandoning WoW, it makes you wonder how the MMO industry is going to work in the future.

The thing is, it's OK to love Guild Wars for only a few months. You aren't paying monthly. There's nobody to call when you decide you've had enough. And when NCSoft decides to release an expansion pack, you can pick up right where you left off. They've completely dismissed this myth that the MMO industry requires a monthly fee to run. Let's state that again - it's a myth that the MMO industry requires you to pay them monthly. They're doing it not from necessity, but profit.

Hopefully Guild Wars will have people re-examining how much it's worth to play large scale online games. Maybe Sony won't get away with releasing pay-per-betaware much longer.

Dvorak is as Dvorak does

By way of Broken Toys on the tip from games.slashdot comes this gem where Dvorak, who admits he's out of touch with the game industry asserts that the game industry is doomed because ... he's out of touch with it.

How about that for ego? You know, I don't get why people still play (real life) golf, which I'm sure is an indication of the sport's demise. By Dvorak's logic they'll all be trying to beat my Tiger Woods avatar in a few years.

But seriously, if it's taken a person this long to realize how out of touch Dvorak is, then that person might be getting a little out of touch themselves. What I mean by that is - the guy's a hack. Pretty much always has been.

Perhaps "Liger"?

Apple Insider is reporting that Tiger Direct is suing Apple for using "Tiger" as their OS name and marketing thrust.

You know what's really dumb about this? Other than the fact that it's completely inane that there'd be any confusion over these two brands whatsoever and that companies trying own the English language is so annoying I could scream, of course. It's that Tiger Direct will rake in loads of free advertising from it. This morning, I was thinking of Tiger - the OS. Not the retailer.

Now I'm thinking that I'll probably not be ordering from the retailer ... ever.

Is Nintendo Going Insane?

OK, then - let's tally up all the rumors:

Revolution's controllers are touch screen, perhaps without any normal buttons...

The Controllers also may be gryoscopic in nature.

There may be no connectivity for the DS, only the next gen GameBoy.

And now...

The Revolution will use a 3D projection display

OK, that is simply a buttload of huh. We're rapidly moving into tinfoil camp here, people. It used to be that console manufacturers would just inflate some numbers and make us believe that the next generation machine would be that supercomputer we always wanted in our living room. We would believe them, and then buy them and generally be content with something that could play Conker's instead of singing Daisy, Daisy. But now Nintendo is threatening to bring together the Virtual Boy, a universal remote and the Coleco GryoBot into some kind of evil trinity. I'm falling into the "they're just spreading rumors to keep their name in the press" camp at the moment. I don't see how a having a gamepad that rotates while you try to press a stylus together can really help me navigate a hologram, but we'll see.

One Hit Wonder

If I had my PC running, I'd so enter this contest to create a game played with only one key. Ever need an excuse to do a quickie remake of those old Epyx "athlete" games where it was all just button mashing? Can't think of a better one.