Katamari on NPR

The Girl just sent word that NPR is doing a bit on Katamari Damacy. Audio should be up on their website later today.

Update: Audio is available at that link. Just heard it. Very good view on the game, a little hyperbolic at times (best game since chess?) ... but still an extremely well-done and thoughtful look at the game and examines why everything from it's blatant otaku-ness and catchy music make the thing so damn popular.



tagged: npr, gaming

Poorly Crafted Demands For 2006

For Corvus' latest roundtable I'll update my previous list of demands which, at the very least, got this out of the deal.

So here goes.

Apple, open a game studio with the aim of developing simple but innovative titles for casual players. Sell games off of iTunes. Make games that interact with iTunes. I have a living room, an AirTunes and a big TV. Help a brother out.

I'm officially bored with simple running and gunning ... although it took quite some time. The biggest problem a title like Quake IV has is that it ignores that games like GoldenEye or Halo never existed. I was moderately OK with that on Doom III ... though I still think the controls there kinda sucked (for more sinful than the lighting). Big monsters and weapon design won't cut it anymore. Give me better control. Give me better stories. Give me better interaction.

Casual gaming, meet casual online gaming. Let's get together sometime. One of the great things about Mario Kart DS is the ability to get human players into the game so easily. Microsoft and Bungie started catching on with their Halo matchmaking and others are taking notes.

Replayability, replayability, replayability. I will say it every year. Give me games that I want to keep on my hard drive until the end of time. Give me games that I can just pick up any odd day that I have a free half hour.

X-Com for the DS. Rebelstar was nice, sure. But I missed base management and open ended campaigns. And now I want wifi multiplayer. Hey, that's what you get for making me wait for the whole thing. Make it coop and I'll give you a gold star. And a buttercookie.

Keep indies indie. Having seen the overcommercialization of mods with front row tickets, I'm hoping the same won't become true for the indie scene. Course, this is a harder line to draw since indie teams are naturally in it for profit from the get go. Just remember that market pressure begets market demands. And those demands are rarely to make crazy fun innovative risky stuff.

Stick up for yourself .... and others. The next time someone attacks the industry, stand up for them ... even if they are Rockstar. The anti-game crowd is getting louder and the industry is going to have to get on the offensive to stay the line. It's not enough to have gamers themselves getting all uppity - we gotta see industry figures become more verbal and more visible when it comes to helping parents get the real story on games.

Sony, stop the evil ... because if you pull any DRM/rootkit crap with your game division like you did with BMG, there will have to be a reckoning. A reckoning I say.

Don't release Duke Nukem Forever because honestly, that joke will never get old unless you do. Don't rob us of that.

I'm not upgrading, so deal with it. The CheapBox might get a new non-Celeron processor and a quieter CPU fan, but that's about it. Gears of War might require dual 7800s but I'll be willing to either that hardware gets cheap or I get a next-gen (or is it just gen now?) console. I've got a massive backlog of PC titles to get through on this hardware, so I'm really in no rush. If the industry wants to sell to a large PC audience, it will have to remember that not everyone throws down four grand to play games.

OK, that's all for now. I'd probably have more but work is extremely swampy right now.


Pull up a seat...





tagged: game, gaming

White House Text Adventure

Political satire in Infocom format? Excellent.


tagged: game, politics

Failure of the Colossus

I'm on the last giant in Shadow of the Colossus, and I've got some complaints to voice. If you haven't gotten this far in the game, stop reading. Don't stop playing - the game is completely worth it up to this point. But right now I'm getting a very God of War feeling for disappointing ending.

The main problem with this giant is it's circular design. But it's not design which is making this so frustrating ... it's mechanics. Everything up to this game has balanced it's overly complicated control setup with a fairly fluid set of mechanics which allows players to actually getter better at distinct tasks like climbing up specific parts of fur or legs. So once you've figured out part of a fight, it generally gets easier.

I'll foreshadow my problem by saying it took me a half hour to get across the bridge. Why? Because thee camera kept circuling around and I was trying to keep the horse straight. An impossible task and the horse knew it. I finally just tried letting the horse guide itself ... and voila. Question is ... why didnt the designers realize what the camera would do to the controls?

Apparently they kept ignoring it. Having a level which has large parts going around a radius and a camera which attempts, often poorly, to follow that radius ... while the player is trying to use an analog stick to maintain a couple directions at once? Ouch. Seriously, seriously ouch. Especially when I'm in this giant's mitt and it's rotating it's arm, it's hand and the camera is going around as well? Half the time I can't even see the character and the other half the character is futilely climbing against the grain ... and often it's both.

Bad show. It's this kind of failed mechanics that makes me hate nearly every jumping puzzle in nearly any game. I understand what you want me to do. I can do it 99% of the time. You force me to repeat it over and over. And if I fail once ....

I get to start all over again. You want me to be precise in my actions? Fine ... give me precision controls.

I definately need to see this game through to the end, but I feel it ending on a downer now.




tagged: game, gaming

My Video Is Split

The Girl and I recently bought a DVD recorder for the main purpose of recording some shows we have saved on Tivo. Things like the AMC presentation of Airplane!. Also, I'm desperate to get my VHS copy of The Maxx on something more durable.

Unfortunately, this started me on a huge crusade to rewire the Entertainment Shrine in the best possible way. Previously, the DVD player enjoyed the TV's only s-video input. But now having seen the difference in quality from DirecTV on s-video versus coaxial ... well, that just wouldn't do.

So now I've spent as much on cables as the DVD recorder itself ... and the DVD recorder doesn't even get s-video in the end. Everything else does, including the PlayStation 2. Our shows now play nice and crisp, which is probably the best part. I'm not sure if I'm going to invest in an s-video splitter (as well as the switch box) or just let the recorder use composite inputs. For now, though, I'll glow in some geeky glory.



tagged: tv, cables

Don Quixote And Gaming

This is simply brilliant:

"If Cervantes had written 'Don Quixote' today," says Gonzalo Frasca, a video game researcher in Copenhagen, "video games - and not books - would have sparked the imagination of its hero and caused him to realize that he is a knight waging a war for justice. Don Quixote was a reflection of fear of a new medium - popular literature - and over the years his fears were proven false. Today there is a big fear of video games. Some people claim they corrupt youth, but over time people will understand that this is a medium that can be used positively."

-- The game's the thing

This article on Haartz covering Gonzalo Frasca (also known for ludology.org) is full of gems like that one. He goes into GTA, cartoons, powerful robots .... ah heck ... just read it.




tagged: ludology , gaming

Escape from the Crimson Room

Stumbled on this odd flash game which goes along the old "escape from a single room" theory of game design. I've been poking at it and still haven't gotten out, though I do keep finding keys all over the place. If someone was going to lock me in a room, they should just keep the key and be done with it ... though I admit that would be an unfun game.

On a side note, I'm considering a textual version of something like this as a demo. I'm working on a new piece to try and really flush out the new design, but something simple might help as well.


Update: A friend of mine informs that this is about a year old, but TIG Source mentions that there is a new one.

tagged: flash, gaming

Banned 360 Ad

I think this is old news, but apparently this ad for the 360 was deemed touchy by MS Lawyers. I swear I saw a parody of this already, so I'm fairly certain this has been out for a while. Still, it's one of the better 360 ads I've seen. Course, I play violent video games.




tagged: 360, gaming

Disaffected - The Game For Copy Store Junkies

Described as "a videogame parody of the Kinko’s copy store", Disaffected allows players to take control of the purple shirt wearing employees. Declaring a new genre of "anti-advergame", the premise alone seems worth a download. (Spotted on Dave's Dump)



tagged: kinkos, gaming

Hope Springs Eternal

Adventure Gamers offers up a review of a game you'd likely to never heard of before reading said review. Hope Springs Eternal is an indie adventure game about being a private eye in Sweden:

If your idea of pleasing gameplay is to leisurely stroll through a delightful game world populated by some gentle locals, with fairly simple challenges, this game is well worth a look. You'll have to live with some unclued inventory item hunting and related backtracking, but at the reasonable purchase price, you will probably enjoy yourself for a few afternoons. For experienced gamers, the game may feel more like a quaint, unambitious game. Still, it has enough going for it to keep it in mind for those long lulls when you want something pleasant and distracting while waiting for the big ticket games.

Check out the developer's site for more.



tagged: game, gaming

Browncoats start a fundraiser

Some rabid Firefly fans have started taking online donations to hand off to Joss Whedon so that Serenity might fly again. I had heard some fairly substantive gossip that Joss himself seemed prepped to let his fictional verse have it's end, but some say otherwise with an emphasis on "direct to DVD" or perhaps a return to television. So whether this is grass roots investing or just pure folly remains to be seen.

Television would be best, I think. Firefly was always too broad of a story to fit into a feature film format, which was one of the problems the movie had. Anything would be good though. Sometimes the strange branches are better than the tree. For instance, I never really got into the Starship Troopers movie ... but the animated series was pretty addictive. And if there was an animated Serenity, I'd certainly be picking that up.

In all honestly, though, the body of work Firefly/Serenity comprises right now is still stellar enough. The DVD set is in itself an epic movie and the movie at least provides a sense of closure. Certainly with characters as good as these, you will always want more.




tagged: television, firefly

Kotaku's Uwe Boll Defense

Crecente has apparently viewed House of the Dead and deemed it worthy:

The first half of the movie is action-packed and full of amazing special effects. If you haven’t seen it yet, Boll uses some pretty interesting technology to create some huge bullet-time scenes. Instead of the scenes including two or three people, he managed to squeeze in a whole graveyard worth of actors. The effect is pretty cool. The middle drags a little, but fortunately it’s a fairly short section. The end jumps back into the action, but isn’t as enjoyable as the beginning of the movie.

Boll also did a lot to turn this slasher flick into a homage to the game. There are bits of footage from the game actually in the movie, and lots of the game elements show up as well. Whenever one of the main characters dies, the background fades to black and the camera slowly rotates around the character, just like the drop-a-coin countdown in the arcade shooter. One of the last shoot-out scenes of the movie features the characters walking down a long hallway blasting zombies as they jump out of the dark.

-- Uwe Boll Ain't Heavy

I have seen the flick and stand by my rating of sucktastic. I'm not sure what amazing special effects could possibly be referenced here, since I mostly remember bad slo-mo directing that feels every bit like a fan-made movie made with a handycam. The "footage from the game" is used to cut in between scenes. When The Girl spotted one of these while passing by, she asked what it was. I replied that this was based on a video game. And those were from the computer game.

She quite rightfully left disgusted and didn't return.

If Crecente is referring to the action shot montage where every character gets to kill a zombie at drudgingly slow frame rate in humorously over-stylized ways ... it's definately the apex of the movie. It's also just about where I stopped watching.

Did I mention one of the characters is actually named Captain Kirk?

Crecente's argument seems to be that House of the Dead is just a victim of it's genre. Instead, I'd say the genre is a victim of Uwe Boll. It uses every bad cliche - stupid characters, bad dialogue, plot holes, violence with a gore level approaching idiotic ... and adds in some new tricks like awful puns, stealing scenes from unrelated movies and prominent product display.

There is one good thing about this movie. One.

Erica Durance shows her breasts in it. It occurs early on. Once you see them, stop watching.

Considering there are so much better examples of the genre (28 Days Later for instance) and even better cheap horror flicks (Evil Dead) or video game adaptations (Resident Evil) there is really very little reason to see this movie to the end. And less reason to defend doing so afterwards.

And if you don't believe me, Fangoria awarded it their worst movie of the year award for 2003. And those guys see a lot of horror films.



tagged: games, uwe boll

Is Indie Gaming Losing It's Soul?

Twitch Guru begs the question of whether indie games are becoming big business and whether that entails the kind of evil market pressures normally reserved for larger titles. The centerpiece of the argument lies with Valve's Steam:

As Valve's Doug Lombardi said to me after I put the question of undercutting independent publishers: "We're not looking to undercut anyone - just give developers and publishers more avenues for reaching customers." Of course he left out the part about beating the snot out of the likes of Battlefront in the process.

-- Is Independent Gaming Getting Evil?

Considering what Valve has done with the mod scene .... namely market the living hell out of it until only large mod teams with commerical level asset creations have a seat to the table ... I'd be suspect of Valve and the indie scene myself. Valve's practically redefined their business strategy to mean "value add" and software like Steam is precisely the kind of thing Valve would use for their own benefit. Just as the concept of mods has become so twisted that it's virtually lost all of it's original meaning, I could easily see a similar dynamic happening with indie titles as well.

And Steam still isn't my favorite thing in the world. Overengineered to benefit the publisher, not the user. So while Darwinia might be a great indie title ... I won't know because I'm not letting Steam back on my box.



tagged: game, gaming

New Features in Modern Graphics Cards

The term "modern graphics card" always seems a misnomer to me, since most people I know are about a generation or so behind. So what's cutting edge always seems a little future forward. I don't have a lot of friends sporting a new water cooled SLI monster, but such a machine is certainly contempory ... just damn expensive.

So while my CheapBox 5000 might not have all these bells and whistles, Tom's Hardware does a rundown of the new features for the latest crop of hardware, including new shader effects, what the new pixelshaders are capable and just how envious you can make a 6600 owner at the next LAN party.




tagged: games, hardware

Guild Wars: Factions Free For All

From the Guild Wars home page:

The Guild Wars Team would like to invite gamers everywhere to join us on the weekend of January 20th for a Guild Wars: Factions Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend Event! This event will take place on the Battle Isles, the new PvP continent. Players can visit this new area of the world to to try out a brand new arena, to visit the new combat training zones, or to experience the PvP explorable areas. Join us to get an early look at how PvP will evolve with the coming of Guild Wars: Factions!

The Event Schedule

Start of Event: January 20th: Midnight Pacific Time; 8:00 a.m. GMT; 5:00 p.m. Seoul
Closing Time: January 22nd/23rd: 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time January 22nd; 7:59 a.m. GMT January 23rd; 4:50 p.m. Seoul January 23rd
Your Key to PvP*

American Players:
888D9-H27PG-NM72D-PLHJ1-2HG11

European Players:
66DG9-C4RHB-9FKD6-287BJ-LRGCJ

Feel free to share this key with your friends, guild mates and gaming partners!

*If you are an existing Guild Wars player, you do not need to acquire an access key for your Guild Wars account; you will automatically receive access to all Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend content when the event begins.

-- Guild Wars


tagged: games, gaming