Archive for January, 2011
“You’re doing what?”
“A game diary. Tom asked me to do a game diary.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Well,” I clear my throat and take another bite of soup, trying not to look like I’m stalling. “Well, I play my way through a game and write about the experience. Taking notes along the way, kind of like I do with movies. We post the bits I write as entries, like journal entries. It’s one of Tom’s ideas for the relaunch.”
As she takes a bite of salad and mulls this over, I get our six-year old boy to eat another green bean and try to gauge my wife’s demeanor. Her suspicious look has not yet emerged —
Oh, I spoke too soon.
After the jump, I bring dishonor to my family. Continue reading →
The game is Starcraft II played in a series of 1v1 matches, with the winner being the first to four victories. The map is Metalopolis, which features four starting positions behind narrow ramps, and two gold mineral expansions in the center. The races are randomly determined, just like real life generals. The players are Tom Chick, ranked 5th in his division in the silver league, and Kelly Wand, who has one of those dragon icons in Warcraft III but hasn’t even played the stupid campaign in Starcraft II.
The score so far: Tom: 0, Kelly: 1
Game two, after the jump Continue reading →
Salman Rushdie likes watching his thirteen-year-old son play Red Dead Redemption. He is intrigued by the idea of a narrative that “goes sideways” instead of from beginning to end and mentions that this kind of narrative is like the idea in Borges Garden of Forking Paths. Games are good, Rushdie says.
Wait — then he goes on to say that games don’t develop intelligence in children and that playing games may erode our attachment to storytelling, leaving open the question as to what that will do to us as humans. As Rushdie says, we are the only story-telling animals on the planet. Games are bad!
There’s a four-minute thirty-nine second clip of Rushdie discussing videogames here at Big Think. Videogames are a central idea in his childrens’ book, Luka and the Fire of Life. Here’s a clip from a NY Times review of the book:
With every heroic task he completes, Luka pushes a button to save his progress, and a new-level number appears in his field of vision. He also gets plenty of extra lives. But while the setting feels like something out of Nintendo, the characters come either from Rushdie’s lively interpretations of mythology or his jovial, limber imagination. A pixelated Fire Bug bursts into “a little cloud of angry, buzzing sparks,” and an army of insult-slinging warriors on flying carpets do battle with a colony of touchy rats.
Gods of Egyptian, Norse, Aztec and Chinese extraction, among others, converge in the final chapters, to stress the diversity of a mythical world eroded by onscreen interfaces. Rushdie isn’t against video games, exactly: Luka’s father cheerily defends them in the novel’s early pages. But the story suggests they are a mythmaker’s chief competition, and Rushdie seems determined to make his book busier than any game, a “supercolossal ultra-exploit.”
How I long for the days when gaming was as simple as being a drunken space marine trying to bag an elvin chick. Now I can’t even play an online game without also helping advance medical science.
ETeRNA is a free online puzzle game about RNA. I will let the NY Times explain:
Designed by some of the same researchers as Foldit, EteRNA is similar in that it is basically a two-dimensional puzzle-solving exercise performed in this case with the four bases — adenine, guanine, uracil and cytosine — that make up RNA molecules. Players can design elaborate structures including knots, lattices and switches. Unlike earlier efforts at crowd-sourced science, EteRNA will cross over from simulation to biology. Each week the best designs created by game players and chosen by the gaming community will be synthesized at Stanford, according to the scientists.
And these gamer-made bits of RNA will lead to this:
“The dream is that within a year or so we will be able to create RNA that is functional and that we can transcribe into cells to do things such as sense light or even deactivate a virus,” said Rhiju Das, a physicist who teaches in the Stanford biochemistry department and who is one of the designers of the game.
The article quotes says researchers think that RNA can be used to build a biological computer someday.
Gamers competing to design RNA that may someday be turned into a biological computer? What could possibly go wrong?
I’m pretty psyched to be reviewing DC Universe for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because it’s my first time contributing to this particular publication, and I’m delighted to get to write for them. I’m even more delighted with how they’re handling the review. Instead of asking me to play for a while and then drop a chunk of text and a rating, the review will be divided into weekly installments before getting to that tricky “final score” thing four weeks after the launch. Furthermore, I’ll be working alongside someone who’s playing on the PS3 while I’m on the PC, and I can already tell she has a very different perspective than I do. I’ll post a link to the coverage when it begins next week.
But mostly, I’m psyched to be reviewing DC Universe for the following three reasons:
1) Holy cats, what a fantastic opening cinematic! I only understood about half of what was going on (Why is Superman a zombie? Am I supposed to know who “Adam” is? Where did that amazing 50-foot tall woman go? And since when is Wonder Woman so bad-ass?), but what a great way to set the stage.
2) I don’t have much City of Heroes experience, so I’m looking forward to digging into an MMO that isn’t fantasy or sci-fi. Wait, aren’t comic books sci-fi? At any rate, I haven’t seen any elves yet, so that’s a good sign.
3) The name “Superchick” wasn’t taken on my server (Brave New World, which is a pretty cool name for a server)! I’m already suffering pangs of character envy seeing how everyone else’s character is way cooler than mine, but I suppose that’s what I get for going with the default Superman template (pictured).
Arcen Games’ Chris Park is the Energizer Bunny of game developers. It seemed like just yesterday that he wrote a dire assessment of his company’s future based on not enough of you jerks buying AI War and Tidalis. Seriously, why haven’t you gotten Tidalis? I love Bejeweled 3 too, but we’re not a bunch of casual soccer moms dinking around while the kids are at school. And don’t give me any of that guff about Tidalis being too complicated. It’s as easy or as complicated as you want it to be thanks to the exhaustive player options. That’s the beauty of Tidalis! If you don’t believe me, read this review some dude name “me” wrote.
Anyway, I’m not here to tell you about Tidalis again. I’m here because despite Park’s earlier dire assessment, AI War is a rampaging monster of ongoing post-release developer support, the likes of which we haven’t seen since, well, various other fantastic indie titles. But look at all the new stuff going into version 5.0, which will be available as a free update later this week. I don’t understand half of what that is, but it sure does make me think it would be a swell idea to revisit AI War. A whole new defender mode? I don’t know what that is, but I’m pretty sure I want to play it. I love it when version numbers shift on the left side of the decimal point!
Thanks, Kildar!
Did I really just type cumming? Tom told me he was trying to elevate the tone around this place. Some ideas need to die a quick and messy death.
Anyway, exciting news from the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo:
A “Bonecraft” computer game at the expo was pitched as a spoof on popular videogames “Starcraft” and “World of Warcraft.”
The game opens with drunken space soldiers crashing on a planet with troll-like “orcs” and Elvin women.
“The space Marines start fighting the orcs to get with the Elvin women,” said a ‘Bonecraft’ spokeswoman who gave her name only as Sarah. “The goal of the game is to have more sex with Elvin women.”
And what a fine goal that is! Starcraft II, meet my dusty shelf. It’s Bonecraft time!
How’s that for a headline, and I hope I misspelled his name and took game journalism down even lower. What could his secret be? That he paid $2000 on eBay for shoes worn by Rex Ryan’s wife? Probably did, but that’s not really a secret. Is it that the EA top banana looks at World of Warcraft revenue and has a secret man-crush on Acktard’s Bobby Kotick? There could be something to that, but no, that’s not this secret. In an article at IndustryGamer.com he says that digital sales for PC will overtake brick and mortar sales this year, which is sort of interesting but not really. This, however, gave me pause:
The free-to-play model has been a huge boon for EA. Riccitiello noted, “Our highest ARPU (average revenue per user) are free-to-play games among paying users. You think about that and say, ‘how can a free game be the game they pay the most for?’ We have people who are giving us $5,000 in a month to play FIFA Ultimate Team. And it’s free. Dirty little secret.”
Riccitiello then rubbed his hands together and giggled.
People are paying five grand a month to play FIFA? That sure made me stop daydreaming about Ashton Kutcher’s abs. What are they paying for? More kicking tees for the field goal kicker? New helmets? I don’t get it.
And that’s why Betty White is still alive and ready to repopulate the world with Ashton Kutcher after the social order collapses, according to a study conducted in Scotland:
People who exercise regularly but still love the box are just as likely to keel over as couch potatoes, research revealed yesterday.
The reason is thought to be that simply sitting for so long causes coronary problems.
Computer game addicts also increase their heart attack risk by 125 per cent – as do office workers who spend too much time at their desks.
Smoking, high blood pressure and being overweight simply ADD to the peril, research by University College London found.
Well, at least I don’t smoke!
Recently Ashton Kutcher made comments about how people should get as fit as possible. Maybe he was joshing. Maybe it was just an elaborate joke that tied in to his interview that’s the cover story for Men’s Fitness. Or maybe he’s ready to move to Australia and bunk with Grimoire non-developer Cleve Blakemore in his underground vault. Here is why we have to get in shape, according to Kutcher: We are going to lose our electricity and this will be…The Apocalypse!
“It won’t take very much, I’m telling you. It will not take much for people to hit the panic button. The amount of convenience that people rely on based on electricity alone. You start taking out electricity and satellites, and people are going to lose their noodle. People don’t have maps anymore. People use their iPhones or GPS systems, so if there’s no electricity, nobody has maps.”
Dear god, in a world without maps how will I ever find my way to my local Hooters? It gets worse, though:
“And people are going to go, ‘That land’s not yours, prove that it’s yours,’ and the only thing you have to prove it’s yours is on an electric file. Then it’s like, ‘What’s the value of currency, and whose food is whose?’ People’s alarm systems at their homes will no longer work. Neither will our heating, our garbage disposals, hot-water heaters that run on gas but depend on electricity – what happens when all our modern conveniences fail? I’m going to be ready to take myself and my family to a safe place where they don’t have to worry.”
So what game do I want? A tower defense game would be interesting: How long can Ashton hold out as the mindless cannibals attack? No, that’s not really it.
Kutcher has been running in the canyons near his bunker to get in shape, and he is spurred on in his runs by “visions of being chased by a wild boar.” There’s something Freudian there, but I’m not sure what it is — let us hope Ashton someday gets over his inner struggle and finds peace.
So here’s my dream game, and it’s simple: I play a boar. I chase down Ashton Kutcher. And when I catch him, the world’s collective I.Q. rises dramatically. Queue the Mario power-up music.
I feel like I should be shouting “Yee-haw!” Because now I’m at the good stuff.
I waded through the opening text and screens. Got beat up in a cut-scene elevator and got rescued. Crawled through some ducts. True, there was some eerie music that piqued my interest. I liked that a lot. For a minute I thought that music was setting the tone for the game, and I got a little nervous. Good nervous. Nervous that I might get truly scared. Nervous-that-I-might-get-truly-scared in that great anticipatory way. The way it felt watching Paranormal Activity for the first time.
After the jump, that didn’t pan out. Continue reading →
A Cleveland man is doing some serious time in jail for pirating PC games and selling them on eBay and Amazon between 2005 and 2009.
“According to federal agents, Qiang “Michael” Bi of Powell, Ohio, purchased legitimate retail copies of various computer games, duplicated the games illegally, and then sold them for $9.95 on eBay and Amazon.”
He was initially given a 90 day suspended sentence but when the judge discovered that one of the games Bi was selling was Rogue Warrior, the judge changed the sentence to 30 months in prison and ordered him to pay the court $367,669 in cash, as well as ordering him to forfeit his house, a car and computer and electronic equipment. The Judge then lectured Bi:
“I believe at your core you are a good person,” Judge Marbley told Bi. “You made a gross error in judgment … Rogue Warrior? That terrible game with the Mickey Rourke voiceover? Dude!”
Of course, all this probably took place in an alternate dimension:
“Investigators found that Bi had sold the games from 2005 through December 2009 for $10 rather than the $20 retail price for an original new game.
“Investigators estimated that the value of the games Bi counterfeited and sold would have been $700,000 at retail.”
And that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the eleventy billion dollars a year that game publishers have scientifically proven they lose due to piracy.
There’s a new book out about gaming, Fun Inc., by Tom Chatfield. It seems to be getting some traction in the press. From The Guardian across the pond:
“Chatfield’s open-minded approach allows games to be a window to human experience. Did you know, for example, that the amount of time a jump lasts in a game is remarkably consistent across a whole range of titles? A game jump is “around double the duration of the time that an ordinary human can lift themselves off the ground for”. Or that, in online games which could theoretically award millions of (imaginary) gold pieces and mystic swords to every player, “the most successful… emerged as those that imposed brutal regimes of scarcity on their players”? What does it say about us that, given a potential electronic heaven where all our wishes could be granted, we have opted to create starkly unequal worlds, where there’ll never be enough mystic swords for everyone?”
Chatfield is also mentioned in a Financial Times article about gold farmers. It all is a bit more high-minded than I care for, but all you games-as-art people might enjoy it. I will continue to work on my real life jumping so I can jump as high as my WoW character. Of course, Ashton Kutcher will still be able to outjump me….stay tuned for that later today.
The game is Starcraft II played in a series of 1v1 matches, with the winner being the first to four victories. The map is Metalopolis, which features four starting positions behind narrow ramps, and two gold mineral expansions in the center. The races are randomly determined, just like real life generals. The players are Tom Chick, ranked 5th in his division in the silver league, and Kelly Wand, who has one of those dragon icons in Warcraft III but hasn’t even played the stupid campaign in Starcraft II.
Game one, after the jump Continue reading →
Days of Darkness is a no-budget horror movie (Netflix instant view here) about a comet that turns people into zombies whose penises fall off and are replaced by baby zombie embryos. The movie manages about ten people to play its zombie horde [sic] because, I presume, most of the budget went to raw meat for a handful of gross-out autopsy scenes.
After this 2007 bit of dreck, writer/director Jake Kennedy will go on to do the truly tasteless Penance, which is sort of like Showgirls meets Hostel. But in Days of Darkness, there are signs that he doesn’t take himself so seriously. For instance, the token minority is a car salesman who, at one point, takes off his shirt to tend to a wounded survivor. Later in the scene, he asks if anyone has a clean shirt.
“I do,” says the straight-laced young girl who will, of course, take her shirt off later in the movie.
Cut to him dressed as above. You’ll note that he’s weilding the blade from one of those paper cutters like they have at Kinko’s (I believe a movie called Operation Endgame — think The Office meets Battle Royale — will use that same trick a few years later). There’s almost nothing to recommend Days of Darkness, but the above taste of Dead Rising nearly made it worth my while.
