blow in the game slot

2011: My Games of the Year

2011-12-27T16:15:00.006-05:00

Reading so many lovely Game of the Year lists debates and lists had me thinking about the nature of GOTY roundups in general, why we do them, but also the inherent nature and how it alienates certain types of titles that may deserve recognition. Kotaku bravely discussed Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery as one of their top picks, and while anyone that played it may see the validity in that approach, an equal number of voices surely will be heard today saying, "An iOS game? What the fuck?"

The current state of games is in an exciting place -- that being that people are figuring out so many different ways to make them and platforms to distribute them on. While games look better than ever before, some longtime gamers also complain of feeling "less engaged," despite high end graphics and big budgets to create them.

I'm notorious for being a picky gamer, not the type to be satisfied with the average release. That being said, my GOTY picks rarely look anything like most lists, even though they can share common points. But, part of the excellence of appreciating games as a media art form is seeing how they affect people differently, and in the spirit of that, I'll share the games that meant the most to me this year.

5. Minna No Rhythm Tengoku (JP)

This making the list is not mystery, as I'm a hardcore fan of the series and trumpet about it more or less any chance I get. Still, the Tengoku series has always been incredibly challenging, and to pull off a new title and make it not feel stale, the magic is in the music -- something that composer Tsunku has somehow managed to make work for three games in a row. Seeing Tengoku at its prettiest ever helps with the jump from portable console to the Wii, but its cartoonlike style also works really well on it. I don't tend to enjoy the Wii control scheme, but Minna no Rhythm Tengoku makes you forget about it entirely.

Called Rhythm Heaven Fever for its US release on February 13th, I expect this challenging rhythm title to capture some hearts with its catchy music and hilarious minigames. Tsunku's done it again -- and kudos to Nintendo for localizing this title and getting that there's an audience for it!

4. Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery

I love that one of the most affecting titles I played this year was on my iPhone. Obviously, the game is all the better on an iPad with more room to see, but even on the iPhone it made quite an impression. While S & S's aura of mystery was surely one of its most memorable attributes, what stuck out about the most for me was the distinct feeling that I was playing an unforgettable classic, something I wish I had realized when playing adventure games for the first time a decade ago. That emotion is difficult to invoke, so I applaud superbrothers for this one. I go into more detail about it in my review for GamesRadar, but this beautiful little gem was one of the most unique of the year and should not be missed.

3. Catherine

I was worked up about Catherine long before the game's release -- all I needed was a trailer to send me flipping out and wailing all over the internet about how it would redefine how we perceived sexuality in games. In an editorial for Gamasutra, I sketched out a ton of ideas about what the game could symbolize, and a lot of them weren't quite spot on. While the initial trailers for Catherine made it look like a very sexy game, in the end, it was anything but.

Catherine was not always a pleasant game to play. If you dug deeply enough into it, however, you would see that pleasant gameplay would never fit this behemoth of a project -- it aimed to expose something even more uncomfortable than we originally speculated. On occasion it felt heavy handed, but the significance it placed on choices and their consequences was unforgettable. I'm not sure I will ever play Catherine again, but I can't name any other game this year that stuck its hand it my gut and twisted it so successfully. (My post-analysis of the game is here.)

2. Portal 2

Valve is king when it comes to a polished release, and the first Portal was so beloved it echoed through fan consciousness for years. I'm majorly wary of sequels, especially when I think the story has been already been told conclusively, and so it seemed with this series. At least, until I played Portal 2 and realized I had found the cure for the common sequel -- a story that introduced new characters that were completely compelling, writing that took an event that could be poor in lesser hands (GlaDOS' resurrection) and gave it reasoning and body, and added co-op that felt anything but tacked on. A model for what a sequel should be like, Portal 2 was nothing less than an absolute triumph.

1. To The Moon

To The Moon is the absolute opposite of a game like Portal 2 -- at least when it comes to budget and production. Portal 2 had a team to give it such shine, whereas To The Moon was created by one person ... and still shone with one of the brightest lights I've seen in some time. This clever RPG was a dream come true for a retro enthusiast, looking right at home alongside titles like Chrono Trigger.

However, To The Moon bravely plunged forward and did something that RPGs haven't done in all too long, too. Daring to tell a story that was emotional and sometimes painful, sketching characters that were memorable enough to truly care for, and accompanying it all with a score that's literally the most beautiful I've heard this year, To The Moon really did something special. It was worth it to borrow a PC to play this game, and I can only hope to see more games that dare to take such bold chances. My full analysis of To The Moon can be found here.

What games made your personal list? Why were they important to you?

Games for the Heart: To The Moon

2011-11-14T20:27:00.004-05:00

I've been waiting.

While the world of games whirls around me, busier than ever, constantly getting bigger and better and telling stories with graphics so lifelike, it seems like it won't be long until we can hardly discern them from real life. And they keep coming out and I keep waiting to feel something, anything, about the next big thing. I keep watching everyone else get excited.

For thousands, even millions of gamers, the "big budget" game is satisfying what they want. It's awesome, but it's also frustrating, because what they want is not what I want. What I want is something that I learned about almost twenty years ago -- that games could not only have a story, but a compelling story, one that made you not only care about the characters, but love them, and be sorry to see them go when the game was completed, feeling as if you were watching friends walk away and wondering if you might ever see them again.

To The Moon is that game, except it's not twenty years old, even though it looks like a Super Nintendo game. Actually, it just came out a few weeks ago. If you have a soft spot for games that dare to go deeper than just the surface, you'll hear it instantly in the soundtrack, which has a main theme that composer Kan R. Gao cleverly embroiders throughout the story. Telling a tale with a single piano melody is not an easy feat, but I'm betting you'll remember that beautiful music long after you've completed the game.

At the heart of To The Moon is a dying man, Johnny, and two doctors, Dr. Eva Rosalene and Dr. Neil Watts. The doctors have the power to alter a person's memories, and Johnny has a dream he wants to fulfill before he passes away: To go to the moon. In order to make that wish come true, they will have to journey backwards through his memory to learn all that they can in order to get to the point where they can make a change.

Many games tell a story, but the most courageous games tell real life stories, and the thing that makes us connect to them is that they resonate with some bit of what our own lives contain. The idea of winding back the clock of our lives and seeing where we've been and what could have been different is an intoxicating idea for anyone, as is the thought of going back and changing it at the end to make it more like what you wanted.

To The Moon knows this, and it executes it with elegance and enthusiasm. Like the Super Nintendo RPGs that are still beloved to so many gamers now, it balances out those human stories and moments with goofy humor that keeps us smiling and makes it all easier to process. It's not afraid to show us tragedy, either, or the parts of life that we wish we could forget.

Most importantly, it exhibits something that is absent in so many current games today: The ability for a developer to be vulnerable about his or her creation. By offering exactly the game envisioned with no concessions about what is "best" or what will sell, we invite our audience in. We take a chance. And if they choose to take that chance as well, they become vulnerable too, which means they are open to be affected on the deepest level by this thing we've created.

We engage in entertainment for many reasons, none better than the other: to laugh, to cry, to scream, to be thrilled, entertained, scared, affected, taught something new. And what To The Moon reminded me of is that for every dozen games that have polish and entertainment and play it safe, there are always the tiny treasures you find by sifting through the sand. You might have to work harder to get your hands on them, but once you do, they'll present experiences that you'll never forget -- experiences that make you a better gamer, a richer person.

In other words, my wait was over.

A Call To Action: Bring Point and Click Adventure Back To Life

2011-10-05T11:52:00.005-04:00

Last week, a post on Kotaku referring to the days of drawing your own dungeon maps in games like Zork struck a chord with me, as well as my co-worker at Touch Arcade (find him at @blakespot). Suffice to say I've been in one of those retro gaming moods where lots of shiny high-def new releases have been hitting consoles, and for whatever reason, not a single one of them has appealed to me.

This morning, I stumbled upon this not-at-all-new video which I somehow had never seen: a fan's remake of Shadowgate for PC, which was never completed but fascinating all the less. In case you have no idea what I mean, Shadowgate was one of a short series of games (MacVenture series) created by ICOM Simulations back in 1987 that led the player through a series of point and click scenarios. Other entries in this series included Deja Vu I & II, two hard-boiled detective mysteries, and Uninvited, a haunted house adventure.

I loved these games.

However, even as I read the aforementioned article about Zork maps last week, I asked myself the question: Are these forms of gaming obsolete? I recently spent some time playing Atlus's remake of Persona 2: Innocent Sin for the PSP, and while the dialogue and characters hold up quite well, I found I had much less patience for the random monster encounters every three steps. Sure, I played those when I was a teenager, because I had nothing to compare them to. Now, gaming is more intuitive, and we don't need to draw our own maps or spend weeks grinding in randomized fights. Some of us prefer those methods, but those numbers are dwindling.

The point and click adventure genre is not entirely dead, but it surely seems antiquated in terms of modern gaming. Look at my beloved Shadowgate as an example: rather than use a menu to select my actions, such as moving to a new room, my environment could simply be navigated with a controller. It saves time, but it also takes something out of the experience that I miss. Perhaps the MacVenture series created an unusual tension in that we were only allowed a window into the surroundings of their titles with no alternate views. We couldn't adjust the camera, so our imaginations were forced to generate whatever was outside of our line of sight.

This limited peek into a world will not interest most developers, who prefer to show you the entire world, and I understand why. I do. Why peek through a keyhole, when you can use the key and stand in the world? It makes much more sense. Except that I keep passing up these fully explorable universes, or spending time in them and finding for all their glory, I'm just not enjoying myself. It has nothing to do with the quality of the game. It's just that as gamers, we all like to stand in different types of worlds.

Can these games come back, exactly as they were? They cannot. They were experienced at a specific time, and the reaction to them is partially affected by the time period and the gamer's personal state of mine. Can they be created in new ways? They can. Jake Elliot's Ruins is a perfect example (and it's free, so you really should play it.) I applaud the developers courageous enough to continue to give us worlds that we can explore that differ from the norm. My true hunger as a gamer is to find those worlds that are not so average, and experience that magic again of peering through the keyhole. Perhaps I will find the key, and open the door, and find that what is inside is exactly what I was hoping to find. Or even better -- Nothing like I could have possibly imagined.

How to Never Really Know Anyone: Facebook Timeline

2011-09-23T17:36:00.003-04:00

I've never been big on privacy. And so as social networks have come and gone, I've been more than okay with splattering them with personal photos, status updates, musical preferences, cutesy photos of me with boyfriends, even memories from childhood. The fabric that makes up our lives seemed to be a thing worth sharing, and so I shared it, and I never spent a lot of time thinking about who would read it and what they might think, because I had that fierce pride that accompanies youth where you feel you must burn through the world and show them who you are with all the blazing fury of a person with everything in the world to prove.

I got a bit older, but I kept sharing. Smartphones got fashionable, then in a seemingly effortless motion, necessary. Photos taken on the fly became commonplace. Going to bars and other social outings and seeing people staring into their phones, trying to capture it all in a perfect Instagram shot or Tweet, encapsulated the irony of it all: In trying to use all the new social media at once, we were so busy capturing all the moments of our lives that we were effectively distracted from living them. It looked like we were living them, in the pictures. But what do we remember about those days and nights that wasn't pressed into a digital photograph?

Facebook ushered in a new level of ability to "research" a person on the internet, better known as comprehensive stalking and something that many people admit to enjoying (me included). In the Friendster days, you could go ogle shared groups or photos and peek through a keyhole into the life of a stranger, or perhaps a person you barely knew at all but wished you knew, or knew a little bit but wanted to know much more. It was fun, this glimpse into a life, even the part where you pretended you might be a part of it.

The combination of Facebook and Twitter is an intoxicating combination when it comes to researching that guy you met at the book launch party or the St. Vincent show who smiled for a second longer than he should have when he was about to leave. Essentially there's nothing wrong with it, we all agree to the information that we put on it. And we can restrict that in any way we want. We can go and see what a person's stream of consciousness is like on Twitter, and make key judgement calls: Do they complain frequently? Do they act like they're above the common guy? Do they use annoying internetspeak and sub in letters for entire words?

Yesterday Facebook introduced Timeline, and we all ahhhed collectively. It was still clean, still functional, but really pretty, and best of all, it didn't just swallow up the moments of our lives in big gulps only to digest and excrete them, never to be seen again. It cataloged them, like a photo album. Suddenly we found ourselves surfing back months or even years to see what we did, who we talked to, who we took photos with. With the click of a button, there was a public view available that showed off every bit of our online activity, all in one place.

It was more information than had ever been available before -- in fact, you could literally see every bit of any given person's thoughts, choices, feelings, travels, and whatever else they chose to expose to the barren maw of the internet.

It's brilliant, and it's also terrifying. We can find out so much more than ever before about the people we come in contact with, to the point where we can look at a scrapbook of their lives that is so comprehensive that it makes us feel as if we are in fact included. And there's something there that we will blissfully ignore: We may not be included at all, but we will absolutely feel as if we are.

Will this lead us to chances to know each other more? I don't know. I think it's more likely to increase the power of that illusion that we do, but really plug us further into our computers, our internet presence, and maintaining a persona that matches it. Before we know it, we realize it requires actual upkeep and perimeters -- we want some people to see it, others we don't. We realize certain things cannot be said. It's like a date where we have no idea how to be, so we try to be fluid and flexible and open and interesting and in the end barely show a scrap of who we actually are.

Are you a digital being? Or a flesh and blood human, sitting behind a computer, trying to express life and your experience and not miss it all at the same time? How can you do it?

The Beguilement of Catherine

2011-08-10T12:51:00.009-04:00

Atlus is my favorite game company, and I've been rabid for the release of puzzle/relationship sim Catherine from the moment the very first Japanese screenshots hit. Even the first trailer was a thrill for me, and I waxed philosophical over at Gamasutra about the possibilities it seemed to offer to break new ground in gaming. A game that addressed the male psyche and issues of fidelity? Add in that Persona Team is behind the title and have handled delicate matters such as true vs false identity (Honne and Tatamae in Japanese) in past times, and well, you can easily see why I was so worked up about the possibilities.

And then, it came out in America. And finally, I had my most anticipated game of the year in hand.

There were a lot of things about Catherine that I expected, and I got. I expected a man's struggle with apathy and fidelity. I expected commentary on modern romance and its pitfalls. And I of course expected that surreal touch that Persona Team games bring to all their titles. Demons, moral conflict, surreal imagery ... that's the taste of Atlus home team going to bat, alright.

What was more of interest, however, was what I did not expect -- and there was more of that than I bargained for. I expected a story that was courageous enough to poke a stick into real life issues, but I didn't expect that those issues would hold a weight that I connected to and felt directly. By the time I was halfway through Catherine, I realized that personal feelings about both women were coming up, and that those feelings would be absolutely different for each person who picked up the controller. For instance, I detested Catherine from her first appearance on, considering her to be the type of person hellbent on destroying the lives of strangers for her own fun and profit. If you've seen the game's ending, you'll know that that characterization isn't far from the truth.

Katherine, on the other hand, showed a sense of frustration I felt I could relate to. Any woman can tell you Vincent's apathy is painful in an obscure way that is difficult to understand from the female perspective. Therefore, Katherine asks for what she wants and comes across as a nag because Vincent is resistant. Vincent wants things to stay the same and seems to feel frightened of change. These are all traditional human thoughts and feelings and roles men and women find themselves in all the time-- nothing particularly out of place there.

So much of Japanese society pressures its residents to follow a "set" path, creating an unrealistic, rigid expectation of what a life should be like. Catherine takes an interesting approach in that it explores the two different paths in its eight endings, but doesn't cast any opinions on which is favorable. In fact, the meter that changes based on Vincent's decisions has a red and a blue side, which we traditionally read as "good" or "bad." But we find out later that the two ends of the scale actually mean "freedom" and "responsibility." Neither are inherently positive or negative in nature, and the "herbivore" trend of the last few years in Japan reflects that the seesaw between the two may be starting to even out in the other direction.

The broader statement of Catherine is distinctly non-Japanese in nature, despite all its recognition of the country's societal tropes. Much like the way Persona 4 dealt openly with the parts of people that they hide, Catherine suggests that rather than follow the way of the "sheep", we make our own decisions on how to live, whether they be towards acceptable societal norms ... or the opposite.

Of course Catherine carried weight that affected me as a player, because it made me question myself. Not about what I thought about the value of fidelity (as I thought it would), but a much larger question about the type of life I choose to lead. Freedom and responsibility can be both good and bad, depending on one's perception as you experience both states. And yeah, cheating is still shitty if you don't have an agreement with your partner that allows other partners. But rather than break "the rules", perhaps we should consider first whether or not they fit us in the first place.

What did you take away from playing Catherine?

No, don't sell my favorite game company's soul! What PopCap's acquisition means (so far)

2011-07-16T17:51:00.006-04:00

Game company acquisitions are not a unique thing in this industry -- they happen all the time. If you're just a person who enjoys games, or maybe even more than that, you may pay attention in a general sort of way. But you probably haven't really worried too much about the meaning of an acquisition unless you're concerned it may affect you in some way.

For instance, in April 2003 it was officially announced that SquareSoft would be merged with Enix, who were famous in Japan for their Dragon Quest series. SquareSoft had created many of the RPGs that had had the biggest impact on my heart and my memories as a gamer, and I recall that this was the first merger that really scared and worried me. As it turned out, I was right to worry -- just because two fine companies make great products individually doesn't mean that those visions will merge well together. And sure enough, the tone of the Final Fantasy series changed drastically, leaving many fans feeling as if the series they once loved had lost its footing (more on that topic another time, when I feel in the mood for a real rant).

Let's fast forward to the recent announcement that behemoth gaming company EA has acquired indie developer PopCap for a cool 1.3 billion dollars. While I never expected one of my favorite developers to be a casual game company, PopCap has really struck a home run with me this past few years, especially after the release of Plants Vs. Zombies. I loved everything about this quirky developer and their addictive, simple to play games. Needless to say, brows furrowed when this acquisition was announced, despite a lovely letter on PopCap's website assuring fans nothing would change about their approach. We want to believe. But we've heard it before.

On the bright side of things, we've got word that PopCap may have some sort of out (which sounds ridiculous, but bear with me). Digital Trends says that PopCap can continue to operate as they always have, and that if EA tries to change anything against PopCap's wishes, that PopCap can "bail." Since when are contracts written like this? I somehow doubt the validity of this concept.

Blizzard's merge with Activision has left the company's output, tone and quality more or less untouched, and fans don't seem to feel they've lost anything. PopCap may go down the same route if EA is smart, merely helping EA to move towards the casual gaming goals they clearly hope to achieve. It seems they feel PopCap is a vehicle that can help them to get where they want to go ... but we can only hope that they will respect the integrity of the vehicle itself.

I'm hoping for the best here, as I've grown to deeply respect PopCap and look forward to their new releases. I feel companies these days have a better appreciation for keeping the elements what makes a developer unique when it comes to acquisitions, but still, there's always a chance of things changing radically if the right suit has his say.

In other words, as long as invasive DRM stays out of my PopCap experience, I'm happy.

So Bad It's Good: Insect Armageddon's Triumph

2011-07-03T10:30:00.005-04:00

As many of you may know, I am hopelessly in love with a series of games called Earth Defense Force. Or, more specifically, one title in the series, Earth Defense Force 2017, which was an early launch title for the 360. Made by a Japanese developer called Sandlot, this series of games was part of a collective called "Simple 2000 Series" -- cheap games that pack a lot of fun for the price. The third game in this series, called Chikyuu Boueigun 3 in Japan, was eventually released in the US as Earth Defense Force 2017.

The game was a race against evil masses of invading aliens to save the planet, and if anything was like being an active part of Starship Troopers. As for craftsmanship, the game seemed to be pretty shabby around the edges, with terrible voiceovers, poorly animated character actions and a framerate that simply couldn't keep up when the screen got really packed with enemies. In other words, an instant camp classic.

Let's fast forward to the announcement of Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, which was news I had been waiting for for some time. However, it wasn't Sandlot behind the title but Vicious Cycle Software, who had previous come up the original Puzzle Quest. Hopeful, perhaps, but to recapture the spirit of such perfectly executed black comedy could be a challenge. Could they pull it off? Would the game be too good to be bad in the way that made 2017 such a classic?

Insect Armageddon came out yesterday, and I can confirm that not only is it not a bad game at all, but it's also much better made than 2017 could have ever hoped to have been. Up to this point I'd scowled at the idea of that, thinking that good game development could only hurt this unintentional masterpiece and that it needed to be bad in order to be good -- kind of like "The Room", which is like watching the various stages of an eight car pileup on the freeway. But in fact, it managed to retain the spirit of the original games while cleaning up what was wrong with them, which was something that I doubted was possible.

One of my favorite parts of 2017 was the voiceovers, which were stilted and awkward with hilarious dialogue such "When this is over, let's go get a bite to eat!" Vicious Cycle opted to hire real voice actors to deliver better written lines that still manage to be funny, such as fellow teammate Cyrus occasionally screaming "Welcome to Earth!" or a helpful pilot who smoothly delivers the usual on-an-airplane speech and casually informs you that we will likely all die before thanking you for flying. The laughs are still there, and I love how they chose to go about bringing the to the table.

Earth Defense Force 2017 is still a great game, even if it also simultaneously manages to be terrible. I've had countless hours of fun with it, and I can't say some part of me doesn't miss seeing the awkward body animation of my soldier as he runs sideways or laughing at useless armed vehicles with names that sound like Starbucks drinks. But I have to hand it to Vicious Cycle: they made a game that has all the spirit of a camp classic, but subtly sneaks in and improves on the broken parts without distracting you from the action at hand. It's what makes a game great, and you can tell that they studied the previous entries in the EDF series with respect and serious attention to detail.

We've recently heard that Sandlot wants to make their own EDF as the next part of the series. Whether or not they can bring us another terrible but wonderful game remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: Vicious Cycle has raised the bar. Could we still fall in love with another poorly made EDF, even if it has the right charms, or will Armageddon spoil us to expect more from now on?

Symphonies of Sound:The Journey beta

2011-06-28T23:19:00.008-04:00

If you care about games at all, you absolutely must play the Journey.

Why?

Well, it's the latest offering from That Game Company, who made Fl0w and Flower. If you've played either, you know both games were very different from the majority of what's out there. That Game Company favors minimal instruction, so their games tend to begin without a lot of backstory or tutoring. The amount of respect I have for this approach is difficult to express adequately -- we live in an age where we are handheld through our games more than ever before, yet these delicate, thoughtful offerings simply hand us the controller and say: Figure it out for yourself. I feel almost honored to play it, that an experience would be so respectful of my human intelligence. It's ... refreshing.

Journey opens organically, as you see the face of the creature you will play set against the backdrop of a sprawling desert. The game's sparing soundscapes and your character's fluid movement communicate the grace to be found in the company's previous offerings, but you'll see right out of the gate that this game is offering something a bit more. Fans of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus will be instantly mesmerized by this universe, which is filled with mysterious structures and bits of music that can help you along the way.

Forward movement will lead you past shimmering sand dunes and to structures that you must climb. The use the of music quickly emerges as a key theme, as one button seems to allow you to release a note that can allow you to interact with items in your universe. Puzzles also use sound interaction, but you must learn for yourself what to do with them and how to use the sounds to achieve a result.

You aren't entirely alone in your vast world, though. You'll meet great silent beings that will communicate wordless messages, open new paths for you, and leave you wondering what could be next. As you explore, you'll experience genuine awe and joy. We get to explore many divine worlds because of this hobby that we love so much, but the remarkable thing about Journey is that the world it presents us with is so fiercely fantastic and unlike the majority of what is out there that it has the capacity to capture you immediately. If there is any argument that games are art, this elegant game fuels that fire.

For some, this beta will be an absolute bore and something they want to chuck out the window within the first few minutes. Some players enjoy instruction and may find the absence of it, or a structured story, rattling. It's really no insult to the game or you if it's not a fit for you, but for the right gamer, this is exactly the experience they've been looking for. I feel it will be more than just an experience to while away some of your free time, but an exercise on hope for the future of the hobby.

Every bit of Journey is like a dance. You must experience this love letter to games, if you've ever cared about what games can be, what boundaries games can break and cross into, how they can grow and become new. I genuinely cannot wait to watch people react to it.

If you're in the beta too, I hope you'll share your impressions below.

The Digital Sonnet: Why I Don't Connect To Modern Games

2011-06-25T08:47:00.014-04:00

I've been thinking a lot as of late about how far videogames have come, and how as a child this was the future I had always dreamed of. Rather than having to hide your habit and have people look at you derisively and privately label you a child in their minds, a world where games could be shared as media just like film and books, as yet another wonderful place in which we can get lost.

And then games evolved, and somehow it happened, and now there is a new world for this long standing hobby, one where I can mention gaming to anyone from my best friend's niece to my grandmother and they all know what it is. Nintendo had the biggest hand in that, successfully accomplishing the homogenization of gamers and non-gamers by introducing a system that was aimed at all of them.

Graphics also ramped up as technology grew and changed. As a child I would peer hopefully at the pages of PC Gamer and PlayStation Magazine and tell my friends, "I can't wait until the whole game looks like the cutscenes", a tone of awe tingling behind the words as I spoke. I wanted a brave new world of gaming, where everything was new and modern and different and I could see my most far-fetched dreams become reality.

Here we are. But it doesn't quite look how I imagined.

Actually, to say I don't like it is a bit strong -- some of the advances have been so spectacular that any person who has been playing games for years would be considered a bit of a crackpot to say such a thing. I do love downloadable gaming, and even though I'm that type of nerd that will always love the physical presence of games and their lovely cover art on my shelf, I also love that I can settle down in the evening, browse a store and buy a new game without ever leaving my house. And the demos which allow us to play games for free, and wireless technology that allows us to play with our friends and loved ones no matter where we are ... it's great. What's not to like?

It's not any of the surrounding circumstances here, what's available to us, what technology has changed games into. It's that there is something about newer titles, high def graphic titles especially, that simply doesn't touch me. It isn't that they aren't well made -- quite the contrary, many of them are. It reminds me of Hollywood big budget films. Maybe it's the underlying emotion with which those films are created: gotta appeal to a large group of people, got to turn a profit, got to make something for everyone.

Sometimes, a thing with mass appeal is good.

And sometimes, there is something glimmering and fine to be found in the smaller efforts, the things less people look at. The games that don't have the mass appeal, which will never make "the big bucks", but are often something that developers simply feel the need to create. Of course, indie games fit this role perfectly, and they have filled this niche for years.

Are big budget titles "bad"?

Well, they can be. But as a whole, not at all. It depends on what you are seeking. Some people like to go to the movies, see something entertaining for a few hours, and promptly forget all about it afterwards. And some people long to see something that will etch itself on them for a long time to come. Being of the latter variety, I think the key that makes me less engaged with the current gen lies somewhere in this: it's become less popular to emotionally engage and more to entertain.

Can we have both?

I often talk about the NES and what a weird library it had. The cost of producing games was so low that a game about a ouija board or a gambling RPG was completely acceptable. However, games are big budget productions now. Your fever dream carnival simulator starring cats from space may not look like such a great prospect when it's going to cost you a ton of money to make and may not sell, so back to the indie pool with ya. Don't worry, there's plenty of company here.

I still deeply appreciate what's going on in the gaming world, even if I rarely connect to it. I see evolution, and I am excited to see what the next stages will be. However, beneath those adult hopes is a child that wants to be enthralled by a game again. Perhaps there was something to those older games less graphically sound but somehow more engaging, the ones we speak of in hushed tones in conversations with other gamers. Imperfect perhaps, blocky, difficult to control, and yet we played them with such dedication, such drive to get to the end and see all that they had to offer.

I'm always on the search for the next game like this. And I don't judge on looks. Sure, it'd be lovely if it was something I could play on my PS3, but I'd be just as happy to play it on Steam, in the form of Flash on your personal website, on an older console, even on a handheld. In the end, the platform and the way it looks hardly matters. How it feels is what matters, and if we are engaged the way we were as kids: when every bit of our attention was absolutely held in thrall by the characters and the worlds we had found.

These digital sonnets still emerge. And always, there will be gamers like me, waiting to find them and to connect in the way I most want to. Maybe older games had the advantage in that because they didn't possess the level of technology to make them photorealistic, we had to use our imaginations more. We embroidered parts of ourselves on those blocky sprites. We made them ours. Perhaps now, there is no room to imagine such a thing, because every line and detail is filled in for us.

And yet, there's still the excitement of the hunt for the next game that will matter. And no matter how long I go without finding one, eventually, something always comes along that does awe and inspire. Maybe it took years to find it, but there is the feeling that I had as a nine year old girl again, and it always comes back, and I'm so happy to have found it. Maybe the treasure itself, in the end, is not even the game, but the feeling: a beautiful sense of mystery and delight, the discovery of a world which must be explored at all costs, and characters to learn to know and find that we love.

Wonder.

Portal 2: The cure for the common sequel

2011-04-20T11:05:00.008-04:00

I am the kind of punk rocker (in my mind, anyway) that hates sequels with a passion. In my mind, there's rarely any genuine reason to make one beyond the realization that people liked the first installment of whatever it was you made, and if you make more, you can make more money. Since the motivation behind this concept is financially rather than creatively motivated, it always feels a bit forced -- hence the endless wasteland of sequels to films that would be better off having never existed (The Matrix Reloaded, anyone?).

Lucky for our set, it seems games are different .There have been some truly engaging sequels in past year, such as Uncharted 2 (with 3 on the way) and Mass Effect 2. The teams at work on these titles know that gamers expect more, and they seem to have some genuine regard for creating a better experience for us on the second go round. Sure, perhaps the motivation to make a sequel is still to build a brand and therefore make more money, but there seems to be something more going on behind the scenes. And we applaud that.

Enter Portal 2, one of the most anticipated sequels slated for this year. The original Portal set fans into a frenzy in which you couldn't go more than five minutes without hearing "Still Alive" played on Rock Band and hearing endless jokes and references to cake and lies. Don't even get me started on the t-shirts. It was a big deal. And even though I played it, and I agreed it was quite good, I found myself irritable about the endless buzz. Overhype. I mean, the game was good, but was it worth people's level of obsession? Was that Companion Cube tattoo really necessary?

I found myself revisiting the same idea yesterday when I picked up my copy of Portal 2. As a precursor to this, I should say that I haven't been feeling terribly inspired about games lately as a whole, and even some of the best produced titles on the market out there today haven't gotten to me like I hoped they would. I often cite lack of character development as the reason, but after playing Portal 2, I wonder if the issue isn't characters, but scripting.

You see, the moment I fired up Portal 2, I watched the opening cutscene and found that I wasn't once looking at the controller to see if I could press select to skip it. That's because from the word go, the writing is so deeply entertaining that you become completely engaged knowing little to nothing about your characters, which is a feat in itself.

Wheatley, the personality core you meet early on in the game that is voiced by Stephen Merchant, is so expertly executed that you cannot help but laugh aloud at your television just watching him. Ellen McLain returns to do exactly what she did with GlaDOS the first time, and somehow, it never feels forced. You never experience that moment of hand-to-forehead that you so often do in movie sequels as they milk some terrible one liner that's bound to be used in the trailer. Somehow, even references to the first game are elegant.

In the pleasure of playing such a beautifully crafted game, I found myself reflecting back to the last time I was so entertained by a voice actor's performance in a game. That accolade belongs to Jansen Friedh, the comic relief from Mistwalker RPG Lost Odyssey, one of the last RPG's I deeply enjoyed. Another expert voice performance, combined with pitch perfect writing, makes for instant engagement for the player. And almost magically, we begin to care about the characters. The bond required to make us play to the end is made. It's like some form of secret sorcery.

Watching the evolution of gaming for the past 25 years, I can't help but feel as if games like Portal 2 signify the next stage of where our beloved hobby might go. I've already mentioned that the polish and presentation of game sequels frequently outdoes the film industry, and we know from current studies that gaming is giving both film and music a run for their money in terms of profit. In fact, we are truly entertained. Unlike when we leave the theatre and promptly forget the summer blockbuster we just saw, we're meeting more and more characters who engrave themselves on our consciousness absolutely.

Is this a new trend in gaming? No. For me, it's happened since the first time I played Maniac Mansion. Great writing has been around for a long time. But games like that weren't evolved enough on a graphical level to compete with film. Our current titles are. And so we enter a new era of this version of entertainment we love so much. And it feels lovely to stand here in it, and see what it's becoming.

Dead Island: Love, family and 10,000 zombies

2011-02-16T23:38:00.007-05:00

I have to admit, the last few years have been so glutted with videogames about zombies that when one is announced now I hardly give it a second look. And in fact, I have to admit that games have become so good looking in general, that I find myself glossing over a lot of them too. Even RPGs, once my favorite genre, look more flawless than ever, but so many games these days seem to lack the thing that made me so deeply attached to them in childhood.

Whatever that elusive thing is, Dead Island seems to have it. Techland describes their game as a "survival horror first person shooter with RPG elements", but truthfully, they could have called it a carnival simulator featuring a ouija board minigame and I would have nodded and said "Uh huh, uh huh" in numbed amazement, mostly because I've watched the trailer ten times and even though I have seen everything that can possibly happen in it, I can't seem to stop watching it.

It also hit me while watching this that the people that make trailers for videogames are going to be ashamed of themselves when they see this. And honestly, they should be. Not because the trailers we see these days are subpar, but because they are all painfully alike. Like sitting at a runway show and watching one impossibly tall and beautiful girl after another saunter down the catwalk. And you should be thrilled, really, to be surrounded by so much hotness. But for some reason, you're bored instead.

Dead Island's first trailer does not fire you up by using crazy music, show you how many guns you can use to reel you in, or even try once to look badass. Actually, it takes a more courageous approach by using a musical track that is slowly paced and introspective. it shows us how savage zombies are, and we've seen plenty of that before, but it also shows us the death of a child, a father and daughter's bond, and a family's happiness. We don't even know their names. But we want to, right away. And that is something that hasn't happened to me watching a trailer for an action game in a long time.

I have to concede that the piece of music accompanying this trailer is stunning, and that may be doing a lot of the talking here when it comes to the emotional wallop it seems to pack. We'll see as more of the gameplay is unveiled, but it looks like for now, we may have something special to look forward to. After releasing a trailer this unique, they have one hell of an act to follow.

One Chance: gaming and consequences

2010-12-07T18:22:00.006-05:00

As we see games evolve, we find that our experiences within them become more realistic. And yet, there are basic tenets of gaming that still are determined to defy reality: monsters that drop money, treasure chests in the middle of nowhere, and last but not least, that ongoing fantasy world of being able to back up to your last save point and try again, no matter how poorly you planned your course of action.

What if you only had one chance to do it right?

New indie sidescroller One Chance from awkwardsilencegames presents you with just that opportunity. In it, you take the role of scientist John Pilgrim, who has come up with a cure for cancer that eradicates the cancerous cells within the human body. John is a hero, and the world champions his name as the papers publish the news. By day two, it's become clear that the cure not only destroys cancerous cells, but all other cells in the body too. And what once seemed like salvation has suddenly, overnight, because unintentional genocide.

Most interesting about the six days you have to take action within the game's time frame is that the creator of the game firmly states there is no replay feature. The comments on Newgrounds are full of people angry about it, and yet, he says the heart of the game is about facing the consequences of your own actions. For a gamer, that's a foreign concept. In fact, it's more a human life concept than something that belongs in a video game. Why, then, is it a part of One Chance?

It's easy enough to say that the creator of the game wanted to buck the system, or just piss off gamers by denying them what they are used to getting, but I think his statement is much simpler than that. One Chance is a depressing tale, and that seems to push many people away from it. However, it's also sure to shake you, make you think, and slow you down. In an age where we are constantly bombarded by social media, ways to delete and hide what we've said and done, and no real reason to think before we act, a game like this is a statement about the decisions we make, and how different our lives can be with as minor of a choice like going to work or staying home.

Several of John's choices present food for thought as well. Every day, he can go to work or stay home. His coworkers encourage him to be with his family as the situation worsens, but he can also ignore them and go to work anyway. He can sleep with one of his coworkers, since the world's about to end anyway. He can forget it all and take his daughter to the park. Each of these actions completely affects your last actions in this desolate few days before your world comes to a close.

Perhaps One Chance is overly dramatic. The chances of something like this happening seem more like a bad action/horror film than they do anything we could suffer in real life. However, that's likely beyond the point. There was a time when consequence in gaming was firmer, but since it "lessens the gaming experience" by frustrating the gamer, we see less and less of it these days.

We aren't accustomed to making hard decisions. We dislike consequence. Yet, I can't help but see a game like this as courageous by offering just that to us and asking us to cope with it. Perhaps we are too adjusted to the idea that any route is open to us. And while that's a lovely fantasy, it presents a softer gaming experience that may lull us into a sense of false safety. However, our strongest emotions are connected to consequences, choices, and loss, so by realistically asking us to look at those things and go through them even thought they may be depressing, they also engage us on a deeper level emotionally (something more and more games fail at these days).

One Chance asks us to experience it all as it really could be. And I think that's for the best.

Sex And The Male Psychosis: Catherine

2010-08-29T22:07:00.015-04:00

This week, I saw the first game trailer that has truly intrigued me this year. The game is Atlus' Catherine, a 360/PS3 offering due out this winter (so far, in Japan only) from the team behind dating sim/dungeon crawler hybrid Persona 3. In the game's first trailer, we meet a man named Vincent who seems to be haunted by dreams both sexual and horrific in nature; he is alternately chased by rams wearing ties and taunted by a blond woman named Catherine who flirts with him, kisses him, and straddles him naked as they appear to have sex. He is clearly worried and afraid, but from the little we've seen, we aren't sure what's real yet and what's a part of the nightmare -- only that we are seeing the first suggestions of a major fracture in our main character's psyche, which only tantalize us to want to see more.

Described as a "horror/adult action adventure", the trailer made a strong impression on Atlus fans, who discussed it wildly in forums. The development team working on the title said it would be "highly erotic" and character designer Shigenori Soejima has stated that there are some shockingly adult scenes in the game. While most gamers reacted favorably to such a topic being central in an adventure title, most seemed more interested the possibility of a U.S. release than the meaning of the sexual themes shown. However, voices here and there were picking up on the very things I found most interesting -- not the fact that the game is not afraid to deal with sexuality, but the themes it is mixed with and what they say about the male sexual psychosis.

Sexuality has made its presence known in much less subtle ways within the games we play. When Fox News caught wind of a sex scene in BioWare's sci-fi RPG Mass Effect, a frenzy followed about the "unsavory nature" of the content. It seems like as far as gaming has come, there is still a gap between "normal" gaming and blatant sex simulators. So to speak, there is no bridge where the two meet -- at least, not one where sex is represented as the multi-layered experience that it can be (under certain circumstances).

Then, we have Catherine. Vincent, our 32 year old protagonist, identifies as a "herbivore" -- a recently-popularized Japanese slang word that refers to men who are passive and lack interest in sex. He argues with a woman who he calls "Catherine" in the beginning of the game's trailer who seems to be aggressive in nature, as she mentions dreams of killing others. As the story goes on, we see a man who exhibits signs of terror when confronted with a sexually forward woman. In fact, we have no proof whatsoever whether Catherine is a real person, or simply a symbol he sees in his dreams that represents a part of his psyche.

It's been a while since I've seen sex in a game and been taken aback, but I was genuinely awed when I realized it was happening again as I watched this trailer. The topic of true sexuality was certainly being addressed here, focusing not only on Vincent's sexual orientation but also the world within his dreams. Whether Catherine is just a symbol or a flesh and blood woman, the scenario being portrayed so far suggests that we are about to participate in a journey through his psychosis to seek the answers -- and that is something new indeed.

Atlus have been poking at the sexuality issue in their games for a while now. Persona 2 protagonist Tatsuya Suou had the option to engage in a homosexual relationship with another character, while Persona 4 famously led the players into dungeons that represented their innermost feelings and explored a blatantly homoerotic dungeon that suggested male character Kanji Tatsumi was suffering confusion over his sexual identification.

However, Catherine appears as if it may forge a new pathway of the presence of sexuality in games: delving into the role of sexual identity, specifically within the male psychosis. Not just a quick what-bam-thank-you-ma'am either, but a much more developed, multi-layered sexuality. After all, the herbivore man in Japanese culture has essentially chosen to forfeit his sexuality and therefore some measure of his power. Yet in his dreams, Vincent is surrounded by rams, which traditionally symbolize virility, power and force. In fact, at one point, he wears the ram's horns himself (echoing Shakespeare's horn-wearing "cuckold" men, who accept their wives infidelities without complaint), but appears uncomfortable and terrified to find them on his own head. In another scene, one ram is wearing a tie, which implies he is a Japanese salaryman (and also perhaps, a sheep in an unending flock which merely do what they are told to do).

Vincent's identification as a herbivore ("soshokukei") may well point to the concept of terror of the feminine. This issue has been gaining presence in Japan as of late, as men in their twenties and thirties are identifying with the term. The idea centers around men do not seek out girlfriends and tend to be a bit clumsy in love, care less about financial matters than the average Japanese, and are more comfortable showing vulnerability.

If the game is localized, these details may be lost on western audiences unfamiliar with the recent rash of men in Japan that fit this description (20 percent according to pop culture columnist Maki Fukasawa, who coined the term). On the other hand, Persona 4's themes also distinctly addressed issues in Japanese culture such as the contrast between honne (true feelings) and tattemae (public opinions and behaviors), but the game still resonated with western audiences and was lauded for its presentation of mature themes.

We've long seen games that place a central male figure in a position of hierarchical and sexual power, allowing the player to take on those characteristics and feel dominant. Even the simplest games imitate this structure, as Mario and Link save their respective princesses over and over. The theme is the same -- the man is active, the woman passive. Catherine turns this deeply ingrained societal role upside down, introducing a willowy, frightened man as the character we will play as. Not empowering at all, is it? In fact, rather than play a role in which the player is lead to triumph, we are led through Vincent's fear as he becomes a victim of the female object he also longs to possess, as his genetics drive him to. While males of every species long to conquer, they often also expect the woman they conquer to remain in her passive role, as that was an unspoken part of the deal. Catherine is clearly not that woman ... and neither is the angry woman at the end of the game's trailer who screams at Vincent that she will never forgive him.

Now, we have a theme, with many layers to explore. But how does it make for compelling gameplay? We've seen little so far, although some summaries suggest that the nightmares act as the game's action component. Set in a world with an unending stairway, Vincent has to make it to the top of the stairs, or he will not be able to leave his dreams and come back to reality. If this is in fact true, we can deduce that we will spend more time in Vincent's dreams than we will in reality to further the story, which may leave us with some very dark paths to walk down indeed.

In any action/adventure, you must control your character, so I expect we will maneuver Vincent through some of his nightmares. With a theme as complex as this, the options to use unique gameplay mechanics are vast. For instance, the same design team entertwined dungeon leveling mechanics with real world relationships in Persona 3 and 4, suggesting the connection between physical and emotional strengths. With such a creative team at the helm again, I suspect we may see something equally interesting in Catherine. For instance, if we play Vincent's nightmares, how will the actions we take affect his day to day life? If we make the right choices within his nightmares, could we "unlock" further parts of his memories, to learn why he feels he way he feels about women? And alternately, if we make the right choices in his real life, will we find some relief from the horrible visions of the nightmares?

The choices a game designer has at hand while designing a game like this are surely more challenging than making another platformer where the knight saves the princess -- although that type of game has earned its place as a beloved part of the culture. However, the more intuitive the gameplay mechanics used, the more we as players can be drawn into a world so human and realistic that we may even feel our character's fear and shame, and therefore push that much harder to transcend it.

While we can only wait to see how the game itself will flesh out the things it suggests, even the things we've already been shown point that Atlus intends to once again use games as a vehicle for commentary on Japanese culture and how its rigid structures are forcing its citizens to create new identities. For the first time in video game history, we may have the opportunity to peer within the male sexual psyche to a new depth and perhaps breathe in a bit of mingled fear and desire, to feel a moment of the responsibility of being the "pursuer" ... and perhaps understand the weight that might carry.

If the game does in fact explore these issues the way the material we've seen so far suggests, it may mean the first time a door is truly swung open into the world of intelligent, human sexuality in gaming. And since the games of today aim for a realism so true to form that graphics grow closer and closer to lifelike perfection, it only makes sense that this last barrier should be crossed. Not to explore "fucking" -- that's been done, thank you, Kratos. But to communicate sexuality as another dimension of characters who we've already come to know emotionally, mentally, share in the memories of and more -- why not begin to understand them sexually, too?

Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

2008-11-25T12:11:00.002-05:00

Being a gamer over 30 means that you likely fell in love with gaming a long time ago. For me, that affair started around age 6, as my uncle showed me the Atari and I prowled through his Commodore 64 collection, wondering what the stone that came with Wishbringer was really for and fantasizing about kicking the sh*t out of Zork for not understanding my commands.

While a lot of kids turn to games as a way to share fun with their peers, in the time period I discovered games, they were very much the opposite for me -- since I was a bookworm and a bit of a loner, games were more like an escape -- a place where I could be alone and yet not quite alone, and have an adventure with friends that, while not real flesh-and-blood people, provided some of the most important friendships I ever had.

Twenty years later, the future is pointing at an age of gaming in which all of our activities are shared -- from friend lists to Microsoft's recent addition of parties, you are always accessible for multiplayer games, chat and more. In fact, games, like LittleBigPlanet focus mostly on user content and online play, taking all focus away from the single-player adventure.

These are all great advancements and certainly follow the flow of current technology to interconnect our world as completely as possible, but where in this new world is there a place for the solo gamer, one who not only enjoys the experience of playing a game alone, but actually (gasp) holds those gaming experiences above those he or she has with other players?
People who are fans of multiplayer games are already talking back, I know it -- you're saying, "If you don't want to play with other people, just don't sign into Xbox Live!" And you know, you're right. I don't have to do that. In fact, despite the fact I love to game alone, I do also sometimes enjoy playing with other people, and I do enjoy the ability to interconnect with them so easily at any time.

The thing is, people who have never been heavy into the solo experience in a game are just not going to get it. Why play a game alone when you could play it with other people? That's like going to a movie alone. Which, of course, I also enjoy doing. Often.

A common complaint about the recent RPG Fallout 3 touches a little bit on the "why" of what solo gamers passionately pursue. Some gamers said they disliked the beginning of the game in which your character grows up in the Vault, where you are surrounded by other people. Personally I found that when I escaped the Vault and got out into the open landscape, I found what I was looking for: the experience of feeling completely alone on an adventure that you are wholly responsible for.

I suppose it's a lot like reading a book. There's an almost reverential quality to the experience, because even though thousands of other people will read the same book, the unique way you will process it and how it will affect you is all yours. While total immersion into a game enviroment is being praised in games like Dead Space, solo gamers have to laugh -- we've had total immersion in the games we've played for a few decades now, not because of advanced graphics or sound, but because of our isolation and imaginations.

Because of my experiences as a solo gamer, I traveled with Crono and his friends and enjoyed their company as if they were my friends, I mourned the death of Nei in a way that actually prepared me to face real loss later in life (laughable, I know, but true), and I learned some pretty valuable lessons about life in general.

I think if I had had friends to share these games with at the time, I wouldn't have had the amount of free time to devote my attention to them in the same way. I would have been more distracted by those real-life interactions, and while that wouldn't have been a bad thing, I don't regret being an isolated gamer back then. I think the inability to share these gaming experiences with other people made them even more special to me -- and I believe the people who listen faithfully to RetroforceGO! on a weekly basis may understand exactly what I am trying to say here.

So yeah, I'm glad that today I can turn on my 360 and be instantly connected to a hundred friends who can invite me to parties, chat with me and enjoy games with me in real time. I think that rocks, and I'm so grateful that I'm getting to experience something like that in my lifetime. At the same time, some days I'm going to go buy a game, come home, turn out all the lights and make sure that I'm not signed on to anything that shows other people I'm there. While it may not measure up to being verbally abused by strangers on Xbox Live, I still kind of enjoy it.

The Difficulty Arc: How frustration ruins the gameplay experience

2008-04-13T01:44:00.002-04:00

The scenario: You, controller in hands, sitting on the sofa, staring at your television with a mixed expression of frustration and anger. You've hit a point in a game where you can't get any further, you don't want the strategy guide, you don't want to go pull up Gamefaqs. You just want to figure the wretched thing out so you can get on with the game you were enjoying up to this point.

The moment is as simultaneously recognizable and detestable as catching a fleeting glance of an ex at a party. The more you try to figure out how to advance, the less enthusiasm you have. It gets to a point where before you even pick up the controller to try again, you can feel it in your stomach -- a kind of grudge you don't even notice developing until it's in full effect. Before you know it, you don't pick up the game anymore at all.

This frustrating little phenomenon is the Difficulty Arc, a slippery slope where wonderful games can easily lose their footing and fall to their death, never to be played again. That perfect marriage of conflict and reasonable challenge rarely find their balance on the Arc. Only the best games manage to delicately hover there, poised as a hummingbird before a flower fat with pollen.

Let's begin with a little video (because somehow pictoral examples make everything seem a bit more realistic.)

Ah yes, that moment. While it rarely gets that bad, sometimes it happens. Perhaps partially the fault of the gamer in question (that lad seems to have some anger management issues.) Regardless, the issue here to focus on is not the gamer but the game: Envision a well-adjusted young man or woman of about 30, sitting with controller in hand seriously fantasizing taking the disc out of the console and hurling it out the window like a shuriken with murderous intent.

What I'm proposing here is that one of the biggest faults of games today is finding the right spot on the Difficulty Arc -- a space that is neither too hard or too easy. Now, all gamers differ, so they can hardly all be satisfied by the same exact point on the Arc, yes? BioShock is an excellent example of the use of difficulty settings: I would have become extremely frustrated (enough so to deter me from the story) had the hard diffuculty been the average, but thanks to the normal, I was able to enjoy the story first and go back to the hard setting later.

One of the worst failings of bad placement on the Arc is when frustration makes a gamer quit altogether. This often happens with excellent games, which seems to me to be a sorry shame. My personal memory of this moment is with Chrono Cross for the PS1. You can beat the last boss in a straightforward fashion, or you can beat it in a complex way, which nets you the best ending. The latter challenge was so elaborately ridiculous that I gave up after a few tries. The frustration here was more mental than physical -- The equivalent of attempting to find a single paper in stacks of thousands.

The physical form of Difficulty Arc failure is more a matter of personal skill and adaption to a game. For instance, some gamers hated the Myst series, citing the puzzles as ridiculously difficult. Others whipped out their graph paper and mapped out elaborate puzzles with relish. Some games have a reputation for being insanely difficult, such as Ikaruga for the Gamecube. This is hardly a failing on the part of the developers, as the title is intentionally intended to be a tremendous challenge.

Dementium: The Ward presents a more recent form of structural slippage on the Arc. The game allows you to save your progress, but you must begin at the start of the chapter each time you die. Sometimes, this isn't such a big deal. After trekking through the entire level to kill the boss six times only to die when you get there and be whisked back to the start, forced to repeat all the same crap, is just a recipe for frustration. This echoes the NES era, but even most of those titles employed checkpoints, rewarding you for your progress and effort. Dementium is a fantastic title, but it did test my patience and I have to admit to putting it down a lot due to that.

Of course, some gamers will tell you they've never been frustrated enough to quit playing a game because of difficulty level (they're likely lying or androids posing as human beings.) You're not a gamer until you've thrown a controller at the TV and screamed SHITFUCKJESUSHOLYASSCOCK loud enough for your neighbor to hear you and look at you oddly the next time you pass them in the hallway. It's simply a classic rite of passage for the digitally addicted. I actually hit a friend in the face with a flying NES controller while playing Super Mario 3 once ... still feel a bit guilty about that.

This is not a rally to encourage harder games to take a hike. Rather, it's a picture of a consistent issue in gaming today: The balance of challenge and difficulty is a delicate one, and to ensure a title is truly enjoyable, there must be a flow to the gameplay. By interrupting this flow with unnecessary amounts of frustration, you are taking the gamer out of the gameplay experience -- exactly what you don't want to do.

I hope the next gen of gaming stands up to the challenge of making more game conflicts that are less ridiculous and more reason, offer level difficulty selection more often, and keep in mind how difficulty works with or against the immersive quality of the title. As long as I'm wishing for stuff I'd also like a miniature pony, a mint condition Delorean and the ability to teleport at will, but for now I'll settle for a few controller-hurling titles that are still within the boundaries of reason. I will try not to hit anyone in the face with controllers again, although it's likely best if the cursing and screaming begin to just get out of the way.

A Thousand Years of Dreams: Mortality in Lost Odyssey

2008-04-13T01:42:00.001-04:00

While playing RPGs, I have encountered situations that sometimes predated me having the same experiences in real life. As a little girl, the first of these I found was comradery, which took me a while to find since I was the bookworm type. This infused the games I played with a sort of private and thrilling magic, which hasn't entirely worn off to this day.

While Mistwalker's new RPG Lost Odyssey does follow the conventions of many other RPGs, it sets itself apart with a feature called A Thousand Years of Dreams, in which you recollect the experiences of your character's past. We've all played games that introduce to our characters' memories, but since Lost Odyssey's Kaim is immortal, the memories are suffused with something more: the absence of mortality.

Much like BioShock and its underlying moral themes, Lost Odyssey presents the player with a richer experience which I believe is the future of RPGs: graphical superiority, yes, but more importantly, having the ability to engage our mortality, including our sense of what it is to be human. Welcome to the next generation -- playing games with the ability to excite your senses, engage your emotions and grasp your own transience.

Hit the jump for more.

Depending on how long you've played RPGs, you may have a very specific expectation of what you want in one. Since I've played them on and off for the last twenty years, I'll chuck a formulaic RPG out the window faster than a hooker administers a BJ. Usually, playing the same old structure isn't enough to hold my interest through eighty hours of game time. At this point, there has to be something different, something that can shake me up enough to make an impact.

Enter A Thousand Years of Dreams, in which the immortal lead character Kaim recalls his memories one by one throughtout the course of the game. Like many other RPGs in which the lead character has lost his memories (ahemcloudahem,) we are intended to develop an emotional attachment about the character we are playing because of his or her past. Since you are playing on a modern console, you would think that Lost Odyssey uses superior graphic capability to its advantage to tell the stories of Kaim's memories, no?

It doesn't.

Instead, the developers made a braver choice: they tell the stories using only words.

I can see you reading this now and saying "Words? Like on the page of a book? LAME!" I have two words for you -- you're wrong. It isn't lame at all; in fact, it's the most elegant tactic I've seen used in an RPG since Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife floated in a dream world and remembered he wasn't who he thought he was. Instead of taking the obvious route, it does something games did before there were graphics to support them -- tells you an amazing story and leaves your imagination to fill in the rest.

The irony of this approach is palpable. Gamers have been complaining more and more as of late that they don't want to have to read a bucket of text, and now here I am telling you that it's the best thing since goat rape. Luckily, those gamers can skip the dream sequences altogether and still enjoy the action, which is solid enough on its own. The dreams are the best part of the game and flesh out the main story with depth and emotion, but if you want to leave that behind, that's your loss.

This nearly literary approach could possibly be effective on its own, but it is accentuated by something that completes the package: writing brave enough to delve deep into Kaim's lifespan, reflecting back startlingly painful bits of immortality and leaving you starkly aware of the vulnerability of human life. It has been a long time since a game has actually reached my emotions in any way, but Lost Odyssey has finally done it, reminding me that it's worth it to sift through all these RPGs after all.

A Thousand Years of Dreams taps into the very spirit of what makes RPGs great, which is why I can say that I see the future of next gen adventure gaming in its courageous approach. As we come closer and closer to playing games that are indistinguishable from our real lives, they will also have to step up to the plate when it comes to matching the human spirit. Literature and film have long probed topics like mortality and humanity, but games are still new to the territory.

Does this mean that every RPG has to send us into a spiral of existential crisis, leaving us wondering who and what we are and why we live human life? No. Obviously this is heavy stuff, and not always what we want to spend our free time on. Used sparingly however, it can create a gaming experience that is the most realistic gamers have ever encountered. Combine that with graphical prowess, and you have a truly modern interactive experience. Let's hope the anti-game crusaders have prepared well -- they aren't ready for what is to come.

Intelligence and games: a poor pairing?

2008-01-08T20:26:00.002-05:00

Today I read an article about the top games of 2007 in the UK. The chart itself was very different from the popular titles of the United States, but that's to be expected. The biggest difference, as noted by the author of the article, was that 2K's award winning shooter was nowhere to be seen on the UK list. This caused a great deal of discussion among readers of the article. In one disturbing reply, one reader commented in regards to BioShock: "It was a FANTASTIC title, but I'm sure all of this talk about noir, Art Deco, and objectivist undertones must have turned a few of the people off who regard games as day-end relief and not an exercise in artistry. "

While the statement is a factual one, I found myself revisiting it over and over in my thoughts, having discovered a sticking point about it that truly bothered me. I felt true indignation at the idea of being "turned off" by BioShock. The title was the very definition of an intellectual gaming experience - a rich storyline meshed with highly addictable gameplay mechanics. It made an unforgettable impact on me last year, and this article and comment provided a shocking contrast to that, shaking me outside of my own thoughts and into those of others for a few moments.

While it's perfectly understandable that a gamer may not always want a rich, thoughtful gaming experience and sometimes craves something simpler, it's unthinkable for me that a game like BioShock is not a welcome addition to our industry as a whole. More disturbing is the underlying concept, which suggests that "intelligent" games are looked down upon as a nuisance by some people.

I have days where I want to settle down and play a game where all I do is kill shit as much as the next guy. In the case of titles like Diablo, these can be addicting experiences than I go back to again and again. However, twenty of years of playing games puts me in a place where I do crave newness from the hobby I love, and bigger and better versions of what have come before don't always hit the nail on the head. Dynamic storytelling, however, can make all the difference.

If gamers look down on this, and all they want is more of the same, they crush some part of the very craft that creates the things that we cherish. I beg you - if you play games, and they have made a difference in your life, want more for their future than this. In order to continue, games have to be allowed to evolve, and supported by the people who love what they are. You don't have to personally play games like BioShock, but for the love of fucking Christ, use your eyes and see how they have helped break boundaries and push games to be more. They deserve your respect.

The Endgame Syndrome; Why do we abandon games?

2007-10-14T13:23:00.001-04:00

As most of my Destructoid compatriots know, I await RPGs with intriguing storylines more than any other type of game. I enjoy nothing more than to sink myself into a rich plot, get to know the characters, and most of all, experience some form of emotional fulfillment at the end of the story for the work I've put into playing it. To my surprise, the last few I have looked forward to I've gotten fifty to sixty hours into and then simply never picked up again. Why this sudden transformation from game committment to total disinterest?

I clearly remember finishing a lot of the games I played for the NES, and I can't blame it on scarcity of product. Between friends that generously shared large cartridge collections and the game rental store down the street (Performance Hobby! I salute you), I played hundreds of games released for the system during its lifespan. Since I started playing often when I was about ten or so, I know I had the free time to complete them, but it seems to me something more was at work as to why I finished those games.

In the case of the games I was most driven to complete, I was so absorbed in them that I thought about them even when I wasn't playing them. Other new releases didn't get in the way because I wasn't interested in them until I completed the one I was playing. Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy X were great examples. I held them akin to reading a great book - by reading other books at the same time, you distilled the purity of the experience of the story.

In the current state of gaming, releases come out so frequently that we constantly have new "stories" to choose from. The biggest catalyst of "Endgame Syndrome" is definitely this factor. Since production values and budgets have risen to new heights, most games are gorgeous to look at. Some argue that one must wade in a sea of pretty games to try to find the ones that are worthwhile, so consumers are constantly sifting through large amounts of content and don't have the patience to spend on completing a game.

Another major factor seems to be length. BioShock was completely engaging, yet presented the story in a shorter timeframe. The more time you have in which to tell a story, the more challenges one faces to keep a gamer engaged. Considering the average attention span is twenty minutes, it's no small feat to create a game that can remain interesting to a player after 40 hours of play. Structural variance is also a key -- If you're doing more or less the same actions for the majority of the game, are they fun to do?

Most difficult of all is the experience of playing an enjoyable game and then abandoning it after committing many hours to the storyline. Eternal Sonata, I'm sad to say, fell into this category. I was pleased with the story, but I didn't think about it when it wasn't in front of me. It leaves you feeling disappointed when Endgame Syndrome kicks in in these instances. I did want to see the ending, but the drive to do so just evaporated, leaving me as confused as waking up naked with an otter. ( I need to stop drinking at those Zoo-To-Do events.)

Is it that games aren't what they used to be, or is it that gamer attention spans have shortened over time? I fear that some of both are present, although I am always hoping to be pleasantly surprised. The shape of the industry that creates these games has dramatically changed. In 1985, few people would have dreamed that games would one day rival the film industry. As a result, more experimental projects may have turned into playable results, which at the very least promoted creativity.

Whatever the secret formula is, recent feedback proves even RPG giant Square-Enix can't always hit the nail on the head anymore. Avoiding Endgame Syndrome is simply a matter of being choosy about what titles you take home -- and even then, there's no ensuring you'll feel the spark. For me, those unforgettable stories that are worth finishing are worth the search, no matter how many duds I have to sort through to get there.

Video Game crushes: Wanting to undress your imaginary friends

2007-09-20T12:29:00.002-04:00

After five hours of Eternal Sonata, I can finally admit it to myself: I have a crush on Frederic Chopin. Before you start laughing, think back over all the games you've played. Maybe you were so absorbed in the storyline you didn't even realize it. Put down your controller in hushed reverance for all of Sephiroth's cut scenes? Waited patiently for all the moments you could get extra glimpses of Lara's endowments? Maybe your heart even fluttered any time Balthier was dashing and debonair, dangerously straddling the line between androgny and rampant homosexuality. Either way, more of you are guilty of this crime than you'd like to admit: The Video Game Crush.

Your average non-gamer (or even some gamers who have never experienced the phenomenon) will be quick to say,"Why would you get a crush on someone who isn't even real? That''s stupid." Stupid, perhaps, but I can't help but think about all the imaginary people I'll fallen a little in love with, and not just in video games. Ender Wiggin in the Orson Scott Card novels is one of my long standing not-real crushes. How can any logical person find themselves in this position? The answer is simple: The heart is not logical, and a video game is an ideal setting to entertain illogical things. You're already flying along the coast of the Etrian Sea Universe in an armored flying narwhale wearing a crown of igloos, so why not fall in love with the Princess of Obscuria?

It also seems that when we play games, we get to meet many characters who we will never meet the real life equivalent of. I am pretty much assured that I will never meet anyone as metrosexual as the Final Fantasy boys until I head straight to the streets of Harajuku, so it makes sense that those characters might be a little fascinating. As far as female crushworthy characters are concerned, the formula is even simpler: Few real world women kick ass and look as sexy doing it as the Lara Crofts and Chun Lis of the world. Then there's the sweet and helpless formula, which Aerith of Final Fantasy fame is the reigning queen of. She looks so sweet while she's being stabbed through the chest with a sword, doesn't she?

Some people think it's ridiculous, but in my mind having a crush on a character in a game is as normal as getting choked up when a great game ends. If the character designers meshed well with the writers and did their job right, they created characters that were ultimately real enough to emotionally engage you -- something that seems to be getting harder and harder in RPGs every day. It's a compliment to their skills that I can't stop thinking about that dreamy Chopin. The voice actors, of course, are the glue that holds it all together. In a modern era of gaming that makes fully voice acted games the norm, they bring these characters to life or leave them behind to blend into the scenery.

So, got a crush? You can admit it. It's okay. Unless your crush happens to be Pyramid Head, in which case you're an ill little gerbil and really should be confined to a damp room with no doors. Really, it takes all kinds.

Eternal Sonata initial impressions

2007-09-19T00:42:00.002-04:00

The only thing that could excite me after the holy sacrament of scrumptiousness that was BioShock was a good solid RPG. I was expecting something a little more utilitarian as RPGs have not broken the mold much lately, so it was a great surprise to play Eternal Sonata at E3 and find not only an exquisitely beautiful title, but one that seemed to have a truly unique storyline as well. I raced to the store today and snatched up the last copy, eager to dive headfirst into the game.

As shallow as it is, I have to say it: For a dying guy, Chopin is SMOKIN HAWT. I think it's his voice actor making it so, as I want to melt his voice into sweet cream butter and rub it all over my nubile flesh. Now that we've gotten my kinky bits out of the way, I don't have to keep making unintelligible references throughout this article. Eternal Sonata is ten times as beautiful in actual play as it is in screenshots and clips -- for some reason, they can't seem to do justice to this title. Playing the first few minutes literally feels as if you've submerged into a completely different universe, which is something RPGs have been failing at a lot lately. Of course, atmosphere can only go so far.

The first half hour of play is as story heavy as you might expect. While the demo may lead you to believe the game will be very simplistic, there is a rich story concept at the heart here. I expected nothing left from a game that is about the dreams of a dying composer, but it's nice to see the story unfolding well even at this early stage. Players annoyed by cut scenes may be bothered and want to get to the gameplay, but luckily these scenes can be skipped if you like. They add a lot to the story though, so be warned you may miss some great details if you do.

So far the fighting is good, but I wouldn't go as far as to call it great. I like the free range movement and the way the attacks feel while landing, but the initial few areas have you meet the same creature through the level over and over, and the battles get a bit repetitive. I'm hoping as music becomes more involved, it will help with this. Turn based fighting can kill a game in the modern player's eyes, so it needs something to keep it interesting (demonstrated beautifully in the old PS1 title The Legend of Dragoon.)

Bottom line: If you love RPGs, pick it up. It's beautiful, the story is interesting and so far the play is comfortable. I'm fascinated with the use of music and can't wait to learn how to use it. Frankly, regardless of whatever the games' weaknesses may be (listed here or not), it beats the hell out of fighting poop monsters in Blue Dragon. Whose idea was an enemy made of poop, anyway?

Cho Aniki Seinaru Protein Densetsu translates to "Shoot your Holy Protein in my face"

2007-09-14T13:31:00.000-04:00

I'm joking. Partially. I was browsing about the interwebs today when I stumbled upon this gem and felt I needed to enlighten any readers that are not privy to the delights of the Cho Aniki series. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, Cho Aniki is a shooter series famous for its large army of greased, muscled, suggestively homoerotic men doing suggestively homoerotic things. It debuted in 1992 on the TurboGrafx 16 and has been wreaking its own special brand of WTF? over Japan ever since. (Actually, considering the Japanese culture, they probably don't blink twice at this title.)

Fascinated yet? If you feel strangely drawn to the concept, I have just the thing for you: the fabulous Hudson has announced that they are going to be releasing Cho Aniki as one of the first of a series of Turbografx CD and TurboGrafx Duo titles coming to the virtual console, along with Y's Book I and II. It likely will not be Cho Aniki Seinaru Protein Densetsu, as there are more popular games in the series, but can you imagine using the Wiimore to shoot your 'Holy Protein" around? CAN YOU? Releases like this are likely stabbing the collector's market in its theoretical face, but there will always be those people that have the have Cho Aniki mint in box with collectible figurine of greased nude male with flowerpot growing from head.

[Via Kotaku]

Moral ambiguity makes a defining mark in BioShock

2007-08-30T19:55:00.000-04:00

I have been playing BioShock for a week and a half or so, just like the rest of you. Of course, the relationship between the Big Daddy and the Little Sister had been often discussed by the time the game was released, and everyone was already aware that there was a moral choice involved in harvesting or saving the Little Sisters. It sounded easy enough, and as I've killed plenty of innocents in my time behind the controller, it seemed the obvious route was to harvest the little girls and take them for all the Adam they're worth. We want to win at this game, after all.

I thought this until I attempted my first harvest. Not only is the result profoundly disturbing, but you're left feeling dirty somehow, and the corpse of the fallen Daddy next to you is somehow ominous even after its fall. Even more clever is what happens if you choose to rescue the Little Sister - her reaction to your kindness is somehow sadder than any violent reaction could have been. Even after taking down many of these creatures, I realized I still could not perceive Big Daddy as an actual enemy, even though it was more than capable of pummeling me into a useless pulp. It does not harm the player when it is not aggressively attacked. What are we to make of such a creature?

Some would say we are emotionally affected by this experience because of morals or personal beliefs. Some perceive the Big Daddy as a father, even though it clearly has no relation to the Little Sister in a physical manner. It could also appeal to the empathies of parents who feel the powerful drive to protect their children. Since I have not experienced either being a parent or having the father/daughter connection as it is portrayed here, I know that I must be affected by something else, perhaps a more primal instinct.

The Little Sister test is one which may say a great deal about the player as he or she chooses the child's fate. Perhaps it can be explained away as simple empathy or the desire to take care of others. We are presented with a situation that is affecting either way it is played out. The lines are not as clear as good and bad though; there is a moral ambiguity present here. Is it wrong to kill something that's clearly evil? Or is everything worth saving, regardless of how far gone it may be?

PAX 2007: Destructoid came, saw, conquered

2007-08-27T15:39:00.000-04:00

Everywhere this Destructoid gang goes, the party seems to follow. At the very least, that's how it seemed this weekend at PAX 2007. This was our first PAX as a group and we were fortunate enough to have a lot of our insanely supportive community come out as well as a fistful of editors. We saw hundreds of amazing games, some really great parties, and a whole lot of photos of the robot in action. You'd be surprised how many people have always longed for a pic of themselves with Mr. Destructoid.

The PAX show floor was well assembled, showing such titles as The Behemoth's Castle Crashers, Mass Effect, Rock Band (which I got to rock with Weekly Geek's Chris Furniss and Kotaku's Flynn DeMarco), not to mention a fine selection of MMO's to sample if that's where the action's at for you. I was personally most pleased with NCSoft's offerings as they have forever impressed me with their stellar City of Heroes. Titles shown at their booth included Dungeon Runners, Tabula Rasa and Aion. Thank heaven for life beyond WoW!

For swag whores disappointed with the lack thereof from E3 and GDC, this was the event to be at. I got tons of shirts and posters, keychains shaped like Wiimotes and stickers galore. We're doing a giveaway over at Destructoid shortly, so if you want to win some stuff keep your eye on the site for an upcoming photo contest.

By far this was my favorite gaming event I had ever attended. On the whole events are fun to attend but also are a lot of work and effort. PAX felt like a vacation from that, allowing us to check out bands like The One Ups and Freezepop in the evenings and entertaining us with keynote speakers such as Wil Wheaton during daylight hours. It seemed more than anything like an event that allowed gamers to unify and enjoy common interests than an event for breaking news and such. At any rate, I had a great time and I will certainly be attending PAX 2008!

The King of Kong review: Go see it, like, yesterday

2007-08-18T10:55:00.000-04:00

Our beloved Tiff at Destructoid was kind enough to post the trailer for The King of Kong for us last month, and I've been patiently waiting ever since to see the full film in the theatre. What I was expecting was a light hearted tale about competitive arcade gaming. What took me by surprise was how affecting of a story it was. When you're laughing one moment and moved the next while watching a film, you know someone's done a good job. Add in that the film is about games, and my admiration of it soars even higher.

I only had the vaguest idea of who Billy Mitchell was before I had seen this film, but in case you don't know, he's like a hybrid of mullet toting proud American hick and Darth Vader. He also holds the top arcade score for Donkey Kong in the world (apparently it was increased by him recently, but it has not been offically approved yet). The story is about the duel between himself and Steve Liebe, who currently holds the Guinness World Record for the high score.

Liebe seemingly emerged from nowhere after losing a job and rigging up a Donkey Kong cabinet in his garage to perfect his game. In the long run he succeeded, and the story runs from there as he travels out to Hollywood, Florida to the legendary Fun Spot arcade to do it all live. To say that the story that naturally develops between Mitchell and Liebe is fascinating hardly begins to cover it. The men are such complete opposites that the roles of light vs dark are inevitable.

Producer Seth Gordon and Director Ed Cunningham have done a clever and memorable job telling a hell of a story, making it well worth the ticket price. Some good PR chap made sure the theatre it premiered at in LA had a Donkey Kong cabinet in the lobby, and by the time I got back outside, it had gained a line of moviegoers waiting to insert their coins. Somehow it does my heart good to see the tradition of arcade gaming still thriving in the modern day, regardless of how advanced next-gen becomes. Now get out there and support flicks like this so we can keep arcades alive!

[Special note: Keep your eye open for special guests from The King of Kong on Destructoid's RetroforceGo! podcast coming soon!]

Bioshock demo liveblogged

2007-08-13T03:38:00.000-04:00

Let me preface this post by saing that even though I have attached a picture to it, it does this title absolutely no justice whatsoever. Seeing screenshots and gameplay videos does not compare to the experience of seeing the world of Rapture open up before you.

I can say with all surety after playing this demo that 2k has made a masterpiece that is going to redefine the medium and perhaps create it's very own genre altogether. The game is marketed as a shooter, but is is infinitely more than what I know shooters to be, even at their very best. The average shooter lacks a story, and Bioshock is the absolute opposite of that. From the very first moment you emerge into the world, choking on water as you watch the airplane you crash landed in sink slowly into the sea, the story is already pulling you in with urgent intimacy. By the time you step through the golden doors of Rapture, you'll have completely forgotten about everything else.

Total immersion is not a good enough descriptive term for the first ten minutes of Bioshock. We are given a few moments to absorb this flawlessly designed universe before things go completely haywire. The atmosphere has a Art Deco-just-barely-masking-an-underground-cult vibe that somehow manages to strike the perfect balance between melancholy and madness. Meeting some of the residents of Rapture nails it down -- you've stumbled from real to surreal in a transition so smooth you never even noticed it was happening.

One thing I found remarkable about the game was how it exhibits features of multiple genres, but abstractly so, as you may smell many fragrances in a single perfume. The beginning reminds me a bit of the Myst series with it's incredible detail and immersiveness, but there are also traces of PC titles and indie games that it reminds me of. Most of all, Rapture reminds me of a world of adventure gaming we are rarely lucky enough to see anymore, and to see that merged with a popular genre like shooters gives me hope that I may continue to see more of the same -- or the birth of completely new genres altogether.

The only complaint I have is that the demo is short -- I was done in about 30 minutes, and I took my time looking around. Still, it has the intended effect of leaving you drooling for more. Had I been sitting here with the full title rather than a demo, I could have easily played until dawn and probably not have even noticed. It's everything you hoped it was and more. There aren't too many titles that I feel I can claim for the "games as art"argument, but Bioshock truly fits the bill. It's simply astonishing.

Eternal Sonata demo impressions

2007-08-12T11:41:00.001-04:00

Pretty! Pretty! Pretty!

No.....really. This demo is gorgeous like I can't even begin to explain to you. The art style is triumphant, the details are perfect, it moves fluidly, the music is gorgeous. More importantly, even though there isn't any story revealed in the demo, it doesn't suffer from that feeling of hollowness that many current RPGs seem to. While playing, I had an echo of the way I felt while playing Final Fantasy 7 for the first time, which I can only think of as a good thing.

I haven't enjoyed an RPG battle system as much as Eternal Sonata's in a long time. While Final Fantasy 12 seemed to master the art of free movement and flow for battles, there is something about the way this system works that I find very satisfying to play. You have a bar of time, which does not begin until you move, to use in any way you like. You can get in a few attacks, heal and even cast a special attack all in one turn. It's basically the indecisive player's dream come true.

For me, Eternal Sonata also nails a difficult middle ground in that it is cute without being completely nauseating. Sometimes the little phrases before or after a battle literally make a game distasteful for me; I feel as the writers chose to speak down to me as the player when the character personalities are too dumbed down(Blue Dragon was a perfect example). While I prefer no catchphrasing at all, the title seems to balance out it's tone well, and I don't want to throw any of the characters out the window yet, which is always a good thing.

My only negative point about the demo is that I wanted to see more of the musical aspect of the game, as I have been fascinated with that concept since it was announced. You can speak to someone in a town about it, but there's no ability to experiment. My hopes are high for how this will work into gameplay and storyline. The title is already a pleasure to play, even without this additional feature.

Eternal Sonata's impact on 360 may dictate the possibility of more RPGs for the system, which is something I would really like to see. It's been the only thing that held me back from buying it when so many other gamers were already enjoying theirs. I enjoy it for what it is, but no matter how advanced a console is, it's useless to me without a selection of games I enjoy. If Microsoft keeps expanding their horizons, 360 truly could end up as king for some time -- especially if Sony keeps struggling. Regardless, after playing this demo, I look forward to the release more than ever. This one looks like a winner.

E3 2007: Square Enix Online store preview

2007-07-15T22:07:00.000-04:00

I'd like to save face and say I'm faking the expression up above, but that's pretty much exactly how I was feeling as I walked to my E3 appointment with Square Enix. They were showing multiple upcoming titles, but Destructoid will be sharing the details with you in a post coming shortly. The scoop I have for you is about the launch of the online merchandise store, and that you will soon be buying your Cloud Strife sculptures directly from Square instead of sending your money to a black market yakuza in China who wrestles three alligators and fights the ghost of Shiva in order to get your goods.

We saw some amazing merchandise ranging from the FF12 figures you see above to highly detailed recreations of the battle scenes between Cloud and Sephiroth from Advent Children.Thankfully there was no way we could buy any of what we saw because I would have hurled my credit card at them with surprising force. Anyway, America gets access to all this goodness and more later this year, although a date was not specified. I'll just save all my money until then, order ten of everything and fill up my bathtub with them, and lay in it.

Dungeon Runners not quite Diablo, but better than cold toast

2007-07-10T00:12:00.000-04:00

I was reading Play Magazine a few days ago when I saw a blurb for the new NC Soft MMO Dungeon Runners, which featured two Colette- friendly selling points: no initial subscription fee (but if you do want the full version of the game, it's $4.99 a month, cheaper than your Mountain Dew habit) and comparisons to Diablo 2. Cheap is good, but not if it sucks. However it is a known fact that if you compare Grandma's Blood Pressure Challenge to Diablo 2, I will try it for at least five minutes. My D2 addiction is still alive and well a good ten years after the first time I played it, and still nothing to this day has quite hit the sweet spot of stabbing wraiths in the face. Still, I keep hoping.

After a little hands on time with Dungeon Runners, I realized it was actually an amalgam of several other games. It has quite a bit of Diablo in it, a bit of WoW, and a pinch of Kingdom of Loathing. It has the point and click action and non-intrusive background soundtrack, and the inventory menu is an almost direct steal from the famous demon slaying adventure. WoW comparisons come in when you get quests and speak to NPCs, complete with question marks above heads. In my initial inventory, I found a red bottle called "Potion of the Daring Noobosaur." You clever geeks, you!

The control is not bad, but I think the thing that no game has mastered since D2 is the ease of control. This game allows you to point and click as Diablo did, but something about it is more awkward and wooden. The battles are slowish, and although they feel fine, sometimes I have to admit I just want to kill things faster. It's a huge point of importance for me how battles handle in a game, and can eventually make me give up or addict me for life. How does each weapon feel in use? Is a kill blow satisfying, or just there? A resonant crunch or the timing of a swing when my character uses a mace can make all the difference in the world.

I can't really tell you if Dungeon Runners is worth your money since you don't have to spend any to play it, so let's say it might be worth a download if you like features of the aforementioned games and want to play something free. I'm not disappointed by the game as much as I don't really have a lot to say about it. I have high expectations for MMOs these days. On the other hand, I don't mind a clone if it's a clone done well (see The Legend of Dragoon in your nearest gaming dictionary). Either Blizzard is the greatest developer in the land -- and it makes you wonder when you look at WoW numbers -- or no one has managed to copy their timeless formula well. If they ever make time for Diablo again between WoW and Starcraft, maybe then I can finally get the fix I've been endlessly searching for.

Would you play a horror MMO?

2007-07-04T21:40:00.000-04:00

My Fourth of July was spent taking it easy (this is a chic phrase for slacking). I stayed in, played some old emulated games, and watched a couple of movies. I've been on a horror kick lately, and I haven't seen a Nightmare on Elm Street film for at least 5 years, so I borrowed a few from a friend and settled down for some bloody camp and bad dreams.

That was a pretty accurate description of what I got, too. Maybe they were scary in the eighties and nineties, but as a hardcore horror fan, I was only enjoying them because I was watching them through my retrogoggles -- and nothing more. I found them most non-frightening when Freddy Kreuger was onscreen, or even worse, when he had actual dialogue. (When were catchphrases EVER cool for evil demons?)

As usual after watching a horror film that I thought could have been more than it was, my inner mental diatribe immediately started on how horror isn't what it used to be, it isn't scary, why can't someone do something decent, and thank God there's a Silent Hill series at my disposal when I want to remember what it's like to be afraid. Magically, the topic of horror flourishing in games blended into another idea before I even realized what I was thinking of. Would I play a horror MMO?

You know, I would. HOLY COCKS YES I would. Immediately, all the secondary ideas came to mind. How would it work? Would people want to log in to a consistently frightening world? Why would it be frightening? Could an idea like Event Horizon's haunted ship be translated into an entire dimension? Bioshock has definitely got the idea -- The Rapture should unnerve many an explorer. However, that's an FPS adventure...and would greatly differ from the logistics of a dynamic world.

One major point of difference is that a horror is rarely a social experience, whereas MMOs thrive on the interactive aspect. Some gamers would say that one difference kills it off before the idea even gets started, but somehow this clash makes me more interested. Could it be possible to play with other people, but only through a complex system (you must rescue a friend or undo a curse before you can play with them)? Would an MMO that made you work to gain interactivity push players to work for it, or simply shut off their PCs in frustration?

Another common complaint of MMO players is that all they do is grind and that the games lack an emotionally engaging story. Perhaps an MMO in a post-apocalyptic setting could kill two birds with one stone -- creating a backdrop of consistent unease and fear while telling a story that all human beings can relate to the terror of. Add in zombies and you could be playing 28 Days Later Online. Imagine the pressure of having to avoid being infected every time you logged in to play, or permanently losing your character if he or she was.

I would like to see the MMO genre electrified, as even consistent WoW players admit to boredom or quitting the game because they just aren't having fun anymore. Bioware claims to be making an online title focused on "story, character and emotion", which gives us something to look forward to. When I think about playing a game that would keep me on the edge when I played, unsure of what could happen each time I logged in, I think that just might be the thing to make me interested in MMOs again. The question is, How do you execute it to strike the ideal balance between fear and playability?

Will great gameplay save the galaxy?

2007-06-20T21:01:00.000-04:00

Rewind back about a year, to the erection-arousing time of Next Gen console announcements. Everyone expected slick appearance, top-of-the-line graphics, and the inclusion of technologically superior Blu-Ray in the PS3. What gamers didn’t expect was a price tag that would make them stammer and sweat, but that's what they got. It was obvious that Sony had chosen to aim for the high end adult market, which perhaps was a wise decision in their eyes. However, as a gamer who fell in love with the NES at age 8, it was difficult for me to be able to support their new direction. I knew had I been that same child today, my parents would not have been able to afford the PS3 and I would have missed out on the experience that has defined a great deal of my adult life.

In the meantime, Nintendo chose to take a different route with the Wii, announcing a campaign that focused on the inclusion of people from all walks of life. The Wiimote was extremely easy to use and unlike any other controller that had hit the market previously. Because of Nintendo’s decision to focus on ease of function over graphical superiority, they captured not only the general market and Nintendo’s dedicated fanbase, but also a demographic that had never played console games before. Gamers now had a console they could share with anyone from their kid brother to their grandmother. The system also made an impact on the elderly, brightening up many a retirement home with a previously forgotten sense of challenge and fun.

The competition at this point seems strongly in Nintendo’s favor; however, many Sony fans claim that as the PS3 sees more games it will ultimately be the winning system because of its capacity for longevity. Meanwhile, Wii continues to fly off shelves faster than retailers can stock it. As a retro gamer, it makes me realize that there is a big question at hand: What is more important to gamers? Graphics or playability? Microsoft seems to be straddling the fence with the 360, offering strong graphics and online play at a more affordable price point, but it seems the two extreme ends of the spectrum are PS3 and Wii – not to mention the ones generating the most buzz.

Since my experience with gaming was landmarked by the NES, obviously my love for it didn’t spring from amazing graphics (although when 16 bit hit the market, I thought my little heart would explode. It looked so good!). The games that made the greatest impression on me obviously possessed something more at that time that drew the love of millions of kids my age. Around the time of the PS3’s release, I clearly recall walking into a Gamestop with a PS3 display and an NES display at the counter with The Legend of Zelda in it. To say I was like a moth to the flame would be an understatement; even though I had never touched the PS3, I was perfectly happy to chase Octoroks instead, despite the fact I’d done it a hundred times before. What’s the secret?

It leads me to believe that while there are tons of gamers waiting on the next Halo or Madden to grace their HD sets, there are more than we realize looking for a different kind of gaming experience, whether it be retro, indie or just a totally different category altogether. The public has been complaining as of late that the Wii only offers “party” titles, which I would consider to be a mostly true statement with the exception of titles like Twilight Princess and Super Paper Mario. The Wii may be rapidly approaching its crossroads – if it doesn’t break the pattern, will people lose interest? Nintendo hasn’t welcomed a lot of third party titles since the SNES days.

On the other hand, this could be the fount from which Sony draws strength. PS2 had one of the most varied libraries in history since the NES, offering everything from Metal Gear Solid to Mister Mosquito. A Sony fan can’t help but hope that PS3 could have a similar future despite the long line of mishaps that have come with the new console’s launch. Here’s some food for thought: If you could be reassured that the PS3 would have the same future as the PS2’s past, would it be worth it to you to shell out the 600 bones to add one to your gaming shelf?

What is more important to you as a gamer – How your games look? Or how your games feel to play? Have we become shallow as consumers, only wanting the best looking games even if they’re devoid of solid content? If you could only choose to own one of these consoles, which would you pick?

Best Hook , Line and Sinker: Silent Hill

2007-04-29T13:14:00.000-04:00

This has been a weekend for playing old games. I'm not really feeling the next gen right now, so I've been sifting through older titles that I loved to play. I was thinking about what I think of as the Hook, Line and Sinker of a game - the part that captures you and gives you the drive to play it through. I believe this phenomenon is also responsible for making you hum the game's music at work and in elevators, but that's another article all on its own.

It was during this dig that I started to replay Silent Hill. I found myself reminded that this game has one of my favorite opening ten minutes of any game I have played, old or new. Shall I remind you of the terror that lurks within?

I will admit the intro had me before I started to play the actual game. A couple standing in a graveyard holding a newborn baby? A little girl disappearing into the fog? The whole thing just left my brain fizzing and wanting more. Hilariously, I remember marveling over the quality of the graphics as well (any person who played this game and tries to go back to play it now will tell you it looks like crap).

Chasing Cheryl's image through the fog, Harry runs down an alley and through an iron gate. The first thing you see after going through the gate appears to be the bloodied corpse of an animal. The designers used angles to great advantage through this sequence, seeming to skewer the world further and further as Harry proceeds down the alleyway. I love the pacing of this careful descent - it created unforgettable emotion.

I remember clearly that as the sequence got darker, I felt a definite sense of dread. Little details like the squealing sound of the wheels of a broken wheelchair lent a great deal to the atmosphere. As Harry finally stumbles into the heart of the fold, he finds a dessicated corpse strung up to the fence and is attacked by tiny creatures which are surely not of this world. After passing out, he awakens in a diner and we are introduced to Cybil, the officer who will help him throughout the rest of the game.

The graphics are rough, the dialogue is wooden, yet why did I replay this title with such interest? A game like Silent Hill proves yet again that a powerful story transcends any graphical limitation - and why the technology of next gen gaming may mean nothing in the long run when it comes to making a great game. I'm hooked by it just as much now as I was when it was released eight years ago. We need more of this kind of storytelling in the modern gaming world. I can only hope developers and writers truly know it.

Guesting on The Weekly Geek podcast

2007-04-23T15:45:00.000-04:00

I was a guest on The Weekly Geek podcast last night thanks to the ever amazing Chris Furniss. Check it out for some Wii doubt via Super Paper Mario, fan voicemails and why violence and video gaming have as much to do with each other as Michael Jackson and healthy sexual desires.

Tied The Leader Interview

2007-04-13T18:21:00.000-04:00

Tied the Leader was kind enough to interview me for their 22 Questions feature. While you're there, check out the website: they are a blog to be watched. The Foundation alone is one of the coolest examples I've seen so far of the approach to gaming with a meaningful cause. Its independent ideas like these that create the diversity of the gaming community and inspire others to come up with their own ideas. Cheers to that.

Total 180 for the 360

2007-04-01T13:00:00.000-04:00

Rewind back to the golden days of November 2001. After repeated delays, Microsoft finally reveals their contribution to the gaming world with a console known as the Xbox. The first system to boast a hard disk drive under its hood, Xbox seemed to be trying to approach the market from a more advanced angle, which was welcomed by many gamers. As with all new consoles, I was anxious to try it out.

Hands on, Xbox was a little uncomfortable right off the bat for me, and I don't think I have to tell you why: controllers the size of the Hulk's fists are not generally comfortable for the normal female hand size. The console itself also weighed in at a whopping 8.8 pounds, larger than the average newborn. Size fixations, anyone? Regardless, it's the games that make a system, not the housing, so I chose to ignore the big black daddy attack and focus on the offerings yet to come.

Of course I played Halo, which ran flawlessly and I could see the reason why so many gamers were addicted. But as I went through the launch titles available, something started to slowly come into the clear: every title for the Xbox was masculine in nature. I wasn't looking for Barbie's Pony Adventures here, but I think the average gamer girl tends to avoid titles like Brutus' Mega Mutilation Spree of Testicular Glory. Still, being the patient lass I am, I was willing to watch the release schedule and give it another shot when the titles came out that sparked my interest.

The clock ticked. The releases came out. NFL Fever 2002. Project Gotham Racing. Moto GP. Mech Assault. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. Halo 2. A slew of fine titles, looking their best thanks to the Xbox's advanced graphical capability. Most notable to this gamer, however: no RPGs, no platformers, few strategy titles, and absolutely NOTHING cutesy. Xbox was a console for a real man. Welcome to the birth of my resentment towards Microsoft. I don't give a shit about being a female in the gaming universe; it's mostly an irreverent detail. But the alienation of any minority by a console maker seemed an ugly snub to me. If Xbox had been the only console to have when I was a 9 year old, I wouldn't have become a gamer. Thank God for Nintendo.

I turned my attention to the other consoles on the market and ended up spending the majority of my money and time on Sony's Playstation 2, which covered all genres of play and did a fine job establishing itself as one of the strongest consoles of all time. When Xbox discussions happened, they sailed over my radar. I had lost respect for Microsoft completely. When the 360 was released, I expected a prettier version of the same Xbox, and seeing it in the beginning of its lifespan, I still found myself unable to care.

Soon after, something great happened. It became public knowledge that the sales of the 360 in Japan were really poor. After all, the Japanese are responsible for a huge chunk of the game buying community. What do the Japanese like to play? RPGs and quirky titles. Just what Microsoft wasn't offering. So in the long run, they got the ultimate kick in the pants -- shitty sales figures. How's that for motivation, guys? Blue Dragon was their answer to the quandry, and as of January 2007, it holds the award as the best selling title in that territory. Dag, maybe those role players are important after all.

XBLA was already gaining steam by the time this took place, and the weekly releases were starting to make me perk my head up again. TMNT Arcade? Alien Hominid? They were blowing the Virtual Console's wilted selections right out of the water. Most of my friends were raving about the fun of online play, and titles like Dead Rising were starting to look damned yummy to me. By the time I got 10 minutes with the smooth interface of XBLA, I was hooked. Upcoming titles like Bioshock and Assassin's Creed are giving me major happy pants, and with Final Fantasy being discussed as a possibility to no longer be a Sony exclusive title, it seems I am right on the edge of finding the new perfect console. Who've ever thought it?

I'd like to delude myself by thinking that Microsoft decided to rethink their decisions about this console because they realized they were alienating a lot of gamers with the original Xbox. I know better though. It all came down to the almighty dollar, and since this is still a business last time I checked, I do understand why. Regardless, I'm happy to see a console I once felt I couldn't interact with at all become the best the market has to offer. Perhaps PS3 can become a competitor for this title later in its lifespan, but for now, the 360's got it going on, and I'm pleased to have been converted. Keep the RPGs coming!

The rise and fall of the classic arcade

2007-01-21T13:29:00.000-05:00

According to recent reports, the average gamer is about 30 years of age. Rewind your inner clock and that means your first system was either the Atari or the NES. By the time arcade gaming was getting truly huge, most of us were about 8 years old and probably just a tad too young to be feeding all our quarters away into Galaga. However, if you born in 1970, you would have been about 13 when arcades were hitting their peak popularity in the early to mid eighties, making you the perfect age to become obsessed with your own personal high score.

Yesterday I found myself standing in an arcade, looking around me at what I felt to be a pretty poor showing. Although not large, the majority of the floor seemed dedicated to Dance Dance Revolution style games and first person shooters. I have no problem with either of these genres (although the DDR kids mystify me in a way I should save for another post altogether), but the only vintage machine I saw was a beat up Pac - Man/ Galaga stand up. No House of the Dead, no Street Fighter, no Rampage. All it once it occurred to me - the modern arcade sucks. It's an afterthought thrown together by movie theaters and theme parks. Thankfully there are a few modern establishments (such as the illustrious Ground Kontrol) that still take the legacy of the arcade quite seriously, but for the most part, we're on our own. This seems tragic to me, as there are very few prestructured enviroments in which people can gather and focus on the enjoyment of gaming.

On the other hand, the "Game centers" of Japan are still healthy and thriving. Seeing a place like the Joypolis exists kinda makes me squirm with envy, although it's obvious the Japanese consumer is still more than happy to pour quarters into a game while the American consumer would rather just buy a console. Looks like if we want our ultimate arcade, we'll have to create it ourselves. Well, at least the arcades are surviving in some format somewhere. In the meantime, we'll all have to cluster about our Wiis and hope no one impales anyone else with a flying Wiimote.

The Cloud Strife syndrome: what makes an RPG matter?

2006-12-31T17:04:00.000-05:00

Gather round, little bots. Tonight I have for you a little known tale about the wretched bucket of experiences people fondly refer to as childhood.

Visualize with me, if you will a girl of about 10: short for her age, long mousy brown hair, wearing a ridiculous sleeveless Tour de France shirt, uniform regulation gym shorts and lavender oversized glasses. She's sitting in front of the television playing Phantasy Star 2 for the first time, totally fascinated and absorbed by the characters she's just been introduced to. She's the loner type and doesn't have friends, so while other children enjoy the throes of popularity, puppy love and underage drug abuse, her after school days thereafter are spent exploring Paseo and forgetting the real world existed at all.

Yeah, that dorky little kid was me, and without emotionally rich games, I wouldn't have had the rich experiences that made me fall in love with games in the first place. This thoughtful article from Gamasutra got me thinking about the games that made the biggest impact on me and why.

1. Phantasy Star 2: The opening credits still make me kinda tingly. This was the first game I've ever played that had the balls to kill off an important character. For those noobs who think FFVII did it first, I'm sorry to disappoint you. It was also the first RPG I ever played that chose a futuristic setting instead of the traditional medieval setting. Yeah, it looks like ass next to RPGs of today, but as a kid, I thought about Nei's death for days afterwards.

2. Chrono Trigger: This game is just gold from start to finish. At the time of it's release it was lauded as revolutionary; the multiple endings specifically drew a lot of attention. It never took the heavy route - instead it seemed to keep a brisk pace, always moving forward with lots of events and character interaction. It's weaving of the topic of time travel into the game was so fluid, you never even realized you were exploring major roads of philosophical thought, because you were simply too busy having fun.

3. Final Fantasy VII: Well, you knew it would be on the list, so for those of you who hate it, bitch in the comments. There's no explaining why so many players cared so much about a spiky haired kid with a shitty attitude, but maybe it was the Han Solo formula. Whatever it was, this game is beloved in the annuals of RPG gamers' memories for a reason. Fantastic characters, engaging plot, and a world so highly detailed it was hard to remember it wasn't a real place. If Sony does ever decide to stop taunting us and remake this baby for the next gen, there's going to be a joy stampede.

4. Silent Hill 2: This game is so freaking perfect it makes my head hurt just thinking about it. Masterfully suspenseful and frightning, it draws you into the story effortlessly with absolutely no idea of what you will face in the end. I actually cried at the conclusion. Being so emotionally engaged with a story that you elicit such a reaction is a surefire sign that the creators have done their job well. It's been recently mentioned that the SH team are drawing on this game's feel for the creation of Silent Hill 5, which makes me a happy little muppet indeed.

5. Final Fantasy X: A lot of people didn't like this one and are going to disagree with this choice. Luckily, this is my article and not yours, so feel free to suck it. Playing through the opening sequence between Tidus and Auron completely fascinated me and made me want to play it through to the end. Of all the FF characters in the series, these were the most real to me. The pilgrimage to Zanarkand really absorbed me as well, and the ending is both completely sad and heartbreakingly beautiful. If you care about being truly engaged in your games, this one is a must.

All joking aside, what are the games that engaged you the most as a player?

Why you have a sad, sad wallet

2006-12-21T02:08:00.000-05:00

In a recent report, Forbes sheds some interesting light on the topic of game pricing -- for those of you in possession of inquiring minds. According to them, the $60 price tag that Xbox 360 games are now proudly sporting is a 20% increase over game prices of the past. The risk involved with creating such a product for a brand new console is high, perhaps justifying why beyond a few key titles, console launch support always seem to suck balls. If you believe in the stats in the article, it'll take a million games sold before a publisher turns a profit at all -- and then when they do, they'll make a dollar per game sold. Makes turning a trick sound about a hundred times more appealing, doesn't it? Prostitution has a much better rep overseas these days, I hear.

I found myself struggling while making this post to remember the prices of NES cartridges. I sure as hell wasn't keeping track of money I stole from my mother's purse to buy them, so I asked some fellow Dtoiders what they remembered paying for games from past systems. The general consensus seemed to be that Atari carts were about $20 - $30 and everything from NES on was $40 - $50. Looking at the comparison between today's games and those beloved relics of yesteryear, it may get you wondering: how can it be that games stay around the same price range, despite the leaps in technology? I paid $50 for Cho Eniki and now I'm paying the same for Gears of War? I know the latter is a homosexual freak carnival and the former is about real men at war, but still -- it kind of feels like finding out you were molested by your stepfather a long, long time ago.

Of course, there must always be forward progress. Ask any megolomanical world leader. Still, this news raises the same concern for me that the PS3 price announcement raised. Sure, your mega tech geek fiend types can afford these new consoles, but if things for kids are anything like they were when I was growing up, the Wii will be the console of choice strictly based on affordability. Sony and Microsoft choose to mostly alienate this demographic with their decision to price games and consoles as high as they have. It's neither good nor bad, but I know I would have been a much lonelier kid without games to play. I might have killed fewer small animals too, but that's beyond the point.

Here's some hard numbers:

ON A $60 GAME OF GEARS:

* 25% (aka $15) goes to pay the art and design guys.
* 20% ($12) goes to pay the programmers and the engineers.
* 20% (also $12) goes to your friendly neighborhood retailer.
EB / GameStop, whoever.
* 11.5% ($7) goes to a "Console Owner Fee" - ie. whichever one
of the Big Boys made your hardware (Sony, MS, Nintendo.)
* 7% ($4) goes to marketing, and puts Mad World and Marcus Fenix
on MTV.
* 5% ($3) goes to "market development" -- paying for cardboard
Standees of the Gears Crew and elbowing other games out of the way
for shelf space at your local retailer.
* 5% ($3) goes to actually manufacturing and packaging the disc.
* 5% ($3) is spent paying the Man for IP licenses or maybe
hiring some big name voice actors. If your game isn't an original IP,
here's where you get dinged by Marvel, Disney, or Ray Liotta's agent.
* 1.5% (just $1) goes into the publisher's pocket.
* 1.5% (also $1) goes into the distributor's pocket.
* 0.3% (about 20 cents) goes into corporate costs. Management,
overhead, lawyers, etc.
* 0.05% (less than 3 cents) go into the cost of paying for the
Developer's Hardware. Who knew an SDKs can cost tens of thousands of
dollars?

Kotaku presents

2006-12-19T00:03:00.000-05:00

Go check out Kotaku today for my feature on this weekend's Video Armageddon event!

Whee!

Despite Jack's opinion, video games make life just plain better.

2006-12-17T16:28:00.000-05:00

Video games HELP people? No. It can't be. Their only purpose is to dement and destroy the young minds of this generation! They're merely a revolting celebration of violence, hatred and homosexuality! Kids are using video games as murder simulators to rehearse unspeakable acts of planned annihiliation! ZOMGGGGG!

Jack? Seriously? They make meds to control that condition. In fact, should you not have enough cash to spare, there's also a bat to the forehead method avaliable to calm you right now. With stories like this popping up, it's harder than ever to hear a mote of truth in the prattle of anti game enthusiasts. It's a thought provoking report on studies done on video games as a method of pain management, helping to provide relief to terminally ill children. Nintendo has played a key role in this project, donating Wiis to Hospital Fun Centers and funding the 5,000th Fun Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in entirety. Ninty fanboys, cheer your freaking heads off, because for this, you really do have the right to. Causes like this and Child's Play get my money and my admiration. After all, no one wants see a child with cancer cry.

Meet me at the podcast.....

2006-12-13T20:53:00.000-05:00

I'll be podcasting tonight with Destructoid.

Come one, come all.

Gayer than a barrel of pink monkeys

2006-12-12T00:06:00.000-05:00

Since the dawn of time, people have been dutifully hiding their sexuality, whether it be a preference for girls, boys, or large animals averagely used for milking. In the last ten years or so, an interesting cultural development has come up. Being gay (not unlike being a dweeb) is cooler than it used to be. First there was a flouncy character here or there on television: shows like Will and Grace got big. People gasped (but also found themselves mysteriously glued to) Queer as Folk as they portrayed the first graphic male on male sex on television. Now, in bright sunny 2006, superstar game company Rockstar has taken it all one step further in their recent release Bully - offering you the Easter Egg option to make out with other boys in the schoolyard.

Of course, Rockstar is no stranger to controversy. It's hard to upstage yourself after making the first game that allowed you to beat the crap out of prostitutes for fun and profit, but being the great guys that they are, Rockstar found a way. Now, enter the bulk of the gamer demographic: men between the ages of 18-25 who enjoy playing fighting games, racing games and first person shooters. Does that sound like the type of guy that wants to tongue lock another 12 year old boy behind the monkey bars?

On the other hand, bold sites such as Gay Gamer have created fantastic communities that are gay friendly without being gay obsessed. It clearly delineates a strong subsect of gamers and about a billion times that many clashes of opinion on the topic. For a further expansion on where all this madness leads, check out the thoughtful article on Gamasutra linked below. Personally, I love seeing this kind of thing come up in games. Not because I like a good ass plowing once in a while (although that topic may make it to the forums in its own sweet time), but because I simply love to see this industry punch it's way through conventional standards. Having anything remotely gay themed in a video game is brave as hell, and it pisses off a lot of homophobes. I will wave my big pink flag for that anyday.

I feel so loud and proud now. If any girl gamer wants to make out with me, let me know and we'll YouTube that sh*t.

[Via Gamasutra]

8-bit art that will blow your mind

2006-12-10T14:39:00.000-05:00

What you see above, dedicated readers, is not a Punch Out screenshot. I know it looks like one, which is what makes it really amazing. It's actually painted by 8-Bit Artist, a guy whose work turns me into a slack jawed drooling yokel. (Disclaimer: Mississippi residents, try not to be offended. You can't help yourselves.) He's done some golden classics, including Contra, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania and Zelda. If you're lucky, maybe he'll do a commission painting for you of that unforgettable moment when you took Ganon out for the first time. The rest of his gallery is avaliable at Deviant Art. If you start to drool and fantasize about your cousins, don't blame me.

See below for more painted goodness.

Firefly MMO announced, geeks everywhere orgasm and fall over

2006-12-07T23:31:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Multiverse, a Firefly MMO will soon be born. For all those fans who have spent the last few years emo over having no more of the beloved space western to whet their appetites, it'll be time to saddle up in front of your computers soon enough. The first questions that pop into my mind are: can we play as the characters? If so, who can we play? Will it be set in 2517 again or a different time? Can we fly the Serenity? Can we go to Inara to have our health "refilled"?

Realistically, this could be fantastic if Joss Whedon is behind the creation of it. There's no mention of it in the article, so we'll just have to hope. Regardless of whether he's on for the ride or not, the mere announcement of this game is enough to inspire instantaneous neural aneurysms in the geek community. We'll be watching close for further updates on this one.

[Via Wired]

Hotel Dusk scores one for the avant-garde

2006-12-06T21:49:00.000-05:00

Wowee zow. Anime fans and DS fans alike, lend me your ears. DS Fanboy posted a bucket of fantastic shots from the upcoming Hotel Dusk. Seeing games like this hit the market thrill me. In a sea of generic first person shooters, endless sequels and RPGs that make you wince with their cliches, a game like Hotel Dusk sticks way out. I remember feeling very much the same way discovering Ico and Okami for the first time. The developers took a lot of chances with the style and format of these games, and often they were noticed for their bravery by gamers looking for something more than just the norm, not to mention the reaction of the industry. It was a sad day when Clover announced the dissolution of the studio due to "extraordinary losses." Ouch. Sometimes there's a way to put it nicely, and sometimes there just isn't.

Regardless of that sad loss, there are more companies making unusual games now than ever before. Katamari and LocoRoco seem to be paving the way for a new genre of quirky action/puzzle games that torture you with cuteness and music you can't stop humming. Shadow of the Colossus definately carries on the torch that Ico lit in the first place. It seems like the American tolerance for games that only Japanese gamers could get into before is going up and up. Personally I couldn't be more thrilled, as I've played enough bland RPGs and platformers to last three lifetimes. The kookier the offering, the better.

Japan, if you're listening, I think a Gloomy Bear game where I beat children for points would be super.

Katamari in the real world

2006-12-04T16:26:00.000-05:00

This video made me bouncy and stupid this morning. There's something completely delightful about seeing Katamari Damancy somehow struggle its way into the real world. It makes me want to quit my job and just meander about rolling things up and singing at the top of my lungs. At any rate, you Katamari lovers are going to squeal with delight over this one. Funny enough, the company that made the commercial claims it had no inspiration from Katamari whatsosver. Sure, guys. By the way, I have some used PS3s for you over here in mint condition.

Honey, you shouldn't have

2006-12-02T15:15:00.000-05:00

There's no better Christmas gift to get a gamer than some semi obscure reference to a favorite 8 bit game of old. Enter Durkl.com and one of the best t shirts ever. Who didn't fight this drooling jungle clan escapee and hurl the controller at the television in complete frustration at least once? Unless, of course, you were lucky enough to have a friend who told you to punch him in the stomach. Great strategy in general--cant figure out what a guy wants? Just punch him in the stomach. Works every time.

Mad Robot Love

2006-12-02T14:11:00.000-05:00

Thanks to a kind invitation, I have joined the Destructoid blog team!

Find me there in future at my Destructoid blog.

Cheers!

No shit

2006-11-29T19:26:00.000-05:00

Destructoid posted this total hilariousness today in which Spanish gaming blog Gamerah proposes we send shit-o-grams to Sony in protestation of their crappiness as of late. I'm not sure what's funnier, the thought of the amount of effort that would go into this mass mailing or the expression on the person's face who gets to open thousands of plastic dumps.

Personally, I think it's a shadow of the intended insult. Send real shit, people. Say it like you mean it!

World of Borecraft

2006-11-26T15:01:00.000-05:00

I know, I know. What I'm about to write will draw the ire and hellfire of countless MMO players. In fact, what I'm writing is the equivalent of walking down Hollywood Blvd wearing a wooden signboard that says "I like to kill kittens." And yet, I've simply got something to say. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!

I've only played MMO's for about 4 years. I didn't even play Everquest, although I did know a guy who quit college to play it, forsaking his education to frolick with elves. The first MMO I ever played was Final Fantasy 11, and it was only my love of Squaresoft that made me decide it was worth a try. Being an old school RPG gamer, I was wary that I could have fun playing a game that essentially had no story. I levelled a character up to 22 before realizing the game didn't have enough healers to smoothly produce good groupings and terminated my account in disgust. For all it's beauty, it just couldn't make it worthwhile to wait 3 hours to find a functional party.

Next I beta tested Lineage II. It didn't really capture me, but I was also distracted by the promise of a superhero MMO called City of Heroes. The character creation system is simply more fun than any other one I've interacted with. I got very involved, joining Supergroups, completing Task Forces, and playing with large groups of friends. In the meantime, it was hard to ignore the murmurs rising to a low roar in the gaming grapevine about a little Blizzard project called World of Warcraft. I was a tremendous Diablo fan, so I was thrilled to see so much work and time going into such an exciting project. I kept tabs on the website, eagerly read the details of new developments, and applied for the beta as soon as it was available. When I got my approval email from Blizzard, I was simply ecstatic. I was finally going to play the most anticipated MMO game ever made! Off to Azeroth!

I logged in and started as an Alliance female, exploring the world around me. As I did so, the pattern of play became evident. Kill stuff, questing, kill stuff, questing, collect herbs, contact, kill stuff, contact, quest, contact, quest, quest, quest, contact, yawn, contact....

Wait.

Did I just yawn?

I'm not tired. I'm excited. I've been waiting for this for months.

Am I......bored?

I was. And I was vastly disappointed by my own boredom. It's only the beta, I told myself. Blizzard has more work to do. It's just a weird first impression. I'm just coming into it at the wrong point. I'll try again when the major release comes out. I sent my feedback to Blizzard and didn't take myself too seriously.

A few months later the game was released and won every award you can possibly conceive of. Game of the Year, Top 10 MMO, Best Multiplayer game, Best design, Best audio, Best Absolute and Effortless Conquering of the Entire Universe as We Know It. I was still apathetic. All my City of Heroes friends slowly forgot their characters and drifted over to WOW. I met a Blizzard developer who encouraged me to try again and gave me a free account. Now I could play WOW at no cost until the year 2029. No, I'm not joking. Blizzard friends have hookups capable of giving the average MMO player a brain aneurysm. In the meantime, here I am, not really wanting to play. I know, the irony is infinite. At this point WOW enthusiasts want to beat my head in with a piece of meat.

This time, I managed to get a character up to level 11 before I got too bored to continue. I soloed, killed more stuff, completed more quests, and explored the incredibly detailed and beautiful world. In the end, not even playing for absolutely free made me want to continue playing. I wanted to care, but I just never did.

Perhaps I can blame this on the fact that I don't tend to enjoy medieval RPG settings. Perhaps it was because I never really played in any groups. Maybe I should have played a Horde character. I don't claim to have an important enough opinion to be able to declare World of Warcraft a poor game. It clearly isn't. It's a beautiful game with a tremendous amount of attention to detail, a rich storyline and tons of interesting features. For me however, it's completely boring despite all this. A split second after I think this to myself, I feel immediate guilt. This is how Catholics must feel all the time.

With the Burning Crusade expansion due out in January, I can't help but think I should try again, even though all previous evidence points to that being a complete waste of time. I'm still waiting for the lightning bolt to hit me that will transform me into a WOW addict. Why hasn't it happened? Everyone else has ascended to heaven already. I'm still waiting to be touched. Lord? Can you hear me?

Cart Art

2006-11-24T15:05:00.000-05:00

This guy kind of rules. He uses old Nintendo cartridges and paints game inspired scenes on them. Here we have a bit of Castlevania action. Admittedly, I'm a sucker for video game art, but this stuff is neat and innovative.

Check his shit on MySpace.

Bow your heads, people

2006-11-21T19:23:00.000-05:00

On today's date in 1990, the Super Nintendo entertainment system went on sale in Japan. It went on to sell 49 million units and to this day is still described by many gamers as the best console of all time.

Happy sixteenth, SNES. You made me a happy teenager (and god knows what a feat THAT was).

Game Armageddon in LA!

2006-11-20T19:05:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of reasons to love LA (and just as many, I'm sure, to run screaming from it), but this has to be one of my favorites so far. A video game CONCERT? All played by video game BANDS?

A geek-plosion is imminent, complete with messy fluids.

I will be going to check it out, obviously. If you're in LA, you have no excuse not to go rock out at this. If you aren't, I will be writing a full article on it, so expect to see some coverage in the near future.

Rock!

Tech Geeks vs the Game Warriors

2006-11-19T14:18:00.000-05:00

A chat with my delightfully geeky boss this morning made me realize a clear battle is emerging in the gaming universe....not just between consoles, but between the players that use them. For a long time, Nintendo reigned as king, putting even the great Atari to shame with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System and more games than any of us knew what to do with. Sega waved it's hands winningly and some were wooed, but mostly we remained committed as the Super NES hit the market and kept on rocking, earning a quick name as the best system of all time. Turbografx 16 and Sega Saturn made brief explosions in the sky, but honestly, it was all about Nintendo for a long, long time.

With almost no warning whatsoever, Sony suddenly arrived and swallowed the market. Whole. How they did it, no one is exactly sure, but some people seem to think it was in the same way that Nintendo succeeded so beautifully back in the day-games, games, games. Playstation 1 had hundreds of games out for it before most of us bought the console itself. With that overwhelming of a selection, could Sony really alienate anybody? And if PS1 conquered the market, the release of Playstation 2 cemented it as the fastest selling gaming console in all history and presented Sony with their crown. Backwards compatibility? Dev kits for game developers? The best graphics the world had seen so far? What else did the gamers of the world need?

Later down the line, Microsoft brought the XBox onto the scene to complete with PS2. With it's bulky body and controllers so ridiculously oversized they could double as blunt weapons, it seemed specifically marketed at the main demographic of gamers:men between18-25. XBox began to develop a name for it's focus on male oriented software and top of the line graphics and gave Sony a little competition. Nintendo floundered about in the background with the Gamecube, but at this point was considered by many to be a child oriented console. Mostly, people still played a lot of PS2.

And now, we stand at the dawning of yet another new era in game evolution. Nintendo has gained back some of the market with the Nintendo DS, which seems to have won a great success over the much anticipated PSP. XBox has released the 360 and expanded it's vision for it's software (due in no small part to lack of success in Japan). While everyone knew what to expect form the PS3, it was a bit of a shock to see Nintendo suddenly reemerge as a major contender again with a console with a completely innovative new controller, the ability to download past game libraries and best of all, a vision for a system that could possibly involve a whole new demographic of gamers. There hasn't been such an exciting clash of swords in the game world in a long time. But now, back to my original point: this current state of affairs sets us up for an obvious battle-tech geek gamer elite for the PS3 versus old school creatives for the Wii. It seemed possible that Nintendo could emerge victorious just based on price-the $600 price tag for PS3 seemed to turn off a lot of gamers, not surprisingly. But in the recent launch, Sony fans seemed as rabid as ever, standing in line over a week to be the first to obtain the console.

Now, it seems all we have to do is wait to see how the picture unfolds. Either way, it's likely to mark the industry permanently, swaying third party developers towards specific consoles. I wonder if Sony has any hope of winning. As much as I have been a fan of Playstation, I personally think the PS3 is a strategic mistake for Sony. It alienates a lot of players with it's tremendous cost. Worst of all, it leaves out a lot of children. Having been a kid whose love affair with games started at a very young age, it troubles me to think of other kids being cheated out of the opportunity. On the other hand, they'll very likely end up Wii players, considering the system's reasonable price and active play system. It sets things up looking very pretty for Nintendo. But still, you never know.

Regardless, it's a thrilling time to still be in love with games.

The perfect gift for the chocobo loving.....fisherman.

2006-11-15T19:13:00.000-05:00

Because if your husband/boyfriend/whatever likes to fish, surely he'll want to wear this very masculine hat.

I've thought it over and figured out that this hat is only for adorable femme gamer lesbians or men brave enough to admit chocobos make them squeak with delight. It's been bid on once, so there must be at least one of these two rare breeds out there.

Speaking of FF loot, where's the figurines from 12? I was on EBay looking for them when I came across the hat. Usually Square drenches the market with merch (hence the 12 billion DR Aki Ross 12' figures floating around EBay that no one wants.) Seriously though, some sculpts of the Espers would be swell. I totally dig Belias enough to buy him as an action figure. So far all I've seen are really expensive 4 and 6 packs of the main party characters. I know the game just came out, but you would think the Japanese imports would be pouring into the US by now....

Miss Video Game 2006

2006-11-06T16:28:00.000-05:00

Ugh.

As many of you can probably imagine, I'm pissed.

I think the requirements list alone is enough to make any real gamer puke:

"1. Must have Personality

2. Must be a female? (No wigs and makeup guys)

3. Doesn't mind Video Games :P

4. Loves the beach."

Um. Since when is LOVES THE BEACH a credit to a gamer girl's status?

I assume that the little emotiocon after number 3 means it's supposed to be some kind of joke. Luckily, that saved me from the rant I was going to make on that one, in which I was planning on blowing a blood vessel.

What this is is an excuse to get pretty girls to hold game controllers and snap vapid photos that are supposed to appeal to male geeks. It's disgusting. If I had a flamethrower, these fuckers would go up in a single blast.

Musings, ten hours in

2006-11-05T21:01:00.000-05:00

I wanted some time to fully absorb Final Fantasy 12 before attempting to post about it. As usual, it's a tremendous universe to explore and a full cast of detailed characters. That being said, I have a few clear impressions I feel are ready for sharing at this point.

One. There is a character in every Final Fantasy game I want to tear the clothes off of. Any player who says he doesn't have one of these in mind when they play a chapter of this series is lying (or at least the past few installments). Square make impossibly good looking characters. Even after seeing the trailers and pictures, I hadn't the slightest idea who it was going to be. Ten hours later, I can easily say it's sky pirate Balthier who would get my pants off with embarrassingly little effort. Think James Bond meets Han Solo and you've just about got it. Just a warning ladies...wear your chastity belts. Or don't.

Two. The battle system for RPGs has been revolutionized with this game's release. Any MMO player will easily recognize the flow of the system. The use of colored lines to indicate your target is simple and helps to keep the new system from being confusing. Even despite that, it's definately a bit of a transition to adjust to the new style. The thing I notice the most is that as an RPG player, I have come to rely on turn based battles as an excellent time for me to pay attention to other things, like feeding my cats or changing laundry. Despite the gambit system, you still have to pay close attention to the way the fight is going and if you will need to modify any of the actions in order to keep your characters alive. And that leads me to my next impression....

Three. The game is harder than it's predecessors. This is a good thing, as I think the complaint of many gamers is that the formula of RPGs puts them to sleep. FF 12 will definately not have that problem. I've hit two sections so far where I've plowed forward, assuming that I'd have no problem with what I was about to face, and died shamefully quickly. It takes a little more use of the gambit system and the licensing board, which I enjoy more than I have many of the previous game systems. It's completely open ended, allowing you to design characters' skills as you wish. The acquiring of weapons and spells is a two step process, ultimately challenging the player to do a bit more work to make characters stronger. One thing this game is not is boring.

Lastly, the story is absolutely engaging....I get the feel of such epics as Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. As always, Square don't disappoint....but this time, they really have outdone themselves. The story has a depth and scale that even recent FF games didnt touch. And, unlike bore-a-thon RPG Xenosaga, the story is actually good in addition to being epic. It's amazing that the bigger the budget, the more beautiful and vapid modern RPGs become. It's disappointing to the little girl in me that gawped at the graphics of games like Loom and Grim Fandango and fantasized about owning a game console that could make games look so good. As usual, my faith in this game series is completely validated. The nice surprise was that it was also better than I expected too.....and I expected a lot. It's a great pleasure to have your hopes exceeded in the game world.

Kupo!

2006-11-04T15:57:00.000-05:00

This EBay seller goes step beyond cosplay (not to mention a surefire way to bring your little one to cons and impress the ladies simultaneously) with the baby Moogle costume.

I wonder if she takes customer orders. A Cactaur costume would be a surefire winner.

Nerdcore article on Kotaku today

2006-11-03T13:45:00.000-05:00

Me on Kotaku

Check it out! That's me!
Yay!

For the love of God

2006-10-30T16:49:00.000-05:00

Rotofugi really does fantasize about my death.

I'm sure of it. That is the only justifiable reason for the existance of these hybrid Qee-Gameboys. For a mere $300, you can have one of your very own.

Sometimes, I just wish that these artists didn't have their greasy finger right on the pulse of everything that makes my geek heart explode into vibrating shreds.

Curse you!

Ire provoked

2006-10-26T19:23:00.000-04:00

Florian @ Kotaku posted this gem today. He says he's joking. I have a good sense of humor; I don't mind a good picking on. But even after reading the fine print, I think I still need to rant a little bit.

Primary bitch: Unless you are a regular Kotaku reader and know Florian's sense of humor, you could think this post was for real. The disclaimer is in the signature at the bottom, but as we all know, most readers have the attention span of a gnat and most likely will not notice this. I admit to not having realized it was there until my second reading.

Secondary bitch: Maybe Florian doesn't really think like this, but honestly, a lot of male gamers probably do think like this. Newsflash on that topic: The female gamer does not need any more of a spotlight on our status as a minority. In the Kotaku article, this survey is mentioned in which CNET states that 64% of the online gaming population is female. I have a very, very hard time believing this information. Sheri Graner Ray, game design veteran and longtime spokeswoman for female gamers, was quoted as saying ," Most video games are like bad boyfriends--they're too involved with their own male sexuality to even try to crack the female sexual code." With systems like 360 out there (basically the console version of the proverbial stick shift), this image is only further cemented into the consumer consciousness. What is the percent of game designers that don't give a shit if women ever play their games? Someone take THAT fucking survey. As bummed as the results might make me, I'd like to see that.

So it is any shock that I find this survey laughable? I assume it encompasses online games like solitare and Bejeweled. Not that those games or the people that play them are lesser than console games; but the players can hardly be considered a part of the female demographic that spends money on consoles and PC gaming. That demographic only makes up for about 10% of gamers. Ah, here we are-back to square one. (did we ever leave?)

delight!

2006-10-24T11:24:00.000-04:00

I woke up today feeling nostalgia and excitement. Today, my friends, marks a week to the release of Final Fantasy 12. What can I say? I wait with bated breath for these days, few and far between-the day a game comes out that's worth a shit. I'm a Square fangirl, no doubt about it. I defend mightily when someone bitches about their too-long cutscenes or murky storylines (even though there are select times when I agree.) When Square releases a FF title though, I can always be assured I'm going to get a rich, vividly imagined story, detailed characters that I will remember long after the game is over, and a world absorbing enough to make me long to come back to it. This chapter marks the beginning of a completely new format for Final Fantasy-doing away with turn based battles altogether. There is no interruption in gameplay (although I have to say there was something about the wait screen as you dissolved into a battle that I loved about past games) and battles run seamlessly with gameplay. I'm especially thrilled that characters more or less start as blank slates ability-wise. Square has been clear that Final Fantasy11 was the inspiration for a lot of these concepts. I'm really delighted with this. I would have continued to play FF 11 if the balance of healers vs other races had been better. For all I know, by now it will be.

Cheers Square, for being innovative, daring, and consistently producing stories that engage players' hearts and minds. You rock.

pr0n-a-th0n

2006-10-16T19:04:00.000-04:00

So Faith Naked made a post about pr0n star Liz Vicious playing a videogame where the cameraman zooms in on her panties. Then Kotaku jumped on the wagon, poking fun at Faith for complaining. Of course then I had to watch said video, which is boring as shit even despite the nubile young corruptor stored within. I'd post it here, but I don't want to waste the space, and the kids above have done a fine job of double posting it for me.

It seems to me that Faith has no place bitching about the state of women's sexuality in the game world, considering her last name is Naked and she's well known for posing close to that state on many an occasion. Sorry sister, no empathy for you. Kotakuite Florian Eckhardt admits that the video is boring, but criticizes that the problem is Liz Vicious is a porn star (and that Faith insinuates that being bad for female gamers. ) Good point here. If porn stars are playing games and flaunting their breasts simultaneously, that doesn't make any commentary on video games or women whatsoever. It only makes a comment on the person, and I know I've met a handful of gamer girls who have either stripped or done porn who are cool as hell and I'd happily get into a joystick duel with any day. Liz looks hot but lifeless in said video (amazingly, she achieves this simultaneously-highly recommended for all you necrophiliacs), but on the other hand it isn't like it's a premiere ad in Electronic Gaming Monthly. It's a tidbit floating around YouTube. It seems kind of trivial to get pissed about. Then again, I was bitching about the lameness of naked girls poorly wearing Nintendo accessories in the Nerdcore calendar a few posts ago, so perhaps that's equally trivial. I think most female gamers aware of our status in the electronic universe are struggling with toeing some line between game-love and our own sexuality. Do we get naked in a tangle of controllers (88% of men want to see this), or do we try to actually be ourselves as gamers without intermingling it with sexual potential?

O Genesis, how did I love thee?

2006-09-29T15:19:00.000-04:00

I just saw a picture of this box on Kotaku and was instantly whirled away into a delightful vortex of memories. I think I got this system for Christmas 1989. I was twelve. Considering that the NES was a dinky looking grey box, I thought this system was cooler than the Fonz. Hilariously, when I bought the reissue of the system about 8 years later, it had been resized and was about the size of a sandwich. I guess all that fancy black housing was just for show.

Lo, it was 16-BIT! Double the powah of previous systems! Finally, I could play with arcade quality graphics! Plus (and I miss these days) it came packed with Altered Beast. What ever happened to bundles, people? I know Nintendo is prepackaging Wii with Wii Sports, but you know, some people don't like sports games, NINTENDO.

One of my favorite games, of course, was Sonic the Hedgehog. Blasting him around at the speed of light? That great expression of shock Sonic makes when he hits something? The frustration of watching all your rings explode away? Of course, at the time there was no way to know that Sonic games would be issued ad nauseum afterwards....but who cared?

It wasn't long before Sega decided to follow up on their successful RPG for the Sega Master System and I discovered Phantasy Star 2. I LOVED that game. It was the first RPG I ever played in a truly futuristic setting and set my predilection for that setting in place for years to come. Even at that age, I was already a little tired of the medieval Dragon Warrior type settings and impatient to see designers do something different. Of course, the game has aged and now sitting through all those thousands of leveling fights seems mundane. Still, when I played Final Fantasy 7 and watched the story arc of Aeris, I couldn't help remembering Nei's story from Phantasy Star 2.

There's so much to be excited about with the upcoming next gen systems (except your bank account, which will be vast and empty), but sometimes the nostalgia just hits hard and you'd give your left arm to hear the words, "Rise from your grave!!!"

pissy.

2006-09-22T15:18:00.000-04:00

WHAT. IS. THIS. SHIT????

Click here, but you might want to vomit first.

It's like the bastard hybrid of Hot or Not and Gamespot.

I'm disgusted.

Start your engines, gentlemen.

2006-09-14T15:12:00.000-04:00

Finally, the gospels have been spoken.

Wii's will be released in America on November 19th, at the oh-so-affordable price of $249.99. Revisiting the old school days, it will come packed with a launch disc (Wii Sports, which will allow you to play around with the remote a bit right off the bat). Also mentioned were the Wii channels, allowing you to choose from 530 Gamecube titles to download. It will be $5 (500 Wii points) to download NES Games, $8 for SNES and $10 for N64. Do you see large amounts of money being spent at the click of a remote button? Talk about instant gratification....it's worse that the I Tunes Store. Another channel, called the Mii channel, allows you to create your own avatar, save it in the remote, and take it with you to friends' houses so when you play, you can leave your avatar behind on the games you've played. And it's called the Mii! Nintendo, the wit! Oscar Wilde is chuckling in the grave, surely.

I would like to translate this press release into a simple, single statement that will save you the time of reading all the details. It's quite simple, really. GIVE UP YOUR LIFE. You are about to spend all of your free time waving that white wand of wonder, buying and spending your Wii points, and pissing off all of your non gamer friends. Girlfriends? Forget it. They'll break up with you as soon as you download Golden Eye. Getting laid vs Mario Party? Hmm. I have to think about that. That Mario, he's got it going on. Being single on November 19th actually sounds like a pretty good idea.

The word was that The Legend of Zelda:Twilight Princess would launch on this date as well, but then other news pointed in the direction of a December release. Either way, Nintendo is hailing it as "The best gotta have it title since the days of the NES and Super NES." Dear God. Of course, they're only words, but Nintendo's really putting it's shiny white balls up on the chopping block, aren't they? That's a big statement to make to a girl who played The Legend of Zelda for NES for months on end. Replayability is key. How many recent games have been so great that even after you finished them, you wanted to go back and finish them again? Not just because of extra bonuses and exclusive unlockable quests...but because the original game was just that good? I would love to see them come through on this promise. I have to admit, I'm hopeful.

That rant made me want to pull out the GBA. Got to make the wait until November pass by somehow....

the brush is mightier than the sword

2006-09-12T15:13:00.000-04:00

It's a game like this that gives a jaded gamer hope. We've all played the bevy of endless first person shooters, the oh-so-similar platformers, the RPGs that ask you go open those eight mystic palaces one more time. Sure, the games look fantastic; there's a lot more to work with than there used to be back in the 8 bit days. And yet, I keep putting down my controller down 20 minutes into my game, distracted by nothing at all, rather, wondering: Why aren't I having fun?

Enter Okami, brainchild of Clover Studios. In a recent interview with Atsushi Inaba to discuss the game, he said, "Since we settled on the basic adventure genre, we needed something that felt new to push game design forward. A game that was built on fancy graphics just wouldn't be enough." If I could have collapsed on the floor with relief to hear these words come out of a game designer's mouth, I would have, but I was busy drooling on the screenshots. Not only did they accomplish their goal of creating a unique gameplay experience, but they chose to interpret the graphical beauty in a completely new way. The game has a brushstroked appearance that meshes effortlessly with the experience of using the Celestial Brush-a new tool that allows you to gain powers such as making the wind blow and changing day to night. You can also use brushstrokes in combat. You know those annoying people who keep saying games are not art? You might want to bring a copy of this sucker for the next round of that argument, because even the most deluded debator couldn't talk his way around this one.

Another vote to impress the judges: story. Not only is there a story, but it's an lush, detailed story rooted in Japanese folklore. The Japanese village of Kamuki has suffered anguish at the hand of Orochi, a beast with eight heads who expects a villager sacrifice for his yearly feast. When he chooses a fair maiden for his next victim, a warrior named Nagi decides that the show canot go on. Unfortunately, Orochi is too powerful even for Nagi's courageous determination, and he is on the verge of losing his life when a mysterious white wolf appears and aids him in battle. Together they defeat Orochi, but the wolf is too badly wounded by the battle and loses it's life, and the villagers erect a statue in it's memory. Fast forward one hundred years: here's where the player enters. Orochi has been released from his prison (apparently, bad guys never really die, they just go on long vacations), and the Japanese Goddess of Sun, Amaterasu (who you play) assumes the form of a white wolf and returns to Earth to defeat Orochi yet again and save the lives of the people. To do so, you must recollect the 13 spirits of the brush, who were scattered throughout the world upon evil's return.

My attention is fully captured. I, for one, have been disappointed with the Next Gen. As a kid, I played my old systems with fervor, determined to solve every last puzzle and eke out every hidden secret. Those games too were formulaic, but something about the formula made them golden in the minds of the people playing them. At this point in gaming's evolution, we have played every version of every genre of game (except interactive porn, which there really isn't enough of whatsoever.) To catch the modern gamer's attention, you need something that stands out. Apparently the cutting edge graphic aren't doing it: bargain bins are full of games that were just released 2 months before. What makes you want to keep a game, finish it over and over? Why do I care? I think Okami's creators got that. They wanted to make more than a generic adventure. In fact, the brainstorming phase was about single sentence concepts like:"Healing a broken world" and "A game about the beauty of nature." When you compare this approach to, "How much money can we make?", it's easy to see why games like this are revolutionizing the industry. They have the balls to do something truly different, and I believe enough gamers are bored with beautiful mindless products to want to see something like this.

Cheers, Okami! May there be more like you in our future....

The eternal delights of Square Enix

2006-09-07T14:53:00.000-04:00

I was sketchy about the merger of Squaresoft and Enix when it was first announced. I liked Dragon Warrior as a kid, but I thought of it as another class of RPG-a little lesser than Final Fantasy. I recently played through the new Dragon Quest game, and frankly I still feel the same, even though the new graphics were fantastic and I squeaked with delight every time I fought something familiar to me from one of the old games. I just like the stories less, although I certainly wouldn't call them poor. But I have to say, with the release of Rocket Slime, I really see the influence of both companies well blended into a single adventure...and that is some thrilling stuff to see.

Of course in Japan, this is already a sequel. The original game, Slime MoriMori Dragon Quest: Shougeki No Shippo Dan, came out in December 2005. What I love about this type of game is a distinctly Japanese attitude-the slime's expression on the cover is total evidence of that. The Japanese have this wonderful tinge of complete insanity through a lot of their media. It really pleases me in a very childlike way. At any rate, the game lands you in the kingdom of Slimenia (hee) where you must fight against the Plob, a mysterious monster brigade who have kidnapped all the slimes from the capital city, Boingberg. I know, some of you are wincing. But some of you are also doing a silly little dance at the mere idea of it. Latter, this post is for you.

You get to launch Rocket Slime out of a tank in order to combat your enemies, which he's clearly thrilled about based on the cover. I'm just thrilled about playing, myself. It looks great on the DS screen-reminds me a bit of those Chrono Trigger days. I just feel all warm and snuggly about Square-Enix right now. Sure, they have their misses (Unlimited Saga made my stomach ache) but more often than not, I'm still delighted with their creativity and ability to write fantastic stories. With the wait for Final Fantasy 12 almost over (this is going to be the best Halloween EVER), I'm so excited I'm about to go streak in front of their corporate offices to show my appreciation. Until I get arrested, that is.

FUCKING FINALLY

2006-09-04T14:23:00.000-04:00

After a ridiculous struggle trying to remember my forgotten password (I had the account registered to an old email address and it kept sending my password reminders to it), I finally beat the system and have made my way back to my own blog. YES!

Of course, it's been weeks since I have been able to post, so you have missed buckets of witty snippets about the world of gaming at large. At any rate, it's water under the bridge, so I'll get to the point of what's been on my mind the past few days.

It seems that Squaresoft has realized that no matter how many Final Fantasy games they make, people keep talking about how great FF 7 was. After a while they caught on and decided to make a whole bunch of games extending from that universe. They also made a film, Advent Children. It was lovely to look at and traditionally vague, as Square tends to be, but I liked it anyway. Or maybe I just really liked coming back to the FF 7 universe. At any rate, I had read about the next upcoming release, Dirge of Cerberus, which allowed a character from FF 7 named Vincent Valentine to have his own adventures. This one was just released, and I've tried to track it down with no luck. Today is Labor Day, so I hope that people are too busy having barbeques to want to stay inside playing games. Then I can finally swoop in and snatch up a copy to check out.

Edit: Still no copies avaliable, goddammitt.

I have gone out of my mind...

2006-08-16T16:10:00.000-04:00

...with desire. I've evolved from not wanting to get one (too clunky! stylus is dumb!) to being swayed a bit by the games (but...Animal Crossing) to really swayed by the release of the DS (oh god...it's so SLEEK) to convinced (Final Fantasy 3! Yay!).
And now, shoved right over the edge, screaming into mad fangirl purgatory until the moment I hold one of these beauties in my trembling little hands.

The Final Fantasy 3 limited edition DS Lite, comemmorating the release of the recreated Final Fantasy 3. Released only in Japan. Signed and numbered. And for a FF freak like myself, the ultimate toy.

I have to have it.

I don't care what I have to do to get it.

I will gladly whore myself out to any cause, falsely befriend any overly shy japanese fanboy, publicly humiliate myself and be seen by millions, beg, borrow, steal or kill.

It wants to be with me and I feel the same about it.

And you know, these types of loves only come once in a lifetime.

I've cast my feelers out to any friends I have that I think could assist in my cause. And I wait with bated breath to see what (if anything) they might be able to do.

It releases on August 29th, and the madness begins. Please lord, help this dweeb reach her holy grail.

Brilliant geekery.

2006-08-07T17:27:00.000-04:00

i wish i had written this....

courtesy of The Reluctant Angeleno

NO ANGRY PIRATES
Starring George W Bush, Aide, Press 1-4, Toadstool, Tony Blair

Aide: Please, please…members of the Press Corps. Please be quiet. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
Dubya: Thank you Mary. Ladies and gentlemen of the Press. I come before you today to discuss a burgeoning threat against these United States. As of 11:30 am this morning, citizens of our great country were attacked maliciously by the Hammer Brothers. I have contacted our allies, Mario and Luigi. I have sent Secretary Powell to the Mushroom Kingdom to seek aid from the Princess Toadstool. I have already included the vicious Hammer Brothers as members of the Axis of Evil.
Press 1: Uh…Mr. President. The Hammer—the Hammer Brothers? From the Nintendo game?
Dubya: That is correct. We will smoke them out of their caves, and we will bring those evil doers to justice. It will not be an easy task. They have seven cities, surrounded by lava and piranha plants. They have koopa troopas which patrol endlessly. They have goombas which, if we are lucky, we can flatten.
Press 2: Sir, I don’t understand. These are fictional characters.
Dubya: Fictionable they may be, but mark my words. We will hunt them, we will find them, and we will advance to the next level. No matter how many hammers are thrown, no matter how many happy clouds toss spikey things at us, we will not fail.
Press 3: Mr. President, how are we going to pay for this?
Dubya: Their cities are filled with floating gold coins. Which we will collect. Furthermore, if we are lucky enough to go down the right pipe, we will find a secret room with more coins. And we will find weapons, fire flowers, and magical mushrooms that make us – big.
Press 4: Mushrooms, Mr. President, are you on drugs?
Dubya: Yes, I am. Some might call them drugs, but I like to think of them as glittering stars that make me invincible. I will never die. Doo doo doo doo doo (star theme).
Press 4: Is this your idea of a joke?
Dubya: If I were joking, maybe I would’a said, “Grasshopper walks into a bar. Bartender says, ‘We got a drink named after you.’ Grasshopper says, ‘You got a drink named Harold?’” But I am not joking. I am being 100% seriotivity. The counterattack has already commenced. Many lives have been lost in the pursuit of the hammer Brothers, but we have also discovered a trick to earn unlimited 1-Ups, by jumping. Repeatedly. We will remain vigilant in our attack. United we stand. (He holds up an 8-bit controller and the light gun)
fin

Well, holy shit.

2006-08-01T15:32:00.000-04:00

From Gamespot:
"GameSpot has learned that tomorrow the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) will announce changes to the format and scale of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the game industry event that typically draws in excess of 60,000 attendees and includes over 400 exhibitors.
On July 28, the Web site of UK trade magazine MCV reported discussions had taken place between the ESA and E3 exhibitors that addressed the future of the annual trade show. GameSpot spoke with informed game industry sources late Friday and Saturday and learned that the show would radically shrink in size and move from its usual Los Angeles Convention Center (LACC) venue to a smaller location.
Sources said that rather than fill the 540,000 square feet of the cavernous LACC, the show will take place at a location that would support exhibitors in meeting room space only, with companies showing their wares to a select group of attendees numbering in the hundreds rather than thousands.
One reason behind the downsizing of the show can be attributed to the dollar cost of the event to exhibitors, including the demands on companies to assign large numbers of staff to focus on the show, expenses associated with travel to the show, and the added expense to polish game builds and demos to be shown to attendees.
While the largest of E3 exhibitors could support their own marketing and promotion of upcoming games, the smaller companies which rely on the attention that E3 generates may have no recourse other than to market their games independently. But a smaller E3 would impact more than the game industry: the local hotel and related entertainment and service industries in Los Angeles take in more than $50 million during E3--the estimated amount attendees and businesses spend over the course of the three-day event.
One source added that the new format of the show may actually result in a more productive environment to demo games to the media, although they stopped short of full disclosure: "My lips are sealed until after the weekend," the source said.
An official statement from the ESA outlining the changes will be released on Monday, numerous sources said. E-mails to the ESA for comment were not returned at press time. "

I feel lost.

Grrrl power?

2006-07-30T15:16:00.000-04:00

I was considering submitting to a gaming site(that will go unnamed here)that was specifically aimed at the female market. It's been a bit busy in my world, so I haven't had a chance to go and actually read the content until today. After reading a bit, I realized I didn't want to submit my work to them after all. And here is why.

As much as I am concerned about women's issues in games, this tone that was present throughout most of the articles had one theme that was pounded into one's head none too subtlely-women, women, women, women, women. I know this is the mantra of the average 17 year old, and rightfully so, but since I have no immediate need to plow something with an avaliable opening, the mantra seems a bit more tired when present in writing. The thing is, games receded into the background. The issues of how men react to Lara Croft's breasts moved so far up into the foreground that her shadow effectively covered the real issues. And let's get real here girls-Lara's tits look GOOD. And there is nothing wrong with noticing, or even better, saying so.

It seems to me that regardless of what female gamers do, we have to admit to the obvious-we are playing in a male dominated culture, and it's going to stay that way. But I don't think the answer is necessarily waving the pride flag and dissing everything that men think and feel about attractive females in games, whether real or digitized. Get real, chicks. We are dealing with men, and no amount of indignation over skimpy character outfits is going to change the fact that men love seeing women looking sexy. Now, here's a eureka moment-could we possibly enjoy that we're being admired physically? Or stop pissing on men for being themselves?

For this gamer, the proof is in action-I pick up my controller and I play. This is an awesome world to be a part of. I still love it as much as I did when I was 8 years old and holding my Atari controller for the first time. It seems to me that the more I riot about the nature of women in games and how they are treated, the less attention I get to pay to the real heart of things-my passion for playing games. I don't block out the fact that there are women's issues in this culture, and I'm not suggesting any female readers do either. Just don't let it absorb so much of your attention that you lose perspective. In fact, all that time you spent bitching could have been much more effective if you just sat down with a guy and whipped his ass at Halo. Point eloquently made.

Now, if anyone wants to bitch about the male centeredness of the XBox, I'm up for that. But only if we play while we discuss.

Yes! You can play Link's shield!

2006-07-22T02:40:00.000-04:00

Now pass Go and collect $200

This is one of the only games that I can play and win regularly....and now, I can play it with Nintendo included!

Gimme!

To lite or not to lite?

2006-07-18T22:54:00.000-04:00

I actually bought the original DS. I had thought about it long enough. And I was tempted by the promise of Animal Crossing. At any rate, when I did get it I was not pleased with the shape or weight and it just felt awkward to me in comparison to my teeny little GBA. Basically, I didn't give it a chance and marched right back to the store and gave it back.
Now, I keep trying to ignore the little twinge I get when I see pics of the brand new DS Lite and it's shiny, slender casing. It's what I think of as IPod syndrome-anything glossy and white and it just pushes my little button somewhere deep in my brain that says YOU CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT THAT in a boundless godlike voice. I saw the ads for Zelda and I thought no, no, I won't go buy it. New Super Mario Bros? I don't have to have...that....do...I....ugh. Children of Mana. And then-Final Fantasy 3, redesigned for the DS, was announced. The one major FF game that never came out stateside. Well.....fuck. I wave my little white flag. It's time to admit it-I need the damn DS Lite. The one thing that always sells me on a system is Final Fantasy's presence on it. Now, will it convince me to drop $600 bucks on Sony's psuedo-computer? I've been kind of grumpy in general about Sony's stance on PS3, so I suppose I'll have to see how I feel after it's release. I'll have to whore myself to get the money to get it anyway, so I should probably get started on finessing my blowjob skills now.

Whee!

2006-07-15T20:23:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of german magazine Games Aktuell, the first ad for the Wi campaign. My first thought, besides the simplicity and cleanliness of the ad, is that it reminds me of the IPod marketing-lots of white, not a lot to say beyond the product. Apple's pretty much got the market on the IPod....gee, I wonder what Nintendo's going for. Not that I have a problem with that. I'm over here cheering with my little white pom pom's. I'll wear a cheerleader costume for you, Nintendo....even if the skirt lets my panties show. Yes, in fact, especially if if does. There, I said it.

chomp. chomp. chomp.

2006-07-12T17:32:00.000-04:00

When I see a site like this, it simply makes me ruin my panties in a quarter of a second. I must say regretfully that while no human being has ever accomplished such a task in my experience (yet!), I'm not even remotely bummed about it. These chicks are fucking excellent.

You know, sometimes I just want to write a dignified, thoughtful commentary on the state of games today, and sometimes, I just want to lay in a pile of vintage consoles and controllers and make out with girls named Vixen and Siren.

Salvation through pessimism

2006-07-11T15:34:00.000-04:00

Pessimists in the general world are one thing. Then, there's pessimists of the gaming world. Sometimes, they're downright annoying, but every once in a while I hear something from one of them that makes me cock my head like an excited dog. Enter Chris Crawford, who some of you may remember as an Atari Designer from 1979 and author of the book "The Art of Computer Game Design". Gamasutra published this recent interview with him, and while it's all interesting stuff, this particular bit jumped out at me:

"GS: Now, as far as the gaming industry: you are a published author on the subject. I can pretty much tell from what you’ve been saying what you feel they're doing wrong. Do you feel there's anything they could be doing right? In keeping with the traditional sense of what a game is, how could games be better, in your opinion?
CC: My advice to the gaming industry would be to sincerely copy Hollywood more closely. The gaming industry really does operate on a model very similar to Hollywood with one huge exception, and that is that they have no system for harvesting new concepts. Hollywood knows that it needs new ideas. The games industry doesn't know. Hollywood goes out of its way to provide itself with a seed stock of new talent and ideas, the games industry doesn't. Hollywood spends an enormous amount of money supporting colleges and universities, and training programs at those settings. The games industry does not. Hollywood has a system for honoring weird ideas that aren't necessarily commercial. The games industry really doesn't. That is, Hollywood actually backs these things up with real money.
There's an awful lot of Hollywood money that goes to supporting oddball ideas, because Hollywood has learned the hard way that entertainment is a high risk business that requires innovation. So you spread a lot of money over a large area and most of it is just dead loss. You'll find one idea out of a hundred that's worthwhile, and Hollywood has developed a balanced system. They don't throw money away. They've developed a balanced system that generates enough creative return for their monetary investment. They look very closely at books; they use novels as the basis for movies. The games industry doesn't do that. They support film festivals and a variety of other things that allow aspiring young talent to get just enough funding to devise an advance. They have a pyramid system in place to creators, and at the very top are the Steven Spielbergs and the big expensive blockbusters. But that thing doesn't sit there in the air; underneath those hundred million dollar movies are layer after layer after layer of cheaper, more creative, more varied ideas, and there's money flowing down that. Because they know they need the support. The creative support of all these new ideas. The games industry doesn't do anything like that and that's why it has no new ideas. It just keeps recycling the same old ideas."

Is it true, or isn't it? Some game designers would surely disagree. Generalizing the industry tends to ruffle feathers. On the other hand, the rumor is that story-centric games get cut off at the pass when being pitched as a concept. There can be a story, but it needs to be outweighed by action, sex appeal, blood, oodles of guns and better than real life graphics. Funny enough, I have been bitching (as you all well know) that the gaming industry is turning into Hollywood-by using recycled concepts and making too many sequels- and Crawford reminded me of the aspects I hadn't considered. Hey, a pessimist just reminded me to be open minded. Sweet.

i can't believe someone invented this fucking thing

2006-07-09T12:41:00.000-04:00

You know that guy that's always "trying to help?" The one standing in close proximity when you lose your job, find out your car is stolen or that your girlfriend really has been fucking the entire state football team? The guy who pats you reassuringly on the shoulder and says" Man, it's gonna be ok" or even worse, tries to crack a joke? The guy that, were you not utterly distracted with the current disarray of your life, you just might punch square in the fucking face? This guy has a fix all for everything. Which brings me to my current point-that guy was clearly involved in this creation of this amazing item.

What is it? It's called "Voice changing software." Ok, why is she upset, the reader is thinking-perhaps you are remembering the goodness of an old toy that could transform your speaking voice into the menacing voice of Darth Vader when you were a wee lad. I thought that toy rocked the house myself, but what we have here is not even worth comparison. It's specifically aimed at the female gamer-wow, that's rare and awesome-how much of this industry targets that demographic? However, upon reading further we find that the voice changer is specifically designed for female gamers using voice software in MMORPG's. It's purpose?

TO DISGUISE THAT YOU ARE A WOMAN BY CHANGING YOUR VOICE.

So apparently audio4fun.com is the seller of this product, and upon further examination of their website I found that the software itself is not aimed at women. It seems that other writers thought immediately of the apparent problem that men just don't like to hear the female voice online when they're trying to launch that 30 man raid. It just threatens their sense of masculinity. What are women doing in this universe, anyway? You can't possibly be useful in this rough enviroment.

News, boys-not only can we be useful, but quite often, we can wipe the floor with you. A voicechanger is not going to make any difference there, beyond the idea that it may save your eggshell-fragile male ego. Women are playing and playing well. This product offends me-not because it exists, but because people are portraying it as a solution to the problem of being female in a male dominated society. Personally, I wouldn't be caught dead using this-on the contrary, I want my voice heard exactly for what it is, and if boys don't like playing with a girl, there's a lot of other servers to go explore. Surely if go on a PvP server, you won't have to deal with this problem. That guy that just wiped the floor with you before you could blink is definately a guy.....right?

The maybe death of the quirky explorational adventure

2006-07-04T23:09:00.000-04:00

I read an interview on Gamasutra today with Ron Gilbert that made my heart hurt a little. I was elated to find it in the first place-I remembered him well as one of the major developers from Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. Gamasutra asked him what games out there were really making an impression on him, and he couldn't come up with one. Now, perhaps he might come off bitter to the average reader, but what he had to say struck a nerve for me.

"And if I'm playing a game that is built around a story, (and it's not like games have to have story by any means,) but if I'm playing a game that is about the story, I have to know that story was crafted by somebody. I want to know that story means something. And I think one of the problems that a lot of developers get into is that… I think people don't have a really good understanding of how to pace an interactive story. So you get into these situations where you've got a series of events that make up the story, but they're not paced very well. Things don't flow correctly through them, and you see these weird kinds of jerky starts and stops in the drama. I think that's what can makes interactive storytelling really not appeal to a lot of people. If you kind of unravel it all, it's just bad storytelling."

So the awareness of story being pushed to the back burner is definately out there. In a way, it's gratifying to hear a developer I respect actually expressing disappointment over this. I certainly don't think it's going to revolutionize the industry by any means. On the other hand, it makes me realize that the same people expressing their displeasure could be motivated enough to create their own games-Ron Gilbert sure is. The quote that made me twitch, though:

"It's actually kind of frightening, you know. You sit down with a publisher and the minute you mention anything like an adventure game or something story-based or adventure-game-like in any way, the meeting's basically over. So the publishers do have a huge resistance to this. And I think a lot of it is that they cannot point to anything like this that is successful in the market today. So it's very difficult for them to put anything behind it. It's a very difficult process."

For the moment, this type of game is simply non-engaging to the general public. The game industry is starting to resemble the mainstream film industry in speed of release and disposability. Of course, the same audience that goes to see the disposable film will want to play the disposable game. There's nothing wrong with this, of course. It's actually ideally suited to the modern demand for easy entertainment. However, I still believe in a game than can be intense and engaging and yet wonderfully easy to play at the same time. The Zelda series has accomplished it over and over again. Nintendo claim they want to unite the gaming public again-something they did seemingly without trying with the release of the NES in 1985. Ultimately, it's not the console itself but the company's vision which will create what could be-alongside the games they choose to define the system. At any rate, I hope we don't see the action/adventure genre dissipate entirely...sometimes all the polish in the world can't make up for the right bit of quirk.

Still toeing the line...

2006-06-29T19:07:00.000-04:00

I have to admit as much as many pairs of panties I've ruined over Wii announcements, I'm still feeling skeptical about the controller.

It's NOT that I can't handle change. Perhaps it's so much easier than I really think it is. Of course I instantly recall the days when you would actually see another player jerk the controller in the direction that Mario was jumping in, as if somehow it would help. Except now, it COULD help-if the Wii controller will actually enable it with actual physical movement. Exciting thought, Oui? I read recently the attachment is called the "nunchaku", which, under average circumstance, would win my heart over right there and then.

But honestly, this just isn't average circumstance. There's a part of me holding my breath for this machine, and for more reasons than it's spiffy new controller ethics. It seems that Nintendo is hoping for an idea with this system-a re-establishment of a certain kind of game and the gamer that will inevitably follow-and I am hoping to see it come to life. At the same time, I don't want to get myself all worked up and be left hanging. So I must toe the line of healthy hope and sweet, sweet abandon.

Reviews of the controller's actual use have been fairly good so far. The weight sounds acceptable and the movement easy to learn, although some reviewers noted they were gripping the remote too hard. Now, on a personal note, I saw a picture of a guy playing The Legend of Zelda:Twilight Princess and laughed really hard. He was in a scene where he was supposed to be using a bow and using the 2 parts of the remote to do so. I see in every way how the remote allows you to experience a true simulation of actual archery, and I acknowledge how interesting it is that it allows you to do that. The problem was, the guy looked like an absolute douche. Perhaps as the controller absorbs me into it's immersive universe, I will no longer care whether or not I look like a douche and will merely shoot arrows to my heart's content. I mean, I'm sure I didn't exactly look like a hipster when I was pointing that neon orange gun at my NES screen in 1984. Not to mention what I must have looked like using the little dance pad to play World Track Class Meet.

Goddamn you,Microsoft

2006-06-27T13:42:00.000-04:00

I have long acknowledged the XBox's big , fat delicious specs and graphic prowess. I know it runs gorgeously. All that is wonderful, but my constant complaint for this system was:no story, no story, no story. For anything. Of course, there is a certain (large) demographic that wants no story, only to blast things to bits and drive mindlessly fast cars. I recognize that as fun, but you know, these damn RPG players want a STORY, and since I'm one of this snobby breed, I haven't paid much attention to the XBox since it became evident that Microsoft was unconcerned with this genre altogether.
Yesterday, I'm reading a magazine and stumble across the previews of a game called Bioshock. And finally, finally, I find myself cursing my lack of an XBox. The setting is Rapture, a failed experimental paradise beneath the sea. Envision a society of genetic elitists living in harmonious superiority...at least until the discovery of Adam, a genetic material with the power to enhance already overenhanced beings. Queue madness, desperation and bloodshed. You come in shortly after total chaos has begun and bodies litter the deserted seascape. Soon enough you will meet "Big Daddy" (refer to screenshot), deep sea guardians of young girls called "little sisters" who look normal enough until you get up close enough to notice their awkward features and massive eyes. Later, you'll have the pleasure of watching these young ladies extract the Adam substance from corpses with a large needle and store it...in their bellies. If your skin isn't crawling by now, you impress me.
I could go on (the demo is a delicious 20 minutes), but I really have no reason to-all my delight buttons have already been pressed. It's got atmosphere, unidentifiable creatures, horror, and a story good enough in the first 5 minutes to make me claw for the rest. It's being called an "FPS RPG", interestingly enough....while I rarely play FPS, I would play this in a moment. Of course, this is an obvious game choice for a total Silent Hill fangirl, but still it's been a while since I've actually been so fascinated to play anything as I am to check out Bioshock.
It's coming out for the PC as well, so now all I have to do is upgrade my computer so I can run the damn thing. Unfortunately there's no release date as of yet, so I guess I'll have to lick the screenshots in the meantime.

Without 90 lives, I'm worthless.

2006-06-26T13:51:00.000-04:00

So, I played Contra over the weekend at a friend's BBQ. The game was emulated on a Dreamcast, which meant there was no use of the infamous code to obtain 90 men to finish one's game. So-3 men per play and a handful of continues to get through the whole damn thing. Replaying it with a friend in tow, we both rediscovered how fucking HARD the game was without the little perks of (seemingly) infinite lives. One tiny stray bullet, and that insanely annoying death noise! Within a few tries we were both screaming made up curse words (note-the invention of 2 part curse words like shitfinger and fuckknots clearly originate from the existance of the NES) and hurling controllers. Ah, true annoyance over a game-how long has it been since I've had the joy of such irritation?
Not to mention over 24 hours later I'm still THINKING about the goddamn game. Could I try again? How long would it take me to finish that first level without losing any lives?

I'm putting my faith in Nintendo to bring back this kind of goodnesswith the advent of the Wii. Sure , it has been a while since we've seen this kind of games. There are a few here and there that echo that classic vibe (Alien Hominid comes to mind), but overall we're seeing a lot of over produced games lacking the essential element that made them fun when the graphics looked like the rear end of a horse-play, play,play. If anyone can do it, it's the crafty fuckers that did it in the first place. Torture me again, Nintendo-I want you to.

Once, there was a really long Nintendo commercial

2006-06-22T00:42:00.000-04:00

There was a movie called The Wizard. I think I was about 8 years old when this movie came out. The 8 bit Nintendo was the most glorious device I had ever discovered. And suddenly, there was a movie about it. In fact, I had a really big crush on the bad guy, whose key line was," I love the Power Glove. It is so bad."

Imagine this guy delivering that line in all due seriousness.

Hysteria aside,back to our story. The movie impressed me. It was a simplistic story about the ridiculous journey of a preteen and a retarded kid going cross country to win a video game contest. These kids lived games, breathed games,and followed their dreams which of course were all intertwined in a journey to an ultimate kingdom paved with golden question mark blocks. It made no sense and I loved it. And of course, I had to have it-the gauntlet of my digital dreams. The Power Glove. I knew come Christmas morning it would be mine, and I was waiting with bated breath for the moment when I would don the magical item. Of course, what I did not forecast for was the eventuality that it was a complete piece of shit. I refused to accept it. I tried to manuever with it and figured-it must be broken. It isn't working right. I wept with disappointment. The day after Christmas, my mother was forced to drive 25 minutes to the nearest Toys R US with me in tow to get a new one. Back home, it did not work. More tears. Another trip. Another glove. One more massive failure reduced me to a sobbing heap, and from that moment on I began to accept that my dreams could so easily be shattered by poor design and false marketing. Of course as an adult, I understand that as a plain fact.

Childhood trauma aside, I'd still buy the damn thing at a garage sale in a quarter of a second. I've let all the pain go now. It's good enough for it just to be. It doesn't have to function. I'd just be happy to have one in the room. Ah, maturity.