Curmudgeon Gamer
13 May 2009
Simple, beautiful pixel/vector art
If you're a Commodore 64 fan (shame on you otherwise), you'll appreciate these derived works. Found on Daily Rodent via GSW.
Click for giant image.
Pixel art to vectorized image. Simple concept, beautifully executed.
Click for giant image.Pixel art to vectorized image. Simple concept, beautifully executed.
--jvm at 11:30
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[ 3 ]
28 April 2009
Gamer Labor: City of Heroes
City of Heroes recently allowed gamers to create their own questlines. I've only played CoH briefly, and my impression apparently was, "Tired engine, bland missions, and large headaches means they likely won't be getting my dough."
Having gamers pay for the privilege of providing free labor has always fascinated me. I've got AWB (Another WoW Blog) myself, and have posted a bit on Thottbot and WoWWiki. I guess you'd have to add Player vs. Player as another sort of gamer labor.
But CoH has taken this free labor to another level by letting players create in-game quest lines. It can't be that hard; heavens knows the quests in WoW and my recollection of CoH are usually pretty boring. "Kill X of Y and get Z from their corpse" just about sums up the typical quest experience, somewhat reminiscent of Matt's and my critiques of a number of games being little more than variations on the "find key, eliminate enemies, exit level" theme.
Which is why a comment like this one from the City of Heroes' news site seems self-deflationary:
What does such a comment tell us? I understood why I'd buy Quake -- for the engine -- and then play mods released for free. I'm not so sure why I'd spend a monthly fee to play user created content. More interesting, though, is figuring out why players would give this content to CoH so freely and why CoH would say it's the equivalent to years of their own work. I wonder why Second Life or an equivalent doesn't play engine to these sorts of adventure construction set games. We've obviously gotten to the point where quest creation is a franchiseable process, easy to reproduce by almost any french frying knucklehead.
Having gamers pay for the privilege of providing free labor has always fascinated me. I've got AWB (Another WoW Blog) myself, and have posted a bit on Thottbot and WoWWiki. I guess you'd have to add Player vs. Player as another sort of gamer labor.
But CoH has taken this free labor to another level by letting players create in-game quest lines. It can't be that hard; heavens knows the quests in WoW and my recollection of CoH are usually pretty boring. "Kill X of Y and get Z from their corpse" just about sums up the typical quest experience, somewhat reminiscent of Matt's and my critiques of a number of games being little more than variations on the "find key, eliminate enemies, exit level" theme.
Which is why a comment like this one from the City of Heroes' news site seems self-deflationary:
We did some data mining of our own, and 3,800 surpasses the amount of content that we, the developers, have made for all of City of Heroes and City of Villains combined. In just one day our users did more than we could in almost five years.
What does such a comment tell us? I understood why I'd buy Quake -- for the engine -- and then play mods released for free. I'm not so sure why I'd spend a monthly fee to play user created content. More interesting, though, is figuring out why players would give this content to CoH so freely and why CoH would say it's the equivalent to years of their own work. I wonder why Second Life or an equivalent doesn't play engine to these sorts of adventure construction set games. We've obviously gotten to the point where quest creation is a franchiseable process, easy to reproduce by almost any french frying knucklehead.
Labels: construction kits, developers, ethics, MMO, modding
--ruffin at 11:18
Comment
[ 1 ]
07 April 2009
Fallujah? No.
Konami is making a game about the 2004 battle in Fallujah, Iraq. From Joystiq's article (emphasis added):
Fallujah is a fat, nasty reminder of how screwed up things were -- and still are -- and I have a hard time believing that it will be treated appropriately. Compelling entertainment? No. Not at all.
* Ricks concludes that historians may eventually consider what we see as two U.S.-Iraq wars as a single longer one: hot war in 1991, followed by containment, then another hot war starting in 2003, followed by more containment.
Unfortunately, for all the realism touted by the game's developer, Konami's VP of marketing, Anthony Crouts, gives the impression that the publisher's still playing it safe, saying, "We're not trying to make social commentary. We're not pro-war. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience. At the end of the day, it's just a game."I just finished listening to Fiasco by Thomas Ricks. It covers the first few years of the second U.S.-Iraq war* as well as some 1990s background of some of the principals. Frankly, you can't come away from the facts of the second war, and that Fallujah battle in general, without feeling a sense of profound dismay. It is one of the culminations of many critical botched actions that preceded it. (It's at this point that I usually come back to the picture of the 3-year-old Iraqi boy whose leg was blown off completely. Thanks, Mike. I'll never forget that one.)
Fallujah is a fat, nasty reminder of how screwed up things were -- and still are -- and I have a hard time believing that it will be treated appropriately. Compelling entertainment? No. Not at all.
* Ricks concludes that historians may eventually consider what we see as two U.S.-Iraq wars as a single longer one: hot war in 1991, followed by containment, then another hot war starting in 2003, followed by more containment.
--jvm at 09:29
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[ 3 ]
31 March 2009
Another week, another typo
Sony really needs someone watching what they type. This week it's Samurai Shodown Anthology. Yes, that's right "Shodown". No, I don't know why, but that's how it's spelled.
Unless you're the Sony PlayStation page showing the game:
I know it's a weird name and all, but come on!
Now we'll see if it takes a few hours and Sony magically fixes this. (As happened last time.)
Unless you're the Sony PlayStation page showing the game:
I know it's a weird name and all, but come on!Now we'll see if it takes a few hours and Sony magically fixes this. (As happened last time.)
--jvm at 16:45
Comment
[ 2 ]
16 March 2009
Finally, registering Nintendo products is good for something
Well lookee here, Nintendo sent me an invite to try out some "DSi" doohicky they're releasing soon. Seems like it was due to registerin' a whole mess-load of products!
Well shucks howdy! By huckleberry! Gee whilikers! Wang-dang-doodle! ...
They even say we can bring in our DS Lites, I suppose to drive home to the poor things how numbered are their days. Maybe I can shame them into doing something about the busted hinge on mine.
Well shucks howdy! By huckleberry! Gee whilikers! Wang-dang-doodle! ...
They even say we can bring in our DS Lites, I suppose to drive home to the poor things how numbered are their days. Maybe I can shame them into doing something about the busted hinge on mine.
Labels: clubnintendo, dsi, event, hype, nintendo
--JohnH at 23:58
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[ 0 ]
05 March 2009
Reminds me of Tempest 2000
I'm not really sure what the heck this is, but I liked it.
--jvm at 20:35
Comment
[ 3 ]
A hacker discusses the Wii's limitations
Is it not beyond strange that Wii homebrew is able to do so much more on the Wii than even the official software?
Homebrew hackers have found ways to play DVD movies, fully access SD cards over 2GB in size, use USB storage in the form of both flash memory and physical hard drives, access Samba shares over the wireless network and connect to Bluetooth devices for storage and using cell phones as a remote control. In their hands the Wii has become both a powerful media player and an emulation haven; add Virtual Console to the homebrew emulators and, excepting PCs, it is by far the system capable of playing the most games, able to play those of the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, TG16, NeoGeo, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, NeoGeo Pocket, Atari Lynx, Atari 800/XL/5200, Commodore 64, Apple II, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 2600, Sinclair and ColecoVision.
Since Nintendo makes money selling Virtual Console games I could perhaps understand why they haven't made available any good general-purpose emulatiors. And it's not like the other manufacturers are keen to develop such software. But those hardware limitations are maddening. While Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles have only become more feature-rich over time, the Wii's feature set is nearly the same as it was on launch day. When they announce some great new feature to get everyone to update their firmware, it turns out to be something like (gasp!) using a USB keyboard in the message center. In the most recent update they (bigger gasp!) even let people use it in the Mii Channel, where it's useful for entering names and nothing else.
For a long while I've seen this as the result of Nintendo having a uniquely tech-unfriendly culture. People joke about how Nintendo is like a toy company more than a software company. While I do like their games and think, in terms of game design, they're the #1 company in the world, I have to admit that this is largely true. Their system software design is woefully nearsighted. The departure of Yamaguchi has done nothing to make the company more technology-savvy.
Nintendo would never themselves admit that their system is limited, especially when the Wii is exploding sales records, so the best person to ask about why this is so would be one of the hackers who has found out how to work around so many of Nintendo's stupid limitations, marcan of Team Twiizer, one of the people behind the super-awesome Homebrew Channel.
Here are his thoughts on the subject. In summary, all Wii software features have to be implemented by the games themselves. Other than the TCP/IP stack, the Wii's IOS system software very little in the way of features at all to Wii software! Presumably they have some libraries that they distribute to developers that implement the basic stuff like returning to the menu and the Home screen.
Those features that it does provide are tied to the version of IOS it was developed for. This is possible because all Wii system updates, with one exception, add an entire new copy of the IOS software to the Wii's built-in flash memory! So a game that was written for IOS 9, the earliest version that can run games, will always use IOS 9, completely ignoring any later system features Nintendo could add. This makes a kind of sense if one imagines Nintendo as being super-cautious about breaking older games, but come on, Sony doesn't seem to have any problems with it, and even Microsoft, which is infamous for just this kind of bug in Windows, has had no problems making new 360 features work with launch games.
While it could be argued that the mindset behind this approach has been the source of the Wii's appeal to most of its audience (most of whom are probably just as non-tech-savvy), that doesn't mean that the system's workings need be dominated by this thinking. C'mon Nintendo, the world doesn't run on NES hardware any more.
Homebrew hackers have found ways to play DVD movies, fully access SD cards over 2GB in size, use USB storage in the form of both flash memory and physical hard drives, access Samba shares over the wireless network and connect to Bluetooth devices for storage and using cell phones as a remote control. In their hands the Wii has become both a powerful media player and an emulation haven; add Virtual Console to the homebrew emulators and, excepting PCs, it is by far the system capable of playing the most games, able to play those of the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, TG16, NeoGeo, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, NeoGeo Pocket, Atari Lynx, Atari 800/XL/5200, Commodore 64, Apple II, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 2600, Sinclair and ColecoVision.
Since Nintendo makes money selling Virtual Console games I could perhaps understand why they haven't made available any good general-purpose emulatiors. And it's not like the other manufacturers are keen to develop such software. But those hardware limitations are maddening. While Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles have only become more feature-rich over time, the Wii's feature set is nearly the same as it was on launch day. When they announce some great new feature to get everyone to update their firmware, it turns out to be something like (gasp!) using a USB keyboard in the message center. In the most recent update they (bigger gasp!) even let people use it in the Mii Channel, where it's useful for entering names and nothing else.
For a long while I've seen this as the result of Nintendo having a uniquely tech-unfriendly culture. People joke about how Nintendo is like a toy company more than a software company. While I do like their games and think, in terms of game design, they're the #1 company in the world, I have to admit that this is largely true. Their system software design is woefully nearsighted. The departure of Yamaguchi has done nothing to make the company more technology-savvy.
Nintendo would never themselves admit that their system is limited, especially when the Wii is exploding sales records, so the best person to ask about why this is so would be one of the hackers who has found out how to work around so many of Nintendo's stupid limitations, marcan of Team Twiizer, one of the people behind the super-awesome Homebrew Channel.
Here are his thoughts on the subject. In summary, all Wii software features have to be implemented by the games themselves. Other than the TCP/IP stack, the Wii's IOS system software very little in the way of features at all to Wii software! Presumably they have some libraries that they distribute to developers that implement the basic stuff like returning to the menu and the Home screen.
Those features that it does provide are tied to the version of IOS it was developed for. This is possible because all Wii system updates, with one exception, add an entire new copy of the IOS software to the Wii's built-in flash memory! So a game that was written for IOS 9, the earliest version that can run games, will always use IOS 9, completely ignoring any later system features Nintendo could add. This makes a kind of sense if one imagines Nintendo as being super-cautious about breaking older games, but come on, Sony doesn't seem to have any problems with it, and even Microsoft, which is infamous for just this kind of bug in Windows, has had no problems making new 360 features work with launch games.
While it could be argued that the mindset behind this approach has been the source of the Wii's appeal to most of its audience (most of whom are probably just as non-tech-savvy), that doesn't mean that the system's workings need be dominated by this thinking. C'mon Nintendo, the world doesn't run on NES hardware any more.
--JohnH at 04:27
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[ 4 ]
18 February 2009
Either disappointment or glorious success (Nintendo DSi)
So the Nintendo DSi is coming out on 5 April 2009 in the U.S. at a price of $170. (Announcement and demo video at Wired, among others.)
Either this is going to blow up in Nintendo's face or they'll come out looking even more invincible.
For a while now Sony's been selling the PlayStation Portable (PSP) for $170 by itself or $200 bundled. According to data provided to me by NPD, and some figuring done on my own through other sources, the average for PSP sales has been $190 or higher. Significantly fewer people buy the core system and many are willing to jump up $30 for a bundle.
All the while the Nintendo DS has been $130. Each month Nintendo DS sales are at least twice the monthly PSP sales. It's not that the PSP sells poorly -- it actually does pretty well -- but the Nintendo DS is in much higher demand. Yet, in January 2009, sales for the PSP were off significantly.
I don't want to read too much into a single data point, but I think it's possible that Americans (increasingly pessimistic about the economy and the future) are finally reaching the point where a slick $200 handheld system isn't feasible. Even worse, they may be saying a $170 handheld isn't worthwhile.
And that's where I'm worried that Nintendo's DSi won't catch on. The upgrades here are the SD card slot, downloadable software, and two cameras. (The GBA slot is gone, but my anecdotal experience leads me to believe no one will notice.) I believe (although I don't know for sure) that it will also play more nicely with modern wireless access points. (Goodbye WEP, I hope.)
But like the PS3, the DSi is making a proposition based on logic that the consumer won't buy. The PS3 is a great media center, hi-def player, and game system. It also is a decent way to browse the web in the living room. But it's also $400.
The DSi is 95% of the Nintendo DS, with added features -- cameras, downloadable software, and a card slot -- that bump the cost up to $170. To paraphrase a line from an article I once wrote: A consumer who can't afford a $170 handheld still won't be able to afford it just because it has two cameras and new software capabilities.
All that said, I'm terrible with predictions. That's essentially why I write about the sales figures after they come out instead of trying to predict them. And, it should be noted, the Nintendo DS launched at a higher price and eventually dropped to its current $130 level. That may well happen with the DSi, and at that point at least it should return to crazy-wild sales levels.
Either this is going to blow up in Nintendo's face or they'll come out looking even more invincible.
For a while now Sony's been selling the PlayStation Portable (PSP) for $170 by itself or $200 bundled. According to data provided to me by NPD, and some figuring done on my own through other sources, the average for PSP sales has been $190 or higher. Significantly fewer people buy the core system and many are willing to jump up $30 for a bundle.
All the while the Nintendo DS has been $130. Each month Nintendo DS sales are at least twice the monthly PSP sales. It's not that the PSP sells poorly -- it actually does pretty well -- but the Nintendo DS is in much higher demand. Yet, in January 2009, sales for the PSP were off significantly.
I don't want to read too much into a single data point, but I think it's possible that Americans (increasingly pessimistic about the economy and the future) are finally reaching the point where a slick $200 handheld system isn't feasible. Even worse, they may be saying a $170 handheld isn't worthwhile.
And that's where I'm worried that Nintendo's DSi won't catch on. The upgrades here are the SD card slot, downloadable software, and two cameras. (The GBA slot is gone, but my anecdotal experience leads me to believe no one will notice.) I believe (although I don't know for sure) that it will also play more nicely with modern wireless access points. (Goodbye WEP, I hope.)
But like the PS3, the DSi is making a proposition based on logic that the consumer won't buy. The PS3 is a great media center, hi-def player, and game system. It also is a decent way to browse the web in the living room. But it's also $400.
The DSi is 95% of the Nintendo DS, with added features -- cameras, downloadable software, and a card slot -- that bump the cost up to $170. To paraphrase a line from an article I once wrote: A consumer who can't afford a $170 handheld still won't be able to afford it just because it has two cameras and new software capabilities.
All that said, I'm terrible with predictions. That's essentially why I write about the sales figures after they come out instead of trying to predict them. And, it should be noted, the Nintendo DS launched at a higher price and eventually dropped to its current $130 level. That may well happen with the DSi, and at that point at least it should return to crazy-wild sales levels.
--jvm at 09:14
Comment
[ 4 ]
04 February 2009
Review: BioShock (PS3)
Yes, you should play BioShock. Not finish, mind you, but play. You can get everything you need by reaching the big confrontation, putting the controller down, and pretending that was the final act.
BioShock gets one thing perfect: a beautiful and dark alternate history vision of a 1950s-era dystopia, Rapture, created on the ocean floor by an affluent Objectivist. Decor, apparel, and music blend together brilliantly within a majestic but cracked underwater complex. For hours I was satisfied to stroll through the world and soak up the rich atmosphere.
The grotesque genetic modifications common among the remaining Rapture survivors lured me deeper into the city and drove the basic combat and defense which served as my only interactions with most of those survivors. As I collected Adam and Eve, the two substances used in the genetic upgrades, I modified my own body and grew in both power and versatility.
That the game boils down to these simple combat interactions is its ultimate failing. There are only three persons in the world of Rapture with whom I could interact meaningfully. Andrew Ryan, the creator of Rapture, insulted me over my radio, sent his underlings to kill me, and ultimately proved me the lesser man. Atlas, resistance fighter and nemesis to Ryan, kindly asked me to join his side and fight to survive and escape from Rapture. And Sander Cohen, a demented and cruel artist who trapped me and enlisted me in the creation of a mixed media assembly.
The last of these, Sander Cohen, is the height of the game's vision. After carrying out the assassinations required for his art, Sander rewarded me with some resources, and turned his back to me. I had a clear choice. I could let him live or I could kill him, and my role within the game told me that killing him was not only the rational choice but the correct moral choice. So I shot him in the back, and ultimately destroyed him.
I actually felt good about that, and truly understood why BioShock is so highly regarded.
Later, when I finally dealt with Ryan, the game reached another climax -- but did not end. While that confrontation had clearly been a primary goal all along, my character's motivation beyond that point is weak to the point of irrelevance. The game finishes with a contrived scavenger hunt, a Sister's Keeper mission, and a boss battle that was as uninspired and simple as the rest of the game had seemed complex.
BioShock delivers an unforgettable experience. Ultimately my disappointment with it stems from its failure to live up to the promise of its premise.
(Image credit: This amazing thread of alternate cover art.)
--jvm at 18:41
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[ 4 ]
27 January 2009
More than 600 PlayStation Demo Discs
This is not my not-auction (nor the not-auction of anyone I know) but given my interest in demo discs, it amuses me:
At first I thought 635 demos probably included too many PC demos to be reasonable, but that's actually not the concern. The concern is that many, many of these are repeats. Rare or not, asking $2000 for this is pretty brave. Maybe there really is a collector willing to drop that kind of dough on redundancy.
Or maybe the rares in this set add up to over $2000 and the seller is hoping to find a reseller who wants to take the time to resell the rares separately.
At first I thought 635 demos probably included too many PC demos to be reasonable, but that's actually not the concern. The concern is that many, many of these are repeats. Rare or not, asking $2000 for this is pretty brave. Maybe there really is a collector willing to drop that kind of dough on redundancy.Or maybe the rares in this set add up to over $2000 and the seller is hoping to find a reseller who wants to take the time to resell the rares separately.
--jvm at 16:48
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[ 2 ]
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