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Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 6.9.06

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Jaws Unleashed


Majesco makes money
I’ve written about this company a few times because they dared to take a chance on some creative games and nearly went bankrupt for it. Now they have a different direction that focuses less on making premium titles and more on making shitty games that sell. Their portable lineup is actually respectable, but with console titles like Jaws Unleashed, it won’t be hard to turn my back on Majesco and hope EA buys them out only to make them all sex slaves (they’ll be paid for 40 hours a week, but not for the overtime they put in).

Hillary Clinton’s Media Guide for Parents (complete with cute drawing of children)
Clinton basically suggests we read Common Sense Media’s take on media ratings. The Common Sense Media people are about “media sanity, not censorship.” This sounds a lot like the Islamic cartoon debacle to me. A lot of people who do lip service to the first amendment but then also say things like, “free speech must be responsible speech.” →  Fine, but this article then no more.

Making enemies move and shoot: An A.I. Primer part 1

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Okay, so after I read the conversation on A.I. between Jay and Christian, I started coming up with comments. Then I re-organized them, and kept coming up with more. Well before I felt I had addressed things enough to post a comment, I had the makings of a brief paper on A.I. as it applies to video games. That was when I spoke with Jay about just writing it up as an article instead of posting a several-page comment, and he said to give it a shot.

Unfortunately I tend to go a little nuts when A.I. is concerned, and so it’s now turned into what’s possibly a multiple installment piece. In this first bit, what I want to cover are the uses to which we put A.I. for video games. They break down nicely into three main categories: uses related to gameplay and mechanics, A.I. that contributes to then immersive experience of the game, and A.I. used for aesthetic reasons. →  Contains 10% more consonants than comparable articles.

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Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 6.2.06

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E3 awards
Wii wins best in show award. So this justifies Nintendo’s actions. When they eventually get trampled in the free market they can at least say, “Oh well, other industry people thought it could work, too.”

Spore won best PC game and best original game. Gears of War picked up a few awards, and the DS Zelda won best handheld. I’m happy to see Bioware’s Mass Effect won something, too, as I am in love with that company. I’m totally having their babies.

Analyst specultes on MS handheld
The Marketeer already broke the news that Microsoft was entering the handheld market.

Peter Moore has started a list of every backwards compatible Xbox game.

Backwards compatibility not a priority for MS
How convenient. Promise backwards compatibility, do a so so job (no Soul Calibur 2?), then after a good number of systems have been sold announce that people aren’t really interested in backwards compatibility and that you aren’t really interested, either. →  Romance of the Three Articles IV: Post of Fire

A.I. woes

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I’m currently reading a book on game design. The chapter on AI speaks only of the good that will come with advancing computer intelligence, yet not a word of caution or hesitation is included. I quickly outlined a number of worries I have over advanced AI and decided to bring them to our resident computer science major, Christian. Keep in mind I’m not “against” better AI, I just think it may lead to issues designers will have to deal with. I also find game design discussion to be infinitely enjoyable.

What follows are the initial worries I had and then Christian’s cool headed reponses.

This guy probably wishes he were smart enough to stop, drop and roll.

Jay: In an old interview, Warren Spector spoke of making the AI for Deus Ex 2. He said that he actually had to tone down the enemy intelligence in at least one specific spot because it led to the unavoidable death of the player. →  One must imagine video games happy.

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The next generation of handhelds

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Handheld video games are important to us because they offer profit with minimal development costs. If a console title costs 10 million dollars but two years to make, the seemingly large profits come at a very high cost. Handheld games take a fraction of the development time, a fraction of the development cost and can still sell millions of copies.

The new generation of consoles is currently delighting gamers across the globe, but where are the new handhelds? Through my business contacts, I have been lucky enough to uncover the next generation of handhelds. So read this over and then put your marketing team to work.
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Sony PSP2 — Sony has finally stopped pretending the PSP is for new titles and delivered what consumers really want — a portable PS1. The beauty of the PSP2s design is it accepts PS1 game discs right out of the box so players no longer need to wait for the games to be ported. →  This better not be as bad as everything else here.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 5.26.06

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Tose’s game Shrek: Reekin’ Havoc has been accused of lacking soul. How could a company that works as guns for hire and doesn’t like getting credit possibly make a game they don’t feel passionate about?

Development team that doesn’t take credit for their work
Tose say they are “development ninjas.” They have worked on over a thousand games and never take any credit for their work. The few games they have admitted to making seem to be average at best, so it may not be a big loss.

It does raise interesting ethical questions, though. While it may be legal, most people think it’s absurd to buy life stories from someone then write about them like thy happened to you (ala Seinfeld: see Kramer and Peterman). I’m not sure it’s any less deceitful to claim your company made a game when you secretly paid someone else to.

“Like this Picasso? I painted it.”

EA’s recent mistakes
An interview with EA’s new president Paul Lee. →  Oops, I did it again.

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Another gamer is claimed by World of Warcraft

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So. World of Warcraft. A game I’ve been putting off playing since inception.

Nice graphics…for 1997! Ahahahahaha!

Diablo has always been one of my favorite games but I always found it a little limited. Added to that, I was one of those people who pre-ordered Ultima Online in the special collectors edition that came with the cool little cloth map and three months of subscription. I almost made it through the first month and a friends prodding left me spending three hours a day fletching arrows for a bit of the second. By the third month I was busy trying to unclog the toilet that I’d flushed that damn cloth map in.

Not that a lot of people didn’t love UO, it just wasn’t the game that I expected.

World of Warcraft is exactly that game that anyone who has ever flushed a cloth map was expecting. It’s the game we’ve all been waiting for since Ultima Online. It’s the game we’ve wanted to buy since we pre-ordered that damn collector’s edition. →  What is word? Baby don’t read me.

What is a hardcore gamer?

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Holy crap the Serious Games Summit looks like fun!

So E3 has come and gone. I missed out on most of the news and hoopla, in favor of catching up after the dust settled. I did, however, read more than a few articles that popped up in the month prior to E3, specifically those that dealt with the marketing aspect of the games industry. I’ve seen articles discussing mobile games, non-roleplaying MMO’s, and a mysterious new thing called “Serious games.”

Most of this meant very little to me in the long run, but one debate that has been brought up as of late has piqued my interest: “Who is a hardcore gamer, how do and why should we cater to them?” This has to be one of the worst questions they could possibly ask, and even worse, they can’t even get the answer right.

The modern game industry has pinpointed the hardcore gamer with a very specific definition. For one, they are a group of people in which gaming is a very serious hobby, which I can certainly agree on. →  Welcome to read zone!

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 5.19.06

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Get it? It’s hacked? With an axe?

Xbox 360 hacked to play pirated games, err backups
That didn’t take too long, but it won’t work for everyone and if you get caught Bill Gates will devour your soul.

Analysts worry PS3 price will hurt the game industry
While somewhat obvious, it’s good to see analysts voicing thoughts that not everyone has had. The reasoning behind the suspicion Sony is hurting the industry is such a high price point for the PS3 will prevent growth. Installing new users each successive generation is very important if game development costs are going to continue to grow and a $500 price tag prevents this. When thought of in terms of accessibility versus cost and hardware versus software, the gap between Sony and Nintendo seems even larger. To paraphrase Derrick Smalls of Spinal Tap, Microsoft will be the lukewarm water that bridges the gap between Sony’s fire and Nintendo’s ice.

PS3’s launch titles may not impress
Many developers lack PS3 dev kits. →  When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a game.

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An E3 for the proletariat: Golden Jew’s final thoughts

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Another year, another E3. This marked the third E3 I have attended. Obviously, this year’s big focus was on the new console systems: Second Generation Xbox 360 games, the Wii, and the PS3.

Last year, after seeing the preview for the Xbox 360, the teaser demo for the PS3, and hearing about the Wii (then called the Revolution, a time which will be remembered as “Heterosexual Nintendo”), I was stoked. I boldly declared to my friends that this next generation of consoles would be remembered as a big turning point in gaming. Finally–at last–systems would have standard support for the goodies that make PC gaming so much fun (hard drives, keyboards, online connectivity), combined with native HD support and some serious rendering muscle. Finally, console makers would get it, and we were in for what would be some seriously high powered, interactive, and most importantly, fun, gaming.

I’m not ready to give up on my dream just yet, but after this year’s E3, I find I’m not nearly as optimistic as I was before. →  Ask not what this post can do for you - ask what you can do for this post.