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Next-gen.biz apparently reads videolamer

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Is it me, or does Next-gen.biz report on everything that I’ve said, only later?

Exhibit A

This is an interview of Raph Koster of Star Wars Galaxies fame at the Austin Game Conference where he talks about how much better life in PC development would be without publishers. He apparently read my second episode on game testing where I said the same thing. He’s definitely right, though.

Exhibit B

This second article was an interview with Charles Deenen at the same conference where he talks about how powerful sound and music are to a video game and the pursuit of emotional response. I think I read something like that on videolamer somewhere. Oh wait, it’s here! We’ve got some eerie similarities in our arguments, too. →  How many games must a gamer play before you call him a gamer?

Sony will have the last laugh…all the way to the bank…or something

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Sony has gotten a lot of crap from gamers recently. Most of it is entirely deserved. They are forcing consumers to buy a Blu Ray player if they want a PS3, charging $600 for their new console and games are anticipated to sell for $60 or $70 a piece. PR statements from Kutaragi and Hirai have made Sony seem more arrogant than ever. More recently, there have been reports of delays in production and now Sony has announced that the PS3 will launch next year in Europe and the launches in North America and Japan will be limited. To top it all off, the new Sony slogan for European territories sucks total ass – Now this is living.

All of these factors combined with how promising the 360 and the Wii are looking have led many to attack Sony, some going so far as to “break up” with them (funniest article in the world – he acts like Sony is a girl, not a company, get it?). →  Just read it.

Life as a Game Tester: Episode 2

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to the crazy, but always interesting world of video game development. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks for me, as we’ve delivered a few of our builds to Nintendo to be approved for manufacturing.

If you are developing anything for Nintendo, be it console or handheld, you need to submit your game to them when you believe it is completely finished (more on this later). They will then go through the game and see if they can find any problems with it. They have their own standards of what should and shouldn’t be in a game, and they even check stuff like how you reference the buttons on the controller.

If the A button onscreen didn’t look just like the A button on my controller, I’d be COMPLETELY lost.

 →  Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Bore me and I sleep.

PS3 delay

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Okay, so by now I’m sure we’ve all heard the news about the delay of the PS3 in Europe until 2007. If not, now you know. Of course this has led to the usual commentary, as well as editors pulling out the best of cliches. I want to talk about something else in this space, namely how much longer Europe will keep Sony on its golden thrown. There’s no question that the company has absolutely dominated the European market, thanks to some slick marketing and a curious sense of loyalty (or something).

But how long can this last? With the PSP, the console was delayed for quite some time (compared to the Japanese and U.S. launches), sold for a good chunk of change (over $300 in most regions), and still managed to do incredibly well. →  Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Bore me and I sleep.

Bad Design 4

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Today I’ll be complaining about the excellent KoToR, the ancient Heroes III and the crappy Samurai Western. As usual, I lied last time when I said this entry would be looking at an issue in Final Fantasy X. Maybe next time.

Hit A. HIT A!

Knights of the Old Republic: Bad Immersion — The characters in KoToR (for the Xbox) make reference to your controller. This makes no sense whatsoever and derails any believability. It is the equivalent to an actor in a movie showing the script to the camera and asking the audience to take a look at line 36. Some comedies do this and even pull it off (Mel Brooks writes excellent jokes about the characters being aware that they’re not real) but in serious drama it should probably be avoided. →  One must imagine video games happy.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.1.06

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The better graphics only make it abundantly clear that football players have dead eyes.

Double Fine finds a new publisher to bring their flops to market
Tim at Double Fine is working on another game. Rumors suggest it may be Psychonauts 2: Straight to Bargain Bins. The good news for us perpetual whiners is that if it’s as creative and fun as the first game and does as poorly, there will be plenty of hell to raise.

EA predicts you’ll buy 18 copies of the new Madden
Good news, tons of people still buy new Maddens despite the fact that they are basically the same game. The proportion of internet whining I mentioned is directly proportional to how many times Maddens sales quadruple the new Double Fine game. →  This better not be as bad as everything else here.

Circuit City’s newest scam

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Circuit City is known for being a shitty store with shitty customer support and shitty business practices. I have had problems there myself, so from experience I can agree on all counts about the store’s shittiness. Their newest shitty deal is that for only $28.99, they will make your Xbox 360 backwards compatible.

Wow, what a steal! Those who think the role of the market is to screw ignorant people out of money any way possible have been defending Circuit City on the interwebs. How they find time to argue between scamming the elderly and emailing people about millions of dollars in African bank accounts is anyone’s guess.

At first inspection, the “deal” almost sounds legitimate for people who can’t connect to Xbox Live to download the backwards compatability updates for free. →  Readout 3: Takedown

What counts as cheating?

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A few days ago, the Washington Post ran a short article on cheating in video games. Because people tend to prefer things to be simplified rather than made more complex, the piece doesn’t attempt to define cheating. But because people also tend to prefer exciting hyperbole, the article proclaims, “Here’s the ugly, sometimes dirty, often-overlooked truth in games: Everyone cheats.”

The guy the Post interviews says things like, “I don’t play games to necessarily play the game, I play it for the story line. I play it for the mechanics. I play it for the graphics.” Profound. I don’t listen to music to listen to the music, I listen to hear the melody, the harmony, the rhythm, and the timbre. The article also reports that games of yore are easier to beat than modern games. →  Please sir, can I have some more?

Howard Stringer and the Sony Machine

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So Wired.com has an article discussing Sony and how much they are betting on the Playstation 3 and it really got me thinking. The press, as well as gamers themselves, love to fling insults at Kaz Hirai, Phil Harrison, and Ken Kutaragi (many well deserved). However, there’s one name that is rarely dropped, though this man is arguably even more detrimental to Sony. I’m talking about Howard Stringer.

If you don’t know, Stringer is the current head honcho over at Sony. He also happens to come from the content side of the company. This is dangerous. Sony made their name on great hardware made by talented, motivated engineers. That same spirit is what led Kutaragi to make the Playstation in the first place. →  Secread of Evermore

Games that shed a tear

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The issue of whether or not a video game can make us cry has been tackled several times in the past, but the issue has still not been given its due. Can video games truly impact a player with a fury of emotion, causing them to cry? Depending on the game, I say yes.

Many people say that games are wholly incapable of causing emotion in people, as seen in Margaret Robertson’s speech at this year’s Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival. She cites games that made her feel a lot of emotion, but states that video games as a whole are not emotional. They’re just ones and zeroes. The players are the source of the emotion, and that you have to tap into their emotion to get a response. →  Lamers so loved the world that they gave their only article, so that everyone who believes in reading won’t perish but will have eternal lives.