Golden Jew

Gaming Industry Advice from a Non Gaming Industry Member

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Hey, that title looks like our slogan! This started as a comment to Derek’s post, but I decided I would kick it up a notch and give you all some Golden Jew advice on the gaming industry, if you actually want in. Matt is probably a better source than I, since he’s active in the industry and it’s been a decade since I was, but being Jewish, I know a little something about business (and about dodging Nazis).

Although the matriculation rate of QA peon to game designer is low in an institutional setting (EA, Maxis, Bioware, etc…shit… those are all the same company now!), it’s comparable to most other popular industries. Examples of “popular industries” include sports teams (going from bitch peon to normal peon), video games (QA peon to developer peon), and the movie industry (production assistant peon to producer peon). All of these are considered “hip” jobs and therefore are flooded with lots of people who want to do something “cool” and therefore are willing to flood their respective job markets with oodles of cheap, generally talentless labor and make entry level an absolute bitch. →  Do the math.

2008 Game Predictions part 1

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2008 promises to be an excellent year for gaming. The 360’s software lineup should remain strong and the Wii and PS3 are coming into their own. From Spore to Metal Gear Solid 4, there will be some huge titles coming out soon, but will they actually live up to the hype?

Based on released information, knowledge of development history and gut feeling, we have chosen some of the games we most look forward to this year and predicted how they will turn out. These should be about as likely to be accurate as any analysts predictions and we charge less.

Golden Jew’s predictions

Civilization Revolution
I’ve written about this already, so this feels cheap and easy (like your… sister?). I stand by my prediction that this will be a good, if not great game. The real strength of Civ Rev will be in the platforms it will come to. Being able to play quickly with friends (or strangers) over Xbox Live, or play Civ on the go on the DS will be what truly makes this game shine. →  Welcome to read zone!

Is this the beginning of the end? Looking back at the past two years

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Two years ago, I was a fairly one dimensional gamer. I enjoyed 4X games on the side, enjoyed PC FPS and RTS… but my heart and soul belonged to MMOs. From punching the wall when dying one too many times in Everquest as an emotional 17 year old, to dumping a girl over World of Warcraft at 24, I was dedicating–easily–30 hours a week to MMO games. Yikes. A second job. That didn’t pay.

Then I burned out. And suddenly, I had free time again. I filled it with other video games, of course, but also structured my personal life better. It was no longer a rush to get home, shovel food in and get raiding. I had thought that perhaps I had finally grown up. I was no longer showing up to work as late as possible to make up for another late night of WoW. My free time was no longer beholden to a guild.

Fortunately, that changed when Halo 3 came out, and I realized that I hadn’t grown up as much as I thought. →  Romance of the Three Articles IV: Post of Fire

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 5.14.07

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Starcraft 2 is coming
Golden Jew was wrong. He is hereby stripped of one hundredth of his massive pile of gold coins, crowns, and swords. I’ll give it back when the Starcraft MMO comes out in two years.

Rare to broaden 360s audience with all age friendly games
But also don’t rule out that they will make mature games, says Microsoft’s Peter Moore. They will or they won’t. They may and they may not. I’m glad Moore cleared that up.

Rare is fascinating because Microsoft seems to think Rare can change the Xbox brand image and because I have a theory that Nintendo makes their second parties what they are. On the first point, Rare will fail. Microsoft is taking the same attitude towards appealing to the mass market as they took when attempting to appeal to the Japanese — “one or two games should do it, now let’s sit back and wait for the money.” Shockingly, Blue Dragon didn’t sell seven million 360s in Japan, and Viva Piñata didn’t sell four million 360s to kids and grandparents. →  Fine, but this article then no more.

Two Gamecubes duct taped together

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Chris Hecker angered a lot of people by calling the Wii a piece of shit at this years Game Developer’s Conference. The thrust of his “argument” seems to be that games are art and Nintendo is focusing solely on making entertainment, not art, and therefore Nintendo is bad. It’s worth noting that on his website Chris says he is the Editor at large of Game Developer magazine, yet their website and the february issue I hold in my hands neglect to mention he holds any position there. But back to the issue at hand – some of the videolamer staff have been kind enough to tell us their thoughts on the situation.

Pat says:
This speech took place during a “rant” session, which seems to encourage hyperbolic, polarizing comments. So while my first reaction was “Who cares?” my second reaction was about his argument that the Wii does not have the processing power for complicated AI. I know nothing about hardware specs, but that does seem like a potential problem. →  Read, you fools!

Lost in Space: Looking for a worthy 4X Game

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I love the 4X genre. It’s most likely a combination of the fact that I’m a huge geek and love space, and the fact I was beat up a lot in middle school and high school and didn’t kiss a whole lot of girls back then (see the first two reasons of my 4X love if you’re unclear on why that is). My love of the genre started on the old Mac II with Spaceward Ho, a game that lives on today in Palm Pilot versions (which are quite badass). Then came Pax Imperia I, followed by the graphically enjoyable but gameplay poor sequel. I tried other games along the way, such as Hegemonia, but nothing really stuck. Like every player of the genre (except for the ones who fail at life) Master Of Orion 2 was my lord and savior. And, since I’m a Jew, I can call it my messiah and it’s less blasphemous than if I were a Christian. →  Michigan: Article from Hell

What we hope to see in 2007

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With a new year comes new hope and a new opportunity to have our dreams crushed.

Stefan —
Saturn Games on the Virtual Console: I know, there are significant disk space problems – seeing as a single game could use up the entire internal memory of the Wii. But if a way can be found, I’m holding out hope for Shining Force III and a NiGHTS re-release with a _real_ 3D Controller.

Panzer Dragoon Saga with motion sensing controls Second coming of Christ

Sony opening the PS3 Graphics hardware to Linux users: This is another one that’s not likely to happen. And by not likely, I mean no way in hell. Allowing direct access to the graphics chipset would essentially let anyone circumvent the price of their dev kit – and would deprive them of licensing fees for game sales. But it might give me enough of a development platform that I’d buy the PS3.

AI used for Storytelling: AI has been advancing, but primarily in terms of combat tactics. →  Tony Hawk’s Posting Ground

Recovering from World of Warcraft Part 2

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Continued from part 1

What ultimately made me stop playing WoW wasn’t so much the new content or the failure in clearing it, but rather the monotony of clearing the old. Let me explain for those not familiar. When you kill a boss in WoW, it drops 2-4 pieces of loot. This can be class specific armor, or a weapon, or jewelry, or whatever. Your average dungeon has 7-12 bosses. A raid dungeon is typically cleared once a week due to reset timers. A raid group has 40 people. Each player has 19 slots of possible gear that can be worn at any time, not to mention extra sets of gear for certain battle roles (such as resistances, damage absorption, damage dealing, etc). There are also special “recipes,” and other miscellaneous items. You can do the basic math–and get the idea of how long it takes to gear a raid force. There is a huge amount of competition for scarce resources. →  Four out of five dentists recommend reading more.

Do Arcades Even Exist Anymore?

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Just got done with a vacation with the family on the world’s largest cruise ship, the Freedom of the Seas (Royal Caribbean). Why am I telling you this? Well, first, to make you jealous of my amazing Golden Jew lifestyle. But second, because cruise boats are one of the last places you’ll find an arcade.

Arcades–remember those? I certainly do. They were the ultimate destination growing up, at least for me. I remember begging my parents to give me quarters to go play at the mall arcade. I remember the glee of the giant arcades at the Santa Cruz boardwalk in California. Arcades have always been special to me–not only as a gamer, but my father’s cousin used to run one of the most well known arcades in New York City–the Broadway Arcade. It was later closed when their lease was up, to be replaced by Gold’s Gym. The management refused to renew their lease, they felt the clientele of a Gold’s (steroid users and anorexic chicks) was preferable to idle teenagers and deadbeat 20somethings. →  There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is games.

Review – Sword of the Stars

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I’m still not writing to say that MOO2 has been unseated from it’s throne as best 4X space game ever, but Sword of the Stars may be the closest thing to bastard upstart rival capable of causing a genre wide (or at least, Golden Jew wide) civil war. The full game builds upon the demo, showing that the guys at Kerebros know what they’re doing and have created an extremely entertaining, robust game with a great deal of replayability.

This review will be written assuming you read my demo review. If you haven’t, you should go read it. Let me touch upon some high level items first. The one personal pet peeve I have about SOTS is they decided to go the route of “you should discover the intricacies of the game by playing it.” This means the manual is useless and does not dissect all of the racial bonuses, give massive detail of weapon stats, or descriptions of the tech tree. →  Some say the world will end in fire, some say in read more

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