Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot?

Happy New Year everyone, and speaking of the New Year, I'd like to close 2007 on a really upbeat note, so if you'll pardon my obvious optimism -- is 3D quashing my hobby?

No, seriously.

I ask, because after settling in for some holiday me-time with games I didn't get to play enough of this year like Assassin's Creed and World in Conflict, I'm instead replaying games six, seven, even sixteen years old. 2D games. Games honeycombed with hexes or colored over in chalky green and blue pastels or littered with stop-go sprites and visible pixels. Games with hand-drawn art that actually looks hand-drawn instead of blearily scanned in and point-mapped and immediately viewable from any angle. Games you can almost hear calling from inside their store-shelf boxes, "We don't need no steenk-ing z-buffering anti-aliasing alpha blending mipmapping in realtime with God rays and depth of field and subsurface scattering and parametric skeletal animation."

Stuff like Triumph Studios' Age of Wonders and SSG's Korsun Pocket and Paradox's admittedly perplexing Victoria (an embarrassingly undocumented and thereby thoroughly misunderstood strategy game) and of course, Bioware's Baldur's Gate 2, incidentally the last Really Great D&D game, I don't care how many ways you want to dress up a cookie cutter (ahem, Neverwinter Nights) and pass it off as a cookie.

I don't mean to imply those games necessarily play better than today's assortment. Well, Baldur's Gate 2, maybe, and Korsun Pocket for sure, but those others because, to be totally frank, I'm a little burned on 3D for 3D's sake.

Don't worry. This isn't another doddering screed against a perfectly understandable trend in gaming toward "spatial deliverance" or whatever we want to call the march toward better-than-perfect reality simulation. My eyes light up just like yours do after catching glimpses of games like Crysis or Unreal Tournament 3 on a dolled up PC.

But I've been out scanning newsgroup posts about some of these older games, and I keep coming across stuff like "I really want to like this game, if only it had [insert manic 3D-love here]." Which, it seems to me, is completely missing the point.

I don't want a game like Korsun Pocket to transition to 3D. Without getting into the nuts and bolts of why regimental games tend to work best in hexes, I don't think I'd want it to go 3D even if it could.

It's as if we're all da Vinci and Michelangelo and Rembrandt just discovering "performance art" and "maximalism" and "synesthesia events," ready to trash the whole prior edifice. It's like we've all collectively accepted that moving from "2D" to "3D" is somehow forward progressive and There's No Turning Back.

What happened to 2D as a design choice? A function-driven rationale? A superior-and-not-just-for-nostalgic-reasons aesthetic?

Should 2D really be viewed as a limitation? A budgetary design compromise? A cop-out for under-talented designers? A middle finger to those of you with $600-$1200 3D setups half-hoping Jeff Fahey's eventually going to pop out of your computer and go "boo"?

I don't think so. Immersion doesn't require dimensionality in triplicate. Personally, I've been far more "immersed" in a game of SSG's Korsun Pocket or something really primitive like Atomic's V for Victory -- both hex-based 2D wargames -- than I suspect I'll ever be in Morrowind, or Oblivion, or even something as beautiful as Crysis. The more I see, the less I imagine, and the less frankly connected I feel to something long term. Maybe that's just me. Maybe it's being thirty-something and growing up playing stuff like Colossal Cave and Zork. I honestly don't know, though when I look at the success of events like the Harry Potter series (black scratches on white paper that birthed a universe) I don't think that's just my age talking.

Anyway.

Thank you Nintendo and Microsoft and Sony for these your super-duper 3D gifts which we have definitely received from your bounty, but for at least a few more days as I hunker down here with a couple feet of snow on the ground and temperatures in the single digits, it's back to Korsun Pocket and Battles in Normandy and Across the Dnepr for me.

Proposed Video Game Tax is a "Kids-Kids Thing"

As a lifelong video game player and practically geriatric 35-year-old, I just want to chime in and express my solidarity with a new proposed Wisconsin-based sales tax on video games, because as I always say, "Get 'em while they're young!"

Says Wisconsin Senator and bill author Jon Erpenbach, the money raised from the tax isn't meant to dissuade gamers or put a negative spin on games, but to help cover the cost of moving 17-year-olds who commit non-violent crimes back into the juvenile system.

Well spoken, sir, well spoken. All our kids making minimum wage flipping burgers and waiting tables and dressing up like elves at Christmas to help our children pose with Santa for a picture and a candy cane, let's make them pay, as you say, by kids, for kids, because when is A not equal to A, right?

And who cares (not me!) that imposing a tax on just about any salable product is viewed by the masses as a mark of shame, sort of the way we don't tax cigarettes to pay chemical manufacturers to put more arsenic, benzene, and formaldehyde in their next batch of coffin nails. Well to heck with the masses, I say. What do they know anyway?

Oh, and while we're talking, maybe you'd like to consider my idea for a wheel tax to help fund public sex education, because let's face it, tires are made out of rubber, and well, condoms are too.

Hey, that gives me another idea! How about a general driving tax based on the number of tire rotations completed every mile to help fund NASA's space program (automatically deductible from a mandatory electronic bank account) because tires move in circles, and after all, so does the space shuttle.

Kids-for-kids, rubber-for-rubbers, gyration-for-rotation, see the pattern here?

Heck, why not an R-rated movie tax to help pay for elderly eye-care? By adults, for adults, and last I checked, you can't watch a movie without using your eyes. Well, unless you're Uri Gellar, anyway.

So yeah, I'm with you Senator Erpenbach. I get it. Let's tax our lovable little'uns, because I can't imagine a better way to fund our juvie system. Nope, not a one.

P.S. Is there any way we could put an age cap on the tax? You know, since you say it's a "kids-kids" thing, which pretty obviously means you're not talking about the ESA's "sixty-seven percent of American heads of households play computer and video games" statistic. I assume "heads of households" means adults (not kids), but maybe I'm out on a limb there. As long as we keep the tax focused on kids (again, your own words) I say let's soak 'em for every hard-earned dollar -- and hey, some of them can probably count their daily earnings in dollars! -- they've got.

I Just Called to Say "No PS3 For You"

Note to EB Games: If you're planning to put more phonebooks inside PlayStation 3 boxes and, you know, ask me to fork over five-hundred bucks for one, can you also throw in an obviously opened and re-sealed Halo 3 game case except with a copy of Hannah Montana's "Livin' the Rock Star Life" tucked away inside?

I'm sure Brandon Burns wants a bonus gift too. You remember him? The 13 year old who was so ba--I mean good! this year that when he opened his Christmas gift -- a PlayStation 3, um, box -- he pulled out a phonebook. A phonebook! Which if you remember the Indiana Jones bag-of-sand trick is pretty ingenious, really, except for the part where the box eventually gets opened by someone, which would be like the part in the movie where Indy gets the weight wrong. I'm sure Burns's parents were, however fleetingly, wishing for a giant boulder aimed at their local games store, and a trigger button like Dr. Evil has.

Playing Games May Damage Your Brain

A study conducted by a doctor Chou Yuan-hua in the Department of Psychiatry of Taipei Veterans General Hospital appears to show that people "who spend much time playing video games, especially violent video games," may damage brain functions related to learning and emotional control, reports Taiwan News Online.

Just what you wanted to hear after spending your holiday parked in front of a gamepad, keyboard, or mouse.

The study involved 30 people, all aged 25, who were given physical examinations to monitor blood flow in their brains before and after playing video games for 30 minutes. The study claims that playing games in general decreases brain blood flow, and that playing expressly violent games exacerbates this effect.

How do you equate "much time" with 30 minutes? Is the study concluding that 30 minutes a pop is enough to "risk damaging brain functions"?

According to Chou, yes, with the primary risk being damage to the frontal lobe of the brain -- associated with thinking, speaking, decision-making, and impulse control -- as well as the anterior cingulate gyrus, which modulates emotional behavior. What happens if blood flow to these parts of the brain is decreased? Chou refers to clinical experiences which suggest schizophrenics and people suffering from depression have notably lower blood flow to both areas.

Reality check: Doing too much of anything is bad for you. Eat too much and you're fat. Run too much and there go your knees. Read too much without frequent breaks for your eyes or in dim light and you'll be wearing glasses quicker than you can say "genetically impervious."

The question was never "Is it possible to game too much?" Of course it is. Duh.

No, the question's really: Are the results any different in other mediums, e.g. movies, TV, books...heck, just sitting on your front porch watching the grass grow or the shadows turn.

By comparison, studies increasingly show that playing "violent" games increases aggressive behavior. But the question everyone forgets to ask is, doesn't playing (as well as watching) football, soccer, racquetball, basketball, baseball, wrestling, boxing, etc. too?

Count Crackula: Castlevania Portrait of Ruin

It's only a matter of time before the Nintendo DS unseats Sony's PlayStation 2 as the bestselling game system in history. Nothing, not even the Nintendo Wii, is as universally salable as Nintendo's tiny two-screened sales phenomenon. Count my family down for three contributions after Christmas. My brother hops flights to Norway monthly to see his girlfriend -- he's a World War II wonk, so it was Panzer Tactics for him. My sister bounces between Wyoming and D.C. periodically to see her boyfriend, so we picked up New Super Mario Bros. for her. My dad's prepping for catheter ablation surgery this spring to remedy a recently developed case of atrial fibrillation. His new addiction? Brain Age 2 and "How many times can you subtract eight from 127 readysetgo!"

Me, I've been playing Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, which came out over a year ago. I've been stalled at 350% complete, i.e. Pretty Early On, for over half a year, and I'm happy to report that after half a dozen hours in a cushy chair pruning plates of Christmas cookies and tapping diligently at the d-pad, I've soldiered forward to just shy of 800% total. Flight-sticks and rudder pedals festooning a PC recently rigged with Nvidia's new triple-SLI 780i chipset and dual Geforce 8800 GTX cards, and all I can think to do is whip-snap through Yoricks and Fleamen and Killer Clowns and Mummy Men on a low-res three-inch-screen handheld. (Oh yeah, if you have any tips for beating the blast-from-the-past protagonist to get the whip-thingy toward game's end, let me know, because he's beating the stuffin' out of me, and I'm stumped.)

Konami's tried on more than one occasion to make Castlevania into a 3D game but they've never really succeeded. After Mario 64, it was like this big dare to classic franchises to follow suit. Some did, while others tried and fumbled. (I'm looking at you, Castlevania's Legacy of Darkness and Curse of Darkness.)

A classic 2D sidescroller, Portrait of Ruins only suffers from problems the series developed after Symphony of the Night, two of which I'll jot down here:

1. Thematically recycled levels. There's the desert level you beat here, then the same desert level with badder bad guys over there later on. Same with the theater-in-fetters schtick that crops up twice. I don't mind the same monsters resurfacing in more powerful configurations and only slightly different fashion wear, but recycling backgrounds in a game that's already pretty short just seems lazy. Besides, the theater level design was hatefully annoying; having to play through it twice feels sadistic.

2. All the come-back-later-ism. On a ledge at the tippy-top of Generic Scary Room are the Boots of Bounciness, which you can't reach until you find the spell that turns you into a fly-up-high bird of sorts. Float up, nab the boots, then pawn 'em at the in-game store, since hey, you can change into an owl for cryin' out loud -- who the heck needs spring-loaded galoshes? I'm not flatly opposed to "see it now, come back for it later" gameplay, but slogging through "Metrovania" style levels to find every last nook and cranny for what too often amounts to dime store tchotchkes is simply borrrrrr-ing.

Otherwise I love Portrait of Ruin. I can pick it up for a five minute dash between save points, or mull over end-boss strategies for hours. My biggest challenge? Playing until two or three in the morning without getting whopped by my wife with her fingers in her ears and trying to sleep a couple inches over.

Amazon Sells 17 Wiis Per Second

Amazon says its 2007 holiday season was the company's best ever, bolstered by sales of the fifth Harry Potter film (DVD) as well as the Wii, selling at a blistering rate of 17 systems per second. Says CNN Money, the Wii was first in Amazon's console sales between November 15 and December 19, with Super Mario Galaxy and Call of Duty 4 fronting the game sales pack.

By contrast, Wall Street stocks are flailing as I write this on news of weak holiday retail figures overall. Some are pinning bounce-back hopes to the next five or six days of shopping, during which consumers will spend an estimated $60 billion alone using holiday gift cards.

What's not being reported? Sales related to online games not tracked by mainstream retailers, e.g. purchases of games and other miscellany through services like Xbox Live or Nintendo's Wii Shop, MMORPG ongoing subscriptions and/or account renewals, direct-download games and expansion packs from sites like Direct2Drive or Gamersgate, MMO auction channels and/or in-game transactions, and items or goods purchased through legit sites like Sony's Station Exchange and/or third party chop shops (estimated at as much as $200 million a year for goods, and $1 billion for currency exchange). In short, the secondary market, i.e. "shadow economy" everyone's racing to get their spreadsheets around.

The price for 100 gold in Lord of the Rings Online? Anywhere from $67.90 to $240. 500 gold in World of Warcraft? Between $21.41 and $40.95. A level 79 Moonlight Sentin female in Lineage 2? $619. A level 70 World of Warcraft Mage and Warrior? $300. A pair of Soul Snatcher earrings in Everquest 2? $3. There's even a market for Diablo 2 items. $2.50 for an Annihilus Charm, anyone?

What Are You Playing For Christmas?

Twas the night before Christmas and across every site, not a widget was stirring, not a feed, not a byte. In other words, "It's dead, Jim," meaning the flow of entertainment news, assuming we're not counting the tittle-tattle bloodsport plaguing Britney Spears' little sis, or the tsunami of "top whatever 2007" reminiscing.

The holiday collapse of the "echo chamber" (aka "the gaming press") always feels a little spooky to me, but it also gives me time to consider the vast recondite edifice we call "games journalism" swaying slowly in the faint digital wake of hundreds of editors and writers bailing like cats out of closets for family, food, and almost certainly a vacation from playing games and parsing the latest gossip.

Playing anything good? I am. It's called Folkore and it's for the PlayStation 3, an action-RPG by the guys behind the much-hyped but critically panned Genji: Days of the Blade. Never mind Genji, Folklore is lovely and practically sui generis and fully reinstates my faith in Game Republic (the developer). By day, it's set in and around the Irish town of Doolin, a real place incidentally whose name derives from the Irish Dulainn or "black church."

By night, though, it becomes something beautifully otherworldly, a borderlands through which inhabitants of the netherworld, i.e. the land of the dead, traffic with impunity, wandering about the village or grabbing pints at its nightspots.

Happy Holidays and a free Folklore holiday expansion from Game Republic! (See my P.S. below.)

Before a glowing fire at the main pub, a ghostly parasol-twirling woman hovers in a busty corset while somewhere unseen a violinist plays a tenderly lilting version of "Londonderry Air." At a nearby table, an aristocratic monocle-touting rat gives me advice about where to go and who to talk to. Behind the bar, a shambling pillar of hair with bulging eyes and a pipe invites me to clean up a Barghest infestation.

Two stories, two characters, you choose who to play and when. Gameplay oscillates between brief walk-about, talk-about sequences and increasingly lengthy expeditions into various realms populated by "Folk," i.e. mythical creatures whose souls -- once captured -- can be invoked to execute a given creature's unique lunging, sawing, bubbling, exploding, etc. ability.

It's Dances with Barghests! Folklore boasts over 100 fantastical creatures to do battle with.

My only quibble: some pretty blatant redundancy. It doesn't bug me that I have to follow a prescribed path with a character, but it does bug me that I have to play through the same exact area and follow more or less the same exact path often even performing the same tasks when I get around to playing the second character. Sorry, any way you spin that, even with the "so that's what he was doing while she was..." angle, it feels a little cheap.

Back with more from the holiday sidelines soon. We just got about seven or eight inches of blizzardy white skiff whipped down on us in a gorgeous frenzy of wind, thunder, and yes, even lightning. I was hoping to skip out to see Sweeney Todd today (I'm reading the Robert Mack edited original 1846-7 "penny blood" version right now, in fact) but the roads are a blinding, slippery bust, so my wife and I are hunkered down with blankets (trying to do our part to save energy by keeping the thermostat low) sipping coffee and waiting for a friend to return my Doctor Who DVDs so she can finally make her way through the series with me -- it'll be my third time -- over the holiday pause.

P.S. - If you're into Folklore, Sony just released a free holiday-themed Folklore add-on pack over the PlayStation network. You get: two new winter outfits, a new quest to play with Keats called "Holy Night Visitor," and a brand new Folk for your collection called "Grab Bag," which Sony's Eric Song says "you have got to play to believe."

The Year's 10th Most Offensive Video Game

I couldn't find a decent screenshot for it because it's one of these ready-to-roll sealed-in-plastic monochrome handhelds made in China with publisher info MIA. So here's the "year's 10th most offensive video game" blog-side, along with the original story by Paul Koepp for the Jersey Journal.

(The other nine? Get 'em here.)

Title: Bush vs. Laden
For: Standalone handheld
By: Unknown
From: Unknown

Let?s take a bunch of offensive imagery related to September 11, 2001 like the twin towers and the president of the United States as an anti-Semite squaring off with a pugilistic Osama bin Laden and cram it into a $39.99 plastic handheld (with a $39 discount!) and hey-presto, it?s a game! Okay, I?ve never set eyes or thumbs on ?Bush vs. Laden,? but it certainly has Jersey City residents in a tizzy. According to The Jersey Journal, the 99-cent handheld game includes an anti-Semitic caricature of Bush as a dove holding an assault rifle ready to blast a smiling bin Laden who?s holding an airplane in one hand and a bomb in the other. Said one shopper ?I wouldn?t let my child play that. Bush would lose anyway. He still can?t find [bin Laden].?

Should PC Games Have Second Lives?

Sure, to play Crysis with visual fidelity worthy of its design team's ambitions you pretty much need a PC designed by extraterrestrials, teleported back from the future, and cooled by liquid nitrogen to stop your desk (your furniture, and maybe even your house) from igniting. On the other hand, Crysis is -- for my money -- the most significant advance in home-PC 3D technology since a $10 shareware 3.5" floppy-copy of Doom hijacked my 486DX2/66 in 1993.

On Tuesday, we reported that Crysis had only sold around 87,000 copies in the U.S. so far. Compare that with the figures fueling the Xbox 360 shooter Halo 3, which had 1.7 million in pre-sales, and has to date sold 4.4 million copies.

Console games sell better in the U.S. We know that, and we pretty much know why. Even after you figure in the HDTVs and receivers and Dolby 5.1 setups, and even based on the assumption that consumers are willing to drop $500-$600 on the console component alone, it's still dramatically less expensive to game across the 5-6 year lifespan of a console than to keep up with thousands upon thousands of dollars in perennial PC upgrades.

Games on the PlayStation 2 had access to the same basic hardware in that console's twilight days as they did when the PS2 debuted in 1999. Design tweaks aside, a PS2 is a PS2 is a PS2. The games looked a smidgen better toward the end -- they always do -- but in the grand scheme of things, not by much. Aesthetics notwithstanding, when you pop in an Xbox to GameCube or PS2 game, your visual expectations are set. You're paying attention to the gameplay, not the fact that they managed to squeeze five guys onscreen at once in game-whatever instead of only three or four. You're also probably buoyed by the fact that you can say the game looks and plays as well on your PS2 as your friend's down the block.

Now remember what you were playing on your PC in 2000? Try these, if your brain can rummage that far back:

Baldur's Gate 2
Unreal Tournament
Deus Ex
Diablo 2
The Sims
Half-Life: Counter-Strike
Thief 2: The Metal Age
No One Lives Forever

Take Baldur's Gate 2 and Diablo 2. I can run any of those on my Macbook Pro, loading Windows XP in emulation under Parallels. What's more, I can run them as they were intended to be played, without trading detail for speed. If you haven't used Parallels, it's better than Virtual PC, but hardly a barn-burner, and certainly not when it comes to games.

If, on the other hand, I try running Crysis in native "Boot Camp" mode (yeah, forget Parallels altogether for another decade or two) I'll be lucky to pull low-side double-digit frame rates. That's with a detail mash of "low" and "medium," i.e. "plain" and "slightly-less-than-comely."

GamePro asks the question "Are gamers abandoning the PC?" after suggesting the upgrade costs to play Crysis were in the $1500-$2500 range. It's a glaringly obvious but key point.

Boom or bust, high prices scare away consumers. PC gamers today are in particular far more savvy than they were a decade ago. They know the "minimum requirements" on a PC game are absolutely useless. They know the "recommended requirements" are barely half what's actually needed to get something running that looks anything like a product's marketing screenshots and gameplay videos. They know that having an experience as good (or better) than their tricked-out-boutique-PC friend's is going to cost something on the order of a year's worth of health and dental.

According to NPD, overall retail sales of PC-based games in the United States exceeded $970 million in 2006, an increase of about one percent over previous year sale of $953 million, which represented about a 14 percent drop from $1.1 billion in 2004. Thus we speculated earlier this year that PC-based games were ever-so-slightly on the rebound.

Now I wonder.

We know that optimized software and vendor drivers are absolutely essential to make the latest hardware toys go "vroom!" In a console, that's a process gradually winnowed over the life of what amounts to an entirely predictive architecture.

PC game development on the other hand is an asymmetric nightmare, with its upgrade windows and compatibility stipulations and Heisenbergian fixes-that-depend-on-bugs-that-depend-on-fixes.

Given the latter, and with all we've heard about Microsoft Vista's foibles (including the operating system being named our #1 "Biggest Tech Disappointment of 2007") what I want to know is:

1. Is Windows Vista actually harming PC gaming? Is it driving consumers away from buying PC games?

2. Should games have second lives? Millions of people have computers, and some ten million alone are playing an online game like World of Warcraft. But less than a tenth of a million have bought Crysis so far despite the game earning critical accolades from nearly everyone. It probably won't be any less amazing in a year or two, when the competition is finally catching up. Given the sheer number of people who won't have played it (but who will eventually upgrade to hardware that runs it properly) should games like Crysis enjoy secondary releases, i.e. Director's Cuts or Absolute Editions? Is it conceivable that a game like Crysis could eventually outsell itself (in a second marketing push) or are we locked into a consumer mindset that equates "year old" with "has been" whether we've played the game or not?

Come Get Some: Duke Nukem Forever Teaser Trailer Debuts

Without further ado, here it is, the ten-years-in-the-waiting-for Duke Nukem Forever teaser trailer.

Observation: No, it's not Crysis, but then Duke Nukem 3D wasn't much to look at (it wasn't even 3D, not really) when it debuted on January 29, 1996. Not compared to id Software's visually and technologically superior Quake (released June 22, 1996). So I'm saying who gives a flip about the so-so graphics and jerky animation, all they have to do is execute on the funny-play (the Freezer, the Shrinker, the Mighty Foot, etc.). That's the only reason I played the original, anyway.

Hail to the Duke, Baby

The official Duke Nukem Forever teaser trailer is actually posting tomorrow. The game was originally announced over a decade ago. Winged swine and snowballs in Sheol? Tune in here tomorrow, Wednesday, at 12:00 p.m. CST for helpings of both if the following announcement from 3D Realms isn't just April Fool's 105 days in advance.

It's time to kick *bleep* and chew bubble gum. And I'm all out of gum.

3D Realms' site appears to be choking like an ant sipping from a fire hose, so here's the first screen scrape from the trailer (above), as well as the front page news post in its entirety.

Last Saturday we had our annual company Christmas party. It was a lot of fun as usual but it featured one special surprise. It turns out that several people had been secretly working late nights and into the wee hours of the morning preparing a special video for those at the party. They created a short teaser for Duke Nukem Forever.

We'd like to thank the people on the team that worked so hard to create this teaser and the friends of 3DR that helped create it (Jeremy Soule and Julian Soule, Frank Bry, Jason Evigan and of course, Jon St. John).

Wow, Jeremy "Oblivion-Neverwinter-Nights-Supreme-Commander" Soule, even. I'm officially impressed.

Are 2D Games Harming Girls' Job Prospects?

I spotted this study which suggests girls prefer 2D games (and boys, 3D games) this morning courtesy games theorist Ian Bogost and thought I'd mention it because the distinction's been following me around lately when I stop to reflect on what I've been playing and why.

Unfortunately I can't get at the original paper because it's behind virtual chains and locks, but in it, the study's author Tina R. Ziemek asks the question: "Are there repercussions from 3D graphics being used in the majority of current video games?" And of course, the answer is yes, there are. Ziemek tests and finds that for reasons which derive from "ease of control," 3D games are more diversely challenging than 2D ones.

From Ziemek's abstract:

Over the course of two weeks participants took part in a study to assess whether 2D and 3D video games attract females and males differently... Results indicate that if an electronic game is to appeal to the majority of female players, the game should be 2D, easy, and fun; if the game is to appeal to the majority of male players, the game should be 3D, challenging, and fun.

Here's Bogost's scrape from the body of the study itself:

Results indicate that 2D electronic games are easier than 3D electronic games for both females and males, and the majority of females would rather play games that are "easy" while the majority of males would rather play games that are "challenging". Females tended not to like the confusion in the 3D video games, whether it was unclear directions, objectives, camera perspectives, or not knowing how to control the character. Females may also prefer games that have dreamlike graphics to games with realistic graphics. Results also point toward a steeper learning curve for females when playing a 3D game than a 2D game.

What are the implications of this 2D-3D gap if Ziemek's research is accurate? I wonder. We know girls don't play Barbie because of some inbuilt genetic trigger any more than boys come hardwired not to with superior spatial hand-eye coordination[1]. And yet, allowing for bell curve exceptions, we all know who Mattel's targeting when it trots out "Barbie: The Island Princess" as opposed to stuff like Hasbro's "Transformers Optimus Prime Voice Changer Helmet." We take the form, at least in part, of what we're socialized to be.

Think about what that means. Increasingly, gaming is cited as an impetus for complex professional skill acquisition. It may affect everything from your ability to fly an F-22 Raptor, to your proficiency carrying out hands-on laparoscopic techniques, to your dexterity manipulating the latest "touch-free" medical tools that include manipulating robotic arms and effectively "3D video gaming" your way through an actual surgical procedure.

Are we unwittingly socializing gameplay skills that could impact the ability of our sons and daughters to compete on a level playing field in their professional careers?

[1] Correction: It turns out that on average, they do, which actually reinforces this post's central thesis, that we may be unwittingly reinforcing one gender's aptitude in terms of spatial ability, while simultaneously enervating another's.

2007 - Year of the Wii, 2008 - Wait and See

Media market analyst Screen Digest predicts that in the console wars, Nintendo will win 2007 "convincingly," with a nod to "the market climate [changing] significantly" in 2008.

What changes (or starts to) in approximately 15 days? "Whereas in 2007 Nintendo has succeeded in expanding the appeal of the Wii to different consumers, including more females and older consumers to drive adoption, Sony?s pipeline of exclusive content and the launch of multi-media services may result in a significant uplift for the PlayStation 3 in 2008," said Screen Digest's senior games analyst Piers Harding-Rolls.

Rolls says a market shift to eyeball in 2008 will be the evolution of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 from game consoles to multi-media hubs. "Now that these multi-media services -- online video, IPTV, digital terrestrial TV and PVR functionality -- are now available or poised to come on line in different markets, this ?hub? strategy is emerging as a key console battleground for Microsoft and Sony," concluded Harding-Rolls.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Don't hitch your horse to the hardware only. Microsoft's beating the snot out of Sony and Nintendo in software sales and keeping apace, relatively speaking, with Nintendo in U.S. console unit sales. Software, software, software. I can't say that enough. If you sell a bazillion consoles and snap up a bazillion developers but only sell the same one or two games in volume, you're essentially sitting on an extremely popular paperweight.

I don't mean to harsh on Nintendo, but I'd feel a lot less like the Wii were the video game analogue of the U.S. housing market (or the dot-com bubble) if Nintendo wasn't trading second and third place for software sales with Sony's PlayStation Cee (stands for 'caboose').

People who pick up hardware but the same one or two software titles (ahem, Wii Play) are either once-in-a-blue-moon gamers or waiting (with increasing impatience) for something really actually great to turn up. Go Mario, go Zelda, go Metroid, etc. But firstly, where's the new property stuff? Is Nintendo going to rest on its MarioZeldaMetroid laurels until fanboys fly? And second, if I were hedging Nintendo-only console-wise, I'd be boiling to give Ratchet & Clank Future or BioShock or Assassin's Creed a try. Some of the best games going are showing up on the competition's hardware. That's a problem all the classic Nintendo-styled games in the world can't remedy.

Best RPG of 2007? Demo Now Available for The Witcher

It's pretty much gargantuan at nearly 2GB, but if you want to give the hands-down best RPG of 2007 a whirl, now you can, because CD Projekt's just released a demo of The Witcher which you can get here from Fileshack.

Did I mention I love this game?

From my SCIFI Weekly review:

Ladies' man Geralt of Rivia gets around, and so does Atari's The Witcher, a sprawling, blackly ironic, ethically complex action role-playing game based on a series of fantasy books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski about this professional monster slayer and "witcher" (from the Polish neologism wiedzmin, originally translated by Sapkowski as "hexer," which sounds arguably less weird than turning a noun into an adjective and back to a noun again). Witchers are humans who have elected to undergo trials that alter their bodies genetically. If they survive these trials, they're endowed with superhuman abilities but rendered reproductively sterile.

...and

The tenability of easy dichotomies like "good" and "evil" is itself at issue in The Witcher, and nothing is as it seems in Polish developer CD Projekt's inspired translation of Sapkowski's beautifully turbulent, oftentimes amoral universe. Friends can be (and probably are) backstabbing cult members. Guards and thugs alike turns out to be aggressive sexual predators (sex as a theme in general is something the game embraces, instead of prudishly whitewashing this most elemental of biological imperatives). Witches sell poisonous suicide solutions and craft voodoo dolls to compel siblings to kill each other. Barmaids and plenty more besides will sleep with you for booze, money, gifts, and occasionally just temporary infatuation. Pious religious fanatics turn out to be repugnant misogynists. Mages who can't control their powers become half-insane, slobbering oracles. And for all the wonderfully "un-Tolkien-y" alghouls and echinops and graveirs and bloedzuigers you'll grapple with, the most hideous monsters in the game aren't the ones with six or a dozen consonants crowding a single vowel, but other humans, like you.

Activision on Rock Band Debacle: It's Harmonix's Fault

He said, she said, that's the latest in what's become a finger-pointing fracas with music game publishers Activision and Harmonix blaming each other for guitar controller compatibility hiccups.

On Wednesday, I reported that Harmonix was blaming Activision for holding up (presumably in somber legalese) a patch, ready to drop, that would allow Activision's Guitar Hero III controllers to work with Harmonix's new music ensemble game Rock Band.

Today Activision responded in a press statement which says that Harmonix's claim that Activision is blocking a compatibility patch, as well as Harmonix's plea to enable Rock Band software to work with Guitar Hero hardware, "paints a very misleading picture."

"In fact, Harmonix and its parent company MTV Games/Viacom recently declined Activision's offer to reach an agreement that would allow the use of Guitar Hero guitar controllers with Rock Band," said Activision in the statement.

Activision claims it has been and remains open to discussions with Harmonix and MTV Games/Viacom about the use of the company's technology in Rock Band. "Unfortunately for Rock Band users, in this case Harmonix and MTV Games/Viacom are unwilling to discuss an agreement with Activision," said Activision.

Call of Duty 4, Super Mario Galaxy Lead November Sales

Call of Duty 4 for the Xbox 360 outsold Nintendo's planet-hopping plumber in Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii by nearly half a million copies, according to NPD's US November 2007 game sales figures. Following closely in third and fourth place: Assassin's Creed for the Xbox 360 and Guitar Hero III for the PlayStation 2.

"Assassin's Creed has earned a spot in the history books as the best-selling new IP at launch, besting the previous record held by Gears of War," said industry analyst Anita Frazier. Developed by Ubisoft Montreal (Rainbow Six: Vegas) Assassin's Creed is a third-person stealth game in which players assume the role of a medieval assassin who must acrobatically navigate complex twelfth-century environments and outsmart sophisticated crowd-based AI.

No surprise, the Nintendo DS and Wii both soared to the top of the hardware sales charts, maintaining their lock on the first and second sales spots respectively, including the second best sales month of the year for the DS. The Xbox 360 did brisk business -- also it's second best sales month for 2007 -- with over three-quarters of a million Xbox 360s, and even Sony's PlayStation Portable managed to kick past the half a million mark.

Sony's PlayStation 2 outsold its younger sibling again, though sales of Sony's beleaguered PlayStation 3 were the highest all year, with Frazier suggesting the price cut and seasonal lift were behind the PS3 achieving "the biggest October to November sales increase of any hardware platform." While Sony's still losing money on sales of the PS3, the company's aggregate hardware sales are on par with the Nintendo DS at 1.53m across the PlayStation franchise.

Overall, it's cork-popping news for the industry in general, with sales marked off at December 1st already 5% over 2006 entire. "With the biggest month of the year yet to go, total industry sales are on track to achieve between $18B and $19B in the U.S.," said Frazier. By comparison, U.S. combined hardware, software, and accessories sales topped out at $12.5B in 2006. That would mean $5B to $6B more in sales, or a 26% to 39% sales increase over last year's December sales of $3.7B.

November 2007 Hardware Sales (units)

1.53m - Nintendo DS
981k - Nintendo Wii
770k - Xbox 360
567k - PlayStation Portable
496k - PlayStation 2
466k - PlayStation 3

November 2007 Top 10 Video Games (units)

1.57m - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Xbox 360)
1.12m - Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)
980k - Assassin's Creed (Xbox 360)
967k - Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2)
564k - Wii Play w/Remote (Wii)
473k - Mass Effect (Xbox 360)
444k - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PS3)
426k - Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS3)
387k - Halo 3 (Xbox 360)
377k - Assassin's Creed (PS3)

PR Firm Kohnke Admits "Convincing" Game Journalists

I saw the story yesterday, fired up my text editor, rattled off an angry two or three paragraphs, re-read what amounted to a useless rant, tapped the "delete" key, then let the story smolder for 24. Media independence is a very personal thing for me. When I see the line being crossed, and I've seen it crossed a lot, sadly, I sometimes sound off like a sanctimonious fossil in an Orson Welles flick, and no one likes a finger-wagger.

If you haven't seen it, the story in question is here, courtesy GamePro. Summary: Public Relations firm Kohnke Communications is suing a developer for breach of contract, claiming money's owed for securing favorable preview coverage of the currently on developmental hiatus action-RPG Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising. From the court filing:

Kohnke's public relations campaign was successful in creating pre-release 'buzz' around Gods & Heroes, and in convincing reviewers to write positive reviews about the game.

Translation...well, who needs a translation? It's remarkably, inexplicably, dare I say refreshingly blunt. PR firm wants compensation for doing what it was ostensibly paid to, i.e. getting game journalists to write up a bunch of happy stuff.

So without further ado, or a bunch of ranty anecdotes (I have dozens), I'm curious -- what say you, readership? After all, this isn't really about a bunch of hand-wringing writers or the speculative soap operas drafted so reliably by the blathersphere when, for instance, someone in the biz gets the axe under pretense of PR meddling.

Not really.

I'd argue instead that it's really about you. You, who in essence, pay us (through ads, or by purchasing from the companies that advertise with us) to get you information you can trust.

Your dime: Stories written for you being admittedly influenced by a public relations firms.

What say you?

UPDATE (12/14/07 7:12 p.m. CST): Kohnke VP Sean Kauppinen (also incidentally the fellow running this year's GCDC "PR For Games" panel) responded to media inquiries about the matter with the following:

This has gotten completely blown out of proportion so I have to say something. This was nothing more than a typo in the complaint. The game [Gods & Heroes] was never released, so it should be clear we didn't mean "reviews," but "previews." It's a missing letter in the complaint that, unfortunately, changes the meaning of the sentence to something we never intended to suggest.

To reiterate, we're not paying anyone off to review games, this is not related to Jeff Gerstmann, the Illuminati, or HGH in baseball. It's a typo.

Funny, I wasn't even paying attention to the 'p' vs. 'r' thing, because for me, an attempt to convince a journalist to do anything is where I tend to see the line, much less convincing "[p]reviewers to write positive [p]reviews" of something.

A preview is a complex, many-headed beast. True, negative pre-reviewing is generally a no-no, but the idea that a PR firm would think it acceptable to drive positive coverage is a smidgen disturbing.

A good preview is insightful -- up to and including analysis that may sound occasionally critical. If a company wants an advertorial, well, that's what paid advertisements are for. If game companies want unvarnished "positive" info-grafts, they ought to stop using magazines to couch their intentions in a journalistic veneer and simply drop the info direct from their product sites.

Activision Deep Sixes Rock Band Compatibility Patch

Developer Harmonix has a patch it's been dying to release that would allow Activision's Guitar Hero III controllers to work with Harmonix's brand new ensemble music game, Rock Band.

But Activision's response? "Fuggedaboudit," according to Harmonix.

In a general press statement released this afternoon, Harmonix said it "believe[s] in an open standard philosophy of hardware and game compatibility" and "think[s] that there should be interoperability between music instrument controllers across all music games."

Harmonix says it created a software patch for the Sony PlayStation 3 version of Rock Band two weeks ago that allowed for guitar compatibility and support for third party peripherals, "including enabling use of Activision's Guitar Hero III controller with Rock Band." The developer says the patch was submitted, approved, and had been scheduled for release by Sony last week Tuesday, December 4.

"Unfortunately, Activision objected to the compatibility patch's release," alleges Harmonix. "The patch remains with Sony, but we have been told that it will unfortunately not be released due to Activision's continued objection."

The company then appeals to Activision directly:

As is the case with the Microsoft Xbox360, we believe that Sony PLAYSTATION 3 users should be able to use the peripheral of their choice with Rock Band. We sincerely hope that Activision will reverse its decision and allow release of the compatibility patch and further, that Activision will allow Guitar Hero III to support Rock Band guitar controllers as well. We welcome all third party developers who wish to support our controllers and will provide any required support in order for them to do so.

Sad news, music lovers, though I should probably be specific: PlayStation 3 music lovers. The Xbox 360 Guitar Hero III controllers get along swimmingly with Xbox 360 Rock Band.

People Buying Top 10 PC Games Can't Play Them

So say the folks at System Requirements Lab, a customer relationship management firm, in a press release today claiming tens of thousands of people buying "top 10" PC games this holiday won't be able to use them. The claim stems from over 3.5 million user tests conducted in the last two months on a special testing website called CanYouRunIt.com, which indicates that 44.1% of the time, a given player's computer didn't meet the publisher's basic requirements.

SRL, a division of Husdawg, calls itself "a leading provider of electronic registration and customer relationship management solutions and technology for the computer software and hardware industry." It also sells the technology powering "CanYouRunIt" to individual manufacturers and publishers like Nvidia, AMD, Activision, EA, and Eidos.

The results meter at CanYouRunIt.com, which offers simple visual feedback about your computer's ability to run a selected PC game.

I had a chance to catch up with SRL's president John Hussey earlier, who was kind enough to answer a few questions I had about the service.

Game On: Can you talk about what's behind the technology?

Hussey: We really developed this tech, and we're calling it "Instant Expert Analysis," to make things as simple as possible for users. A user just has to click a button. We detect hardware info, nothing personal, and then provide analysis for "can you run it," answering what we think is one of the oldest, costliest questions in the PC business. Do I have the hardware necessary? Do I have the latest drivers? And so on. A lot of companies have looked at this technology over the years, and once they understand what we're doing, they say let's do this project.

Game On: In the press release, SRL claims to have provided over 16 million tests for clients such as NVIDIA, AMD, Activision, CNET, Eidos, IGN, and EA UK (in the FAQ, they list dozens more). Given the number of video card benchmark scandals over the years, where publishers have attempted to influence test scores via "optimized" drivers, how does SRL ensure the test results are agnostic?

Hussey: At SRL we try to be as agnostic as possible, but it really depends on the site we're running on. If we're on Nvidia's site, for instance, they only want to show their cards, which is of course understandable. It's the same for AMD. But when we're on other sites, or our site (CanYouRunIt.com) then of course we show everybody's.

Game On: Who determines what's recommended if gamers fail the requirements test for a given piece of hardware and, in the "detailed analysis" that follows, click the "We Recommend" button? How does that work?

Hussey: What we do is set a performance range and recommend all of the manufacturer cards above that level. We want to show a user that if you're buying this software program and have this machine, these are the cards or parts that you need. But that changes, right? It's a moving target, because publishers can change their minimum requirements based on tech support feedback after release. So every three months, we add those changes in manually. We're constantly updating the specs.

Game On: How is SRL funded?

Hussey: It's mainly through the services, the technology being used by companies on their own sites. We do some advertising, and we're probably going to start doing some more, but we're really focused on getting companies to run this on their sites. We've found that they end up with a huge decrease in support calls, just by putting us on their site, because that's what a lot of calls are generated from, say folks who don't have the hardware necessary to run the game.

Game On: Do you have any control over what hardware they get to recommend using your technology on their site?

Hussey: If it's on their site, they would have the prerogative to recommend what they want. On our site, of course, the recommendations are completely agnostic.

Game On: I love the idea of an agnostic easy-to-use "can I run this?" tool to help demystify the relationship of games to hardware. I'd love it even more if it could eventually put a personal spin on the feedback, so that without having to pull down a multi-gigabyte demo I could get at least a rudimentary visual or aesthetic sense for what something's going to look like and how it'll run speed-wise if I'm riding the "minimum required" line.

Hussey: It's such a hard issue. There's a constant battle within every publisher between the engineering guys and the marketing guys. The marketing guys say "Look, we have to sell to the broadest base," and the engineering guys say "We've got to make this a cool looking product or nobody's going to want to play it." I get that. But at the end of the day, it's about what you can fit specifications-wise on the retail box. The other side of that, of course, and I got this from watching my kids playing Lego Star Wars, is I believe that games today offer a much greater entertainment value for everybody. A user who has never played a game before, or maybe they've played an older game, if they get involved now, they can have a much better experience, and say "Wow, this is really cool" without the esotericism. It's happened to some of my neighbors, my next door neighbor, in fact. She's now a World of Warcraft gamer, and she wouldn't have touched games three years ago. I think that if we can get more people to try games now, the industry is going to grow a low, because the entertainment value is able to draw more people in.

Blizzard Lets Slip It's Working on "Next Gen" MMO

Could it be Sat--err, I mean Diablo? World of StarCraft? A version of Blizzard's 1991 "mega-hit" Radical Psycho Machine Racing?

I have no idea why this wasn't picked up by the pundits and gossip blogs last week,[1] but WorthPlaying sighted listings on Blizzard's job recruitment page for several positions working on a "next-gen MMO" last Thursday, noting that Blizzard confirmed it's nothing to do with World of Warcraft, but in fact something entirely new.

Said Blizzard's Drysc on the World of Warcraft forums in response to "Could just be additional manpower for Wrath" (referring to the upcoming WoW expansion "Wrath of the Lich King"):

No, it is an unannounced Next-Gen MMO. And that doesn't mean an expansion for World of Warcraft either.

Which means it's either World of Warcraft 2, or something else entirely. World of Diablo, World of StarCraft, World of [insert Blizzard franchise here], even World of It's-A-Brand-New-Property-So-Nyah-Nyah.

The positions in questions? Actually three, by my count (the forum post lists only two):

Lead 3D Character Artist - Next-Gen MMO
Lead 3D Environment Artist - Next-Gen MMO
Game Physics/Collision Programmer - Next-Gen MMO

Oh yeah, if it is StarCraft-related, my money's still on something like "Galaxy of StarCraft." How can you have a puny little old "world" of StarCraft, hmmm?

[1] Oh yes I do. Turns out Brian Crecente reported this all the way back in April, which makes the only new news here Blizzard's (official? unofficial?) confirmation that it's not a WoW expansion.

Castronova Predicts Exodus to Virtual Worlds

I dig Edward Castronova, the guy who wrote a book about the social biz behind the rise of online gaming, and now he's got a second one out with a provocative thesis.

Synthetic Worlds, selectively scribbled in and nestled between Steven Kent's Ultimate History of Video Games and Raessens and Goldstein's Handbook of Computer Game Studies on my shelf, is a well-reasoned, easy-to-read engagement of the social and economic ramifications of the rise of machine-driven virtual worlds.

His new one, entitled Exodus To The Virtual World, considers what might happen if reality sims like Second Life trigger an exodus of people seeking to "disappear from reality."

The BBC interviewed Castronova, a professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, who said in discussing the book: "My guess is that the impact on the real world really is going to involve folks disappearing from reality in a lot of places where we see them...so what I tried to do in this book is say, 'listen - even if the typical reader doesn't spend any time in virtual worlds, what is going to be the impact on him of people going and doing this?'"

At one point, he even draws parallels between a potential exodus into cyberspace, and the early seventeenth-century, when thousands abandoned Britain for a new life in North America. "That certainly changed North America - and that's usually what we focus on - but it certainly changed the UK as well," he said.

Now the latter is certainly a powerful sound-bite, but is it really a fair comparison? The people leaving Britain for a new life in North America were doing so for much more radical reasons than, say, the average real-life obese or socially maladjusted user who turns to Second Life because of social exclusion or physical insecurity. Compared to those early North American colonialists, we -- at least in Western society -- live lives of relative and politically autonomous plenty. And of course, someone exploring a virtual world like Second Life can still instantly disengage by simply stepping away from the computer, say, when someone drops by, or we need to sleep, or the dinner bell rings. Disease, famine, and all the other lovely circumstantial factors that led to the death of untold numbers of early British settlers in North America play no role in the colonization of virtual space.

Moreover, what of the indigenous Americans left to the margin of that example, whose world -- to extend and invert Castronova's analogy -- was in fact gradually subsumed by the colonial influx? Imagine a powerful, relentless, culturally alien wave slowly and inexorably reconstituting the fabric of your "reality," changing it to the point of near-eradication. Today, only the most fleeting remnants of that "reality" continue in the traditions of atavistic practitioners on pockets of federally reserved land. Nothing like those indigenous peoples exists in today's online simulations -- there's simply no parallel.

So while I can almost see the relevance of Castronova's broader point about the impact of the "exodus" on British society, I wonder if it North American colonialism was the best hook to hang it on.

But let's change the subject.

Ever hear of Jean Baudrillard? (The last name's pronounced something like bow-dree-AIR.) French theorist, wrote a treatise called Simulacra and Simulations which had its pop-culture moment in the first Matrix film, the part where they flash to the green book Neo pulls off the shelf. It contends that the human experience is a simulation of reality, as opposed to reality itself. I know, I know -- such deep thoughts.[1]

My question, in an attempt to rescue these ostensibly "sophisticated" ideas from what I've come to view as their esoteric and largely useless academic prisons, is: What does a prediction that everyone will be involved in a virtual environment within 10 years really amount to?

I was reading an editorial in an aviation magazine the other day in which the writer related his experience as a child sitting in front of a flat picture-poster of an airplane cockpit on his bedroom wall. Both he and his brother would imagine flying the plane the cockpit represented around the world, having all sorts of virtually real adventures. His contention, no doubt in part viewed through a nostalgic filter, was that these little afternoon or evening exploits were vastly more "real" for him than any flight simulation (including Flight Simulator X, with its multiplayer elements) since.

You've heard that sort of thing before, I'm sure. It's just the idea that computer-simulated environs are merely glorified extensions of what the human imagination's been doing ably on its own for millennia.

Besides, isn't anyone with a computer sending email and using instant messaging already involved in a virtual environment, complete with its own social, political, and even economic strata? Why view Second Life as such a bold, unique, and if you'll permit, paradigmatic shift? How many of you spend a dozen hours positioned in front of a computer screen doing "work" in a cube or office or from home (on a plane, in a hotel room, etc.), interacting socially, politically, and economically with others? How different is that, really, from someone who spends a dozen hours sitting in front of their computer screen and "playing" something (socially, politically, economically) like Second Life?

The whole concept of mingling "states of reality" and its repercussions for human society is hardly a new idea. Science fiction authors have envisioned an "exodus" to virtual space for decades. In 1946, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges's story "On Exactitude in Science" conjured a world in which cartography had become such a precision discipline that the map necessary to chart the planet was unfurled on a perfectly one-to-one scale, ergo the perfect replication of reality itself.

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Near the turn of the century, author Tad Williams considered in his sprawling Otherland tetralogy what might happen to a society where groups of people have transitioned broadly into cyberspace -- socially, politically, and economically. What would happen, for instance, if the wealthiest groups secretly pooled their assets to fund a scientific solution to the problem of consciousness, and attempted the first transfer thereof into a hyperreal reality sim to achieve both immortality and "godhood"?

My question, and I really don't mean it in a smarty-pants semantic sense, is whether it's proper to refer to what's happening with simulations like Second Life or World of Warcraft or Whatever Comes Next as an "exodus," i.e. a mass departure or emigration, or if this is all simply the culture coming to terms with a phenomenon that -- with all its social and economic implications -- we've been undergoing since well before those games and simulations existed.

[1] Actually, one of his deepest and most compelling, as far as I was concerned in grad-school anyway, is that fantasy-fueled environments like Disneyworld thrive, at least in part, because they reinforce the sense that everything not Disneyworld is "what's normal." We define "reality" by constantly referring to things we view as "not reality," in other words.

Monday Gamewatch

It's fussy and ostentatious and at times a trace byzantine, and it plods along at roughly the pace of the book, which is to say glacially, but Chris Weitz's The Golden Compass is still a better than average adaptation of Philip Pullman's pseudo-philosophical three-book response to CS Lewis's Narnia series.

I'll forever wonder what might have been with a Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Empire of the Sun, Brazil, and my favorite, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead) screenplay -- Stoppard's proposed draft script was actually rejected -- but I can live with Weitz's version, as long as the lackluster opening weekend box office receipts aren't the beginning of a tank-job that precludes the necessary sequels from being made. I suppose I'm mostly impressed that the guy responsible for The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (though to be fair, also the much better About a Boy) didn't totally louse things up. Weitz is no Peter Jackson, but he's certainly got the framework laid out for the fireworks to come.

Anyway, here's this week's notable PC game releases:

Monday

Universe at War: Earth Assault: From the ex-Westwood Studios guys behind Command & Conquer and C&C: Red Alert, and more recently, the Star Wars: Empire at War real-time strategy games, comes an original RTS the publisher blurb claims "features unprecedented levels of customization and an epic storyline set on near-future Earth." Looks like another three-faction roshambo brawler, with a tactical hook -- you can on-the-fly swap out weaponry, rework your tech tree, and retrain units in the middle of combat to thwart your foe and seize the advantage. There's a playable demo available from Fileshack here.

Tuesday

The Lost Crown: From the guys who brought us AnaCapri: The Dream and Scratches and Bad Mojo and...what's that? You've never heard of those? Think of publisher Got Game Entertainment as one of the last bastions of old-school adventure gaming -- niche, but necessary if you're still a fan of the "go west," "look drawer," "use lead pipe" school of gaming. The Lost Crown is the company latest, a "new adventure title inspired by classic ghoststories and today's modern ghosthunting techniques. Travel with Nigel Danvers, to an eerie seaside town on England's east coast. Learn to use advanced techniques used by real paranormal investigators, and uncover an ancient mystery, and treasure. But beware, not all of the town's residents will help in your mission, whether they are alive or dead. The haunting works of Charles Dickens, M.R. James, Arthur Conan Doyle and E.F. Benson combine with night-vision cameras, E.V.P and other ghosthunting gadgets to bring a frightening story to gamers in Spring 2006." Err, make that winter 2007?

Friday

The Golden Compass: Ergo my opening comments, but while the movie reviews are pretty much love/hate (A / C-), the early game reviews aren't pretty for this multi-platform action adventure tie-in. Are we surprised? Well maybe a little. EA's Harry Potter stuff's not half bad (and if you're into the books and movies and not the average look-how-snarky-I-can-be game critic, you could argue they're actually pretty good). Basically you play the protagonist, Lyra Belacqua, as she navigates the frozen northland attempting to rescue her friend, kidnapped by a group colloquially dubbed The Gobblers. Your companions are your daemon (Pantalaimon, an animal-like external manifestation of Lyra's soul) and an armored polar bear named Iorek Byrnison. Employing these three characters and a truth-telling alethiometer (the titular "golden compass") you measure your progress in battles and puzzles solved. Maybe it'll be fun for the kiddies?

Lunging, Punching, Flailing: Playing Games Without a Controller

The San Jose Mercury News has a story this morning about newfangled optics-driven control technology from Israeli developer 3DV Systems that lets you "play video games without a controller," but like a lot of stories about "gesticulative" feedback, it misses a key point. Namely, that the sort of high-resolution hands-free interface Tom Cruise makes look so effortlessly urbane in the movie Minority Report doesn't really work in real life.

That's because when it comes to complex, nuanced feedback, hands want surface contact and fingers, thresholds.

No matter how high-fidelity, a motion capture system which can track increasingly realistic or complex gestures still depends on dexterous, deterministic input from your hands while simultaneously stripping them of any physical, tactile grounding. That's a problem, one which all of the leading input specialists I've chatted up over the last couple years don't think will be solved by simply jacking up the camera resolution.

Take pianists, whose hands derive as much information about a performance from how and what they're touching (its material composition and heft or responsiveness) as when and where. The visual feedback -- seeing the piano key depress or bounce in reality or on a game screen -- is a nominal part of the circuit loop (the eye can't even keep up with what's happening on the keyboard during quick runs or arpeggios) compared with the audio-tactile relationship between hands, piano keys, and ears. (In addition to its 88 hammer-driven positions of black and white impact, the piano has a practically infinite number of velocity strike-points.)

Air guitar may be well and good for Wayne and Garth, but no matter how exacting an optical device's capture resolution, guitarists like Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani are still going to balk at the prospect of playing "Eruption" or "Satch's Boogie" in free-space.

Device-free input eschews a crucial, intermediary layer and instead goes straight for your eyes or ears, requiring your hands to make what amounts to digitally precise decisions in inexact, analog free-float.

Sony's Eye Toy lets you play casual games by recognizing broad, abstract gestures, but even "next generation 3d imagine technology, originally used in advanced defense systems" from 3DV Systems -- capable of tracking fast or fine motor movement -- won't be able to compensate in hardcore games for the conspicuously absent, digitally precise tactile feedback system.

Logitech's Director of Strategic Marketing Fred Swan told me this in 2005 when I asked him about gestural interfaces:

What I would say is that in general, I think that that type of interface [in Minority Report] is both charming and very dramatic. It?s dramatic because there?s motion, because it?s new, because whether or not Tom Cruise has the most expressive of faces he knows how to make broad crisp motions with his body that are compelling to the audience when the right environment is created and it?s interesting in that way.

And there are some people that still have a hard time on DVD players remembering the little triangle button means play and the rectangle button means stop. At least with remotes you have labels. If you have a gestural system that isn?t sort of polluting the screen by putting up prompts or a help system, you have to remember all that.

Here's another angle from Peter Molyneux (Populous, Black & White, Fable) who argued that "game controllers needed a revolution" during a demonstration of Fable at DICE 2004:

It?s really interesting that we?ve got things like the Eye Toy. You?re not limited by any controller there. The only problem I?ve got is, it?s bloody exhausting to play games. I have to have energy drinks after about five minutes. And the thought of actually playing a sort of twenty hour gaming experience...you?d be like an international bodybuilder at the end of it, and forget pilates, this is real effort.

(For more on game input, see "Brainless? Playing Games With Our Minds" and "Microsoft Surface: Will it Be Tabled?")

TV and Video Games Strain Children's Vision

Watching images on a flat screen (as in any flat surface screen, including CRTs) for prolonged periods has a deleterious effect on a child's vision, and eventually leads to nearsightedness and issues shifting focus, according to eye experts in the US and UK.

Professor Andrea Thau, spokeswoman for the American Optometric Associations, advises:

Children need appropriate visual stimulation for sight to develop normally. Parents should limit TV and computer games, especially in children under six whose sight is still developing, though the effects occur in older children too.

I guess that explains my problem, or part of it, anyway, though I'm extrapolating out to adulthood as someone who didn't use computers or watch much TV as a child. I have increasingly poor vision as I age, something so trivial as a teenager I didn't bother wearing my glasses most of the time, but which now seems to grow increasingly worse as I spend longer and longer hours either gaming, writing (on a laptop), or reading (often by lamplight, in the evening, in bed).

I'm not blind, but it's bad enough that I need glasses in front of a desktop computer screen a couple feet in front of me. Which has additional downsides if you're into various specialty gear. For instance, I slipped on Natural Point's Track IR infrared-based head-tracking system (it lets you look around inside the cockpit of a plane or other vehicle just by moving your head) and was suddenly all too aware of my glass frames, which obscure parts of your view since, per the Track IR freelook mechanic, it's explicitly tied to the shifting visual field. In other words, when I look around, I invariably end up looking through my frames around the edges.

A few years ago, my optometrist noticed I have problems focusing correctly. He said I "overfocus," which as I understand it, means I look at something like the page in a book that might be X inches away, but my eyes exert themselves focally as if I were looking at something X + 3 or 4 inches extra.

Keith Holland, a leading specialist in children's eye problems who examined 12,500 children's eyes in the last decade, noting an "alarming increase" in problems linked to TV and computer game exposure, says:

Humans are not designed to look at a flat screen for long periods ? and this is especially the case for children or infants whose vision is developing ? and we believe visual skills are being damaged.

As anyone knows, anything that strains your vision is going to be harmful to it over time. I presume some of my focal issues may be due to extended time in front of computer screens (I've never been much of a TV watcher). The good news is that they make special corrective glasses for focal issues. They only help when you're reading up close (not to be confused with reading glasses, which are different) but I can actually feel my eyes forcibly relax when I slip them on. (Now if only I could be more disciplined about wearing them.)

The bad news, of course, is that the only cure-all is spending less time in front of flat screens, kids especially, be they TVs or computers.

Or maybe that's good news too.

Tom Brokaw Calls Blogs, Video Games "Cancerous"

Back in 1995, I managed a mall-based Software Etc for a year in Omaha, Nebraska -- guess which mall. That's right, Westroads, nestled betwixt some of the wealthiest homeowners (among them, billionaire Warren Buffet) and a bunch of pretty typically middle-class neighborhoods, banks, gas stations, retail stores, car dealerships, hotels, and a sports bar I used to play weekends in a cover band on keys.

On Wednesday, wearing a hooded sweatshirt concealing an assault rifle, 19-year-old Robert Hawkins walked into Von Maur, a two-story department store located on the south side of the Westroads (a ten-second stroll from the store I used to manage, now a GameStop), shot and killed six store employees, two customers, then turned the gun on himself.

There'd been shootings at this particular mall before, mind you. Mostly minor incidents involving kids flashing or firing guns, all attributed to gang-related activity. This was back in the early 1990s, when Omaha actually made the cover of Time magazine for its gang problems, and violent crime (all types) in the U.S. was peaking. For the record, despite all the disproportional and unrepresentative 24-hour cable network news reporting, violent crime (all types) has been steadily declining every year in the U.S. since 1991.

Tom Brokaw isn't the kind of guy you mock lightly, but in a Townhall radio interview with American radio talk show host and neo-conservative evangelical Christian Hugh Hewitt, he reacted to the shooting with the sort of typical generationally challenged punditry that makes game hobbyists like me wince.

HH: Do you not think it?s going to incite other people to try to do the same thing?

TB: No, I don?t. I think?to get back to something we were talking about earlier in general thematic terms, I don?t think we?re doing a very good job about talking about violence in this country, either. You know, Virginia Tech went away. We didn?t have any ongoing dialogue in our communities or on the air about the corrosive effect of violence. It was not what he, what people saw of him on the air that will drive them, it?s what they read in blog sites, and what they see in video games. It?s that kind of stuff that I think is cancerous. And I?m a free speech absolutist, but I think that at the same time, we have to have free speech in some kind of a context. And part of that context is a discussion of the possible effects of it.

I'll leave the video game comment alone, because it's broadly dismissive and idiomatically ignorant enough that I'll just sound cruel going after a 67 year old South Dakotan with an enviable public and industry awards list. And he's not wrong in his assessment of way the country has a horrible track record when it comes to dealing with its weirdly hypocritical stance on violence (violence in games is fine, for instance, but sexual themes and even partial nudity are big no-nos).

But the blog comment just sounds like an angry, resentful, old-media-journalist dig. Sure, blogs are often un-sourced, are frequently little cults of personality or echo chambers for cynical albeit occasionally amusing blathering, and they can certainly sound or seem to function as "mob-like." But they're also tremendously effective ways of applying (increasingly) democratic pressure to a monolithic, deleteriously corporatized informational superstructure, a means of confronting a mainstream media that's increasingly less informative, insightful, carefully sourced, and journalistically competent than its newer, somewhat hostile peers. In Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's The Elements of Journalism, the authors in fact argue (and I agree that):

Journalists are under intense scrutiny from bloggers, and many companies are struggling to integrate their online operations into the newsroom without lowering standards of verifying and reporting information. Much of that pressure is healthy. Clear away the rhetoric and animus of those who yearn for the annihilation of traditional journalism (the hated "MSM," or mainstream media) and journalism will be better for the scrutiny that the blogosphere offers.

[Thanks, GamePolitics]

How to Get Your Hands on a Wii for the Holidays

You want one, you've tried to buy one, you've realized only too late how incredibly difficult it's going to be to find one, so here's a quick list of ideas to help you track down a Wii before your holiday vacation.

The Bargain Tracker: Keep your browser parked at WiiTracker.com. It's a subset of something called Ben's Bargains ("Where ghetto dogs come for the lowdown on deals") with a Wii-focused portal page that checks listed merchants on a regular basis to see if they have the Wii in stock. The site includes an RSS feed that updates automatically when a store reports availability. As of 12/6/07 @ 11:14 a.m., everyone's sold out, but several retailers, from Toys R Us and Costco to Buy.com, have shown the system briefly in stock over the last 48 hours. With Nintendo of America spokeswoman Anka Dolecki saying that the company will have twice as many Wiis available this year as it did at the product's launch last November, count on those retailers to restock several times before the month's up. (UPDATE: Here's another tracker, which as of 12:44 P.M. CST says Amazon and GameStop both have the Wii back in stock!)

The High-Roller: How'd you like to pay $1 million for a Wii? Okay, pranks aside, you can always go the online auction route via sites like Ebay or Amazon. Sure, a lot of these folks are parasites who literally sit and wait and watch and buy in bulk to create the shortages that drive the demand that let's them sell for prices starting in the $500 range on up to in excess of $4,000 in places. Of course, I can imagine anyone willing to spend that much on a Wii might alternatively be swayed to pick up an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 now and wait for the shortage to abate.

The Pouncer: If you're really, really desperate but don't want to pay the "parasite" tax, you might try to find out when your local retailers get their daily shipments (of anything, and in general). UPS, FedEx, DHL...they all have regular shipping schedules with delivery "windows" that vary according to outlet and location, but tend to be pretty consistent for said outlet/location. The trick, of course, is having time as well as the appropriate amount of charisma to stalk and pounce when the mail guy shows up without annoying the living stuff out of overworked, underpaid store employees. Also, stores like GameStop usually have distro shipping printouts with quantities the day before they receive restock, though sometimes those lists don't print until the morning-of. Also, check your retailer's holiday hours, then make sure you arrive early (sometimes 3-4 hours early if you're anticipating lines or groups of people up to the same thing).

The Lucky Browser: A friend of mine tried to pick up Guitar Hero III for the Xbox 360 at a local GameStop the other day, but they'd been sold out for a week. We walked over to Target, and lo and behold, they had three copies just out on the shelf. Stores like Wal-Mart and Target tend to slip stuff onto shelves randomly and throughout the day without warning. Since they don't cater as directly to the enthusiast crowd (the way stores like GameStop and Best Buy and Circuit City do) they're always worth an off-chance look.

The Opportunist: Ask your local retailer if they have any on hold in the back. (Hint: They're not supposed to, and contemporary SKU-tracking point-of-sales systems make it tough to circumvent this typically company-driven policy, but I've caught people doing it anyway.) Hey, it never hurts to ask!

The Stealth Grabber: This one could be a fish story, but some people claim to have had success by getting the product number for something (in this case, the Wii) from its (empty) shelf space, then manually plugging it into the end-of-aisle price checkers to monitor if/when the store shows quantities in the back, i.e. when it's just arrived, but before it's made it out to the shelf.

The Long Shot: It's not inconceivable that a local grocery store -- the kind that rents videos and video games -- might also rent video game consoles. The big chains like Blockbuster nixed console rentals years ago, but some local stores still offer hardware along with the games.

The Defeatist: Give up. Sign up to play it at a friend's. And maybe consider grabbing what I consider the superior piece of hardware anyway, the inimitable Nintendo DS Lite.

Majority of Americans Want Government Regulation of Games

Sixty percent of US consumers polled agree that the government should regulate sales of violent or mature content video games, while a slight majority (51%) believe the government should actually regulate mature content itself. That's according to a study released today by the Opinion Research Corporation, commissioned by public relations firm Hill & Knowlton.

The study also reveals that 54% of the total 1,147 American adults with children surveyed believe violent or mature content affects a child's behavior.

?We?re seeing an interesting shift in economic growth and societal influence across gaming, movies and music," said Hill & Knowlton director of worldwide technology practice, Joe Paluska. "While the gaming industry is forecast to grow faster than the motion picture and recording industries, gaming still under-punches its cultural influence except when it comes to mature content.?

With current gamers, the percentages change when it comes to government regulation of violent content in games, but only slightly, with 44% saying yes to regulation and 47% saying no. 55% of current gamers are in favor of government sales regulation of games with violent or mature content, according to the study.

?While the industry is reinventing itself by broadening the content and the category, society still tends to view gamers as one-dimensional,? said Paluska. ?The industry?s reputation centers on mature content due to the sensational nature of the content and subsequent publicity. As a result, our survey suggests that there?s an appetite for more government oversight even among the maturing Atari generation who now have children.?

UPDATE (12/5/07 7:56 p.m. CST): The Entertainment Software Association has released a statement calling the Hill & Knowlton study both "unprofessional" and "unethical." The full statement (my emphasis) reads:

Today, Hill & Knowlton released the findings of research it conducted on the American public's views about the computer and video game industry. According to the agency's findings, a majority of respondents believe that the government should regulate the sale of mature content video games.

* Educational video games are perceived to provide more learning than TV or DVDs.

Also, Game|Life's Chris Kohler has a laudably incensed reaction to the study here.

10 Games to Avoid Buying For Your Children and Teens?

The other night my wife and I were watching The Simpsons episode "The Girl Who Slept Too Little," the one where Homer vigorously protests the construction of a stamp museum next door, wins, and ends up instead with a cemetery in his backyard. Much body snatching and buried-alive chicanery ensues, causing Lisa to -- no surprise -- freak the fazoli out.

I don't have kids, but it reminded me of just how utterly terrifying the most innocuous things can seem to children (like, say, the scaly, baleful, fang-toothed, glow-eyed critters in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are). I recall, for instance, my six-year-old younger brother being frightened to the point of tears after I concocted some nonsense about the constellation Draco (Latin for "dragon") being home to a full-blooded flying reptile who swooped down in the middle of the night and did whatever nefarious things a cosmic lizard might if it could creep around your house after dark, or skulk under your bed athwart the feeble yellow glow from a wall-socket nightlight. Oh how my parents loved me for that one.

The point being, the whole thing about kids and impressionability and violent or "mature-themed" video games? I get it. I'm not in denial. I'm not that sort of sardonic writer who enjoys taking shots at aggression researchers or portraying them as being "desperately out of touch" because I know it'll play well to a given "you can have my ability to eviscerate someone by plunging a pen repeatedly into their stomach when you can pry it from my cold, dead gray matter" audience. The latter's easy. It requires no thought, like hanging someone or thing in effigy and pushing a mob's "go" button.

That said, the video game industry is in the grip of demagogues just as shallow and uneducated. Take federal prosecutor Kym Worthy, who according to the Detroit News (by way of GamePolitics) just issued a "Top 10 Most Violent Games" list. The list (with what I presume is a press summary of the list comments, courtesy Detroit local news station WXYZ) follow.

1. Grand Theft Auto
"Allows to [sic] players to act out crimes and rewards players for doing so." [1]

2. Manhunt (presumably Worthy means Manhunt 2)
"Revolves around the making of a snuff film."

3. Scarface
"Involves buying and selling drugs and killing hundreds of people."

4. 50 Cent: Bulletproof
"Rapper 50 cent is involved in a web of corruption, double crosses and shady deals that lead him on a bloody path through New York's drug underworld."

5. 300: The Video Game
"Invites game room gladiators to slice their way through the Persian army."

6. The Godfather
"Opens with a 'child's version' of the player witnessing the murder of his father."

7. Killer-7
"Experienced adult gamers call this the most violent and twisted game ever played."

8. Resident Evil 4
"Shoot outs involving massive crowds of enemies in large open areas. A typical play-through can result in the killing of up to 900 enemies."

9. God of War (presumable Worthy means God of War 2)
"A sea of unrelenting violence"

10. Hitman: Blood Money
"Self-proclaimed 'most violent' game of a series. This game glamorizes killing."

11. Loaded [2]
(No comments)

Could a bunch of anti-blurbs be any less facile, unrepresentative, contemporaneously irrelevant, and otherwise entirely abstruse? To be fair, I don't know the blurbs are Worthy's (as noted, they may be WXYZ's).

Said Worthy at the accompanying press conference:

There's no way that anyone can convince me that the horribleness and the gruesomeness of the crimes that we've been seeing is not somehow a result, at least in part, of the violent video game culture.

So in the absence of direct, causal evidence, "no way that anyone can convince me" is good science? Great. Let's just ignore factors that actually have been shown (causally) to contribute to youth violence over the centuries, like, you know, bad parenting.

If anyone wants to dismiss gamers and the admittedly hyper-defensive game media as intellectually juvenile, rhetorically flippant, and aggressively over-simplistic on the violence in games issue, they need to start by looking in the mirror first.

[1] Contrary to popular myth, the Grand Theft Auto games in fact punish you for acting deviantly. Aggressive acts are in general prone to raise your notoriety rating, which culminates in massive law enforcement blitzing and your demise. Do some people enjoy the thrill of going nuts for the pleasure of being chased? Sure. I certainly have. But you can't really progress in the game if you act like the sort of maniac the media pretends the game celebrates your being. And where's the celebration of emergent stuff the game lets you do, like driving an ambulance or a fire truck around to crisis spots?

[2] I have no idea what this one's doing in the list -- it's a PlayStation top-down shooter that came out in 1996.

Super Mario Galaxy: Little Mario in Magical Misty Land

It's not the Mario we probably deserved, but it's pretty good anyway, especially given what it sets out to accomplish, and it's a whole lot better than the mess that hindsight reveals Super Mario Sunshine was on the GameCube. My only real issue right now is that so many game "journalists" have embarrassingly regressed to a state of childlike sycophancy, glossing over the kinds of issues they'd be more than happy to pick to death in a non-Nintendo game.

Like:

- Camera control. I'm three stars in, and already I'm wondering, why the heck can't I hold down the 'c' button to pan my view around in first- or third-person with the thumbstick? Nope, I have to reach up and awkwardly click the d-pad, then pan around with a cramping 180-degree headlock using a "down-is-up" control scheme I apparently can't invert. I'd even take the glitchy point-and-look view controls from Zelda: Twilight Princess over this obvious attempt to say "Pay no attention to the visuals over yonder...we know they look kind of crude and jaggy, so keep your eye on the planetoid and...oh fine, fine, fine, you can have the d-pad and a little peek once in awhile if you absolutely must, but we're not going to make it convenient!" And hey, point taken, you don't play Mario for the cutting edge visuals. Err, I mean we don't anymore, at least since Nintendo stopped caring after Mario 64, and for the record, that's fine with me, because I play games, not "a million-gazillion pixels per second!" But that still doesn't excuse the free-look mechanism, which is still a little clunky, any way you spin it.

- Correct me if I'm wrong, but I gather the interplanetary travel sequences are on rails throughout? If yes, that's really too bad, because it represents a huge opportunity missed. Why no flying mini-games to break up the flip-floppy perspective shifting as you dart around a universe that among other things tributes (or borrows shamelessly, you pick) from Antoine de Saint Exupery? Instead it's just "unlock this thing to go to that thing" and you have the controls taken away. Fingers crossed that changes up the road.

- Must every boss observe Ye Olde "Three Hits, Goes Down" Maxim? Seriously. Also, what's with the same old run around behind the bad guy and bop it in the tail schtick? Okay, I'm grousing, but it's because I'm zipping right through this thing and worried the rumors I heard that it was ridiculously easy are true (not just to beat, but to get everything, which I am a few worlds in, and I swear I'm really only half trying).

- Three dimensions of motion are tough enough to master with your brain tracking 3D on a 2D screen, but navigating upside-downside inversions of backwards-forwards precisely can get almost prohibitively confusing. I can tell I'll still be fighting the "forward is now backward, until backward is forward again" controls throughout, which since you often can't see where you're going (the occasionally lazy camera that doesn't reliably follow you over the lip of a flip, or sometimes lets you run out so far you get lost behind objects temporarily) means you end up making more reactive thumbstick course corrections than feel appropriate by my metrics. Fortunately the game isn't really about precision control. Or maybe that's unfortunate, depending on whether you're old school Mario, where precision was the gameplay, or new school "casual" Mario, where your latitude for error is so broad that my technical quibble almost doesn't matter.

More happy-to-call-them-cavils as I progress:

- The one-life-slice klaxon. Why couldn't it be quieter, or just a gentler sound? Needling you incessantly while you're desperately trawling, hopping, twirling, and stomping for coins isn't functionally helpful. It's just an old-school gameplay trope someone wasn't smart enough to design around (or design better).

- A few more camera issues, like spots where you want to look back up a slide you just slid down to pick up stars you missed, but the camera stubbornly refuses to move without going back into the clumsy first-person mode. Later, when you have to grab star pieces off the queen bee, the camera locks in circle-strafe mode, which is fine until you hit the water, lose the bee suit, and have to grab it again...except you can't see it or travel to it in a straight line, because the camera wants you to keep looking at the queen bee. Why not at least the option to pan around with the thumbstick or pointer while holding down the 'c' button? That's all I'm saying.

My favorite moments so far?

On the first planetoid, when you hop in the orange pipe that leads to the cube-shaped room and trigger the centipede sequence that has you following the trail Lionel Richie-style (dancing on the ceiling!) wall to wall to get your free guy before hopping out again. Also tres-cool, the first boss you have to climb around on, though again, it's a smidgen too easy. Why not knock me off a few times and require I climb up the other two legs? Maybe an inverse underside path (or even a route that takes me inside to sabotage the apparatus in stages?).

UPDATE: (12/4/07 10:08 a.m.): For the benefit of readers who worry I'm reviewing the game in this post, I'm not -- these are very early impressions, approximately two dozen "perfect game" stars in. I've also added a few more quibbles (above).

Review: Renegade Game Chair, It's So Very Chair-y

It's big, it's black, it's plush and cushy, it's got a plastic cup holder large enough to bear a 40 ounce 7-Eleven Slurpee, a pull-out storage container, wraparound stereo headspace speakers, game-triggered flashing lights, a swanky neck pad, and it vibrates at the speed of "massage therapy." Can you say dork-tastic?

Meet the Renegade Game Chair, the latest version of That Game Chair You Might've Seen in The 40 Year Old Virgin during the "you know how I know you're gay" exchange between (Cal) Seth Rogen and (David) Paul Rudd. Yep, that's this game chair, only an earlier version.

It's the big black leathery looking thing Paul's sitting in with the speaker jutting out like the driving end of a 1-wood golf club.

Ultimate Game Chair, Inc. (that's their name, for real) was kind (or crazy) enough to send me one, which since it ships in its own splashy image-splattered box, had the neighbors out on their porches and gawking when it rolled up my front walk...all 50 pounds. Well okay, not really, but it did get the UPS guy to pause after we carried it in, grinning, and ask:

UPS Guy: You play games for a living, don't you?

Me: Why yes, yes I do.

UPS Guy: So that's why you're in your pajamas every time I drop something off?

Me: Uhhh... Think of it as me cutting my personal carbon footprint by saving on water for showers and laundry.

UPS Guy: So, does it pay good?

Me: Umm... Say, you guys hiring? [Gesturing at truck] You need a special license to drive one those?

Anyway, the Renegade Game Chair bills itself as "the all in one video game, massage, and home theater chair," claiming 12 vibration motors that sync with sound effects in games so you can "feel" the grenades slamming you to the ground in a modern warfare shooter like Call of Duty 4, or the kickback from your shotgun in an action-RPG like Mass Effect.

Hello big, posh, and geeky.

Assembly is essentially tool-less save for some light torquing with a supplied allen wrench to attach the side arms. It takes about 10 minutes out of the box to get everything unwrapped and plugged in. Note that the chair is only warrantied up to 200 lbs., though the site's FAQ claims it's "passed drop tests at 300 lbs."

Fully assembled, it looks smaller than I'd imagined. Before it arrived, I'd envisioned something more like an adjustable office chair (or at least with some sort of height adjustment option) but the Renegade is one-height-fits-all, which translates to a sitting area about a foot off the ground -- much too low for most PC gamers at a desk, alas, where your average chair base needs to be closer to two feet.[1]

So I hauled it out of my office and upstairs after enduring a little gentle ribbing from my wife (fashion tip, black and gray sync dreadfully with olive-green couches and heavy-patterned area rugs), plugged in my game systems, and had at it.

It's hard to convey something as personally subjective as "comfort," but sitting in the chair sans feedback feels to me like a healthy compromise between "relaxed" and firm enough to provide the sort of vertical support I'd imagine an ergonomic specialist giving the thumbs up. Sitting for extended sessions, and I used it for several 4-5 hour stints, I can say it's a heck of a lot more comfortable than the folding chair, wooden rocker, or couch I tend to move between when working on game reviews.

Apparently the older versions of the chair connected directly to the game consoles themselves, allowing precise feedback emulation, assuming the chair can read the feedback signals, of course. The new version of the Renegade eschews direct connections for a one-size-fits-all 5mm-to-RCA audio adapter, and includes the stereo RCA passthrough adapter.

After attempting (and failing) to find a special connector or USB port to plug my systems in directly, I contacted Renegade's Jamie Duran, who explained that the reason they dropped feedback-specific connections was because some publishers (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) encrypt their feedback signal. If you can't read the signal, creating an agnostic deterministically fed setup is impossible (without, presumably, feeding Microsoft your firstborn).

Thus in the Renegade, the audio signal runs directly from your game console (in fact, anything that plays audio works) into the chair, where it can be adjusted courtesy sensitivity sliders which dictate vibration intensity.

The compromise? Indeterministic feedback. Well, that's my term for it, but it essentially means that your play experience is shaped by audio frequency amplitude, not preprogrammed, deterministic cues. Translation? Loud music, loud voices, loud just about anything (especially anything with low-end kick) can trigger the vibration motors, resulting in a mix of really cool as well as really confusing sensations.

The Renegade keys off audio signals to generate vibration, which works at best imprecisely, since anything within a certain frequency range can trigger a response.

Duran suggested disabling background music, which helped measurably, though you'll be in trouble with games like Halo 3, which, I had no idea until I tried, actually won't let you disable the music. (Gee, Microsoft standing in the way of consumer choices? Anyone see a pattern here?)

Another problem's that you can't (or, well, you can, but probably shouldn't) feed the audio signal through a receiver, which is how my systems are connected, because the receiver is likely applying additional effects (reverb, digital reprocessing) which can muddle the chair's ability to translate effectively. Moreover, the tiny speakers in the chair's headspace tend unsurprisingly to target mid-range EQ levels at the expense of low and high end fidelity. Also, feeding the audio straight to the chair cuts it completely out of your stereo setup, which in my case means sacrificing a pair of gloriously high-end Energy Connoisseur C-series speakers I've had since 1999 (and which, for the record, still sound miles better than alternatives from competitors ten times as pricey).

The upside of going direct to the chair's head-speakers is that you can still game at a fairly high decibel level after hours without incurring the wall- or ceiling-thumping wrath of your neighbors (if you live in an apartment, or like me, a series of connected town-homes).

Tip: A Radio Shack RCA splitter that lets you run a single source to two designated stereo outputs should in theory let you get around the receiver issue, though I didn't have a chance to test it myself.

As for the feedback itself, those 12 vibration motors set to maximum pack a hefty wallop, but they only fire in "on" or "off" states. No "hey, I felt that grenade on my left side" or "that bullet-stream just grazed me on the right" distinction, in other words. Another "aww shucks" letdown I imagine direct feedback could have pretty easily remedied.

That said, while playing Ratchet and Clank Future, I flipped on the "massage" option, which simply runs the motors at your selected intensity level. While they don't actually roll up and down your back, the motors oscillate in a way that seems to emulate a rolling sensation. Put it this way, it's probably the drowsiest I've felt while simultaneously playing a pretty intense platformer. Anything that makes me, a bona fide three-pots-a-day caffeine addict, want a nap while playing my favorite action game of the year (you heard right, Super Mario Galaxy) is probably getting the job done.

In conclusion, I don't know that I like the Renegade enough to personally own one, because hey, let's get real: a large, delectably curved, sleekly black, and cable-snaky chair with "Ultimate Game Chair" emblazoned on the headrest looks a little dorky in your average domestic living room setup.[2]

But if you're hardcore about game feedback or just want a sturdy, comfortable, luxurious spot to plant your derriere, the Renegade is a top performer. I've tried a lot of the cheap imitation off-brand stuff you can find wandering around malls or in department stores, and they're bric-a-brac junk compared to UGC's Renegade.

Ladies and gentlemen, the cup-holder -- do not, and I repeat do not attempt to game and drink a Starbucks grande low fat latte without one.

A few closing notes:

- At Sam's Club, the price of the Renegade is $179. According to UGC, they bought only 24 per store and the in store date was 11/12/07, so they were expected to go pretty quick.

- You can buy the the Renegade online direct from UGC for $299 plus $55 UPS Ground. You can also find it at Target and (Correction: Apparently you can't find it at Target) Fred Meyer.

- You can read more about the Renegade here, or download an info sheet here. (Links directly to 638.9 Kb PDF)

[1] Why not an adjustable version for PC gamers sitting in front of desks? Most PC gamers probably don't have rear-channel speakers in their office space, and the game chair's convenient headspace speakers (with proper volume balancing) could be a perfect way to add surround sound without dragging cables across the room to satellites, or running clunky cantilevered speaker holders from clamps attached to the desk.

[2] Hey, it'd probably look hot in your average college dorm room illuminated by the soft glow of wall-strung Christmas lights!

Activision and Blizzard Merge, Become 'Activision Blizzard'

I'm torn. Activard? Blizzavision? But Activision Blizzard, that's a little meh, between you, me, and the talentless if predictable name-brand fallback. Oh well, guess we'll have to live with the new six-syllabic company moniker, because according to the AP (by way of Business Week) Vivendi SA said today it plans to snap up a controlling stake in Activision and merge the publisher with Vivendi Games in a deal said to be worth $18.9 billion.

The new company is expected to have a combined 2008 turnover of $3.8 billion and the highest operating margins[1] of a "third-party" game publisher that isn't functionally affiliated with "first-party" console manufacturers like Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony. Interestingly, Electronic Arts, which back in May forecast net losses for its fiscal year ending March 2008, is expecting slightly lower net revenues of between $3.35 and $3.65 billion. In a year that's seen record business for the industry overall, EA announced a $195 million second quarter loss and said it was cutting four percent of its staff last month (to be fair, EA claims the downturn's due to new mobile and casual initiatives that haven't yet paid off).

The Activision-Vivendi deal combines some of the top franchises in the game industry, from Activision's Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk, and Call of Duty, to Blizzard's marquee WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo series.

Look at it another way, and you could argue that in recent years, Activision's strengths have been in console games with strong single-player experiences, while Vivendi's have been mostly in PC-based games and online (*hem* World of Warcraft *hem*). Combine the two, and add giddy-scream-inducing stuff like StarCraft 2, and you get a merger that not only makes strategic sense, but which forges a formidable brand-driven powerhouse.

Bigger than Electronic Arts? Hard to say. Certainly "on par with," financially speaking with annual revenues expected in the $3.7 billion range. But look past the clinical Wall Street number crunching and the only real questions I'm interested in are:

1. Can 'Activision Blizzard' (gawd that's weird to say out loud) duplicate EA's business model of churning out perennial franchises that generate reliable profits?

2. Should it? Would that really be a good thing for consumers?

Also, while the merger is undeniably blissful news for the new class of video game tycoons (set, in my opinion, to eventually rival or become one with media empires like News Corporation, Sony, Time Warner, or Disney), I suspect it's bad news for a lot of developers. After the Wall Street honeymoon's over, the next phase in just about any merger is consolidation, which means culling "redundancy," which typically culminates in layoffs, not to mention the old saw about corporate incompatibility with spontaneous creativity.

Anyway. I've left out all the stock-trade mazuma-speak. Get it here if you like. The companies will remain publicly traded on the Nasdaq under Activision's ticker ATVI.

UPDATE (12/2/07 5:00 p.m. CST): Gamasutra's Simon Carliss has a nice five-point overview of what he views as the merger's "five key points." Numbers one, two, and three are fairly self-evident, but the fourth isn't, and it's worth a read. The fifth I'm not sure I agree with, since Carliss's "$3.8 to $4 billion" figure for EA's fiscal year revenue is after deferred net revenue.

UPDATE (12/2/07 10:31 p.m. CST): 1UP's Jeff Green talked to Blizzard's CEO Mike Morhaine earlier today and clarifies a few of the less obvious details about the merger/acquisition/takeover/bunch-of-guys-singing-camp-songs-together/whatchamacallit here. Apparently the new name is nominal, and won't appear on a boxed product. (Remember when Babbages and Software Etc. were called Neostar? Sort of like that.) I wish Jeff could've pushed a smidgen harder and asked about what this meant for each company's staff in terms of studio changes and/or potential downsizing, but comme ci, comme ca, I guess.

[1] Give it up for World of Warcraft. Technical and support staffing costs are probably a drop in the bucket compared to the revenue generated from over nine million worldwide subscribers times $180 a year (per user).