What do you get when you smarten up a clunky browser-like interface and drag access to all its goodies down local-like? Try the new PlayStation Store interface, coming sometime in April, localized and optimized to make browsing for content less of an eye-squinting, d-pad tapping fiasco.
If you've used Sony's PlayStation Store much, you know it's more or less like using a gamepad to navigate a browser. You've probably at one time or another lost the cursor while tapping around, groaned waiting for half the screen to refresh after a screen change, and generally felt like you'd traded the snappy confines of the PS3's native interface for something tacked on and klutzy.
Sony's PlayStation Store 2.0, coming soon to a PS3 near you.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the new PlayStation Store looks like it's part of the PS3's native interface, probably because it will be, and while you'll still access it via the XMB (XrossMediaBar) you won't be whisked off to somewhere else, but instead zip around in an ostensibly-as-snappy menu schema that breaks things down a bit more the way Microsoft and Nintendo already do. There's no shame in pointing that last bit out. It's not who gets it right first, after all -- just ask Blizzard.
The only downside? Per Sony:
To enable enhancements to be made to the store, no additional downloadable content will be posted prior to the revamp, starting April 3.
Existing content will remain available, of course, and PlayStation Store updates should be back on track middle-April, with the addition of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.
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No, it's not a day-early April Fool's story, sorry as that sounds to report. According to this ad, "a national newspaper...will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person" for the answer to the question "did computer games make you turn to a life of crime?"
Note the operative vernacular: Did computer games make you. As if "computer games" were like a thug with a gun jabbed rudely in your midsection.
Here's the full ad, soliciting "Males and Females aged 0 to 60 from the UK."
A national newspaper wants your story and will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person. Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it's something we like, we'll call you straight back.
So what about all the newspapers that've contributed to the delinquency of, oh I don't know, verity in general?
[Thanks, MCV]
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wow. so much for unbiased reporting. they are basically making an assumption that video games "make" people into criminals, because i mean, realistically, GTA3 is just as effective as an al-Queda training camp for making people do bad things in America.
And why not do an article about how video games did something GOOD for someone?
Meanwhile they forget to mention all the real-life images of gangsters, terrorists, pedophiles, criminals, murderers, and rapists that appear on the front cover of their newspaper, along with complete details and how-to's for repeating those crimes. Now THAT would make a good story.
Imagine a future in which the only devices you use to access applications for work or play are little more than empty digital shells. Imagine a game like Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft run not from a local chunk of high-end hardware, but on incredibly powerful back-end cluster servers in office buildings thousands of miles away that contextually pipe visual data over ultra high-speed wireless to the view-screen of your choice.
Imagine a future in which you own neither a PC nor a console. Instead, you own a fleet of cheap display devices (fixed and mobile) with set-top-like technology stitched into inbuilt chips capable of relaying visually cutting-edge information to you instantaneously, on any device you like, anywhere in the world, any way you like it.
The guy who architected Europea's Xbox buseiness, Sandy Duncan, is the latest to proclaim the death of consoles "in the next 5 to 10 years." The thing that got me thinking about where that ultimately leads comes from this:
There is a definite ?convergence? of other devices such as set top boxes. There?s hardly any technology difference between some hard disc video recorders and an Xbox 360 for example. In fact in 5 to 10 years I don?t think you?ll have any box at all under your TV, most of this stuff will be ?virtualized? as web services by your content provider.
The future of questions like "whither PC or console?" may be irrelevant, in other words, because the answer to the question could turn out to be "neither," and I don't mean because they'll merge and become one box. Instead, the box disappears, supplanted by a series of variously located screens and interface tools (physical or gestural) that allow you to receive, engage, and move information around on the fly.
Think about that. How cool would it be if information simply flowed to various points in your living and working environments the way that electricity flows to every lamp and light bulb in your residence? Now imagine World of Warcraft dialed up and playable as you like, in the same sense that you might tune to the same TV station at different times and on multiple different TVs located in different rooms of your house.
The technology to pass along low-band visual information to "dumb terminals," i.e. display devices with virtually no internal computing horsepower has been around for decades in mainframe and via client/server tools from companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Citrix. It works great for simple office apps and other sundry utilities. Trouble was, the power necessary to run something as CPU and GPU intensive as World of Warcraft and stream it to millions of users in realtime without a hitch or a hiccup was simply unavailable.
Connectivity and parallel processing power are finally catching up, along with technology that reduces or eliminates application redundancy. Sharing the load actually eliminates a huge chunk of that load, savings which can be applied to enhance other aspects of a given application.
Imagine buying or subscribing to a game online that pipes nothing more than visual information to your local view screen, reconfigures the interface dynamics of the game to match the size and interactive capacity of said interface, then lets you engage at whatever level you like without worrying whether you have the latest graphics processor or sound card or CPU.
What do you think? Does a PC-and-console-free future in which games compete for your attention on an external grid-computing playing field sound interesting? Or do you think we'll still have PCs and consoles taking up shelf space as discrete devices in the next 5 to 10?
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two words.... bull.... shit.... the day that anyone can afford, and even want to afford, the cost of the bandwidth necessary to do this would not be in our lifetimes. you cant have "just enough" bandwidth to run this type of application because it is never constant and even a slight drop in stream would ruin the whole experience. no i dont think that people in general would be willing to get rid of physical media and physical processing on a local scale for the purposes of having a server run it for you a thousand miles away. i most certainly would not want to risk losing my information or have to start all over if a server crash occurs or if lag forces the game to end. this whole thing is just what you said, an imagination, a non-happening, an impossibility at present and certainly into the future. i mean i can see the business sense in it (saving money on expensive computer hardware) but not the gaming sense in it (incredible data loads over limited internet bandwidth...)
I agree. Not going to happen. Tons of games have addons and mods and other customization. Also Yuffiek133 is correct. You need more then enough bandwidth so you don't get lag. This also opens up huge security holes with people sniffing out packets being sent back and forth. Personally I prefer having a pimped out PC I can brag about and not just some emachine. This architecture would also put thousands of hardware companies out of buisness with only the best of the best remaining to supply hardware for the clouds. Also, this means the companies could charge whatever they wanted. 100.00 for a "computer" plus 100.00 for the bandwidth. You're looking at 200.00 a month just to be able to check your email not to mention subscription fees for everything from outlook to photoshop since you are only "renting" the software and you don't actually own it.
Bareleif has it more than many here seem to realize. The fact is that the USA is nowhere near being the leader in bandwidth distribution. I love the USA, but just because this isn't going to work for us doesn't mean it won't work for at least a dozen other countries with higher broadband penetration than us. Unless something drastic changes in the next 5 - 10 years, the US will not be participating in the system discused in the article--but several other countries could.
Here's a followup to my earlier rant reacting to a Times Online report suggesting that the UK plans to slap cigarette-style health warnings on video games. The report behind all that hoopla's now out, and among other things, it calls for BBFC ratings to supplant PEGI ratings on the front of game boxes, and for the BBFC to take a leading role in rating and regulating game sales in the UK.
Why choose a populist TV celebrity psychologist for this report? Why not Jade Goody? Seriously, this is a political matter of state control over children. There are many far better qualified people who could have written it.
In the same way you wouldn?t let your 11 to 12 year-old watch the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is an 18-rated film, you really shouldn?t be letting them play 18-rated video games.
I agree. Common sense, right? If so, why does the report spend much of its ink criticizing the ratings industry for what's ultimately a parental responsibility? Is it because criticizing parents directly is off limits? Career-damaging because it's too pointed and potentially offensive? Because we're too timid to admonish the real buck-stops-with-them policy makers? That we need intermediary scapegoats to channel professional fecklessness?
Now what Byron proposes in the report, as it relates to video games, is a hybrid classification system, in which:
- BBFC logos are on the front of all games (i.e. 18,15,12,PG and U).
- PEGI will continue to rate all 3+ and 7+ games and their equivalent logos (across all age ranges) will be on the back of all boxes.
Hybrid, then, but only in the unbalanced sense that primary video game rating responsibilities will be transferred to the BBFC. The thinking, plainly, is that the BBFC, which by the way stands for British Board of Film Classification, is more familiar and comprehensible to parents than PEGI, and that the PEGI symbols are too confusing.
So instead of supporting all the terrific work that PEGI's already done and calling for simple classification reforms like the addition of text labels to PEGI's symbols (e.g. "fear," "sex," "violence," etc. below the black and white pictures), Byron instead argues for classic British protectionism:
As PEGI is a ?pan-European? system, the ratings have to account for the different sensitivities of all member countries. This means that the ratings given reflect a much wider spectrum of views than a national system, catering for just UK sensitivities might do.
Be aware that the BBFC, which selectively rates some but not all video games, is the organization responsible for banning Manhunt 2 from release in the UK.
If there's going to be one ratings system, it should be PEGI. With PEGI, they think very carefully about age [appropriateness], but the BBFC is set up to rate films, and it takes that approach for games when a different approach is required.
PEGI breaks it down to a different level. If there's bad language it will give you a specific symbol, if there's gambling there's another symbol, and some games will have a whole raft of symbols on the back. It's a different depth, it's more sensible, and it also has a European aspect to it.
Tanya Byron's new task force is seeking better information for parents and other users of video games. This seems reasonable. One cannot be enthusiastic about the idea that young children are participating in horrible games.
But we should keep cool. The evidence justifying a more draconian stance is pretty thin.
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Thank you for bringing the issue to a mainstream computer magazine!
It needs more public attention!
Imagine spotting a label on a video game that reads "Quitting Gaming Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health." Now stop imagining, because according to The Times, video games in the UK will shortly be forced to carry cigarette-style health warnings that "would have to be displayed prominently on all packaging materials, like health warnings on cigarettes, as well as on shop display cases."
Nope, not a plot for a new version of George Orwell's 1984. Not a hypothetical either -- apparently it's already in the works.
I like that the Times refers to the report behind the move as "in response to a growing moral panic," because that's certainly what it sounds like to me...not unlike the sort of moral panic playwright Arthur Miller was fingering in his anti-Mcarthyist polemic The Crucible. Is government legislation of video games the new international McCarthyism?
Everyone gets that the data on how games affect kids "in terms of learning and development" is inconclusive and hotly debated, right?
Now I don't have a problem with clinical psychologist and report author Tanya Byron when she says "You would not send your child to the pool without teaching them to swim, so why would you let them online without teaching them to manage the risks?" Of course you wouldn't. And you shouldn't let your underage kids play video games without rules, supervision, and paying attention to what they're playing.
But I'm getting sick and tired of the cultural double standard when it comes to established media. You know, the one that gives books like Anne Rice's The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty and movies like Saw IV a pass, when arguably less graphic games like Manhunt 2 are threatened with interdiction.
What's most infuriating, though, is the implied analogy between video games and cigarettes. Cigarettes cause lung cancer. Lung cancer. Don't tell me video games cause "psychological cancer." That it's games and not bad parenting that's to blame when some GTA-tweener goes on a real-life gun rampage and the parents can't be bothered to consider how their working two jobs a piece and leaving the kids unsupervised had anything to do with it.
UPDATE (3/27): Now that the report's out, it seems the "cigarette-style" labels The Times was referring to are in fact just the proposed BBFC ratings (on a game's front) with the PEGI ratings on the back. You can read my initial reaction to the report here.
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What a load of crap! What is it going to be next, an interview with the psychiatrist general, the legal gaming age?!?!?!?! What the hell are these numskulls smoking?!?!?!?! I'm 14 years old and love to play games like Halo and Crysis and I'm not a deranged serial killer. If all it takes is a video game to push you over then you had mental problems anyway.
I can't say anything that hasn't already been said over and over again: we can't let governments censor every aspect of life. I'm sick of politicians and 'moral police' laying such heavy blame on video games. How are they any different from films, television programs, etc? If anything, I've learned more relevant things in my life from video games than any other media, and they've never tempted me to lash out in real life. No rational person would think it. The simple answer: lazy parenting.
I for one intend to raise informed children who are only given information and tools appropriate for their age. When I feel they are mature enough to understand something, whether it's a game, a book, or a movie, then I will let them experience it, and be there to explain it.
Things need to be understood, not misunderstood. One Very Important Thought: "If you can be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you can be told what to say or think."
Remember Fox 'n' Friends' segment on the "SE"X-Box where they outlined how Mass Effect contained graphic sex? I think it's safe to say that all this paranoia is just propagated by the fact that mainstream media report on what attracts viewers, as opposed to what's important, and that parents are willing to watch/listen to any news regarding stuff that might harm their kids (see South Park: Cheesing. btw why the hell is nobody mad that kids like my little brother's 9-y/o friends are watching South Park?).
Just how accurately are weapons in video games modeled after their real life counterparts? I'm going to venture an educated supposition that the answer has a lot to do with how you react to the aim-and-trigger abstraction of a gamepad or remote (for the same reasons these can wreck the sense of control in an otherwise highly accurate driving simulation). But let's assume abstraction's not an issue -- just how accurate are those 7.62MM AKS-74Us and 500 Tactical Shotguns you're whipping out from your protagonist's invisible ordnance spin-wheel?
Popular Mechanics investigates and concludes what we all know intuitively: while increased realism is always on developers' minds, gameplay trumps realism, every time.
For example, people associate shotguns with doing massive close range damage, so even though buckshot penetrates poorly in reality, it's purposefully designed to shred walls and armor with ease in most video games (in RB6V2, for instance, the 500 Tactical Shotgun has "high penetration [to make it] ideal for defeating cover").
Another example in the article is the Uzi, which many (including me!) think of as a sloppy, inaccurate submachine gun, when in reality it's considered both reliable and accurate. In video games, it's thus often modeled to handle the way you'd imagine it would after watching a couple episodes of that popular 1980s unreality-instigator, Miami Vice. (And in RB6V2, it's called a VZ83 SMG with a "high rate of fire" that "trades accuracy for higher power").
"It's about taking the personality of a weapon, and making it shine in the game," says Rainbow Six Vegas 2 designer Philippe Theiren. "These consoles are so powerful, when you fire a bullet we could factor all of it in: windfall, range, everything about the history of that specific weapon, friction values for the barrel, how many times it?s been fired since it was last cleaned. We could make it as anally realistic as possible. But we?re not trying to make a live simulator.?
Of course some people are, say the folks behind the freebie online shooter and promotional recruiting tool, America's Army. You'd think, anyway. According to the article, AA's executive producer Phil Bossant appears to suggest that high frame rates trump gun realism for the AA development team. Popular Mechanics concludes this makes AA the inverse of the RB6V2 situation, where RB6V2's Theiren claims frame rate limitations aren't the issue so much as observing basic shooter conventions. Except for the part where even today's mid-grade PCs with dedicated video cards pack more powerful hardware than today's "now-gen" consoles.
I'm betting what Bossant really means, having played a lot of AA myself a few years ago, is more along the lines of "while we're several orders of magnitude more realistic than your average mainstream shooter in terms of modeling gun ballistics, being 100% accurate would impact the frame rate." But that doesn't mean AA isn't several double-digit percentage points more realistic than for-fun shooters like Call of Duty 4 or RB6V2, which for totally valid reasons attempt to please a broader swathe of players weaned on popular ballistic stereotypes.
Now in AA, part of the entertainment value lies in figuring out how to work around your preconceived perceptions about weapons-fire derived from exaggerations and caricatures in TV and books and movies. Mastering tactical combat in AA is more about retooling your ballistic sensibilities than sacrificing entertainment value.
Wouldn't it be interesting to see a developer take a serious crack at modeling your average SR2550 Sniper Rifles and AUG Para SMGs as perfectly as possible, then marketing the game on the premise that the entertainment value lies in mastering the weaponry as much as fast roping and rappelling and coordinating multi-phasic, multi-personnel assaults?
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I thoroughly agree with your last point. A lot of developers CLAIM that their shooters (mostly war FPS's) are the most realistic and they tout some new trademarked doohicky that has the most realistic physics etc. As a gun owner and avid shooter and shooter game fan, they are incorrect. I would love to see a developer just once try it to see what happens, but in todays age no one is willing to take any kind of risk of a game not selling. They could be worried also of a gamer being frustrated at not being able to hit a target. Far Cry and Crysis had those complaints, but it wasn't because of realistic gunplay. It was because Crytek wanted to try to make the game difficult.
If you've hacked your Xbox 360 save files in order to falsely inflate your Gamerscore, standby to see your Xbox Live profile sullied for good. If you care at all about Microsoft's meta-scoring system that tracks player achievements in games and assigns them a summary number that cumulatively boasts player prowess, that's good news for the presumably honest majority who've been knocked down the leaderboards by your not-so-average hoodwinking prima donnas.
How do you cheat? You mean you didn't realize you could? (Hey, neither did I.) I'm told it's possible by monkeying with your save files and account info to somehow unlock objectives without actually playing the related games.
The director of programming for Xbox Live, Larry Hryb (aka "Major Nelson") wrote about the crackdown yesterday on his blog, noting that the steps include resetting violators' Gamerscores to zero, making it imposible for them to regain all previously earned achievements (including legitimate ones), and labeling each account as a "cheater" for the entire community to see. In this example, the gamer card says "What happened to their Gamerscore?" with the answer "They've been caught cheating" followed by a link to "Find out more."
Click the latter and you'll see the official policy breakdown. The only controversial point would hypothetically be that gamerscore "corrections" (as Microsoft is politely calling these resets) "will remain permanent without any way to appeal." Hypothetically controversial, because what if Microsoft pulls over the wrong traffic violators? According to their website it's actually a baseless hypothetical, because "the company look[s] for abnormal achievement and gamerscore activity using criteria that identifies users who have used external means to earn achievements without really playing the game," and that they "only correct gamerscores for players who meet the criteria 100%."
The "you've got the wrong guy!" defense is probably bunkum, in other words, as is the even lamer "someone hijacked my account" defense per Microsoft's "terms of use" account policy.
Microsoft's test account example of what a "corrected" account will look like.
Care to see justice in action? Back in December 2006, GamersReports interviewed an Xbox Live user with the Gamertag StripClubDJ who'd apparently broken the "nearly unthinkable 100,000 gamer score," an interview in which StripClubDJ answers the question "How do you do it?" with:
Time consuming and patience will conquer anything. DETERMINATION!!!
Apparently determination laced with flimflam, because here's StripClubDJ's profile as of 3/26.
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Online games should let those people who are bound to cheat have a few levels or a server where there's auto aim and whatever other cheats there are, and then realize how lame it is to press a button.
And Single-player games should have a way to unlock a sort of developer/God mode, but deactivate achievements so they can still explore a game in a free manner, but not increase their gamerscore.
People... People... People.... For those who don't understand this banning: 1. You agree to their terms of agreement, in which you agree not to cheat 2. These people who are being banned are taken off for using hacks... not cheat code that are built into the game that developers allow you to use 3. How would you feel if you were paying for an XBL membership and every time you signed in to play a game you got cheated out of your money by a hacker? This is a good step in the right direction for the XBL community. Note that they are banning only those who did this to obtain 100% of their gamer score. I'm sure if it was up to the gaming community the rule would have been a little more strict, you do it once then you're gone. Sooo... if you really feel the need to cheat, don't go online and just keep your cheats to yourself. If you really feel proud of yourself for doing absolutely nothing to earn these points then celebrate yourself by yourself.
First off, there is a difference between cheating and hacking.
Cheating is pressing up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, a, b, start, select.
Hacking is modifying software or hardware to achieve a goal not intended by the original design to have an unfair advantage over competition.
Meaning you can't use God Mode on Multiplayer but you can on Single player because your going against AI and not other people.
I realize there was Game Genie to modify HEX in Nintendo games, but like I said, its you vs the computer, not really hacking.
These people being banned modified a file(s) from their xbox hdd or memory card to manipulate their gamer score, which is violation of the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Terms of Agreement and End User License Agreement.
They can still play and compete and use their account, they just cant gain ranks.
Roger Ebert is famous in gaming circles for writing that games will never be art in the sense "serious" films and books are. That, according to never-deferential Ebert, is because "video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."
Meaning, of course, only that Roger Ebert would have gotten along swimmingly with the early structuralist literary theorist Roland Barthes, but perhaps not so much the later Barthes that crawled (perhaps a tad shellshocked) from the rubble of post-structuralism. According to Later-Barthes, "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." Which in case any of that sounds a little too hand-rolled and smokable, is just a dramatic way of saying "get over your whole 'artist as author' schtick, Roger."
Thankfully Roger Ebert is no more an aesthetic authority on the artistic status of video games than Harold Bloom has any serious credibility snobbishly dismissing the literary significance of a populist writer like Stephen King.
And thank goodness as well that the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) are willing to host a symposium on the debate entitled The Art of Play, "exploring games as an expressive medium," between March 31 and April 1.
For two days, attendees will be able to check out and play both independent and commercial games in an arcade hosted by Kokoromi, a Montreal-based group that "creates and promotes experimental gameplay."
About the symposium:
The Art of Play brings together creators and researchers of games from multiple contexts - large AAA productions from major corporations, mid-sized developers completing work-for-hire projects, indies developed by small teams and released for free on the internet or for a small price on one of the many alternative distribution channels, and experimental games produced within an academic context. The aim of this Symposium and Arcade is to survey the games that brought us to this moment with their unique creative vision, and to frame the field moving forward, as game makers finally abandon the question "CAN games be art," and begin to ask ourselves in how many ways they WILL be.
Best of all? It's free and open to the public.
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That games development is a global phenomenon anymore goes without saying. So what happens when French game developers find themselves in the economic crosshairs of national governments? Develop's Rick Gibson speculates pointedly (and poignantly) here, exploring the pros and cons, and rightly questioning whether financial kickbacks for French game developers are just "classic French protectionism" under a different name.
I remember reading about this in late 2006, when news broke that the European Union was investigating whether tax breaks for French game makers constituted an illegal subsidy. France wanted to offer a tax credit worth 20 percent of the cost of making European video games with "cultural value" to France-based game studios. Pass a test of some sort -- satisfy a government-determined requirement that the game contributes to "European cultural diversity and creativity" -- and presto, instant 20 percent cha-ching-o. Reviewing the proposal, the EU was concerned that the definition of "cultural value" might be too broad, and that the tax break could dramatically bunch up the playing field.
One year on, in mid-December 2007, the EU reached a decision about that "broadness," and effectively said "Go for it, France."
To be fair, it's worth noting that this has every bit as much to do with whether the French recognize gaming as "artful," as the raw financials. French cinema is already eligible for tax breaks, you can argue, so why not games as well? Incidentally, see this piece about a very similar issue in Australia. The sorry reality seems to be that the artistic status of a medium, culturally speaking, has a lot to do with government bankrolling.
If the idea of a French tax credit for game studios seems unsettling, ask yourself whether you'd sit politely on your laurels and nobly refuse to partake of the same accolades granted other "artistic" venues. The tragedy is that game studios really have no choice, lest they buttress the idea that games, as antediluvian critics like Roger Ebert might have us believe, merely "represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."
Gibson makes additional observations about a French tax break's pros and cons worth considering. He rightly notes that France's development sector "collapsed" in recent years because Quebec solicited a virtual exodus by offering massive tax breaks for game developers. According to Gibson, "in a further twist of the knife into the back of the French development industry, the Quebecois ["French-Canadians"] offered an additional tax break for Francophone ["French-speaking"] studios." Witness the rise of Canadian development studio Ubisoft Montreal in recent years -- the government of Quebec gave the company $4 million dollars to expand in 2005. The company gets that money over three years and says it plans to increase it's staff to 2,000 by 2010.
Surely, says Gibson, the French deserve an ameliorative tax break? Yes, but since France's games industry was ailing well before Quebecois stepped in, make that "yes with caveats."
...a tax break for games will definitely help French games studios attract finance and publishing deals by reducing their cost base, even though their scheme offers just over half as much assistance as Montreal?s. But the French need to learn from their past to make the scheme work.
...both larger and smaller studios alike will benefit but, unless commercially viable projects are assisted, the scheme could still fail.
Which gets us to the million dollar question: who decides which projects get funded? More from Gibson:
The disbursement in France must avoid illegal state aid by ensuring that funded projects are ?cultural? in nature. A scorecard for titles exists, based on a test applied by the Ministry of Culture. I suspect I?m not the only one filled with unease about the idea of a government wielding an effective veto over which games studios make.
Is anyone shuddering yet? Even with Gibson's suggestion that the criteria for funding are "fairly generous," the notion that a Ministry of Culture would scrutinize a game and determine its cultural "worth," and that such an organization already exists in the UK and applies a similar litmus test to UK-based films, sounds awfully creepy.
Think about it. 20 percent's a huge number if your budget's in the millions, say the Euro equivalent of $10 to $20 million U.S. dollars. Seeking approval from the Ministry of Culture will almost certainly determine which games get made. Witness the UK ban only recently lifted on Rockstar's Manhunt 2. What are the chances Rockstar would ever get that by the Ministry? Even if a company had the funding and recognizability of a company like Rockstar to succeed without the credit, they could find themselves competing with Francophile developers at a 20 percent disadvantage.
That's only the start of things. Gibson says more fundamental problems exist:
If the French Inland Revenue interprets games as audio-visual products rather than computer software, then there may eventually be ramifications for (amongst other things) development and retail contracts, possibly even import duties on games consoles. That could have a catastrophic impact on this business, with ramifications beyond France.
Read that again: "ramifications beyond France." I think he's right. As noted at the outset, gaming's long since gone global, with, for instance, art and other asset creation studios in China impacting game budgets and retail prices of games in Europe, the U.S., etc. Half the games you're playing on your console or PC were probably designed in another country, which in turn drew upwards of half its production costs from external asset creation et al. sources. Some of the hottest games going are created by nationally amorphous game studios with limbs extending into multiple countries and who offer cultural fealty to no one. National tax credits designed to influence game makers to promote a particular culture contravene the global trend.
I'm as skeptical about the legacy of the world's Milton Friedman's as anyone, but when you hop into bed with the government and mix national economics with aesthetic sensibility, you're playing with the sort of fire that's bound to burn someone, perhaps seriously, in the long run.
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Most of the time I read gossip blogs like Joystiq and Kotaku purely for their entertainment value. But this post kind of bugged me, because I read it, checked one of the source sites, and was left like a lot of you've probably been in the past: unsettled by the emphatic lack of credible sourcing.
The purported "issue" involves the PlayStation 3 version of Rainbow Six Vegas 2, about which Joystiq claims the following:
...a majority of those who try to play online either can't connect or have to suffer staggering amounts of lag.
A majority of those who try to play online? Really? And someone has the official stats on this "majority" where, exactly? Has someone conducted an official 1,000+ player call-based survey I'm unaware of?
It gets worse. Other than reporting that their "tip box has exploded with complaints from owners of the PS3 version of the game," the only offsite source is here, an IGN post titled "Rainbow Six Vegas 2's online has issues on PS3," which since 3/19 has logged just 14 responses, a couple by users claiming that they're in fact playing just fine. Joystiq's description of that IGN post? "A good portion of the console gaming world."
Nothing against Joystiq, which has plenty of interesting and legitimately sourced things to say much of the time, but how are 13 to 14 posts on a message board "a good portion of the console gaming world"? Anyone?
I raise the issue only because these are the kinds of questions I'm asking as a gamer when I read news-blogs these days and find folks raising hoopla over anecdotal evidence. If you think all that's harmless, consider comments like this:
Well, what to say? It's Ubisoft. The technical quality of their games has sucked for quite a while now...
...and
Definitely Ubisoft appears to be on the slack side of late.
...and
Just one in a stack of many developers leading on 360 then porting to PS3 and/or PC as cheap and fast as possible to make a quick buck.
...and
People always complain about EA, but y'know, i'm really starting to dislike Ubisoft...
Which for all I know may be well and true, but the point is, based solely on all the information at the links above, how do you know?
What do you think? Is anecdotal evidence enough to justify sweeping generalizations and finger pointing?
UPDATE (3/25): Shacknews reports (without claiming anything about "majorities") that a few people are also complaining about the "issue" on Ubisoft's official RB6V2 forum. As usual, be intellectually wary if you peruse -- half the thread seems to involve a descent into adolescent threats of class action lawsuits.
UPDATE (3/26): A Ubisoft community developer posted an official statement from the company on the RB6V2 message boards addressing the issue last night:
During the last days some of you have experienced issues with Rainbow Six Vegas 2, in particular multiplayer connectivity and achievements. We are aware of these issues and looking into them. We are very sorry for the trouble you may have experienced and will keep you updated regularly on the situation. Thank you for your patience.
(Thanks, Silica.)
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Matt,
I understand that when writing an article that you have to have facts not assumptions. Totally agree with you on that. First of all if you own a PS3 have you tried to play the multiplayer online? Did you research any of the ?Assumptions? before writing your article? I really enjoy this game; yes I have had multiplayer connection issues. I am surprised that a reputable magazine such as PC World has not reported on the PS3 problems. PS3 owners will attest to the connection problems, it seems to be the main topic in any game room lobby (hope we get a game in, etc.). Before bashing an article first do your research, then make your assumptions off of facts. Thank you for your time.
D.H
10 days now and I all have to show is one is one quote that pulled out of devs on ONE OF THOSE INFAMOUS boards! Why should I be upset-it is only their second run on the platform?
Back to the original article, there were various threads on several sites, including Rivals.com (sports site), that was urging people to email game sites because UBI was not responding. I believe they did state in the article that their 'tip box' was full.
Anyway, old story now. I have enjoyed the conversation. It was a pleasure Matt.
"Ubisoft would like to update you on the situation regarding the connectivity issues that some customers are facing. Ubisoft has been working closely with Sony to identify the origin of the problem since it was first exposed. This collaboration allows us to make sure that the best experts are mobilized and working together. We will continue to keep you informed in the process. We?d like to apologize again for the inconvenience and we assure you that all our teams are currently committed to bringing you a complete game experience."-- 4-02
When your day job unfurls in random news bites and "oddly enough" bulletins, holidays pass like traffic along a distant almost out-of-sight highway. Is today a holiday too? It is in France. My wife who's been in Lille since early February tells me that in some parts of the country, they take the whole week. (The whole week!) Me? I spent most of yesterday chewing through a loaf of stale bread between inspecting walls and patching holes with Spackle and leftover house paint.
Anyway, with the expansion pack to EA's Tiberium Wars finally shipping today, the last week of March looks a wee bit less gloomy. That, and perhaps Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core for the PSP. Stand by for plenty 'o thoughts on the latter in the coming days.
Note the days listed are ship-to-store.
Monday
Command & Conquer 3 Kane's Wrath: Some villains won't lie down, but then who'd want someone as delightfully campy as actor Joseph D. Kucan (he plays Kane) to anyway? This expansion to last year's terrific Tiberium Wars adds a global conquest mode more or less lifted (like the game engine) from EA's The Battle for Middle Earth 2 (in turn lifted more or less from Risk). Move your armies around the map, then square off in traditional real-time battles. For $30, you get a brand new 13-mission Nod campaign, six new sub-factions (two per each main faction), and units you can carry between battles in global conquest mode. If you somehow missed Tiberium Wars, you can alternatively go all-in with the Special Edition, which wraps the whole edifice up in a neat $50 bow.
Tuesday
Australia Zoo Quest: Games like Zoo Quest are fun to list because they're just...so...anomalous. To be fair, the age group here is definitely junior. According to the official site, you're supposed to "race against the clock as you try and stop the Zoo?s animals from becoming extinct." I can't exactly tell from the screenshots how it works, but I gather you have to drag a needle, i.e. your mouse pointer, around and tag certain animals in a crowd before a timer runs out. Complete a level and you unlock new animals along with educational photos and info (food, home, life) about each. Only question is, with only 20 levels of gameplay, is $20 for the game, i.e. $1 per level, a parent's idea of reasonably priced?
Escape From Paradise City: Didn't this come out already? I'm staring at a press copy published by CDV last year, and yep, sure enough, looks like it was reviewed by mostly everyone last October-November-December (and not kindly). According to my copy, it's an "RPG meets RTS" set in "a vast city, superbly rendered and bustling with life" where the idea is to "create and hold onto an expanding crime empire." You play as any of three "distinct" characters through a story 16 chapters long. Looks like a mediocre GTA-meets-The-Godfather knockoff to me, but maybe that's worth $20. Try the demo if you're on the fence.
Thursday
Guild Wars Platinum Edition: Contemporary MMOs leave me cold. I did WoW for two months in 2005, roared through D&D Online in a week, and probably had the best time with Lord of the Rings Online, except for the part where killing 6 bees and 8 wolves and 10 spiders and 5 goblin lords (etc.) started to grate prohibitively on my sense of wonderment. I've never played Guild Wars, but I'm even less interested in "large head-to-head guild battles" that by definition make solo play pretty much impossible. If on the other hand you are, Guild Wars Platinum Edition comes with Guild Wars and the expansion Guild Wars: Eye of the North, which I'm told makes the original even guild-ier. WoW may be the genre's great granddaddy with over 10 million subscribers, but Guild Wars is certainly competitive with millions of subscribers and over 5 million units sold. Oh yeah, it's the only one of the MMO majors that has no subscription fee post-purchase, which depending on your proclivities, may make the $40 platinum edition a steal of a deal.
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Guild Wars has a strong NPC ally system that makes it easy to play solo. For Guild battles you obviously need a team, but there's a lot to the game that has nothing to do with Guild battles.
Guild Wars plays better solo than any other MMORPG. So much so that many purists claim is shouldn't be considered as such.
Who needs an MMO when Oblivion is the best action RPG in town.
Games don't need writers, but when you think about it, they don't really need designers either. Not in the conventional sense we mean when we trot out those labels, anyway.
That's my responser to Adam Maxwell of Dopass.com, who wrote something a few weeks ago provocatively titled "The Case Against Writers in the Game Industry" which Gamasutra picked up and pruned for publication today. Maxwell has a point, but my contention is going to be that it misses a broader, more important one. (I'll be focusing hereafter on Maxwell's unedited original post.)
In his post, Maxwell -- whose credits include the defunct MMO Auto Assault -- says he came to the game industry as a writer, but quickly switched to "assistant designer," and that the change-up saved his career. The studio imploded, and Maxwell contends that would've been the end of his journey into gaming, but for the saving grace of his job title ("designer"). He thus concludes that "there's no place for writers in our industry."
Really? Yes, really, says Maxwell. Writers, he argues, don't bring enough to the bottom line to justify their existence. They plot, but they don't have to think about how players interact with a given world. They work linearly from A to Z, scene to scene, plot-point to plot-point, which contravenes the nonlinear way games work. Designers, by contrast, have to work asymmetrically, creating experiences, puzzles, and other dynamic content that may or may not conform to the structural rigidity of your average Aristotelian narrative.
For Maxwell, writers superimpose a kind of formalism that turns out to be incompatible with the spontaneous act of actually playing a game, whereas game designers have to crack the static granite of a writer's story and -- to the degree that story's even necessary -- integrate it in a way that doesn't violate the flexibility of the gameplay. Gamers want just enough structure to know what their goals are, then it's "look out below, here I come," and whatever you do, "don't fence me in."
That's a persuasive point. When we play games, we (not the game) create more of the narrative ourselves than we absorb through traditional cues like cutscenes and scripted call-and-response sequences. Whether you're playing an arcade-puzzler like Tetris or a sprawling RPG like Mass Effect, the ratio of "you" to "story" in gaming is always dramatically in your favor.
Test that theory. Take a game, any game you've been playing recently, and describe what you did in the last hour or so of gameplay. If you're like most people, you'll tell a story. "I did this, but then this happened, so I had to do this other stuff, and then I stopped to buy supplies and level up, and then I had a battle with these things over here." And so on.
Take a first-person shooter like Doom 3 with its hokey "hell on Mars" story:
I'm skulking along a klaxon-lit catwalk and I have my pistol out pointed at the shadowy space in front of me, but I think I hear growling up ahead, so I'm turning on my flashlight and whipping out my shotgun instead, and...oh-holy-crap, an imp just popped out of a closet and he's lobbing fireballs at me, so alley-oop, I'm jumping off the catwalk and scurrying for cover behind some crates in a corner, but will the imp follow me down here, and what'll I do if it does?
...or even something as seemingly plot-averse as Tetris. Say someone asks you how a game went:
I just made it to level 15, but with junk piled halfway up the screen because I was going for points, and I really needed lines to knock out a few bands, but the random generator shafted me. So I started over, but this time I'm just focusing on knocking out the bottom line instead of building stacks of four.
Did anyone at id script what you did? Predict exactly how you'd react? What you'd think? How you'd describe it?
Ask a hundred people to describe what happens in the seventh Harry Potter book or the last Star Wars flick and, allowing for memory lapses, you'll probably get very similar summaries.
Not so in gaming, where players create highly personal, event-specific narratives on the fly.
Bringing that back to Maxwell's point, games need creators (as opposed to writers) who understand nontraditional narrative, i.e. self-created narrative, narrative that lets you explore and test hypotheticals. Games that, to say it as plainly as possible, allow you to play, which is really just another word for "safely experiment."
Now here's the problem with Maxwell's argument that designers trump writers when it comes to building virtual playgrounds: It's too compartmentalized, too antagonistic, and too limited by old ways of thinking about design roles. It tries to answer the question "writers" vs. "designers" by assuming either category deserves to exist in relation to games in the first place.
Why be blinded by labels?
What we need, instead, are people who can synthesize the vital essentials of both. Call it "renaissance designing," or maybe just "common sense." Design hybridism, if you will, in the sense that stodgy old-fashioned labels like "writer" and "designer" become as functionally irrelevant as they are creatively bankrupt when it comes to making a design idea live up to its potential.
Maxwell alludes to this toward the end of his post, when he says:
For the same price (sometimes cheaper, I?m sad to say), you can hire a designer who is also an unsung writing hero (they exist in far larger numbers than anyone wants to give the industry credit for) and when the story is done, that same designer can be there to throw his lot into the fire with the rest of the designers and actually make the game fun. He can be retasked as needed, and he can be useful at every stage of development.
But then he tarnishes his point by concluding with "For those reasons, and maybe even a few more, my money is on the designer over the writer, every time."
I get that games are designable entities first, that writing, sound editing, voice acting, etc. all feed into the master design plan. What I don't get is why we still feel the need to reinforce outmoded relationships and rank design roles like ethnologists. At the very least, separating writing from design, rank and file, critically misunderstands the value a little professional word-smithing can bring to a game's bottom line.
Harrison Ford once reportedly told director George Lucas "You can write this s***, George, but you can't say it." We need more designers who get that. Who recognize that the days of "You, the master of lock picking" are over (or at best, bound for the campy-on-purpose bin), and that the days of "Would you kindly head to Ryan's office and kill the son of a [you-know-what]" are here to stay.
Or at least they'd better be. We deserve nothing -- not one word, sentence, or punctuation point -- less.
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Actually Ombwah my only issue with what Adam was saying -- and it's the crux of a large portion of my post -- is that he continued to make the distinction between "writer" and "designer" right up to the very end, whereas I see the two as necessarily indistinguishable.
I was just trying to explore and expand on that point.
As a game writer/designer in the industry and co-founder of Writers Cabal, I can tell you that the distinctions between writing and narrative design are not clearcut. Some free-lance game writers do what would be considered narrative design as part of their job and are happy to be known as game writers only. At our recent session at SXSW Interactive, we discussed how storytelling in games encompasses more than just the dialog, but cuts across all disciplines. If you work with professional game writers (I've been in the business for 10 years), then you are more likely to work with people who "get" games. You bring up the point of differentiating between the gamestory and the player-story. We will actually be discussing this at the ION conference in a session called Story Vs Story: Redefining Narrative and Player Engagement in MMOs. As for Mr. Maxwell, our response is posted on the Writers Cabal Blog, http://writerscabal.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/good-writers-make-better-game-designers/
I love a game with a good story keeps it from being just any other shooter, RPG, whatever.... Plot is important no matter who gets it done.
Here's another reason you want to be especially wary of unsourced chatter on the Internet. First, you may have encountered certain persons (PR plants in disguise? Is that too paranoid?) claiming HD DVD wasn't going anywhere in the wake of the format's early 2008 studio sponsorship meltdown. Of course it now seems that even the people suggesting HD DVD was in serious trouble may have been too conservative, given that the entire edifice effectively collapsed overnight.
Then you had the occasional wander-by planting rumors that the PlayStation 3 Blu-ray drive was going to somehow be incompatible with upcoming changes to the Blu-ray format and thereby future Blu-ray discs, and that buying a PS3 for Blu-ray was simply an exercise in planned obsolescence.
Well surprise, it's called "upgradeable firmware," which lets Sony update the PS3 to Blu-ray 2.0 profile compliance courtesy version 2.20 of the console's system software.
What's BD Live? Think "Internet" for your video playback device, where the discs themselves contain code that can access the Internet and increase your "interactive experience." Which -- since the PS3 already is Internet-enabled -- may turn out to be less of a big deal and more of a formality for Sony than it'll be for upcoming standalone players.
Of course Sony's standalones probably aren't worth your dime at $400 to $500 a pop. Given the choice between a standalone player and a PS3, who wouldn't buy the dramatically feature-superior PS3 for the same or less? The 40GB PS3 is generally sold for less than $400. How much do you want to wager that price drops (or Sony intros a cheaper entry-level model) by year's end?
Per Sony's official PlayStation blog, other features/enhancements coming in Firmware v2.20:
- The ability to copy PS3 Music and Photo playlists to a PSP system. We introduced the ability to create Music and Photo playlists on the PS3 in firmware update v2.0. Now you can easily export your playlists to your PSP. (Me: Cool, but it still won't supplant my iPod shuffle, which I clip into a lightweight pair of Monster headphones when I go running.)
- You can now play DivX and WMV format files that are over 2 GB. In addition, you can now display subtitles when viewing DivX files. (Me: And you'll be getting DivX movies that utilize subtitle files from where exactly? Assuming you're thinking what I'm thinking, this seems like kind of a bold support move on Sony's part.)
- Resume Play - begin playing a DVD or BD disc from the point where you previously stopped it, even if you eject the disc and insert a different movie or game. (Me: And you can optionally turn this off if you want to, right? Now how about a "skip all the bologna at the beginning of the disc," including the FBI warning, once you've viewed it at least once?)
- Use your PSP as a remote control to play back your music files on your PS3 without turning on your TV. (Me: Almost typed "boh-ring" until I digested the part about not turning on the TV, which suddenly upgrades this to "must-have" for me.)
- The Internet browser now displays some web pages faster. In addition [Save Target] has been added as an option under file. This option lets you save a file that is linked to a web page to your PS3 hard drive or storage media. (Me: Saving files to your PS3's hard drive = fantastic-o! But browsing the Internet on a TV, even a high-def one = still clumsy-o.)
The only thing missing? PS2 backward-compatibility for the 40GB PS3. Call me insensitive to the "here's how Sony makes a buck so it can " argument, because it's simply unacceptable that Sony's still blocking this, when a simple software update could add it back and remedy an irksome up-sell gimmick.
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"[Yuffiek133] but i was disappointed in heavenly sword because it has the graphics of a PS2 title...."
I Agree with "theoboley", Heavenly Sword was awesome, the graphics are sweet and character modeling was fantastic. Hell, even the actor who did Golem in the LOTR Trilogy did the Mokap acting for King Bohan. Even the "God of War" style of gameplay fit really well into Heavenly Sword.
The only problem I had with the game was that it was to short. I could have played it for hours more.
Only one thing matters in terms of PS3 firmware updates right now: "Where the hell is the PS2 backwards compatible enabling update."
PSone is supported, future features of BD tech will keep coming in firmware updates, making the PS3 a PS2 backwards compatible system should have been a huge selling point but here we are waiting and hoping with no relief in site. ! WHAT ! ! THE ! ! HELL !
I'm not a gamer but got the 40GB PS3 solely for blu-ray DVDs. It was the best player for the money at $399. I don't recommend it for a non-tech type person for blu-ray only since setup and operation are not as simple as a standalone player. I extremely pleased with it and upgraded to 2.20 today. Not sure I got the resume play working since I have to watch all the FBI warning again.
"Stop!!" cries the intro, "Let me save you money before you send that 'broken' Xbox 360 back to Microsoft." Fix your Xbox "by yourself in 30 minutes!!"
Now wait for it...
"100% Guaranteed!"
"56 Day Money back guarantee."
...and my favorite:
"The best method to fix your Xbox 360 in than [sic] 30 minutes."
Not a joke, or at least I don't think it is (we've still slightly less than two weeks 'til April 1st, but who knows). All I do know is that Easy3RedLightsFix.com, which purports to offer a guide that lets you "permanently" fix an Xbox 360 with the so-called "red ring of death" issue, contains all the cadences and cliches of the dreaded "money-grubbing scam artist," with real winners like:
Don't worry anymore, we have got the solution for you now here and it only takes 30 mintues [sic] to do.
Microsoft would take weeks to repair your Xbox, you don't have to wait all that while you can repair it using the same methods they will use.
I'm going to teach you what to do exactly what to do [sic] so that your Xbox will never crash again, no matter what game you will ever play you will never face the three lights error again.
And then the guarantees (why only "56" and not "60" days?), the warning that existing freely available internet methods are bunkum (which, granted, they are), the random testimonials ("thanks, you saved my xbox," and "awesome guide, i didn't think it was such a [sic] easy repair"), the "100% satisfaction guaranteed" logo, and of course, the whole "$49 $39 $35 $29.99" schtick that makes me want to scream "cheat!" at sites like this, as well as the TV every time I see an add for junk like "Head On" or "cutting knives that never lose their edge" or anything spawned of the euphemistic travesty of a neologism "infomercial."
According to a former Microsoft tech, once your 360 starts to experience the "red ring of death" issue this guide purports to let you auto-repair, it's probably a sign that you're too late, i.e. the internal components have passed the point of homebrew heatsink therapy.
Here's what a Microsoft insider told 8BitJoystick back in January:
RROD is caused by anything that fails in the "digital backbone" on the mother board. Also known as a core digital error. CPU, GPU, memory, etc. Bad parts, incompatible parts (timing problems) bad manufacturing process (like solder joints), misapplied heat sinks or thermal interface material, missing parts, broken parts, parts of the wrong value, missed test coverage.
Microsoft's repair policy for ailing Xbox 360s is as generous as they come. What's more, the company doesn't take weeks to repair most Xbox 360s, they take days. You won't spend $140 repairing your Xbox 360 because Microsoft extended the warranty last year to effectively cover everyone who has the error -- technically, you'll spend nada, and only be out the time you can't play games.
Note the one point that's conspicuously absent from this "repair guide" site's FAQ:
Does it void my warranty?
And the answer is, if it involves monkeying around inside your Xbox 360: certifiably.
Given Microsoft's 100% standup, 100% free send-in repair policy, why would you do anything else?
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No looks like you've had the bad day, it's about time somebody wrote about you scam artists.
1. RROF is a general error code that could be the result of any a number of components, it's not possible for for a guide to teach people with no assembly skilsl to fix all the possible scenarios.
2. Microsofts 3 year warranty will repair it completely free and the turn around is quite prompt.
3. Messing with the innards of your console WILL void your warranty.
4. If you've mod chipped your console to play copied games or cheat online go ahead and get scammed, you probably deserve it.
Why oh why oh why would ANYONE PAY for a service with no guarantees instead of sending their box back to the manufacturer for repair. I don't get it???? If you had a new car still under warranty would you let "bubba the internet mechanic" fix your car or would you take it back to the dealer and have a certified mechanic fix the problem? Why would you send it to someone who can not prove their skills, other than "i can show you how"...ohhh...yes, that's convincing. And t to the response about the warranty being 56 days...hey if the payment processing company is the one setting the liabilities on warranties for YOUR work then there is an issue there. Isn't this YOUR company...if you cant back up your own work then that in itself is a huge RED flag. Using the payment center as an excuse...that's laughable. Stop attempting to rip people off...and for you poor saps that believe the "internet xbox gods"...then the old saying a fool and his money.....
And yes, you are an ass hole!
Yeah, your not getting it are you, that's because your a big stupid idiot!
Obviously, there's a market for this sort of thing and markets just don't up in appear unless people are asking for help! Then when people are looking for help or a product, the market happens.
You don't see it the way these people do, because your not the target audience.
example:
If your house fell into foreclosure tomorrow because you an asshole and your boss knew it and fired you stupid a**, you would start looking for a way to get out of foreclosure wouldn't you?
It happens everyday, why do you think there's a market for that, there's all kinds of guides about how to avoid foreclosure.
So before you open your big fat mouths, do a little investigating first.
Not everyone got a 3 year warranty either asshole! and since you know everything, you should have known that, Dicks!
Lerone Wilson in a post over at Blackline is tired of hearing "white young men" use the 'n' word while playing XBOX Live. Wilson claims he hears it "at least twice a day while gaming," and indicates that he's both offended and concerned that it's "giving the many children who also use the service the false impression that it's an acceptable word to be used in the world of online video games."
"I assure you, it isn't," says Wilson.
He admits that when he hears the word on XBOX Live, it "usually isn't targeted towards African Americans," but that it "clearly mimics the way young African-American men use it." As a sort of macho term of endearment, in other words.
I can't tell exactly where Wilson stands on this, but it's always seemed to me that the 'n' word is either off limits to everyone or it's off limits to no one. Making exceptions for groups of people just informs a different kind of segregation. Telling one group it's okay to use a word may for that group in some sense deprive it of its "power," but in a broader sense, it reinforces its power due to the culturally charged double standard. It's the flip side of multiculturalism, where celebrating cultural differences can simultaneously and often deleteriously reinforce them.
But to the broader point, online chatter can certainly be toxic. I've heard far more (and arguably far worse) than the 'n' word flipped off while playing against random opponents in games like Mech Assault and Halo 3. Anonymity is this great big dare to test boundaries and cross lines considered off limits in conventional offline social situations. For whatever reasons, people seem inclined to take that dare as often as not.
In a sense, that's both the triumph and tragedy of gaming. Games invite gamers to try things they wouldn't in so-called real life. Dealing with language used both with and without intent to harm is, at least as long as we allow people the option to mask their identities, part of the complex and sometimes rewarding, sometimes poisonous tradeoff.
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I agree with Matt.
If black people continue to use it then it can't be as bad as people make it. You either have to make it a "curse word" that should never be uttered or allow everyone to say it. You can't have double standards.
And how is someone so emotionally hurt when they hear it from a white person and sing along when they hear it from a rap song? Give me a break.
I think if " Lerone Wilson" (i am using my intellect and guessing thats a black name) complains enough then there will be affirmative action policies in Xbox spotting minorities kills.
fo shizzy my nizzy
Actually it was the language on XBlive that drove me back to PC gaming. I play on servers which are no swearing no porn and no racial slurs. Life is good again. people that break the rules get banned permanently from the server and we never see them again.
Only 20% come from Europe, 30% from North America, and a whopping 50% from Asia. That's according to a new report from InfoCom, a research company that broke the international demographics down by region and estimated the money involved totals between $5.5 and $7 billion.
Other fun facts from InfoCom's report:
- 17 million (of 48 million total) residents in South Korea regularly play online games.
- Online game providers in South Korea make money primarily through micro-transactions, i.e. sales derived from minor customizations to a player's character.
- Within the Asian sphere, South Korea's PC online games market alone was around 25% of the total worldwide pie.
- In Japan, the most popular platform for gaming was the PC (35%), followed by mobile phones (14%), game consoles (9%), and portable gaming devices (7%).
The most popular games, to put some of this in perspective, were table/card, role-playing, and puzzles. Which means casual and MMO games have effectively become PC gaming's lifeblood, both in the U.S. and abroad. In other words, pull casual and MMO games and the PC would virtually disappear as a mainstream gaming platform.
That's perhaps good news for casual and MMO fans, but bad news for traditional PC gamers, or at least those of you who want the PC to maintain its edge against consoles at a feature-for-feature level.
For the record, I'm neither concerned nor despondent about PC gaming's ostensible plight. Some of the best wargames ever made -- and I mean ever -- arrived on scene years after wargaming as a genre was proclaimed dead and buried. If you want the best flight simulator going, try IL-2: Sturmovik, which showed up years after hardcore flight sims had effectively vanished. IL-2 creator (Oleg Maddox) and his team are, as I type this, in the process of putting together the most historically accurate and complete World War II flight sim ever attempted. And have a look at what DCS is up to if you really want your mind blown.
The DCS Black Shark: Fun with Trains! Try this on a console.
Sure, some of these will never compete visually with the likes of your average Gran Turismo Prologue 5, but that doesn't cheapen their appeal to a specific, dedicated, hardcore demographic. The future of PC gaming (beyond MMOs and casual games, that is) lies in this kind of sophisticated innovation, in my opinion.
Why? Because you'll always have a certain gaming segment that goes in for deeper, more nuanced experiences than the sort of transient, mindless thrills offered by your average Mario or Master Chief. You'll never see something like the DCS flight sim on a console, in other words. Or if/when you do, it'll be because the distinction between PCs and consoles has effectively disappeared.
Who cares if games like BioShock or Half Life 2 are eventually only available on consoles. You'll buy them anyway and probably enjoy them that much more on your 40 or 50 inch flat screen TV with Dolby 5.1 surround sound. PC gamers tend to be console gamers too. There's nothing mutually exclusive about either paradigm. And in the process, gamers in a given demographic ultimately end up getting more of what they want, where they want it.
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Agree, because some people are playing in consoles.
And lots of people playing Online Games too.
It's better to play Online Games now.
I love playing WOW it's really awesome.
I'm one of the player in WOW.
Thank you for sharing and good day.
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If Gran Turismo 5 stinks, who cares how amazing it looks, but let's assume based on this particular series' track record that it won't and shamelessly revel in the latest screenshots. Check these out.
Even I'm not completely immune to the power of photo-real visuals you can fiddle with in realtime. So long as (a) the end product matches the marketing hype, and (b) the game as a rule always plays better than it looks.
As for 'a', the history of the Gran Turismo series speaks for itself. It's one of those games you walk into a store running a PS2 demo and wonder whether someone's got a PC and a couple high-end video cards running in tandem tucked away inside the display kiosk. Chalk that up to everything a racer doesn't have to render, allowing the dev team to focus almost exclusively on visuals and physics Oh, and getting more cars simultaneously on the track -- GT5 lets you race up to 16 cars at once and online to boot.
As for the second point, I'm sure there's a mathematical formula for this somewhere (I'm leaning toward 2:1, personally). All I know is, it's absolutely true, and that I only wish more gamers felt the same way I do. Too often with some of today's best selling games (I'm sorry, did someone say Mass Effect?) that ratio's reversed.
Of course you'll want a high definition TV that does honest-to-goodness 1080p to really appreciate the "over 40 stunning, high-performance cars" in GT5, but if you have the high-def muscle, Sony claims the racer runs all that at a stunning 60 frames per second.
You'll also be able to download the game, which ships on a Blu-ray disc, but only weighs in at a modest 1.9 GB online. You get down to that number by apparently using a godlike compression algorithm as well as by stripping out all the cinematic videos and whatever other miscellany's considered inessential to the bottom line.
Gran Turismo 5, exclusive to the PlayStation 3, ships on April 17.
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GT5 Prologue looks so good I still cant believe its real
"If GT5 Prologue Stinks.." ??? Um... I don't know what GT games you've played in the past, but they are THE best sim racing games ever. They've always pushed the graphics envelope, and the racing is just what it is, Sim racing. It WON'T stink
If it plays anything like the demo HD Concept demo, it's going to be outstanding. Now I hope GT doesn't fall into the same trap as F1: CE, and TOCA 3 (PS2) where anyone with a wheel can out turn anyone using the analog sticks. That gets frustrating online. I don't to have to spend a whole bunch of extra dollars just to keep up with someone with a wheel. But, I'm still excited!
Most pundits analyzing the rumored "imminent" US economic recession in light of overwhelming video game revenues merely reiterate sales figures before shrugging into an assumption that gaming is siphoning revenue from the rest of the leisure market. No one knows, of course. No one actually has sales data that proves as much. We just know that despite all the doom and gloom in the general media about "markets," video game sales are up, and we're talking way up. The rest is just a guessing game -- just like the notion of "when" (as opposed to "if") in relation to the "R" word.
Is the U.S. economy slowing? Perhaps. I'm not an economist, but I know two things: the U.S. economy is driven mostly by consumer spending, and it's also therefore driven mostly by psychological disposition -- call it the "belief" that the economy is healthy or sick, i.e. a self-fulfilling prophecy. USA Today is running a story about 76% of Americans (it says "more than three in four") who now think the country is, in fact, in a recession. If you think the economy's shrinking, then it probably is, because you'll spend in kind and help make it so. All it takes is a certain segment of the market (say housing) to go even a little bit sour and the psychological shock wave can be a bit like watching a snowball grow from hand-sized to stadium-sized over the length of a single football field. Consumer psychology to a large degree actuates market reality.
Assuming that's true -- and remember, I'm not an economist -- what does that say about market reality and consumer psychology as it relates to video games?
February video game hardware sales were up over 2007 by $78 million and 19 percent. Software sales were up from $454 million to $669 million, a staggering 47 percent. Game accessory sales were up $49 million and 36 percent. Overall, NPD says the market jumped 34 points in February over the same period last year. That's especially noteworthy because (a) February is conventionally a slow month for video games, (b) we're over a year past a new product launch and well into each new game system's life cycle, and (c) nothing notable software-wise arrived in February to account for those sales. Read that again: only four of the top 10 software sales charters debuted in February -- the rest, including the game in slot number one (go Call of Duty 4!) came out intermittently over the prior three months.
So games haven't (yet) been affected by...let's call it "pre-recession" spending trends. Assuming the doom and gloom isn't just hysterics, but also that game revenues wouldn't be any higher in a "boom" market (i.e. that they've been unfazed by all the purported turmoil), does that mean games are taking from other leisure markets?
It's impossible to say with certainty, but let's look at film, books, and music. The new movie Horton Hears a Who shot to number one with $45 million in ticket sales this weekend, and box office sales in general were up .43 percent over the same weekend last year. And in case you hadn't heard, the movie industry actually set a record in 2007 with total ticket sales of $9.6 billion. That's despite claims of piracy and declining ticket sales. (Movie execs will claim anything, it seems -- they embarrassed themselves and their industry last year by trying to explain away last October's terrible box office numbers, the worst in eight years, as Halo 3's fault.)
Book sales on the other hand are admittedly flattening, but that's due to a long-term trend blamed on competition from the Internet, video games, and other electronic devices. And retail music sales? They've been declining for years for similar reasons, including an ongoing shift in the way consumers relate to traditional music packaging, e.g. albums versus individual songs. The point is that any encroachment by games into either area has been occurring for years.
Is the economy tanking? Like I said, ask an economist, not me. But we can recognize that game sales are up, that they're up despite media doom and gloom about the economy, that they don't appear to be tapping unexpectedly into other leisure markets at this point, and that there's nothing suggesting sales won't keep on booming.
That's the beauty of entertainment -- up or down sales-wise, it's certifiably "bubble" free.
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i believe that our government is a collection of retards who insist upon denying the truth. that is that we are in a recession. i spend alot anyway, but it doesnt matter because this recession is caused by housing. people losing their houses arent really going to to buy other things and so forth. so you cant really blame people for not spending as much, blame them for buying into these houses at 300% more than they are actually built for.
Home entertainment will increase in a recession. Think about what it would cost to take a middle-class family of four out to dinner and a movie. $100 for dinner and another $60 for the movie. If you do that only twice a month(a lot do more) your looking at $320 a month($3840 /yr. Or you can throw down a one time cost $500 for a console and peripherals. If you buy two games a month (thats a lot IMO) your monthly spending is now only ~$100. So, now the kids and the parents(everyone plays now) can glean a lot more entertainment for a lot less money ~$1700 year. You just cut your entertainment costs in half. When you do the math video games are cheaper for families.
How many places can you use the words "Nintendo DS" and "professional retro-audio sound machine" in the same sentence? Just one I can think of, right here at AQ Interactive. AQ is actually the Japanese developer and publisher behind the action/stealth game Vampire Rain for the Xbox 360, and an upcoming action RPG no one knows much about yet called Cry On. Vampire Rain may be on a lot of folks' "worst of 2007" game lists, but this more than makes up for it, as you can see for yourself in the following clip.
Wuzzat-all-about? Take the KORG MS-10, a classic 1978 analog synth known for its bass and percussion sounds and used in contemporary synthesis by groups like The Chemical Brothers, then transplant it sans the keyboard to the Nintendo DS. Change up the interface to take advantage of the DS's dual-screen touch panel, throw in a six track sequencer, and add a "sensory input mode" for creative doodling and you've got a pretty stunning little block of audio power swinging around in your pocket.
The venerable KORG MS-10. Korg released it in 1978 as an entry-level, monophonic single-VCO (voltage controlled oscillator) analog synthesizer.
The only downside? Currently only announced for Japanese and/or region-free versions of the DS. (Bummer!) Release date: July 2008 for 4,800 YEN or about $50 USD.
UPDATE (3/18): Create Digital Music brings news from AQ that the DS-10 will eventually receive international release treatment. Hooray!
Here's the specification rundown:
- Two patchable dual-oscillator analog synth simulators
- Four-part drum machine that uses sounds created with the analog synth simulator
- Six-track (analog synth x 2, drum machine x 4) /16-step sequencer
- Delay, chorus, and flanger sound effects available from the mixing board
- Three note-entry modes: touch-control screen, keyboard screen, matrix screen
- Real-time sound control mode via touch-control screen
- Exchange sounds and songs and play multiple units simultaneously through a wireless communications link
Even if the MS-10 isn't your bag, the potential for portable professional quality audio composition tools that piggyback on handhelds suddenly looks incredibly enticing. For the record, the Nintendo DS has 4MB of "mobile RAM," while something like Sony's PSP has 32MB of main memory, plus the option to plug in multi-gigabyte flash cards that could theoretically store compressed sample data.
But wait, you're saying, 4MB? Isn't that incredibly limiting? Well sure, if you have a couple grand to drop on huge terabyte-sized sound libraries (and more to secure the computing oomph necessary to run them latency-free). Then you need the knack and/or know-how to put everything together. Speaking as someone who's doing this right now with Apple Logic Studio and a bunch of other gizmos, even in 2008 with a galaxy of audio at your fingertips, it still requires at least one or two PhD's in Patience.
Put things in perspective. The KORG 01/W keyboard workstation I owned back in the early 1990s, which to my ear still has some pretty terrific sounds, employed 254 real-world PCM sample instruments stored in a mere 6MB of ROM. You could probably get a lot of mileage out of the DS's 4MB of RAM doing retro-modeling, and just imagine what you could do with the 32MB in the PSP, especially if Sony ever elects to offer a version with a touchscreen interface.
What do you think? If something like this offered the option to export your compositions, say interface with a computer to grab the audio at professional sampling rates or store MIDI data or even link up with a controller via a MIDI interface, would you drop $50 on a portable professional-grade music lab? With a tip of my hat to all the homebrew stuff that's out there, is it time to start thinking about the DS and PSP as more than merely handheld game and video playback machines?
[Thanks, Create Digital Music]
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Talk about your slow weeks for PC games. Well for games in general, really, unless you're chomping at the bit for an Eye of Judgement expansion deck, a Worms game for the Wii, a Fantasy Aquarium for the DS (okay, seriously?), the Metal Gear Solid: Essential Collection for the PS2, and the only major "now-gen" release you need to pay attention to: Rainbow Six Vegas 2. The latter's what I'll be playing.
Monday
Merv Griffin's Crosswords: I know, what's this doing on the list, right? Without it, you'd be looking at one, count it one PC game release, and I'll get to it in a moment. But first, Merv Griffin's Crosswords! You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll use your knowledge and your "immense" vocabulary to answer all the right questions in order to win big (in-game) money! Holy yahoo! Because playing the Crossword Extra online isn't exciting enough! (Wait, you mean it's an actual TV show too?) Pay $20 for a boxed copy, or play it free for an hour at Big Fish Games and/or download the full version for $20 (or just $7 if you're a member of Big Fish's "Game Club"). It's currently Big Fish's fifth top word game after "runaway" hits like Bookworm Adventures, Great Wall of Words, Bookworm Deluxe, and Boggle. Don't let the wave of amazing lay you flat.
Tuesday
Lost Empire: Immortals: Complex strategy games from somewhat less visible publishers like Paradox never get the attention they deserve because they're not on the media radar. Then you get stuff like Sins of a Solar Empire, which could very well be the best game of 2008 you're not likely to play unless you're (a) into PCs, (b) into strategy games, and (c) into complex real-time warfare with a gloriously user-friendly interface. Which isn't to say Lost Empire is necessarily up to Sins' caliber (I can't comment, since I haven't played it yet), just that it could be and you'd never know it given the virtually null coverage. Like Sins, Lost Empire is a 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) strategy game, but unlike Sins, it's an honest-to-goodness turn-based throwback. I see one review by a site I've never heard of calling itself Game Chronicles, whose review of the game begins "I don't have a whole lot of experience with these kinds of games because I often get bored of them very quickly," which tells you pretty much all you need to know about the reviewer (as opposed to the game) right there. What else? Thousands of stars to explore and colonize, six playable races, AI or multiplayer play, and a game demo you can pull down to judge for yourself at the game's official site.
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Myth: The growth in violent video game sales is linked to the growth in youth violence -- especially school violence -- throughout the country. So claims a new book on the verge of publication by Drs. Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson, co-founders and directors of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media. With $1.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice, the pair set off in 2004 on a research odyssey to determine the effects of video games on young teenagers. What they found, according to the book's promotional site, "surprised, encouraged, and sometimes disturbed them."
The real risks, say Olson and Kutner, are subtle, and not just about violence, gore, and sex. Games don't affect all kids the same, and some children are at "significantly greater risk" than others.
Some of the book's eye-opening "facts" and "myths," from the promotional site:
Fact: Video game popularity and real-world youth violence have been moving in opposite directions. Violent juvenile crime in the United States reached a peak in 1993 and has been declining ever since. School violence has also gone down. Between 1994 and 2001, arrests for murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assaults fell 44 percent, resulting in the lowest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes since 1983. Murder arrests, which reached a high of 3,800 in 1993, plummeted to 1400 by 2001.
Myth: Girls don?t play violent video games like Grand Theft Auto.
Fact: Our survey of more than 1200 middle school students found that 29 percent of girls who played video games listed at least one M-rated game among the games they?d "played a lot" during the previous six months. One in five specifically listed a Grand Theft Auto game. In fact, among these 12- to 14-year-old girls, the Grand Theft Auto series was second only to The Sims in popularity.
Myth: In August 2005, the American Psychological Association issued a resolution on violence in video games and interactive media, stating that "perpetrators go unpunished in 73 percent of all violent scenes, and therefore teach that violence is an effective way of resolving conflict."
Fact: The allegation that "perpetrators go unpunished in 73 percent of all violent scenes" is based on research from the mid-1990s that looked at selected television programs, not video games.
Myth: School shooters fit a profile that includes a fascination with violent media, especially violent video games.
Fact: The U. S. Secret Service intensely studied each of the 37 non-gang and non-drug-related school shootings and stabbings that were considered ?targeted attacks? that took place nationally from 1974 through 2000. (Note how few premeditated school shootings there actually were during that 27-year time period, compared with the public perception of those shootings as relatively common events!) The incidents studied included the most notorious school shootings, such as Columbine, Santee and Paducah, in which the young perpetrators had been linked in the press to violent video games. The Secret Service found that that there was no accurate profile. Only 1 in 8 school shooters showed any interest in violent video games; only 1 in 4 liked violent movies.
Game Couch conducted an interview with Dr. Olson in late February. A few of the choicer responses from the interview:
Until now, the most-publicized studies came from a small group of experimental psychologists, studying college students playing nonviolent or violent games for 15 minutes. It?s debatable whether those studies are relevant to real children, playing self-selected games for their own reasons (not for cash or extra credit!), in social settings, over many years. But media reports and political rhetoric often ignore that distinction...
The most-published researchers have built their careers around media violence. Their studies were designed under the assumption that violent video games are harmful, which dictated the questions they asked and how they framed their results. Media violence is just a small part of what we do, so we could look at the issue with fresh eyes and no agenda...
One of the biggest draws of GTA [Grand Theft Auto] seems to be not the violence but the open environment and array of choices: ?You can be a good guy and a bad guy at the same time.? Every child will play the game differently...
It may take a new generation of researchers and advocates, open to both pros and cons of video games (and who?ve played video games themselves!), to start truly productive discussions...
I'll reserve commenting until I've read the book, but while we're waiting, you can read excerpts from the book here, about the authors here, and some of the academic papers that led to the creation of the book here.
Grand Theft Childhood is available April 15, 2008.
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Idiots. How the hell do they know it's definitely the video games? It could be a factor, but not always. I do see some pretty bad things sometimes, for example, the first time I played Half-Life 2 I was thoroughly disgusted by the zombies and bodies and stuff, but number 1, usually games aren't that bad, and number 2, they have no idea if it's THE GAMES that influence kids. Maybe sometimes, but who are they to know what drives murderers?
As a retired social worker who also worked in juvenile corrections I know it takes more than a video game to make a child violent. A big part of turning out a violent child is accomplished by parents, family friends, and other relatives modelling violent and/or ausive verbal and physical behavior and often inflicting it on the child as well as each other. Most violent children are exposed to "real life" people doing horrendous things to adults and children. This can be greatly intensified by subtance abuse in the family.
I have also seen children who just seem to be wired wrong by their heredity. They can be drug effected before birth which can damage their impulse control and judgement center of their brains. Sometimes it is a simple matter that many mental illnesses only clearly emerge as a child enters adolescense.
A small minority of already damaged children should not be stimulated by any violence, real or fantasy, but the vast majority will not be greatly effected.
once again we see the "experts" trying to help people avoid even the appearance of taking responsibility for their actions. this is the same crap they said about D&D, tv, Judas Priest, and God knows what else.
it's always some external factor, not the lazy parents who can't be bothered to raise their own damn kids. it doesn't take a village, it takes
parents who give a damn. i played D&D, video games, watched violent movies, and yet never shot up a McDonalds. some people will snap because their pizza had 2 less slices of pepperoni on it than it did last week. it's not the games.
Nintendo beat everyone by a pretty sizable margin, and that, in fact, may be the most important news to take away from the latest NPD sales data. Last month Sony came within striking distance of the Wii in hardware unit sales -- a mere 5,000 units -- but this month Nintendo's well ahead by 151k units, lending credibility to the theory that Nintendo's drop was availability-related.
Before I go any further, the February 2008 numbers, courtesy the folks at NPD:
Hardware - February 2008
588k - Nintendo DS
432k - Nintendo Wii
352k - PlayStation 2
281k - PlayStation 3
255k - Xbox 360
243k - PlayStation Portable
Software - February 2008
296k - Call of Duty 4 (360)
295k - Devil May Cry 4 (360)
290k - Wii Play (Wii)
234k - Devil May Cry 4 (PS3)
223k - Guitar Hero III (Wii)
206k - Mario and Sonic: Olympic Games (DS)
204k - Lost Odyssey (360)
198k - Turok (360)
184k - Guitar Hero III (PS2)
162k - Rock Band (360)
Analysis:
- As a hardware brand, Nintendo dominated February with 1020k total hardware unit sales versus Sony's aggregate 876k, but in top 10 software sales, the 360 once again cleaned up, taking the lion's share with a whopping 1,155k units versus only 513k for the Wii and 234k for Sony (and that from a single game). You can make a strong argument that software -- as long as sales are sustained -- is what primarily matters, and to that extent, Microsoft continues to be the clear winner of this two-and-an-anomalous-third-plus-a-surprise-fourth horse race.
- Followup to the last point, Sony's sales almost have to be Blu-ray loaded. Two months with only a single chart topper each month? With HD DVD effectively dead, fence-sitters are buying Blu-ray players. The PS3 rates a steal of a deal if all you want is a machine to watch high-def movies, and I suspect that's where a lot of those sales are coming from. The flip side of that coin is that Sony could be looking at a lot of game-specific headroom to grow into if it lands a few critically acclaimed exclusives in 2008. (No pressure, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Gran Turismo 5.)
- Go Nintendo? I keep expecting Nintendo's boat to hit shallow water, but once again I'm eating my words and predictions. What's more, expect those numbers to go ballistic in March and April, between Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Mario Kart Wii.
- Go Nintendo DS! Over half a million sales and twice those of Sony's PSP. Between you and me, if I were a game developer, this is where I'd hitch my horse, no ifs, ands, or buts.
- Microsoft anticipated NPD's sales data by claiming earlier today that "supply issues" were why it sold fewer systems than Sony. Without independent verification of that claim -- and there's been nothing newsworthy to suggest it's either true or false -- I don't know if Microsoft's word is enough to go on, especially given the statement's proximity to the sales data. When Nintendo's Wii has supply constrains, it was in the news well before the sales data hit. For all the software Microsoft's selling, I've yet to visit a Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Gamestop, etc. that isn't brimming with 360s, or to read about a hardware shortage at any of the major retailers. NPD's Anita Frazier adds that "while hardware inventory issues at retail may still be lingering post-holiday, the fact that all now-gen systems generated significant year-over-year hardware sales increases indicates the situation is coming into balance faster than it did last year."
- In related news, video games sales are up 12% over last year. Now take the extra sales week in 2007 into account and sales are actually up 26%. And according to NPD's Anita Frazier, "Software sales are up 47% for the month of February and 43% for the year on a comparable weeks sales basis...with several marquee titles still to come in the front half of the year, the industry is poised to achieve another year of record-breaking sales despite difficult economic conditons." Even more great news for the games industry! Put that in your pipe and smoke it so-called "U.S. recession."
- Look at the PS2 go. I suppose it's not a total surprise given the notion that the PS2 competes in the same space as the Wii, and you also have to consider how many incredible games -- new and used -- are available for the system. Says NPD's Frazier: "I was most surprised by the PS2 hardware sales numbers this month...while it certainly has earned its spot among the now-gen slate of console systems because of it staying power in the marketplace, the fact that it realized such significant growth this month is really a testament to its broad adoption and the response of consumers to promotional activity at retail."
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joeshmo
I live in the USA so I don't really care if the rest of the world moves to PS3, and of course they are not since the Wii is beating PS3 every month. The rest of the world doesn't change the fact that Xbox 360 is millions of units ahead of PS3, and 30,000 units a month is not going to change that for years. The 17 million Xbox 360 consoles in the market now guarantee strong game support for me so the rest of the world is irrelevent.
Too bad number of consoles sold tells you nothing about how good a console is. Ever heard of buyer's remorse? I think the best argument for that is the huge lead the 360 still has in software sales despite the fact that the games it topped the charts with were multi-platform. I think that speaks more for XboxLive than anything else---why play COD4 on playstations online service when XboxLive tends to be much better. The PS3 is selling strong lately mostly for it's BluRay2.0 capability in the future and it's low price tag(as a BD player), maybe that will change once it gets some exclusives or the Home service comes up. If that happens(well) I'll finally have an excuse to drop the 400 on it. But let's be honest here---hardware sales say nothing about a consoles "superiority" --- that can be determined more readily by which platform the multi-platform games are being played on.
The play station 3 is the home computer replacer! It plays lots of games and comes with linux so u can surf the internet, NO PC REQUIRED! with my xbox 360 I still cant surf the internet or stream internet radio while I play. If micro soft came out with a keyboard and mouse and had surfing threw x box live then they would double there sales , think, no expensive computer moniter required, lower cost ...the NEXT COMMODORE 64! EVERY ONE OWNES ONE . you buy one box ( not 3 with pc + monitor + periferial s) plug it into tv and bam your playing ,surfing, kids are happy , parents get there own at half the price of a pc and do there budget/ banking/ investing. every 4-5 years pull off the external hard drive put it on new xbox to transfer old docs throw old box away, most would be happy, spend more money on games not on hard ware. PS3 can already mostly do this as the linux is already there, it needs keyboord, mouse and better online service, what web TV should have been.
Those folks at Sony are the biggest kidders, to liberally paraphrase Xbox 360 product manager Aaron Greenberg. Greenberg just told Reuters that Microsoft is in fact decidedly not in talks with Sony to do anything whatsoever with Blu-ray and the Xbox 360.
Instead? Focus on online distribution of content, i.e. directing Xbox 360 owners to Xbox Live's hundreds of downloadable TV shows and programs.
In case you missed it, last Friday a Sony executive suggested to the Financial Times that Sony and Microsoft were in talks about the Xbox 360's Blu-ray future. Needless to say, Microsoft's response was "We have made no such announcement." Now, via Greenberg, they've gone one further to effectively quash speculation that talks are occurring at all. Pay attention to our online distribution model instead, says Microsoft. Optical media? Who needs optical media when you can download TV shows and movies direct?
My response: Fine, fair enough, but let's keep it real here. For all Microsoft's claims about offering "high-definition" content, the company is simply dreaming if it thinks it can compete with Blu-ray at the pixel-for-pixel level. Microsoft knows it, and so does any videophile. Imagine trying to download the BBC's Planet Earth, something like the Harry Potter Collection, or frankly any single given 1080p movie. For the record, Microsoft's existing service tops out at 720p, the movies have to be downloaded (as opposed to streamed) and each one takes up a whopping 4-5 GB space with no recourse to burn and store on the side. Can you say yikers?
Not only will more than a handful of movies chew through what little space is available on your average Xbox 360's hard drive, they simply take forever to download. Want the latest movie-of-the-week? You can either trigger the 4-5 GB download, or you can hop in your car, rent the movie for $5 or buy it outright for $20-$30, then be home and have it watched by the time the download's a third complete.
I'm just not convinced online distribution mechanisms for film-length 720p or 1080p content are mature enough to get around the need for a physical optical drive. Eventually, probably -- when we can either offload that content to instant-recall backup media or internet speeds are so fast backups no longer matter -- but the digital infrastructure isn't close to ready. On my 7 Mbps DSL connection, it can take upwards of half an hour to download 100MB Rock Band music packs if Microsoft's servers are running slow (they often seem to be).
Do the math. Using services like "OnDemand," I can cue up the entire first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm on my cable box connection in HD in seconds. Microsoft's enemies are time and space, and I don't see either the 360 or PS3 obsoleting Blu-ray or cable/satellite or services like Netflix with regard to either dimension in the near future.
Long story short, don't worry Xbox 360 owners. Reality is completely amorphous when it comes to public relations. If a company says no on Friday, there's a 50-50 chance they'll say yes on Monday. All this announcement tells us is that someone picked up the phone and told Mr. Greenberg to stay on target with "digital distribution," even if its a message that rings a little hollow to someone like me who's finally ready to start up-converting to incontrovertibly glorious-looking 1080p HD.
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Harryki you are obviously another PS3 fanboy. PS3 fans just keep bringing up old (very old) news about Xbox 360 failures. The 360 was redesigned a year ago with a new chipset. The fact that 360 failures are not currently reported on all game sites as an on going problem shows that the problem mostly exists in PS3 fan's memories. Microsoft has a 3 year warranty to cover the issue so it is no issue at all. Microsoft gave 360 owners the "option" of adding HD DVD, it isn't even their product so they lost nothing and they don't have any reason to admit defeat. You PS3 fans better hope MS doesn't add BD because then there wouldn't be any reason to buy PS3. Xbox 360 has the largest high quality game library on any of the top three consoles to day. Xbox 360 is focused on games; not movies.
I'm not sure it's fair to say that the XBOX 360 is focused on games but not movies. Focused on games, yes, but Microsoft is also flogging the XBOX 360 as a Windows Vista Media Center extender (if you're not familiar with Media Center, think client/server AV system, with a Windows Vista-based PC serving up movies and music to extender clients throughout the house via a wired or wireless LAN). A Blu-Ray Disk player integrated into an XBOX 360 would appeal to the AV-gamer crossover crowd, as well as to families with both videophiles and gamers. Also consider the fact that the PS3 is often considered the best Blu-Ray disk player available, due to its ability to easily pick up firmware updates off the Internet via the built-in ethernet interface that other players lack. Other than an XBOX 360 with a Blu-Ray Disk drive, that is!
Great blog with lots of useful information and excellent commentary! Thanks for sharing.
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Can you name the fastest selling Tomb Raider game? [1] The highest rated in that series? [2] The largest Tomb Raider enemy? [3] The highest grossing video game movie? [4] And how about the video game with the most official real-life stand-ins? [5]
I flunked all five in that mini-quiz, so I guess I'll be picking up a copy of the new just-released-yesterday Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition for all the answers. It purports to include thousands of high scores as tabulated by Twin Galaxies, a little record-keeping outfit situated just 76 miles southwest of me (Iowa City, Iowa) in a quintessentially midwestern little radar blip of a town called Fairfield. Don't ask me how or why in Iowa (and technically they now have representatives worldwide) but there you go.
Some of it's a little anomalous or just plain obvious, like "Only action-adventure to be banned in the UK = Manhunt 2" or "The most successful game mod and widely played online shooter = Counter-Strike," but other stuff is reasonably informative, like "What's the most popular Xbox Live demo?" [6] or educational: "Can you name the first freeform 3D action-adventure?" [7] or just plain bizarre: "What was the first gaming clan to legally bind their players to a clan?" [8]
With 256 pages of factoids and a collection of official records chronicling the epic achievements of the world's nerdiest, what are you waiting for?
[1] Tomb Raider: Legend (2006) which sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide in the first five weeks alone.
[2] Try the original Tomb Raider. No surprises there. If you never played it, I strongly recommend the recent 2007 remake, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, available for the PC (best version), Xbox 360, Wii, and PSP.
[3] The giant sea serpent in Tomb Raider: Legend. Now you know.
[4] The first Tomb Raider (2001) movie, which grossed a pretty darned respectable $275 million worldwide. That's "highest grossing video game movie" across the board. Take that Uwe "Ed Wood" Boll.
[5] Lara Croft (see the pattern here?) who's been officially portrayed by nine different models since 1996.
[6] BioShock (of course)!
[7] Try Mercenary from Novagen, published in 1986.
[8] SK Gaming, which issued contracts to Counter-Strike players on February 1, 2003.
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Ever wondered just how well the iPhone stacks up against other dedicated handhelds like Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS? How's this for tantalizing: The iPhone is theoretically even more sophisticated than Sony's PlayStation Portable, says Doom and Quake creator John Carmack, who calls it "an extremely nice platform to work with" according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Could we be looking at an iPhone version of id Software's Doom 3 somewhere in the handheld's future? id is considering porting some of its titles to the platform, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Apple recently introduced its iPhone Software Development Kit and showed off an iPhone-specific version of its upcoming cross-platform Spore, a tectonically hyped "god" game from The Sims creator Will Wright. Sega likewise demoed a copy of its popular tilt-o-matic "Super Monkey Ball" arcade game, which uses the iPhone's internal accelerometer. Everyone seems pretty excited about the iPhone's potential as a serious mobile game device.
The way the media puts it, developers are lining up left and right to catch the train. My only question is, why didn't Apple have this ready to rock and roll when the iPhone debuted last June? When the iPhone shipped with nary a game in site, I'll admit to being stunned Apple and perennial tech evangelist Steve Jobs spaced such an obvious opportunity. Sure, you can argue in hindsight that Apple planned to support mobile gaming all along, but given the towering success of mobile gaming in the U.S. market, why wait six months to a year, leaving impatient iPhone owners to scrounge on their own for workarounds?
Research firm M:Metrics estimates Americans will spend over $600 million on games for mobile phones in 2008. On the other hand, however, only 3 percent of phone owners in the U.S. download a game to their phone each month. Now figure in the development costs to create versions of games that work on all the disparate models available. Depending on its iterative longevity, i.e. how many times Apple plans to bump the iPhones specs in a given multi-year period, the iPhone could be a far more lucrative and stable island in an ocean of ephemeral and effectively forgettable phone models from mainstream manufacturers.
As speculated, the iPhone will probably do all its gaming business via iTunes, making it easy to find, track, and organize games without the odd, amateurish proprietary tools or workarounds associated with one-off cell phones.
I've never touched an iPhone. I'm not even curious in a gadgety way about Apple's super-device. It's completely redundant in terms of everything I need or would use a PDA for, personally. But if it turns into a serious -- and by serious I mean more than just "Peggle-playing" -- game platform, I may have to pick one up after all. Apple expect to have an install base of 13 million by the end of 2008. If the games are unmissable, factor in buys from non-customers like me and I don't see why the iPhone can't go screen-to-screen with the PSP, and maybe eventually even the DS.
"Compared to Apple, the other things that go on in mobile development, that's all amateur hour," adds id Software's John Carmack.
QFP, i.e. "quoted for potential," anyway.
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wow, apple just cant leave well enough alone, now they are trying to intrude on the games market. whats next "iGame"??? thats so stupid.
How can you write about the iPhone if you've never touched one? Not even 'curious'? Sounds like BS to me. Maybe you should stick to writing about your Palm Treo or crashy Windows Mobile phone.
Actually Vassar, try my "cheap pre-pay Motorola..." Geez, I can't even find a model number on this thing.
What sounds like BS? The fact that I don't have an iPhone? Or that I'm excited about the prospect of gaming on one?
As predicted, Microsoft has slashed the price of all three versions of its Xbox 360 console in Europe, and at ?160 ($245 USD) the entry-level Arcade model just barely squeaks by the Wii to claim the coveted "cheapest" crown. Of course it's still $280 in the U.S., but cross your fingers and hold your breath, because I smell a U.S. followup in the near future.
As for the other two higher-end models, the Premium Xbox 360 gets a ?50 drop to ?200, while the Elite inches down from ?280 to ?260.
Assuming Microsoft's neutralized any remaining Xbox 360 hardware failure issues, I'd call a price drop of $30-$35 in the U.S. "buy now," wouldn't you? Especially if you've been on the fence, or even sitting on the other side of it ogling stuff like BioShock and -- even though it has a few serious issues -- Mass Effect. Remember that the Xbox 360 is probably more expensive than the PlayStation 3 when you factor in apples-to-apples component comparisons with accessory upgrades. But you're paying for the option to buy low and upgrade later at your leisure. That's sometimes worth the price.
Will Nintendo follow suit and undercut the Xbox 360 if Microsoft drops the hammer stateside? Probably not. Nintendo's still outselling everyone, and king of the hill usually doesn't flinch first. Unless Super Smash Bros. Brawl fails to hand Microsoft months and mountains of sales, I don't see the Wii moving anywhere before the holidays, and then only if sales drop off. The dealmaker (or breaker) for Microsoft and Sony versus Nintendo? Grand Theft Auto IV. Get your tickets for that show now, because the fight's about to get really interesting.
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Ok, online gaming is free for ps3 so that saves you big for a year, compared to xobx paying for online gaming, also if you want to have a wireless online experince the xbox cost a 100 bucks, and the ps3 is built in, plus you blu ray is the best movies available
xbox has the best games right now, but wait and see. the ps2 took awhile to get off the ground and it stills sells llike mad
Ok - if all Xbox Live offered was online gaming, I would conceed your point. Instead what Xbox live offers is available servers, high rate of transfer, and creative content. I've heard a lot of gripes about the PS3 network, with often users stating "well, you get what you pay for." $50 a year is very low compared to the services you get from Xbox that PS3 doesn't have the ability to provide. So Xbox live should be considered an extra plus that is unavailable on PS3, that you can get if you want . . . Sort of like Frosting on a cake . . . but you PS3ers only get frost-less cake . . . no sugar for you, just bitter ashes.
Duh! Of course Xbox 360 will lower the price worldwide to press their advantage. PS3 can't compete on price.
Only PS3 fans kids themselves and others that PS3 is a better value than Xbox 360.
PS3 the highest priced console still in last place. PS3 has not big exclusive game catalog which was the only reall advantage PS1 and PS2 had. PS3 20 GB, PS3 60GB, PS3 80GB, PS3 sixaxis controller, PS2 backwards compatibility all obsolete. PS3 Home online service not ready for prime time. Not a single top rated game today which isn't already on the Xbox 360.
Xbox 360 can do everything the PS3 can except BD. The largest catalog of top rated games this generation and the software sales show the results every month. We have HD, networking, rumble, Xbox Live!, and so much more. Please don't tell me how I need a PS3. I am too busy playing Halo3, Bioshock, Gears of War, Ace Combat 6, and the list keeps going.
Movies make bad video games, video games make even worse movies, but what about video games making rock stars? No, I don't mean some hidden talent scouting feature in Rock Band or Guitar Hero ("Hey, you can sure tap buttons swell! You've got your choice of data entry, or playing finger bongos during happy hour at the local cantina!"). I just found this interview with Electronic Arts game audio exec Steve Schnur by way of MSN and read the sentence "Avril Lavigne was first introduced to European audiences through FIFA 2003," followed by "Ozomatli, a band that has existed for years with minimal sales and exposure, got an iPod commercial, a career-changing sales jump, and a Grammy nomination based on their exposure in Madden 2005," both at least mildly surprising.
Schnur goes on to claim success for a whole list of international acts:
Within the past two years, we've seen major international breakthroughs from acts that include Robyn, Mando Diao, Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Bloc Party, LCD Soundsystem, D?n?, Tribalista, Go Team, Bullet for My Valentine, The Caesars, Kasabian, Lupe Fiasco, MIA, Wolfmother, Hawthorne Heights, and others. That's just a small sampling of what we've helped make happen. It's all real and exciting proof that video games are a critical component of the new industry paradigm.
Three things. First, I couldn't name, hum, or frankly recognize an Avril Lavigne song if my life depended on it (which of course means absolutely nothing, but there you go anyway). Second, it's not like Lavigne was a total unknown in Europe before FIFA 2003 -- still, given the FIFA series' popularity in Europe, where it's sold millions, I'm sure the exposure helped. Third, and the only question I really care about, is whether it's really a good thing that video game studios are simply becoming the new "15 minute" musical popularity kingmakers. I despise celebrity rock today with a passion only equalled inversely by my youthful love of moonwalking, silver sequins on thin white gloves, and laying out flat sheets of cardboard in the garage to do you-know-what while listening to Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me.
Says Schnur: "The key aspect of every soundtrack must always be for the music to fit with a game's theme, lifestyle, and emotional heart." And that's exactly right if, as he points out, your game is The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or James Bond. Where the music's incontrovertibly part of the total product, give me all the Howard Shore and John Williams and John Barry I can handle. But if it's a musically headless series like FIFA whatever (or frankly any of EA's sports games) where the soundtrack's all studio-selected pop hooks, I want the option to throw out the game's soundtrack and build my own, and by build my own, I mean using my own personal library, not EA's, and not some pay-per Rock Band-style download service.
Of course failing that, there's always the "disable in-game music" and "stream an MP3 or whatever audio file from your stereo in tandem" workaround.
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Hey Matt,
Actually, I can back up some of this statement because I, for one, get turned onto new music through games. It's been that way for me since I played Road Rash on the 3DO. Back then, they even had videos of the bands...but I went out and picked up Swervedriver's Mezcal Head and Jesse's Paw after I heard their music piped in-game.
Would I go out and buy a game soundtrack? Not likely, but at least It'd make me want to google a band I'd never heard of before playing a game. And that was all happening way before game soundtracks became some huge blow-out deal with major artists like they have today.
Good points Darren, and since we're sharing memories, I'd like to add that Jeremy Soule's Total Annihilation soundtrack was a glorious good fun, and great for making heads turn ("That's coming from a *video* game?!?"). Sure, he totally ripped Goldsmith and Horner off (who in turn have been ripping Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky off forever) and I was never frankly all the crazy about Total Annihilation's gameplay, but oh what fun with a passable pair of desktop Labtecs.
And...uh...I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I have pretty much everything Nobuo Uematsu's released. His solo piano renditions of the soundtracks are amazing, and I mean as serious compositions.
But back to the post, I was just sort of wondering out loud whether the notion of "kingmaking" in terms of studios is in the process of dying a long, protracted death. I kind of hope it is in the sense that Chris Anderson (Wired) means when he and others talk about content as "build to one."
Don't worry, I swear I don't have a flaming digital arrow nocked and aimed at PC gaming's hypersensitive heart. Insert stuff about me loving my PC and PC games (yada yada) here. It's just that this morning, I was reading an interview with Unreal creator Tim Sweeney (the one-time "alternative" John Carmack) over at TG Daily and it got me thinking about how increasingly backwards the traditional PC games industry looks. Backwards, because at least in terms of the way it's covered by the press and marketed by its purveyors, it's weirdly front-loaded.
Front-loaded, because...
...the majority of PC games media coverage is enthusiast-oriented, e.g. male and niche focused, despite more PC gamers being statistically casual and female. In the old days when almost no one had a PC, it made sense -- PCs along with PC gamers were certainly niche. But anymore, finding representative press coverage of PC gaming is like looking for general entertainment news, e.g. Entertainment Weekly or People when all you can find on the shelf are copies of Cinefex.
...that coverage almost universally presents new games in a way that trumpets the futurist aspects -- still largely visually-focused -- that only a fraction of the actual PC gaming populace will ever functionally experience on their median-grade PC.
Consider Sweeney's response to the cost of "stunningly expensive gaming rigs":
There are many overpriced computers out there. It's like sports cars. They are everywhere, everybody writes about them, but there are only a few who can afford them. There isn't a great amount of people that will spend large amounts of money on that. In the case of PCs, they mostly don't deliver that amount of performance that you would expect to justify that cost. You pay twice as much money for 30% more performance... That is just not right.
And here, as they say, lies the rub. Sweeney's right, but he's also missing a crucial point.
He's right in that the cost of the PC hardware necessary to run a game like Crysis smoothly at the level of detail with which it's been shamelessly marketed really is preposterous. To this day, a tiny fraction of the total PC gaming populace has played Crysis at anywhere near detail settings worthy of the hype that game engendered for over a year courtesy developer Crytek, publisher Electronic Arts, and just about every game media site wiling to drool in tandem. Scan any related games forum right now, and you'll see that most people still haven't experienced the Crysis we saw in preview videos and montages slathered everywhere leading up to its release, and unless that majority revisits it in a year or two with new hardware eyes, they probably never will. In summary, the disconnect between median gamers and cost-to-do-business at a level that fulfills the marketing hype is horribly, deleteriously broken.
The critical point Sweeney misses, in my opinion, lies with the way game developers approach and/or intellectually subsidize game-oriented PC hardware cycles. Let's talk tough truths here. First-tier game developers like Sweeney tend to treat game design like it's the world's tallest mountain and hey-get-out-of-my-way, they just have to climb the thing...until the next tallest mountain comes along, at which point they do it all over again. That's all well and good in an experimental physics lab, or somewhere like NASA, but in the consumer market, if your end product only looks like you intended it to on a handful of PCs at time of release, what have you really accomplished? You may have designed the world's most efficient light-rendering path or plugged it into a game that looks better than a Pixar movie rendering in realtime, but it's like the tree in the forest: if virtually no one can play it at its hyped and marketed level -- and note the marketing aspect is key here -- did it even really come out?
Sweeney adds that "Intel?s integrated graphics just don't work...I don't think they will ever work." Well sure, they don't work if you're Tim Sweeney and always hell-bent on making games like Unreal that turn GPUs into whimpering puddles of molten silicon. Those sorts of games are always fun to read about in a preview or to watch in a trailer, but when it's time for the rubber to meet the road, most people don't have the tire tread to even register.
You look at consoles, by comparison, and they lock in a certain level of hardware for a sustained period. Consoles force developers to be innovative with the tools they have, to compete on a more or less level playing field with their peers. Consoles instantly equalize gamers -- no more nerdy hardware envy. And guess what: consoles are pretty much PCs in terms of their internal components. We just call them consoles as a point of reference. They're really just "locked-in" computers, and judging by international sales figures, all that adds up to "way more appealing" to the average generalist gamer.
Developers need to stop looking at the PC as an infinitely scalable platform, and publishers need to to stop selling us games we can't play...at least not the way they're marketed.
Final note: To anyone who thinks I'm just making an argument for dumber games in terms of embracing the growing casual PC games element, I'd say firstly that -- sorry to break it to you -- "mass appeal" is a factor in any growth industry, and second, that you need to also make absolutely certain that you're not mistaking complexity (of whatever sort) for intelligence and depth. Some of the smartest, most artistic, most enjoyable games I played in 2007 were in fact casual indies from studios with shoestring budgets.
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The thing is crysis was a game that was been sold as the best thing since slice bread and altho it look amazing fact is when it came out and thier was the big push for dx10 to see best visual of the game so alot of ppl upgraded whole systems and still got shafted with crap fps yet alone the new headace and the crap of hunrgy vista i know first hand i built a rig as much as i could afford and got the latest parts and guse wot crysis couldnt play at max res and setings not untill i got my 2nd 8800gtx and an other 2gigs of ram and cpu till i was happy with how it would run as for colsoles bugger paying (1000+ for ps3 when they first came out ) for some thing that you also so dont get to see it ing it full 1080p glory untill you upgrade your display to support it or all readly spent abit of money on the display
I have 2 XBox 360's, but for less than the price of a console the average uses could upgrade to a better GPU and monior and play at close to 1080p specifications. on a 22" monitor. The difference is your computer can then continue to do all it has done in the past and you don't have another thing hanging off your TV,
Secondly Crysis, really? Also, what console is it on? None that I know of so not really a fair comparison. COD4, yep playing at 1920 X1200 maxed with two wimpy 8800GTs in sli can play at 1600 by 1200 with one card. Looks better than any 1080P, and all on a machine I have less than $1500 dollars into, the local computer shop could build it ad it wouldn't have added much to the price.
Overall your computer can do more and with a little upgrade you can then use a computer to play as well without adding a second machine to your house. Also, you pay more for the Console titles average $10, which over the life also adds additional cost.
This article just breaks my heart because I totally agree that it's true. I've always wondered about the irony of games like Final fantasy XII, or Shadow of the Colossus, running on hardware that's, what, 5 years old? and still managing to keep up with current visual standards of next-gen consoles and PC. I'm a long-time supporter of PC gaming because of its mods and its strong community, but hearing people tout graphics as the ONLY source of competitive advantage everytime an argument like this comes up gets old fast.
Do you spend nutty amounts of time online? Do you experience bouts of anger with other players -- even fits of blazing rage -- while playing online games or visiting message boards to chat about what you've been playing? Does gaming ever make you feel suicidal? Romantic? "Like someone in love"? Do you feel "empowered" playing online MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, and does that sense of power relate inversely to a less-than-satisfying day job?
If you answered yes to any of the above, you may want to put the forthcoming Pure West documentary Second Skin on your view list (it premieres at SXSW, which runs March 7-16 in Austin, Texas). The film follows a handful of gamers deeply devoted to massively multiplayer online games like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Director Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza calls it "An Inconvenient Truth meets Errol Morris." Here's the YouTube preview clip:
"We are in a world that is becoming increasingly atomized, and we're all becoming isolated," says Exodus to the Virtual World author Edward Castranova (interviewed in the documentary).
Are online games socially liberating? Harmful? Is it as simple as saying they're somewhere in between or that "it all depends on the player"?
More and more, I see people exploring their wildest ideas and fantasies online, and more and more, I see some of those same ostensibly happy folks ready to tear each other to bits over the tritest slight. I know people who sit on message boards for hours a day playing semantic one-upsmanship, taking cheap ironic shots in some bizarro quest to pass as pseudo-intellectual on a given subject. I know others who seem to think passive-aggressive or just plain incendiary behavior in chat channels is the new Feng Shui. Blizzard's World of Warcraft played a role in wrecking the marriage of a relative (of course I blame the player, not the game). It may have been a major factor in delaying someone else I know a full year toward their terminal graduate degree.
Ask any psychologist: Going online removes basic communicative cues developed over evolutionary eons. It's called the disinhibition effect, and it can be as toxic as it is liberating. (See Erin Biba's piece "Jerks of the Web" for some interesting examples.)
The gaming press likes to mockingly reject anything that paints gaming in a negative light most of all because it plays well to gamers who see themselves as disenfranchised next to other media like film and books. They're right (about the disenfranchised part) but that doesn't excuse the occasional spillover into lowbrow reactionary territory. Gaming isn't some pristine, perfectly formed, great big happy sugar pill. Certain aspects of it have some fairly disturbing side effects, particularly when you get into the psychology of cyberspace and more complex theory like "dissociative anonymity" and "solipsistic introjection."
Most of us aren't thinking about that stuff. We see the chance to be someone else (or something else) as liberating. And it is, and I have no doubt there's a healthy cognitive angle here. But online games don't just offer us an alternative identity, they also strip us of some of the most fundamental elements of social interaction, reducing conversations to abstract symbols and basic physicality to cartoony gesticulative tropes like "wave" or "laugh" or "cry." Online games allow -- and by virtue of that allowance, actually encourage -- people to do and say things they never would in so-called "real life." And no, I don't just mean the obvious sex-related time sinks -- this is much broader than mere sex.
You may intuitively believe that "letting it all out" is more "honest," and therefore a benefit of online interaction. Not necessarily true. Most psychologists include the social layer we loosely refer to as our "filter" or "personal space" or "bubble" (etc.) as every bit a part of the cumulative package that comprises a person's "total" personality. Without the social immediacy of physical proximity and all the subtle cues we read through body language and vocal inflection, we're effectively having socially neutered conversations in virtually-anything-goes-land, a perfect alchemical testbed for some of the most amazing -- but as well, some of the most disastrous -- social interactions.
I have no idea where Second Skin comes down on any of this, but the teaser trailer looks professional and pretty darned interesting. Hopefully it'll be smart enough, incisive enough, and take enough of a stand (as opposed to just window-shopping the online paradigm) to get more people thinking about this, rejecting blithe futurism (i.e. most "analysis" of online communities by the gaming media to date) and engaging the bad as well as expanding on the good.
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if you get addicted to a game like WoW, you are gay. "oh im an elf, im an elf!" uhmmmm no youre not, you are gay, you need a life, and you need to stop paying 180.00 a year for some underwhelmingly pixelated and poorly rendered game. if it were some free MMO, that you didnt have to pay for and could play in your free time, then thats not being gay, thats being intelligent. but paying 180 bucks a year for a game that sucks up your life is ludicrous. i mean XBL only costs 50.00 a year for unlimited, awesome, friend-filled gameplay, that you can actually put down and go outside and enjoy life with.
They are quite right in the video that most people go to their deadend jobs and come home and play these video games 8-10 hours a night I can certainly relate to that, working nights coming home to a empty house or with people asleep didn't equate much socially so I started playing what I soon found out that you truly can't expect to have a normal life of any sorts playing all the time. I have gave up playing WOW because now I have a girlfriend and live together and there are far more important things for me to worry about then some game that takes me away from her.
To Oldtimegamer,
You will be back ..... lol just wait til she pops out a few kids and you be back hidding from the real world... lol trust me ...
Reading Microsoft's response in the Financial Times (requires registration) cynically, one can't help but wonder whether the Redmond-based company wishes Sony had kept it's yap shut. "We have made no such announcement," said Microsoft. "Games are what are driving consumers to purchase game consoles and we remain focused on providing the largest library of blockbuster games available." Which they have, if we judge purely on the basis of software units moved.
The questions now, as I see them, are as follows:
- Does Microsoft view Blu-ray as critical technology in terms of high definition (and true 1080p) hardware video playback? I think the answer to this comes down to where Sony's surge in PS3 sales in January came from, and whether that surge continues in the absence of corresponding video game sales.
- Does Microsoft recognize that doing 1080p -- even streaming -- by download as opposed to physical media is a fool's errand for another half decade (or longer)? Downloadable content as complementary = fabulous. But downloadable content as stand-in for physical media is insanity. Unless you want to also bundle in a cheap 10 Terabyte drive. Lost Season Three alone could probably fill up a good sized chunk of a 1 Terabyte spindle (and don't try to convince me I don't need 1080p -- I do, and I'm not going back, thanks for asking).
- Can Microsoft get a standalone player to market in the $250-$300 range? I was at Best Buy yesterday and noticed a standalone Sony Blu-ray drive going for $400. A quick scan of Google Shopping suggests that unless you're going refurbished, that's about as cheap as they currently get. And remember, Microsoft has to pay Sony a license fee to use the technology.
- Is this even the right cycle? Wired speculates that it isn't. I think it is, but that's based mostly on what I continue to view as a jaw dropping, unexpected sales surge in PS3 players in January. Microsoft can market the 360 as a games machine that happens to play standard definition DVDs all it likes, but if people are ready to go high def en masse in 2008 to complement the current flat screen feeding frenzy, the lack of a legitimate high def player is going to cripple the 360. I have friends and relatives who prefer the 360's library, but -- heedless of my advice -- have been springing for PlayStation 3's simply because they want Blu-ray now (that HD DVD is history).
- Internal versus external. Note to Microsoft -- external. If you really want to offer a Super Duper Elite-Ain't-Half-The-Cool-In-This-Thing version, go for it, but disenfranchise your existing base at your peril. If Microsoft releases a standalone player first, it'll sell as well as bricks, unless they sell it at price parity with the cheapest iteration of the PlayStation 3, which you and I know ain't gonna happen.
Put it this way -- if Microsoft releases a standalone player, I'll pick one up the second it's available. Internal player? Not until whatever comes after this generation of game machines.
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hey yuff, i think thats what has been happening - thats why the PS3 got some extra sales. people probably had the 360 and if they had the money - they waited until bluray was new HD format and bought a PS3 (unless they were anti brand switchers).
your hvd sounds nice. but i want whats available now. the best hi-def, quality, features, compatibility, etc. which should also last more than a year or two next to my tv. which i don't think the wii or the 360 is going to do since they are already talking about new systems.
i'll buy new nintendo, sony, microsoft products if its good (and maybe support your new hvd). gotta be the 1st one on the street to have it right? then i'll rub it in everyone's face! (isnt that a sin?) unless it gets obselete.
then i would get moded. yes, moded. lol.
There won't be a BD add-on for Xbox 360. The system doesn't need BD. The HD DVD add-on sold around 200,000 units, and BD won't do much better. Microsoft is planning support for BD in Windows. Maybe just maybe BD will be the drive in the next Xbox. Only PS3 fans think Xbox 360 needs BD. Xbox 360 has all the best games this generation so it doesn't need to add BD. Developers are not going to make 360 BD games for a small number of gamers. A BD add-on would be for movies only; but Xbox 360 is a "game console". The so called PS3 "surge" occured just after HD DVD dropped out of the format war, and it also coincided with a hardware shortage for Wii and Xbox 360. PS3 will not sustain the high sales numbers as it will still be the most expensive game console by far.
Finally..the death of the X-box it nearing. A POS system to begin with that stresses grapics and power over great games. If I was Sony I would refuse to license the blu-ray technology to microsoft at ALL therefore killing the crap pile that is the Xbox for good.
If Steve Jobs wants to turn the iPhone into an industry, what better way than with Will Wright's already legendary Spore? I say "already" because the hype around Spore feels a little like the hype surrounding George Lucas's Star Wars prequels years before they came out. The difference, of course, is that unlike Lucas, Wright has a reputation for delivering.
Spore on the iPhone -- It'll ship around the same time the full game does for PC and Mac this September.
Spore, if you hadn't heard, is Will Wright's ostensible magnum opus, a multi-platform "god" game that's been in development forever, and which claims to marry open-ended gameplay with cutting edge "procedural generation," i.e. content created on the fly (as opposed to pre-made).
You can start as a multicellular organism and evolve all the way up to an interstellar spacefaring culture. Wright calls it a "massively single-player online game, with fingers into pretty much every aspect of entertainment media. The iPhone version, like the Nintendo DS, reportedly focuses on just one phase of gameplay: the tide pool phase, where gamers can sort of float around as protean microbes ala flOw devouring cells until they form an egg. Will you be able to transfer your egg from the iPhone to your PC or Mac running the full version? Who knows, but I'm guessing it's at least a maybe.
When it hits in September this year, Spore will be the very first third-party game on the iPhone. It'll apparently take advantage of the iPhone's touchscreen (well duh!) as well as the phone's tilt sensitivity (okay, that actually sounds cool).
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I'm an interminably geeky Doctor Who fan, which makes this news seem a bit of a letdown given its less-than-enterprising target demographic. The PS2 and Nintendo DS are the two most established consoles on the planet at the moment, ergo instant cha-ching, while PC gaming is dramatically more pervasive in the UK and Europe than it is in the U.S. Sounds like something "casual" as opposed to epic and enthusiast-oriented to me.
Den of Geek speculates that the game may have something to do with cards and trading (i.e. a trading card game!) given the lack of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 love, though why you wouldn't do a Wii version if you're doing a PS2 version given all the Wii shovelware out there is beyond me. I just hope Eidos was paying attention to Auran's recent joke of an arcade Battlestar Galactica tie-in, about which TV series writer Ronald D. Moore said "They never even show them to me...I was appalled to see that it was lambasted in the reviews...I made my displeasure known, and the word got out." Let that me a warning to Eidos and anyone else who might be considering a feckless easy-bake knockoff.
To be fair, creating a Doctor Who game that's both open-ended and simultaneously engages the conundrum of "I have a TARDIS and can go anywhere in time or space!" sounds tricky, to say the least. But Doctor Who is so big ratings-wise abroad that not doing something bigger and bolder than a card game (or whatever) seems awfully timorous on someone's part to me. Even something episodic and on narrative rails -- done with appropriately smart writing and voice acting -- could be a huge success in the European market, and with the proper amount of critical buzz, as well on this side of the pond.
As for all of you favoring a be-scarfed Tom Baker version over, say, something starring the incredibly talented Christopher Eccleston or David Tennant, time to move up and get with the superior creative team and version of the show!
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When it's priced the same, for all intents and purposes, which it's looking like it just might be by late next week. Referencing "trade sources," MCV claims that Microsoft plans to drop the price of its entry-level Xbox 360 Arcade by as much as ?50 ($76 USD). TechRadar.com adds spice to the rumor by avowing the drop and claiming it'll occur across Europe on March 14, sourcing "numerous UK retailers...who agree that the 360 price is set to be slashed on this date."
Altogether, the Xbox 360 Elite is poised to take a dive from ?300 to ?240, while the basic Arcade system, which lacks a hard drive, should drop from ?200 to ?150. That would technically make the Arcade cheaper than the Wii, which lists for ?180.
Is it time to drop the price of the Xbox already? Let's see:
- Microsoft dumps HD DVD drive for Xbox 360 -- more of a psychological oops, but it leaves a ton of existing 360 owners in a lurch, and feeds a right or wrong public perception that something major associated with the Xbox 360 failed.
- Sony muscled past the 360 for the first time in January. I know, it shocked me too, and since Microsoft beat the pants off Nintendo and Sony each in software sales that month, I guessed it was Blu-ray sales driven. Which means Sony could be on the verge of a hardware sales turnaround that's not even games driven.
- The Xbox 360 has (or had) an absurdly high unit failure rate, i.e. the doleful "red ring of death," and enthusiast confidence on message boards and blogs is low, trending toward sardonic. Microsoft has performed minor miracles to rectify the situation and deserves full honors for being stand up about the problem, but first impressions (like possession) are nine-tenths law. Unreliable and expensive is of course a universe away from "bargain-priced" and "sufficiently revised."
- A considerable part of the Xbox 360's revenue model is Xbox Live and aftermarket online and/or casual game sales. Drop the 360 price into Wii territory and get your marketing team going toe-to-toe with Nintendo on the casual-online front and you just might redraw the battle lines. Nintendo may have found a new niche, but it remains a pretty monolithic one. The Xbox 360 (uniquely) has the economic and creative potential to mix and match hardcore and casual demographics. Figuring out how to market that message is Microsoft's game to lose.
So yeah, I think it's time to drop the price, unleash the new marketing campaigns, spin the monthly statistics to emphasize the company's forte (software revenue and critically acclaimed games), release a standalone Blu-ray player, etc. to get the system back on its feet, lest Nintendo continue to pull ahead based on sheer momentum, and Sony eradicate Microsoft's lead by virtue of movie player sales alone.
Will U.S. Xbox 360 prices follow suit? Grab hold of your wallet, then bet your bottom dollar.
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The 360 is more of a niche platform "hardcore shooter" then the nintendo wii " everybody and there grandmas want one". However I'm all for a pricecut!
Xbox 360 has more top rated games than any other next gen platform. 360 outsells every console for cross platform games. The technical problems are behind them. The RROD was solved over a year ago, and Microsoft added a 3 year warranty too. The price cut is needed to keep pace with the Wii, and Sony will not be able to match the new price point. The HD DVD sold around 200,000 drives out of 17 million systems so it was hardly a mainstream device. I agree the price cut is great move because it is bound to sell a lot of 360's. Sony sold a few PS3 systems to Blu-Ray fans and it is doubtful they will sustain these sales. As for the USA Sony won two months for PS3 sales by approixmately 20,000 units. PS3 is behind Xbox 360 in the USA by 7 million units at that rate it will take many years for the PS3 to pass Xbox 360. It may not matter anyways because I don't think anyone will pass Wii in sales, but you can bet Xbox 360 will be a strong 2nd place.
Everybody's doing it, according to a new study in the journal Cyberpsychology and Behaviour, so why not you? Psychologists at Nottingham Trent University have apparently found that a majority of online gamers switched gender while playing, and that women were more likely to switch their gender than men -- up to 70 percent, in fact. You've probably heard the reason for this before, but here it is anyway: to avoid unsolicited or untoward male attention.
Less than 70 percent of males admitted swapping gender, but the number was still greater than 50 percent. "Fifty four percent of men said they had portrayed a female character online, a move they said allowed them to flirt with other players and explore a different side of their personality," according to a summary of the study at The Guardian.
Perhaps the most interesting and potentially disturbing statistic: 40 percent of respondents said they played online games to escape from "troubling issues" at home or work. Also: one in five players said they found it easier to socialize online than in real life.
"In these environments you can manipulate gender, ethnicity and even species," said study co-author Professor Mark Griffiths of the university's International Gambling Research Unit. "People do find it interesting to manipulate characteristics like gender to see what reaction they get. In our offline lives, there are set boundaries and limits ? but these synthetic worlds allow people to explore aspects of their personalities that they couldn't otherwise do."
Poll time!
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I am a female playing female toons in an online game. Some of the guys I know who've played females say, "I play a female, cuz i'd rather look at a female toon all day rather than a male one." Just another point of view.
Loy
Most of that growth will be in casual web-based games, says researcher eMarketer, beating roundly console-based contributions from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Last year marketers dropped $502 million on game ads, which per the study include in-game and so-called "advergaming" games built around a product, e.g. LEGO Star Wars. That number is expected to grow by 120 percent to $650 million in 2012, "buoyed by a 133 percent surge in Web based games."
Consoles will contribute 91 percent growth over the next five years, but the top income-getters are predicted to be PC-based casual and online.
"The big growth in in-game advertising will come not from console games but from the rapidly evolving casual and online game segments," reads the report. Why? Because casual gaming ads currently cost less, as well as "in this space, advertising is accepted not only as art imitating life but also as a trade-off for free game play." Putting reality-detached ads in reality-detached web games is less disruptive than picking Pepsi as Master Chief's favorite soft drink, in other words.
PC gaming may (and I stress may) be in a heap of trouble these days. Or it's absolutely booming.
It all depends what you mean by "PC gaming."
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Some in-game ads are worse than others, Madden 08 plasters an Under Armor ad on the bottom half of the screen for about 5 seconds everytime you reach the red zone. And there's no way to disable it! It's really obnoxious to see this in a game I spent $60 on. If EA continues this trend, I will not be buying anymore of their games.
Finally, some good news about video games that's based on reportedly sound science from a reputable source. Said source? The Mayo Clinic, and medical magazine Pediatrics has the scoop: add activity to video games and you get healthier children.
No kidding Sherlock? I know, but sometimes it takes science to convince the incredulous that the sun's going to come up tomorrow. And that moving instead of sitting still for half a dozen hours is going to yield more calories burned.
What's significant about the Mayo study is that it's the first to measure the amount of energy spent playing video games. Long story short, thin kids expended more energy while moving, obese kids somewhat more, and everyone expended the same amount of energy -- three to five times less than while moving -- while sitting and watching TV or playing traditional video games.
What else? Screen times averages eight hours a day among children. I don't know whether to be frightened by that statistic or not. I suppose it's one more reason to either buy a Wii, or demand that Microsoft and Sony get off their hands and follow Nintendo's aerobic lead.
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Ever read about the budget shooter "Quest for Saddam," the one that Al-Qaeda reportedly hacked to let you go on a virtual hunt for George Bush?
Petrilla Entertainment, whose website currently leads to a squatter portal, released the game in May 2003, where it mostly got attention because of its topicality (as opposed to its actual gameplay). In Petrilla's original version, crudely rendered with the venerable Duke Nukem 3D engine, the idea was to find and capture Saddam Hussein while fending off Iraqi soldiers.
In September 2006, CNN broke a story about a game called "Quest for Bush, The Night of Bush Capturing." At the same time, the author of "Quest for Saddam," Jesse Petrilla, released a statement claiming "Quest for Bush" was actually a revamp of his game by "a propaganda wing of none other than Al-Qa'eda."
Now Wafaa Bilal, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has hacked "Quest for Bush" to insert himself as a suicide bomber. According to the promotional iEAR site, "after learning of the real-life death of his brother in the war, [Bilal] is recruited by Al Qaeda to join the hunt for Bush."
The point? Says the promotional site:
This work is meant to bring attention to the vulnerability of Iraqi civilians to the travesties of the current war and racist generalizations and stereotypes as exhibited in games such as Quest for Saddam; along with vulnerability to recruitment by violent groups like Al Qaeda because of the U.S.?s failed strategy in securing Iraq.?The work also aims to shed light on groups that traffic in crass and hateful stereotypes of Arab culture with games like Quest for Saddam and other media.
Bilal, whose family is from Najaf, Iraq, was at one point arrested for art critical of Saddam Hussein. According to his profile on Wikipedia, he refused to participate in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and began organizing opposition groups. He fled Iraq in 1991 and lived in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia for two years, teaching art to children. In 2005, his brother was killed by shrapnel in Najaf, which led to his "Domestic Tension" project, a quasi-performance-art undertaking which saw Bilal living in a Chicago art gallery for a month and being repeatedly shot with a remote control paintball gun by internet users, who viewed him through a webcam.
Political protests involving graphic engagements of culturally complex subjects like political violence and sexuality have frequented art galleries or graced your average street corner for as long as I can remember. Are games that allow detailed graphical enactments of unambiguously real-life murders and/or assassinations any different? Is hyperbole or extremism the only way to respond to a disputed ideological approach? Is using extremity as a vehicle to raise consciousness of an issue justified? And do games raise the bar in any notable way because of their uniquely interactive, increasingly simulative nature?
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Hey Jesse,
It'd be nice to know with what, since I didn't really allege anything, but was opening up the subject for anyone else to (allege whatever they felt like).
Matt
I disagree with Mr. Bilal's approach, it's not art it's technoterrorism if you ask me, my game was satire no worse than anything you would see on Saturday Night Live, but his idea of art, (which is illegal by the way and in violation of copyright laws since I hold the license to the engine and the game and he does not), crosses the line into some sick form of propaganda on students at the tax payers expense. It's one thing to laugh at an otherwise stressful subject, it's another thing for him to be exploiting it for his own political propaganda purposes. The co-producer of Quest For Saddam was very much an anti-Iraq-War democrat whereas I am a staunch conservative, but it was about satire, entertainment, and marketing not about politics.
I disagree with both of You in-fact. I have never played either game as I consider both of them to be a promotion of hatred. Just under different guise. And whether co-producer was or was not against the war he did participate in making a game that is pure hate. It is interesting however how quick You are to attack the remake. What promotion of hatred for America does not deserve same respect as promotion of hatred against Iraq. You are a hypocrite Jesse. Aside from being an ignorant fool.
It's about time! The old PS Store was really lacking. I like the teaser screencap -- it's clean and looks easy to navigate. The main categories are there for easy access -- I'd bet most people will come to this with an idea as to what they're looking for and these categories should answer most needs.
For those with criticisms, don't just criticize -- that's a waste of bandwidth -- provide better alternative design suggestions.
Now, where's my HOME??? 8)
You think it will have a patch I am looking for? ;)
Only the PS3 store is going to get an update, or is the PS Store for PC getting an update too?